Digital Library Center Blog | UF

The National Archives have announced the most recent National Historical Publications and Records Commission’s grants, and the University of Florida Libraries is one of the award winners for a project to digitize historical Everglades records. The project, entitled “America’s Swamp: The Historical Everglades” will digitize material from six collections relating to the exploration, development and conservation of the Everglades from 1878-1929. “America’s Swamp” will feed into the Everglades Digital Library (EDL), from the Florida International University Libraries and many other partners.

We’ll keep you posted as the collection starts to go online, and there will be a great deal to share since this project will digitize approximately 99,690 pages in six archival collections. The collections selected for this project document early plans for draining the Everglades in the 1880s and 1890s, the dredging of canals and subsequent development of the destroyed wetlands at the start of the 20th century, as well as early attempts by conservationists to preserve the natural resources of the Everglades.  The six collections featured in this project are part of the P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History and the Archives & Manuscripts Unit of the Department of Special & Area Studies Collections at the University of Florida Libraries.  The collections to be digitized date from 1854 to 1963, but the bulk of the materials included in this project will date from 1877 to 1929. The year 1929 was selected as an end date because it marks the end of the South Florida land boom and the onset of the Great Depression.  Of the 99,690 pages, approximately 9,040 pages are letterbook pages and 250 are photographic prints.

The UF Digital Collections are in the newest issue of Florida, UF Alumni Magazine on “Gator Bytes” with a note on the Baldwin Library Digital Collection and with a four page story on postcards from UF and Gainesville, from the Matheson Museum Collection hosted by UFDC. The story includes beautiful images of the postcard covers and their backs, with personal messages from 1917, 1915, 1949 and more. The UF Libraries are in InsideUF for the African Beadwork exhibit,  “Between the Beads: Reading African Beadwork” that just opened!

Every digital item and collection is built through our work across the UF Libraries and our connections with our partners. For me, it’s especially nice to see so many news stories for so many collections all at one. It’s also especially nice because UFDC is still developing. Online sites normally take awhile for critical mass to build for  links, general traffic, search engine rankings, and so on. Then, those build and the knowledge about sites results in more links and more traffic and the site popularity starts to grow on its own. UFDC has only been in existence since 2006, so it looks to me that we’re just finding another crest of popularity that will continue to grow as we continue to load more and more!  Oh, and we’re up to 2.9 million pages–we’re so close to three million only a little over a year after reaching one million!

Mark Sullivan (our wonderful UFDC Programmer) just added RSS feeds by institution to UFDC!

For each institution (other than ones we suppressed, such as UF), we have a complete RSS feed with every item, and a feed with just the last 20 items added. This is a feed for all items tagged to this institution from all of their collections within UFDC.

Check out these great RSS feeds for:

• National Archives of Haiti
• CARICOM
• The College of The Bahamas
• Caribbean Studies Association
• FUNGLODE
• National Library of Jamaica
• Belize National Library Service and Information System
• Pontificia Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra
• Universidad de Oriente
• University of the Virgin Islands
• University of Central Florida
• Florida International University
• University of South Florida

The University of Florida’s Florida Free Culture Group has a meeting coming up soon, on Monday, December 8 at 7pm in the Reitz Union (room 288). I know this isn’t that soon, but the Assistant Director for the Digital Library Center Stephanie Haas will be speaking (and maybe with others, maybe me!) and at this point in the semester everything books up quickly so it really is approaching soon for anyone taking or teaching classes. I hope to be there!

After 14 long days, UFDC is finally loading again. We had bad hardware and had to restore from a backup and with so many files (and permissions to be reset) it took a long time. Thankfully, UFDC is finally loading again.

It shouldn’t be that important–not so important that it pains me when we don’t load for even 24 hours–but it is. Loading means seeing all of our work, our meticulous, time-consuming efforts realized. Without loading, we work without seeing or sharing the fruits of our labors and it’s actually depressing. Thankfully, UFDC is loading again and goodness is there a lot to load. We’ll be loading constantly for the next several days, so please check UFDC and see what we have to share.

This is not an encyclopaedia. It is an ABC. And it is not an ABC of bibliography, or of printing or binding or book-production terms, though many of these come into it. It is an ABC of book-collecting, for novices, would-be collectors and that section of the literate public which takes an interest in our pursuit without necessarily wishing to share it.

From John Carter’s ABC for Book Collectors, pages 11-12,  available online.

We had a drive fail on our development box, which runs our loader. This wouldn’t have caused much of a delay, but we had people out and the drive should have recovered with a disk check (or at least that’s how it appeared). With the holiday yesterday, we’re running hopefully the last of the checks possible and we’ll either have the development server back up and running tomorrow or we’ll restore from the last backup. While it’s been a long delay–thanks to a weekend and another day off–we’ll soon be loading again and we have lots to load. With all of the files ready to load and the fact that we’re currently sitting at 2.87 million pages, we’ll soon be over 3 million pages. Any delays tend to depressing because we have so much to share that it’s hard to wait. Once we start loading, though, it will once again be wonderful and in the meantime we’re holding steady.

Normally, I blog about historical artifacts and their connections to the past and present. Today though, history is palpably alive, forged by the citizens of the United States. Today is a day for looking ahead.

The UF Digital Collections (UFDC) have grown so dramatically that we critically need more resources to both promote and explain the many materials and their use. As of November 1, UFDC includes over 2.79 million pages. This means we’ve added 1.79 million pages in 13 months. Our existing training materials, tutorials, and help pages haven’t been able to keep up with the variety and quantity of materials, nor with documenting and explaining the other technical improvements we’ve implemented.

We’re working on making online tutorials that will explain the basics of using UFDC and that will highlight a few of the largest collections. While we’re actively working on these, we have far too many materials to cover in the near future so I’m also on the lookout for any existing training or contextual materials from other digital collections that could support UFDC. I found a great online tutorial on the Sanborn Maps from the Colorado Library Consortium.

UFDC includes the Sanborn Fire Insurances Maps of Florida Digital Collection and, while the Colorado Library Consortium’s tutorial is clearly focused on Colorado’s maps, the background it provides on what the Sanborn maps are and why people would use them applies equally well for any Sanborn Map Digital Collection.While this first screencast from the Colorado Library Consortium is wonderful for the history of the Sanborn Maps, we still  need to develop our own tutorial for how to use our Sanborn Map Digital Collection. While we have a great deal of work ahead of us developing this and other tutorials, it’s still wonderful to be able to find wonderful resources already available.

Check out UFDC’s Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of Florida for Florida’s Sanborn Maps and the Accidental Map Librarian Workshops, a wiki with many resources that explain the fascinating history of the Sanborn maps for all of the many Sanborn Map Digital Collections. Hopefully as we develop resources for UFDC, we’ll also be able to share resources as wonderful as those from the Accidental Map Librarian Workshops that will benefit digital collections!