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SSDN News
A newsletter of the Sunshine State Digital Network
Welcome to the bi-monthly newsletter of the Sunshine State Digital Network (SSDN), the Florida Service Hub of the Digital
Public Library of America (DPLA). As the Sunshine State's service hub, we provide partner metadata to the DPLA. The DPLA is a portal of over 40 million digital cultural heritage items from thousands of organizations around the country.
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Archival Terminology of the Month
Lamination
n. ~ the process of applying thin sheets of cellulose acetate to both sides of a document to reinforce it and protect
it from the environment
Note: This practice is out of favor in the archives and is no longer considered a good preservation decision for documents. Over time, the documents can deteriorate under the acetate with little recourse for intervention. It also makes documents difficult to
capture digitally with the lamination reflecting back on scanners and cameras rather than capturing the text underneath.
Source: Dictionary of Archives Terminology by the Society of American
Archivists (SAA).
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Expert of the Month
Jennifer Nicholson
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This month we are highlighting Jennifer Nicholson from the Florida Department of State Division of Library and Information Services. Jennifer is the
new Florida Statewide Digital Initiative Consultant and began her role in November 2024. The Florida Statewide Digital Initiative facilitates the discovery, sharing and preservation of digitized resources held by libraries, museums and other cultural heritage
organizations. She is working under Dorothy Frank to implement the Florida Statewide Digital Repository (FSDR). The FSDR will host digitized cultural heritage materials held by Florida libraries, archives, museums and other cultural heritage organizations,
all on one platform. Jennifer is developing and implementing policies, procedures, and workflows for the FSDR. She earned her MLIS from the University of South Florida, taking courses in cultural heritage and libraries. Jennifer collaborates with the SSDN
on the Steering Committee and the Outreach and Training Committee.
For more information about the
Florida Statewide Digital Initiative, contact Jennifer Nicholson at 850.245.6637 or
Jennifer....@dos.fl.gov
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Hidden Gems
Highlights from our DPLA partners
This month’s hidden gem features a chromolithographic cigar box label
Flor de O’Halloran from the O’Halloran Cigar Company. This colorful label is part of
The John William Osterweil Collection of Tampa Cigar Box Labels from SSDN partner
Digital Commons @ University of South Florida.
From this collection’s 1889 artistically colorful cigar bands and labels collection, the O'Halloran Cigar Company’s historical connection to Cuban independence is a fascinating story.
In 1893, the O'Halloran Cigar Company moved from Chicago to Ciudad del Pino, now known as West Tampa, when the area became central for cigar production.
Tampa also was pivotal in supporting Cuban independence from Spanish colonialism. Each week, cigar workers contributed one day’s pay, called
Día de La Patria (day of the fatherland), for the purchase of rebel arms. Many guerilla-fighters were outfitted and sneaked into Cuba from Tampa.
On January 29, 1895, a secret meeting of the revolutionary junta took place at the residence of Gonzalo De Quesada, secretary of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in New York City, with José Martí, leader of the Cuban freedom crusade. Soon after, Quesada met with
local leaders in West Tampa about how to smuggle a message to incite the rebellion into Cuba. Fernando Figueredo, Mayor of West Tampa (and general agent of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in Tampa) suggested concealing the message in a cigar.
Late one night, a few members of the local revolutionary junta met at the O’Halloran Cigar Factory and Blas O’Halloran rolled five Panetela cigars — all identical. The cigar concealing the historic
Cigar of Liberty message was distinguishable by two tiny yellow specks on the tobacco wrapper.
Days later, Quesada sailed to Key West with the five cigars in his pocket. There, he was met by Miguel Ángel Duque De Estrada, the man who was chosen to deliver El Grito de Guerra
(The Call to War) to Juan Gualberto Gómez, the insurgent chief of Cuba.
On the morning of Feb. 24, 1895, Gomez sent a wire to Quesada in New York, with "Viva la independencia!" The phrase "Viva Cuba libre!" fiercely unified the Cubans toward their independence from Spain.
Six years later, the O'Halloran factory burned down during a cigar workers’ strike in 1901. In 1914, a Carnegie library opened on that site and is one of the last remaining functioning
Carnegie libraries in Florida. Occasionally tourists visit to just see the site where the cigar that sparked a revolution was made.
Imagine what other hidden stories can be learned from diving deeper into the backgrounds of cigar box labels and bands. Satisfy your curiosity about Florida and its history and spend some time searching the SSDN partner collections via https://ssdn.dp.la/.
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Training Opportunities
A roundup of digital library related training from Florida and beyond.
Upcoming Live Training
"Ready — Or Not": California Cultural Heritage Disaster Preparedness Information Session
The Accidental Archivist
Monday, May 12, 2025, 9am-4:30pm ET
Where: Jacksonville Public Library, 303 N Laura St, Jacksonville, FL 32202
Join us for a free, day-long, interactive workshop to understand the basics of physical and digital archives. This workshop will cover best practices relating to collection development, processing,
description, access, and preservation of both physical and digital collections. Presenters will provide different approaches that will take into account varying resources and organization sizes. Come learn the basics of archives management with the Sunshine
State Digital Network.
Presenters: Krystal Thomas, Florida State University and David Benjamin, University of Central Florida
Free registration and lunch provided. Space is limited!
Registration link Jacksonville: https://forms.gle/Mm8U19ZxhUVoryiUA
This workshop will be offered in other locations around Florida in 2025. Please keep an eye out for more information regarding those sessions soon.
ICYMI: Recorded Webinars
Personal Digital Archiving
https://youtu.be/grpSV42l5g4?si=cjZHbr0qJXba3-eg
This webinar will offer guidance and resources about preserving our “digital lives” – after all, digital files are today’s scrapbooks and personal collections. These digital assets represent a significant investment in both time and resources, and are often
more fragile than we realize. This webinar will prepare you to collect your emails, photos, videos, and text messages and create a personal plan to ensure they are cared for well into the future. For slides and resource links, visit
www.nedcc.org/personaldigiarchive25
Tracing the Genealogies of Ideas with LLM Embeddings
https://youtu.be/sOEZ2Hw5kfE?si=Puspsa-Av2TFT4e5
Identifying intellectual influences in unstructured text is a crucial challenge across many academic disciplines, including intellectual history, social science, and bibliometrics. Researchers in computational social science and digital humanities have explored
various approaches to this problem, using techniques like dictionaries, word embeddings, and language models. At this summer's Digital Humanities conference, Ben was impressed when Lucian Li introduced a new method that leverages sentence embeddings to efficiently
search large historical text corpora for similar ideas. This approach remains effective even when the source texts contain high levels of optical character recognition (OCR) errors, which can disrupt previous techniques. Importantly, Li's method is also able
to capture indirect influences and paraphrased ideas. Li evaluated this sentence embedding-based approach on a corpus of 250,000 19th century nonfiction works, and found the detected influences to be well-aligned with existing scholarship in the history of
science. By expanding the scope of influence detection beyond just canonical texts and prominent figures, this type of method can provide a more nuanced understanding of how ideas spread, including among historically marginalized groups.
The Speaker: Lucian Li is a Doctoral Candidate at the School of Information Science, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. His research falls between digital humanities and computational social science. He leverages the unique affordances of large language
models and natural language processing to analyze large scale collections of historical and cultural documents. He is particularly interested in discovering instances and patterns of intellectual influence from unstructured text corpora.
Introduction to Project Management
https://youtu.be/WsvJ5wkfoEo?si=G1XZ6IpCGhGMRivC
This session will address all stages of digital project management, with a focus on the planning stages. A majority of the work when it comes to a digitization project is in the planning stages, answering these questions:
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What are you going to digitize?
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How are you going to digitize it?
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Who is going to do all the work?
This session will look at how to define and map out your project, exploring tools that will help in all stages of a project as well as ways to continually evaluate your plan once a project gets
up and running.
Implementing and Assessing AI Tools in Archival Metadata Workflows
https://youtu.be/ZehwzO6wO8U?si=EEDZvkYRLwfkRcM3
This winter, at the AI4LAM conference, Sara attended a talk by Jessica and Jeremiah on how they were experimenting with OpenAI's GPT models for their archival metadata workflows. Not many are attempting this (yet!) and we thought folks would be interested
in what they are doing, how they are going about it, and the results they are getting.
The speakers:
Jessica Roberson is the Digital Initiatives Librarian at the University of Alabama Libraries.
Jeremiah Colonna-Romano is the Digitization Manager at the University of Alabama Libraries.
View SSDN's full catalog of recorded training sessions on our
YouTube channel.
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Copyright Corner
January 1, 2025 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1929 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1924!
By Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle
Directors, Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain
CC BY 4.0
Please note that this site is only about US law; the copyright terms in other countries are different.[1]
On January 1, 2025, thousands of copyrighted works from 1929 will enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1924. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon.[2] 2025
marks a milestone: all of the books, films, songs, and art published in the 1920s will now be public domain. The literary highlights from 1929 include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A
Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. In film, Mickey Mouse speaks his first words, the Marx Brothers star in their first feature film,
and legendary directors from Alfred Hitchcock to John Ford made their first sound films. From comic strips, the original Popeye and Tintin characters will enter the public domain. Among the newly public domain compositions are Gershwin’s An
American in Paris, Ravel’s Bolero, Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, and the musical number Singin’
in the Rain. Below is just a handful of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2025.[3] To
find more material from 1929, you can visit the Catalogue
of Copyright Entries.
The title of Faulkner’s novel was itself taken from a public domain work, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and its lament over the seeming
meaningless of life. “Life…is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” The Sound and the Fury was published on October 7, 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression.
Faulkner won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. During those intervening twenty years the world had witnessed unspeakable horrors: economic crises had fueled the rise of authoritarianism and totalitarianism.
Keep
reading...
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Duke Law | Public Domain Day 2025 Preview
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Metadata Minute
The
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) uses databases of metadata to enable searching and accessing the cultural and scientific records of DPLA partner institutions and networks.
DLPA has only two required elements
of metadata, the title and the rights statement. These are the only metadata elements you need to get started as a partner institution. The Sunshine State Digital Network (SSDN) recommends the use of standardized rights statements in the form
of URIs from either
RightsStatements.org or
Creative Commons.
There are eight recommended elements. The recommended fields are contributor, creator, date, format, geographic, coverage, language, subject, and type. Including these fields will allow
more robust search and discovery of your collections.
DPLA has additional optional elements. Optional elements are not considered essential for discovery. However, they may be helpful for access, fuller description of the resource and additional
context.
The
SSDN Metadata Participation Guidelines provide guidance for libraries, archives, and museums who wish to contribute their metadata to DPLA through the Sunshine State Digital Network. The guidelines are intended to help
potential and current partners create, enhance, and map their metadata records for contribution to DPLA.
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Teachers’ Corner
Featured Primary Source Set of the Month
The Freedmen's Bureau
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Primary Source Sets are
designed to help students develop critical thinking skills by exploring topics in history, literature, and culture through primary sources. Drawing on materials from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States, the sets use letters, photographs,
posters, oral histories, and video clips. Each set includes a topic overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.
February 2025 Black History Month’s theme is “African Americans and Labor” with a focus on “the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective
experiences of Black people.” In designating the theme, The Association for the Study of African
American Life (ASALH), explains that “work is at the very center of much of Black history and culture” and that “Black people’s work has been transformational throughout the U.S., Africa, and the Diaspora.”
ASALH underscores how the “work Black people do and have done have been instrumental in shaping the lives, cultures, and histories of Black people and the societies in which they live”, noting that “[u]nderstanding Black labor and its impact in all…settings
is integral to understanding Black people and their histories, lives, and cultures.”
In observance of Black History Month’s “examining [of] Black life and culture through time and space”, this newsletter highlights an
1866 correspondence from a North Carolina Freedmen's Bureau to an employer admonishing
him for failing to pay his African American servant who had worked for him the previous year without receiving any compensation. This digital artifact is part of
The Freedmen's Bureau Primary Source Set of the
Digital Public Library of America.
The Freedmen’s Bureau (also called the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands) was an agency established by President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, the end of the Civil War, to help support freed slaves (or freedmen) in the South. The Source Set contains
other artifacts as well as well as Additional Resources, and
Teaching Guide of discussion questions and classroom activities.
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A letter from a North Carolina Freedmen's Bureau to an employer who failed
to pay his African American servant, 1866.
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Have digital library questions? Want to stay updated? Join our
listserv or subscribe to our
newsletter.
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Getting Started as an SSDN Content Contributor
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Are you interested in sharing your organization's digital collections with the Digital Public Library of America? We have a document that will walk
you through the steps and requirements for becoming an SSDN partner. It is not as intimidating or difficult as you might think!
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