Collections as Data – Stewardship and Use Models to Enhance Access
What happens when researchers with powerful computing tools meet massive digital collections? What discoveries are made? What new directions and best practices in scholarly research emerge?

Hear from scholars who have used digital collections to expand human understanding and from leaders in institutions that collect, organize, preserve, and provide digital collections as data. We invite you to attend the symposium, which will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, September 27th, in the Coolidge Auditorium on the first floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First Street SE, Washington, D.C. The event is free and open to the public. Advance registration is required if you wish to attend in person. For a complete program of the day’s events, visit http://digitalpreservation.gov/meetings/dcs16.html. This FREE event will be live-streamed. The link will be made available the day of the event on the conference page. Join the conversation on Twitter using #AsData.

Jer Thorp, keynote speaker and co-founder of The Office for Creative Research, will open the symposium with a look at his organization’s work making complex data sets accessible, thought-provoking, and ultimately more human.

Speakers will highlight efforts in the cultural heritage and digital humanities communities to enhance access to digital collections, help develop communities of practice and address rising concerns for data scholarship. The symposium will conclude with steps towards supporting computational research with “Collections as Data: Conditions of Possibility” by Thomas Padilla, Humanities Data Curator at the University of California Santa Barbara.