Day/time: May 8, 2025, 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. EDT
Title: Expanding Library Publishing Services Beyond Campus: Engaging the Greater Community Through Library Publishing
Presenter: Kyle Morgan (he/him), Scholarly Communications and Digital Scholarship Librarian, Cal Poly Humboldt
Description: As universities have acknowledged their educational responsibilities beyond their campus borders, academic libraries have engaged the cause in a variety of ways. This presentation on the efforts of The Press at Cal Poly Humboldt details how opening library publishing services to the community has become one of the more effective outreach engagements in the library, all the while fostering student voices and skill development, advancing social and environmental justice issues, stoking fundraising, and broadening the university’s community integration and impact.
Title: Entangling Stories to Organize Digital Scholarship: Creating Generative, Community-Engaged Workflows
Presenters:
- Mariam Ismail (she/they), Digital Projects Coordinator, Virginia Tech University Libraries
- Jason Higgins (he/him), Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Virginia Tech University Libraries
Description: Digital humanities projects aim to bring together diverse stories, media, and knowledge. The support we often provide as practitioners is helping partners weave these elements together. This involves breaking things down, a deconstruction of the very smallest elements to aid in reconstruction of complex stories and collective narratives. This reconstructionist approach is rooted in social justice, ethical stewardship, and intersectional critical perspectives — with/in the various parts unfolds a more complete story. It is also firmly grounded in collaborative relationships with communities. Partners help us gather fragments and reorganize them into digital narratives, and the generative DH workflows enable us to brainstorm, interact, and envision possibilities. By sharing authority at every stage — the identification of research questions, thematic focuses, vetting and peer-review, project design, access, and preservation — we are fostering a culture in which partners contribute at critical stages of knowledge production and thereby participants see parts of their own lived experiences represented and feel pride towards their contributions. This process also creates replicable documentation throughout the steps of creation rather than treating digital preservation as an afterthought.
This proposal explores the implementation of this workflow for a DH project that navigates the potential mental health effects of learning about historical and ongoing racial trauma. In collaboration with the More Than a Fraction Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting education, research, and networks on the legacies of slavery and descendants of enslaved people in the United States, we have been collecting oral history interviews and creating a DH project that seeks to raise awareness of intergenerational trauma, records the collective memories of families of descendants, and advances new understandings of racial trauma. Also central to this process is an educational component that includes and immerses students in the experience of creation, allowing communities to share wisdom with young people and students to engage in experiential learning beyond classrooms and into communities.
Title: From Locality to Decoloniality? The Role of Perpusnas Press in Knowledge Sovereignty in Indonesia
Presenter: Zaki Fathurohman, Information System Analyst, National Library of Indonesia
Description:The disclosure of local knowledge is often mentioned as one approach to decolonization. Indonesia, as an archipelago with diverse ethnic groups spanning both land and sea, covering an area two-thirds the size of Europe, is believed to possess its own wealth of knowledge. Since its establishment in 2019, Perpusnas Press, the publishing arm of the National Library of Indonesia (Perpusnas RI), has published nearly 1,000 book titles on its website. In addition to publishing ancient manuscripts, it has also released books that emphasize local themes. Beyond waiting at the downstream, Perpusnas RI actively organizes writing activities across various regions of the country, contributing to efforts to equalize literacy development in a nation as vast as Indonesia.
The question then arises: is the disclosure of locality part of a conscious decolonization effort? How does the discourse of decolonization appear in the publications, both written and audiovisual, managed by Perpusnas RI? Understanding the state of library publishing in a country that experienced colonization by the Portuguese, British, Dutch, and Japanese provides valuable context for assessing the role of Perpusnas Press in advancing knowledge sovereignty. Through an analysis of interviews, news websites, journal websites, and Perpusnas RI’s YouTube channel, it is revealed that the explicit decolonization discourse is still emerging. However, the access provided to ancient manuscripts through preservation by Perpusnas RI has proven to open avenues for researchers to conduct studies related to decolonization, particularly in understanding how historical texts illuminate the anti-colonial stance of national heroes.
This is exemplified by Arif (2024), who examined the biography and bibliography of Sheikh Yusuf Makassar, an anti-colonial figure who journeyed from Indonesia to South Africa and served as an inspiration for Nelson Mandela. Several books about Sheikh Yusuf Makassar have also been published by Perpusnas Press, highlighting the richness of content about local wisdom in Indonesia. Amid the potential gap between content on locality and the awareness of a decolonization agenda, there is evident potential for Perpusnas Press to optimize its role in knowledge sovereignty through synergy and collaboration with various partners.