News & Blog

Lee Dotson, Digital Initiatives Librarian and manager of STARS (Showcase of Text, Archives, Research & Scholarship), UCF’s institutional digital repository, has been accepted into the prestigious Digital POWRR Peer Assessment Program for the year 2024. POWRR stands for Preserving (digital) Objects with Restricted Resources. This program is sponsored by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). 

The Digital POWRR Peer Assessment Program is an exclusive initiative that is designed to empower individuals to address the challenges of preserving digital assets, especially when faced with limited resources. Lee will engage with a cohort in a year-long comprehensive assessment process, collaborating to evaluate and improve digital preservation strategies and practices. Participants will work closely with peers and mentors, conduct an institutional case study, generate a longer peer assessment report, present findings through a final project showcase, and write a white paper that will be published.  
 

Participants also receive a participation stipend as well as a “Technology Start Up” award that can be provisioned towards helping to jump start digital preservation activities. 

Congratulations to Lee on this significant achievement! Her participation in this Program is an investment in both her personal and our organizational growth. The digital preservation skills acquired, coupled with her strengthened network and gained leadership capabilities, will contribute significantly to advancing the digital preservation efforts of the UCF Libraries and facilitate deeper collaboration with Special Collections and University Archives. 

Congratulations to Ven Basco!

The UCF Libraries is proud to announce that the 2021 Jean Key Gates Distinguished Alumni Award of the USF School of Information has been awarded to our own Ven Basco! This award is given in honor of USF Professor Emerita of the same name. The award is presented annually to an alumnus whose outstanding professional career achievements serve as a role model for all information science graduates.

Many of our knights have benefitted from Ven’s expertise in his role as the Engineering and Computer Science Librarian at UCF where he has been serving the UCF community for over two decades. Either via a one on one science consultation session with him, attending one of his library instruction sessions, utilizing one of his many online research guides, or just having access to the many books he has helped procure for our collection.  Ven has held may many titles and responsibilities over the years. In addition to being a subject librarian, he also coordinates the library’s research consultation services and Ask a Librarian service, two of the services that the library provides that made a tremendous impact to the type of services that the library offered during the pandemic. His interest and many years of involvement with international aspects of libraries through ALA’s International Relations Committee, and ALA’s International Relations Roundtable committees made him aware of the various opportunities to meet and network with a lot of librarians here and in Asia. He was the past president and Executive Director of the: Asian Pacific American Librarians Association for seven years. He was also the 2019 recipient of the Excellence in Librarianship Award at UCF and the Joint Conference of Librarians of Color (JCLC) Distinguished Service Award.

In the past few days, some news sites have described uncertainty for the future of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). With NEH under discussion, we will take this opportunity to highlight good news from the NEH by celebrating winners of a 2016 NEH contest. (more…)

The Burnett Honors College and the UCF Libraries are awarding $1000 to recognize two outstanding library research papers or projects by Honors students in any discipline:

– $500 for the best paper/project at the lower division level (courses 1xxx or 2xxx)
– $500 for the best paper/project at the upper division level (course 3xxx or 4xxx)

The prizes will be awarded to the individual winner or will be divided equally among the members of the winning team (for team projects or papers).

For more information, visit the Information Fluency Awards page from the Burnett Honors College.