Digital Collections Center at FIU Libraries

Digital Collections Center at FIU Libraries The Digital Collections Center hosts unique collections of cultural, historical, scholarly, educatio

Part of Florida International University Libraries – https://library.fiu.edu/

Digital Collections - http://digitalcollections.fiu.edu/
The goal of the Digital Collections Center is to build online collections of enduring value for the university and broader patron community by identifying, digitizing, and preserving information resources of scholarly, educational, and civic interest. Collections include: The Miami Metropolitan Archive, Everglades Digital Library, Mile Markers, Coral Gables Memory, Tequesta Online, the Digital Library of the Caribbean, and many more. The Center’s digital collections focus on local and regional materials of historical, scientific, cultural, and educational importance. FIU Libraries’ digital preservation program adheres to international standards and best practices, documenting technical, administrative, preservation, and rights management metadata, along with the archival digital files, which are deposited in the Florida Digital Archive. Institutional Repository - http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/
The IR, FIU Digital Commons, is a repository for capturing, archiving, and disseminating the research, creative, and scholarly output of the Florida International University community. The Digital Collections Center works with departments, centers, and individual faculty to select, submit, manage, and preserve digital content in FIU Digital Commons. This includes technical reports, pre-publications, research papers, and presentations. Digital Commons offers a suite of services including FIU branded faculty webpage hosting (Selected Works), journal hosting and publishing services, collection building, as well as conference and event management and promotion. Accessing the Collections
The majority of the content served by the FIU Digital Collections Center is free and open to the public. The center will be launching a copyright and intellectual property website in the coming months in order to provide information to the university community about user and author rights as well as FIU policies related to digital collections. Disclaimer
Posts made by anyone other than the official "Digital Collections Center at FIU Libraries” do not necessarily reflect the views of the Digital Collections Center, nor Florida International University.

We went digging in the archives and found proof that Panthers have loved Dolly Parton for a long time. In November 1980,...
09/25/2026

We went digging in the archives and found proof that Panthers have loved Dolly Parton for a long time. In November 1980, SGA hosted FIU's first-ever "American Week," and one of the big events was a Dolly Parton and John Wayne Look-Alike Contest in the Rathskeller, with 25-cent b**r. Just a few weeks later, 9 to 5 hit theaters.

We lost Dolly last month and are still processing it. It's hard to think of anyone who gave more joy away so freely. She was a songwriter, businesswoman, and philanthropist, and she put millions of free books into kids' hands through her Imagination Library. Few people spent so much of a life making other people feel welcome. Happy Dolly Parton Day. 🦋 This year it means a little more.

From Élan, the 1981 FIU yearbook, Special Collections & University Archives. Browse the full yearbook on dPanther: https://dpanther.fiu.edu/record/7703

FIU Alumni

Conference planning in the 1980s was clearly ruthless, but Miami Beach had the ultimate pitch: trade frozen convention c...
09/23/2026

Conference planning in the 1980s was clearly ruthless, but Miami Beach had the ultimate pitch: trade frozen convention centers and brick-wall views for sunshine, jai alai, Cuban nightspots, and stone crabs.
Check out this vintage promo brochure from the City of Miami Beach Digital Archives, hosted in our dPanther digital repository. It’s a candid snapshot of classic South Florida marketing from decades past!
Check out the full brochure at: https://dpanther.fiu.edu/record/87894
Miami Beach Convention Center

Happy National Ice Cream Cone Day! 🍦Meet Abril Lamarque (1904–1999), a Cuban-born cartoonist, caricaturist, designer, an...
09/22/2026

Happy National Ice Cream Cone Day! 🍦

Meet Abril Lamarque (1904–1999), a Cuban-born cartoonist, caricaturist, designer, and art director who built his career in New York. In the 1920s he created Monguito, credited as the first original Spanish-language comic strip, and he invented the "radiocature," a caricature you drew at home by following his instructions over the radio. He was also an amateur magician.

Here he is doing something a little less revolutionary: enjoying a cone on a sunny day. The look on his face says he's taking this very seriously.

Explore more from the Abril Lamarque Collection at FIU Special Collections & University Archives: dpanther.fiu.edu/record/72679

09/18/2026

A century ago today, the Great Miami Hurricane came ashore before dawn — 145-mph winds, 372 lives lost, and a young boomtown changed for good. A hundred years later, the storm survives in photographs, city letters, and family stories.

The records in this slideshow come from partner collections hosted in our digital repository. Explore them at https://dpanther.fiu.edu

On this day in 1949, Miami Beach announced that being broke could land you in jail, and one local weekly wasn't having ...
09/17/2026

On this day in 1949, Miami Beach announced that being broke could land you in jail, and one local weekly wasn't having it. That week, Beach police warned that "job-hunters and destitute visitors" arriving without enough money risked arrest, even as the resort advertised nationwide for tourists. Miami Life, the tabloid Reubin Clein published for three decades, put the warning on its front page and checked a month of arrest records, reporting that only destitute defendants had been jailed.

The full editorial is worth reading for its place in Beach history - it moves from the city's civic boosterism to the era's "restricted clientele" signs before landing on a closing line only Clein would write: "It's time Miami Beach achieved adultism."

Miami Life is preserved and digitized by the Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab at FIU, with support from a Florida Humanities community project grant and copies shared by the Clein family. Read the full September 17, 1949 issue: https://dpanther.fiu.edu/record/19152

09/16/2026

Before Miami Beach's first trolley could carry a single passenger, it had to hitch a ride itself. On September 16, 1920, a crowd gathered to watch crews from Frank's Transfer Co. lower streetcar tracks' newest arrival off the back of a truck — the future of Beach transit, delivered by road.

The trolley was part of developer Carl Fisher's plan to solve a very specific problem: how to move winter tourists from the train terminal in downtown Miami to the resort hotels he was building five miles away across Biscayne Bay. The County Causeway had opened just seven months earlier, and by December, the Miami Beach Railway was running cars across it. Service lasted until 1939. (South Floridians have been debating how to get a rail travel back to the Beach more or less ever since!)

Photographer Claude Matlack documented the delivery. This image comes from the Claude Matlack Photograph Collection, digitized and held by the Museum of Miami and available online through FIU Libraries' dPanther repository: https://dpanther.fiu.edu/record/20077

In 1916, every registered voter in Miami Beach fit inside a pocket address book. Someone at town hall crossed out the pr...
09/15/2026

In 1916, every registered voter in Miami Beach fit inside a pocket address book. Someone at town hall crossed out the printed NAME AND ADDRESS and PHONE headers and penciled in new ones: Age, Color, Occupation, Poll Tax. The pages read like a founding cast list, with just over 90 names in all. Carl G. Fisher turns up in the F's. J.N. Lummus, the town's first mayor, listed his occupation as "Real Estate," as did Thomas J. Pancoast. Around them: farmers, plumbers, a sea captain, a bar pilot, and one man whose occupation reads simply "Peanuts."

What's missing tells its own story. No women appear (the 19th Amendment was still two years off). Every single name is marked "W" in the Color column. And the poll tax columns, checked "Pd." year after year, tracked who paid to keep their ballot.

On National Voter Registration Day, registering takes minutes and costs nothing. The full ledger is digitized courtesy of the Miami Beach Digital Archives, City of Miami Beach: https://dpanther.fiu.edu/record/86921

City of Miami Beach Government

A fisherman couldn't wait. On September 9, 1925, the Boynton Inlet was still a construction site, but that didn't stop t...
09/09/2026

A fisherman couldn't wait. On September 9, 1925, the Boynton Inlet was still a construction site, but that didn't stop this angler from walking to the end of a half-built jetty and casting a line into the Atlantic.

The inlet (officially the South Lake Worth Inlet) was conceived in 1923 as a way to freshen the stagnant south end of Lake Worth and open the lagoon to sport fishing. Riddle Engineering Company of West Palm Beach directed the work, and their solid concrete jetties proved sturdier than they look here: they rode out two hurricanes in 1926 without damage. The ocean finally broke through in March 1927, when spectators gathered late at night to watch the first Atlantic water flow into the lake by searchlight.

This photograph by Ray B. Dame comes from the Boynton Beach City Library Local History Archives, available through FIU's dPanther digital repository: https://dpanther.fiu.edu/record/17595

Want to learn more? The Boynton Beach Historical Society has the full story of the inlet, including the 1927 Palm Beach Post article announcing its opening: https://www.boyntonhistory.org/the-south-lake-worth-boynton-inlet-history/

09/03/2026

Before the Biltmore was a hotel (again), it was a hospital, and the hospital had a bowling alley! In this photo, patients at Pratt General Hospital in Coral Gables line up a shot on lanes built for recovering World War II servicemen.

Those lanes had a job to do. Army hospitals of the era built bowling into their "reconditioning" programs, prescribing it for both the physical and mental recovery of wounded soldiers as part of their physical and mental recovery.

This image comes from the City of Coral Gables Historical Resources Department's Coral Gables Memory collection, hosted in FIU Libraries' dPanther repository: https://dpanther.fiu.edu/record/3039

City of Coral Gables - Government Biltmore Hotel Miami Coral Gables

Say "August 24, 1992" to anyone who was in South Florida at the time, and they can tell you exactly where they were that...
08/24/2026

Say "August 24, 1992" to anyone who was in South Florida at the time, and they can tell you exactly where they were that night. Thirty-four years ago today, Hurricane Andrew came ashore near Homestead as a Category 5 storm, with sustained winds around 165 mph and gusts that outran the instruments meant to measure them.

Country Walk, a subdivision in southwest Miami-Dade, became one of the storm's most recognizable casualties: nearly every home there was destroyed, and the neighborhood's name became shorthand for the building code failures Andrew exposed. Miami Herald photographer Tim Chapman took this aerial view of one of those houses about a week after landfall, roof peeled open and walls scattered across the yard.

The photo is part of the Tim Chapman Collection at Museum of Miami, hosted in FIU's dPanther digital archive: https://dpanther.fiu.edu/record/12102

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