Digital Partnerships Series: Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC): Modelling Strong Governance and UnColonized Mutual Aid

Wednesday, October 23, 2019, 2:00-3:00 PM, Library West Room 212

The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a collaborative, international digital library of Caribbean and circum-Caribbean resources, providing access and preservation for materials from archives, libraries, museums, and private collections. dLOC exemplifies shared governance and mutual aid, a model transnational digital collaborative community serving diverse populations and for promoting bridge building, intersectionality, and inclusion. This follows the first session in the Digital Partnerships Training Series, on Partnership Management and Project Portfolio Management. The training series is informed by ongoing work with research libraries with digital scholarship serving as a nexus point for research libraries as provider, partner, and pioneer. 

In this session, we will review dLOC and the dLOC model for partnerships, including the history, underlying principles and values (mutual aid, shared governance, generous thinking, appropriate technology, minimal computing), and operations. We will conclude with a discussion of procedural justice, equity, and terminology for the model presented by dLOC. 

At the conclusion of this one-hour session, participants will: 

• Be able to define mutual aid, generous thinking, and polycentrism. 
• Be able to identify how dLOC’s governance model supports partnerships and promotes DEI. 
• Be able to share examples of how partners implemented mutual aid and generous thinking to create a model that supports partners alongside supporting the collective and the broader world (e.g., rights retention). 
• Be able to describe decolonizing, postcolonial, and postcustodial work in libraries, and how these relate to the dLOC model (as uncolonial, intermutual, or another term). 

Presenters:

Brian Keith serves as the Associate Dean for Administrative Services and Faculty Affairs for the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida. His work enables the Libraries to meet challenges by fostering evidence-based decision making, transparency, fairness and inclusion, workplace and workforce development, and collaboration and partnerships. His recent research focuses on library publishing, graduate education, research ethics regarding human-based library research, and digital scholarship platforms to support communities of practice, diversity and inclusivity.

Laurie Taylor is Chair of the Digital Partnerships & Strategies Department in UF’s Libraries, where she provides leadership for partnerships with the Libraries across the university, regionally, nationally, and internationally. She works closely with colleagues to create and sustain supports for collaborations for building collections, community, and capacity, including for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and LibraryPress@UF. Her work is geared towards enabling a culture of radical collaboration that values and supports diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Video conferencing is on request. Please email Danielle Sessions (dsessions@ufl.edu) if you will be attending the session via video conferencing.