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Comprehensive usage statistics are maintained and openly available:
Comprehensive resource and collection statistics are also maintained and openly online:
The Digital Library of the Caribbean (presented at TICFIA, SALALM, ACURIL, CSA, and ALA in the summer of 2007). (dLOCPoster2007.ppt)
Grant ReportsIn order to preserve and increase access to valuable resources for the study of the Caribbean and the advancement of Caribbean Studies, the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University, in consortium with the University of Central Florida, University of Florida and the University of the Virgin Islands, proposes a multifaceted and collaborative international digital library project. The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) intends to cross borders and build collaboration among diverse institutions to share resources in a common space, thus expanding the range of Caribbean materials available to scholars, students and citizens through enhanced electronic access in multilingual interfaces.
The Caribbean comprises a diverse mix of cultures, histories and peoples that share a common space. This region illustrates trends in migration and nation-state building that are currently taking place on a world scale, and is thus a significant focus of study for scholars and students alike. Pan-Caribbean research will provide scholars, leaders, and citizens with the resources necessary to build an understanding of issues central to our lives today and to construct effective current policies and sound strategies for the future.
This digital library will comprise collections that examine the similarities and differences in histories, cultures, languages, and governmental systems. The dLOC will be an umbrella for digital projects and collections from and about the Caribbean that might exist in isolation at a single institution, thus providing a critical mass of resources in a single space.
Building upon the success of a cooperative pilot project and the progress made at the first dLOC Planning Meeting in July 2004 at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, this project proposes to use Federal funds to meet the following goals:
The dLOC project has made substantial progress in the first five months of the grant period. The management plan of dLOC follows a linear process that builds upon itself and its achievements. During this first term, the majority of time, effort and expenses have been to build the necessary infrastructure to ensure the success of the project. This has included developing the governance structure, building capacity in the region and developing the technologies to support the project.
As noted above, implementation of the governance structure, capacity building in the region and development of the technical infrastructure is well under way. Soon, dLOC will enter phase two of the project, which includes training in digitization, and will be even closer to providing improved access to Caribbean resources.
Although only 5 months into the official launch of the dLOC project, it has already impacted the field of Caribbean Studies and has generated unprecedented interest in the ability to access Caribbean resources in digital format. Through exemplary outreach and promotion of the project, supplemental funding has been awarded, additional institutions throughout the Caribbean have inquired about membership, its co-Directors were invited to write a refereed article about the project, and it has already been awarded a prize for collaboration. More detail about these exemplary outreach activities and their impact is included in the section entitled "Exemplary Activities."
Although this project is only five months old, dLOC has generated tremendous interest throughout the Caribbean and beyond and has impacted the way that scholars view the future of Caribbean research resources. Much of this interest is as a direct result of the exemplary activities that have emerged in both outreach activities and in technology.
The Co-Directors of dLOC have dedicated much of their own time and energy and, in most cases, their own institutions money, to promote this project locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. These exemplary outreach activities include: interviews with newspapers in the Virgin Islands, a presentation about dLOC at a digital library conference in Venezuela, planned participation in a round table on Caribbean collections at the upcoming Latin American Studies Association, a confirmed dLOC panel at the upcoming SALALM conference, and the submission of a peer-reviewed article on dLOC in an upcoming book entitled "Caribbean Libraries in the 21st Century: Changes, Challenges and Choices - a Collection of Selected Articles."
These outreach activities have led several Caribbean and U.S. institutions to inquire about participating in the project and contributing their resources to this digital library. These institutions include the University of Puerto Rico, Universidad Metropolitana de Caracas, Unversidad del Norte in Colombia, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of New Mexico. Both national and international interest was also clearly visible from the overwhelming response to the call for participation to sit on the inaugural dLOC Advisory Board. Accomplished Caribbeanist scholars, scientists, students and libraries all vied for seven coveted spots.
As a direct result of the outreach undertaken by the co-Directors of this project, approximately $6000 has been pledged in additional funds in order to support continued promotion of the project. Various departments at FIU, including the Center for Transnational and Comparative Studies, the Latin American and Caribbean Center, and the Libraries have pledged an additional $4500 in travel support beyond any obligation to the grant. Two Caribbean partners (CARICOM and National Archives of Haiti) have also received ENLACE scholarships from the SALALM (Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials) organization to present the project at its annual conference, for a total exceeding $1500.
dLOC has already received an award for its efforts in increasing collaboration in the Caribbean region. The Albertina Prez de Rosa Information Units Alliances and Collaborative Projects in the Caribbean Award, presented to dLOC at ACURIL 2005, recognizes and honors excellence in collaborative efforts and the implementation of successful projects for the benefit of their clienteles in the Caribbean. Technological advancements have also been exemplary. A full discussion on these follows in the "Use of Technology" section. The dLOC programmer responsible for many of these advancements has been asked to speak on them at a pre-conference sponsored by the Library and Information Technology Association at the American Library Association s 2006 Annual Conference.
Use of TechnologyAs the partner providing the technical support for the Digital Library of the Caribbean, the University of Florida is responsible for the creation and support of the digital library management system [DLMS] which will be used to search and display all digital resources submitted. Considerable progress has been made during the first five months of this grant on the development of the architecture which will provide this technical backbone to the project. In addition, distributed tools will allow partners to create the metadata to accompany each digital resource and progress has also been made on the development of these applications. Finally, to support both searching and metadata creation, construction of a gazetteer has begun including historical, as well as current, place names in the Caribbean.
Until recently, UF managed its digital collections through PALMM, the centralized digital library of the Florida State University System. However, in the last year, UF has laid the ground work for an independent, open-source DLMS system to support their collections. This new system allows for more control and flexibility in collections management, attributes from which dLOC will greatly benefit. Over the last year, and particularly the last six months, work has progressed in implementing this new system. Specific requirements were collected, and an off-the-shelf solution was initially implemented. As work advanced, a new architecture, involving a new presentation layer on the existing solution, was installed. Work on this has continued and the UF Digital Collections are close to being publicly launched. This approach has already begun to garner interest in the technical community. The collection of digital items in dLOC will be supported through identical architecture.
The groundwork for the final solution was the collection of specifications required for a new digital library system. Any new system would need to contain multi-lingual support, both in searching and in display. Compliance with standards was a requirement, and it was preferred that the solution be inexpensive and open source. Since we work in a collaborative environment, the system must allow branding to give credit to each individual partner while still providing a standard appearance for all resources. And, of course, the system would have to support a variety of searching and browsing, including full text searching.
Among the several inexpensive and open-source libraries, Greenstone appeared to be the closest fit. A new server was purchased and Greenstone was installed roughly eight months ago. Greenstone has native support for multi-lingual searching and display. In addition, it provides full-text indexing and searching.
As work continued with Greenstone, however, it became apparent that the web interface would be unable to fulfill all of our needs. The support for table of contents display appeared inadequate; many institutions had been forced to turn to outside software and programming to create multi-tiered table of contents displays. In addition, text searching within a single document was absent. And finally, branding of the resources was lacking.
Tackling these problems, development began on a new presentation layer for the digital library. The indexing and searching of both the bibliographic data and the text would remain in Greenstone. In addition, the Greenstone server would continue to serve the images. However, a new layer of code will handle the display window through which the user sees the item. This solution allows for the desired display for table of contents and supports searching for text within a single document, which were both weak points of Greenstone. In addition, it should allow distributed resources to display within a single look and feel, while allowing each item to bear the brand of the individual contributing partner. The new system has been built with multi-lingual support in mind and should easily support English, French, and Spanish.
The creation of the new digital library architecture was accompanied with new challenges. More programming time was required than was initially expected, although this work is well ahead of schedule and should be ready when the first content is submitted. In addition, metadata creation tools were needed to create the standard metadata files which will be read by the system. Work on these tools is documented below.
The creation of this new system is on schedule and should be ready to start loading new Caribbean content during the next stage of the grant cycle. The UF Digital Collections, the first collection to use this architecture and programming, should be public within the next two months as well. Recognition for this approach has been quick in coming and the dLOC programmer will be participating in a Library Information and Technology Association pre-conference at the next American Library Association meeting to discuss customizing collections with the context of Greenstone.
There is no freely available, user-friendly, template for creating metadata for digital resources which conforms to the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard [METS]. METS was established by the Library of Congress and is quickly being adapted by most digital libraries. Work is well underway to create our own template which will produce the metadata files for this project. This template is being designed to be easily customizable for each partner, and for later projects. This template should be easy to use while still supporting differences in the users comfort level. The design of the template allows for easy customization and can hide many of the fields which will be constant for this project. A beta of the bibliographic metadata portion is available on line at the following (temporary) url: http://digital.uflib.ufl.edu/development/dLOC/index.htm#tools
In addition, the tool will facilitate the creation of structural metadata. This structural metadata will allow for complete table of contents to be displayed for each resource. Incorporating previous work at UF on their Quality Control Application, users will be able to enter the structural information in a visual manner, while viewing thumbnails of the page images. Once completed, this effort should result in the premier metadata entry tool for the METS standard.
Geographic Referencing: a place name authority list is being compiled for each of the countries and states in the region defined by the Digital Library of the Caribbean. The current state of this sub-project records tens of thousands of names and represents new effort. Caribbean place names have never been fully collected by any national, international, educational or governmental agency. An effort completed through time, the Caribbean Gazetteer will associate forms of names in the project's primary languages as well as in other local languages, as well as historical names, to facilitate searching across the region's national and linguistic boundaries and to enable research through historic and archival collections.
Working on technical issues in a collaborative environment with distributed partners is always a challenge. Care has been made to provide, and continually update, online documentation for all of the technical requirements for submission to dLOC. Additionally, any general information which illustrates the technical underpinning for our decisions and solutions has been posted online. Well over a hundred pages of documentation have been included in our temporary web location. This will ease in the creation of technical training manuals, and allow partners to delve into whatever amount of detail they desire. The temporary URL for this site (as we work toward securing the permanent dLOC URL) is: http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/digital/development/dLOC/index.htm
Work will begin on translation into both Spanish and French during the next stage of the project.
In order to preserve and increase access to valuable resources for the study of the Caribbean and the advancement of Caribbean Studies, the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University, in consortium with the University of Central Florida, University of Florida and the University of the Virgin Islands, proposes a multifaceted and collaborative international digital library project. The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) intends to cross borders and build collaboration among diverse institutions to share resources in a common space, thus expanding the range of Caribbean materials available to scholars, students and citizens through enhanced electronic access in multilingual interfaces.
The Caribbean comprises a diverse mix of cultures, histories and peoples that share a common space. This region illustrates trends in migration and nation-state building that are currently taking place on a world scale, and is thus a significant focus of study for scholars and students alike. Pan-Caribbean research will provide scholars, leaders, and citizens with the resources necessary to build an understanding of issues central to our lives today and to construct effective current policies and sound strategies for the future. This digital library will comprise collections that examine the similarities and differences in histories, cultures, languages, and governmental systems. The dLOC will be an umbrella for digital projects and collections from and about the Caribbean that might exist in isolation at a single institution, thus providing a critical mass of resources in a single space.
Building upon the success of a cooperative pilot project and the progress made at the first dLOC Planning Meeting in July 2004 at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, this project proposes to use Federal funds to meet the following goals:
The dLOC project has made substantial progress during the first year of the project, October 1, 2005 to September 30, 2006. The majority of time, effort and expenses were used to build the necessary infrastructure to ensure the success of the project. This has included developing the governance structure, building capacity in the region and developing the technologies to support the project. Because of the successful infrastructure implementation, in this first year, dLOC has been able to collect and deliver hundreds of research resources, in digital format, that were not available nor accessible to a wide audience even one year ago.
Although only one year into the project, dLOC has already impacted the field of Caribbean Studies and has generated unprecedented interest in the ability to access Caribbean resources in digital format. Through exemplary outreach and promotion of the project, supplemental funding has been awarded, additional institutions throughout the Caribbean have inquired about membership, its co-Directors were invited to write a refereed article about the project, dLOC trainers were invited to present a Digitization Training Workshop at the Caribbean Library Association (ACURIL) conference, and it has already been awarded a prize for collaboration. More detail about these exemplary outreach activities and their impact is included in the section entitled "Exemplary Activities."
dLOC has generated tremendous interest throughout the Caribbean and beyond and has impacted the way that scholars view the future of Caribbean research resources. Much of this interest is as a direct result of the exemplary activities that have emerged in both outreach activities and in technology.
dLOC members have dedicated much of their own time and energy and, in most cases, their own institutions' money, to promote this project locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. These exemplary outreach activities include: interviews with newspapers in the Virgin Islands, a presentation about dLOC at a digital library conference in Venezuela, participation in a round table on Caribbean collections at the Latin American Studies Association, a dLOC panel with three institutional members at the SALALM conference, participation in a Digital Libraries Technology panel at ACURIL, official receptions and ceremonies during scheduled dLOC training workshops at Caribbean partner institutions, and the submission of a peer-reviewed article on dLOC in an upcoming book entitled "Caribbean Libraries in the 21st Century: Changes, Challenges and Choices - a Collection of Selected Articles."
Caribbean partners have been very proactive in promoting the project by inviting neighboring institutions to participate in the dLOC Training Workshops. At the training at the National Archives of Haiti, participants came from the following institutions: Bibliothque des Pres du Saint Esprit, la Bibliothque Nationale, la Bibliothque des Frres de l Instruction Chrtienne, and l Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie. At the training at FUNGLODE in the Dominican Republic, representatives came from the following institutions: Pontificia Universidad Catlica Madre y Maestra, Universidad Nacional Pedro Henrquez Urea, Universidad Autnoma de Santo Domingo and the Biblioteca Nacional Pedro Henrquez Urea. Eighteen staff members participated in the training at CARICOM, many from functional areas outside the Documentation Centre. CARICOM is also working with the National Library of Guyana to digitize some of its materials.
These outreach activities have led several Caribbean and U.S. institutions to inquire about participating in the project and contributing their resources to this digital library. These institutions include the University of Puerto Rico, Pontificia Universidad Catlica Madre y Maestra, Bahamas Library Service, College of the Bahamas, the Caribbean Conservation Association, Bibliothque Nationale d'Haiti, Bibliothque des Peres du Saint Esprit (Port-au-Prince), Bibliotheques des Freres de l'Instruction Chtienne (Port-au-Prince), Universidad Metropolitana de Caracas, Unversidad del Norte in Colombia, and the University of New Mexico.
Both national and international interest was also clearly visible from the overwhelming response to the call for participation to sit on the inaugural dLOC Advisory Board. Accomplished Caribbeanist scholars, scientists, students and libraries all vied for seven coveted spots.
As a direct result of the outreach undertaken by the co-Directors of this project, approximately $6000 was pledged in additional funds in order to support continued promotion of the project. Various departments at FIU, including the Center for Transnational and Comparative Studies, the Latin American and Caribbean Center (LACC), and the Libraries pledged a combined additional $4500 in travel support beyond any obligation to the grant. Two Caribbean partners (CARICOM and National Archives of Haiti) also received ENLACE scholarships from the SALALM (Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials) organization to present the project at its annual conference, for a total exceeding $1500. Personnel at the University of Florida have also been very generous with their own personal funds, including the gifts of DVDs to archive digital content and two transparency scanners to enable the National Archives of Haiti to scan photographic negatives. LACC also very generously covered the $5000 cost of the translation of the training materials into French.
Two dLOC training personnel were invited by the Information Technology - Special Interest Group of ACURIL to give a full-day Digitization Workshop as a pre-conference to the annual ACURIL conference in June 2006. Attendees participated from Aruba, Curacao, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
dLOC has already received an award for its efforts in increasing collaboration in the Caribbean region. The "Albertina Prez de Rosa Information Units Alliances and Collaborative Projects in the Caribbean Award," presented to dLOC at ACURIL 2005, recognizes and honors excellence in collaborative efforts and the implementation of successful projects for the benefit of their clienteles in the Caribbean.
Technological advancements have also been exemplary. A full discussion on these follows in the "Use of Technology" section.
dLOC technologies are both a public interface and a suite of applications (toolkit) for partner contribution. At the beginning of the grant period, UF decided to move to new digital library management software to manage its digital collections, creating initial delays, but affording multiple long-term benefits. More programming time was required than was initially expected and metadata creation tools were built to create the standard metadata files read by the system. With the assistance of FIU and the Archives Nationales d'Haiti, all dLOC technologies now support, with some exceptions, the three dLOC languages: English, French and Spanish.
Regarding the public interface: The Greenstone and University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) technology on which dLOC is built is now stable for the most part. A recent release of UFDC a) provides thumbnail view at all query levels; b) increases the transparency and availability of thumbnails at all query levels (thumbnails previously displayed at only the lowest collection level); c) fleshes out the table of contents views (new views are no longer truncated); d) nests related items (e.g., journal volumes, newspaper issues, multi-volume monographs); and e) enables JPEG 2000, a zoom technology, allowing users to view the detail of artifacts, maps, and photographs - every image regardless of publication type now has a JPEG 2000 version.
Regarding the toolkit: Tri-lingual support is now in place and modifications made following road tests by partners and several remote non-dLOC agents of the University of Florida. New versions have been rolled out and now up-date automatically via the web. Recent changes to the toolkit make it easier to use and improve metadata collection to facilitate the discovery of resources in the dLOC/UFDC public interface. Modifications of the toolkit continue based on feed-back and as necessary to support data discovery as suggested by partners and researchers.
The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) technology that is the backbone of dLOC's digital library is now stable. It is the largest Greenstone library anywhere in the world. And, modifications resulting in the presentation layer that forms the public interface now rivals the presentation layers of US research institutions using the more complex Fedora digital library software developed in part by Princeton University. Additionally, the library now includes tri-lingual support. While still in need of improvement, none of the other Greenstone or Fedora based libraries offer more than bi-lingual support. Additional work remains to enrich the descriptor datasets. The libraries's subject descriptor tables, for example, are richest in English.
Other items remaining on the library's development list include: a) display of search terms in context; b) search term highlighting, which is particularly necessary in large format items such as newspapers; c) advanced geographic referencing (e.g., to support targeted zoom on maps, i.e., to zoom immediately to a region of interest); d) support for data-mining (i.e., the extraction of data from searchable text and its processing against authority tables for more advanced document discovery), and e) support for the Open Archives Initiative, both 1) the harvesting of data from partners with local digital libraries and 2) making our collections harvestable by other digital libraries. Other issues remaining are less complex: a) the creation of virtual collections for countries and sub-regions, b) creation of virtual collections for partnered institutions, and c) creation of virtual collections for topics of interest. All of these are currently being researched and the ground work for many is being put into place.
Additionally, because the Greenstone base is primarily a data store designed for text, dLOC has added support for zoomable images (JPEG 2000) and, recently, with funding from ancillary projects in Florida, multimedia data stores for audio and video. We are currently working to build additional capacity for each of these services. Some of the content served under these new services, however, still needs to be integrated with the dLOC catalog. Caribbean maps, for example, still reside in a collection separated from the main dLOC text collections.
UFDC Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard - METS, the technical metadata standard for dLOC, is now out of beta but continuing growth. The application of this US and international standard is fully documented at . Initial tests on the viability of the application, the transfer of dLOC data from UF to the Florida Center for Library Automation was successful and indicates that dLOC data can be shared with other digital libraries, the Library of Congress and other national and multi-national libraries.
The construction of a gazetteer continues, with the appointment of GIS staff at FIU, the appointment of an internal UF task force to structure a broader "life events" data set compliant with the US Federal Board of Geographic Names format, the international Encoded Archival Description format, and the international MARC21 Library catalog record format for name authority. This effort will ensure dLOC's ability to share standardized data and to export our enhancements of known data about specific places in multiple standard formats.
The basic dataset comprised of first through third order (country and next two major divisions) have been established and extended to support dLOC's three languages. Methods of importing an extended data set is still under construction. The basic dataset is now being used to assign geographic descriptors to digitized resources and, in dLOC's digital library to support sub-setting holdings into country and other geographic collections and sub-collections.
In other areas relative to metadata and discovery tools, we have also begun to build tri-lingual authority tables for the description of artifacts, art works and utilitarian objects.
Geographic data, as well as temporal and other topical metadata is intended to enable the discovery of resources in the dLOC digital library. Moreover, in future, it will enable data-mining: the discovery of data obscured by variant names embedded in digitized texts, a necessity for territories that changed hands and crossed linguistic boundaries more frequently germs by handshakes at a church service.
Documentation continues online apace for each development, albeit at the temporary location:
The project website is now otherwise available at . And while page design is currently under revision to enhance its visual appeal, work has been largely completed on its English, French and Spanish versions.
In order to preserve and increase access to valuable resources for the study of the Caribbean and the advancement of Caribbean Studies, the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University, in consortium with the University of Central Florida, University of Florida and the University of the Virgin Islands, proposes a multifaceted and collaborative international digital library project. The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) intends to cross borders and build collaboration among diverse institutions to share resources in a common space, thus expanding the range of Caribbean materials available to scholars, students and citizens through enhanced electronic access in multilingual interfaces.
The Caribbean comprises a diverse mix of cultures, histories and peoples that share a common space. This region illustrates trends in migration and nation-state building that are currently taking place on a world scale, and is thus a significant focus of study for scholars and students alike. Pan-Caribbean research will provide scholars, leaders, and citizens with the resources necessary to build an understanding of issues central to our lives today and to construct effective current policies and sound strategies for the future.
This digital library will comprise collections that examine the similarities and differences in histories, cultures, languages, and governmental systems. The dLOC will be an umbrella for digital projects and collections from and about the Caribbean that might exist in isolation at a single institution, thus providing a critical mass of resources in a single space.
Building upon the success of a cooperative pilot project and the progress made at the first dLOC Planning Meeting in July 2004 at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, this project proposes to use Federal funds to meet the following goals:
The Florida International University Digital Library of the Caribbean TICFIA grantee has made substantial progress during the current reporting period. This progress has consisted primarily of increasing contact with project partners and improving local infrastructure in order to open our collaborative model to new partners.
HELPING PARTNERSAs planned, the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) has begun undertaking follow-up visits to foreign partners who received intensive training visits in year one. In this current reporting period, dLOC sent programmer Mark Sullivan to Caribbean Community (CARICOM) in Guyana, and sent Mark again to the National Archives of Haiti with Project Coordinator Kyle Rimkus. Both CARICOM and the National Archives of Haiti had previously received initial intensive training visits on using digitization hardware with the dLOC Toolkit software in 2006, and each has been able to begin digitizing documents at their respective insitutions. The follow-up visits of the current grant reporting period proved invaluable to helping partners at CARICOM and the National Archives of Haiti refine their local workflows and improve on their ability to contribute high-quality imaged documents with rich metadata to dLOC.
In addition to these two follow-up training sessions, equipment was shipped to the National Library of Jamaica, and an intensive training visit was undertaken at their facilities by dLOC Programmer Mark Sullivan and Trainer Lourdes Santamaria. dLOC trainers in Jamaica were able to address local issues regarding the configuration of hardware and software, local workflow management, and collections selection.
While undertaking training at the National Library of Jamaica and follow-up training at CARICOM and the National Archives of Haiti, dLOC also made the necessary arrangements to bring equipment and training to project partner the Universidad de Oriente in Venezuela, to be undertaken in the next grant reporting period.
BUILDING INFRASTRUCTUREdLOC's administrative infrastructure building has taken great strides in the current grant reporting period. Regarding personnel, with the departure of Catherine Marsicek from Florida International University, Liesl Picard has taken over as a Director of the project. As planned, a full-time Project Coordinator, Kyle Rimkus, was hired as of October 1, 2006, to take responsibilty for project administration and coordinate the efforts of its many contributors. Using match funds from FIU's Latin American and Caribbean Center, Kyle was sent to the University of Florida at Gainesville for two days to meet with contributors and deepen his working knowledge of dLOC's infrastructure. dLOC trainer Lourdes Santamaria from the University of Florida also visited Florida International University in Miami to provide Kyle and Giovanni Graziosi with a hands-on introduction to dLOC digitization training.
In addition to this personnel change and growth, dLOC has completed an Equipment Agreement from to bring our grant-chartered equipment transfers to foreign partners into accordance with Florida state equipment inventory policy. This document has already been signed by partners CARICOM, the National Library of Jamaica, and the National Archives of Haiti, with plans to acquire signatures from FUNGLODE and any other partners to receive dLOC equipment in the future.
dLOC has also brought its most essential institutional documents, the New Member Agreement and the Bylaws, into a final draft form. During this grant reporting period, dLOC established a solid working relationship with legal counsel from Florida International University's Office of Sponsored Research, and our New Member Agreement and Bylaws are in the preliminary process of a full legal review under their direction.
To allow for new partners greater flexibility for contributing items to dLOC, dLOC's technical team at the University of Florida has built functionality for harvesting new partner metadata records using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
Finally, dLOC has made significant strides towards improving our web presence by collaborating on content for a fully trilingual website. dLOC expects this new content to be publicly accessible in the near future, once final decisions are made regarding page design and web presentation.
Use of TechnologyAs in preceding grant reporting periods, dLOC has continued to make great strides in improving its own technology and helping partners to benefit from those improvements.
In this grant reporting period, for example, dLOC published an updated version of the Toolkit software suite which includes improved trilingual support for Spanish and French speaking partners. This version of the Toolkit provides drastic improvement in the presentation of image files, evinced primarily by the transition from JPEG as a web presentation image file format to the JPEG 2000 format. While JPEG in its prior incarnation provided static images of a fixed resolution, JPEG 2000 images can be zoomed into by the user at varying degrees of resolution. The presentation layer of UF's Greenstone digital library integrates this new functionality into the user experience, presenting items with an innovative and intuitive interface for choosing zoom levels and navigating throughout images at scalable resolutions. Whereas reading an imaged newspaper in the collection may have been burdensome before, with the introduction of JPEG 2000 functionality and the dLOC collection's zoom interface, users are now able to interact with dLOC collections in a more satisfying way.
Under the direction of the Cataloging Department at the University of Florida, a comprehensive review of partner metadata has begun in order to reconcile problems with multiple attributions to the same corporate author all having different spellings. Investigations have begun into helping partners to improve their knowledge of cataloging and metadata principles and to integrate the findings of UF's post-submission metadata enrichment into the dLOC Toolkit.
Technological problems were overcome on-site during the dLOC visit to partner the National Archives of Haiti. Previously, FTP transfers of large image files during the day had been slowing down the local network, so the dLOC Toolkit was re-configured to schedule all FTP transfers to the dLOC central repository after working hours, when bandwidth was free. During the dLOC visit, working capacity at the Digitization Lab at the National Archives of Haiti was improved by Director Jean-Wilfrid Bertrand with the purchase of an extra computer and sufficient memory to enable two employees to digitize for dLOC simultaneously. dLOC trainers were able to configure the two computers for digitization, dedicating one to high speed and positive image scanning, and the other to the scanning of photographic negatives.
To improve dLOC's ability to respond to partners' technical problems, dLOC programmer Mark Sullivan also installed software to allow for remote access to partner machines at the National Archives of Haiti, CARICOM, and the National Library of Jamaica. Mark also installed a process on these machines which would allow for the export of the entire local database of a partner to him at UF in order to better assess the nature of partner technical difficulties.
Production has begun on improving the dLOC collections front end to allow partners to each have an individual "virtual collection" displaying all items they have contributed. A manual is being created by the dLOC technical team to describe to partners how to manage the interfaces to their own collections.
OAI-PMH functionality was integrated into dLOC's local content ingest mechanism. This protocol allows dLOC to harvest metadata to serve as a finding aid for relevant items held in off-site digital collections. Through the use of OAI-PMH, dLOC will acquire the capability not only of hosting collections itself, but also of serving as a gateway to other Caribbean collections. dLOC intends to implement this model for new partners in the years to come, as it allows for great flexibility in serving as a gateway and hub for widely dispersed digital collections related to the field of Caribbean Studies.
Finally, data storage, data processing, and long-term preservation services offered by dLOC have emerged as vital to meeting partner needs. While project partner the National Library of Jamaica was originally considering a purely OAI-PMH-based relationship with dLOC, National Library representatives opted to store a second copy in dLOC central servers with Florida Digital Archive for backup as well as an additional layer of preservation. This choice bespeaks the confidence shown by partners in the dLOC infrastructure, as well as the mutually beneficial nature of the collaborative model which dLOC uniquely represents in the digital library world.
