Archive for April, 2008

We’re Traveling!

Laurie N. Taylor April 30th, 2008

In the next few months, folks from the Digital Library Center will be traveling to meet with some of our partners, and to meet new friends. Our upcoming travel includes:

  • May 8: Erich Kesse (director), Mark Sullivan (programmer), and Brooke Wooldridge (dLOC Coordinator, from Florida International University) are going to Washington, DC to meet with the World Digital Library based at the Library of Congress about the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC)
  • May 11-14: Erich, Brooke, and Mark are off to meet with the US Embassy in Haiti and the National Archives in Haiti about the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and establishing a digitization center in Haiti
  • May 14-18: Mark joins Brooke to travel to Guyana to meet with CARICOM
  • May 24-31: Jane Pen (Metadata & Quality Control) is visiting Taiwan and will be meeting with the library at Tamkang University (淡江大學).
  • June 26-July 2: Laurie Taylor (Digital Projects Librarian) will be going to the American Library Association Conference in Anaheim, California where she’s hoping to see the Disney Archives and to find a partner for the comics collection and the Barks’ materials

We’ll probably have other meetings and explorations in the near future, so let us know if you’ll be in the same area and would like to meet for coffee and great conversation about digital projects.

Flash Flip Books

Laurie N. Taylor April 30th, 2008

I’ve been looking at different tools to allow users to flip through books, in the pretty and easy style of Flash flip books like this one and this one. I made both of these in Flash (editing a template that was freely available online from here), but I’m not a good enough Flash translator to make this do what I’d like it to. I’d like the files to auto-resize to a maximum fixed width to make it easier to automate nice looking versions of the flipbooks. Also, I’d like a simplified version of the files so that I can easily add special components for books that need it, like the Topsys & Turvys book, which needs to be able to be flipped upside-down and back again. Even more than the other options, I’d like to know how to make this happen in OpenLaszlo so I can simultaneously create SWF files for compression and DHTML for open standards for all they bring for preservation and more. The samples are really pretty, but if anyone has suggestions on how I can make them better or the process of making them better, I’d appreciate the help!

Work with the UF Libraries!

Laurie N. Taylor April 28th, 2008

With the dire budget Florida is facing this year, there are very few job openings and only openings for critical positions. Luckily, the UF Libraries have a few critical positions to fill and one is for our training coordinator, the “Personnel Services and Employee Development Coordinator.” The official job description is below, and the Libraries’ HR employment page has more information.

I think the best recommendation, though, is from the Libraries’ staff as a whole, and we’re a really fun group. We’re on Facebook (mainly for internal communication since there are so many of us); the HR main page has links to pictures of our picnics and parties; and some of us have blogs like this one and off-UF email if people have less formal questions (like about great grocery stores, the weather–right now it’s hot and dry–about the pet-friendliness of Gainesville, and so on). The UF Libraries have a great community and it’s just a great place to work overall!

Classification Title: Assistant Instructor
Working Title: Personnel Services and Employee Development Coordinator
Position Number : 00012789
Salary: (Starting salaries for positions may be negotiable based on qualifications and experience.) $45,000; Actual salary will reflect selected professional’s experience and credentials commensurate with selected applicant’s qualifications.

Work Location: Main Campus (Gainesville, Florida)
Department: 55130100-LB-PERSONNEL SUPPORT
College/Unit: UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES (55000000)

JOB SUMMARY:
The Personnel Services and Employee Development Coordinator provides leadership to the human resources and training and development functions of the University Libraries. The Coordinator ensures the delivery of vital customer services including: employee relations; interpretation of library and university policies; and faculty and staff recruitment. The Coordinator facilitates key processes including: tenure and promotion, professional development leave, and employee evaluations. The Coordinator develops and leads a need-based and outcome-oriented training and development program.

The duties of this position include:

Human Resources:

  1. Coordinates recruitment activities and supports the work of faculty search committees.
  2. Ensures delivery of excellent customer service through the HR Office.
  3. Develops and maintains policies and processes.
  4. Interprets library and UF personnel policies.
  5. Ensures the maintenance of personnel records and data housed by the HR Office.
  6. Counsels library employees and supervisors on employee relations issues.
  7. Facilitates the processes for tenure, promotion and development leaves.
  8. Facilitates employee evaluation processes.
  9. Liaison with relevant UF entities and officials.
  10. Coordinates recruitment activities and supports the work of faculty search committees.
  11. Ensures delivery of excellent customer service through the HR Office.
  12. Develops and maintains policies and processes.
  13. Interprets library and UF personnel policies.
  14. Ensures the maintenance of personnel records and data housed by the HR Office.
  15. Counsels library employees and supervisors on employee relations issues.
  16. Facilitates the processes for tenure, promotion and development leaves.
  17. Facilitates employee evaluation processes.
  18. Liaison with relevant UF entities and officials.

Employee Development

  1. Assesses library-wide training and organizational development needs.
  2. Develops and implements strategies for delivering training and development programs.
  3. Measures outcomes of training and development programs.
  4. Frequently facilitates and occasionally conducts training sessions.
  5. Actively works to improve the effectiveness of training and development programs.
  6. Develops and maintains a skills inventory database.

Minimum qualifications:

  1. Masters degree in human resources management, higher education, library sciences, or related field.
  2. Professional level experience in human resources management.
  3. Strong customer service orientation.
  4. Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
  5. Ability to manage a broad variety of tasks simultaneously and deliver results.
  6. Excellent analytical and innovative problem solving skills.
  7. Judgment, tact and discretion.
  8. Ability to work effectively with diverse groups to achieve objectives.

Preferred qualifications:

  1. Library science or equivalent degree.
  2. Professional experience in an academic or research library.
  3. Advanced knowledge of laws and standards pertaining to employee relations and employment.
  4. Experience developing and conducting training programs.
  5. Expert knowledge of spreadsheet and web development software.

APPLICATION PROCESS:
The University of Florida is an equal opportunity employer and is strongly committed to the diversity of our faculty and staff. Applicants from a broad spectrum of people, including members of ethnic minorities and disabled persons, are especially encouraged to apply. As part of the application process, applicants are invited to complete an on-line confidential and voluntary demographic self-disclosure form which can be found at: http://www.hr.ufl.edu/job/datacard.htm. This information is collected by the University of Florida’s Faculty Development Office to track applicant trends and is in no way considered by the Smathers Libraries in the selection process.

Please submit application materials via e-mail. Send, as attachments (MS-Word format preferred), a cover letter detailing your interest in and qualifications for this position, your current resume and a list of three references. Include address, telephone and email information for references. Please include a 250-word document on the topic “The process of developing a need-based and outcome-oriented training and development program.” Apply by June 8, 2008 (applications will be reviewed as received). Send all required application materials to Brian Keith, Smathers Libraries Financial and Human Resources Officer, at: brikeit@uflib.ufl.edu.

Job Close Date 06-08-2008

Word of the Day (or maybe even year): autotechnogeoglyphics

Laurie N. Taylor April 27th, 2008

Autotechnogeoglyphics

I’m not sure how I came across the “Pruned” blog’s post on autotechnogeoglyphics, but it’s the most wonderful word I’ve seen in sme time. auto-techno-geo-glyphics sounds of steampunk, science fiction, fantasy, epic world building and world altering technology, histories of giants, and it holds so much promise, so much potential for exploration. While the definition speaks more to reality, the word speaks to fantasy worlds of stone like Shadow of the Colossus, science-fiction worlds of steel, and ancient worlds of myth and reality, of stone, sediment, and things long lost.

“Pruned” explains autotechnogeoglyphics from the CLUI newsletter as:

Among the many wonderful things worth noting, there is their aerial photographs of automotive test tracks — those concrete hieroglyphs, in the fringes of urban sprawls, recording “the condition of America, land of the automobile, a syndrome that transformed the landscape of the nation, and the world, more than any other.”

As an information addict, I normally value words by utility. However, there are those words that go beyond the possible into the impossible, seeking for more than they can possibly find and finding all that they can in the process. autotechnogeoglyphics is one of those; it speaks to what it is and what it could be, helping to define studies of large-scale, made-designs in the Earth, made only over time with parts intentional and parts their sum unforeseeable in their planning, and all seen only with enough correct distance. It only seems right in all lowercase, perhaps because weighting the first letter seems to give priority to the auto over the rest, or perhaps the font isn’t right for a word of this magnitude. Hopefully autotechnogeoglyphics will appear enough to find its fit for font and scale, and hopefully it will also find and share new words that similarly sing.

Blogs at the UF Libraries

Laurie N. Taylor April 27th, 2008

The UF Libraries now have a multi-user install of WordPress (known as WordPress MU). The blogs that the Libraries have been using externally from various other sites, including this one, are now being centralized for ease and improved communication. Blogs at the UF Libraries are here: http://blogs.uflib.ufl.edu.

The Blogroll for the main blog includes only the blogs at the UF Libraries, so the first page is an easy entry into the rest of blogs. Right now, many of the blogs are still being pulled in and other non-blog areas of the Libraries are being tested for reformatting  as blogs. After all, blogs are great for any chronological style information site and for sites that are heavily populated by events, dates, and other happenings.  This blog will likely remain here. It may become a more personal-professional chronicle of my work (which is unlikely given that my information addiction makes the professional the personal so the two aren’t really separable); or I may simply clone the blog so that it’s easily accessible in either area (more likely); or the other blog may host the day-to-day technical update blog and this may stay as it is for my reflections; or I may pursue some blend of the possible options.

PS Magazine online, at VCU (and UF)!

Laurie N. Taylor April 23rd, 2008

VCU Libraries have announced a full digital run of Will Eisner’s work on PS* Preventive Maintenance Magazine! Here’s their press release:

psmagazinecoverVCU Libraries is honored to present these rare examples of the incomparable art work of the late Will Eisner. In an effort to encourage soldiers to keep better care of their equipment, the US Army hired Eisner’s American Visuals Corporation to do a digest-sized publication focusing on preventive maintenance. Each issue consisted of a color comic book style cover; eight pages of four color comic continuity story in the middle; and a wealth of technical, safety, and policy information printed in two color. Eisner drew and was artistic editor for PS Magazine from its inception in 1951 until 1972. Presented here are complete scans for 145 regular issues, 3 special issues, and 14 index issues.

The University of Florida just finished scanning our issues of PS, and we have them all openly online as well. UF has far fewer issues, and we were scanning them in hopes of soon partnering with other institutions to locate and digitize the other volumes, so it’s all the more wonderful that VCU both had all of the issues and was able to scan them and add them to an open access Digital Collection. In doing so, it lays an even stronger foundation for other projects involving comics. PS is especially important because these early issues were well read, well loved, and well used. They’re excellent sources for any study of visual rhetoric, technical writing, literature, media studies, the military, American culture, and more. Will Eisner is the father of the modern graphic novel, popularizing the term and showing what it could be, and his work in all fields is so relevant and so important that it’s essential to have access to materials like PS. Hopefully, we’ll continue to see more great materials go online like VCU’s complete run of Will Eisner’s PS.

SPARC-ACRL Forum addresses Harvard open access policy

Laurie N. Taylor April 23rd, 2008

Washington, DC & CHICAGO ­ April 22, 2008 ­ SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) announce that the SPARC-ACRL Forum during the 2008 American Library Annual Conference in Anaheim, Calif., will provide a timely look at Campus Open Access Policies: The Harvard Experience and How to Get There. Co-sponsored by the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services up-close look at the recent vote by Harvard¹s Faculty of Arts and Sciences enabling open access to their scholarly articles in an institutional repository.The Harvard vote grants the university the rights necessary to archive and make freely available on the Internet articles written by Arts and Sciences faculty members. It is the first time the faculty of a U.S. university has voted for an open access directive and the first time a faculty has granted permission to the university to make its articles available through open access.

The forum will offer an exploration of the motivations behind the Harvard policy, the groundwork invested in its creation, reactions and outcomes to date, and the broader implications of this historic step. Headlining the event will be Stuart M. Shieber, professor of computer science at Harvard, director of the Center for Research on Computation and Society, faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the key architect of the policy.

Shieber will be joined by Catherine Candee, executive director, Strategic Publishing and Broadcast Initiatives, from the office of the president of the University of California, who will relate similar activity in the UC system; and by Kevin L. Smith, JD, scholarly communications officer at Duke University, who will suggest legal considerations for institutions following the open access policy path.

The 17th biennial SPARC-ACRL Forum will be held from 4 ­ 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 28, in room 210 A-C of the Anaheim Convention Center. The ACRL Scholarly Communications Discussion Group will additionally host an open conversation about issues that surface at the Forum from 4 ­ 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, June 29, in room 203 B. Please consult the final program to verify room assignments.

The Forum will be available via SPARC podcast at a later date. For more information, visit the SPARC Web site.

LibX: Browser Plugins for Libraries

Laurie N. Taylor April 22nd, 2008

LibX is a browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer that provides direct access to your library’s resources. It’s an Open Source framework from which editions for specific libraries can be built. Currently, 330 academic and public libraries have created public LibX editions, and UF is one of them.

The toolbar is wonderful because it allows searching of the Library’s catalog from the browser without navigating to the UF Libraries page. That’s one minor plus, but then it also adds the UF icon to WebPages with book identifiers (Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, or other booksellers) so that when searching for a book in Amazon, it’s only once click to see if the Libraries have the book. The toolbar allows you to search the catalog, UF Digital Collections, databases, for articles, and through Google Scholar and UF’s Research Gateway.

There are many major bonuses, but one is the ability to reload a page using the Library Proxy. No longer will you have to return to the library page and search for an article after searching the web from off campus and finding an article you want. Now, you can simply reload the journal page with the proxy to have full access!

Read more about it here or on the Libraries website to see related tools as well.

100,000 pages a month

Laurie N. Taylor April 20th, 2008

The University of Florida Digital Collections are still relatively young, established separately only recently. Since March 23 of this year, we’ve added another 100,000 pages, up from 1.62 million on March 23 and now we’re at 1.718 million (and counting) and it’s only April 20. The full stats–as of today–are: 53,682 titles; 70,323 items; and 1,718,050 pages. Our statistics are dynamically updated, listed online here, and the statistics are broken down by collection.

The statistics are a handy gauge of how our collections are developing, but they can’t reflect the quality of materials online. For reflecting a more complete sense of the materials online, new items are shown on a regular (daily to every few days) on the “browse new items” view, available here and dynamically updated with new items.

Darwin Online

Laurie N. Taylor April 18th, 2008

The complete works of Charles Darwin are now online in one place, appropriately named “Charles Darwin: the Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online.” This one place includes:

Darwin’s complete publications, thousands of handwritten manuscripts and the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue ever published; also hundreds of supplementary works: biographies, obituaries, reviews, reference works and more.

This work is related to the “Darwin Correspondence Project,” which includes over has over 5,000 letters online and is working to locate as many letters as possible and to make them all available, and they’ve found around 14,500 already. Locating, collecting, and digitizing all of this material is wonderful and projects like this are amazing for their contents and for their structure which gives users an easy way into the materials.

It’s always exciting to see excellent projects like this, and the University of Florida even has a few connections because of our work in digitizing works related to the reception of Charles Darwin’s work in the comic magazine Fun (a contemporary to Punch).

Response to Darwin in Fun Magazine

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