Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Power inequities have allowed even well-intended museums and libraries to disrupt people’s knowledge of and access to cultural heritage. Libraries and museums were allies in or at least instruments of the political and legal dominance of one culture over others. Alternative or mitigative models to this colonization have emerged in response: decolonizing, postcolonial, postcustodial, and slow archives. This presentation discusses a new alternative model based on the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), which incorporates tenants of shared governance, mutual aid, generous thinking, community building, polycentrism, collaborative pluralism, and mutual dependency. dLOC is an open access digital library of Caribbean and circum-Caribbean resources, providing access and preservation for materials from archives, libraries, museums, and private collections. Partner institutions are dLOC’s heart, connecting other core communities of scholars, teachers, students and other groups. dLOC exemplifies a transnational digital collaborative community serving diverse populations and under-represented voices, and promoting bridge building, intersectionality, and inclusion. This session examines dLOC’s robust governance model which created an un-colonized digital library that uplifts diversity, equity, and inclusion. Partners support each other and their international community of scholars, students, and peoples. dLOC surpasses many commercial collections, including oral histories, newspapers, official documents, ecological and economic data, maps, histories, literature, poetry, musical expressions, videos, and artifacts, with over 3.3 million pages. A significant resource for teaching, research, and cultural and community life, dLOC developed as a socio-technical—people, policies, communities, technologies—platform, developing and enhancing communities of practice through shared goals, joint action and procedural justice.

Laurie N. Taylor, PhD., Senior Director for Library Technology & Digital Strategies, University of Florida, & Brian W. Keith, MBA, Associate Dean for Administration and Faculty Affairs at the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida

Zoom registration