The Panama Canal Museum Collection (PCMC) at UF (https://pcmc.uflib.ufl.edu/) includes millions of pages and items documenting primarily the 20th Century history of the Canal, the former Canal Zone, and the Republic of Panama. The collection includes a wide variety of materials including books, periodicals, maps, oral history interviews, artifacts, and archival materials such as photos, scrapbooks, letters, etc. Most of the published materials (maps, books, etc.) can be discovered in the library catalog.
To discover and access archival materials, please contact John Nemmers or Betsy Bemis. Some PCMC resources are available digitally as described below.
The collection inventory database is available at https://apps.uflib.ufl.edu/pcmci/viewItems.aspx. This includes descriptions of archival holdings (photos, letters, etc.) and also artifacts and some publications. This database is currently being developed, so not all of the search features are functional at this time. Please contact John or Betsy for assistance.
Margarita Vargas-Betancourt has a good guide to resources https://guides.uflib.ufl.edu/panamasilver (see the tab named "Materials on West Indians in the Panama Canal Museum Collection").
Digital Collection
Available in both UF Digital Collections (UFDC) and the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC):
dLOC includes digitized materials from UF and also from other institutions around the world, so you might want to start there when searching for digital content because it includes more content.
The PCMC Oral History Program https://pcmc.uflib.ufl.edu/research/oral-histories/ was created to document the story of the Canal in the words of the people who lived it; capturing the details of life that are often not discussed in publications, not captioned in photographs, or would otherwise be lost. The oral histories are freely available online in the Panama and the Canal Oral Histories digital collection: https://ufdc.ufl.edu/collections/ohpcm.
As part of our Oral History Program, we are partnering with Pan Caribbean Sankofa https://www.cgmcemeteryfoundation.org/pan-caribbean-sankofa on a project to record and preserve oral histories narrated specifically by people of West Indian descent. Members of Pan Caribbean Sankofa conduct the interviews, and UF preserves and provides access to them as part of the Panama and the Canal Oral Histories collection. More information about the project is available on our project page: https://pcmc.uflib.ufl.edu/research/oral-histories/sankofa/.
Most of these interviews include both a recording (audio or video) and a transcription (PDF). For example, if you view the Interview with Marvin Gordon https://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00081356/00001 you can click on "PDF Files" to see the transcription and "Videos" to watch the interview.
There are several interviews that are not online yet because they are still being transcribed. If you're looking for specific topics or people, ask Betsy Bemis or John Nemmers if they are aware of any interviews that aren't online yet.
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