 Welcome. I'm Judy Russell, Dean of University Libraries at the University of Florida. I'm joined today by my colleagues, Lori Taylor and Todd Digby, to share information about our collaborations to develop broad and deep digital collections for public access to Cuba and Patrimony. Celebrating Cuba is the result of a collaboration between the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida and the Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba Jose Marti BNJM, as it's affectionately known, the National Library of Cuba. The collaboration began with a visit to UF by the director Eduardo Torres-Cuevas in 2011, during which he joined the Digital Library of the Caribbean, D-LOC, as a means to provide broad worldwide public access to digital copies of Cuban historical and cultural material. In 26, as you can see from the map, Cuba is an enormous in size and incredibly close to Florida. It's been connected for over 500 years. UF has long collaborated with Cuba, and indeed one of the preeminent collections in the Smathers Libraries is our Latin American and Caribbean collection, which has a major focus on Cuba. In 2016, the Smathers Libraries and the BNJM signed a convenio committing to an expanded partnership. Dr. Torres-Cuevas wanted to focus on digitization for public access of content uniquely held in the BNJM and asked UF to coordinate an effort to create a digital collection of Cuban materials available in the U.S. and elsewhere outside Cuba. Together, these efforts would build a broad and deep collection for global access to Cuba's patrimony, celebrating Cuba. Because of limited internet capacity in Cuba, UF agreed to host the collection for global access while BNJM would host an identical collection for access within Cuba. Other partner universities and contributors in the United States who've already joined the effort include Cornell University, Duke University, Florida International University, Harvard University, History Miami, Kent State University, the U.S. Library of Congress, LLMC Digital, New York Public Library, the University of California, Los Angeles, University of Kentucky, University of Miami, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and Yale University. So you can see that the collaboration has been growing and expanding as we bring on additional partners. Now I'll hand off to my colleague, Todd Digby, who will tell you more about our collaborations. Thank you, Judy. Celebrating Cuba currently contains more than 1 million pages organized in 10 different collections, as you can see on the slide. Project work today includes creating a U.S. partner community for the identification and digitization of materials from and about Cuba, targeting specific areas for developing comprehensive collections, sharing catalog records of holdings at BNJM through WorldCat, conducting core bibliographic work to determine publication histories, developing a database of all known historical books published in Cuba, collaborating to confirm permissions, and then coordinating digitization of current periodicals to have complete years online, identifying holding locations of materials for various worldwide libraries, and completing U.S. compliance requirements to be able to transfer hard drives, those with digitization materials to and from Cuba for access within and outside of Cuba. In 2016, BNJM had completed a major portion of record conversion, moving previously print-only catalog records to digital, with the incredible work to convert these records from print to digital. The problem remained that the digital records were only accessible in Cuba. Through the Celebrating Cuba Project, UF transported the digital records via SneakerNet, internally to support record validation and collaboration with OCLC, to have all the BNJM records added to WorldCat. BNJM has additional materials with record spending, even with more to share, BNJM now has over 135,450 catalog records in OCLC for worldwide discovery. Over 97,000 of these records are unique. The enormous amount of work for creating the digital records and sharing the records is one of many foundational activities in BNJM's wide-ranging work. All of the work by BNJM and other partners support developing comprehensive collections from and about Cuba. BNJM is leading the work to develop other foundations for comprehensive collections on Cuba. BNJM collaborated with UF to identify four major projects for initial development. Cuban monographs, Cuban journals and newspapers, and Cuban legal materials, and maps of Cuba. BNJM identified each of these as priority areas to help focus the collaborative and cooperative work. BNJM serves as an advisor and digitizes and contributes copies of materials not held elsewhere. With the overall goals identified along with these specific projects of interest, other projects have emerged in support of the overall goals. Many defined projects and activities are interrelated and have additional related impacts. Another example of this is with maps of Cuba. With this project, the Library of Congress is contributing maps of Cuba, including working with UF to support additional inventory of their collections to identify maps of Cuba for digitization. This collaboration supports a more comprehensive collection of Cuban maps. Another example includes works to identify important periodicals and newspapers, and then working with collaborators to identify how many issues should exist to find holding locations for issues, and then to digitize as many issues as possible. In some cases, single institutions have nearly complete holdings. But in most cases, a comprehensive run for any given title can only be created with the aid of five or more institutions working together. Another example of how this initiative has expanded beyond the collections of the BNJM is the unique collaboration between UF and the synagogue at Shalom in Havana. Many of these their materials are now digitized and online through Celebrating Cuba. Collaborating with colleagues in Cuba requires ingenuity and many unique processes, including using KonekerNet or physically transporting equipment for digitization and drives with digital files because of internet access and speeds are not sufficient for transferring files. So we have to do this using people. For another example, UF has worked close with Adela, Vice President of the Community Center in synagogue in Cuba. She supported the digitization of unique materials in the collections, which has enabled worldwide access to these materials. But that's for all who have internet access. This means though that the digitized collections were not accessible within her buildings for her users to meet their needs, which had to have a non internet solution. I set up an offline database using Zotero to ingest records for all of her items and added PDFs to each record. This Zotero database was set up on a large USB flash drive that could be used on a laptop, which was then used on site in Cuba as a local digitization database for access to files. Also, Fletcher Durant, UF's preservation librarian, had strips of colorful acid free paper, which serve as flags for the physical items in the collection, letting all users know that these items are digital and available from the local laptop and the internet. For all the projects and examples resulting digitization materials are now accessible through BNJM, your streaming partners and venues they select and for global public access using UF through celebrating Cuba. The models for these collections that are housed are over 3,055 titles. This includes about 33,754 items and then this is pages-wise it's over 1,167,000 pages. And for just to get a sense of kind of viewership and use these materials have, in January alone of 2021 there was 685,692 views through these titles. Initially BNJM and UF shared materials transported by DVD and then removed to high density USB drives and hard drives. Materials shared include this historical materials, historical reprints, current research, archival documents, maps, books, photographs, newspapers and much more. And now turn over to my colleague Lori. Thanks so much, Todd. Yeah, so in addition to digitizing historical materials, UF is collaborating on new resources, including new publications on Cuba with the library press at UF. You can find our publications on your preferred bookseller site, including the University of Florida Press website. These publications build on smaller earlier work where we reprinted historical pamphlets, we printed them locally, and then we shared them in different ways at different events and with collaborators to help people understand and think with materials and more ways. This relates to the areas of learning and communication where objects can be boundary objects that help connect us across fields and areas of expertise and a bucket of objects that help us to think to feel and to imagine. We're writing collections from and about Cuba with the small print runs, the historical reprint items, as well as with major publications. Our first book in this initiative is inspired by Cuba, a survey of Cuba themed ceramics by Emilio Cuedo, noted historian and collector for Cuban history. We're now in process for our second book in the inspired by Cuba series, and this is delivering Cuba through the mail. This will be published later this year. In the ceramics book, this book showcases materials from outside of Cuba that feature Cuba. The prior book focus on ceramics and this is on stamps. It's simply astounding to see how far and wide Cuba is referenced inside and included outside of Cuba. This book will be available from your favorite regular booksellers again, including the University of Florida Press website. So in addition to looking forward to having this book out soon, we're really excited as we look forward to our virtual book launch and book plates and other promotional activities. In addition to publishing books you have is also creating new scholarly resources that are digital for understanding and using the digital resources in the collections. Cuba, the pearl of the Caribbean is a digital humanity site to showcase materials from celebrating Cuba. Shown here is an excerpt of the part of the top of the site, and a part of the front page which includes the timeline. So this is on the full digital humanity site. The contents of the site already includes important information on important Cuban thinkers information on their works, more than book reviews more like context essays on different works. We also have a Zotero bibliography, a timeline and timeline JS, and all of this is anchored in materials from the collections. Also, Dr. Paula de la Cruz Fernandez continues to develop the site with more content and English and Spanish to be added. So we have these fantastic collections and partnerships and work that builds on the collections. We also have other broader impacts to conclude we wanted to share on how this project has changed us and our ways of working. So on the slide you have a number of examples and celebrating Cuba overall reinforces and illuminates critical needs for large scale international collaborations, including the need for bilingual metadata, the need for dedicated staffing for project management. It informs how we make workforce changes for language and for project management. We know that leadership from the top and throughout is absolutely critical to project success flexibility patients and mutual respect. For celebrating Cuba, there's a very special emphasis on collaboration with the compliance office for taking equipment and digital files to Cuba without violating us export controls for always dealing with the different levels of paperwork that are required to make this successful. So to take one of these examples, we now have new positions and people in them who are making bilingual metadata. So workforce has changed. This is kind of really two of the examples. We have people in special and area studies collections, digital support services and cataloging. It includes Dr. Paula de la Cruz Fernandez, Nelisa Caraballo-Ramos and Angie Soto. I've no thanks to their work we have many finding guides that are now both in English and in Spanish. And then we've learned that this is not currently supported in archive space. Archival folks have already been attached to request the functionality, but it's really interesting to consider. Had we not worked on celebrating Cuba, we would certainly still needed this at some point. But the question is when, when would this need have come up and when would we have started to make the changes that are necessary to best support our collections. This project moved us along further and faster to meet the project goals and for our larger questions of how we work with such dynamic unique unique and world class collections across languages to support immediate needs and for the larger goals for diversity equity inclusion and justice. We're thrilled to have been able to share about celebrating Cuba today and we would love to collaborate with more folks to participate please contact the team at UF. Please also see the fantastic collections and read the newsletter to see new updates. Please note if you read multiple issues of the newsletter, you'll see that each collection has standard information at the top and then updated information below. This is important and it's part of the collaboration. It's the fact that when we share the reports with our collaborators in Cuba, we share them as a printed document. And so they need to have the newsletters printed and shared with them, and the text is meant to be supported for offline reading without immediate reference to other prior reports. So just another learning that we had come out of this and how we present materials for online and offline usage. Again, thank all of you for your time and give thanks to all of the partners who collaborate on celebrating Cuba. Please feel free to contact us with your questions and suggestions, especially if you have content to contribute. Thank you.