Jennifer Wolfe
Digital Initiatives Manager, Newberry Library
Matthew Krc
Digital Initiatives Librarian, Newberry Library
Like many smaller cultural heritage institutions, the Newberry -- a Chicago-based independent research library specializing in the humanities -- is rich in collections but relatively poor in digital infrastructure. Lacking in-house web design or development staff, librarians have struggled to keep up with demand for digital scholarship support. Adopting a toolkit of free and open-source software (FOSS) programs has helped turn things around, enabling a mostly pain-free process for creating professional-looking sites with specialized functionality. Learn about the Newberry's resources showcasing digital collections, crowdsourcing, digital pedagogy, and open data, how you can participate in these initiatives, and how you can use FOSS tools in your own digital scholarship projects.
Jen Wolfe worked as a librarian at Seattle's Museum of Pop Culture and the University of Iowa Libraries before becoming the Newberry's Digital Initiatives Manager. She was awarded the Center for Research Libraries Primary Source Award for Access in 2013, and co-authored "DIY History: Redesigning a Platform for a Transcription Crowdsourcing Initiative" in Outreach: Innovative Practices for Archives and Special Collections (Rowman & Littlefield: 2014).
Matt Krc is the Digital Initiatives Librarian in the Department of Digital Initiatives and Services at the Newberry, a Chicago-based independent research library specializing in the humanities. Matt's areas of expertise include digital collection building, cultural heritage crowdsourcing, and metadata workflows; he holds a Masters in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.