Digital Library Center Blog | UF

Right now, I’m working on digitizing multiple versions of books about characters from the golden age of children’s literature, and this is one of the first Pinocchio books I’ve gotten online. I hope to have a number more soon. The variety of book forms and illustrations is extremely interesting, as each book offers a slightly different look at Pinocchio as a character.

One of my current goals is to get materials online from awesome scholars who have the copyright to their work (often academic books return the copyright to authors after a set period of time). I’m extremely happy that the first book I’ve gotten to do this with is Donald Ault’s Narrative Unbound. Not only is Narrative Unbound important for Blake studies and imagetext/visual rhetoric/comics/textual studies, it’s also an important book because of what it shows about copyright and because it’s by Donald Ault, a great scholar who I’ve been lucky enough to work with.

There’s so much more that I could say about Narrative Unbound, but the book speaks more clearly for itself.

This is the biscuit from 1913 referenced in the last post. As the story for this biscuit goes, in 1913 a UF student was so displeased with campus food that he mailed a biscuit to a friend to show how inedible the food was. The biscuit, stamped and addressed, has survived these many years and the libraries’ Preservation Department has ensured it will survive many more. The actual biscuit can be seen in Special Collections, inside its protective housing, or online in black and white and in color and zoomable.

I love the fact that UF has a digitized biscuit–it’s a great object to show how digitization can help showcase weird objects and make them accessible to more people. Plus, the multiple images and views really capture the biscuit well. The biscuit itself is an important historical object for UF and for the history of the mail system. I’ve chatted to everyone I know about this biscuit and one person mentioned that many schools used to have art classes on postal art, where students would try to mail weird shapes or designs and then see how the package is treated or do interesting things with them (like a Postcard-of-a-Secret style art project without the internet), but with 9/11, new mail restrictions made a lot of the projects impossible.

Another super-cool object is Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ manuscript for her children’s book Jacob’s Ladder. The story was written when paper was expensive, and so it was sold on rolls. The story is on two sides of a 15 foot sheet of paper, and it’s just an interesting object to see. (The weird line to the left is a small version of one page–it’s ratio is approximately 1 to 20.)

I’m the digital projects librarian in the University of Florida’s Digital Library Center. This blog chronicles my work with the Digital Library Center. In the DLC, I get to digitize various materials including books, paintings, manuscripts, objects (like this biscuit), audio, and more. Digitizing materials is only part of my work, though. I’m largely working on projects to help people better access and use the collections, which includes writing lesson plans, grants, creating learning objects, creating mashups (like adding materials from the digital collections to Google Earth and Maps), and more.

Working in the Digital Library Center is fascinating and it’s not what many people would expect. While we’re digitizing materials and putting them online, it isn’t a fast or an easy process. We have all sorts of equipment and we work closely with Special Collections (rare books and amazing materials) and with Preservation (book binding, chemical additives to de-acidify and preserve materials, and all sorts of exciting tools, even some from the early 1900s).

The library work, materials, and tools are all fascinating, and the work helps build the information commons that helps everyone, including academia itself at a time when many people have lost sight of what higher education does–creates knowledge and adds that to the foundations of society, forever building more information for use by society. Digitizing materials, especially through things like the Institutional Repository, helps to make academia more visible (instead of existing as a powerful, but largely invisible force in terms of direct, significant impact).

As this blog begins to build, I hope it will become a space for discussion of digital libraries and digital media repositories in general. I’m also a game studies scholar, which is how I’m affiliated with Gameology, but I didn’t think all of the information I wanted to share would be relevant to games and even digital media studies. So, this is a separate blog for all of the exciting digital library happenings.