Laurie N. Taylor, Librarian

Lynn Dierking (who is fantastic!) presented at UF  as our kick-off speaker for the internal grant “Building Dialogue Around Collections: Libraries, Museums, and Museum Educators.” She covered a ton of great material, including explaining roles of museums and libraries as: Community anchors Connectors Innovative learning specialists Stewards of cultural, scientific, historical and environmental heritages She also then asked how these are answered with collections. To what end can we use our collections (our stuff) to accomplish these core roles? This seems to parallel some of the conversations on the digital humanities, where digitization and born digital curation provide materials in digital form, and digital humanitiesRead More →

Quote/Note: Saidiya Hartman. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Page 16: “My graduate training hadn’t prepeare me to tell the stories of those who had left no record of their lives and whose biography consisted of the terrible things said about them or done to them. I was determined to fill in the blank spaces of the hisorical record and to represent the lives of those deemed unworthy of remembering, but how does one write a story about an encounter with nothing?” Page 19: “‘No matter how big a stranger’s eyes, they cannot see.’Read More →

The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) has selected Collaboration Across Borders: Opening Access to Holdings of the National Library of Cuba as the recipient of the ALCTS Outstanding Collaboration Citation for 2019. The Outstanding Collaboration Citation recognizes and encourages collaborative problem-solving efforts in the areas of acquisition, access, management, preservation or archiving of library materials. It recognizes a demonstrated benefit from actions, services or products that improve and benefit providing and managing library collections. The citation will be presented on June 22 at the ALCTS Awards Ceremony during the 2019 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference & Exhibition in Washington, D.C. CollaborationRead More →

See the official posting and apply through interfolio: https://apply.interfolio.com/59954 Assistant Director for Programming and Public Engagement (43420) University of Florida: College of Liberal Arts & Sciences: 16720000 – LS-HUMANITIES-PUBLIC SPHERE Location Gainesville, Florida Open Date Jan 29, 2019 Description The Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere at the University of Florida, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences invites applications for a full-time, twelve-month, non-tenure-accruing position at the rank of Lecturer, beginning July 1, 2019, for the position of Assistant Director for Programming and Public Engagement. The salary is competitive and commensurate with qualifications and experience, and includes a full benefits package. As aRead More →

Award CategoriesAll disciplines and areas of study are considered. Applicants must be enrolled in a doctoral program at a university in the U.S. Recipients must be in residence during the course of the fellowship and may not hold concurrent teaching positions. Graduate Pre-Prospectus Summer FellowshipsPre-Prospectus Summer Fellowships will allow doctoral students to determine how the Cuban Heritage Collection may serve their research needs as they prepare the dissertation prospectus. These are exploratory fellowships to decide if research resources in the CHC will support a dissertation. Fellowships of $1,500 will be granted for one month in residence between June 1 and August 31. Graduate Research FellowshipsResearchRead More →

SAVE THE DATE FOR OUR NEXT WEBINAR! DATE: THURSDAY, JANUARY 17, 2019 TIME: 2PM EST The work of Dr. Lorena Gauthereau, Carolina Villarroel and Gabriela Baeza Ventura focus on the creation of the first digital humanities centering on US Latinx studies. Goals of this initiative and program, the significance of building a digital infrastructure from a Latinx perspective, as well as centering Latina decolonial and postcolonial theory, post-custodial models, the creation of bilingual metadata, and the types of digital projects developed using historical archival collections will be discussed during this presentation. *Presentation will be in SpanishLink: https://fiuconnect.adobeconnect.com/rtduomvagjq7Read More →

My brief notes are below. I am excited for whenever I teach DH or anything next, because I know that this is the book I will get to teach and explore with–the book is simply fantastic! This should be required reading for all graduate students, and others. It weaves together technology, complexity, and what the humanities can and should do for world making. Thanks to Roopika Risam for writing such a magnificent book! Risam, Roopika. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Evanston, IL: Northeastern University Press, 2019. Pages 7-9: Introduction covers expansive and capacious nature of postcolonial digital humanities, notingRead More →

Today, one of the most important projects of my life was awarded. CLIR Hidden Collections announced the newest round of funded projects for their Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives program. The full list is incredible! Within that full list is: Film on a Boat: Digitizing Historical Newspapers of the Caribbean ($448,139.00) University of Florida, University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras (UPR), Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) Film on a Boat will serve a continuing partnership between the University of Florida (UF) and the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras (UPR) to digitize each institutions’ unique, hidden holdings of Caribbean newspapers on master microfilm. This three-yearRead More →

SALALM LXIVLatin American and Latinx Cultural Heritage: A Horizontal DialogueJune 26-29, 2019The University of Texas at AustinAustin, Texas LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections and the University of Texas Libraries are proud to host the annual meeting of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM), which will explore current and changing ideas and practices surrounding stewardship of cultural heritage in Latin American and Latinx contexts. The conference will engage in critical dialogues about cultural heritage from a horizontal perspective of shared agency and mutual understanding. Conference participants will participate in conversations that are paramount to the work of information professionalsRead More →

Below are my book notes for Margaret Heffernan’s A Bigger Prize. I learned about this book when discussing mutual aid with my colleague, Bonnie Smith, who is an expert in HR and sustainability. She mentioned Heffernan’s TED Talk, which is quite good, where Heffernan covers the failures of zero-sum competition, which reduces everyone’s individual achievement and loses out on much greater work made possible through collaboration. She uses an example with chickens, where the constant pecking order leaves to dead chickens and unproductive (no egg) chickens, and then walks through how the same process of degradation happens with people in competitive. Her discussion of collaboration includes conflict,Read More →