Digital Initiatives Librarian, Writer and Artist

Photo of the Author with a bad pandemic haircut

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Contents: Workshops and Presentations | Scholarly Publications | Other Writing | Exhibits | Digital Scholarship Tools | Student Fellowship Projects | Press

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Andrew Weymouth is the Digital Initiatives Librarian at University of Idaho. He focuses on using static web technology to curate the institution’s special collections and partners with faculty and students to create custom fellowship projects. He also develops digital tools and workflows to enhance transcription, tagging, and image processing, making the university’s audio, text, and visual resources more discoverable for researchers.

Workshops and Presentations

  • U of I LibGuide Remediation Workshop An open access resource for University of Idaho faculty and staff to help ensure U of I LibGuide materials meet WCAG 2.1 guidelines. Guide covers how to remediate image files, PDFs, media and semantic content. Winter, 2025.
  • Adobe Premiere Transcript Workshop Open educational resource for University of Idaho faculty, staff and students on using Adobe Premiere to generate transcripts. The workshop explains how to edit the transcript material, export or convert to captions. Fall, 2025.
  • Adobe PDF Accessibility Remediation Workshop Open educational resource for U of I staff, faculty and students for manually remediating PDF documents using Adobe Acrobat. Fall, 2025.
  • The Tideflats: Distance and Environmental Psychology Paper for Resist, Reclaim, Restore: Preserving an Inclusive Heritage Society of Architectural Historians 2025 mini-conference. The paper examines the history of land use in the Tideflats, an industrial area in Tacoma, Washington. Fall, 2025.
  • Image Extraction for Overhead Scans and Archeological Photographs Presentation for the 2025 Visual Resources Association Conference. Fall 2025.
  • Creating Geographic Animation Using Google Earth Studio Presentation for the 2025 University of Idaho Library Tech Talk Series. Fall 2025.
  • Using Geographic Visualizations to Enrich Oral History Recordings Presentation for the 2025 Western Association of Map Libraries Conference. Fall 2025.
  • Preserving and Enriching Podcast Projects: A Workflow for Small Teams Poster presentation for the 2025 Northwest Archivist Conferences outlining the process developed during the course of creating the Context Podcast Digital Collection. Spring 2025.
  • University of Idaho History Thesis Materials Materials related to my 2024-2026 History Thesis Project, including Thesis Prospectus and Syllabus. Spring, 2025.
  • CALS Liaison Presentation Presentation on the College of Agriculture and Life Science for the Library Liaison Committee. Spring, 2025.
  • Using Embodiment and Audio Narrative to Present Historical Research A presentation created for Alyssa Kreikemeier’s HIST424 Environmental History course on using embodiment in field recording, interviewing and utilizing oral history recordings to restructure scholarly work to the audio narrative medium and enrich your research. Winter, 2025.
  • Introduction to Zotero Introductory guide to using the citation manager Zotero to organize scholarly materials, create bibliographies, summarize annotations, collaborate on group projects and preserve your research for future reference. Created for the Spring 2025 U of I Information Landscape series. Winter, 2025.
  • University of Idaho VERSO Guide Introductory presentation for students, staff and faculty engaging with University of Idaho Library's VERSO institutional repository platform. The guide walks through how VERSO functions, how to create a profile if data harvesting hasn't done so already, how to add scholarly work, edit your author profile and hide any work you don't want to have public. Fall, 2024.
  • Using OpenRefine to Standardize Metadata Language Practical guide to using OpenRefine for metadata language standardization intended for faculty, staff, patrons and students at U of I. The focus of this workshop is to provide only the steps you need to perform to work through language standardization and not the many other OpenRefine capabilities. Fall, 2024.
  • College of Agricultural & Life Sciences Liaison Introduction Reference site for introducing undergraduate students of the College of Agricultural & Life Sciences to myself, how my work corresponds with their studies and the various library resources on hand that they can use for producing scholarly work. Fall, 2024.
  • Aerial Time Lapse Tools Survey Survey of five platforms that researchers can use to generate aerial time lapse visualizations, highlighting their unique strengths, weaknesses and the technical skills required for each. Created for the 25th annual University of Idaho GIS Day Short Talk series. Fall, 2024.
  • Using Python Tools and Obsidian to Connect and Visualize Research Presentation on using custom Python tools to correct optical character recognition layers and extract annotations from digitized text and contextualizing these notes with Obsidian detailed tagging methods to enrich scholarly research. Fall, 2024.
  • Distant Listening, Seven Minute Scholarship Presentation Presentation on text mining oral history collections created for the Seven Minute Scholarship segment of the 2024 Loyola Marymount University Digital Commons conference. Fall, 2024.
  • Distant Listening: Using Python and Apps Scripts to Text Mine and Tag Oral History Collections Workshop on using Python and App Script to create subject tags across complete oral history collections and empower student workers to run, modify and expand these tags during the copyediting process. Created for the 2024 U of I Tech Talk series. Fall, 2024.
  • Presenting Research in Five Ways to Increase Understanding and Uncover Connections Workshop for history undergraduates on framing research five different ways using various digital scholarship approaches. Created for Alyssa Kreikemeier's HIST 320 course. Fall, 2024.
  • Analytics Workshop Introductory workshop for U of I library faculty about how GA4 is set up across the library site, getting access to analytics, reading and refining the series of Looker Studio templates I created for the many library teams and the limitations and misconceptions of what this data can tell us. Co-created with Digital Infrastructure Librarian Evan Williamson. Fall, 2024.
  • Digital Geolocation Tools for Archival Research Workshop teaching geolocation tools and methodologies to identify archival photographs lacking metadata to enrich resources. The presentation covers text analysis, landmark identification and creating aerial time lapse videos. Created for the U of I Information Landscape series. Fall, 2024.
  • Humanizing Nature Research History with Static Web Technology Presentation for UCLA Library's Captivity: Assembling Nature’s Histories detailing my experience creating interpretive materials for the Taylor Wilderness Research Station digital collection. Spring, 2024.
  • Collaborating with Community Archives to Increase Access to Collections Created for the 2024 Northwest Archivist conference, this presentation details my experience collaborating with the Filipino American National Historical Society to create an article on the Alaskero migratory laborers, and explores being mindful of bias when engaging with community heritage spaces that don't look or function like institutional archives. Spring, 2024.
  • Using Digital Scholarship to Conduct and Present Historical Research A revised version of the Humanizing Nature Research History presentation for Ellen Kittell's History 209 class, to introduce undergraduate students to digital scholarship concepts. University of Idaho, Spring, 2024.
  • Sourcing Copyright Free Media Workshop Workshop created for Exploring the Information Landscape series, hosted on customized CollectionBuilder Workshop template. University of Idaho, Winter, 2024.

Scholarly Publications

Other Writing

  • Priest River’s Community Archive Post describing the process of creating the Marylyn Cork Priest River Historical Collection, a community informed repository exploring the timber history and economic recovery of the North Idaho region. University of Idaho Special Collections Idaho Harvester, Fall, 2025.
  • Assembling the Taylor Wilderness Research Station Archive Article describing the process of merging preexisting digital collections, creating bibliometric visualizations as well as oral history visualizations and developing Python tools to audit private internal documents in the Taylor Wilderness Research Station Archive. University of Idaho Special Collections Idaho Harvester, Spring, 2025.
  • North Idaho Cultural Heritage Institutions Survey Article detailing a survey I created and conducted with the participation of twelve institutions, rethinking traditional practices of archival accessions and digital initiatives and exploring the similar challenges and successes of these smaller cultural heritage centers. University of Idaho Special Collections Idaho Harvester, Summer, 2024.
  • UI’s Berry Fellow Once Again Breaks the Mold in 2024 Article detailing my experience working with the 2024 Berry Fellowship recipient Irene Koreski to create a digital exhibit around a rare, unpublished oral history interview with jazz pioneer and eastern spiritualist Alice Coltrane. Pullman Moscow Daily News, Spring, 2024.
  • Through a Filipino Lens: Washington State Cannery Workers in Alaska Article on the history of Filipino cannery workers and their movement between Washington state and Alaska. Research involved optimizing small scale photographs and using open source chronolocation and geolocation tools to identify Alaskan landmarks which added context to the industrial and social environment on Kodiak Island. Maritime Washington, Fall, 2023.
  • Tacoma's Northern Pacific Hospital Article on the history of Tacoma’s Northern Pacific Hospital, the westernmost post of one of the oldest, most enduring prepaid health care systems in America. Research involved oral history interviews, text mining and data visualizations of hospital records to help shed light on the impact of ethnicity and religion on mortality rates of early twentieth century railway workers. HistoryLink, Summer, 2023.
  • Lost Tacoma: Demolished and Unbuilt Local Buildings Post on the Tacoma Public Library's site about my time processing the Lost Tacoma born digital archive material, focusing on my selection process and how everyday architecture can convey deep cultural significance. TPL Blogs, Summer, 2022.
  • Above the Clouds, The Tacoma Mountaineers Records Post on the Tacoma Public Library's site about my time processing the Tacoma Mountaineers archive material, focusing on a female member’s scrapbook which documented expeditions during 1906. TPL Blogs Winter, 2022.
  • Capturing the Oral History of a Historic African American Community in the Pacific Northwest Reflection on a displaced African American community south of Seattle, oral history, and equity in historic preservation, published by the Society of American Archivist's Archival Outlook, Winter, 2021.

Exhibits

Digital Scholarship Tools

All tools except Read_Image developed independently


  • Opticolumn OCR tool developed by Digital Initiatives Librarian for University of Idaho, over summer and fall of 2025. The tool implements the TrOCR text recognition model and the Kraken BLLA page segmentation model to improve the accuracy of handwritten and cursive archival documents and add digital preservation metadata to processed materials. The tool was developed for overhauling the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning's digital collection PDF files, to make the collection more discoverable and accessible. The development of the tool is written about in greater detail in Transparent Practices: OCR and AI in the Archives, by Rebecca Hastings and Andrew Weymouth. Accepted by Collections: A Journal for Archives and Museum Professions, November 2025. Fall, 2025.
  • Timestamp Generator This site was created so student workers can easily copy time codes to enrich oral history transcripts. Students can access the page, drop their audio or visual files in and every time the user pauses the media, that time stamp is generated in a box below, which can be copied to their clipboard by select a button to the right. Created for enhancing legacy transcripts from the Rural Women's History Project, so they can be utilized in the CDIL's Oral History as Data platform. Fall, 2025.
  • Convert_Legacy_Transcript Python tool created to identify speaker names, transcript and dialogue of legacy printed transcripts and convert them into individual rows of within a CSV file format. Created to utilize work done during the 70s and 80s for the Rural Women's History Project oral history initiative, to ultimately migrate them to U of I's Oral History as Data platform. Fall, 2025.
  • OCR_Scanner Python tool that scans specific folders and identifies all of the PDF files lacking a layer of optical character recognition. Identified PDF files are generated in a CSV file alongside their parent folder. Created to have U of I digital collections meet accessibility standards for patrons using screen readers. Fall, 2025.
  • Illustration_Extraction Python tool utilizing the rembg computer vision model to identify and extract musical notation from Huo Becker's Mechanik und Aesthetik des Violoncellspiels (1922) for use in Miranda Wilson's CDIL project, School of Cello Music. Fall, 2025.
  • Edge_Detector Python tool implementing rembg[isnet] salient object detection models created for University of Idaho to facilitate web hosting special collections and archeological projects. Images are detected, extracted and batch processed into subsequent folders with transparent, white or black backgrounds. Summer, 2025.
  • Abstract_Scraper Python tool for analyzing large JSON datasets, scraping missing scholarly information and generating complete JSON files to help enrich data for U of I’s VERSO institutional repository. Summer, 2025.
  • PII_Scanner Python tool which vets batches of PDF file OCR for sensitive information such as social security numbers, addresses and phone numbers using regular expressions and outputting CSV files with corresponding filenames. Spring, 2025.
  • Assess_Differences_CSV Developed for long-term static web projects with large datasets, this tool offers a more readable and targeted alternative to GitHub’s diff view by comparing changes between versions of metadata files and generating a minimal CSV of only pertinent lines and changes. Spring, 2025.
  • RSS_Scraper Python tool developed to collect and format metadata into CSVs after filtering out programmatic language and import both audio and video files included in the feed. Media files are converted to MP4 and MP3 and formatted CSVs are generated with the scraped RSS metadata and corresponding sequential file names. Winter, 2024.
  • Prototype for Encoded Audio Player Developed alongside the Using Embodiment and Audio Narrative to Present Historical Research workshop for practical application in graduate, undergraduate and independent research projects in environmental history, archaeology, geology, humanities, journalism and interdisciplinary science to showcase long form audio narratives, presentations and oral history material. Winter, 2024.
  • Read_Image Optical Character Recognition Tool Iteration of an OCR tool developed by Luke Sheneman, Director of the IBEST Northwest Knowledge Network (NKN) at University of Idaho. This extension was developed to help extract text from images files in an effort to enrich alt text metadata and make digital collections more accessible. Private repository but link is pointed to introductory presentation for Digital Collections group. Fall, 2024.
  • Trello_Export Tool Tool for exporting archived Trello cards, categorized by label to help track activity for liaison reports and annual reviews. Fall, 2024.
  • Book_Splitter Tool Python tool for quickly splitting two page scans to increase accuracy of OCR. Fall, 2024.
  • Annotation_Extraction Tool Created to help code PDF files and extract the text of those annotations to export categorically and chronologically to markdown files so they can be visualized and make connections within Obsidian. To use, add your annotated PDF to the A folder, run the script and categorical and chronological files will generate in the B folder. Adjust color values and names of categories by adjusting data in lines 63-83. Future improvements include adding annotated text, shapes or underlined text. Summer, 2024.
  • Web_Scraper Tool Created to help extract contact information across multiple areas of the University of Idaho CALS directory for liaison work. Summer, 2024.
  • Image_Extraction Tool Created to extract and name individual images from overhead scans of archival scrapbooks containing multiple photos. Summer, 2024.
  • Transcript_Mining Tool Tool developed for the University of Idaho to increase efficiency and accuracy of the Digital Scholarship and Open Strategies department Oral History as Data tagging process. This template can be iterated on by dropping new sets of transcriptions into the CSV folder and running Python within the hello.py file. Future iterations of this template will modularize the text mining categories into General, Geographic and Custom categories. Winter, 2023.

Student Fellowship and Consultation Projects

  • 2025 Berry Fellowship Working with Gus Labayen to produce a digital essay on the history of vocal jazz performance in the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival. University of Idaho, Fall, 2025.
  • Review_Miner Text mining and sentiment analysis tool created for an undergraduate senior research reference request, designed to analyze reviews of tourist destinations by year, rating, trip type and underlying sentiment of text and titles. University of Idaho, Fall, 2025.
  • 2025 Undergraduate CDIL Fellowship Collaborated with Shelley Walker-Harmon to enrich the context of the U of I Campus Photograph Collection, detailing the history behind the buildings for patrons and researchers. University of Idaho, Fall, 2025.
  • Echo Washington Public History Curriculum Site Custom template for graduate archaeology student Megan Caves. University of Idaho, Spring, 2025.
  • Inuit Story Custom digital exhibit template for Undergraduate history student Jacob Kuenning. University of Idaho, Spring, 2025.
  • Alice Coltrane, Jazz Spiritualism Guidance and Oral History as Data audio visualization for 2024 Berry Fellow Irene Koreski, on the life of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, an American jazz pianist, organist, harpist, singer and composer. University of Idaho, Spring, 2024.
  • Chestnut Collective Exhibit design and network visualization for Nick Koenig's CDIL Graduate Student Fellowship. University of Idaho, Winter, 2023.

Press

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