2021 Annual Meeting

DS held its Annual Meeting on Friday 24 September 2021 from 2:00-4:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time. The meetings was held remotely by Zoom with 56 people in attendance, including all members of the DS Board of Directors. This was a milestone meeting because it included elections for three new Board members and marked the end of the leadership of Debra Cashion, who served as President and Executive Director of DS for six years. Also stepping down from the Board were E.C. Schroeder, Treasurer, and Cherry Williams, Director-at-Large, both who served during the same time as Debra, 2015-2021. Elections included the approval of existing Board members to fill the positions of officers, including Lynn Ransom as President and Executive Director, Janine Pollock as Vice President and Deputy Director, David Faulds as Secretary, and Vanessa Wilkie as Treasurer. Newly elected Board members included Ray Clemens, Tamar Evangelistia-Dougherty, and Sue Steuer.

Several reports were submitted including the annual Director’s Report, posted on the Governance page of the DS website. E. C. Schroeder presented the Treasurer’s Report, and Lisa Fagin Davis, Chair of the Advisory Council (AC), gave a report regarding recent changes to the membership of the AC, which is a standing committee appointed by the Board. New members of the AC include Eric Johnson and Elizabeth Hebbard, while James Marrow and David Ganz have stepped off. Other members of the SC include Consuelo Dutschke, Barbara Shailor, and Bill Stoneman.

Vanessa Wilkie, Director-at-Large in charge of membership, presented Princeton University as the most recent institution to join DS. Emma Sarconi, of Princeton Libraries, gave a presentation of the various collections of manuscripts which Princeton plans to include in the DS 2.0 catalog.

A report on DS 2.0 was presented by Emma Thomson, Doug Emery, and Lynn Ransom. Progress on the development of the new DS database has been facilitated by a $100,000 IMLS planning grant and $100,500 in funds raised by a group of institutional members of DS able to support the project in the interim between the end of planning grant and the application process for the IMLS implementation grant. The University of Pennsylvania will be the new technical host for the DS database, although the hosting of images will depend on distributed management by institutions with IIIF servers. For further details see the DS 2.0 page of the DS website.

In spite of obstacles such as limited travel and restricted communications because of COVID-19, there was a broad consensus that the Digital Scriptorium database and consortium have a bright and sustainable future.