Digital Archives in the Commonwealth Summit
Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Richmond, VA
November 11 and 12, 2025
The Digital Archives in the Commonwealth Summit is an annual gathering of scholars, librarians, archivists, technologists, museum curators, and students who are engaged in the creation of digital archives and integrated research platforms. The Summit aims to highlight innovative projects and methodological frameworks in the Commonwealth of Virginia by fostering a collaborative dialogue among its participants. The Summit is an ideal forum for demonstrating advanced projects, conceptualizing new initiatives, and everything in between.
The 2025 Summit is a joint effort between the University of Virginia Law Library, the Library of Virginia, and the Virginia Museum of History & Culture. It is an opportunity to present past, current, or ongoing digital archives-based projects and to explore the practical, theoretical, and methodological issues at the intersection of archival practice, scholarly research, museum science, and pedagogy. We also encourage projects that integrate AI and other computer-assisted tools into archival work, research, or public engagement.
We welcome proposals for topics, panels, and workshops as well as participants for 5-minute lightning round project demonstrations. Library students, graduate students, and early-career professionals are especially encouraged to participate.
We envision the summit engaging with the following topics:
- How do digital surrogates change our interpretation, use, or understanding of physical materials?
- New techniques of interfacing, indexing, and discovering content within collections.
- Methods of expanding access, assessing public engagement, and promoting digital archives projects.
- New models of description, interpretation, or analysis of digital archives.
- The inclusion of critical archives theory in archival practice, such as encouraging a focus on collecting and highlighting materials from understudied subjects and persons, opening collections to new audiences and methods of interpretation, or discussions of the privileged role archives play in historical memory making.
- The value of digitization in terms of the preservation of the cultural record.
- Discussions on the convergence of technologists, archivists, museum professionals, and scholars inside and outside the archives, particularly regarding collaborative methods of selecting, processing, interpreting, and teaching with collections and digital archives.
- Institutional issues surrounding funding, prioritization, collaboration, or the digital humanities.
- The technological underpinnings of digital archives creation including digitization methods, transcription, development of data models, standards-based metadata, hosting solutions, data management, the application of empirical data techniques, data visualization, and the integration of AI or other computer-assisted methods.
- Digital archives as pedagogical instruments in classroom instruction and public engagement.