ULA Annual Conference 2026

This session explores the Eccles Health Sciences Library’s (EHSL) role in commemorating milestones across the University of Utah’s health sciences campus. As colleges, schools, and departments celebrate anniversaries and historical achievements, they often turn to the library for curated materials, particularly photographs, from EHSL’s historical collections. Additionally, these collaborations help the library grow its own archives through new donations of historical material from the respective collaborators.

This session showcases how these partnerships can bolster both physical and digital collections. Attendees will discover how these efforts helped foster campus engagement, preserve institutional memory, and develop inclusive historical narratives.

This session shares practical strategies for assisting campus partners, fortifying institutional memory, and further developing archival resources at the library.

From 2021 to 2023, BYU Library commissioned an in-house, interdivisional task force to holistically examine the extant personnel, systems, and workflows allocated to managing our wide range of digital content types. The aim was to identify the gaps and better coordinate the future access to and care of digital content. We created a set of guiding principles for the library administration and staff that oriented planning and discussion. These helped us trace commonalities between issues or solutions. We believe they are general enough to pass on to other institutions. They guide library staff in addressing the future digital curation questions that will surely arise with increasing frequency, complexity, and diversity. In brief, they are: 1. The Expectation of Change 2. The Expectation of Rapid Growth 3. The Expectation of Digital Access 4. An Embrace of Experimentation 5. Cross-divisional Co-ownership and Collaboration 6. Resource Requirements 7. The Necessity (and Present Difficulty) of Achieving a Full Lifecycle 8. The Urgency of Resolution 9. Documentation. In this presentation, we will elaborate on these principles and describe how they informed our task force’s deliberations, how they are currently influencing our strategic directions, and how they can be practically applied elsewhere.

Auditing digitized AV files is essential for ensuring accuracy and preservation, but our early approach was anything but efficient. We started with spreadsheets and formulas to compare filenames and descriptive metadata, paired with separate tools for technical metadata checks—a process that was slow and prone to human error. To speed things up, we introduced small scripts for individual tasks, then refined each by identifying the essential steps for a comprehensive audit, and eventually combined them into a single, streamlined tool that verifies filenames against spreadsheets and audits technical metadata in one pass.

When imaging AV media became part of our workflow, new standards demanded additional checks for image files. Instead of introducing additional manual steps, we expanded our script to handle these requirements too, creating a unified solution for auditing across formats. Today, this tool saves significant time and ensures consistency, but we’re not stopping here. Future plans include adding progress indicators, notifications, and even rewriting the script in Python for greater flexibility and scalability.

This session will share how we transformed a tedious, manual process into an automated system that supports quality control at scale—and what’s next on the horizon.