We at Texas Digital Library are continually inspired by the amazing work going on within our member libraries and other organizations throughout Texas and the region – work that furthers TDL’s mission of ensuring long term, equitable access to digital content of value to research, instruction, cultural heritage, and institutional memory. We are honored to play a part in facilitating some of that work, and the TDL Awards are an opportunity for us to recognize the labor, creativity, and expertise of the library and archives workers in our community.
Every year through the TDL Awards, we honor individuals and groups that have made outstanding contributions to the advancement of digital libraries in various areas, including:
- Excellence
- Individual Impact
- Outreach
- Scholarly Communication Impact
- Student Excellence
- Trailblazer
- Service to the TDL consortium
Below are the words of the nominations for each awardee, anonymized and edited for context and length.
Excellence Award
Dr. kYmberly Keeton and Dana Reijerkerk, ART | library deco
The Excellence Award honors a specific project that demonstrates overall excellence in one or more areas of digital curation or digital library practice.
The winners of the 2025 Excellence Award are Dr. kYmberly Keeton and Dana Reijerkerk for their work on ART | library deco.
Founded in 2013 by Dr. kYmberly Keeton as a graduate research practicum at the University of North Texas, ART | library deco is a Texas-based digital library focused on curating and preserving African American collections across history, art, photography, genealogy, and literature.
The platform also offers original reporting, digital exhibitions, and archival resources. Signature initiatives include the Texas Black Artists Web Collective, the Hip Hop Lib Guide, Canvases—a collaborative digital zine—and an in-house repository for African American art and community archives.
ART | library deco redefines digital librarianship by centering Black Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (BGLAM), fostering access to knowledge, cultural preservation, and public engagement. Through this model, it supports the documentation of Black intellectual, artistic, and historical contributions often overlooked by mainstream institutions.
A physical location in Fort Worth, Texas is in development, advancing ART | library deco’s mission as a center for African American cultural preservation and research. Supporting this effort is the newly formed Friends of ART | library deco association, a nonprofit partner dedicated to strengthening the library’s programs through fundraising, volunteerism, and advocacy.
Individual Impact Award
Megan Scott, Texas Tech University
The Individual Impact Award celebrates an individual who has made significant contributions and improvements to the field, demonstrated through leadership in digital initiatives and / or the development of students and early-career professionals.
The winner of the 2025 Individual Impact Award is Megan Scott, Digital Curation Librarian and Assistant Librarian at Texas Tech University.
Megan has had a tremendous impact on the Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) and the collections that it processes since she started her position as Digital Curation Librarian in 2023. Over the past two years, she has completed almost 15,000 metadata records for over 14 collections, which accounts for 87% of all new PDFs created during that time – an increase of over 700% from the year before she was hired.
In addition to her metadata work, she has performed copyright curation on more than 3,700 volumes from three distinct collections. Her thoroughness in tracking down publishers, copyright status, and permissions greatly helps the DSL in determining which records they can upload online to make available for researchers.
This past year, she has also taken on the additional role of Digital Scholarship Internship facilitator. During this time she helped to train four interns on DSL processes, including digitization and metadata description. She has helped guide them through questions on digital collections and helpfully explains how it all benefits our patrons and digital scholarship as a whole.
Outreach Award
Travis H. Williams, St. Edward’s University
The Outreach Award honors an individual or team that demonstrates a creative, innovative, and successful approach to increasing accessibility of digital information, promoting engagement among new users, or increasing public awareness of an organization’s digital collections.
The winner of the 2025 Outreach Award is Travis H. Williams, Archivist and Special Collections Librarian at the Munday Library, St. Edward’s University.
The Munday Library is home to the Texas Craft Brewing Collections, which document the history and culture of the craft beer industry in Texas. The collections include brewery-related ephemera such as stickers, coasters, and bottle labels; however, they were not readily accessible for casual archival patrons. So, with assistance of one student worker, Travis launched TexasBeerArchive.org, a website that features scanned items from over 200 breweries and related collections. This site has made the collections more accessible to people outside of Austin.
To further promote the collections and the website, Travis organized Hillhops, an annual event celebrating Texas beer history. The event includes panel discussions with industry leaders, a job fair-style networking event with breweries, and displays of the collection. The 2025 event drew 330 attendees, and has increased awareness of the Texas Craft Brewing Collections and positioned the library as a hub for interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration.
Hillhops has fostered collaborations with various on-campus agencies, including the Campus Safety Department, Recreation and Wellness Center, Office of Professional Development, and Office of Sustainability, and these partnerships have enriched the event and provided educational opportunities. In addition, Hillhops provides students with networking opportunities and access to potential internships and employment in various fields such as business, marketing, graphic design, chemistry, and biology.
Scholarly Communication Impact Award
Heidi Winkler, Texas Tech University
The Scholarly Communication Impact Award honors an individual or group that has demonstrated leadership in or advancement of scholarly communication.
The winner of the 2025 Scholarly Communications Award is Heidi Winkler, Digital Services Librarian at Texas Tech University.
Texas Tech University’s institutional repository, ThinkTech, was established in 2005, but after 14 years of effort by many librarians trying to do open access outreach on campus, only 202 items had been added to the Faculty Research Collection.
Enter Heidi, who took over as repository manager in 2020 and promptly changed the strategy. Instead of waiting for authors to add their work, she employed a proactive approach of notifying authors that articles were eligible for inclusion and would be added without any further action on their part. This resulted in better metadata, better journal OA compliance checks, and better understanding of the sources of the works, and since 2020, more than 4,000 articles have been added to the repository (a 2014% increase).
Heidi worked with programmers to develop software to automate parts of the process, which allows more and more items to be uploaded and made available for researchers in Texas and around the world.
And if that wasn’t enough, Heidi is the chair of the TCDL 2025 Planning Committee and has been instrumental in ensuring that this conference meets the expectations of all attendees.
Student Excellence Award
Hannah G. Wool, University of Texas at San Antonio
The Student Excellence Award honors an individual student who has demonstrated overall excellence and significant contributions to digital library practice.
The winner of the 2025 Student Excellence Award is Hannah G. Wool, Scholarly Communications Assistant at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Hannah is receiving this award in recognition of her contributions as the very first student assistant at UTSA to work on their DSpace institutional repository from 2022 to 2024. The repository was launched the year before she arrived, and her work was instrumental in ensuring that it grew into a full-fledged library service.
One of Hannah’s first projects was uploading reports from UTSA’s Center for Archaeological Research, which required creating more than 600 records, and she completed the project within a few short months. In the process, she identified numerous areas where metadata standards could be improved and helped hone and improve upload procedures and practices.
Another project Hannah worked on was the addition of nearly 4,000 electronic theses and dissertations to the repository, and her hard work and feedback provided valuable insights about how ETDs could integrate with existing collections.
Hannah’s work ethic will make her an asset to any employer.
Trailblazer Award
Lisa Huntsha, EMDR International Association
The Trailblazer Award honors the work of an individual or group who has used limited resources in innovative ways to create, maintain, or support digital collections. TDL strongly encourages applications from libraries, archives, and cultural heritage institutions that may not have full-time staff dedicated to digital projects but that have found creative and innovative ways to develop a digital presence.
The winner of the 2025 Trailblazer Award is Lisa Huntsha, Clinical Information and Resource Center Specialist at EMDR International Association.
Lisa is the digital librarian and information manager for the EMDR International Association (EMDRIA), supporting over 17,000 Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapists worldwide. She led the creation of EMDRIA’s digital library, an innovative resource that helps mental health professionals stay on the cutting edge of their field.
With over 15 years of experience spanning library science, association management, and technology strategy, Lisa’s work focuses on using digital solutions to enhance member engagement and user experiences. She previously spent a decade working in libraries and archives in higher education before transitioning into the association world.
As the sole (and first-ever) library professional at EMDRIA, Lisa spearheaded the development and launch of the EMDRIA Library in 2024.
EMDR therapy is an evidence-based psychotherapy designed to help individuals process and heal from trauma. By using bilateral stimulation (such as guided eye movements) and structured protocols, EMDR helps ease distressing memories, reducing their emotional charge and alleviating symptoms of conditions such as PTSD, anxiety, depression, and more.
The EMDRIA Library provides a centralized, accessible repository of more than 2,000 evidence-based resources for EMDR therapy in 23 unique languages. The library saw significant user engagement, with over 1,500 visits from 960 unique users in the first 30 days, and to date it has been accessed by more than 15,000 individuals in 110 countries or territories. Future plans include expanding language offerings, introducing AI-driven discovery tools, allowing user submissions of peer-reviewed materials, and establishing a content review model.
The library serves as a valuable resource for EMDR therapists, individuals undergoing EMDR therapy, and the broader mental health community, providing free trauma resources and enhancing trauma-informed care.
TDL Service Award
Jon Crossno, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
The TDL Service Award is given at the discretion of TDL staff to recognize a member of our community who goes above and beyond in service to the TDL consortium.
This year’s TDL Service Award recognizes Jon Crossno, Collection Management Library at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
As the Collection Management Librarian at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Jon manages the library’s collection budget and electronic resource subscriptions and ensures that access to those subscriptions is made available to the UT Southwestern community. He also serves as the local system administrator for the library’s online catalog (Koha) and the TDL-hosted instances of DSpace and Vireo.
Texas Digital Library recognizes Jon’s long service to the TDL, manifested most recently in his leadership of a Vireo Users Group Accessibility Task Force, which is developing web accessibility resources for theses and dissertations to our partner graduate schools. This work is essential to TDL’s commitment to improve accessibility of digital materials published through platforms we host. Additionally, you have served on the VUG Steering Committee since 2020, providing expert leadership through a crucial period of Vireo 4 development and deployment, and served on the TCDL Planning Committee in the current year, as well as on several past committees.
As if all that weren’t enough, the TDL staff and community recognize Jon as a constructive and collaborative partner – someone we know we can trust to test new systems and provide useful (and kind!) feedback, and someone who is quick to offer support and guidance to other TDL members when they post a question on an email list or bring up an issue in a users group meeting.
TDL is fortunate to have Jon in our community.
TDL Awards recipients were honored at the Opening Plenary session of TCDL 2025. Learn more about the TDL Awards and read about past years’ winners.