SSDN News February 2024

[Keila Zayas Ruiz]

Issue 40 | February 2024 Facebook Instagram Website YouTube   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.     In This Issue: Archival Terminology of the Month Hidden Gems Training Opportunities Metadata Minute Copyright Corner Teacher's Corner: Featured Primary Source Set DPLA News Getting Started as an SSDN Contributor   Back to Top     Archival Terminology of the Month   Libraries, archives and museums (abbr. LAM) n. ~  three types of cultural institutions that share a collaborative relationship stemming from their similar missions A popular variation of this acronym is GLAM which includes galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Source: Dictionary of Archives Terminology by the Society of American Archivists (SAA).    Back to Top     Hidden Gems Highlights from our DPLA partners Blues Music Singers   Let's bring on the blues! In observance of Black History Month under the theme “African Americans and the Arts”, the SSDN highlights a collection of blues musicians, including gospel singer and Touched By An Angel’s main star Della Reese, featured in the photograph shown here.   The image, captured by Miami photographer David Spitzer in 1979, is one in an album of blues music singers held in the Miami-Dade Public Library System Digital Collections.   If you would like a retrospective close-up encounter with Florida’s own blues tradition, including a smashing bandstand interactive stage, stop by at NSU’s Alvin Sherman Library to view the Museum of Florida History’s traveling exhibit “Florida’s Got the Blues”.     Back to Top     Training Opportunities A roundup of digital library related training from Florida and beyond.   Introduction to OpenRefine Wednesday, February 7, at 1pm ET View the recording here: https://youtu.be/sAS0_RQSmms  Curious about OpenRefine? Wondering how this popular data-cleaning tool can help you streamline your DPLA metadata workflows? Join the Outreach and Assessment and Metadata Working Groups for an introduction to OpenRefine.  Viewers will: Learn the basics of OpenRefine Understand what OpenRefine is really good at/not good at Learn how OpenRefine can help you with metadata prep for DPLA Be introduced to advanced techniques such as reconciliation Discuss workflows in a meeting-style format This meeting was led by Helen Baer, Digital Projects Librarian at Colorado State University, a member of the Plains to Peaks Collective. No software pre-installation is required by participants. Copyright for Digital Libraries Thursday, February 15, 2024, 2-3pm ET https://fsu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEvdOusrT8rG9djq9R5IANkyXQ8gQ_m23Fd  Copyright in libraries can be confusing, especially when it comes to knowing your rights concerning the digitization of archival and special collections. This one-hour webinar will address basic copyright considerations and fair use cases that can be made when assessing the copyright status and access of digitized collections online. Copyright for Archival Newspapers Tuesday, February 27, 2024 1:00pm ET https://psu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NueB_5mRRgyL5rCF9s3ZzQ#/registration  Do you have copyright questions about digitizing archival newspapers? At this event, Ana Enriquez from the PA Digital Rights Team will cover how to check public domain status, analyze fair use, and assign rights statements, with a focus on newspapers published in the United States. This workshop will be an update and expansion of our 2019 module, Copyright for Archival Newspapers. To view that module in English and Spanish, visit our Rights Resources page. AI-Assist in FromThePage: Using HTR in People-Centered Transcription Thursday, February 29, 2024 at 12:00pm ET https://content.fromthepage.com/feb-2024-webinar/ How can artificial intelligence be used to support humans instead of replacing them? This presentation demonstrates how we integrated Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) into the FromThePage crowdsourcing platform while keeping the central role of humans in the transcription process. We asked ourselves how can we introduce enough friction into our user interface that volunteers have to think rather than blindly trusting machine generated data, while still using AI to speed up their work and increase their pleasure? Our focus lay on enhancing user experience rather than on character error rates or model training. We will discuss design considerations, implementation specifics, and the initial outcomes of user testing conducted by the State Library of New South Wales and their Digital Volunteer working group. Introduction to Project Management Tuesday, March 19, 2024, 2-3pm ET https://fsu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0vduCuqTgiHdEi4rPWf4p-bvWO_vV703vp  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.   View SSDN's full catalog of recorded training sessions on our YouTube channel. Back to Top   Back to Top   Copyright Corner Public Domain Day 2024 If you, like us, are still giddy about Public Domain Day 2024, and also curious as to why poor Mickey Mouse gets the blame about the public domain clock stopping for so long, we highly recommend this article from Duke Law which clearly outlines what they call "Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle." This article gets into the nitty gritty of the law and explains why it's only a certain version of Mickey Mouse that entered public domain on January 1, 2024. A part of the article that is particularly interesting is how trademarks can become involved. Trademarks, or words, logos, images, and other signifiers that serve as brands identifying the source of a product, are not something we discuss a lot in digital library land but as public domain days continue to move us forward in years, it may be something we need to keep a closer eye and potentially adjust rights and source statements to make sure we're not misrepresenting ourselves and the materials we select to share online.     Metadata Minute Language Justice in our Metadata Language justice is an evolving framework based on the notion of respecting every individual’s fundamental language rights—to be able to communicate, understand, and be understood in the language in which they prefer and feel most articulate and powerful. Rejecting the notion of the supremacy of one language, it recognizes that language can be a tool of oppression, and as well as an important part of exercising autonomy and of advancing racial and social justice.  Many of the collections we have in Florida are multicultural and contain materials which are not written in English. To make these resource more readily discoverable to users who read and speak that language we can work to incorporate the language of the material in our descriptions. These descriptions then get indexed and become available to search engines for broader access. Learn how our colleagues at Florida International University are incorporating language justice in their finding aid metadata by viewing a recent presentation here . Gonzalez, Annia; Valdivia, Ximena; and Ferrer, Karla, "Creative Collaboration: Providing Inclusive Access to FIU Libraries' Collections" (2022). Works of the FIU Libraries. 130. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/glworks/130 Back to Top     Teachers’ Corner Featured Primary Source Set of the Month  Exodusters: African American Migration to the Great Plains The post Reconstruction years gave way to a great migration of African Americans out of the South to escape violence, economic exploitation, and discriminatory laws.   The Homestead Act of 1862 offered lots of land at low cost which encouraged more than 20,000 African Americans to leave the South for Kansas, the Oklahoma Territory, and elsewhere on the Great Plains in a migration known as the Great Exodus.  The migrants, or Exodusters, came primarily from Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Tennessee, only to find that living in their new “promised land” was often challenging due to difficulties in cultivating the land and the limited resources for building homes and businesses. By the turn of the century the population of many of the rural Exoduster towns and settlements began to decline.    This month’s featured Primary Source Set, Exodusters: African American Migration to the Great Plains offers a topic overview, discussion questions, classroom activities and primary source analysis tools for the curated collection of digitized photographs, illustrations, maps, and documents.  The teaching guide will encourage students to read newspaper articles and letters to learn more about the reasons people decided to leave the South and the factors pulling them toward Kansas.  Excerpts from the Kansas Freedmen’s Relief Association report and illustrations from Harper’s Weekly and other photos will help with study of the efforts to organize migration, travel experiences, and challenges the migrants may have faced once they reached their destination.   A 1910 photograph of Elsie and Lela Scott, children of Exodusters John and Julia Scott, who settled in Stafford County, Kansas. View Primary Source Set | View Item   Back to Top       ·         DPLA hosts introduction to OpenRefine ·         Introducing Indie Selections on Palace Marketplace ·         Reflections on our ebook work in 2023, and what comes next ·         Wrapping up 2023, and a look ahead ·         Toward a digital library ownership model ·         DPLA and Wikimedia: The Project in Brief   Back to Top     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!   View and Download Facebook Instagram Website YouTube