Digital Library Center Blog | UF

The University of Florida’s historic biscuit dates back to 1913 when a hungry student mailed it to his parents as evidence of UF’s food quality. The George A. Smathers Libraries now preserves the historic biscuit. Our biscuit can be viewed online along with millions of other images through the University of Florida Digital Collections.

Every institution archives objects illustrative of its own history. Join us here to let us know about yours.

We’ve got the Biscuit. You bring gravy.

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UFDC now has more RSS feeds! The feeds are available here, http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc2/rss/, and can be added to readers or webpages of your choice (and these are again thanks to our ever-working, industrious and creative programmer)!

The new RSS feeds and other improvements include ongoing optimization for faster loading online and for faster internal processing. Plus, we’re working rapidly and now have 2,60,4573 pages online from 61,108 titles and 116,492 volumes! The Digital Library of the Caribbean now stands poised to hit half a million pages with 475,992 pages online and the Florida Newspapers now include a whopping 306,702 pages. We’re loading quickly, so using an RSS feed or two (or maybe even an even dozen) is smart for those looking to keep up on the items being loaded.

UF’s Florida Free Culture student group will be having it’s first meeting of the semester on Monday, October 13, at 7:00 pm in Reitz Union 288. FFC is an organization that advocates for copyright law reform, the use of open source software, and fights for your rights online. Free food will be provided! For more information about FFC, see their website: http://uf.freeculture.org/.

While I can’t make this meeting, I’d recommend it to anyone who can. FFC is a great advocacy group to promote awareness and as a ways for finding the means to do needed work. Copyright law reform is desperately needed, as is a greater awareness of copyright (many academic authors have their rights returned to them for published books and they often aren’t even aware of it; academic authors often have the right to put their pre-prints on their website or in their institutional repository), and greater awareness of the costs of free culture (”free as in freedom, not free beer”) and greater advocacy is also needed to develop support for the much cheaper and more beneficial free culture as opposed to proprietary, closed, and expensive systems that hold too much information right now.

************(Press Release)************
The Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library is pleased to announce the availability of a new open access monograph, Economics and Usage of Digital Libraries: Byting the Bullet, edited by Wendy Pradt Lougee (University Librarian, University of Minnesota) and Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason (Arthur W. Burks Collegiate Professor of Information and Computer Science, School of Information, University of Michigan). In the late 1990’s, researchers and digital  library production staff at the University of Michigan collaborated on deploying the Pricing Economic Access to Knowledge project (PEAK), a full-scale production-quality digital access system to enable usage of content  from all of Elsevier’s (then about 1200) scholarly journals, and at the same  time to conduct a field experiment to answer various questions about the  interplay between pricing models and usage. The experiment culminated in a lively conference that engaged scholars, library practitioners and publishers. This volume captures some of the most interesting and provocative discussions to come out of that conference. PEAK was a ground-breaking effort in its day, and references to the project have continued over time. It raised important questions about the potential for highly functional journal content and new economic models of publishing. In today’s context of socially-enabled systems and open-access publishing, the motivating questions of PEAK remain relevant.

This monograph is part of the SPO Scholarly Monograph Series, an interdisciplinary collection of original, open-access scholarly monographs and essays. The University of Michigan Library, through its Scholarly Publishing Office, provides academic publishing services that are responsive to the needs of both producers and users, that foster a sustainable economic model for academic  publishing, and that support institutional control of intellectual assets.

Like the other collections in UFDC, the Florida Digital Newspaper Library is expanding rapidly. The Florida Digital Newspaper has added 158,989 pages, doubling the previous size for a total page count of 279,507. Sometimes I prefer to post statistics like page and item counts because those can speak more effectively to how much mass is there and to its usefulness even if people aren’t sure what they might be looking for or why–just knowing that there’s enough stuff can help indicate critical mass and use value. For the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, the number of pages is useful as are examples of the titles and coverage. However, what I think is most useful right now is being able to see the full (or nearly full) runs of select newspaper titles. Many of the newspapers in Florida only had a few publication years before closing or merging with other papers so while the long and continuous issues are impressive, they’re impressive becausethey speak to the coverage across the years even through the many different titles.

For instance, for the Jax Air News, a military newspaper for the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida (most often referred to as NAS or NAS Jax), the Florida Digital Newspaper Library has issues loaded for these years: 1945-46; 1951-57; 1961-62; 1964-67; 1969-1971; 1973; 1975; and 2005. We have many more years to load and we’ll have them online soon, but the papers already loaded give glimpses into different eras, and the histories of those times as they were being experienced. With a similarly long coverage, The Star newspaper for Port St. Joe, Florida has 1937-1985 and 1988-2005. The Star has sixty-six years of newspapers online allowing its full sixty-six years of print to speak to the stories of the past. The Clewiston News has 1928-1945 and 2005-6 online and The Bradford County Telegraph has 1888-1893; 1895-1898; 1900; 1902; 1906-7; 1910; 1926-7; 1932-3; 1940-41; 1962; 1985; 2005-06.

The long runs with sporadically spaced years loaded may seem strange, but because the newspapers were old and Florida’s hot, many of the newspapers were digitized from microfilm by a vendor and then those papers were transferred to us (UF’s Digital Library Center) on hard drives to process. To maximize space (which is always too limited even with many, many terabytes in use), the papers are spaced by size so a paper with so many years and so many pages may have select years on one drive and other years on another. We process these all as quickly as we can, but we have more to go then we’ve loaded so far so we’ll certainly be over half a million pages just by loading the drives.  In the meantime, enjoy the papers that are online and know that more are loaded daily.

In fact, some of my personal favorites don’t have as many years loaded, like The Florida Alligator which was UF’s student newspaper before it became the Independent Florida Alligator (1990 and 2005 online). The Florida Alligator’s issues for 1945-8 and 1964 are online.  Also, for Orlando, the 1914-1915 issues of The Morning Sentinel are online and so are the 1947 issues of the Orlando Morning Sentinel, papers from a time when Orlando wasn’t huge. I don’t know if I can really think of Orlando as something other than a sprawling city, but these papers definitely make that more possible in my mind by helping to show an Orlando I’ve never met but would like to know.

The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) currently has 109,991 total items, which make up 60,664 different titles (newspapers, serials, and so forth mean one title can have thousands of items so that’s why these numbers differ), for 2,471,489 total pages.

Of that total 34,578 items in 5,067 titles with 512,204 pages have been added since July 1.

Meaning, in only slightly over 3 little-ole months, we added 512,204 pages! That’s over my hoped-for goal–which was set intentionally too high based on what I thought we could do–of 150,000 pages a month! I don’t think I should keep setting unrealistic goals, but it sure is nice to set something at an unrealistically high level and then still exceed it, so this is certainly cause for celebration, but we’ll wait for the next 29,000 pages to load and celebrate at the 2.5 million page level–which we’ll meet only a smidgen over a year after hitting the first 1 million pages (which we did in September of 2007–so less than a year later and a million more pages)!

LOC Press Release:

The Library of Congress is among a dozen federal agencies launching an initiative to establish a common set of guidelines for digitizing historical materials. Basing its efforts on a combination of collaborative research and combined experience, the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative will address a variety of issues related to the complex activities involved in the digitization of cultural heritage items.

Two working groups have been formed, one addressing content that can be captured in still images, the other involved with content categorizing sound, video, or motion-picture film. The initiative includes a just-launched Web site, www.digitizationguidelines.gov.

The Federal Agencies Still Image Digitization Working Group will focus its efforts on content such as books, manuscripts, maps, and photographic prints and negatives. Its members include the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Gallery of Art, the National Library of Medicine, the National Technical Information Service, the National Transportation Library, the Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Government Printing Office. An Advisory Board of technical experts from industry and academia will also contribute to the initiative.

The Federal Agencies Audio-Visual Working Group, which will address standards and practices for sound, video, and motion picture film, includes the Defense Visual Information Directorate of the Department of Defense, the Library of Congress, the National Agricultural Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Library of Medicine, the Smithsonian Institution, the Government Printing Office and the Voice of America.

The agencies began meeting in 2007 to identify common practices for digitizing cultural heritage materials in a sustainable way. Establishing guidelines is expected to increase the quality and consistency of digitized documents and media that are made available to the public, streamline workflows and reduce costs, promote the exchange of research, and encourage collaboration across agencies. The guidelines will also provide common benchmarks for digitization service providers and manufacturers.

The Web site currently features two documents developed by the Still Image Digitization Working Group that are open for comment until mid-November. The first proposes a minimal set of embedded TIFF metadata for use in historical and cultural heritage digital imaging. The second two-part document presents a taxonomy of digital image characteristics and provides corresponding metrics and criteria to describe and validate imaging performance and quality.

The Web site also provides a glossary of digitization terms and concepts, and presents digitization-related news and events on the subject from the participating agencies.

This collaborative effort initially formed under the auspices of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), a Library of Congress-led program initiated by Congress in December 2000 to develop a national strategy to collect and preserve digital content. For more information on NDIIPP visit www.digitalpreservation.gov.