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Bridge Building, Intersectionality and Inclusion
Panel
Lourdes Santamaría-Wheeler
Exhibits Coordinator
University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries
Crystal Felima
Caribbean Studies Data Curation Visiting Librarian
University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries
Melissa Jerome, MS
Project Coordinator, Florida & Puerto Rico Digital Newspaper Project
University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries
Chelsea Dinsmore
Chair Digital Production Services
University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries
This panel includes representatives speaking from projects and perspectives about specific needs that relate to our collective work with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC, www.dLOC.com). dLOC is a unique open access, collaborative, international, multi-lingual digital library for resources about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC includes almost three hundred documents and artifacts contributed by universities, libraries, archives, museums, government agencies, and NGOs. Importantly, dLOC is a socio-technical (people, policies, communities, technologies) platform supporting collaboration among partner institutions, enhancing communities of practice, and building intellectual infrastructure. The panelists work at the University of Florida, which is a founding partner in dLOC and the technical host. In this panel, we will discuss metadata, access, inclusion, and resource limitations of three specific projects:
• A library exhibition program that showcases materials in Spanish, with exhibition labels and materials in both Spanish and English.
• A course on Haitian Studies and the Digital Humanities, bringing students into the libraries and making visible the operations of libraries for student engagement and action with digital scholarship production.
• The Florida and Puerto Rico Newspaper Project, encountering a program requirement for English-only abstracts in the metadata despite the availability of Spanish abstracts to accompany the Spanish-oriented newspapers.
This program will present the results of a pilot study in which domain experts and local librarians both wrote abstracts for newspapers for inclusion in the metadata records to ensure materials were findable and discoverable by researchers and the originating communities connected with these materials. The presentation includes an analysis of the two newspaper abstract versions and discussion of the results, along with explanation of the process used to create both research objects added as support for both catalog records and digital library items, and as proof of concept to pursue future research.
Together, we discuss specific examples for embracing culture and community through library work alongside discussing workload and labor demands that are necessary to support diversity and inclusion. We conclude with a discussion of specific, concrete opportunities for developing and implementing shared programs for countering limited, colonial, inaccurate, and insufficient metadata focusing on the newspapers example.