Books About Florida & the Caribbean: from the University Press of Florida to the World Not one of our books; inspires our work Books About Florida and the Caribbean is a Mellon-funded project that covered costs to clear rights, digitize, and convert to digital-native formats like ePUB and ePDF 39 important scholarly books from the UF Press. All of the books are now online, and we are within a 1 year extension which gives us time to promote the project as intended with scholar talks. These are listed in the brochures. This project was always about bringing back these books. But, importantly, this project was also about strategic partnerships. It was about forging a closer relationship with the Press, and hoping to obtain Mellon funding to forge that relationship. This was so that we could open a door for more Mellon funding. We did receive Mellon funding, and UF took the opportunity to apply for and be awarded more funding with the major Mellon Intersections grant. The relationship with the Press is a critical one as we think about what libraries mean in the digital age, and what it means for we, the people who work in libraries and for us, as in the much larger all of us that we support through libraries. I became a librarian based in part on reading Learning from the Left, which examines a short period in children’s literature publishing and libraries, where people sought to become librarians and publishers to plant seeds of change and further the Civil Rights Movement. We know we want to support equity, justice, and compassion in the world, so the question is always how to best do so.

www.ufdc.ufl.edu/librarypress http://ufdc.ufl.edu/librarypress Who and What Slide: As a socio-technical expert, my work is in technologies, policies, procedures, and communities—and, in how we wield all of these to make a better world possible. Our worldviews and worlds are shaped by our lack of access to quality information and a lack of context, which can only be provided by connections with a beloved community. How do we do this? One way we do this is by providing access to and dissemination of quality information, which we do so well in libraries. In recent years, this has meant wielding the digital and also thinking about what it means to acquire, preserve, and create information resources. Libraries are responding with new units and groups for library publishing. This is often the digital conversion of existing publications, as was the case for this grant, and is often the publication of new forms and types of work which the libraries are doing with the LibraryPress@UF. The LibraryPress@UF features content that aligns with the mission and strategic directions of the Libraries, including: Publishes works based on the Libraries’ unique collections and Open Access textbooks with Orange Grove Texts Plus  Acquires new publications to extend library collections Selects projects that support shared goals (e.g., Mellon/NEH Humanities Open Book Program Grant to enrich and enhance library and press collaboration) Undertakes new works in the spirit and manner of transformative collaboration Engages in the public sphere to expand the form and meaning of publication to further the spirit of public scholarship  If you have a project idea for the LibraryPress@UF, please see the resources page on the site, and please be in touch. www.ufdc.ufl.edu/librarypress http://ufdc.ufl.edu/librarypress

Without poetry, the tongue dies. Sin poesía, la lengua muere Why slide: This very practical project and the very practical needs for the LibraryPress@UF also further our larger, broader goals for what libraries can and should do, and our role in the world. Marlene Daut in her book on Black Atlantic Humanism explains rich understanding of the humanities and what it means to be in the world, citing Franz Fannon for , “how in his estimation combatting racism depended not only upon appealing to human feelings, but depended upon a principled faith in the inherent goodness of humankind to want to lessen the suffering of others” (xxxvii). Poetry Is Not a Luxury, BY AUDRE LORDE: “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.” How do we put in place the conditions for creativity and generativity, not innovation for novelty, and instead true change in the world that benefits everyone? We dream. Libraries are places of dreaming, through our work, we nurture the spirit for dreaming. This was but a small project. The impact taken in the aggregate and the import taken with our goals and vision, is tremendous.