Digital Library Center Blog | UF

Before the Internet made information access faster and easier (and it continues to improve), libraries were already mass-sharing information through interlibrary loan. Interlibrary loan is such a simple concept–libraries share books with other libraries–but it was and continues to be carefully planned and implemented to ensure availability and access through cooperative collection plans, lists of records and methods for disseminating them (National Union Catalog, publishing bibliographies of what books were where), and agreements to make sure users know about the materials in order to request them.

Thanks to interlibrary loan systems everywhere for making information available and accessible. Making information findable, available, and usable is always something to celebrate, especially when they’ve been doing it for so very long. The original interlibrary groups have expanded, merged, and reformed, but some carry on under the same names like Florida’s interlibrary loan network, FLIN (The Florida Library Information Network) which turns 40 this year. Over those years FLIN has shared 6.6 million items, or 167,000 items a year! Congratulations to FLIN! And, congratulations to all of the interlibrary loan networks celebrating another year or another decade of service!

The Internet is now the main information source for many, but making the Internet really work (with information on where to find information, the information wanted) begins with the infrastructure for information access. Information architectures, systems for finding and accessing information, and making sure that information is in the best form possible has been a long tradition within interlibrary loan and with the subsequent technologies it employed, including facsimiles, microfilm (or microphotography), electronic, and digital. Without the systems for interlibrary loan, we wouldn’t be able to access many books in print and our digital-only systems wouldn’t have had the benefit of the painstaking work done through postal/train/car/horse/shoe/sneaker/net of interlibrary loan.

As this year comes to a close, thanks to all of the interlibrary loan services who have shared so much!

After finding so many great New Year’s images, I quickly scanned the University of Florida Digital Collections for images of Christmas and found these. Santa’s mighty large book of naughty and nice is from a book in the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, one of the Special Collections in the University of Florida Libraries, and the black and white photograph is from the University Archives, another Special Collection in the University of Florida Libraries.

The Florida Digital Newspaper Library has grown enormously in the past year, adding 384,238 pages since July 1 for a grand total of 504,773 pages!

Those many pages capture history in the making, including  New Year’s Day across the years and across Florida. Front-page news covers the then-current events, often including a New Year’s baby.

For more news of the day, see the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, supported by the Smathers Libraries, which exists to provide free access to the news and history of Florida. The Florida Digital Newspaper Library ensures long-term digital preservation of Florida’s news, making the news available to everyone over the Internet and adding accessibility functions - zoomable page images for detail and searchable text for enhanced usability.

For a faster overview, UFDC’s Flickr account has a small selection of New Year’s Day front pages.

Well maybe not featured, but at least mentioned in the wiki for a graduate library science course (LIS 5313) at Florida State University. It’s great to get noticed, but it’s far better and more important to have that recognition become a resource that the UF Libraries and others can use in deciding and refining how to best use resources like YouTube to support existing projects and needs.

The videos on the UF Libraries YouTube Channel are all available in the UF Digital Collections, but the UF Libraries’ YouTube Channel has links to friends in UF News Bureau and the USF Libraries, so it’s worth checking out for the social network and the videos!

These two news items from the Florida History Collections at the University of Florida Libraries:

Cecilia L. Johnson Library Grant for Visiting Graduate Scholars

The Cecilia L. Johnson grant provides funds for out-of-state researchers who wish to come to the University of Florida to work in the UF Libraries’ Florida history collections. Application is open to all graduate students at higher institutions of learning. Awards are for $1000. Researchers are required to spend at least one week (five working days) on the University of Florida campus making use of materials in the George A. Smathers Libraries. Preference will be given to students who are currently working on an article, thesis, or book dealing with some aspect of Florida history, or in which Florida is a major component of research. All applications will be reviewed by a judging panel composed of archivists and historians at the University of Florida. Similar awards are available for faculty through the Julian Pleasants Visiting Scholar Grant offered through the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program.

For information on how to apply see the Application Instructions or contact James Cusick at jgcusick@ufl.edu. Application deadline is January 15, 2009.

Upcoming Events for Stewards of Florida History

Stewards is hosting a Sunday talk series with the Florida Museum of Natural History for Spring Semester 2009. Please see the Events PDF for full details. All events are free and open to the public.

• Sunday, February 15, 2009.Leslie Poole (Adjunct Professor in Environmental Studies, Rollins College) will speak on the origins of the Florida Audubon Society and the plume trade in the Everglades. 2:30 p.m., Classroom, Florida Museum of Natural History.
• Sunday, March 22, 2009. Frederick Rowe Davis (Associate Professor, Florida State University) will speak on his book The Man who Saved Sea Turtles: Archie Carr and the Origins of Conservation Biology. 2:30 p.m., Classroom, Florida Museum of Natural History.
• Sunday, April 19, 2009. Jackson Walker (Artist in Residence, Museum of Florida Art, DeLand) will discuss how he chooses and recreates scenes from Florida’s past in his award-winning Legenary Florida series. 2:30 p.m., Classroom, Florida Museum of Natural History.

On Dec. 11, the National Digital Newspaper Program added 183,698 historic newspaper pages (including 14 new titles) to the Chronicling America Web site, hosted by the Library of Congress. The site now provides free and open access to 864,509 pages from 108 titles, that were published in 9 states (CA, FL, KY, MN, NE, NY, TX, UT, VA) and the District of Columbia between 1880 and 1910. Six additional states–Arizona, Hawaii, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington–will be contributing content in 2009. Chronicling America is a project of the National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress…. Read more about it!

CALL FOR PAPERS:
World Library and Information Congress: 75th IFLA General Conference and Council
“Libraries create futures: Building on cultural heritage”
23-27 August 2009, Milan, Italy
Deadline Extended to 15 January 2009
CALL FOR PAPERS

The IFLA annual congress provides an opportunity to present library research and outcomes in Information Technology and Innovation in a multi-disciplinary international forum. The IFLA Information Technology Section invites technologists, librarians and other interested parties working in the field of digital library infrastructure to submit proposals for papers in a 2-hour session in Milan, Italy.

SESSION THEME

New repositories: architectures interoperability and data exchange

THE TOPIC

This theme will cover issues of (technical / data driven) interoperability for all types of libraries when dealing with the massing up of digital repositories in a manner that supports open services, including the convergence with archiving solutions and new challenges for digital libraries from the point of view of services versus user impact. In keeping with the theme of the 75th World Library and Information Congress, “Libraries create futures: Building on cultural heritage”, we invite papers that showcase:

• Successful models of interoperability between different types of digital archives and repositories.
• Various experiences in data exchange between multimedia archives.
• New services based on successful interoperability solutions, as distributed systems and federated access to digital archives/repositories.
• Development of open APIs and open source solutions which helps to facilitate advanced services based on metadata from various type s of collections and organisations.
• Case studies in open source application deployment (eg. Library Management Systems) that enhances digital archive interoperability between a diverse range of libraries.

SUBMISSIONS

1. The deadline for submitting a detailed, abstract (500 words) and full author details is 15 January 2009. Selection of papers is based on the abstract, and presenters will be notified by mid-February 2009 at the latest whether they have been successful.
2.  All submissions should be sent to Alenka Kavcic-Colic, Secretary of the Information Technology Section, e-mail: alenka.kavcic@nuk.uni-lj.si.
3. The full paper is due on 31 May 2009 and must be an original submission not published elsewhere.
4. Both abstracts and full papers should be submitted as a MS Word file by e-mail; fax or post should be used only as a last resort.
5. Papers should be of up to 4000 words.
6. Papers should be in English with an abstract, and the presenter must be fluent in English.
7. 20 minutes will be allowed for a summary delivery of the paper in the Conference.
8. The author(s) should indicate his/her personal full contact details and include a summary curriculum vitae with the paper. Also, a digital photograph would be useful.

Invited are the following types of contributions: papers, research studies and reports on practices and advances that will be presented at the conference and included on the conference Web site. The abstracts will be reviewed by members of the Information Technology Section’s Standing Committee. 15-20 minutes will be allowed for a summary delivery of the paper during the Section’s open programme in Milano.

Selected papers can be nominated by the committee for inclusion in the IFLA Congress Journal. Some papers not selected for the IT Session may be selected for publishing in ITS Newsletter.

TRAVEL & ATTENDANCE COSTS

Please note that the expenses of attending the Milano conference (including travel, expenses and conference fee) will be the responsibility of the author(s)/presenter(s) of accepted papers, and at least one of the presenters/authors must be present for the program.

The title says it all–or as much as can be said with any brevity. The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) now have 3 million pages!

Or to be exact 3,012,406 which means that since October 4 we’ve added over 500,000 pages and that we’ve added a full million pages since July. Our largest collection is the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Digital Collection, which now has 749,686 pages. The Baldwin’s many pages have been digitized through NEH grants and the current grant is coming to a close so we’ll see comparatively fewer books load in the near future, but the many wonders of the Baldwin’s beautifully illustrated children’s books have so much to explore that there’s always something more to see. The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is the next largest with 568,139 pages contributed by the many dLOC partners, including the University of Florida Libraries. The third largest is the Florida Digital Newspaper Library with 491,330 pages of Florida newspapers, historic to current.

We won’t be loading as much soon–with holiday vacations and closing days–but we’ll continue to see more pages and wonders load even if at a slightly slower pace.