The Association of Research Libraries recently released a new book, Celebrating Research. The book includes UF’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, among many others as a
compendium is a sampling of the remarkable abundance of collections available for use in the member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). It is not a comprehensive view or a directory but instead an array of profiles that exemplify a spectrum of rare and special collections in research libraries. Special collections have been broadly construed to encompass the distinctive, the rare and unique, emerging media, born-digital, digitized materials, uncommon, non-standard, primary, and heritage materials. (”Preface”)
While many of these rare materials are available in reprint or online, far more are not available other than in physical form. This compendium is like a traveling guide, highlighting only some of the particular treasures held by research libraries. For those interested in seeing some of the Baldwin Library’s gems, we’re continuously working to digitizing more materials for the Baldwin Library Digital Collection. However despite our work, many more books remain in the closed stacks, some of which aren’t even haven’t even made it to being listed in the library catalog.
A few weeks ago I was talking to a student about how the Digital Library Center grew out of the Preservation Department and its work in microfilming. The student asked me to explain what microfilm was because she’d heard of it, but didn’t know. I explained through older movies when people are researching crimes and go to the library and sit in front of a big screen and use a knob to flip through pages. Later on, I thought about how others unfamiliar with microfilm will need to know what microfilm is and why it’s important, so I went to YouTube to try and find an example. I found great “how to” videos like this one are available to help new users, but not fun clips from movies. I expected to find those clips from media studies classes doing media archaeology or research on dead media.
Is microfilm considered a dead media yet, or is it just waiting to be fully reborn in digital form? Given user preference it seems dead, but it can’t die because so much information only exists on microfilm. In fact, before the Digital Library Center began, preserving and sharing materials at the University of Florida was accomplished through microfilming. While microfilm is a tedious and unextensible form, many materials are on it that aren’t available in their original form or any other than the film. This is especially true of the masses of fragile materials like newspapers, where there’s simply too much to save it all in the original form given the sheer volume and given the high level of work needed because of the weak material type.
In honor of microfilm’s importance and it’s slow demise, these are some of the many cinematic moments that use microfilm to show research (on mysteries! on monsters):
Books based on Girl and Boy Scouts have grown popular recently with the release of The Daring Book for Girls and The Dangerous Book for Boys. Complementing those scout-style guides are the actual Scout materials, like the Eagle Scout Book of Gold from which the page above comes.
This wonderful artifact, the Eagle Scout Book of Gold is from the Alachua County Public Library’s Heritage Collection. The book shows Eagle Scouts in Gainesville, Florida from 1941-1965 (the cover says it only goes until 1955, but the contents cover through 1965). The pictures of each of the Scouts and their short letters on what becoming an Eagle Scout has meant to each of them is a wonderful snapshot of history, of the individual Scouts, and of the Gainesville community.
Some of UF’s video archives are now online. While most of the sports videos are in copyright and can’t be loaded online, there are tons of great videos that can be and we’re starting to slowly load them.
I switched to the new name so that it was clear that these are UF Libraries’ archival videos, but I don’t yet know how to transfer the videos from the other two accounts, so if anyone knows an easy way to do this, please let me know.
Progress on loading these will continue to be slow because of the time involved. We’re processing for preservation (converting to a normal format, saving, and loading to UFDC for online access, and then saving to another format and sometimes editing for YouTube since the videos have to be under 10MB and under 10 minutes for each upload). It’s a long process, but it’s nice to see some of the videos up!
The Gainesville Sun has an article on the Sanborn Maps of Florida. The maps in public domain (prior to 1923) are online in UF’s Digital Collections and the Map Library–which houses all sorts of fabulous antique, literary, flood, and other maps–holds the rest. The Map Library is a treasure trove of wonderful, playful materials and this page lists some of the main categories for all of the wonders. The image to the left is from one of those wonders.
UF’s Libraries is a great work environment, as is the Digital Library Center in particular. We’re all friendly and fun, and this week we’re having a triple birthday celebration with three people having birthdays within the week. In light of our collective birthdays, and our hard work with nearly 1.5 million pages in the Digital Collections and more loading each day (and many audio and video files that can’t be counted in pages), these pictures are for us!
We’re still working on implementing OpenLaszlo for creating film objects, but I wanted to share the Grebo Mask in Flash (in part so I can always find it when people ask). The photos for the mask are already online, so this is just the in-motion version. The full version of the mask in motion is here.
“This is crucial, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there, durable, indefinitely reuseable, an object of value.”
The quote above is from page 38 of “Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading,” by Ursula K. Le Guin in Harper’s Magazine (Vol. 316, No. 1983, February 2008, p. 33-38), and it speaks to the issue of materiality for digitization. Digital initiatives have rightfully focused on access to book contents, or access to information. Given the technological limitations for even this, with the difficulties from copyright and costs of mass digitization, access to information has been a lofty goal alone. Now however, with ever-increasing screen sizes and touch screens entering popular use through the MacAir, iPhone, Nintendo DS, and others, the object-ness of the book must be further considered.
In Evocative Objects, Sherry Turkle explains “We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with” (5) and this love includes the object of the book. The design of an interface impacts its usability based on the way the user feels about the interface. Donald Norman has shown that people find “prettier” interfaces easier to use, so the interface is also a consideration in working through to a means for representing the book-as-object in a digital form. I don’t have any easy answers for how to best go about this representation, but I’m working on it for my upcoming presentation at the University of Florida’s Comics Conference, and I hope to post more about it soon. In the meantime, I’m considering the object qualities of digitized comics, the interface(s) in which they are represented, and the relation of digital libraries and museums in terms of needs and problems for showing the qualities of objects and addressing the users’ desires for those object-qualities.
In working toward the new virtual libraries pages, the UF Libraries’ Library 2.0 Group is also working on tools so that users can use library services more easily. These tools are on the new tools page, and include links to a Firefox toolbar that searches the library catalog, library services related to games, and how to get RSS feeds from the catalog for use in readers and how to add them to web pages. These are small, useful tools for users and we’re also working on the larger virtual library pages which will incorporate these and loads of other resources. Other libraries have tons of tools as well, and it’s amazing to see the variety and diversity of tools, so as we get feedback from patrons we will add to or alter existing tools to best meet their needs.
