Building Digital Archives in the Caribbean – Librarians, Techies, and Scholars Required

Successful growth of the Digital Library of the Caribbean (www.dloc.com) depends on the active involvement of librarians, techies and scholars. The cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean now relies on 38 content contributing partners, 15 financially supporting members, a technical training team and many involved scholars that identify content and develop new projects. A multi-institutional collaborative model with democratic governance allows for all partner institutions to contribute to dLOC’s evolution and success. As a result, the amount of open access content available in dLOC surpasses many commercial Caribbean collections. Content now exceeds 2.25 million pages and includes newspapers, official documents, ecological and economic data, maps, histories, travel accounts, literature, poetry, musical expressions, and artifacts which have registered a cumulative total of nearly 50 million page views. dLOC does not make any claim to ownership of the materials it hosts and serves in its collection and project partners are responsible for copyright control of their content. Partners self-submit materials online or via disk swaps and dLOC ensures that these research materials are preserved, accessible and discoverable. Partners in dLOC gain access to the dLOC website built upon the SOBEK Content Management system technologies which includes: highly advanced OCR/text conversion; zoom image technologies; a sophisticated digital library interface; and access to the Florida Digital Archive (FDA). In development since 2004, the collaboration is jointly administered by Florida International University, the University of Florida and the University of the Virgin Islands and seeks to develop the socio-technical infrastructure for Caribbean Studies. This presentation will present several examples of current dLOC projects highlighting the roles of the diverse stakeholders.