1.
Introduction
This
report covers the first six-month period of the IMLS Directed
Grant #CL-00006 awarded to the University of Miami for
the Cuban Heritage Collections Digitizing Project.
This project builds on the ongoing work of a previous IMLS
grant (#LL-90160) to the University of Miami for the Digitization
and Preservation of Selected Afro-Cuban & Cuban Exile
Collections. Together, these two grants are forming
the foundation of the Cuban Heritage Digital Collection which
aims to be the most comprehensive Web-based repository
of digital materials on the culture and history of Cuba.
Establishing the concept of the Cuban Heritage Digital
Collections has been a major accomplishment of the first
phase of this grant period.
2.
Personnel
Esperanza
de Varona and Jeff Barry served as co-Principal Investigators
until the beginning of March 2001 when Mr. Barry assumed
sole PI responsibilities.
Diana
Kirby served as Project Director until her resignation.
At that point, Mr. Barry assumed the duties of the Project
Director on an interim basis until a replacement for Ms.
Kirby is hired.
Pedro
Figueredo serves as Project Manager for this grant. In
this capacity, he oversees the daily supervision of the
digitizing process. Mr. Figueredo also supervises the digitizing
workflow for the IMLS grant funded project LL-90160-99
at the University of Miami library. In the recent period,
Mr. Figueredo has made a presentation to a local school
in Miami on the Cuban Heritage Digital Collections. Also,
he served on a panel at the ARLIS conference on the topic
of museum and library systems.
Isidro
Noguera serves as a research assistant for this project.
The focus of his work is on scanning materials. Lubia Caballero
was hired as a research assistant for this project. The
focus of her work is on scanning materials. However, at
the end of this reporting period, Ms. Caballero resigned
her position to pursue other opportunities.
Due to
the turnover in staff performing scanning operations, we
are examining the option of outsourcing the staffing required
for digitizing the collections.
3.
Content
In this
first period, the digitization has focused on two collections
within the Cuban Heritage Collection:
- Tomás
Estrada Palma Papers. From the collection summary: "Tomás
Estrada Palma was a general of the Cuban forces during
the war of 1868 to 1878 against Spain and delegate-at-large
and minister plenipotentiary of the Republic of Cuba
in arms. In 1901 Estrada Palma was elected first president
of the Republic of Cuba and was inaugurated in May
20, 1902. This collection contains 270 items including
correspondence, photographs, invitations, clippings,
obituaries and other documents related to Estrada Palma
and his descendants as well as the relationship of
the Cuba Government with the United States.
- Enrique
Labrador Ruíz Collection. From the collection summary: "This
collection consists of approximately 9,000 pages of
personal papers of one of the leading twentieth century
literary authors. His correspondence includes letters
from prominent Cuban, Latin American, and Spanish literary
figures. To students of twentieth century Cuban, Caribbean,
Latin American, and Spanish language literature, the
Enrique Labrador Ruíz Collection offers outstanding
educational and research opportunities.
The digitization
of the Tomás Estrada Palma Papers has been completed. Work
is currently underway to complete the EAD encoding of the
finding aid and to deliver the finalized finding aid and
digital images via the Web.
The digitization
of the Enrique Labrador Ruíz Collection is well underway
and will be completed within the next reporting period.
4.
Technology
The
technological framework for this project is being based
on the same technical concepts as grant LL-90160.
In summary,
the technical strategy for this project centers around
developing finding aids based on the Encoded Archival Description
(EAD) standard and utilizing the Digital Archival Object
(DAO) element of that standard to display the digital images
as part of the finding aid. Locally created Perl scripts
have been developed to facilitate the display of the images
via the Web from a finding aid.
The following
image depicts the shared architecture of the digital library
projects being developed at the University of Miami. This
grant has played an instrumental role in crystallizing
the vision for this architecture and accomplishing the
initial development of the technical framework.
Technical
documentation further describing the architecture will
soon be available on the project's Web site. One important
aspect of this framework is that it allows digital collections
within the Cuban Heritage Collection to be integrated with
digital collections from other units of the University
of Miami libraries.
5.
Objectives for Next Phase
-
Announce
the public availability via the Web of the Tomás Estrada
Palma papers.
-
Complete
the digitizing and metadata preparation for the Enrique
Labrador Ruíz Collection and announce the public availability
of this collection.
-
Promote
the Cuban Heritage Digital Collections site among archivists,
librarians, and researchers as the premier Web site
for scholarly information on the cultural heritage
of Cuba.
Principal
Investigator: Jeff Barry
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