Laurie Taylor

I am heavily involved with data curation and scholarly cyberinfrastructure work. I work with the University of Florida Libraries’ digital collections and digital scholarship supports, including the Digital Library of the Caribbean (http://www.dloc.com) and the UF Digital Collections (http://ufdc.ufl.edu), as well as related services, tools, and other supports for scholarly collaboration. Existing collaborative partnerships have been founded on critical needs for preservation, access, and impact. For instance, the UF Libraries have served as the preservation partner for the Caribbean for over 80 years with collaborative partners in national libraries, archives, universities, and other institutions. The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is the newest incarnation of the collaborative and it is a multi-national and multilingual cooperative digital library for the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC represents a shift from the prior collaborations which focused on preservation and access (now supported through digital technologies that have greatly eased prior processes) and dLOC now builds on those to focus on impact. The need to support broader impacts has already grown to include a wide variety of work, including developing scholarly curated digital collections, online exhibits, and new projects in order to facilitate new scholarly research projects that are made possible by collaborating across the network of contacts in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums who are actively involved with and connected through dLOC. In undertaking this work, diversity of the partners and projects have also been informative in terms of their demand for developing new methods for bridging traditional research questions into the digital humanities t and, in doing so, changing how the research is being done. I would like to share information about the dLOC, including the: permissions-based model that supports copyright, moral rights, cultural heritage rights, and many other requirements for supporting international collaboratives; dLOC online tools and standalone software; and example projects. I would like to share the dLOC model as a successful model for international collaborative projects and one that guarantees support for preservation and access because all of dLOC has guaranteed support in perpetuity from the partner institutions as a founding element of the partnership. This support includes ongoing service to ensure the primary and scholarly work is allowed to survive and thrive. dLOC presents a model that shows how digital humanities projects can leverage existing capacity for immediate needs, and long-term needs for preservation and access to prevent silos and loss, and for ways of operating with a network for the benefit of other in-process, future, and past projects. I would like to share information about dLOC with potential collaborators. I would also like to share my experience from dLOC, other digital collections, and various types of digital humanities projects as a collaborator for other digital humanities projects. Finally, I would like to explore ways to teach scholars the dLOC model as an example of ways to undertake collaborative projects that leverage existing capacity in support of scholarly needs.