Research & Sponsored Programs Report ResearchAnnual201819-electronic | Page 7

New digital portal
to give online access
to Gulf Coast
maritime history
A collaboration between the University of West
Florida and a host of regional libraries and mu-
seums will create a digital portal that will provide
access to the maritime history and heritage of
the northern Gulf Coast.
The project, tentatively called the Gulf Coast
Digital Portal, is funded by a two-year grant from
the National Park Service dedicated to maritime
heritage, as well as matching funds from UWF.
The effort will include the digitization of thou-
sands of documents gathered from historical
repositories throughout the region.
Dr. Jamin Wells,
assistant professor,
UWF Department of History
“FPAN, of course, has contacts around the state
with cultural institutions,” Wells said. “They’ll be
a big part of that conversation and a relationship
builder.”
Wells said UWF students will begin to digitize
documents at West Florida Genealogical Library
in the summer of 2019.
“We will be reaching out to the smaller museums
and archives,” said Dr. Jamin Wells, an assistant
professor in the Department of History who is
one of the principal investigators for the grant.
“We’re hoping to see if there might be ways we
can help them spread their message, share their
story and also share some of their documents
with the public.”
Wells, who is also the director of the Public
History Master’s Program and oversees the UWF
Digital Humanities Lab, said a beta version of
the portal, which will be hosted by the UWF
Libraries, could be online and accessible in 12-14
months.
“This portal will be an access point for students,
for researchers, for scholars. It will bring together
all the siloed repositories of information into one
site,” he said. “If you want to study the human
relationship with this part of the world, this will
be the place to start.”
One of the partners in the project is the West
Florida Genealogy Branch Library, which is on
the campus of Pensacola State College.
“They have all these neat original historic docu-
ments,” Wells said. “We’re going to digitize some
of them for the library and make them available
on the portal.”
The Florida Public Archaeology Network will
also play an important role in the creation of the
digital portal, Wells said.
2018-2019 Research Annual Report
Volunteer Jo Anne McKay goes through files at the West Florida
Public Libraries Genealogy Branch Library.
“The challenge is not scanning the documents,
the challenge is inputting all the metadata, the
information about those documents. We’ll be
digitizing at least 5,000 documents for this
project,” Wells said.
Wells said the organizers of the digital project
were inspired by other sites, such as Florida
Memory and Michigan Memories, which aggre-
gate important historical and cultural documents
and photos.
“There are dozens of these around the country,
but we felt there was really a need (in this
region),” he said. “The idea of the northern Gulf
being the ‘Forgotten Coast’ holds true in many
ways, especially for the maritime history and
heritage work many of us at UWF do. This portal
is our effort to bring together cultural institu-
tions, historic resources, and scholarship under a
collaborative umbrella.”
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