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USF Libraries is collaborating with Dr. Thomas Hallock (USF St. Petersburg campus) and Dr. Amanda Hagood (Eckerd College) to archive a series of columns called City Wilds for the newspaper Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. The articles are intended to highlight various creek sheds around the Tampa Bay area. Dr. Hallock finds it important to make sure the conversation on this topic is sustained. In an effort to get the word out on these pieces, Dr. Hallock and Dr. Hagood created and put into use an easily taggable hashtag name, #creekshed.
The project’s principal authors, Thomas Hallock (USF) and Amanda Hagood (Eckerd College), use narrative to better understand headwaters–broadly defined. We want to know when a creek becomes a culvert or ditch; the lost or misremembered histories behind active or buried springs; the relationship between water quality and social health; and the boundaries between built and natural environments, for even the smallest aquatic systems feeding Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
You can explore the #Creekshed Collection online on Digital Commons: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/creekshed_collection/
Librarians worked with the professors to better understand their articles and the places that inspired them. Working together to find, or in some cases take, photographs of these hyper-local spaces, the team created an ArcGIS StoryMap of the project with images and abstracts regarding the original articles. The Special Collections departments on both campuses also had fascinating glimpses of the waterways dating back over 100 years, providing needed context to the changes taking place at these natural sites. The exhibit offers a bit of a now and thenperspective and offers a peak into some of the most popular articles from the column.
To archive the #creekshed project, the articles were added to a collection on Digital Commons @ USF, our institutional repository. We geolocated the articles to the different Tampa Bay creek sheds using longitude and latitude. The articles were then pinpointed on a GoogleMap to create an interactive resource that allows visitors to select titles or a point on the map to discover articles.
To enhance the articles, we added an image collection that is also geolocated on a GoogleMap to create a more engaging collection. We next added links to datasets from the USF WaterAtlas that contain data from the local creek sheds. We hope to add more datasets from interdisciplinary courses at USF.