Digital Library Center Blog | UF

The UF Digital Library Center has a number of homegrown tools for digitization, and we’ve refined these tools working with our partners in the Digital Library of the Caribbean. Our digitization tools for the digitization process are available online with general documentation as well as a full manual with tools available for download.  We also have documentation on our servers and general infrastructure as well as on our internal equipment and our day-to-day operations.

Much of this was created in response to our small team and for the Digital Library of the Caribbean, and some of it comes from our ever-changing needs and operations. In looking for documentation on other digitization projects, I haven’t found as much as I’d like in terms of available tools or documentation.

Currently, the new tools we’re evaluating include Fedora Commons (the library system and not the Fedora Linux flavor) and we’re trying to decide what other tools we need most critically right now and what tools we’ll most likely need in the near future if we do use Fedora. Given the coincidental Fedora-naming overlap, Stephanie Haas (the Assistant Director of UF’s Digital Library Center) suggested that we start calling our digitization software “hat rack” or “the hat rack suite” to note how these tools create objects that are then contained and displayed on Fedora Commons and on Fedora Linux. We’re actually running Unbuntu, but it seemed close enough, and “hat rack” presents a nice image showing the need for more rack components, more hats, and more flair for those hats.

If anyone has suggestions on where to look, please let me know. If anyone has documentation or applications that aren’t really ‘finished’, alpha and beta versions are still helpful for our team to evaluate other systems and possibilities.

Finger Plays for Nursery and Kindergarten by Emilie Poulsson is a playbook of sorts, with technical writing style guides for finger plays. As wonderfully silly as this image is, the purpose of Finger Plays as explained in the “Preface” is even more wonderful:

“WHAT the child imitates,” says Froebel, “he begins to understand. Let him represent the flying of birds and he enters partially into the life of birds. Let him imitate the rapid motion of fishes in the water and his sympathy with fishes is quickened. Let him reproduce the activities of farmer, miller and baker, and his eyes open to the meaning of their work. In one word let him reflect in his play the varied aspects of life and his’ thought will begin to grapple with their significance.”

Of course, then the “Preface” returns to wonderfully silly again as it proclaims that babies need finger plays to strengthen small, “lax” hands. Play is always good, and reading about play is also wonderful, whether or not it strengthens hands of any size.

37Signals’ blog recently featured a discussion of path vs hierarchical navigation. As many of the commentators noted, hierarchies and paths both have their uses and a mixture of both based on need and site are often useful. For many websites, creating paths is a relatively straightforward process. For UF’s Digital Collections,
we create paths by allowing users to sort their results and to link to similar from the results, but most notably by organizing all of the collections into thematic collections (historical children’s literature, newspapers, Florida photographs) and by providing starting points into more manageable sub-collections through these groupings. We also create direct links from other relevant content pages (Wikipedia, Amazon, OCLC, publisher pages, instruction and research websites). These navigational landing pages help create entry points into each of the collections and, through them, to all of the collections.

The Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) has created an online preservation class, “Preservation 101: Preservation Basics for Paper and Media Collections”. “Preservation 101″ covers the basics of preservation for small and moderately-sized collections, for the preservation of paper collections and related formats (which includes film and electronic media and glass slides). The course homepage explains “Learn how to identify deteriorated materials, how to properly care for collections, and how to set priorities for preservation.” This is a wonderful service for all libraries, museums, archives, and personal collectors because it advocates for the value of learning about and supporting preservation, while also supporting others in preservation.

Comics studies and comics collections continue to grow, and now there’s more great news. Ohio State University’s Cartoon Research Library is acquiring the International Museum of Cartoon Art’s collection. Currently, OSU’s gallery space is small (or so this article says–I haven’t been lucky enough to see it yet, but it’s on my list of places to go as soon as I can) so OSU’s Cartoon Research Library is planning a larger gallery space to display more of their already excellent, and now growing, collection. This is great news for comics studies as a whole–it means more resources will be available in a centralized and organized place–and it means that the International Museum of Cartoon Art’s materials will again be available and in a place with lots of human, institutional, and printed friends. This is also great news for OSU and the International Museum of Cartoon Art because it will allow them to more easily continue their work in comic studies together.

The University of Florida Digital Collections have a number of collaborative partnerships with the Digital Library of the Caribbean, the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, and other projects. One of our local partners is the Matheson Museum. The picture above comes from one of their photograph collections, the E. H. Bone Collection, and many other photos are in the Matheson Museum and in the University Archives, so this is a great partnership to help preserve the history of the Gainesville, Florida area and to preserve the early history of the University of Florida while also showing how the town and school developed together. This particular picture seems like a great image for a Friday Gainesville’s quirky side.

Well, our infrastructural updates went faster than expected thanks to Mark putting in long hours for several days, but we’re now loading again. Right now, we’re sitting at 1,804,535 pages, from 54,260 titles and 71,597 items, and counting. Plus, these can now all be viewed within the slightly updated interface (with tabs for views and additional collection-based pages) and within the better overall structure with optimized code for speed, accessibility, and interoperability.

In order to simplify our internal systems through a complete overhaul, we won’t be loading any items for the next week. A week from now, users will notice subtle, yet significant changes in terms of the overall design and in terms of speed. Most of the changes appear small, but they’re all part of the optimization process which will greatly enhance the infrastructure supporting the Digital Collections, stripping out additional code, enhancing system memory usage, and speeding and cleaning the whole process for human users and robots for search engine indexing.

While we’re completing this process, we won’t be loading any items, but as soon as we’re done, the many new items we’re processing will start to load and there are a lot. We’re already sitting at 1,797,881 so we will hit the 2 million mark rather soon. Don’t be dismayed while we’re holding for the next week. In the meantime, check out the many wonderful materials we have online, like the image above, which comes from the digital Archive of the Rossica Society, a world-wide society devoted to all aspects of Russian philately, from the pre-stamp days of Imperial Russia to current post-Soviet philately.

The second annual ALA TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium will take place on November 2-4, 2008, in Oak Brook, IL (a western suburb of Chicago). The website has preliminary information about registration, the location, keynote speakers, and the Call for Presenters. The call is for all libraries doing innovative work with gaming and games studies in relation to libraries. The deadline is June 15, 2008, and they’ll respond by July 1–this sounds like a great conference, with an upcoming deadline, so don’t miss it!

The Webby Award winners and nominees for 2008 are out and one of the nominees was “The Calligraphic World of Mi Fu’s Art” from the National Palace Museum, and it’s on calligraphy. UF’s Digital Collections don’t have as much related material as we’d like (but we’re digitizing 100,000 pages a month so we’ll get there), but we do have the 24-volume set of “Qin ding xi Qing gu jian” and we made a few pages into a Flash flipbook to help display the beauty of the volumes.

Jane Pen has been instrumental in getting “Qin ding xi Qing gu jian” digitized and she’ll be visiting Taiwan this May 24-31, and meeting with the library at Tamkang University. Hopefully this will lead to more partnerships with libraries and museums, especially with so many museums in Taiwan are actively involved in digitization projects.

“The Calligraphic World of Mi Fu’s Art” is an excellent site because it does something that couldn’t easily be done without the technologies it uses. For many of the other Webby Award sites this is also true, but many others are aesthetically pleasing first and then accessible second or not at all. For some sites like the National Palace Museum’s site tools to recognize calligraphy or handwriting akin to Optical Character Recognition simply aren’t yet available at the level they’re needed to make the site as accessible as possible, but the site still has a great deal of other accessible information. In the meantime, “The Calligraphic World of Mi Fu’s Art” is a beautiful site and one that will hopefully be enriched even further in the near future with new technologies.