Annual Meeting of Digital Scriptorium, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 23 September 2016 (photos by Matthew Heintzelman) |
October News
On Friday September 23, 2016 Digital Scriptorium held its
annual all-day meeting of the membership at Houghton Library, Harvard
University, in Cambridge, MA. The annual meeting this year was exciting for
several reasons:
1. It
coincided with the opening of the Beyond
Words exhibition of illuminated manuscripts in Boston area collections,
held at three separate venues: Harvard, Boston College, and the Gardner Museum.
2.
The same Beyond Words exhibition helped to
encourage interest in DS membership among Boston institutions. At the meeting:
·
Tufts University officially joined DS
·
New York Academy of Medicine became a non-voting
Associate
·
Wellesley College sent a representative who
attended as a potential member
3.
DS members approved new Bylaws, Articles of
Incorporation, and a legal Action of the Board to incorporate DS as a 501c3
tax-exempt organization. This means that DS will soon be eligible to receive
tax-deductible donations, apply for government supported grants, and operate as
an independent non-profit organization with all the legal protections and
privileges that status incurs. We are grateful to the St. Louis based Volunteer
Lawyers and Accountants for the Arts who assigned to us a pro-bono corporate
lawyer to help us through the requirements of non-profit organization.
Presentations were made about:
·
website updates (see http://digscriptnews.blogspot.com/2016/09/digital-scriptorium-website-enhancements.html)
·
new cataloging and research tools implemented at
the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library
·
new appointments and tasks for the DS Advisory
Council
·
progress made on the Broken Books project
·
the Digging into Data Challenge and the
possibilities of CC0 licensing of DS records
·
the potential for use of authority control of
names,
·
a membership strategy based on regional analysis
of the Conway-Davis directory and inspired by the Digital Public Library of
America.
In attendance were: Christopher Barbour (Tufts), Debra
Cashion (Saint Louis U), Lisa Fagin Davis (Medieval Academy), Consuelo Dutschke
(Columbia), Lynne Grigsby (UC Berkeley), Matthew Heintzelmann (Hill Museum and
Manuscript Library), Janine Pollock (Free Library Philadelphia), Ruth Rogers
(Wellesley), E.C. Schroeder (Yale), Barbara Shailor (Yale), William Stoneman
(Harvard), Elizabeth Teviotdale (Western Michigan), Vanessa Wilkie (Huntington),
Cherry Williams (UC Riverside). Lynn Ransom (UPenn) was absent due to illness.