About Digital Initiatives

What We Do

The Digital Initiatives department digitizes. That may not come as a surprise, but despite the fact that it is not all we do, digitization – including the scanning of photographs, feed scanning of books, conversion of legacy files, batch processing of born-digital files, and other tasks – is the foundation by which we build our collections and web sites and through which we digitally preserve institutional, local and scholarly material and resources.

But, again, digitizing is not all we do. We also work with departments, schools, librarians, citizens, machines, code, and each other to provide guidance on digital tools, projects and preservation, and to identify, acquire, and promote new collections.

Our History

The department was established in 2008 with an initial charge to digitize and make accessible the library’s renowned International Jazz Collections. Material from the Jazz Collections continue to be added to this day, and we continue to build on our collections. We currently maintain over a hundred digital collections and applications, and work that begun in the lab has now been incorporated into a library department, Digital Scholarship and Open Strategies, and a University center, the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning (CDIL).

Our People

• Kevin Dobbins, Digital Labs Manager

• Klytie Xu, Digital Projects Manager

• Andrew Weymouth, Digital Initiatives Librarian

• Evan Williamson, Unit Head for Digital Scholarship and Open Strategies Digital; Digital Infrastructure Librarian; Co-Director of CDIL

• Devin Becker, Associate Dean Research and Instruction; Co-Director of CDIL