 I think it's about time to get started. Thank you all for joining us at our full 2020 CNI virtual member meeting. You're in the second day of the first week of project briefings. And I'm Cliff Lynch. Let me welcome you to this one very briefly. I will mention we have chat going. And please feel free to introduce yourself, if you like, or to comment as we go along with the presentations. At the bottom of your screen, you'll also find a question and answer tool, which you can use to pose questions at any point during the presentations. We will deal with all of the questions that come in in a moderated Q&A session at the after the presentations, which will be moderated by Diane Goldenberg Hart of CNI. I'll also mention that the session is being recorded and will be subsequently available through our usual channels, and that closed captioning is available if you would like to make use of it. I think that's everything I need to summarize for this, so let me just briefly introduce our speakers. We have two presenters today, Lori Taylor and Brian Keith. Both are with the University of Florida. And what they're going to talk to us about today is a project called the Digital Library of the Caribbean. And specifically, they're going to talk about the interplay of management and technical practices that deal with equity and governance kinds of issues in a very complicated, multi-stakeholder situation. And I think this should be quite an interesting presentation on a challenging problem. With that, welcome. Thanks for being with us, and over to you, Lori. Thank you so much for that lovely introduction, and thanks so much for having us here today. So good afternoon, everyone. I'm Lori Taylor, and I'm here with Brian Keith. We're excited to be speaking with you today about the Digital Library of the Caribbean, or D-LOC, and its use of technical and management practices to enable equity. We feel this is an important example of digital information technology, advancing scholarly communications, and enabling intellectual endeavors. So for our talk today, we'll cover the Digital Library of the Caribbean, or D-LOC. We'll cover libraries and colonial operations, and then we'll cover D-LOC's operations, which are post-custodial about mutual aid, polycentrism, collaborative pluralism, flow archives. We'll discuss organizational design and technical development. It's a pleasure to join you guys today. In today's talk, we're presenting D-LOC as a model for how to use technical and management practices to enable equity and increase organizational effectiveness. But to begin with, what is D-LOC? The Digital Library of the Caribbean, or D-LOC, is an open access digital library of Caribbean and circum-Caribbean resources. It provides access and preservation for materials from archives, libraries, museums, and private collections. D-LOC seeks to leverage the work for preservation and access to build community and capacity. D-LOC fosters diversity, equity, and inclusion. Partners support each other and their international community of scholars, students, and other people. D-LOC surpasses many commercial collections in size and scope, totaling 3.6 million pages, over 3.6 million pages, I should say. And it includes oral histories, newspapers, official documents, ecological and economic data, maps, histories, literature, poetry, musical expression, videos, and artifacts. D-LOC is a significant resource for teaching, research, and cultural and community life. In D-LOC, partner institutions define shared goals to support joint directed action and procedural justice. This is achieved through inclusive and distributive collection development with local level rights retention and collection development decision making. With the University of Florida serving as content host, but with the authority of a regular partner and digitization and metadata creation residing at the partner level. The result is a community of practice with increased capacity for collaboration and through collaboration. D-LOC is effectively a case study in the positive disruptive capacity of technology at a time of need. Its development has been informed by an awareness of the historic colonization of library collections. This represents an important departure from historic models. And D-LOC was born of Accurl. Accurl is the association of Caribbean University research and institutional libraries. Accurl was founded in 1969 amid fights and wins for independence for Caribbean peoples. Libraries created Accurl, recognizing that people need access to the people shared experience and past through media and that creating, disseminating and preserving culture and information should be done by the people, not the former colonizers. Experts in the Caribbean created Accurl for local needs and those for huge diasporic populations. In 2004, Accurl members founded D-LOC. The then director of the University of the Virgin Islands libraries, Judith Rogers, led the drive to create D-LOC. She was responsible for supporting University of the Virgin Islands students with campus locations on three islands in St. Croix, St. Thomas and St. John, where transport is by ferry or by plane. And just to note, Judith is my hero. She's the one who I modeled that and learned how to be a librarian from. So Judith and her Accurl colleagues recognized that any of their core communities span vast geographic areas and that the internet, if wielded by community stakeholders for their needs with a platform designed by actual stakeholders, had the potential to better support immediate local needs and important needs for broader communities. At the same time, partners throughout the region recognized that accessing each other's materials would continue to be difficult and all D-LOC partner institutions faced problems with preserving our materials because of our tropical climate. They then and now a much bigger we have also recognized that we needed to work together to identify, share and preserve materials. And so D-LOC was launched because the community recognized the point where technology had evolved to the point where it was prevalent and it was predicted to become more affordable. At this point, technology could support stakeholder needs as defined by the communities. It should not be lost on us that librarians were at the fore recognizing these needs and opportunities. And the librarians recognized that the technology was at the point of what EF Schumacher termed appropriate technology where it could support local production from local resources for local use. And these are some of the underpinnings for D-LOC. Other relevant practices and concerns include the rule of least power, which suggests we should use the least powerful technology suitable for any purpose, specifically technical languages and minimal computing where we seek the least powerful systems and methods to meet our needs. In explaining the importance of D-LOC's use of technical and management practices for equity, we need to consider library related colonial practices. Colonialism, according to Merriam-Webster dictionary is quote, control by one power over a dependent area or people or a policy advocating or based on such control, end quote. The latter part of the definition is the most relevant for cultural heritage institutions. This short definition belies the vast complexity of oppression and abuse with colonialism, which extends to mindsets and worldviews. The dynamics of colonialism apply to the treatment of less powerful groups within one country or across borders. Examples of heritage and information colonialism and of technologies are prevalent. Lori and I are fortunate to work with the University of Florida colleague, Marguerite of Argus-Pentoncourt. She's the Latin American and Caribbean Special Collections Librarian at the University of Florida. She recently described the processes of colonialism represented in archives. Empires use extensive record keeping to control their colonies. They use classificatory systems to ensure the hegemony of a small group of European colonists over others. And the US also became an intellectual hegemonic power in part by collecting or removing Latin American and Caribbean cultural heritage. This is the application of a desperate power to determine what is known, recorded and preserved. So creating DLAC, the founding partners put forward a model for a digital library that was polycentric and based on principles of shared governance for collective action for the common good and mutual aid. Some of us we've already covered. The partners would determine the materials to digitize and work together to digitize materials for open access and long-term digital preservation. Partners would be the ones to select materials from their collections, no top-down mandates. And partners retain all rights to their materials. They're only granting permissions to share the materials through DLAC for access and preservation. In all of this, partners emphasized that digitization and digital library work had to be part of a larger mission for building the community and developing capacity for stakeholders. How do we use this preservation and access work in order to do something more? So in all of this, theories and worldviews that underpin DLAC include shine theory. If you don't shine, I can't shine. Mutual aid, how do we both bring things to the equation for something better for all of us as individuals and collectively? Ethics of care, knowing that emotion is always part of the equation. Theories already mentioned appropriate technology, minimal computing, also looking at maintenance. How do we ensure that our systems are maintainable and sustainable? And procedural justice, informational justice and the triangle of satisfaction, ensuring that we're doing things the right way so that everyone is supported in their process. And all of this also relates to solidarity as we come together. So in establishing the DLAC model, partners created DLAC as a polycentric system based on mutual aid and generous thinking. As described by Eleanor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess, polycentric refers to the systems and processes designed so that, quote, there will be decentralized alternative areas of authority and rule and decision-making, end quote. Margaret Heffernan described this collaborative pluralism as quote, lots of different solutions applied and devised locally by those with an immediate and personal investment. Left their own devices, individuals can create solutions together that are superior to those imposed by external authorities or managing agents, end quote. Heffernan describes Ostrom's assertion of, another quote, so start quote, the absolute requirement of trust, the sharing of resources and denial of dominance. We thrive when we acknowledge our mutual dependency, end quote. Polycentrism with the acknowledgment of mutual dependency connects with the concept of mutual aid. These concepts are core to DLAC and to the model that we're trying to describe. So how do we enact these principles? For our technology work, we have to have processes to support our mission and our workers, including how we structure our work for collaboration to enable engagement, equity, and inclusion. At UF, which is the technical host for DLAC, we do this on our programming teams through things like Agile, which is another philosophy for how to work, and scrum is an applied method, where we develop methods and solutions through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with our collaborators and end users. As you can see in this diagram, Agile and scrum allows us to define our needs and to support them, focusing on the folks involved in the work and for our broad communities. Done right, Agile and scrum allow for prioritization of the most needed work and allow processes to follow from our shared needs and ways of working. And to be done in the manner that we need. Agile's about making it work and empowering the folks who do the work. And working with DLAC, we've seen time and again that the best ways of working are those that enable all of us to have meaningful work and to build together. Where Agile and scrum can be just another way to roll out projects, they can also be part of a bigger framework for enabling equity. For example, scrum defines processes and roles so that we can celebrate and build from each person with many ways of contributing, including project owners, project stakeholders, project workers and larger stakeholders as with our communities. Scrum also requires acceptance criteria. We have to know when a project is done and accepted in order for us to be accountable to our communities. Scrum also allows us to manage complexity by structuring work as iterative and incremental. This allows us to deal with exterior complexity and internal volatility. Priorities will always change. By defining our roles, process schedules, we can work better together and we've done this in D-Lock for our programming work to develop our systems as well as for developing different practices and workflows. As a single example of many, the number one obstacle to Agile and scrum is management where managers want greater control often without being directly involved or impacted in the work. That negatively impacts work product and working conditions. As managers and leaders, when we work from spaces of mutual aid and generous thinking, we get to and we have to allow for the spaciousness of trust to allow workers to work. And that means sharing the labor and sharing power. D-Lock is a case that illustrates important socio-technical governance principles. As Lori described, these principles translate to technology work. All of these concepts relate to and can be informed by important management theories. These include theories of motivation which dominated social, organizational and industrial psychology from the mid 20th century on. Critical work in these areas came to be categorized as needs theory. The three foundational needs theories works are represented in this figure. You may be familiar with all or some of these, but the works build upon each other. Maslow's needs hierarchy theory may be the most well-known. It provides a hierarchical framework for physiological to social to broad categories of intellectual needs. Herzberg's motivation hygiene theory is an elegant theory with two dimensions. Satisfaction, which are described as hygiene needs and dissatisfaction, motivational needs. Motivating factors, including recognition, achievement, responsibility and work characteristics are required for sustained motivation by workers. Deficiencies are detrimental. McClellan's need theory is the third. Motivation comes from needs for achievement, power and affiliation. Power in this instance is a desire to control others. This is a drive or motivation which is mitigated in the frameworks we are discussing today. Need theory and a range of others which are employee centrics and based on employees understanding of the environment in which they are positioned have been foundational in the modern management theory. Concepts like perceived organizational support have arisen. POS is the employee's perception of the organization's attitudes towards them. POS is valued as an assurance that aid will be available from the organization when it's needed to carry out one's job effectively and to deal with stressful situation. Critical contributors in this area are self, America's and Schrader. Justice and management theories is conceptualized in several different forms. Distributive justice, how resources including awards are allocated and procedural justice which is based on judgments about transparency, consistency and other values reflected in or in some cases not reflected in, how organizations operate and how decisions are made. Based on the work of Brockner, Korsgaard, Folger and others, we know perceptions of fairness are increased by sharing information including advanced notice of changes showing respect for individuals, openness and consideration for participants concerns and providing opportunity for inputs that can affect ultimate outcomes or in another word voice. The work in this area, expanding on these theories and concepts to inform work culture and to achieve success through sustaining employee motivation through progressive work cultures and constructs is obviously ongoing. Many of you will be familiar with the work of Deetta Jones. Deetta is a very influential library consultant on equity, diversity, inclusion and workplace transformation. She has synthesized this half century of scholarship in her work. Deetta puts forward five social needs for achieving the best through teams. This directly relates to technology work. Status relates to how one feels they are perceived by others. These perceptions reflect value and standing. Certainty promotes effectiveness because work can be based on knowledge of one's role and the work processes in a word stability. Autonomy relates to power over one's work or control. This also relates to agency which is the belief one can accomplish one's work. Relatedness is present when one feels their work environment and workflows reflect or incorporate care, concern and support. Fairness appears again in Deetta's list of conditions for highly motivated work environments. As we discussed before, fairness and justice take a number of forms. Obviously, these conditions are interrelated when they occur. Further scholarship and practice indicate they are all essential in achieving potential for collaboration. And so as we close, what we wanted to highlight, notably what's not in our organizational models, control, command and power over others. Working with D-Lock, it's about agency, which is just like what we see in our technical models and our use of Agilent Scrum. And thinking about how we enable equity, a great deal of the work requires generosity and trust. So we've shared the example of D-Lock as one of the beloved community of abundant generosity and deep trust. Working with D-Lock has changed how we work by making real our technological and organizational processes for equity. In doing so, it's changed our ways of working with D-Lock and our ways of working and being in the world more generally. We know that enabling equity as part of the best practices for technology needs and management because it enables our best work and our best ways of working. Part of our work as leaders and technologists is in understanding what works to get the work done and what works for our workers to be in solidarity with all of us. Thank you for coming to our presentation. We do have a couple of slides of our different references. We've also shared these through the CNI Dropbox. We know that they will be available. I'm also going to click through quickly just to make sure that they are available in the recording. And we're now over to the Q&A. Thank you, Laurie. Thank you, Brian, for a really interesting overview of the methods that you've implemented at D-Lock. I really enjoyed hearing about that and I am sure that our attendees did as well. And thank you also to our attendees for making time to be with us here today. And without further ado, I will move right over to the Q&A. We have a question from Sarah Pritchard who asks, can you give examples of how your partnership specifically benefited, how your partnerships specifically benefited from this framework? Yeah, that's a great question. And there are so many answers to that. So for an early answer, it enabled D-Lock to exist. The shared governance model and the agreement, the partners, it wasn't so many collections that are like, hey, we're one institution that has more power. We have a collection scope. We will kind of want to go in a cherry pick. We want to say what we want and that's how we're going to define the partnership. But partnerships are about equals. And so when D-Lock came together, a lot of partners are like, some of these things may not be important to some other institutions, but they're really important to us. And these are also really important, not just within our institutions, but with our communities and our diaspora, because you'll have more people from any one island in the Caribbean who live outside of the island and still identify. So there are more Jamaicans that live outside of Jamaica than in Jamaica. So some of the things that partners found really, really important, funeral booklets. The University of the Virgin Islands has digitized tons of them. The funeral booklets have family information. They have information about the evolution of the different islands and the Virgin Islands in terms of different community members, different groups. And so by having the model where partners get to choose their materials, that enabled that to be possible. Other things, the training, the tech team and training work that happens to D-Lock is super awesome. It is one of the places that it only places that I've seen things that just happen. It seems like so organically, but really it's the model that provides the scaffolding for it. So different partners, there's obviously we have technical trainers at the University of Florida and Florida International University. But by being involved in D-Lock, partners are like, okay, so I've learned this, now I need to teach people. And we've got multiple languages going on. So the National Archives in Haiti are a super powerhouse for teaching all of the French Caribbean because they do all of the translations. And so even if we're in a meeting, like if we're at the Acura Conference and we're doing a workshop on technology, depending on who the different partners are in the room, if the presentation is in English or French or Spanish, you've got simultaneous translation going on in the room with people just doing whisper translation. So they're leaning to the side and whispering to other people doing the translation. And that's something that's specifically encouraged by the model, because everyone is part of it. And we know that we need to have different ways of working to make everyone successful. And so languages are just a sort of a simple example of that. That is really interesting. I'm sorry, go ahead, Brian. Well, the one thing I was gonna add to that is by having distributed governance, a shared governance, where the University of Florida has technical responsibilities and serves as the technical lead, but you have that broad governance, the technical platform itself evolved in ways that it wouldn't have evolved without that sort of member governance. And so that I don't often have something I can add to an answer from Laurie, but that's one piece that I thought I would contribute. No, that's great, that's great. Thank you. Thanks, Sarah, for that wonderful question and for expanding a little bit on how the model works in practice actually, because I was gonna ask sort of can you give us an example of how Agile and Scrum, I don't know if it's possible to give sort of a tangible example of how that model in particular might work differently from a more traditional model that would provide more equity in the process? And so some of the things, the equity and the restraints are bounded together as well, because some of it we can only make work if we make it equitable. So in big projects, you'll see these beautiful grant proposals that are like we're gonna spend $100,000 on digitization equipment, here's the room, here's who's gonna be employed in it, we're gonna set it up. We don't normally write grants like that and they're not feasible for us. It's okay, so what do we think will work for the technical setup? Often you have a smaller room, you really want the room to not have risk of water incursion and other things. I mean, we're in a tropical climate. Brian and I are working from home today because our institution has shut down from the storm. So when you're trying to work with different factors and also the most important materials at any partner institution, it's not going to be, oh, we only have AB digitization, we'll write a grant for that, or we're focusing just on newspapers. It's all over the place. And so how do you accommodate for the shifting technical needs? So some of that, obviously with programming, it's a more straight, agile scrum process. You know, we have daily sprints and stuff, but with our technical training and our equipment setup, we have a bunch of different lists like, okay, this is what the National Archives in Haiti have, this is what the U.S. Embassy in Haiti has, and here's how they're doing it for these material types. Okay, and here's how Antigua is doing it here, and here's how they're doing it for this project. So many of the projects what we found are best are digital single lens reflex cameras mounted with a camera stand, because you can move it around. And so you have a lot more flexibility. Those setups you can also do for under $10,000, which is what we're normally looking at as an absolute maximum. We also have recommendations for like better flatbed scanners and for the $100 ones. And then we end up getting recommendations and suggestions for, oh, you're in the Dutch Caribbean. Okay, well, this one is gonna be cheaper for you and more available. Oh, you're in the French Caribbean. This one you're probably gonna be able to find. So that's some of like how it's sourced. The other thing is, depending on where the grants are coming from, getting equipment in and getting it through customs, that can be complicated. So we work with the different networks of researchers and collaborators. If someone traveling to see their family members in Canada, can they go to Target and pick up X scanner and come back with it? It's not a joke. It's funny, I think, because people are bringing equipment back really regularly. But how do you activate all of the different stakeholders to make sure that you can get equipment where it needs to be? And the equipment is all different types. And then some of it, how do you support setup? Working with the National Library in Cuba, they also have the digital single lens reflex camera setup. And they're doing mainly newspapers. But one of their core needs that we had to figure out was getting uninterruptible power supplies in because of the power in the building flickers. And so then you can have the computers go out and obviously that's a big problem while you're scanning large files. So just being able to, we can have a project idea, but we're going to have to constantly iterate about it. We're gonna have to ask questions that we don't normally have to ask or even consider for a lot of these projects in order to make it work for the different local situations. And then each of the partners tells the other one, oh, here's how we made it work. And here's how this worked out. And, oh, here's this idea. And so the different cross training and connecting together. That is really interesting how it adds so much richness and depth to not only the project itself, but I'm sure the experience of the people working on it. So it sounds like a wonderful. And so I don't want to take anybody's opportunity to ask a question here. So attendees, please weigh in, please ask your questions. But while we're waiting, just one other question, if I may, what are some of the friction points that you experience using this model? What do you encounter in terms of pushback? Anything? That's one of the things that's really lucky and wonderful about Deloc. And you'll see if you ever get the chance to attend like a West Indian Literature Conference or Caribbean Studies Conference, what the word that you'll hear most often is generous, generosity, generous, thank you. This is only possible because someone has helped. Thank you so much for your presentation here. Other people you can build upon that generosity and abundance and connection and the recognition that there's more work than all of our lifetime. So we all have to come together to work on it. We really don't experience friction. We have enough exterior friction. We have friction from different governmental policies for travel and we have friction from the storms. No matter what happens, we will always have the storms. We always have the climate to contend with. So we have shared obstacles that we have to overcome. Thank you, Lori. And thank you, Brian, for this wonderful talk, an interesting resource and a fascinating method for managing it. And it's just really interesting. So I really appreciate your coming to CNI and sharing this with us. I'm gonna go ahead and close down the public portion of the talk. I'll stop the recording, but any of our attendees who are still with us, I invite you to stay if you're interested in approaching the podium and asking Lori or Brian a question or making a comment, please feel free to do so. Just raise your hand and I can unmute you. And with that, I wish you all a very good afternoon. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.