Week One
As this was the first week of the DFW, activities began at a slower pace while I focused on some foundational tasks. I worked on setting up my artifact repository and completing general administrative work for the course. I also met with my site supervisor/mentor, Ann Hidalgo, to complete onboarding and discuss initial goals for the quarter.
During the week, I also familiarized myself with HathiTrust and the Internet Archive, to better understand the available materials and platform functionalities. After onboarding, I began contributing to existing OCLC collections by adding relevant documents based on specific keyword searches. These activities provided a strong start to understanding the scope of available materials and set the foundation for future work in collection development!
My initial searches included the following terms and outcomes:
- Vatican (98 results): This was an example search that was done during the first meeting in order to familiarize me with the process. I added one document.
- Holy (1,887 results): Using this term I returned quite a few results and added the following materials: A Brief Concordance to the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, A Brief Historical Sketch of the Holy Apostolic Church of Armenia, and A Chronological and Analytical View of the Holy Bible.
- Baptist (1,970 results): A Century of Baptist Achievement (ed. A. H. Newman), A History of American Baptist Missions in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, and The Acts of the Apostles: A Popular Commentary Upon a Critical Basis.
- Voodoo (2 results): I was pretty unsurprised by the number of results. I added: Voodoo Tales as Told Among the Negroes of the Southwest.
Week Two
This week, I learned how to create my own collection in the Digital Theological Library (DTL), focusing on open access theses and dissertations from the University of Alabama within the African American Studies discipline (the specific title of the collection I created: DTL OA University of Alabama Open Access Dissertations & Theses African American studies). I found the process of building and curating a personalized collection to be both intuitive and rewarding. Adding specific titles to my new collection allowed me to explore how DTL structures metadata and categorization for open access materials, and it gave me a greater appreciation for the possibilities of digital curation within academic research environments.
The process was mostly straightforward, but I did encounter a few technical obstacles. For instance, some titles could not be added due to missing OCLC numbers, such as Career Mobility of Black and White Upper Level Administrators in a Predominantly White Institution of Higher Education: A Case Study. Others, like Expanding the Beauty Spectrum: A Case Study of Lupita Nyong’o as the Brand Ambassador for Lancôme Cosmetics, returned no results during search attempts. I also noticed that a few works generated duplicate entries—such as King’s Return to the Mall, Songs of the Soul, and Institutional Factors That Affect the Mathematical Achievement of African American Females—and I am still exploring how to determine which record is most authoritative or complete. Additionally, I experienced a minor technical interruption when the University of Alabama’s DSspace Repository site (the original location of the titles that I was adding to the DTL collection) became temporarily unreachable on April 8 at 1:02 p.m., which interrupted my progress.
Anyway, after returning to the platform later, I also adjusted my search strategy by expanding beyond the initial “African American Studies” filter to include “Black Studies.” This change led to finding more results and enabled me to identify additional relevant works that might otherwise have been missed.
By the end of the week, I successfully added 44 titles to my collection. This experience helped strengthen my understanding of digital library curation, metadata reliability, and the often-overlooked nuances of disciplinary labeling when working with Black studies materials. I’m looking forward to continuing to refine the collection and developing a better strategy for evaluating duplicate entries and incomplete records!
Week Three
This week, I was tasked with identifying additional repositories that provide open access materials. I focused specifically on repositories outside of the United States, as this region tends to dominate discovery systems and scholarly visibility. Given the ongoing emphasis on building collections of theses and dissertations, I prioritized university-based repositories and evaluated whether their records were cataloged in WorldCat (because the titles needed to have OCLC numbers).
During this process, I explored several repositories of interest. The Research Information Sharing Service (RISS), a South Korean platform, offers a substantial body of content however, while the interface can be translated into English, I found that materials from Korean universities such as Yonsei University (interestingly, Yonsei University Library is listed in WorldCat as an institution, yet I was unable to identify OCLC numbers for specific titles) and Seoul National University were not represented in WorldCat (Seoul National University’s “S-Space” repository did not appear to have corresponding WorldCat records).
Other repositories yielded mixed results. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center’s Arnold Library includes some theses and dissertations in WorldCat, but only a limited number (approximately 30) are available as open access. When testing discoverability for the University of Cape Coast (located in Ghana), selected titles did not appear in WorldCat at all. Additional repositories, including those from the University of Warsaw (located in Poland) and the United States Military Academy at West Point, provided useful pathways to other institutional collections.
Among the repositories reviewed, Stockholm University’s collection appears to be the most promising in terms of both accessibility and representation within WorldCat. Next week, I’ll be building a new collection on DTL using titles found through the Stockholm University Library.
Week Four
This week, I worked on building subject-specific collections within the DTL for Stockholm University’s open access dissertations, organizing materials across disciplines such as social sciences, political science, natural sciences, and languages and literature. The following are the exact names of the collections I created this week:
DTL OA Stockholm University Open Access Dissertations & Theses Social Sciences
DTL OA Stockholm University Open Access Dissertations & Theses Languages and Literature
DTL OA Stockholm University Open Access Dissertations & Theses Political Science
DTL OA Stockholm University Open Access Dissertations & Theses Natural Sciences
While the task initially appeared straightforward, it did require some careful attention to how disciplinary boundaries are defined and represented in metadata systems! More notably, several known dissertation titles failed to appear in search results, despite being publicly listed elsewhere. This discrepancy raised some questions for me about the completeness and reliability of the repository’s indexing processes. It also highlighted a broader tension within open access infrastructures: materials may be technically “open,” yet remain effectively inaccessible due to metadata gaps, ingestion delays, or system limitations.
Overall, I feel like this experience reinforced how critical metadata quality and consistency are to equitable information access, and how absences in digital collections can mirror larger structural blind spots in knowledge organization.
Week Five
This week pretty much went the same as the previous week; the focus was on adding collections and adding even more titles to collections I have already created! The collections I created this week are:
DTL OA Stockholm University Open Access Dissertations & Theses Computer and Information Sciences
DTL OA Stockholm University Open Access Dissertations & Theses Humanities and the Arts
Of note, I found out that the reason I wasn’t able to find certain titles of materials in WorldCat was because some of them included dashes or other punctuation in the title. After removing them, I was able to find most of the materials I was looking for (and subsequently add them to the collections I was building!).
Week Six
Alongside continuing to expand the collections I developed, I was also responsible for ensuring that metadata was accurately entered for 25 anthologies, including detailed information for each chapter and its respective author. I found this work particularly engaging and rewarding, and it’s definitely a task I look forward to continuing!
Week Seven
As with previous weeks my main focus was on expanding the collections that I’ve created. The following collections now have the following number of materials:
DTL OA Stockholm University Open Access Dissertations & Theses Computer and Information Sciences: 137
DTL OA Stockholm University Open Access Dissertations & Theses Humanities and the Arts: 150
DTL OA Stockholm University Open Access Dissertations & Theses Social Sciences: 76
In addition, I was also tasked with conducting a peer review of another intern’s collections. My peer review consisted of checking approximately 10% of their added titles starting from the knowledge base and others starting from the catalog to see if anything was missing from the properties section of the collection (or if any links weren’t working properly).
Week Eight
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Week Nine
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