The news item on dLOC below is from Paul Losch in the Latin American & Caribbean Collections, with the news item in the UF Latin American & Caribbean Newsletter.
It’s always great to share great news (even the same great news) on dLOC’s birthday, and with new recommendations on resources. Thanks to Paul for writing and sharing this!
dLOC 10th ANNIVERSARY
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The Digital Library of the Caribbean (www.dloc.com) was recently recognized at the meeting of the Association of Caribbean University, Research and Institutional Libraries (ACURIL), held in Nassau, June 8-12. The award for ten years of “excellent performance of alliance and collaborative efforts” was received by Dr. Laurie Taylor, UF’s Digital Scholarship Librarian, and Technical Coordinator for dLOC.
At the 2004 ACURIL meeting, an international group of librarians began to plan a shared digital library for the Caribbean region. The US Department of Education made a grant that funded much of the initial work at host institutions UF and FIU.
UF continues to supply new content, digitizing materials from its rich collections. One very recent addition is an insurance policy taken out on the lives of slaves in Trinidad, Cuba, in 1857, now online at http://www.dloc.com/
Today 39 partner institutions (http://www.dloc.com/partners ) around the Caribbean region contribute scanned images and descriptive metadata. For example, the National Library of Jamaica has contributed over 20 years of the magazine Planter’s Punch: http://dloc.com/AA00004645 and the University of the Virgin Islands has a collection of historic photos online athttp://dloc.com/uviphotos .
Various UF faculty members have also made use of dLOC as a platform, adding content related to their research and teaching interests in the Caribbean. For example, Prof. Ben Hebblethwaite’s NEH grant to create an “Archive of Haitian Religion and Culture” uses http://dloc.com/vodou as a repository of images, recordings, and texts.
The dLOC Executive Board continues to meet at the annual ACURIL conference, and reports from its 2014 meeting, including a new “dLOC Scholar Update” prepared by Dr. Taylor, are now online at http://www.dloc.com/