Congratulations to Dan Reboussin and the Derscheid Collection within UFDC!

As CRL officially announced on Thursday (I’m quite behind on things with the planning for Interface + Digital Humanities Day), congratulations to Dan Reboussin for winning the CRL Primary Source Award for Access!
Dan Reboussin is the Head of the African Studies Collections at the University of Florida and won the award for access for “developing access to the Jean-Marie Derscheid Collection, a rich set of manuscripts documenting pre-colonial and colonial events in Burundi, Eastern Congo, and Rwanda.” Dan developed access by

  • Arranging for the digitization of the full Derscheid collection of materials
  • Creating an excellent finding guide and then arranging for the guide to be digitized and online
  • Securing permissions for the digitization of related scholarly materials as with Lemarchand’s book, Rwanda and Burundi, to provide access to the complete research context relating to these materials
  • Utilizing search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure the full collection was findable. This included creating the Derscheid digital collection within the UFDC which is powered by the SobekCM software engine, which is optimized for search engines including Google to best support human and automated indexing of materials. This also included creating a Wikipedia entry for Derscheid for human and automated mechanisms to best connect search engines with the collection and collection materials

I’m pleased to say that I was able to nominate Dan for his excellent work. It’s  wonderful to see Dan’s work be rewarded by library community with the CRL Primary Source Award!
The full story is in the CRL Focus on Global Resources Newsletter.
The CRL Primary Source Awards are:

an annual competition designed to recognize and publicize librarians, teachers, and researchers who use or promote use of primary source materials.
Program Description & Criteria
The Primary Source Awards are presented annually in three categories:

Access
Facilitating access to primary source materials.
Research
Using or promoting primary source materials in research projects & methodologies.
Teaching
Employing primary source materials in the classroom.