Digital Collections Center at FIU Libraries

05/21/2026

Happy !
The Red Cross has always depended on the people who show up locally — organizing neighbors, building chapters, and doing the on-the-ground work that makes the mission real. In Miami, that person was Florence Gaskins.
Gaskins arrived in Miami in 1896 as a laundress and built herself into one of the city's most consequential civic organizers. Among her lasting contributions: establishing a Red Cross auxiliary in Overtown that became a platform for addressing child mortality and public health crises.
This 1910 photograph comes courtesy of Museum of Miami: https://dpanther.fiu.edu/record/19652

05/21/2026

Check it out at: https://www.archivozmagazine.org/en/the-caribbean-in-the-open-inside-the-digital-library-of-the-caribbean/

dLOC was featured today in Revista Archivoz, an online publication dedicated to topics related to archives and document management. Check it out via the link in our stories!

05/18/2026

Miami Beach has been a working film city for decades, and the archives are there to document it!
In the summer of 2000, Miami Beach stood in for Palm Beach, and Gene Hackman showed up in pink trousers and a Panama hat. This photo from the City of Miami Beach Digital Archives captures Hackman on location on Star Island during production of Heartbreakers (2001), a con-artist caper directed by David Mirkin and starring Sigourney Weaver, Jennifer Love Hewitt, and Ray Liotta alongside Hackman as to***co tycoon William B. Tensy.
https://dpanther.fiu.edu/record/86729

05/15/2026

Before the group selfie, there was the studio portrait. In honor of International Family Day, four families from partner collections in dPanther, FIU's digital repository.
https://dpanther.fiu.edu/

05/14/2026

Before Key West was a tourist destination, it was a cigar‑making powerhouse.
This 1908 postcard shows the Havana‑American Cigar Factory at the height of Florida’s Cuban‑American to***co industry.
By the first decade of the 20th century, cigar manufacturing in Florida reached its peak, relying on skilled Cuban and Cuban‑American labor and purpose‑built factories like this one. At the time, the Havana‑American Cigar Factory was among the most substantial industrial sites in Key West, employing hundreds of workers and reflecting the city’s central role in hand‑rolled cigar production before the industry’s shift toward Tampa’s Ybor City and eventual decline.
From the Mile Markers: Linking Keys History collection, courtesy of the Monroe County Public Library System (May Hill Russell Library – History Department): https://dpanther.fiu.edu/record/91947
Florida Keys History & Discovery Center

05/13/2026

We are so happy to have Laura on our team!

📆 Another day, another new face to celebrate in our Week of Welcome.

Joining the FIU Libraries team as our Digital Initiatives Librarian with the Unique Collections service area is Laura Capell.🎊

Capell joins us from the private sector, previously working with our friends and colleagues at the University of Miami.

05/13/2026

On this day in 1949: The Riviera‑Times reported that a pre‑dawn fire gutted three floors of the Coral Gables Congregational United Church of Christ. Investigators traced the blaze to a short‑circuited attic fan, with flames racing through the west wing before firefighters brought it under control.
Explore this issue and more in the Coral Gables Memory's Coral Gables Newspapers digital collection: https://dpanther.fiu.edu/record/24171

05/12/2026

Remembering Cristóbal Díaz Ayala (1930–2026), whose passion for Cuban and Latin American music gave the world an archive like no other. The Díaz Ayala Collection at FIU Libraries (over 150,000 items strong!) is his lasting legacy, and our absolute honor to preserve and make accessible to future generations.

Cristóbal Díaz Ayala amassed the largest collection of Cuban music and related materials in the world and gave it to FIU. A lawyer and businessman, he turned an early interest into a lifelong passion.

05/04/2026

A long time ago, in a parade not so far away...
This Star Wars float with the Star Trek name rolled through the 1977 North Miami Bicentennial Parade. The same year A New Hope hit theaters and swept the country.
Photo from the Greater North Miami Historical Society, via the GNMHS Photograph Collection. See more at https://dpanther.fiu.edu/record/62990

05/01/2026

The F1 Miami Grand Prix is this weekend, and South Florida's racing obsession goes back a lot further than you might think. This is the Fulford Speedway, February 22, 1926. 20,000 people showed up in what is now North Miami Beach to watch a full field of drivers tear around a wooden oval at over 100 mph. The track's turns were banked at 50 degrees - so steep that if you slowed down, you slid off. Winner Peter DePaolo averaged 129 mph over 300 miles.
Carl Fisher (developer of Miami Beach and co-founder of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway) had dreams of making this the winter racing capital of the world. He got one race. Seven months later, the Great Miami Hurricane demolished the track. The lumber from the track was salvaged to help rebuild the city.
Photo from HistoryMiami Museum’s Claude Matlack Photograph Collection: https://dpanther.fiu.edu/record/20258