|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
Archival Terminology of the Month
conditions governing use
n. ~ an element of archival description that conveys information about the nature of limitations on reuse of the archival
resource or lack of such limitations. (SAA Dictionary of Archives Terminology)
This kind of information should be outlined in a deed of gift with a collection and shared through a collection’s finding aid. Depending on a collection’s conditions, an organization’s ability to digitize and share objects online widely may be affected so should
always be checked before embarking on a digitization project with a new collection.
|
|
|
Teaching With and Using Primary Sources
HOW ARE WE FACILITATING ACCESS TO THE FRUITS OF OUR ARCHIVAL LABOR?
Making the Case for Primary Source Literacy
Towards the conclusion of a City of Coral Springs (FL) Commission Meeting on 21 May 2025,
Mayor Scott Brook issued a, what might have appeared to be a tongue-in-cheek, sobering appeal to residents of the importance and benefit of accessing credible information:
“...[Y]ou do not need to go to social media for your information. If you want to have the negative information and enjoy the drama, go for
it; but if you're looking for solutions and if you're looking to make a difference, you can call me…you can text me… and, really, the best way to make a difference and to share your concerns, is to e-mail me or anybody on our team…and that’s the best way to
preserve your concern[s], your questions, your ideas…But, we’re here to serve you. We’re not here to serve conspiracy theories, and we’re not here to merely listen to conjecture. We’d like to give you the best information we can...We want to get you the right
information. We want to do it readily and we welcome the opportunity to speak with you directly, instead of, sometimes, just engendering some fear one way or the other, especially on social media, where things could blow up real quick
[sic] …and not necessarily be the truth.”
In an information-glut age when unsuspecting folks are unable to separate the wheat from the chaff, critical thinking becomes a casualty, expanding the void for echo chambers and their growing number of inhabitants. The mayor’s reminder stands as proof of the
uphill task by public officials to stem the tide of mis- and disinformation in order to guide citizens. Public officials and the information they generate are original, credible sources; in fact, they are considered primary sources. Primary sources also abound
in information collection centers such as archives suitable for complementing the role of public officials. Can the mayoral appeal serve as a useful example for prompting us—archival information practitioners—to pause to re-examine our role, redouble our efforts,
and renew and scale up our commitment to an informed citizenry through primary source literacy?
The Online Dictionary of Library and Information Science (ODLIS) defines a primary source as “...a document or record containing firsthand information or original data on a topic, used in preparing
a derivative work. Primary sources include original manuscripts, periodical articles reporting original research or thought, diaries, memoirs, letters, journals, photographs, drawings, posters, film footage, sheet music, songs, interviews, government documents,
public records, eyewitness accounts, newspaper clippings, etc.”
How are we facilitating access to these treasures to contribute to a better informed and knowledgeable society and the citizen's right to know? What information are we placing in the hands of citizens to help them make informed decisions? While our field is
guided by umbrella instruments for our collective operation, how are local contexts shaping our collecting and archiving decisions? What are some patron requests that have sent us deep into our vaults and what kinds of surprises have we encountered in the
process? Is primary source research and scholarship trending upward and what might be influencing this? To what extent are reference enquiries influencing our digitization decisions? What are our experiences of collaborating with instructors to incorporate
primary sources into the curriculum to support teaching and learning? What about partnerships as a means of bolstering our commitment to making available more archival content for public access? These questions are among a multitude to help us reflect on our
collective responsibility to a properly informed citizenry.
Within our archives, large and small, are rows of primary sources, processed and unprocessed. Archival workers work behind the scenes, preparing their collections for appropriate access. But, what about the public engagement side with archival collections?
This new column aims for us to extract examples of primary source engagement out of our own local practices around digitizing, archiving, publishing, teaching and learning, researching, and scholarship.
|
|
|
Hidden Gems
Highlights from our DPLA Partners
This month’s hidden gem features “The
Torch of Friendship,” a recently re-digitized film from SSDN partner, the State Library and Archives of Florida. The film promotes the Hampton House Hotel in Miami. Built in 1954, Hampton House opened during the era of legal segregation in the United
States as a welcoming space for Black tourists in Florida. The hotel was once known as “the Social Center of the South” and was visited by Martin Luther King Jr., Jackie Robinson, Althea Gibson, Jackie Wilson, as well as other prominent Black leaders, athletes,
and entertainers.
In addition to the Hampton House and its famous guests, the film showcases entertainment, the Hampton House owners, a fashion show, dog and horse racing, the Miami Seaquarium, the Torch of Friendship, Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle, the Baltimore Orioles, and the
FAMU Men’s Track and Field team, including U.S. Olympian and Super Bowl Champion Bob Hayes. Re-digitized using Blackmagic’s Cintel Scanner 2, “The Torch of Friendship” is the only Florida Development Commission film that focuses on Black tourism, making it
a valuable piece of Florida’s history.
By revisiting our past, we can evaluate the present. Imagine what other hidden stories can be learned from diving deeper. Satisfy your curiosity about Florida and its history by exploring SSDN partner collections in the DPLA. Check out
https://ssdn.dp.la/.
SSDN Newsletter Readers: Submit your Hidden Gem story for the next issue!
|
|
|
Training Opportunities
A roundup of digital library related training from Florida and beyond.
Upcoming Live Training
SSDN Discussion: Pitfall to Triumph: Lessons learned from failed projects
June 12, 2025, 2-3 PM ET
https://fsu.zoom.us/meeting/register/oAsstSD9QjOU-8a_7B0_Jw
Experimentation is an important part of innovation and sometimes means we get an "unsuccessful" outcome. Join us for a one-hour discussion session to discuss your digital library and archives projects in which you tried something and "failed." What lessons
were learned? How can we take these lessons and turn these "Pitfalls" into future "Triumphs?"
The Accidental Archivist Workshop Registration Tampa
When: Wednesday, July 23, 2025, 9am-4:30pm
Where: C. Blythe Andrews, Jr. Public Library, 2607 E Doctor Martin Luther King Junior Blvd, Tampa, FL 33610
Register here: https://forms.gle/XAXwEQjDUxtBzgjc6
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.
Lunch will be provided.
Presenters: Krystal Thomas, Florida State University and David Benjamin, University of Central Florida
This presentation will also be offered in Fort Lauderdale on November 13, 2025. Registration to open in August.
NEDCC: Celebrating with Collections!
September 9, 2025, 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM ET
https://registration.nedcc.org/register?sgid=1b436c8871a4483ab7426af0009c0143
Before you bring out your most precious items, though, you'll want to attend this introductory webinar to learn the basics about how to protect them during handling, scanning, and exhibition.
ICYMI: Recorded Webinars
Selecting for Digitization
https://youtu.be/FLF-AQBebNg?si=FLVihoUXlY44LapH
Starting a digitization project, but not sure which materials in your collection to start with? Not sure how best to prioritize collections? Join SSDN for a one-hour webinar which will offer guidance, advice from experienced professionals about how to select
materials for digitization to best fit the needs of users and the available resources of the institution. Our panelists, from public libraries and museums, will share their experience and processes, and will include time for questions and discussion with attendees.
This session will be recorded. Register to attend or receive the recording.
Presenters: Tara Backhouse, Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum
Stephanie M. Garcia, Special Collections & Archives, Miami-Dade Public Library System
Jenny Tolbert, Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library
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:
-
What are you going to digitize?
-
How are you going to digitize it?
-
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.
|
|
|
|
Copyright Corner
AI and Copyright Updates
June marks the halfway point of 2025 and it is shaping up to be a notable year for copyright in several areas. AI is still front and center of much
of the copyright news, especially after the abrupt firing of the Head of the copyright office on May 10th. Shortly before that event, the office uploaded part three of their report on
Copyright and Artificial Intelligence. The report continues to
stress (from part two of the report) that human authorship needs to be present in order for a work to receive copyright protection.
The new update focuses on training AI with images, music, and datasets and explores the current voluntary licensing approach which is already actively happening in the news and music industries, as well as for some large collections of images. The report points
out that this will lead to high transaction costs and suggests that a collective licensing approach may enhance access. Following working models from the the EU and other international bodies, the report also suggests that a voluntary opt-out choice be made
available to rights holders.
The main recommendations from the new report are to:
-
Continue to monitor the legal and technological developments
-
Avoid government intervention at this point and let licensing markets evolve
-
Develop extended collective licensing only if licensing markets fail to evolve or to provide sufficiently for rights holders
Overall, we can expect the rest of 2025 to be an active year for AI as several cases are still in litigation and the shake-up in leadership in the U.S.
Copyright office has impacted 20,000 registrations.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Metadata Minute
Inclusive metadata / evolving folksonomy
At the Society of American Archivists annual meeting in August 2024,
keondra bills freemyn, co-director of
Black Lunch Table (BLT), presented “Toward an Afro-present: Centering Culturally-Specific Epistemologies in Digital Archival Practice.”
The mission of Black Lunch Table is to build a more complete understanding of cultural history by illuminating the stories of Black people. Part of this undertaking has included Wikipedia edit-a-thons by over 340 “Black Lunch Table Wikimedians”. As Black artists
are still marginalized within mainstream contemporary art, Wikimedians “focus on Wikipedia knowledge gaps” by adding to and improving Wikipedia articles pertaining to the lives and works of Black artists so that their value is recorded accurately. Their approach
to topical description of content to increase inclusion prompts a closer look at the use of localized vocabulary.
Folksonomy is a collaborative classification system where users apply keywords or tags to online content (like images, videos, or articles) to describe and categorize it. It can be used for representing regional slang and included in localized controlled vocabularies.
The tags used in folksonomies can provide valuable insight into how people think and speak about a particular topic.
Over 302K terms have been cataloged during the 16-year of their Wikipedia edit-a-thons. freemyn shared that these results employ an evolving folksonomy that allows for broader inclusion and reflects an interdisciplinary and intergenerational transfer of knowledge.
With the BLT’s “Roundtable” project, where participants gather around a table for food, fellowship, and engage in a recorded conversation, one story is not singled out as happens with traditional oral histories, rather it is communal and focuses on inclusive
participation. Here, folksonomy for custom topic tagging is used to preserve collective memory along with the fidelity of atmospheric sound.
The application of folksonomy with both Black Lunch Table projects shifts the “demographic [from the white, male majority] and empowers people to write their own history.” Even so, freemyn warns of “blind spots” in using folksonomy, as terms can be ambiguous
to outsiders or lead to variations in spellings.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Teachers’ Corner
Featured Primary Source Set of the Month
The Hudson River School
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.
This month’s primary source set is the
Hudson River School. According to the
Thomas Cole National Historic Site, in the summer of 1825, Thomas Cole, who is widely considered the founder of the Hudson River school movement, first visited Catskill, New York. The resulting art he created based on
the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson River Valley sparked a period of American landscape art still highly regarded 200 years later.
The Hudson River school was an artistic movement that often held up a romantic vision that humanity and nature can exist together peacefully. The American landscape—and its grandiosity—is the school’s predominant subject. Visions of the Hudson Valley, as well
as naturalistic scenes from across the United States and beyond, are depicted in the paintings.
Homer Dodge Martin, Frederick Edwin Church, and Albert Bierstadt are some of the most notable first- and second-generation Hudson River school painters. While the Hudson River school artists were American, many European artists picked up the themes of their
work. Few women were part of the movement, although some, like Eliza Pratt Greatorex, were influenced by it. One offshoot of the Hudson River school was the Luminism movement, and many second-generation artists’ works are examples of both.
This
primary source set features 15 items, the majority paintings, associated with the Hudson River School. The sources are accompanied by additional resources and a teaching guide.
|
|
|
|
Have digital library questions? Want to stay updated? Join our
listserv or subscribe to our
newsletter.
|
|
|
Getting Started as an SSDN Content Contributor
|
|
|
|
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!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
