Laurie N. Taylor December 26th, 2007
Britain’s Queen Elizabeth is now on YouTube. Since there’s so much in terms of historical footage and in terms of history within that footage, I’m excited to see what this will mean for museums and historical materials. The Queen is on YouTube on The Royal Channel: The Official Channel of the British Monarchy. While many official organizations - political, governmental, and other - have released videos through museums and libraries, it’s interesting to see those materials being added into the regular-user interfaces where people can stumbled across them through the official-and-popular format. Seeing historical footage like “Roses for the Rose Queen” are interesting in themselves and it will be more interesting to see what others do with them, using them for teaching, research, and hopefully new creative projects.
In thinking about the Queen on YouTube, it also seems like Queen Elizabeth is always the correct queen-size, being large and small enough for any format, like the always one and more of the royal “we”. While queen-sized on US women’s clothing is used to mean large or plus-sized, it’s often a normal woman’s size. Like the large-yet-normal-size known as queen-size, Queen Elizabeth seems to be sized appropriately for any media format. Hopefully, other public figures will learn from her appropriate-sizing and size themselves to speak through different media formats in the most appropriate and productive ways possible.
Laurie N. Taylor December 26th, 2007
The technology and popular culture criticism blog Boing Boing had a recent post on search rankings. It mentions that five years ago, a bet was made that blogs would rank higher than the New York Times website. This indeed came true, largely because the New York Times chose to restrict their content through a signup and paid subscriptions rather than to make the information free. Now, the New York Times has changed their methods and made their site open, but they’ve already lost out on the advertising revenue and on the reputation value for being a free information source.
In an online environment, information that can be most accessed is most valuable, so free information has more value by being freely available and then mashed/added to another system that generates revenue. Making money from free information does mean learning new ways to work and new ways to use information, and that’s been a difficult change for many companies. Hopefully, more corporations will soon see that information should be free and that new, emerging markets which make information more usable, entertaining, or comprehensible can be marketed at a higher rate.
The new online economics could also make for greater recognition of usability, which could enhance information vendors and sources and then reverberate into other areas. Ideally, small changes like this could build into a cultural recognition of the value of giving-things-for-free in terms of the return of reputation and community. Gift economies do seem to have a system where things are given for free, but that concept of “free” still results in a return on investment (ROI) and that’s what companies should soon be leveraging in their online information ventures.
Laurie N. Taylor December 20th, 2007
The Digital Library has been experimenting with pop-up and movable books, in part to abstract methods for working with movables into optimum ways for representing books as textual objects. One of the projects that came of the work with pop-ups is this version of a Cinderella Panoramic Book.
We’re also looking at a Flash page flipper for some of the scrapbooks and other flip-like books. We’ll be working to create files and then reconstruct the Flash page-flipping in Open Laszlo (so we can migrate it forward in DHTML and in Flash as the versions change).
Laurie N. Taylor December 19th, 2007
The Comics Digital Collection is slowly building, and the scans of the Imagerie d’Epinal broadsheets will soon be online. While they’re still processing, they’re also online within Picasa so that others can see them even if only the smaller versions. It’s great to have rare materials added online so that others can use them and it’s even better knowing that these are only some of the many materials being added.
These pictorial broadsheets known as the Imagerie d’Epinal sheets told simple tales and were made by the Imagerie Pellerin of France, and then reprinted by the Humoristic Publishing Co. in Kansas, Missouri. These are the reprints and are important for the history of comics and printing. In Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer, David Kunzle compares Töpffer’s “kind of graphic naïvete and that of the truly unschooled and awkward Imagerie d’Epinal” (77). Kunzle argues “the subsequent history of the comic strip occupies this middle groudm but inclining more to Töpffer than imagerie populaire” (77). Kunzle’s overall analysis places Töpffer alongside the likes of Gustave Doré, William Hogarth, Willhelm Busch, and George Cruikshank in publications like Punch, Le Charivari, L’Illustration, and Illustrated London News.
References: Kunzle, David. Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer. Jackson, MS: UP of MS, 2007.
Laurie N. Taylor December 7th, 2007
The Eric Williams Memorial Collection is sponsoring a “School Bags” Essay Competition. The deadline is right around the corner, December 17, 2007, but the prizes great! Read more about it Eric Williams School Bags Essay Competition Flier
Laurie N. Taylor December 4th, 2007
UF’s Libraries are testing different methods and uses of the library-buildings as third spaces (the not home and not work, where you go for social time and a break from the confines of home&work). This Thursday we’re testing Guitar Hero in Library West (third floor from 12-2pm). We’ve also set up a game section of our website for events like this and for game-like approaches to traditional library services. It’s fun for us to hone our skills and develop new ones through connecting games and the library, and games are an easy way to break traditional assumptions on what should and should not be in a library.
This event is also great because it was requested by a student, who’s now helping with the planning and set up process. He wanted to do it because he felt Guitar Hero was awesome and he wanted to share. This acceptance of the library as-place and as-information-point is an important shift, and the next steps should be only more fun and more exciting. As more information goes online, new approaches to information (access, spaces, connections) will also require a heavy emphasis on ways to play with and rethink information.
Laurie N. Taylor December 3rd, 2007
Matthew Daley and Chris McHale (along with other UF Library folks, and maybe others–I only know a couple of the people in the video so I’m not sure who everyone is) made an INFO ZOMBIES film for the SPARC Video Contest. Since the SPARC contest centers around information sharing, the idea of sharing information as a viral-need, like the Zombie urge to eat brains, is a nice, funny combination of information needs and zombies. It’s also neat to see a zombie-cure in the form of information.
Zombies are always fun, especially when they’re INFO ZOMBIES!
Laurie N. Taylor December 3rd, 2007
One of the more interesting new Web 2.0-style mashups are library and museum partnerships. Both have large collections that need to be interconnected and digitized for easier and expanded access. However, libraries have traditionally focused on information access and museums on exhibit-access with the display significant to the materials. As more special collections go online and more information in general, display and access are both becoming more important for libraries and museums. The image above is a shot from a SketchUp file of Gallery B in the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. This is just one small work-in-progress, but it’s an artifact of a much larger process and it’s also really neat to explore the inside of a museum from outside the museum.
We also have these files for a virtual exhibit using the Special Collections Exhibit Area for an exhibit on the Art of Letterpress. Hopefully we’ll soon be adding more contextual materials on exhibits and exhibit design, as well as more exhibits themselves.