Daniel Genkins
Digital Library Architect
Vanderbilt University
Vanderbilt University has a rich history of advancing digital projects and stewarding its assets for perpetual preservation. However, it has long wrestled with questions around the extensibility and reproducibility of its core digital projects. To this end, the University is refocusing efforts on developing and deploying discrete digital solutions that advance these projects locally in ways that can be adopted globally. The briefing will share the vision, mission, staffing structures, and key industry partnerships that make this approach possible, and it will introduce one such solution, Archivault, a modular platform for processing and enriching digitized archival images. Archivault automates resource-intensive steps such as document boundary detection, transcription, and metadata generation via cloud-based infrastructure that lowers the technical barrier to entry. The platform supports both rapid prototyping for individual projects and scalable deployment for large repositories. In doing so, it demonstrates how targeted, reusable services can address heterogeneous scholarly and institutional needs.
