 Welcome. We're really excited to speak with you today about the Digital Library of the Caribbean. We are Laurie Taylor. I'm the Senior Director for Library Technology and Digital Strategies. We're also on this presentation with Brian Peek, the Associate Dean for Administration and Faculty Affairs. Perry Collins, the Copyright and OER Librarian, and Todd Digby, and I am the Chair of Library Technology Services. And in this presentation, we'll explain where Delac began, how it's matured, recent changes, and what Delac will be with new community and capacity building work over the next four years. So in talking about Delac, we're talking about it at age 18 and the future to come. So first, what is Delac? From its founding, the Digital Library of the Caribbean or Delac has developed to provide access to collections as well as collaborative network to support partners, scholars, educators, and broader publics. Delac was established in Association of Caribbean University Research and Institutional Libraries Conference and then a planning meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2004. Judith Rogers, Director of the Libraries at the University of the Virgin Islands, convened initial discussions and led development alongside the University of Florida, Florida International University, and six other founding partners. Delac is a collection of collections with over four million pages of newspapers, maps, photographs, correspondence, scholarship, and teaching resources all freely available from delac.com. Delac is a community-driven effort with content shared by nearly 80 partners. Delac's collections depend on many individual and institutional efforts to process, digitize, and describe materials. Delac shares the partner collections through post-custodial digitization. As a digital library, Delac can share collections without removing them from their home institutions. Delac also brings people together through online workshops, professional development institutes, and outreach events. Delac extends beyond collections to strengthen our community. 18 is the age of majority when we officially reach adulthood in the U.S. It's a huge milestone for humans and as it turns out for systems and communities like Delac. So to frame our talk today we're going to follow John Cotter's eight-step change model which flows in three phases. We're going to use this just for recent history with Delac and then on through the next few years for expectations. As a quick review, Cotter's model includes the stages and steps of warm-up with establishing a sense of urgency, creating the guiding coalition, developing a vision and strategy, communicating the change vision, and also introducing the new practice with empowering broad-based action and generating short-term wins. And the final grounding phase, consolidating gains and producing more change and creating new approaches in the culture. We're using Cotter's model with a recognition that change is constant. We are viewing a slice of time with Delac and following certain changes while recognizing that these phases and steps are overlapping and flow in return. For example, in one area we might be in the step for empowering broad-based action while also simultaneously consolidating gains and producing more change. This is a bit different, we think, than most common uses of Cotter's model. We see these stages as useful explaining the cycle and the flow of change for this particular time segment. For our warm-up, we've been in the sense of urgency for many years. Delac began as a project and transitioned to a program in 2011. Since the early project days, the goal was always to get to the next stage of maturity, maintainability, and sustainability for ongoing growth that meets partner needs and facilitates the community in growing together. While we've worked consistently towards these goals for a decade, by 2021 we faced impacts from deferred maintenance on technologies, limited staffing, and impacts from staffing vacancies and so many changes with the pandemic. Delac has always been about more than technology. It's always been based on a technological foundation with partners working together for preservation and access to materials. Then along with work on materials, the community was together for pursuing new needs. In working with partners for so many years, the vision was clear and always had two parts. Continue the core for access and preservation, always with strong shared governance. Collaborate across the community to build additional capacity for more work with access and preservation and for new work with copyright, ethical rights, technical training, OER, digital scholarship, data management, and more. In December 2020, the foundation needed urgent attention. The Delac site was down for one week because of aging technology and deferred maintenance. It could not remain in that state. At that point, the team also only had one, the technical team only had one programmer who had been with the team for over a year and he passed away. In January 2021, the two new programmers who had only been with us for a few months, all of us together recognized that we had to rebuild the entire technical apparatus and we needed to begin with a patron interface. The sense of urgency was known with the outage affecting all partners. We also recognized that this is the foundation that's deeply connected to the community. We immediately engaged more with partners for the technical needs to be able to release a new patron interface by November and to update other core aspects. For example, we communicated with the community to move forward on an update to the bylaws, elicit nominees for overdue elections for the executive board, and plan Delac's first ever all virtual partner meeting. During this time, the then Delac director position posted at FIU became vacant. In 2021, we learned of more technical problems and of communication drops across the community. This was all in addition to the lack of a partner meeting and a lack of stable communications with the pandemic. As we learned of problems, we sought to correct them. Technologically, in the fall of 2021, we released the new site and created a plan for production. Recognizing that technology is only part of the foundation, we supported the election process with new executive board members now elected, supported voting on new bylaws and released a new governance site. Part of the prior difficulty was that the patron site and governance and production were all together. Now we have three sites, which is a major win for patrons and partners in terms of ease of access to the appropriate information. The new governance site has a list of all partners. This is minor. It is a list. It is also a huge win. This is the first time we have had a list online of all the partners. The prior bundled site that served patron production and governance only listed partners who had collections that were impacted. Now all partners are listed even those in process for sharing materials. We hosted the first ever virtual partner meeting. This was a huge win with new partners meeting others for the first time. We also developed our first org chart. This was a combination of communication and a small win for the formalization of D-Log for documenting and communicating community operations. This falls within waves of overlapping change within change management. We started working on this chart while working on the grant proposal, which we were just awarded. In working on the grant proposal, we did the normal method for explaining to partners and drew this out. Rather than just rough scribbles, we took the time to enlist an amazing designer Tracy McKay Ratliff for her to create this into the design you see now. This is not your average org chart. The center is hard with partners. Partners rely on the foundation from the host institutions for operations and outreach and enlist other communities like the scholarly advisory board and executive board for ongoing activity. While the grant application was the impetus to create the org chart, we needed this because we needed to re-explain to existing partners and to better explain to new partners for how D-Log expected to work and to have the complicated model be made clear. We are now consistently using the org chart to share the model with partners. Sharing another win, the Patreon site. This new site is the first ever mobile responsive site for D-Log. It remains in the three official languages for D-Log and presents all materials from D-Log with no interruptions and from production. So please check out the new site at D-Log.com. Again, the governance site, this is empowering and a win for the first time partners have the full list of partners as well as core governance and technical resources all in one place instead of scattered throughout the old bundled site. And it is currently almost all in English, so we will be adding translations soon. Now for this season of change following Carter's model, we moved to the final group grounding phase with step seven and eight. Seven consolidating gains and producing more change and a anchoring new approaches in the culture. And you can see here some of the dates that listed as we move forward. And again, we recognize that these are not static ends but are steps in an ongoing dance. Step seven and eight also overlap with empowering broad-based change for sustained evolution. And indeed, this final stage is also the beginning. Again, working once more for a stronger foundation. So this time as we undertake the next cycle of change that you know co-located and concentric with the with the other stages of change, establishing the sense of urgency means an urgency to share joy. Here you can see a selection from the Archipelagos Journal special issue on D-Log. Archipelagos is the top journal of Caribbean digital studies. The special issue shares love and joy with D-Log with articles by scholars who have used and supported D-Log over many years. The special issue came out right around the time of the news of the new grant award. So thus our urgency was in sharing the joy from the past for an even brighter future. So in sharing news of our newest joy today, thanks to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's generous gift, D-Log is now embarking on the revitalizing D-Log project. The project will cover four interrelated activities, refining a sustainable a menu of sustainable technical assistance services, working with four Caribbean-based partners, faculty and staff members each year during intensive engagements. The project team will learn and consult about needs relevant to their collections and each intensive planning engagement will serve as a deep dive into a collaborative exchange resulting in the development of a five-year plan that aligns available network assets with partner needs. And so we're doing these as a really grounded theory approach in order to develop a foundation with 16 partners across the four years of the grant, but also to then share those out with the full D-Log community. We're establishing a rights advisory network which will be made up of an international rotating group of experts to balance day-to-day as practical as well as more significant demands on D-Log partners and users through direct responses to questions. Sustained conversations for instance may deal with complex topics such as colonialism and intellectual property, privacy and community driven approaches to open licensing. Right now D-Log has such a strong foundation for technical training for doing digitization and metadata and a strong foundation for digital preservation, but we found over the years that there's a really critical need for thinking about rights you know rather than okay digitization stops it this year or digitization is enough, no let's talk about ethical rights different uses to other considerations. We're also enriching the educational resources for higher ed. This component will develop a pipeline to compensate instructors for documenting and sharing teaching resources including assignments and lesson plans, contextualized primary source sets and data sets and course modules, as well as full courses with material shared through D-Log and other appropriate systems. So this helps us to answer and what do you do with it? How does the digitization of these primary materials really take flight and continue on with new lives and new ways of impact? We're also documenting and guiding for future engagement. We're going to publish a series of eight to ten short handbooks two to three per year and multiple languages that will share knowledge about professional development topics of known interest, exhibits supporting student interns, preservation of disaster response, collection development, digital journal publishing, with additional topics determined from consultations with partners. So in some ways we've described this as the and and and you know when partners call and say hey we're interested in digitizing or if we have a new collection these are all the other things that they ask about you know oh and we'd really love to do a digital exhibit and we have this journal and so how do we formalize those supports rather than simply being reactive or responsive you know to the partners that know to call and have the opportunity to ask questions. So with the new project underway we're now at the hiring stage. We're excited for the new phases and for waves of change. With Carter's phases essentially you know stage one vision and coalition building, two empowering broad-based action and achieving lens, and three consolidating future orientation to success. Of these the second and third PD life processes will result in centric waves of broad-based action and change while supporting a stronger growing community. We'll do this through the rights network, OER, the partner resources for many unknown and to be defined needs, and we do resources for the future. Until two years ago we were working to rebuild a foundation. For this next phase our hearts are filled with joy and gratitude and it's very abundant because this urgency is for growing from a positive place for more joy. So with that we're very excited to have shared a bit about D-LOC where it's been where we're going with you. We look forward to engaging with all D-LOC partners and new partners in the coming years. Please contact us if you're interested in becoming a content contributing partner, or if you're interested in collaborating with D-LOC in other ways. Thank you.