About the DLF Forum
DLF programs stretch year-round, but we are perhaps best known for our signature event, the annual DLF Forum. The DLF Forum welcomes digital library, archives, and museum practitioners from member institutions and beyond—for whom it serves as a meeting place, marketplace, and congress. As a meeting place, the DLF Forum provides an opportunity for our working groups, and community members to conduct their business and present their work. As a marketplace, the Forum provides an opportunity for community members to share experiences and practices with one another and support a broader level of information sharing among professional staff. As a congress, the Forum provides an opportunity for the DLF to continually review and assess its programs and its progress with input from the community at large.
Here, the DLF community celebrates successes, learns from mistakes, sets grassroots agendas, and organizes for action.
The 2023 DLF Forum and affiliated events, including Learn@DLF (pre-conference) and NDSA’s Digital Preservation 2023 will be held at the St. Louis Union Station Hotel in St. Louis, MO, November 12-16, 2023.
Land Acknowledgement
The DLF Forum, Learn@DLF, and NDSA’s Digital Preservation will be meeting in St. Louis, Missouri. It’s important to Team DLF to acknowledge our tourism and whose land we’re on wherever we gather.
St. Louis is the ancestral, unceded traditional territory of the Chickasaw Nation, Illini Tribe, Ioway Tribe, Kickapoo Tribe, Osage Nation, Otoe-Missoria Tribe, Miami Tribe, Sioux, Iroquois, and the Quapaw Nation, among others, and today there are over 183,400 Native Americans living in the state of Missouri. (1,2) We would like to offer our gratitude to the Indigenous peoples, past and present, who have cared for the lands we will meet on. (3)
As a team, we operate remotely year-round, which is also why we’d like to recognize the impact of the carbon footprint of technologies, which disproportionately impacts Indigenous communities.
We would also like to acknowledge the free people forcibly kidnapped from Africa who were enslaved on these lands. From before the United States assumed political control of St. Louis in 1804, enslaved and free Africans and African Americans contributed to the city and state’s history in significant ways. (4)
At CLIR, we are reflecting on what it means to make this acknowledgement and the type of action that must follow. We follow the tradition of donating to local Indigenous organizations in an effort to exemplify our commitment to beginning the process of interrogating and dismantling the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism.
We continue the tradition of land reparations by making a $250 donation to the Sugarloaf Mound Fund of the Osage Foundation, which supports the Osage Nation’s ongoing preservation and management of Sugarloaf Mound, the oldest human-made structure and last Native American Mound in south St. Louis. CLIR/DLF is happy to support this work.
1: https://native-land.ca/
2: https://patch.com/missouri/stlouis/indigenous-peoples-who-once-lived-st-louis-map
3: https://sites.wustl.edu/budercenter/land-acknowledgment-2/
4: https://www.nps.gov/jeff/learn/historyculture/african-american-life-in-saint-louis-1804-through-1865.htm