Archive for July, 2008

Haitian Law

Laurie N. Taylor July 29th, 2008

The Haiti Press Network has an article on the digitization of Hatian law (in French, or translated with Google Translate). Digitizing Haitian law is a major project with great significance because like all democratic societies, access to the law and legal information is necessary for the public to be involved in the democratic process. Many countries, including the US, are still struggling with making laws accessible and comprehensible, and Haiti’s digitization project faces the same challenges and will reap the same rewards. The Haitian law digitization project will present a complete inventory of Haitian law from 1804 within a clear and ease to use database so that lawyers and the general public will have equal access to the law.

The first part of the project is focusing on more recent legal documents, with all documents added eventually. This is a wonderful project and the University of Florida Digital Library Center is excited to be able to contribute to it through the Digital Library of the Caribbean. The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) includes many partners with projects focused on preservation and access for cultural heritage materials and contemporary needs, including many law projects. The Haitian law project embodies the core goals of preservation and access, and the ideal goals of digitization - presenting and preserving the past as it bears on the present through rare cultural materials that relate to current needs and future desires, and presenting them in ways that make them more useful and usable than in their original form. To see actual Haitian law documents, check in the Digital Library of the Caribbean and for more on Haitian law, see “Researching Haitian Law” by Marisol Florén-Romero from FIU (another dLOC partner).

One Year, Two Months

Laurie N. Taylor July 28th, 2008

I’ve been so busy the past year (or 14 months to be completely accurate) since joining UF’s Digital Library Center that it’s hard to see what all we’ve accomplished. The time has flown by with loads of wonderful work, and wonderful progress. I decided to review some of our documentation and to note a few of the highlights:

  • More stuff! We hit the 1 million page mark in September 2007, and as of today we’re at 2.12 million with so many more to load!
  • More types of stuff! Improvements to UFDC that include support for audio and video files, better multi-language support!
  • Better ways to see the stuff! Optimized code for a faster UFDC, thumbnails for new all book images for faster quick-viewing, a better interface for usability!
  • Better connections to find stuff! Optimizing UFDC for search engines so we’re crawled properly, created RSS feeds for the collections within UFDC, set up external accounts to share content and to connect users to UFDC (this blog, our Flickr account, our YouTube presence, Wikipedia links for items and entries on authors, books, people, and places related to the collections connecting context with actual items).
  • More work to tell people about our stuff! Multiple presentations internally and at national and international conferences, interns, class tours, working with faculty, students, staff, and organizations to tell them about UFDC and to show them how it can help their work. We made exhibits, contributed digital materials to exhibits and other events and publications, and worked with the Libraries’ Public Information Officer to write and distribute press releases and other materials.
  • More projects to keep going! Working with other groups at the UF Libraries for particular collections, including: Retrospective Dissertation Scanning; Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Collection; Romanies Collection; Gainesville Bands; British Parliamentary Debates; Asia Collection; Women in Development; and many more, including further developing existing collections like the Florida Digital Newspaper Library and the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) with partners at the UF Libraries, at UF, and elsewhere. In addition to projects based on partners, we’ve also defined some projects chronologically with grant and time-based projects and this we’ve finished some grants, started new ones, applied for others, are preparing to apply for even others, and migrating some of our older projects from other technology to UFDC.

All of this and much more happened during the past year, but the Digital Library Center has been around since 1999 so it all grows from that ongoing work. That’s still the more recent history because the Digital Library Center grew out of the Preservation Department (founded in 1987, I think, based on the  “News from the Preservation Office” newsletters now online in UFDC). By 1993, the Preservation Department was already looking toward a comprehensive method for preservation, around the same time that the Mosaic browser was helping generate interest in the World Wide Web, heralding the promise of the digital revolution to come. There’s so much more to the history and the future of the Digital Library Center, but it’s too much to try to put in one blog post so it’ll have to wait for later.

Pastcasts

Laurie N. Taylor July 27th, 2008

The Florida Humanities Council has funded a project by the University of West Florida (and involving the University of South Florida and the University of Florida according to the The Gainesville Sun article) to create podcasts about historic Florida. The project will create these “Pastcasts” (I love the name!) for historic Florida towns and the programs will be available for download from the Florida Humanities Council website.

I’m excited to hear all of the programs, but most excited to hear the Pastcasts for Alachua County, and to hear the rest with an eye on ways to connect them to the photos, maps, and other materials related to historic Florida already in the University of Florida Digital Collections. Then, I get to work on mapping them within a spatial, audiovisual, textual format, but I have to wait until I can steal some free time since I have a few other mappings to make first. It’s very exciting to have these Pastcasts and to have a venue for more of them and for enriching them and using them to enrich other materials.

Work with us, at least occasionally!

Laurie N. Taylor July 25th, 2008

The Florida Center for Library Automation is looking for a bright, energetic, technophile to work in the Digital Library Services group. The University of Florida Libraries, which includes UF’s Digital Library Center (us), works with the Florida Center for Library Automation. FCLA coordinates library technology for all of the State Universy Libraries. For those not from Florida, our universities are all of the publics with the word “University” in them, but the universities aren’t tied as one institution (like the University of California at…) so FCLA works with all of us (FGCU, FIU, FSU, UNF, FAMU, USF, FAU, UCF, UWF, NCF, UF). While we (we as in UF) don’t get to see the folks at FCLA nearly enough, we do get to see and hear from them fairly often and they’re great.

FCLA is in Gainesville, but not next to the UF campus (where we, the DLC are), so there are no traffic and no parking woes for FCLA, and they can have events like “Take Your Dog to Work Day“. The official job description is online here and more official details are below. The parts of FCLA that I find most exciting are the Florida Digital Archive (cutting edge awesomeness!); collaborating across so many institutions and with so many great people; working with FCLA; being in Gainesville; and working with UF in particular, of course. FCLA is also a technical unit playing with an implementing technology and so they get to play with, test, and implement really wonderful tools while working with all sorts of great people across the state.

FCLA is a center of the State University System of Florida which provides automation services to the libraries of eleven public universities.  Working at FCLA combines the challenges of library and information science with large scale data processing in a fully networked, web-based environment. Application areas they work in involve:

  • training and user support of library staff
  • e-resource licensing
  • metadata
  • structured and full-text search and retrieval
  • XML technologies
  • web services
  • relational database management systems
  • next-generation integrated library systems
  • digital image, audio, and multimedia

FCLA is located in Gainesville Florida, consistently rated one of the best places to live in the United States, and administratively associated with the University of Florida.  We offer a casual work environment, ample free parking, flexible hours, and full State of Florida benefits.

Congratulations to the Harn!

Laurie N. Taylor July 22nd, 2008

The Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida has been awarded a Collections Stewardship grant from IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services). The project abstract is online along with the abstracts for the many other winners, and the Harn’s project is “Digitization of the Harn Museum Collection.” For the project, the Harn Museum will be taking digital images for 2,000 items and adding them to their collections management system. These digital images are necessary for practical purposes of access right now, but they’ll also create the foundation for building larger projects like digitizing exhibits and entire collections later on.

Congratulations to the Harn!

Zotero Rocks!

Laurie N. Taylor July 21st, 2008

One of Zotero’s tag lines, “citation management is only the beginning,” explains its current and coming abilities rather well. The most needed component for Zotero’s widespread adopting is almost officially here with Sync Preview’s online backup and synchronization of each user’s Zotero library. Zotero 1.5 includes other improvements as well, but the most important first changes are the ability to save online and synchronize from multiple computers. That strong, centralized core offers so many amazing possibilities, especially given Zotero’s already impressive abilities.

Applications like this are exactly what web-top, Web 2.0, innovative/emerging scholarly style technologies should be. While Zotero’s Sync Preview is still under development, it’s exciting to see it coming along and so close to being here as a feature!

US National Archives in the World Digital Library

Laurie N. Taylor July 18th, 2008

Rosie the RiveterThe US National Archives announced earlier this week that they will be contributing materials to the World Digital Library! This is not unexpected, but still wonderful news because it will place so many resources together in a convenient interface, and each time one collection is contributed to another mismatches and other conflicts occur that result in better interoperability.

Getting it: Finding Hidden Data and Amassing Data

Laurie N. Taylor July 11th, 2008

Now that the UF Digital Collections have worked through a bit more of the backlog–and gotten 2 million pages online!–I’ve started catching up on reading. Many great new (or maybe new-ish) ideas are being realized with sites like Foodsville, which repurposes digitized historical cookbooks to create a cookbook community and herald in innovations in printing, Interactive Relighting technologies that bring new information to life (which is amazing for so many historical documents!), Mscape keeps getting better, IBM and Linden Labs are moving toward virtual world interoperability (which is especially great with Google’s new 3D chat), and Google’s Map Maker has been out for awhile now but it’s also worth mentioning. Even with all of these and so many other new and improving technologies (I *heart* R&D!), the more exciting change, to me, is the shift where more and more people, companies, and entities are starting to “get” the information age.

“Getting it,” of course includes that more people have access, but it also means that more people understand the changes from that information and technology. A recent IBM news release explains it rather well in a single sentence “Data has become the new currency in today’s information economy.” For libraries and other non-profit information holders, this is critical. Too many areas of the commons–libraries, museums, education–have been trapped in a funding nightmare with limited public funds (and not wanting to tax the public they serve) and the lack of a “product” to sell.

The whole point of a “commons” is that it’s for everyone–it’s a public good, like a city park. The problem has always been how to support something that benefits everyone with the least cost to everyone and this is especially difficult when the work is invisible (which non-profits so often try to do–making their work hidden to better showcase their services and contents). In the information age, data has value as a public good and as a source to be mined, coallated, repurposed, and reconfigured into other services and products. As more people “get it”, funding should be available that doesn’t “buy” pubilc goods, but that pays to support it and to use it for other purposes. For instance, a library could digitize materials as funding permits, but then a company could cover the costs of digitizing materials and then return the materials to a library to be openly accessible on the library site and the company could recoup their costs by presenting the newly “acquired” data within an existing service, compiling the new materials within a larger analytical data set, or many other possibilities and then reselling that service as a new or improved service–made possible by improvements in finding, collecting, and using information. We’ve heard “Information Age” and “Internet Age” but the real information age is still gaining momentum and I’m anxiously awaiting what we can really do when we teach our information to dance.

(Of course, there’s a lot of work to go and that’s exciting as well, especially with items that don’t exist online–Googling finds zero results, Worldcat has nothing–from projects like the Digital Library of the Caribbean. There’s so much more to gather, and all the while we get to refine our methods. The real information age means more available to learn, new ways to learn, and an infinitely expanding horizon for playing with information!)

Two Million Pages!

Laurie N. Taylor July 10th, 2008

Baldwin Book, SpineCarrots book spineBaldwin Book SpineCarrotsUF Digital Collections (UFDC) now provides free online access to more than two million pages converted from the Libraries’ paper collections, as well as from UF museums and other UF programs. UFDC hit the 1 million page mark in September 2007 and continues steady growth. It is now the largest university based digital library in the southeast and one of the largest in the country. UFDC (www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc) can be text-searched or browsed online.

Titles available in UFDC are not commercially available and are often difficult to access or use in their original state.  Library archives and special collections, Florida Museum of Natural History Herbarium specimens, selected Samuel P. Harn Museum objects, and Samuel Proctor Oral History Program interviews can now be viewed online without restriction.  Microfilmed books and newspapers have been freed from the vertigo of microfilm.  Additionally, UFDC accepts contributions from partners throughout Florida, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, mitigating travel time and costs.

Digitization is funded by the state, federal and international granting agencies, through library, museum and faculty research, and from donations from the Gator Nation. See the collections online at www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc and help them grow! For more information on supporting growth see http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/admin/giving

ALA, Bioactive, and More!

Laurie N. Taylor July 2nd, 2008

On Monday morning, Val Davis (from the University of Florida Marston Science Library) and I presented on “Bioactive: A Library Game” (currently online here) that several UF librarians made as an alternative to the standard 40 minute library intro tutorial to increase student engagement with the actual work of learning about using library resources.

Bioactive was originally designed in Inform and it’s now moved to a web quest design, which is an even greater simplificiation from the earlier text-based Inform format. The simplicity of the design is for sustainability and ease of maintenance, but it’s more importantly used to ensure that the interface doesn’t get in the way of the learning objectives.

Our presentation was incredibly fun thanks to the wonderful crowd, and great set up from all of STS and especially Margaret Mellinger and Barbara MacApline. We were not only lucky in the great setup for our own presentation, but we also got to see Felice Frankel’s presentation. Frankel presented on her work in scientific photography, capturing the beauty and scientific information in her photographs and then using scientific photography to aid in working toward creating a visual scientific language for scientific literacy. Frankel also spoke on how many images have become too computer-focused in many senses, and this is true. Her photographs are computational, like good flowcharts and paralleling much of the current thought on computational modeling and representation (UF’s own Paul Fishwick’s work on aesthetic computing; Ian Bogost’s work on procedural rhetoric and situational/contextual modeling for interaction/testing; James Paul Gee’s work on situational learning in games; and many others). Even with all of this wonderful work, often the computer as artifice/interface seems to encourage the wrong inds of computation where computationally cleaned/corrected is favored over computationally modeled/accurately presented. Frankel’s work is especially excellent because it offers the visual equivalent of what a sound bite should be–even a glimpse and viewers are hooked into wanting to see and know more. Frankel mentioned a number of sites that showcase her work and methodology, including PicturingtoLearn.org and ImageAndMeaning.org.

Frankel also mentioned her interest in capturing the images for a book on the “science of cooking” and I can’t wait for her to do it! So much of gaming and new media is about the appropriate design of the interface to conceal and reveal the underlying structure to generate interest and to pull players/users in at a set pace. Frankel’s work pulls viewers in through its sheer beauty and then each images teaches how to look by making us want to continue looking and understanding what we’re seeing. These ways of seeing relate to aesthetics that communicate as well as the use of metaphor, with metaphor as a reduction/abstraction of information that still remains true to the integrity of the information and the image, the need for the transparency of the interface or the exposing of the interface to show context while editing noise (unnecessary/confusing information), and all to develop images that speak to multiple viewpoints and the modeled system as a method/view. Frankel’s work essentially exposes variables in play and combining this with the additional motivation of making/playing with something tasty through cooking is brilliant. The hands-on play using concepts best known from computing within real world style crafts continues to grow rapidly in popularity, including the knitting/hacking with sites like Ravelry (thanks to Merrie Davidson for pointing this out in our Library 2.0 meetings, otherwise I wouldn’t have known to read up on Ravelry and I could have missed the story on the success of Ravelry community funding drive) and on more traditionally tech-oriented sites like O’Reilly launching Makezine and on yet other sites like Boing Boing that are technologically agnostic in their fusions of hack/make cultures.

I’m too tired and jet-lagged to write more now, but the STS session was wonderful and I’m already looking forward to the next one!

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