The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC): Creating a Shared Research Foundation

Authors

  • Laurie N. Taylor University of Florida
  • Margarita Vargas-Betancourt University of Florida
  • Brooke Wooldridge Florida International University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22230/src.2013v4n3a114

Keywords:

Digital libraries, digital humanities, scholarly cyberinfrastructure, Digital Library of the Caribbean, dLOC, scholarly communications, peer review

Abstract

This article explains the history and development of the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) as a research foundation for reading, writing, and researching the Caribbean and thus as part of the scholarly cyberinfrastructure for Caribbean Studies. As a research foundation, dLOC includes technical, social, governmental, and procedural supports including open source tools, executive and scholarly advisory boards for governance, permissions-based rights model to support intellectual property as well as cultural and moral rights, and a core support team. As a research foundation, dLOC supports new forms of research as well as new ways of reading and writing Caribbean Studies.

Author Biographies

Laurie N. Taylor, University of Florida

Laurie N. Taylor, PhD, is the Digital Humanities Librarian for the UF Digital Collections (UFDC), and associated collections and projects hosted by the UF Libraries using SobekCM including the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and many others. Her work focuses on building scholarly cyberinfrastructure to build, preserve, and ensure findability and usability for digital humanities and other digital scholarship projects with digital collections. She is the technical director for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), technical director for the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, and was co-principal investigator on America’s Swamp: the Historical Everglades, a project to digitize six archival collections. She supervises interns working on class-credit internships on UFDC and related digital scholarship projects. Prior to joining the UF Libraries in 2007, she taught undergraduate digital humanities courses and graduate writing courses, as well as workshops on digital technologies. Her current research explores methods to digitally represent and contextualize archival materials, as well as other issues related to the digital humanities. She has published refereed articles on collaborative international digital libraries, digital media, library and information science, open access, and literature; and she co-edited a collection on digital representations of history and memory, Playing the Past: Video Games, History, and Memory.

Margarita Vargas-Betancourt, University of Florida

Margarita Vargas-Betancourt is an Assistant University Librarian at the University of Florida; Latin American Collection, Smathers Library, PO Box 117009, Gainesville, FL 32611; mvargasb@ufl.edu

Brooke Wooldridge, Florida International University

Brooke Wooldridge is the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) Program Director at Florida International University; FIU Libraries, GL 225A, University Park, Miami, FL 33199; bwooldri@fiu.edu

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Published

2013-11-29

Issue

Vol. 4 No. 3 (2013)

Section

Articles

License

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