Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Data-Driven Decision Making: A Holistic Approach To Assessment In Special Collections Repositories, Melanie Griffin, Barbara Lewis, Mark I. Greenberg

Barbara Lewis

Faced with shrinking budgets and reduced staffing, the University of South Florida Libraries Special & Digital Collections Department (SDC) implemented a comprehensive, integrated assessment program to better focus its diminished resources within clear strategic goals. Department faculty sought to answer the following inter-related questions: 1) What are the Department’s staffing needs? 2) What staff skill sets and training are required to meet researchers’ expectations, and what personnel skills and functions are most needed by the Department in the future? 3) Where should the Department target its outreach efforts? 4) How can the Department streamline and prioritize technical services to support …

What The Heart Remembers: The Women And Children Of Darfur, Barbara Lewis, Audrey Powers

Barbara Lewis

In 2009, the University of South Florida (USF) Libraries received from the organization Waging Peace a collection of materials which included transcripts of interviews with female genocide survivors and original children's drawings depicting the atrocities of genocide in Darfur. These materials are particularly significant in that they were used as evidence of genocide In Darfur in the International Criminal Court. The children's drawings have been digitized by USF and are an important element in the development of a web portal for the new Holocaust & Genocide Studies Center. These drawings also inspired the performance piece What the Heart Remembers: The …

What The Heart Remembers: The Women And Children Of Darfur, Barbara Lewis, Audrey Powers

Barbara Lewis

The University of South Florida Tampa Library received and digitized original materials created by refugee children depicting the atrocities of genocide in Darfur. The development of a performance piece inspired by these materials to promote the Library’s resources and initiatives was proposed; thus, the project What the Heart Remembers: The Women and Children of Darfur was born. This presentation focused on digital image management, technology related to the visual arts, faculty outreach, and collaboration within disciplines such as the Library, Theatre and Dance.

Special Collections And The New Web: Using Libguides To Provide Meaningful Access, Barbara Lewis, Melanie Griffin

Barbara Lewis

Librarians have long struggled to find user-friendly mediums to provide meaningful information to patrons; using bibliographies, pathfinders, and subject guides with varying degrees of success. Content management systems, such as Springshare’s LibGuides, have recently been developed to facilitate the creation of online subject guides. Special Collections units also struggle with this issue. This article examines how special collections are presented on the Web, the use of LibGuides for special collections, and how the use of LibGuides is facilitating the goal to provide information in a meaningful way by Special & Digital Collections at the University of South Florida Tampa Library.

Transforming Special Collections: A (Lib)Guide To Innovation. Peer-Reviewed Poster Session Presented At The American Library Association 2010 Annual Conference., Barbara Lewis, Melanie Griffin

Barbara Lewis

“Special Collections as Laboratories,” a recent posting on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s The Wired Campus blog, revived the myth of special collections as dusty and often forgotten repositories.

This poster session illustrates how Special & Digital Collections (SDC) at the University of South Florida Tampa Library transformed its web presence in order to dispel such notions. SDC created a series of collection guides using Springshare’s LibGuides platform to make its web presence more user-friendly, engaging, interactive, and holistic. The guides also add value to the researcher by contextualizing each collection and highlighting connections/partnerships with other Library units, related academic …

Digital Collections Task Force Report, Barbara Lewis, Brian Falato, Richard Bernardy, Pete Reehling, Ilene Frank

Barbara Lewis

Libraries, museums, archives, and similar institutions worldwide are digitizing their physical collections and creating born‐digital resources, all in an effort to make them accessible to people everywhere. The digitization program at the University of South Florida Tampa Library has been active since the mid 1990s. Today it is expected that, as the Library proceeds with its ARL collections initiatives, the demands on this program will increase dramatically.

In order to meet these new demands, changes are necessary to increase the productivity and capacity of the operations and to improve the accessibility and visibility of the collections. These challenges and their …