 Our first two speakers are Laurie Taylor, who is the Senior Director for Library Technology and Digital Strategies at the University of Florida. She provides leadership for technology and partnerships within the university libraries and across the university regionally, nationally, and internationally. Speaking with her is Ellen Huet, who is the European Studies Librarian also at the University of Florida. She's the Chair of the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium, a collective of institutions in Florida that seek to promote an understanding of the humanities in light of digital technologies and research. And Laurie and Helen, their paper is entitled Generous Thinking to Meet Community Needs with the Digital Library of the Caribbean. Welcome. It's so nice to be here with everyone today. I'm Laurie Taylor, I'm the Senior Director for Library Technology and Digital Strategies at the University of Florida. And I'm presenting with a colleague on Generous Thinking to Meet Community Needs with the Digital Library of the Caribbean or D-LOC. Hi, everyone, and I'm Ellen Huet. I'm very happy to be here. I am the European Studies Librarian at the University of Florida and I'm looking forward to this presentation. All right, this image here is from our Open Education Resources site. In May 2019, over 30 educators, scholars, and librarians came together for a week-long institute to collaboratively explore the potential and the limitations of digital pedagogies within Caribbean studies. Posted by the University of Florida and the Digital Library of the Caribbean, Migration, Mobility, Sustainability, Caribbean Studies and Digital Humanities included a multi-institutional international group of participants working throughout the Caribbean and the United States. Participants delved into digital humanities projects, amplifying community narratives across the Caribbean diaspora, low barrier tools to enable student instructor creation and efforts to subvert colonialist legacies as we build and describe digital collections. The institute emphasized relationship building, lived experience, empathy, and flexibility as foundational values grounded in feminist approaches to teaching and technology. This presentation relies on these values as a framework for unpacking one major goal of the institute, the creation and collection of open educational resources. As described in the funded proposal to the US National Endowment for the Humanities, following the in-person institute, participants engage in a year-long series of virtual workshops and teaching within their own institutions, culminating in a web publication. Alongside teaching resources, such as lesson plans, syllabi, student-driven exhibits, tutorials, and so on, this publication features a series of reflections that contextualize participants' experiences and the impact of the institute on their teaching and their students. So these are questions for the presentation. First, how did participants engage with existing OERs, especially digital collections as a shared knowledge base? How did the institute structure facilitated collaboration? And how have participants built upon this foundation to co-create course materials? And finally, how might OER development be sustained through ongoing crisis and constrained resources? All right, so the image that we have here is from a newly loaded newspaper issue, The Dominican from Dominica. And some of the most used items in teaching our newspapers. So how did participants engage with existing OERs, especially digital collections, as a shared knowledge base? Collaborators explicitly planned the institute so as to utilize and promote existing digital collections. The institute intentionally shared a selection of existing digital collections, including the Digital Library of the Caribbean, also known as D-LOC. So they asked for a project, the Dutch Caribbean Digital Platform and Chronicling America. While Chronicling America is focused on American newspapers, including Puerto Rico, the papers include stories from and about the Caribbean. In addition to these, participants also shared information about other collection they're familiar with. The institute presented both its platforms and the material they contain as OERs, ready for reuse in the classroom. Indeed, in working with our broader community of practice before the institute, we realize that many teachers identify open access primary resources as OERs in and of themselves because they are foundational to creating equitable courses and assignments that may be shared back with the community. For example, one early list of OERs in D-LOC is the list of Anglophone Caribbean novels published before 1950 by Leah Rosenberg. Rosenberg first shared this list online in D-LOC in 2012 to assist the library and technical teams in locating and prioritizing digitization of important Caribbean novels. Rosenberg then updated the list in 2014 and 2016 to reflect newly identified items and to add links to newly digitized items. This list has been a frequent starting point in discussions because access to primary resources is a critical concern for teaching Caribbean studies. In fact, this list helped to spark conversation on collaborative teaching, which, while enabled by technologies in the digital age, were insufficient and a shared tax could be available for all students. With access to core primary tax made possible and promotives for Rosenberg's list of novels, new conversations emerged on collaborative teaching and teaching with digital collections like D-LOC. These conversations led to a 2013 distributed online collaborative course called Panama Silver Asian Gold Migration Money in the Making of the Modern Caribbean, which saw updated iterations in 2016 and 2017. These deeply collaborative courses informed development and goals for the Institute. Instructors frequently note that the core obstacle to teaching is the lack of access to primary sources. And while many teachers readily share syllabi and teaching materials for their teaching communities, access to primary text is often beyond the abilities of any single person for enacting change to enable access. This is why the Institute was designed in a way that would enable participants to familiarize themselves and connect with digital collections, built through the work of many individuals, communities, and institutions as OERs. Our experiences leading up to the Institute affirm that we most often will not hear from people teaching with OERs from D-LOC or other sources. As a matter of fact, we regularly need to reach out to teachers to request syllabi for review in order to evaluate the use of OER. Part of this is due to the demanding workloads for teaching and some of this is due to communication needs as teachers do not necessarily use the term OER. Explaining the request can therefore require a bit of translation and time. With the sudden move to remote work and teaching with the pandemic in 2020, we have heard anecdotally, I'm sorry, on the increased use of D-LOC and other online resources in teaching. However, work to collect and review inclusion in syllabi remains pending. So the photo here is of the Institute participants. The Institute's sympathetic and flexible approach to pedagogy provided a supportive network for participants to share educational resources and envision their humanities projects in new ways. Many participants in their interviews responded positively to their hands-on experience working with digital tools during the Institute and learning from a diverse set of member projects that showed how courses, assignments, and research could be translated for digital platforms. Further, interviewees were interested in engaging in digital humanities not only to engage student and research projects, I research participants in their classrooms or the field, but also as a set of methods and tools created more that created more collaborative opportunities and greater access to learning technology among under-resourced communities and institutions. Overall, there's a shared interest in applying digital tools for educational or public outreach purposes, and it's reflected in contributed websites, maps, online exhibits, and timelines. Participant reflections also expressed that experiencing the Institute as a cohort fostered a sense of community among members that encouraged further partnerships. We see much of this continued collaboration and contributed co-authored courses syllabi developed by members with similar research topics and teaching disciplines like Caribbean literature and history. So the image you see here is a map of the Caribbean. Many people on the Caribbean and Southern US are familiar with maps like this one for home hurricane tracking. I remember these maps printed on paper grocery bags so that we all had home maps to be aware of and to prepare for approaching storms. So as we reflect on how might OER development be sustained through ongoing crises and with constrained resources? Two disasters, the COVID-19 global pandemic and Hurricane Dorian took a major toll in the personal and professional lives of Institute participants and their students. The impacts of each have persisted long term demanding adaptation to new modes of teaching and exacerbating historical inequities and students access to technology. Participant reflections report course delays and challenges for students in completing coursework. Of course, we cannot know the full extent of personal trauma and grief among the community of Institute participants as they have carried on in teaching and leadership roles over the past two years. Dorian especially affected participants living in the Caribbean, particularly those based at the University of Bahamas North Campus, which along with materials in the campus library was destroyed by the hurricane. These participants, Juliet Glen Callender and Sally Everson were not able to undertake the course project they had originally planned. However, both were able to implement alternative assignments that engage students in co-creating digital public humanities resources. Both contributed to Everson's online course, Climate and Inequality, where students created a Zotero digital library and undertook community-based research to document stories incorporated into an exhibit developed in partnership with the Rutgers Humanities Action Lab. Of course, hurricane and attendant issues such as climate change have long affected the greater Caribbean. One institute guest expert, Shaila Esprit described the impact of both Hurricane Erica and Hurricane Maria in just three years following the founding of Create Caribbean. This program, which takes a for students by students approach, invites interns at Dominica State College to teach technology workshops for K through 12 students and to develop digital scholars of research. One major project, Keresi Land, engages students in developing regional resources that actively support or raise awareness about sustainable development and the era of climate change disaster. The damage Maria caused Dominica into the Create Caribbean space forced a period of rebuilding and compounded existing access barriers. However, a spree in our students moved forward with support from local and global networks. These examples reflect how recent disasters have made the development of OER and digital pedagogical models both more challenging and more immediately urgent. The burden often falls on individuals to create course materials, sometimes with limited resources or institutional support. As described throughout this presentation an emphasis on collaboration and co-creation with other educators, with students and across institutions, surfaces again and again as a response to community educational need through on-growing crises. This need has also motivated a more ambitious vision for the Public Institute website which complements teaching resources available through Deloc. While many Institute participants were able to contribute materials to the community website, we know the gaps in the collection reflect the obstacles of COVID in particular with materials collected during the pandemic peak from mid-2020 to early-2021. With a commitment to sustaining the website long-term, we hope to continue building on this project to assess the OER needs of wider Caribbean Studies Network and to implement effective and ethical ways of sharing. And so in this, our final slide, we have an image of the National Endowment for the Humanities logo with their grant funding making this work possible and a photograph from the Digital Library of the Caribbean of a carnival mask. And this is a photo by Lowell Fiat. Thanks to all of you for your time today. And of course, thanks to all of the participants in the Institute who contributed to the OER site. And thanks to the U.S. National Endowment for Humanities for funding this work. We invite you to explore the OER site and to continue to share and grow OER as built from and as digital collections. So thank you both to Laurie and Helen for offering their reflections. So it's really fascinating presentation. I'm sure there will be plenty of questions afterwards. Please, if you do have a question, submit this via the Q&A function at the bottom. And we'll be asking Laurie and Helen these questions towards the end of today's session. So please do submit your questions by the Q&A function. So our second and final speaker today is Jordy Padilla Delgado who will be speaking about the LGBTQ plus memory in institutional and community archives. This paper that Jordy will be offering is only a small taste of the research work that has been developed jointly by the Archival Science and Records Management School at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Loret Del Mar Municipal Archives in Spain. And so now I will hand over to Jordy and his paper LGBTQ plus memory and archives, Power, Community and Intersectionality in Difficult Times. Hello and welcome to this presentation, LGBTQ plus memory and archives, Power, Community and Intersectionality in Difficult Times. And so very recently, public inception of archives, municipal, regional, national, have been unable to include the voices of women and minorities in their discipline. Archives are firstly a political reality. They reflect in their organization and mechanisms those of the dominant political power, which in our case is characterized by being, among other aspects, racist, clasist, cis-heteropatriarchal, macho, nationalist, anti-nature, and concealer of minorities. In this work, Delogued in the joint framework of the Courts, Archives, Human Rights and Gender Perspective by Archival Science and Records Management School at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, and the Programme Archives and Intersectionality by the Webdom Art Municipal Archive, we will try to approach different points of interest about the dialectic process that is established between institutional archives and community-based archives while we are looking for the lost memory of the LGBTQ plus community in both. Well, now we pass to study the LGBTQ plus memory and institutional archives. Institutional archives do not pay attention to LGBTQ plus memory until 1970s period of feminist and gay movements expansion. As Stephen Maynard explains, it is the constant activism of the associations in the political arena that opens the door of the academy. In this process, we find two main obstacles. The first one, sexual minorities have not only been anonymous, but have simply become invisible for documentary production and historiography. And in second point, in the rare case in which documentary production related to the LGBTQ plus community is observed, these documents have been hidden, declared inaccessible or directly destroyed. This situation has evolved through the past of years. In all the cases, the role played by LGBTQ plus people in documents is that of subjects sanctioned and stigmatized by political power. Since the implementation of feminist and gender studies, however, institutional archives are also adopting the role of collectors of documentation related to the struggle for LGBTQ plus rights. Here we have two cases, one in initial archive and another referred to a municipal archive that can be taken as an example to imitate on this topic, both in Britain, the National Archives and London Metropolitan Archives. The National Archives, or TNA, has undertaken the approach to sex-effective and gender minorities-related documents from different spaces on the website. They have a total of 358 research guides in help with your research section that cover a wide variety of topics and issues. In 2012, they published the one entitled Sexuality and Gender Identity History. It lists the documentary series held by TNA, likely to contain data and information about the LGBTQ plus community. It also presents recommendations on how to search what terms and keywords to use in your discovery search engine and what series are available online. In the same sense, you can find a list of documents identified by TEM closed in 2013 and prepared jointly by a team made up of two groups or LGBTQ volunteers, one from the TNA staff, ARCAS, and another one from the Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Justice Rainbow Network. In a project that can be considered as an example of best practices of archival and community activism for the dissemination of LGBTQ plus memory from and by institutional archives, the list is available at TNA's GeoArchives and includes links to the digitized documents. Other LGBTQ plus history resources can be found at the Archives Video Player section the block and the Education Virtual Workshorts area. On the other hand, TNA manifests a gender perspective and vision about organization and staff through three instruments, equality and inclusion policy, equality act and the creation of an LGBTQ plus staff group. For all these, no other national archive worldwide has the same achievement level on this topic and they become a model to follow undoubtedly. In the case of municipal archives, this same role is played by London Metropolitan Archives or LMA. On the website, we find a research guide in the collections catalog section that under the title Les Gen Gay Bisexual and Transgender Community Archives at LMA provides as with the list of the documentary series was a municipal administration in LMA that may include references to the LGBTQ plus history. Private collections from individuals or associations and kept by LMA are also included. Another interesting resource provided by LMA on this topic is a block specifically dedicated to the LGBTQ plus history in London through the documents. The project ran between 2014 and 2016 with the title Speak Out London Diversity City. Since July 2020, LMA has been running another project on intersectionality between sexual orientation and race in archives in collaborations with the archives and museum service of the London Borough of Haringey. The project called Haringey Vanguard promotes a creation of an oral history archive on the local LGBTQ plus community of Afro-Caribbean origin from 1990 to the present day. We have already talked about LHA in the historical review on queer archives. We can consider them a typical community archive and documentation center managed by a foundation. The guiding principles emphasize the independent character of the entity and the implementation of community-driven archival practices far away from the academic orthology, building a kind of archival feelings as said by Ankh Ved Kovic. A second model of community archives is found in the archives that compile documentation and artifacts without having a physical location in an exclusively digital way. A good example is Digital Transgender Archive or DTA. As is explained in its website, DTA aims to increase accessibility to the history of the transgender community by providing an online app for digitized historical materials, digitally-born materials and information on archival resources worldwide. Despite not having a physical headquarters, the project management is located at Northeastern University in Boston. It was born in 2008 thanks to an initiative headed by academics Kaye J. Rosen and Nick Met. And currently brings together the collaboration of more than 16 institutions and entities. Its methodology is that of virtual reunification defined by Ricardo L. Panzeland as the process of assembling and gathering physically dispersed funds and documents in a virtual way around a subject or term. Okay, and now we are following this classification in a third step, the blocks. This is one of the most widespread modalities about digitally collecting the existence of the LGBTQ plus community. Some of these blocks call themselves archives and also serve as virtual showcase for consulting digital documents. One example is LGBTQ Game Archive. Driven by Adrienne Shaw of Temple University in Philadelphia, it defines itself as a curated and researched collection of LGBT content information in digital games from 1980 to the present. The use of term archive here is ambiguous as is admitted by the block itself expressing in all its dimension the conflict that often arises on the use of the word archive in community initiatives for the compilation of LGBTQ plus memory. On the one hand, the community feels a justified suspicion towards institutional archives, given the long tradition of invisibility and documentary repression. On the other hand, community knows and wants the power of invocation and the solid and well-founded memorial identity connotation that the word archive has. And we have a four level of community archives this is the social media networking. We find a good example in Lost Gay Melbourne or LGM Facebook group. Studied by Australian academic and investigator at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Rocko by 2017. It was born in 2017 this same year to collect testimonies of the LGBTQ plus community experiences in the city since 1900. The collection of material is based on interaction with the user who upload the digital or digitized materials directly to the group. At this point, some of us could wonder if it can be considered really an archive. Is any set of documents an archive? If we stick to academic orthodoxy, an archival treatment would be required beforehand to be able to consider it as such. However, digital, virtual environments and the very nature of community documentary collections require and favor archiving practices outside the usual regulations. Practices in digital and media make archiving an activity that is part of the daily online experience in the words of Rob Kova. Another question is how to preserve this virtual legacy. Okay, to conclude the presentation, here we have a proposal of considering LGBTQ plus memory inside a more inclusive intersectionality program to be run at a small municipal arcade. In fact, this is the real purpose of the study to put into daily archival practice strategies and tools for that. The S.A.M. institution, which we are part of, works servicing at the same time as an institution municipal arcade in seaside resort town of Duvet de Mar, Catalonia, Spain, and really a population of 40,000, that's 200,000 in the summer, and as a community, archive focus and local associations. The treatment of LGBTQ plus local memory is going to be incarnated in an intersectionality program that aims to study and take this issue from an archival point of view following four main sections. One, women and feminism. Two, race and migrant people. Three, sex-affective and gender minorities. And four, functional diversity. Sections one and two has been recently displayed and now we are working on sections three and four. On LGBTQ plus community as on the other groups, we must wonder what strategies and tools can institutional archives develop to recognize in an adequate way its reality and experiences. Here we have a first proposal. They've designed an implementation of archival policies that are consciously aware of invisibility and marginalization of sex-gender minorities in the intercourse of other situations like race, social class, religion or ethnic origin and the adoption of a gender perspective. First point related to collections and documents acquisition, processing and dissemination but also related to all participant agents, users, stakeholders, staff or government. These policies can materialize in different ways. Best practices guides, inclusive archival description tools, transforming the archives of safe spaces to LGBTQ plus community, applying the queer polar lens defined by Lizette Zepeda to look over documents and collections we get. As in second place, as the National Archives and London Metropolitan Archives have done, creating and developing easily accessible LGBTQ plus sections in archives websites where to find a list of related documents and collections. In the third place, establishing dialogue and collaboration with associations and community organizations by offering the archival facilities, services and knowledge available to them. The fourth place, interacting with LGBTQ plus community groups in the digital environment through blocks and social networks with specific initiatives. In the fifth place, dedicating special attention to the dissemination of the LGBTQ plus reality through archives across different age population segments towards teenagers and young people and also recovering the hidden history that resides in the older generations. And in the sixth place, considering an orthodox archival practices inspired by community archives activity from a female recollection to formulas such as artistic residencies or philosophical studies with a general perspective in the archives. Thank you very much for your attention and have a good Friday. Thank you, Jordy. And if I could now invite Jordy, Laurie and Helen to put on their cameras. Thank you, colleagues for questions. Please keep these coming in via the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen. So if Jordy and Helen, you'd like to join us too. Thank you. Firstly, thank you so much for your papers. So much is buzzing around my head. There's many different areas of potential questions and interests. But just as colleagues are thinking of their own questions to submit, maybe if I could start with a general question. Both of your presentations have cited the importance of working really closely with communities in co-creation of materials and establishing meaningful dialogue. And that's something that came out through both of your pieces. And although both of these projects predate COVID, obviously they have been running across a period of great stress. There's a lot of interest in the sort of work that you've been doing amongst colleagues in the UK. So just to start us, could I ask the question is, are there any sort of top lessons that you've learned over the last year or so of engaging with a variety of communities around these meaningful dialogues, around co-creation, that you think of as really the top points that you'd want to share with the UK audience that you would think will be most important? And maybe if I just turn to you, Laurie and Helen first and then go to Jordy. So it's interesting because during COVID or not during COVID, some of the four principles of working with community partners always apply. Margaret Kovacs' book, Indigenous Methodologies, is perhaps a best primer on this. But it applies with working with any partners. You want to make sure you're really in the spirit of mutual aid, understanding that you're working together for a shared goal. And so you may have other individual goals that are separate, but how do you make everyone speak together? How do you make our voices in harmony? How do you make sure everyone's supported? We have in academia, there's too much of a history of extractive research practices, treating partners as subjects. And so always that's horrible, and that doesn't make sense. So really a spirit of mutual aid, mutual respect, how do we build something together? And some of the simple things that you'll hear from different researchers, like, oh, I published a paper, I did this study of a particular bay of the ecology of it, cool. And did you share that paper with the archive that helped give you all of these materials and that really partnered with you and helped frame your research and directed you to different other researchers on the island or anything. And often they'll say no, and that's a huge mess up. And so we also need to be part and within our institutions of making sure people have good research practices that are truly collaborative and supportive. But Emyne, did you want to add more? I'm just trying to think back to the past year and a half. I'm trying to think about the lesson learned, but I think for me, one of the positive thing about the whole pandemic is that it actually forced us to communicate better. And I know we are all zoomed out and everything, but again, one of the positive aspects is that it forced us to have these meetings and have these discussions. And because we were all in this together, it also created a huge community of support. And that to me was one of the biggest lesson learned is that we had to communicate with one another and we had to adapt very quickly and we had to support one another. And so that's the biggest lesson. So, yeah. Thank you. And Jordi, any reflections from you? Yes, I agree with Loria and Helen. In that past year, we are a small newspaper archive. We have learned that we are at the same level that community we can not talk to the communities, no lessons, no, we are all at the same level. And we have to share our knowledge when our kind of science in our case with community and making available all our resources. In that case, especially through the virtual and digital ways because in the last year, 90% of access and consults here have been digital. That's really a huge amount of digital interaction, digital engagement with community. And we have to be very close to communities to know their necessities, their needs also. And to know the way we can share, even considering their archival practices. Maybe someone can think that these practices are not academic, but they are useful. And we can consider that as a useful resource also. Thank you, Jordi. So we've got some questions that are continuing to come in and please do keep submitting them via Q&A. So we've got a question for Loria and Helen. This is from Liz Fulton. How did you help support your participants on a more personal level during COVID-19 and Hurricane Dorian? So how do you support your participants on a more personal level? You're on mute, sorry. Sorry, that even clicked it. So depending on timing and depending on how the different devastation is not so often hurricanes, but there are also earthquakes, volcanoes, other things that we all deal with. But with Dorian, it was a bit different. So many people had evacuated from the University of the Bahamas, the North Campus, which was the one that was most devastated. And so normally it depends. Different storms are different. Sometimes we do like mail different relief supplies, looking at sending books, other things. I've definitely been on, hey, we're all going to a conference here. It's after a storm has passed. We need additional gauze in your bag. Here are the things that we expect you to pack because we know that you're going to buy books while you're here. The mutual aid and the Caribbean, one of the things that you'll always hear as soon as someone's like, okay, we've got a storm going, everyone's tracking it. And then you'll hear once the storm has passed, okay, ships are launching from Trinidad. My brother's on that ship, my cousin's on that ship. They're going to be there in this amount of time. And so you actually, like I've traveled for professional conferences to one island where that has not been affected, but people know that they're going back to the other island that has been or they know where the mail ships are running or they know their brother, their cousin with a different power and light. And so you have a lot of like really personal things that you send around. We always have the deep wealth and well of mutual aid. And so in terms of like how we send each other different books, we make sure our books are accessible online to books and other materials, accessible and preserved. This is the work that Deloc was born to do. We know that no one island can do it on their own, no one partner. And so we always know the next storm is coming, the next storm and the next storm. And so within that deep approach of solidarity and we're all together, how do we be there for folks? I mean, we check on them, you see how folks are doing. We ask what they need. And we know that the ongoing work continues and abated. And this work is so critical to meeting our needs. Like how do you tell the story of the North Campus of the University of Bahamas when so much of that doesn't exist anymore? That's the criticality of our work on a day to day basis. Yeah, I'm not sure that fully answers that, and I don't know if you have more a different way to add, but I mean, really it's solidarity and mutual aid and the constancy of the ongoing work. But there are other things, calling and checking in, also knowing like, hey, I'm here if you need me, but I'm not gonna keep checking on you because we know that you've been through this. And yeah, Elaine, I'll let you talk. I don't know what else I can add, but I think that first of all, a lot of the participants were also on social media and posting about their experience and are still posting about their experience, what it's like being a summer in the Caribbean, as I said in the US, a little bit all over. And so posting about their own experience and there is a sort of solidarity that has built up through the participation in the Institute and afterwards. So there is that support. And I think it's also, I would add like bringing understanding that deadlines will not be met, that the projects may not be completed and that it's okay. Like it's totally fine. So it's also reassuring people that even if things don't happen with the we're supposed to, that it's okay and that, you know, it's fine if the project's gonna be done and it's fine if it's done late. So bringing understanding. And in addition to that, for us, I think it was also important to not only extend the grant, but also like we hired graduate students and it's providing work to this graduate students. And so it's providing solidarity, it's providing understanding. I think this is what I would add to what Laurie already explained. That's really useful and thank you for such a thorough response on that combination between so that flexibility of the project but also flexibility and understanding and approach that colleagues and friends and family in the Caribbean and elsewhere are going through these periods of change and actually how to be sensitive to that both in providing direct support but also some emotional support as well. Thank you. If I have one more question for Helen and Laurie and then a question for you, Jordy. Helen and Laurie, there's a huge amount of interest in the UK at the moment around open educational resources, OERs. And that has been enhanced by the periods and the experience of COVID and the lockdown of buildings and the need for learning contents online. In terms of your experience of creating OERs with communities, both through D-LOC and other projects, are there any top things that you would really want to share and highlight from your experience of creating specifically OERs? You mentioned one issue about capturing their impact and understanding how they're being used during your presentation, but are there any other things that you would really highlight as sort of must know or must things that Collie should be aware of around the developments of OERs with communities? So OER is a lot of work, but it's tremendously beneficial work. So some of it, like when we talked about some of the difficulty for tracking the data, always focus on your area of greatest need. So what that can be, is this textbook $400? Or is it that it's so often in Caribbean studies, it's, well, we can't teach the course because we don't have access to these materials that are critical for us. Okay, so if we build this digital collection for you, now you can actually teach a course that you have never been able to teach before in your life and you've always wanted to. And now your students have a zero textbook cost for the class. So we're helping on textbook affordability, we're helping higher education be more affordable, we're helping get your students engaged in a way that isn't a burden on them. That's fantastic. So we've found a lot of literary and art classes where people wanna teach these really dynamic classes. Some of the cases, they've never had access to the materials or the access to them is it's cost prohibitive if you're looking at different print editions or even if you're doing a course pack that's like a Xerox setup. And so how can we as cultural heritage providers, how can we fit in with that and make these courses possible, make new research possible? So those are some really high impact ways that we can address it. And then. I would just say, whatever time you think it's gonna take you is gonna take double that time. So that's really the main thing I want people to know is that it's a lot of trial and error. And I think that that's also something that is important to share is that, you always use a result, but you never really know about how long it took you to get to this beautiful open education resource. But it's gonna take trial and error and it's gonna take more time than you thought. It's really my practical thing that there's to know. That's great. And apologies if I squeeze one more question then I'll move to Jordy. And that this relates to the demographic of the D-Lock team and the makeup of the D-Lock team in terms of is it made up of a permanent staff from the Caribbean or is it made students within the Caribbean? And what's the relationship between the library schools and the Caribbean information specialists? So I guess it's a sense of who are the individuals involved in this work and what backgrounds are they from and what's the makeup in terms of permanence versus students as it were. So that's a great question. So the Digital Library of the Caribbean began of Accurl, the Association of Caribbean University Research and Institutional Libraries. And Accurl has always had its home base at the University of Puerto Rico, but it's always been throughout the Caribbean. So Accurl had an IT special interest group and they said, we need a digital library that's for us and that we define. We wanna make sure that we retain rights to all of our materials. We wanna make sure that materials are preserved and accessible and we wanna be able to think with it. How do we use this? We build a house and then what else can we do with that house? As we build that foundation and move it forward. And so that was really led by Judith Rogers who was then the director of the University of the Virgin Islands libraries. And so she had, she had three islands, three libraries, three islands. There's a mail boat that goes, or there's a boat that goes between one but the other is a seaplane or a commuter plane. She couldn't even handle lending. It wasn't feasible to have the materials go back and forth. So she was looking at it for her needs and then how do we do this across the Caribbean? It's not just the Virgin Islands, it's all of us. And with the diaspora, it's really the entire world. So they set out really solid plan for governance. So the different partner institutions are the ones that run the Deloc Executive Board. There's also Deloc Digital Scholarship, or sorry, the Scholarly Advisory Board. So those two boards provide the governance and then the partner institutions contribute content. And those, so every partner institution has someone who is contributing to governance and contributing the content. But that's the majority of the staffing, the vast majority of staffing for Deloc. In addition to that, we do have an executive director, Miguel Asencio who's based at Florida International University. He doesn't have a library science degree, but he has a degree in education. So we have different degrees and backgrounds. We do work closely with U.E. Mona, the library and information school there, and with University of Puerto Rico. But that varies based on what classes are being taught, when people want people in for guest lectures, what things students are interested in for different projects. It also relates to the Digital Scholarship, projects that people are doing with Deloc. So very connected and federated, not centrally oriented kind of relationship and support. And then did you want to say more on that? Cause you also, you've got the French Caribbean network. Yeah. No, I think you explained it all, just that at the University of Florida, we do have sort of a Deloc groups, like everybody who is involved in one way or another, we have colleagues working on digitizing newspapers from Florida and Puerto Rico. I worked more, I worked with digitizing the progressist, which was a newsletter created by, whatever, long story short, we have this group and we're all working together. And it's, as Lori said, it's not like a centralized thing. So it's a learning experience for me coming from France where everything is centralized, for sure. Thank you, thank you both. And please do keep questions coming in, they're coming in thick and fast. So please do keep putting those in the Q&A. Geordie, we've got a question from one of our delegates, Claire, and this is a question about language and how the LGBTQ plus community can reclaim some of the language and some words used that are used within the archive that can be seen as offensive. We're sometimes used as a term of abuse for members of that community. And how through projects like yours, members of the community and non-members of the community can reclaim that language as has been seen in some work elsewhere. Was there anything you could say about that in that process? Yes, of course. When the study began at the academic level, we thought using the expression LGBTQ plus because that seems more used maybe by the same community. But after the study and during the proposal to the archival practice, we have learned that maybe it's better to use another expression that is sex-effective and gender diversity because you know, there is a bit of confrontation between some groups inside the community, the sexual diversity community. Some of them are not to be named queer and say that they don't want to be with LGBT. Okay, no problem. All we have in common is the sex-effective diversity and the gender diversity and we can include all in that expression. But that's true that words matter and language matters. We have to be very careful trying the correct words in that sense. In terms of some of the project, after you're now entering stages three and four of your projects, you're about halfway through. How are you in terms of some of the language used within the documents and collections themselves which are would now be, well, I know always have been seen as offensive and inappropriate use. How are you having some discussion around that? What are some of the conversations that you're having about with members of the community in terms of how that language is presented and potentially can be reclaimed? Well, in that sense, we have not had any problem with community. They are all really agree with the expression sexual diversity and gender diversity. But also with the LGBTQ because community, the sense of community is very near to the youngest people maybe, younger people and not to the old generations, to aged generations. It's more difficult for us has been very difficult to engage with people who has been into the community, but not out. So we have to be careful really using the words and including especially that voices also. Thank you. There's a fantastic question that's come in from Rafael about really for both papers or three of you. And that is a relationship between the preservation of physical collections, whether they are stories or papers and also digital resources and how these intersect. So for example, Laurie and Helen, you brought up the difficulty of making sure that areas suffering from natural disasters are documented. And Jordy, you've talked about the preservation of digital archives that are at risk of disappearing. So there's really a question here about how these intersect. What is the relationship between preservation of the physical and the relationship with the digital and vice versa and can practices from one be applied to the other? So quite a broad question there, but I think that gives a lot of scope in terms of drawing on what you've talked about in your papers. So maybe start with Laurie and Helen. Yeah, so from our perspective, we're doing digital because our emphasis tends to be digital because that's often our only actual option if we want to preserve and make things accessible. So many of the materials in the Caribbean and the University of Florida historically, since it's founding, the libraries have identified as a Caribbean institution because we're in the swamp in Gainesville. We're low-lying. It's always 100% humidity. Is it ever not raining somewhere in town? And so our materials and so many of the materials that we have also from our region were printed on, you know, not as a free paper with animal blues. These are things that even when we have them in a storage facility that is temperature and humidity controlled, they continue to degrade. And so digital is the only way that we can ensure that these materials can be preserved moving forward. There are other materials that we actually can preserve, you know, the materials that will last. And so we're always interested in preserving and making accessible all of the materials to the extent possible. With like making sure that materials are documented and can be found, there's so much work to be done. And it's really fantastic and important work. And some of it is you document the loss as well when you can or you document not known to exist is a regular classification that we see where things, as far as we know, they've been lost or maybe they were never actually printed but they're mentioned. And so then we do different research. We work with scholars really heavily on this. And so let's see if I can send this to everyone. One example, the crib, which is one of the earliest known in English, West Indian literary magazines. So Evelyn O'Callaghan was talking about this. She was really interested in it because the editor Frida Kassan has published some other things. Evelyn has done different research on her and also republished. She was really interested in seeing this and she's telling me we don't even know if that it exists. It's in this one archive that we think it exists in Antigua but the roof, the building isn't totally stable. We're not sure if the materials are actually stabilized. They don't wanna open the box because you don't want to open things even for researcher to see or to do digitization unless you know you can immediately stabilize those materials because you may lose them at the moment that you open it if you can't stabilize the materials at the same time. So this is always a question that comes up. And one of our questions from that is also can we find another copy? And so doing a ton of like Googling, searching around Senate House Library at the University of London did have a copy and they graciously digitized it. And so thanks to their work these materials are now known to exist at least for some of the issues, not all issues and they can be researched for the first time ever. And so I think it was two years ago that these were digitized. So I mean, two years born into the world of like modern research is really radically new for someone to work with. And now we also know that the physical materials are there and the physical materials being there gives us another trace. Okay, well, what else might have been collected and put there that's related to these? Was it the same librarian doing the collection? Was it a particular missionary? Was it a researcher? Was it a civil employee? Who, how did those materials get there and what else can we find? So we're always interested in preserving the physical and the digital materials. We're also interested in seeing what the echoes are. How does relate to the other collections? And when the material has been lost, how do we document that loss? So not known to exist, but here are the gaps, here are the silences that have occurred. Ellen, did you find? What to add? I think you've said it all, but I think I would add that we are also interested in this is really like a long-term project in also making sure that whether it is the physical material as a digital material that it is discoverable, sorry, in not just English. I mean, I think this is one of the things we still like is that we have material in Creole and we have it in French and in Spanish. Mostly we don't really have much Dutch Caribbean, I think. But one of the things that we need to do is also improving like our information and our metadata in a variety of languages. And this is again, like a really long-term project that applies to both, but this is something that we're currently working on. Thank you. And Jordi, that intersection between physical and digital, are there any reflections that you have from some of your work and some of the works that you were citing? Yes, I also agree nearly with Loria and Helen. We have very similar issues here in that sense. When you are a small archive, a small newspaper archive, even if you have not a big amount of resources, you are pretty good preserving physical documents and you know how to do it. But we are not so good preserving digital materials. And now we are learning also. But preserving physical documents and physical materials is a very good base, a very good point of start to be a good digital preserver also. There are many challenges because we, for example, cannot preserve websites of associations. It's very difficult to preserve a website. How these websites probably in 10 years, in 20 years, there will be the same, probably not. And we probably will lost this memory and that's scaring. But so we have to, I think that the best way is to share with another association, with another organizations and institutions with academic, with university, with institutions more powerful, with more resources and to establish partenary art and associations in that sense because it's really a drama. It's losing all that memory, especially in the idea of sexuality and gender diversity. I think that is a good point to lead us up to some of our final reflections. Any, this is a final question, any final questions if people have them, please do add them to the Q&A. But, Jordy, you just given a sort of rallying cry for collaboration, which is actually at the heart of this conference. Laurie, you cited the digitization with Senate House Library and the potential to share collections and how like this. As we are talking and at the heart of the conferences around catalyst for change and collaboration, are there any final reflections that you would make in terms of how we can better share some of the experiences that you've been working on for your projects to build up that community that you've highlighted, Jordy? Are there any tangible things in your mind that we might think for the next four and a bit days, how we might do that and build those bonds and cement those links across institutions internationally? So maybe start with Laurie and Helen. So ours is kind of overlay, ours is very easy compared to many places. Everyone has Caribbean collections. So the history of the Caribbean is the history of capitalism. It's the history of the modern world. We know you have Caribbean collections. Take a look around, see what you have. It would be really, really neat just to sort of think with the Caribbean as you're looking through your collections. Also think with that as you're thinking through your communities. We'd love to hear from you directly. We'd love to partner and collaborate. But there are so many other things as you look through your collections with a collaborative lens and like where could we really partner with someone else in spirit of mutual aid? We could support collections, collections that have been lost to disasters, collections that aren't accessible for whatever reason. If you thinking with those eyes, you can see so many different connections and not opportunities for cooperation internationally. Obviously we'd love to hear from you for the Caribbean. But the same speaks to so many different groups and communities. I would say now that you know about Deloc and maybe you already knew about Deloc or on our website as well, let us know if you're using our collections. Let us know if you're using them for a project in the classroom because we love to hear from that and we love to highlight the project that are using our collections. And even if you're not using Deloc, whatever collection you're using for your project, let people know because I think this is the best thing that there is to do is that we want to hear how our collections are used. So this would be my little thing to say. And Jordy, I think the final comments are yours in terms of how can we build collaboration between us? Yes, as Helene has said it, let to be known. We have to go outside the archives, outside the institutions to spread the preserving of the memory because the community needs us. That's the fact and we are for them. So maybe if you have not the resources, it's more difficult that you have to go to the streets, to the communities and asking communities, hey, we are the archive, we are the library, we are the museum, what can we do for you? That's the question.