News: The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) Awards $17,000 to Partners in Seed Grant Funding

The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is pleased to announce the first round of awardees for the Seed Grant Program for digitization projects on the Caribbean. Using membership funds, the dLOC Seed Grant Program will award five partners a total of $17,000 including support for training, equipment and staffing. The dLOC Seed Grant Program provides initial funding for activities that build local programs and support online open access digital resources for researchers, students, and the general public by supporting contributions to the dLOC repository (http://dloc.com/).
dLOC partners institutions submitted proposals that would support their digitization programs and the dLOC Executive Board approved the following applications:

1. The College of the Bahamas (COB) – $5,000 for “No Ordinary Time: Bahamians in the Allied Fight during the Second World War”
2. Educa Vision – $2,500 for “Advocacy and Activism in Haiti: 1915-2004”
3. National Library of Aruba (BNA) – $2,000 for “Digitization Postcards collection 1960-1986 /
   Missing early issues of Aruba Esso News”
4. University of Curacao (UOC) -$2,500 for “Zikinzá Collection of Curaçao Oral History Recordings”
5. University of Suriname (UOS) – $5,000 for “University of Suriname Online Thesis Collection”

These small grants will not fully fund projects, but they will help project partners leverage existing resources to complete long awaited digitization and preservation projects, and as part of the start-up process for new projects.
Often a small amount of funding can make a tremendous impact to provide the needed support to complete a project – be it staff, equipment or training on a new process. As the Library Director of The College of The Bahamas stated, “this funding will greatly assist in bringing this project to light and to heightening the awareness of the contributions made by Bahamians to the WWII efforts.”
dLOC has grown from the initial nine partners in 2004 to more than thirty, and these five projects will continue to build the collection of digitized content coming from the Caribbean region. The dLOC collection already provides a vital research and preservation resource and hosts more than 15,000 titles and 2.25 million pages of content which register over a million page views per month. The need to support dLOC partners with digitization and preservation resources is imperative and the newly launched dLOC membership structure makes these grants possible. Brooke Wooldridge, dLOC Program Director, indicated that the amount budgeted for Seed Grants was originally $10,000 but that “given the strength of the proposals and the breadth of topics and countries represented, we have reprogramed some resources and increased this year’s budget to $17,000.” These resources, like all materials contributed to dLOC by the partner institutions, are freely accessible for educational purposes.
For more information about personal or institutional memberships, see www.dloc.com/members.
About dLOC
The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative of partners within the Caribbean and Circum-Caribbean administered by the libraries at Florida International University and the University of Florida that provides users with access to Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials held in archives, libraries, and private collections. dLOC comprises collections that speak to the similarities and differences in histories, cultures, languages and governmental systems. dLOC serves an international community of scholars, students, and peoples by working together to preserve and to provide enhanced electronic access to cultural, historical, legal, governmental, and research materials in a common web space with a multilingual interface.
Original press release online in dLOC: http://www.dloc.com/AA00027510