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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
Weeding
n. ~ the process of identifying and removing unwanted items from a collection.
Example: "Weeding, disposal, and deaccessioning can be done in an ethical manner as a integrated collection management strategy, and in fact needs to be done to prevent bloated, unfocused, and ultimately unusable collections." From Danielson
2010, 101.
Source: Society of America Archivists (SAA) Dictionary of Archival Terminology,
https://dictionary.archivists.org/entry/weeding.html
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Hidden Gems
Highlights from our DPLA partners
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
Before she became known for her work preserving the Everglades in South Florida, Marjory Stoneman was a reporter for the
Miami Herald.
When she was sent to cover the story of the first woman in Florida to enlist during World War I, the woman did not show up. Douglas enrolled instead. She served in the United States Naval Reserve for one year and then joined the American Red Cross in Europe.
This image is from the State Archives of Florida’s
World War I Service Cards collection on Florida Memory. View the “In
Her Own Words” exhibit on Florida Memory to learn more about Douglas and other Florida women.
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Training Opportunities
A roundup of digital library related training from Florida and beyond.
Upcoming Live Training
Practical Approaches to Reparative Description Workshop Series: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Metadata
Thursday, April 18, 2024, at 1p ET
https://dpla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0kc-GvpjItHdAfdRttcZJbXLJuQ4GGoSDk
Capturing information about gender and sexuality in descriptive metadata often surfaces questions and unique considerations about how to effectively maximize exposure of diverse collections without mislabeling or putting members of vulnerable communities at
increased risk. At this presentation, attendees will hear a variety of perspectives on strategies for how to approach the capture of this information, as well as how to implement existing resources to help enhance collection metadata.
Reparative Archival Description: The Past, Present, and Future
Thursday, April 18, 2024 02:00 PM EST
https://yale.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_nnTZN939TOaOhWJuSB7PDw#/registration
The Past, Present, and Future of Reparative Archival Description (RAD) reflects on past initiatives and future directions for RAD work in university and community archives. A moderated panel discussion will follow introductory presentations by panelists to
discuss challenges and opportunities. Hosted by Yale University Library’s Reparative Archival Description (RAD) working group, this event is free and open to the public. Registration is limited!
Practical Approaches to Reparative Description Workshop Series: Local Contexts: Tools for Supporting Indigenous Rights and Interests in Collections
Thursday, April 25, 2024, at 2p ET
https://dpla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUqfu2rqj0pEtE5uBQSLpJLszfj3F3ErMyl
Every Indigenous community has cultural and biological knowledge within educational systems, archives, libraries, and museums that they do not own, do not control, and cannot govern circulation over. Local Contexts is a global nonprofit organization that was
founded to address the needs of Indigenous communities and local organizations who wanted a practical method to deal with the range of intellectual property issues that arise in relation to managing cultural heritage materials. The Local Contexts Traditional
Knowledge and Biocultural Labels and Notices are tools for Indigenous communities and collections- and research-based institutions to support Indigenous cultural authority and data sovereignty. In this webinar, which is being hosted by the DPLA Rights Statements
Working Group, the Local Contexts team will introduce the Labels and Notices and how they can be used to support Indigenous rights and interests in collections and data.
Writing Grants for Audio Preservation and Reformatting
Tuesday, April 30, 2024 12:30pm – 1:30pm Eastern
https://www.nedcc.org/preservation-training/registration?p=681
Registration deadline: April 28, 2024
Maximum class size: 300
Instructor: Bryce Roe, Director of Audio Preservation Services, NEDCC
Audio collections are at a high-risk of loss due to the relatively short lifespan of their carriers and dependence on obsolete media for playback, but reformatting is a challenging and technical process, which can require the involvement of vendors whose services
might be difficult to afford without outside funding. This webinar will introduce participants to a variety of grants that fund audio preservation and reformatting activities and offer guidance on selecting a grant-worthy project for their institution. Director
of Audio Preservation Bryce Roe will also walk participants through each major section of a grant with tips and advice for preparing a successful application.
Practical Approaches to Reparative Description Workshop Series: Special Projects in Reparative and Inclusive Description
Friday, May 10, 2024, at 1p ET
https://dpla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0tfu-tpz8uGNEDEs_oqUz8wd7w7Wi39aAb
In this final workshop of the series, presenters will share how they approached description projects for special collections at their universities. Projects include: reparative description for Nazi publications identified in the collection, expanding access
to electronic agricultural extension reports through non-English language subject headings, and applying content statements and strategies for graphic images/thumbnails.
ICYMI: Recorded Webinars
Copyright for Digital Libraries
https://youtu.be/vw64XGCeS9M?si=DLbaSsgLf1rRDPb3
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.
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
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Large Language Models (LLM) are being “trained” by scraping copyrighted materials. Companies that provide generative AI platforms claim it is fair use, with some researchers
supporting the claim (see, for example:
Training Generative AI Models on Copyrighted Works Is Fair Use in the Association of Research Libraries Blog from January, 2024).
It is a widely debated topic, as the
New York Times,
music publishers and
others are suing AI generating companies such as Open AI and Anthropic for copyright infringement. The plaintiffs argue that the copyright infringement is at both ends of the process – both in the use of copyrighted material
in the training of the AI and in the regurgitation of copyrighted language in the AI generated text.
Companies such as
Patronus AI and
Copyleaks are building text checking services for AI companies to integrate into the software, in the hopes of reducing the amount of regurgitated copyrighted text. Their
tests show that AI generated text does have a high level of copyrighted material included in the output. Whether these tests – conducted by companies interested in selling plagiarism checkers – are accurate is still
to be determined.
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Metadata Minute
What is Metadata Assessment?
Metadata assessment involves evaluating metadata to enhance its usefulness for both internal and external users. There are three main categories of metadata:
[1] Administrative metadata provides information
about the management or preservation of digital objects such as when it was archived, what access or restrictions are placed on an item, a unique/permanent identifier for an object, when files were last migrated/copied/checked, etc.
[2] Descriptive
metadata is the human-readable text describing the creation and content of an item, such as who made it, what it
is about, and when it was made/published. This information is displayed in a publicly-accessible and searchable user interface (while administrative and structural metadata may be less visible,
or only internally accessible).
[3] Structural metadata names all of the files
associated with an item (e.g., a single PDF or multiple individual image files, metadata files, OCR files, etc.) and describes the relationship among them. For example, if there are images for individual text pages, or multiple views of a physical object,
the structural metadata would express how many images there are and the order in which they should be displayed.
Continue
reading...
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Teachers’ Corner
Featured Primary Source Set of the Month
The
Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among the Ghosts (1976) weaves together elements from traditional
Chinese folktales and incidents from the author’s experiences or family stories in five interconnected chapters. These chapters follow the lives of several women while they lived in China and/or after immigration to the United States: Kingston, her mother
Brave Orchid, and her aunts, Moon Orchid and No Name Woman. Kingston, a first-generation Chinese-American, was born in Stockton, California, in 1940. The book uses recurring consideration of voices, stories, and ghosts to develop its various themes, including
the transmission of culture across generations and the importance of gender and memory to the immigrant experience. The Woman Warrior won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named
one of the top nonfiction books of the 1970s by Time. This source set includes photographs and other items useful for exploring the book’s context, contents, and impact.
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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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