Digital Library Center Blog | UF

Laurie N. Taylor March 27th, 2008

Meridian International center is hosting an exhibition, Jam Session: America’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World, on Thursday, April 3, 2008. The exhibition will feature photographs and documents drawn from archives around the country. The brochure cover image, shown above, includes Dizzy Gillespie’s horn from a Cuban magazine, held at the University of Florida and scanned for especially for Jam Session. Unfortunately, the magazine is under copyright so we couldn’t put it online, but the Jam Session exhibit will be filled with many important items not online, but far too wonderful to miss. The exhibit:

chronicles the tours of American jazz legends as they traveled the globe on behalf of the U.S. State Department. From the mid-1950s through the 1970s, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and others served as cultural diplomats. They toured through over 35 foreign countries in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Middle East and North Africa, where they played their world-famous music and interacted with citizens—promoting a positive view of the United States at a time when Cold War tensions were at their height.

The exhibit even opens with a concert on April 3, at 6:30pm. See more about the exhibit and related events here. I wish I could make it, but if someone else does, please share comments and photos of the exhibit!

• exhibit , Collection Items
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Laurie N. Taylor March 23rd, 2008

In August, the Digital Library Center proudly announced breaking the one million page mark, with over a million pages online for more than “20 collections, representing more than 44,000 titles in more than 52,000 volumes.” Now, just 7 months later we’ve added slightly over another 60% of that to the collections for a total of 1,621,841 pages, over 5,1746 titles (up from 44,000) and 67,487 volumes (up from 52,000). That means we’ve been producing almost 10% of our total holdings each month for the past 7 at nearly 100,000 pages a month!

The incredible production rate is far more incredible when the types of pages are considered. Large scale digitization initiatives produce far more pages than this, but any comparison would be apples to alligators because our pages are from all sorts of documents, photographs, maps, video, audio, and more. Each file requires metadata (title, author, and a lot more) so books are relatively quick per item for page count. Letters, maps, and photographs are much slower with the same information often required for each page. Plus the 100,000 pages have been produced over the fall to spring semester break and spring break, times when student workers are in short supply, and when many staff people take their own vacations. The page count also can’t accurately reflect the audio and video files, which are counted as a single file for any video or audio clip, even if that one page really means an hour long video, with all of the required processing. Even large printed materials skew aren’t accurately represented by pages given that a single page map will often be several square feet in size, requiring additional processing and time for a single page. Despite the difficulties in reporting fully accurate statistics, the production rate remains extremely impressive and what’s even more impressive is thinking about how many people all of these pages, and all of these materials, will help. Of course, many of the materials are also books like the cover image above, which is from Susan Proudleigh by Herbert G. de Lisser. The book is well out of print and was rare and hard to find, so hard to find that this was actually digitized from a photocopy because that’s what was readily available. But now Susan Proudleigh is available for all.

The fast and steady production is due to a great crew of dedicated workers (including students, some of whom have been at the DLC for multiple years), great technologies that we all work to constantly improve, and constant work to streamline digitization work flows. While we may not be able to much faster than this current speed of roughly 100,000 pages a month, and we may go slower during the summer with missing student workers, 100,000 pages is still a great service for the University of Florida, the University Libraries, and every citizen as all benefit from more information being openly available.

• uf , Commons , Library , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor March 17th, 2008

The annual University of Florida Comics Conference will be this Friday and Saturday. The conference events will be held at Emerson Alumni Hall (on University Avenue, across from the stadium) and the program is on the conference website and posted below. The keynote speakers are the incredible Phoebe Gloeckner, Gail Simone, and Sally Cruikshank.

Friday, March 21st

• 9-10:15 AM – Panel 1: The “Body” of the Text
  “‘Time is a Man / Space is a Woman’: Narrative + Visual Pleasure = Gender Confusion,” Aaron Kashtan
  “Eggs, Birds and ‘an Hour for Lunch’: A Vision of the Grotesque Body in Clyde Fans: Book 1 by Seth,” John Kennett
  “Love in the Binding,” Laurie Taylor
• 10:30-11:45 – Panel 2: Groensteen’s Networked Relations
  “Memory and Sexuality: An Arthrological Study of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” Adrielle Mitchell
  “The Joy of Plex: Erotic Arthrology, Tromplographic Intercourse, and ‘Interspecies Romances’ in Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg,” Daniel Yezbick
  “Our Minds in the Gutters: Native American Women, Sexuality, and George O’Connor’s Graphic Novel Journey into Mohawk Country,” Melissa Mellon
• 11:45-1:15 – Lunch
• 1:15-2:30 – Panel 3: Women on Top
  “Buxom Moebius Strip: The Hyperreal World of Gilbert Hernandez’s Fantastic Women,” Sacha Krader and Austin Rich
  “‘Are You Ready?’: Renee Montoya and the Question of Lesbian Identity,” Karen Burrows
  “Just One Damned Dildo After Another: Pornographic Space in the Work of Colleen Coover and Molly Kiely,” Lyndsay Brown
• 2:45-4:00 – Panel 4: Performance and Positions
  “The Queering of Haruhi Fujioka: Cross-Dressing, Camp and Commoner Culture in Ouran High School Host Club,” Tania Darlington
  “She-Rambos in Lipstick: Authorial and Artistic Depictions of Androgyny and Femininity in Comics,” Hannah Dame
  “Reading between the (Panty) Lines: The Body as Ethnographic Text in Jaime Hernandez’s Recent Narratives,” Derek Royal
• 4-6 PM – Dinner
• 6-7:30 – Phoebe Gloeckner Keynote
• 7:30-9:30 – Reception Ustler Hall

Saturday, March 22nd

• 9-10:15 – Panel 5: The Figure on the Page
  “‘Gimme Gimme This, Gimme Gimme That’: Confused Sexualities and Genres in Cooper and Myerson’s Horror Hospital Unplugged,” James Newlin
  “How to Draw the (DC and) Marvel Way: How Changes in Representation of Female Bodies and Attitudes are Changing ‘Superheroine Chic,’” Mollie Dezern
  “‘The Muse or the Viper: Excessive Depictions of the Female in Les Bas-Bleus and Cerebus,’” Tof Eklund
• 10:30-11:45 – Panel 7: Let’s Transgress
  “I for Integrity: Futurity, (Inter)Subjectivities, and Sidekicks in Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns,” Jordana Greenblatt
  “The Joker Wears Purple: Gender Transgressive Villains and Trickster Archetypes in Superhero Comics,” Rachel Edidin
  “Otherness, Perversion and the Transformed Male Body in Seinen and Shounen Manga,” Katherine Schaeffer
• 11:45-1:15 – Lunch
• 1:30-3:00 – Sally Cruikshank Keynote
• 3:30-4:45 – Library Exhibit of UF: National Obsessions: Twentieth Century Pop Culture, Comics and Cross-Promotional Merchandizing. Featuring comics, movies/TV, and pop culture items from Star Wars, Peanuts, Walt Disney, and Superman and Batman
• 5-6:30 – Gail Simone Keynote

• conference , exhibit , comics
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Laurie N. Taylor March 12th, 2008

In working on other projects, I stumbled across this poster on the Digital Library of the Caribbean from last year. The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. All materials in dLOC are Open Access for everyone to see, but any rights remain with the owners or with the contributing partners. This is a great example of collaboration creating materials for all to use, while supporting the creators and their communities and nations. The digitized materials include Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections.

The poster describes this all more fully, but I’m most impressed with the rights management and with the centralized technical infrastructure, which provides a scaffolding for new projects to begin digitization as well as an umbrella collection online to ensure that even new collections contribute to the growing critical mass of resources in a single space, allowing the searching across collections, while also allowing for individual collections to be searched on their own once ready. The poster says more though, so check it out (in Google Presentation Mode and the slide alone).

• preservation , archives , dloc , open access , Library , Academia , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor March 8th, 2008

Google is having another design-a-campus contest in SketchUp. It’s the Google 2008 International Model Your Campus Competition! Students around the world can compete by modeling their school’s campus buildings in Google SketchUp, geo-reference them in Google Earth, and submitting them by uploading to the Google 3D Warehouse. Students at higher education institutions almost anywhere in the world can submit individually or in teams of students. In addition to Google’s prices, for those modeling schools in Florida or the Caribbean or circum-Caribbean, please also submit your designs to the University of Florida Digital Collections or the Digital Library of the Caribbean, or your own school’s digital collections as applicable so that the schools can also host and archive your designs for current viewers and for posterity.

If you’re a University of Florida student designing the University of Florida campus, please let us know. We’re the folks at the Digital Library Center we’d love to lend moral support and positive thoughts throughout the competition and to host and archive the campus in 3D after the contest ends!

• archives , preservation , uf , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor March 5th, 2008

More comics collections are being added to libraries. Each time it’s wonderful news because it means more of the wonderful materials will be preserved. The most recent (at least the most recent I’ve heard of) is at the University of Minnesota, explained in this story and this story. The collection will be part of the University of Minnesota’s Children’s Literature Research Collections, which is also wonderful because so much of the history of comics and children’s literature connects in terms of illustrators, innovative designs, techniques, and more. Similarly, the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature is housed alongside the Popular Culture Collections, which include the Performing Arts Collections and the Comics Collections.

The closeness makes sense for our collections because of the interplay, but the division also makes sense because of the relationship of comics and performance related materials. The similarity and difference between these two configurations make sense because comics are so closely related to so many areas in terms of form, function, and content. Thus, comics collections can be added in a useful manner to any library collection and I’m hoping more will be added soon so researchers can benefit from greater access to these important materials.

• comics
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Laurie N. Taylor March 4th, 2008

I’m currently in the Bahamas visiting the College of the Bahamas. I got in yesterday and was lucky enough to be here in time for the 10th Annual Lenten Tea Party, at Dr. Rhonda Chipman-Johnson’s residence on Emery Street in Highland Park, with Mrs. Mavis Collie as the MC. I really wish I had brought any sort of audio recording equipment with me so I could have captured and shared more from the event because it was wonderful. The tea party was not only enjoyable and entertaining, it also included Bahamanian History on Grant’s Town, Over the Hill, and future shock from welcome progress (and the less welcome new problems that come along with progress). Today I learned more about the College of the Bahamas Library. The College of the Bahamas Library is facing the same needs and challenges that so many libraries, including the University of Florida Libraries, are facing. The need for more information commons space with computers with internet access for students and the need to put more materials online so students and others can access those materials from anywhere.

The College of the Bahamas Library has the College Archives (with photos, catalogs, fliers on speakers and events, and more) and Special Collections, in addition to the General Collections, Reference, Circulation, IT support, and Technical Services. It was great to see the Library and see how much it contained even outside of specific collections, with historical photos framed and hanging on the walls, paintings celebrating important events also adorning the walls, and other artifacts explaining the history of the College and the Bahamas exhibited throughout the Library. I’m still processing all of the materials I’ve seen and all that I’ve learned, but the photo above is from the tree outside the Library, which has a birdhouse and a sign that reads “Soothing Moments.” The tree with its own beauty and its friendly sign and practical and aesthetically pleasing birdhouse parallels the Library at the College of the Bahamas because both the tree and the Library are friendly, welcoming, beautiful, and incredibly impressive in their ability to multi-task for the benefit of those around. I love what the tree says and represents with its sign and birdhouse, and I’m hoping the University of Florida Libraries might be able to take note and perhaps put up our own birdhouse.

• archives , preservation , dloc , Digital Library
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