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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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Expert of the Month
Krystal Thomas
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This month we are highlighting Krystal Thomas from Florida State University. Krystal is the Director of Digital Archives and manages the Digital Library
Center within the University Libraries. She has worked with community archives and organizations on digitization projects, managed grants, and serves on the SSDN Outreach and Training working group. Her areas of expertise include project management, digital
library management, digital preservation, born digital collection management. Please feel free to reach out to Krystal if you want to discuss questions or work in these areas at
kmth...@fsu.edu.
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Hidden Gems
Highlights from our DPLA Partners
This month’s hidden gem features the historic
Burgert Brothers Photographic Collection from SSDN partner
Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library. This collection recently completed a massive conservation, digitization, and preservation project spanning nearly 50 years of work and it is now part of the
DPLA!
About the studio
In 1899 S. P. Burgert & Son opened a photographic studio on Franklin Street in Tampa. By 1918 it was known as Burgert Brothers Commercial Photography Studio with brothers Al and Jean running the business. The studio operated until 1963 amassing over 80,000
photographs. Their images were published in magazines, newspapers, advertisements, brochures, displays and more. [Image: PA 5906]
Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library’s collection ranges from the late 1800s to the early 1960s and is archived at the John F. Germany Public Library. The
University of South Florida,
Florida Memory and other sources also maintain smaller Burgert Brothers Collections.
Collection history
The collection was discovered in an old warehouse unit without climate control and contained many highly flammable nitrate negatives. In 1974 nearly 20,000 Burgert images and negatives was acquired Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library and since then, the
library has been working on obtaining funding and budgeting for the preservation, digitization, and exhibition of the collection. Funding sources included:
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1988 Grant from the National Historic Publications
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1992 Grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission
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1977 Grant from Frank E. Duckwall Foundation
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Funds Provided by the Library System
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Funds provided by the Friends of the Library of Tampa-Hillsborough County, Inc.
Recent preservation efforts
Each photograph and photo session were annotated in in fourteen original handwritten ledgers, which degraded over years of wear and tear from use. The NEDCC digitized the ledgers and created two sets of replicas for staff/public use and long-term preservation.
Chicago Album Works conserved, digitized, and preserved about 16,000 negatives, including 441
Cirkut negatives, to the highest resolution possible. Both the modern negatives and nitrate negatives were digitized. Many of the nitrate negatives needed the emulsion layer removed, creating a raw pellicle to be duplicated
before digitization to JPEG, TIFF and camera raw image file formats.
This mammoth project culminated to over 80 TB of data on a dedicated server and these images will be useable for a
large-scale interactive display planned for Tampa’s downtown library as well as for future, undreamed-of projects.
Why this collection matters
The Burgert Brothers Photographic collection is beloved for capturing historic images of celebrations such as Gasparilla and the State Fair, regional businesses, characters, and social events. We can revisit landmarks like Old City Hall, Tampa Union Station,
and Henry B. Plant’s Tampa Bay Hotel to segregation-era dance halls and eateries. Images also include locations beyond the Tampa Bay area and even beyond Florida.
Preservation of collections matter for the community and, as librarians, we are witnesses to when a researcher accesses a high-resolution image that provides clues to a discovery, or a patron finds a sister and himself in a 1930s school picture.
[Image: PA 2560]
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!
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Training Opportunities
A roundup of digital library related training from Florida and beyond.
Upcoming Live Training
Discover Hyku: Empowering Libraries with Open-Source Repository Solutions
May 5, 2025, 2:30pm - 3:30pm ET
https://register.amigos.org/discover-hyku-empowering-libraries-with-open-source-repository-solutions-20250505
This informative introduction to Hyku, the powerful open-source repository solution tailored for small- to medium-sized libraries, will demonstrate its uses as both an institutional repository and a digital repository for cultural heritage items, open educational
resources, and theses and dissertations. Hyku offers intuitive upload processes and robust bulk import/export capabilities. Its shared search functionality across multiple Hyku libraries can enhance discoverability and collaboration. In addition to a review
of Hyku's features, this session will highlight real-world use cases and ongoing development efforts, equipping libraries with the knowledge to leverage this tool for current needs. Take advantage of this opportunity to explore how Hyku can transform your
library's digital repository management!
NEDCC: No Budget Preservation Tips
May 22 , 2025, 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM ET
https://registration.nedcc.org/register?sgid=82282f31cc33489fade827ebd789b0ff
Preservation is an underlying responsibility of any collections caretaker, whether you are an archivist, a public librarian, a family collector, or anyone in between. Preservation has a lot to do with knowing your collections and prioritizing the materials
that need the most help to survive. This webinar will discuss methods and projects that require no additional funding or supplies, including collection management, storage environment assessment, care and handling practices, and emergency preparedness.
The Accidental Archivist
Monday, May 12, 2025, 9am-4:30pm ET
Where: Jacksonville Public Library, 303 N Laura St, Jacksonville, FL 32202
Registration link Jacksonville: https://forms.gle/Mm8U19ZxhUVoryiUA
Wednesday, July 23, 2025, 9am-4:30 pm ET
Where: C. Blythe Andrews, Jr. Public Library, 2607 E Doctor Martin Luther King Junior Blvd, Tampa, FL 33610
Registration link Tampa: https://forms.gle/pFpdmVmhXsoxcC6Q6
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!
This workshop will be offered in Southeast Florida in November 2025. Please keep an eye out for more information regarding future sessions.
SSDN: Digital Library Platforms Discussion
May 22, 2025, 02:00-03:00 PM ET
https://fsu.zoom.us/meeting/register/Aa9DuHq5REGqMEXc9qH0VQ
Join us for a one-hour discussion about digital library platforms. Curious about how libraries and archives are managing their digital cultural heritage content? Do you want to know what works well, and what could be improved? Are you thinking about migrating
from your current platform? Come chat with us about what options are out there and learn from your colleagues who are using a variety of different platforms.
Introduction to OpenRefine
June 17, 2025, 2:00pm - 4:00pm ET
https://register.amigos.org/introduction-to-openrefine-20250617
OpenRefine, formerly known as Google Refine, is a powerful open-source tool for working with messy data. As the amount of data grows, so do the errors and inconsistencies, leading to more time required to manually correct these issues. This course will introduce
and review OpenRefine, the software which allows users to quickly view, identify inconsistencies in, and enhance a variety of data.
Preservation Grant Season
July 15, 2025, 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM ET
https://registration.nedcc.org/register?sgid=1776246509214282903e066865eecce4
Many applications for U.S. preservation grant opportunities are due in the Winter. Get a head start on the application process and join NEDCC for an overview of preservation grants, including eligible projects, important deadlines, and administrative steps,
like creating a Grants.gov account. The presenter will also provide application tips that are useful for all programs, no matter the grant you plan to apply to.
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
Fair Use
The ALA has a copyright resources research guide available for information professionals. Below is information from this guide regarding fair use.
The Fair Use Doctrine provides for limited use of copyrighted materials for educational and research purposes without permission from the owners. It is not a blanket exemption. Instead, each proposed use must be analyzed under a four-part test.
"Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use" (Section 107) offers a set of factors to consider when using copyrighted work for teaching or research. Specifically, the factors include:
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the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
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the nature of the copyrighted work;
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the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
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the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
You can read more and find additional resources on their research guide here: https://libguides.ala.org/copyright/fairuse
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Metadata Minute
Could Artificial Intelligence Help Catalog Thousands of Digital Library Books? An Interview with Abigail Potter
and Caroline Saccucci
Catalog records are key to storing and finding digital library materials. As the volume of digital materials continues to grow rapidly, the Library of Congress is exploring whether AI can help catalogers by automating the generation of metadata. AI could provide
an opportunity to speed up description workflows. Yet there are numerous machine learning (ML) approaches and questions about benefits, risks, costs, and quality we must consider before adopting these technologies.
The Library recently released reports from a set of experiments called Exploring Computational Description, which examined which technologies and workflows provide the most promising support for metadata creation and cataloging, assessed the practices of other
organizations, tested many different ML approaches with Library ebook data, and evaluated the output in iterative data review interfaces.
Leah Weinryb-Grohsgal, Senior Program Advisor to the Director of Digital Strategy, recently interviewed Abigail Potter, Senior Innovation Specialist in the Library’s Digital Innovation Division (LC Labs) and Caroline Saccucci, Chief of the U.S. Programs, Law
and Literature Division, about their hopes for this experiment. The group also discuss how they’re interpreting the automated outputs and user implications of adopting AI for a core library workflow.
Continue Reading....
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Teachers’ Corner
Featured Primary Source Set of the Month
The Great Migration
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.
The Great Migration, which lasted from the 1910s to the 1970s, was one of the largest voluntary internal migrations in the nation’s history. At the turn of the century, 90 percent of the United States’ Black population was living in the South; however, lynchings,
Jim Crow laws, limited educational and economic opportunities, and other forms of racial violence and oppression made the thought of staying in the South a nightmare for many. Over the course of six decades, roughly six million African Americans left their
homes in southern states to start new lives in the North, Midwest, and West.
Historians often divide the Great Migration into two periods. During the First Great Migration (1910-1940), an estimated 2 million African Americans migrated to the North and Midwest. The Great Migration stalled at the end of World War I with the onset of the
Great Depression. The start of World War II led to the Second Great Migration (1940-1970), during which an estimated 4.5 million people moved out of the South. While the North and Midwest were still popular choices, many journeyed west to Southern California,
Seattle, and Portland.
During both waves of the migration, African Americans realized that the blatant racism of the South could still be found in other parts of the country, though it was often unspoken or hidden. Historians today recognize the Great Migration’s role in casting
a spotlight on issues of police brutality and systemic ills in education, labor, housing, and healthcare due to government policies.
This
primary source set features 15 items that focus on the First Great Migration. The sources are accompanied by additional resources and a teaching guide.
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A painting of the Great Migration by Jacob Lawrence, 1917.
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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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