This year we invited our TCDL Student Scholarship recipients to share their conference experience for the TDL Blog. Read on to learn more.
My name is Hilary Turner, and I’m a first-year MSLS student at University of North Texas who is based in the Austin area. My primary focus is on digital academic libraries. This year (2025) was my first to attend the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries (TCDL), and Texas Digital Library (TDL) afforded me the experience thanks to a generous student scholarship award. I had initially heard about the existence of the conference through two other individuals who attended: Cristina Berron and Ben Brumfield. I met Cristina through an informational chat in the spring to learn more about digital librarianship, and Ben is an old undergraduate Rice classmate with whom I had reconnected who owns an intriguing library-adjacent business with his wife, Sara. I reached out to TDL initially to find out if I could attend the conference as a volunteer and was invited to apply for a scholarship. The rest is history.
It is difficult to select favorites among all the sessions because I learned so much from each. I gleaned a lot of learnings from discussions on open educational resources, as well as other key topics. A couple of standouts overall included Dr. Katherine Skinner’s keynote speech on the first day, two of the lightning talks, and Dr. Katie Pierce Meyer and team’s discussion of a fascinating LLM metadata project.
Dr. Skinner (“call me Katherine”), Director of Programs at Invest in Open Infrastructure, faced the murky waters of digital librarianship in the current environment head on in her plenary speech titled “Navigating the Now: Shared Values as Our Compass for Community Action.” She expressed that we are at a most pivotal time in our field and surprised me by positing that there is enough money available to support open infrastructure in digital libraries; the larger problem is strategy. A collaborative professional environment is our greatest asset, and we should focus on pooling our efforts and resources.
Nicholas Woodward and Kristi Park of TDL shared the organization’s recent pilot project, which involved hosting DSpace for 20 of its members and then creating a potential entities workflow. Emily Grover’s talk introduced me to the weird and wonderful world of artists’ books at Texas Tech and their digital preservation via photography. Last but certainly not least, Dr. Pierce Meyer’s team at the University of Texas at Austin’s Architectural Collections showcased cutting-edge research on the potential of LLMs for creating metadata. They highlighted the importance of choosing the right LLM tool for a particular task, and I’m looking forward to following up with the team to learn more about the prompt engineering aspect of their project.
I ran into lots of new friendly faces at the conference in a variety of settings, extending my professional network. I met some folks at the opening reception, chose to attend both networking sessions on Wednesday (New Bees and Arts & Crafts), and was very kindly invited to an informal TCDL happy hour just a few miles down the road that evening. I would love to present at a future TCDL conference—I’m hoping my courses over the next semesters at UNT will spark some creative ideas worth sharing. I urge other students thinking about attending to absolutely register or consider throwing their hats in the ring for a scholarship like I did to cover that cost. TCDL is a well-organized event and a lot of thought clearly went into the programming for this year’s conference. A diversity of session topics all related to digital libraries was offered, while keeping the event to a manageable size. Mark your calendars for the 2026 TCDL next spring!