Digital Library Center Blog | UF

In the 1970s Gainesville, Florida was home to many of the radical women of the Women’s Movement. Despite a rich web of activity and impact, much of this history is in danger of being lost or at least obscured by a lack-of-presence from current and accessible avenues. Luckily, researchers like Leila Adams are not only collecting the archival materials but also digitizing the materials to ensure preservation and access, thereby ensuring proper representation of the Women’s Movement.

The Radical Women in Gainesville collection is rapidly growing and more materials will be added soon. As materials are added and slowly populate through the web, hopefully articles like “From Barricades to Blogs” questioning the contemporary relevance of the Women’s Movement will have their answers and a whole slew of better questions, like “what can the current battles for equality and social justice learn from the Women’s Movement?”

UF’s Digital Library Center is working on digitizing videos and putting them into the Digital Collections. In order to make sure these videos are preserved for the long run, we’re saving large and small files and taking the necessary steps. In order to make sure they’re found and used as soon as possible, we’re loading them into Youtube. While many of the videos are standard educational and institutional materials (interesting, but not email-forwarding type stuff), we have one wonderful video of books vs. bugs.

Bugs vs. Books Techno
Bugs vs. Books Darker

The video was made by the Preservation Department and the Nematology and Entomology Department and it’s three minutes of bugs eating books. The video was made so that people know about how dangerous bugs can be for books, but it’s also just a wonderful video. It’s also wonderful to see what sort of conversations these videos spark. When Cathy, our Preservation Officer, showed the video Erich, our former Preservation officer and now head of the Digital Library Center, noted that smoky brown roaches normally won’t eat books, since they normally live outside and generally prefer books older books that used animal byproducts in their binding. This led to a great discussion of bugs versus books and I learned that cockroaches normally eat books only when other food isn’t available, and that this happens when students leave and thus close the “bug cafeterias,” otherwise known as the food and drink in trash cans. The discussion also covered our worst case of roach-book-killing, which was years ago in an older building where duplicate law books had been stored by a well-meaning scholar. Then, the books were left alone while the building was renovated. When the misplaced books were found again, the bugs had eaten through the covers leaving only the pages inside. Luckily, the books were duplicates, but all of those folks saving things in Florida garages and mini-storage units should take heed–when bugs attack books, books lose. Or do they?

I’ve uploaded two versions of the video with audio (from Creative Commons-licensed music) and the short video clips from the video. These clips are for anyone to use in making remixes! Please make and share your own stories of bugs versus books. For music, there are loads of Creative Commons fair-to use music sources and CC lists many of them: http://creativecommons.org/audio.

The video citation information is: “Books vs. American Cockroaches (Periplaneta Americana)” by the University of Florida Smathers Library Preservation Dept. and University of Florida Entomology & Nematology Dept., Producer Cathy Martyniak, Videography & editing Richard Martyniak. Music online for the techno version and darker music.

Share your stories of bugs vs. books! Do bugs win?

The UF Libraries’ Preservation Department has started a retrospective dissertation scanning project to help solve problems of access to research, but UF needs permission for Internet Distribution from each author. Authors can grant permissions by completing this form and sending it to the address on the form.

UF requires all new dissertations to be submitted electronically, but that leaves decades upon decades of paper and microfilm-only versions. Finding all of the UF alumni to assign permissions is a monumental task. The retrospective dissertation scanning project has been featured in various news venues (newsletters and the newspaper, emails have been sent to alumni with email addresses on file, letters have been sent to addresses on file) and more communications are planned. Other efforts to get the word out include working through departmental and college contacts and larger and smaller news venues, but this is a slow process so anything automated or anything that easily grows on its own would be a major help. With all of this work the response is slowly building, but I’m hoping that this blog post helps get the word out, too.

Having the dissertations and theses online will be great for researchers and society because it will build the overall pool of shared and available knowledge. Like the picture above, having these materials online will also show a bit of history - UF’s history; the history of a particular idea, research topic, field, researcher; and more. Making high quality research, even older research, openly available to everyone changes the information landscape and opening new doors and allowing for many new possibilities.

If anyone has ideas for more keywords or ways to share the information through faster channels, please add comments to help the project. Authors can give permissions through this online form and mailing it to the address at the bottom of the form, and those who know authors can share the form with the authors. For more information, see the Preservation Department’s page on the Retrospective Dissertation Scanning Project or see this example of a digitized dissertation.

To best help this message get to past authors, here are keywords to further it along through the magic inner workings of the Internet and search engines: UF dissertation, dissertations, thesis, PhD, EdD, doctorate, doctoral, graduates, alumni, former graduates, graduate students, research, retrospective, online, microfilm, print, past, online, digitize, share, archives, scanning, prior, past, old, database, University of Florida, UF, gators, Florida alumni, alumnus, open access, online, openly accessible, make available, share, digitization, digital

One of the major benefits of large digitization projects is that important and amazing artifacts, hidden in the archives, come to the surface and are easy to access not just by themselves but also within their overall context. One of these amazing artifacts is Droopy the Drew Field Mosquito by Harry Lampert. Harry Lampert is best known as co-creator of the DC Comics superhero The Flash. Lampert began his career at the Fleischer studios and worked on comics - including Betty Boop, Popeye, and KoKo the Clown - wrote humor comic books, worked on gag cartoons for many periodicals - including The New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, and Time - and taught cartooning at the New York School of Visual Arts.

Harry Lampert’s Droopy the Drew Field Mosquito was published in the Drew Field Echoes, the newspaper for the Drew Field Army Airbase (in Tampa, Florida). The University of South Florida holds the physical issues and now the Digital Collections contain the first strip, published in August 1942, and all following strips through February 3, 1944, as well as an article on Droopy from August 13, 1943. The Droopy comics are important for comics scholars because of their popularity and influence, their place within Lampert’s work, and their role within the larger history of military comics and publications. Within the Drew Field Echoes papers, studies of fan cultures also benefit because the paper includes articles that specifically show the fan/community-support culture with articles like “Droopy’s Daddy Takes Himself a Wife.”

The individual Droopy comics are compiled on this page, and each is linked to the Drew Field Echoes issue in which it appears.

As the Digital Collections continue to grow, more treasures will certainly be found. Most fortuitously Will Canova, the project coordinator for the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, happens to be an excellent comics reader who ensures that important comics get the attention they rightly deserve.

UF’s Digital Library Center is still working on making video files work properly through our Digital Collections. In the meantime, we’re adding videos to Youtube so that people can access the videos since some of them are really neat.

Thus far, we’ve loaded the Preservation Book Care video in two parts because of Youtube’s file size and length limitations: part 1 and part 2.

I also separated out a very short clip of a roach eating a book part because it’s great. The clip is super-zoomed in on the roach and it just looks wonderfully sci-fi. The Library Preservation Officer has an entomology video connection and so we’ll hopefully have more wonderful videos like this soon.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an post about libraries in the digital age. The post notes that digitization projects often lead to a patchwork of online materials that aren’t available within an integrated interface. This is certainly true for the time being, but steps toward integration can be seen in the WorldCat’s full catalog listings for so many different libraries and from corporations as they attempt to catalog or at least extract catalog-style metadata from information sources. For instance, Microsoft Live Labs’ pages have a note on their work on entity abstraction and the image of it is listed here. I started noticing the same sort of information in Google Search results, and here’s another sample image.

While the map linked from this slideshow isn’t actually accurate because nearly all of the images are from the University of Florida’s original Library, Smathers East, and I spread them out for easier viewing, the map does accurately show why there’s reason to be excited because Picasa has improved once again. Not only can the images in Picasa be mapped, the images now show as small icons of the images instead of the generic picture icon, and the individual images can be clicked on and enlarged and they can be played in a slide-show format across the map.

The slideshow with the map is a great way to embed complicated information (this picture taken here, before this picture which was here, and after these pictures which were taken in this sequence in these places) and makes it allow easily visible. Plus, this is all available online without requiring any additional software so it’s even easier for users. This sort of elegant design is exactly what more programs need and it’s exactly what the Digital Library Center needs for many of our projects. We need ways that our users can easily access our materials in ways that contextualize the materials. While we still need more functionality because we need the same material-mapping onto a real map and we need it added to a chronological mapping system so we can locate materials in space and time, and over time (years, time periods, timeline-event markers). Other downloadable applications like Google Earth offer us more functionality and almost as much ease for our users, and each step toward more data integration and ease takes us closer to our current goal of modeling systems for a historical virtual world that users can see through time and space.