Digital Library Center Blog | UF

UF’s public awareness campaign is “The University of Florida is the foundation for The Gator Nation” and then sub-campaign taglines like “The Gator Nation is everywhere.” While it does sound a little sci-fi overlord-esque, it’s actually true in that UF does have land everywhere and does have projects conducted all over the state and all over the world. UF is also one of the largest public schools and has alumni everywhere. If Gator fans are counted, then this becomes even more validated because Gator fans are everywhere. I’m not a sports person, so I only know about any of the sports when people tell me or when my students are on the teams (the students work so hard that it’s almost an ethical imperative to keep up as a teacher). However, I’m so often on phone calls or emails with someone and they hear/read “UF” or “Gainesville” and I hear/read “Go Gators!” in return. It happens so often that it almost no longer seems strange, even when they’re in California or Texas or Canada or wherever. What had seemed strange was not that the recognition of UF and the general friendliness of the response, but that the people were actually Gator fans.

Looking at the image from Puerto Rico, with the grounds keeper in a Gator shirt seems so fitting for UF’s presence across the globe and for Halloween (Dia de Los Muertos).

UF is a partner in the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), so I was excited to see that the book Caribbean Libraries in the 21st Century: Changes, Challenges, and Choices edited by Shamin Renwick and Cheryl Peltier-Davis is available. The table of contents with all twenty-five chapter titles and authors is listed on the Library of Congress website and gives an useful sense of the full book, and I hope to grab the UF Library copy tomorrow and I’ll post a review as soon as I’ve read it. It looks really interesting for my more pragmatic purposes and for all interested in library collaborations and in the evolution of libraries.

This is the mindmap I made for the Baldwin Digital Library Project using Mind42, which is a new online mindmapping service. Mind42 is free and allows for collaboration, so it’s a nice service for many uses. However, I’m hoping to find something that will display the nodes in motion (like the Visual Thesaurus but I’m not looking for the search/query functionality). I want the motion purely for visual interest, but I’m having trouble finding something free and easy for use in creating the visual-motion mindmap. I’m guessing a simple Flash animation would be best for my needs, but I’d appreciate any recommendations for something that I could recommend to folks who don’t have Flash so that I can get people interested in mapping their workflows and then playing with them for efficiency.

I’m obviously behind in my fan-reading of all things Google because I just noticed that they have Walter Crane’s Line and Form online (and I was planning to scan it next week when I noticed I couldn’t find it online to view or purchase easily). They don’t seem to have the cover of it, either that or they’re choosing not to show it in their cover browse view. At any rate, it’s wonderful that they have this online solving the issue of access to this important work for art, design, book history, and so many other fields.

On November 15, Stephanie Haas (the Assistant Director for UF’s Digital Library Center) and Matt Mariner (our Institutional Repository coordinator) will be presenting at UF on UF’s Institutional Repository. Underlying their presentation and the IR itself is Open Access. Open Access is the academic’s version of Open Source, it demands that scholarly materials be presented at no cost, quickly, permanently, and completely (full-text) online.

This PowerPoint video shows how the Open Access movement is growing as it spreads across the world. UF is one node in the larger Open Access network, which shares information for all. Stephanie and Matt’s presentation on UF’s IR will be November 15 at 1pm in

UF’s IR is the next step in a long process of moving materials to Open Access to ensure that the materials are freely available in the Smathers Library Conference Room. The presentation will cover all the work that’s been done and all the work left to do. It will be a great presentation for anyone interested in Open Access, Institutional Repositories, or data collection or organization more generally.

UF’s Digital Library Center has digitized this Grebo Mask. I’m not a mask expert of any sort, but the description tells that the Grebo Mask is possibly Kru (Liberia and Ivory Coast), in the shape of a bird with four eyes, representing a seer (Wood) circa 1960.

The Grebo Mask alone is a beautiful artifact, but what’s more interesting is that the Digital Library Center is working on a standard method for putting these images together in a looping clip, where users can click to stop the clip or to zoom in on the object. A number of museum websites offer spinning objects or objects that can be zoomed in on, but I haven’t found any examples as good as our full 360-rotation and depth of zooming. As museums and libraries move to digitize more materials, the best methods not only make materials accessible in the same ways as they would have been in non-digital format, but in ways that improve their usability through digitization.

Masks and other object-artifacts are often presented in museums encased in glass, so that only parts of the objects are viewable and the detail of the view is hindered by lighting, glass or ropes defining the space, and eyesight. Digitizing objects in ways that respect the materiality of objects allows users to see and study the objects in new ways while working within the traditional constraints of not handling, and thus not damaging the objects.

Digitization approaches that respect the materiality of object dovetails into digital preservation initiatives and into more recent studies on the importance of objects-as-objects, like Sherry Turkle’s edited collection Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, which studies the importance of objects for inspiration and thought patterns (it’s much like Donald Norman’s work on how designs affect the way users think about and use objects in Things that Make Us Smart and The Design of Everyday Things). I’m excited to see where this project takes us and to see the many problems and solutions we find in presenting digital versions of objects.

The Spatial Information Services Unit of the George A. Smathers Libraries is hosting UF’s inaugural GIS Day on Wednesday, November 14, 2007 from 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. This all day event will showcase the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to the academic community and the public. The event will include guest speakers from UF’s Geomatics Department and the Geoplan Center as well as interactive geocaching opportunities. It will be an opportunity to meet with professional and expert users of GIS technology. Lectures and poster sessions are open to the public and unrestricted. No registration fee required for any session or activity. Registration is highly recommended for the geocaching game since space is limited. All sessions will be held in Smathers Library (East) Room.

A detailed agenda and further information along with online registration for the geocaching game can be found online or contact the GIS Spatial Information Services Unit. Held each year on the Wednesday of National Geographic Society’s Geography Awareness Week (November 11–17 in 2007), GIS Day is a global event that celebrates GIS technology, the innovative technology that uses geography to bring countless benefits to the world. Further information can be found online. The Smathers Libraries will provide an opportunity for those curious about GIS to see its applications in action. A GIS is a computer-based mapping tool that takes information from a database about a location, such as streets, buildings, water features, and terrain, and turns it into visual layers. The ability to see geographic features on a map gives users a better understanding of a particular location, enabling planners, analysts, and others to make informed decisions about their communities.

In working on some of the comics materials here and setting up the Alice exhibit, I was looking at other online exhibits and kept stumbling across online comics exhibits. Each of these are different in terms of material covered and scope, but together these are absolutely fantastic for comics research.

The exhibits I’ve found so far (in random order) are:

• The Yale Library exhibit collection on comics, with the collection group titled the Illustrated Word
• Library of Congress’ exhibit on Blondie and UF’s exhibit on Blondie
• UF Exhibit on Superhero Comics
• Early Comic Strips at Duke
• Several from San Diego State University including work by Donna Barr and women cartoonists
• The University of Buffalo’s comics cover browser
• 9/11 Comics from the Library of Congress
• Japanese Woodblock prints at the University of California, San Francisco
• And, the Cartoon Art Museum lists many others

I found all of these looking for ideas for the Alice exhibit, but now I’m still looking because I’d like to do a comics exhibit once I have enough materials digitized. I was able to get the Superman Fanzine digitized, so that’s a great start and other materials are slowly being added to the comics collection as well.

Yahoo recently improved their web search to by adding related terms and other possible searches in a directory-esque structure for general searches. The change means that general searches bring up the other concepts. This is an interesting and useful change because it will likely help people improve their searches and their search abilities by teaching people how the search works (at least in terms of the words-concepts and general hierarchy) and how to think of their terms/topics in order to get the best results.

I’m hoping this will be a great way for people to learn how to better search by searching. Because the learning aspect is embedded and helpful, and requires no additional effort, this should be really useful and really well used by many. This is also a great example of an interface being more complex and less complicated at the same time. This is elegant design because it embeds the additional material after the search instead of requiring users to see or use new information until after it benefits them.

The Afterlife of Alice in Wonderland Exhibit is now open. The exhibit website has some of the text and images, and it’s here. The exhibit also has a video on Youtube and a huge slideshow with images from the exhibit materials.