Judith Russell
Dean of University Libraries
University of Florida
Todd Digby
Chair of Library Technology Services
University of Florida
Laurie Taylor
Senior Director for Library Technology and Digital Strategies
University of Florida
Celebrating Cuba! Collaborative Collections of Cuban Patrimony seeks to advance and centralize current digital surrogates of Cuban historical and cultural material with the ultimate goal of providing global access to Cuba’s patrimony. Celebrating Cuba! is the result of over four years of collaborative work between the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida (UF) and Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba José Martí as well as other partner universities and contributors in the United States. In this project update, we will share on: Current status (partners, over one million pages organized in ten different collections), Unique processes for working with and in Cuba (e.g., sneakernet file transport, minimal computing including using Zotero in Cuba as an offline database), New publications on Cuba with the LibraryPress@UF to promote collections from and about Cuba (e.g., ceramics and stamps), and How the project continues to inform work at UF (e.g., bilingual expertise for metadata and finding guides, critical need for project coordination, working with US regulatory processes).
