Posted February 10, 2026 by L.P. Coladangelo, DS Catalog Project and Data Manager
To get regular updates about DS, please subscribe to our email list by clicking here.
New Member: Pepperdine University
DS is proud to announce Pepperdine University as our newest member following a unanimous vote of approval. We at DS are looking forward to working with member representative Alicia Petersen and her colleagues Bailey Badger and Bailey Berry.
Pepperdine University Special Collections and Archives collects, preserves, and makes accessible materials of historical and research value in all formats—including rare books, periodicals, audiovisual materials, and objects—in support of the University’s teaching, research, and service mission. Holdings include rare book and archival collections, the Pepperdine University Archives, the Malibu Historical Collection, and the Churches of Christ Heritage Collection. These materials are open to all users, including students, faculty, staff, alumni, community members, and scholars. The department actively engages in collection development and acquisition; preservation and conservation; organization and description; research services; exhibitions; events; and course instruction. These activities are guided by the current and anticipated learning and research needs, with the goal of fostering discovery and the creation of new scholarship.
To learn more about Pepperdine’s collections before they make their way into the DS Catalog, please follow this link: https://library.pepperdine.edu/collections/special-collections/
New Blog Post
As part of her work getting acquainted with the massive dataset that is the DS Catalog, our Manuscript Data Curation Fellow Kelly Tuttle explored her area of expertise, Islamicate manuscripts, through SPARQL queries and AI-generated visualizations. Learn more about her query strategies and the observations she made in her newest post on the DS Notes and Insights blog.
Description Assistance Reminder
Thanks to the 2-year NEH-funded grant awarded to DS in late 2025, our Manuscript Data Curation Fellow Kelly Tuttle is on hand to provide metadata creation assistance. This help is currently available to all DS members, and we encourage non-member institutions to contact us about membership if they are interested in taking advantage of the metadata creation program. We are especially keen to assist under-resourced institutions who may lack the cataloging expertise to create their own metadata. Faculty members, scholars, and researchers are also encouraged to pass along this information to colleagues at institutions they believe may benefit from this manuscript description assistance program through DS membership.
If you would like to participate in the program or learn more about manuscript metadata creation through DS, please message us at [email protected].