Digital Library Center Blog | UF

The UFDC usage stats are now online in great detail. The stats include overall, collections by date, items by date, collection history, items by collection, and definitions to sort out what all of this means. The items by collection is particularly interesting where you can see how many hits are on particular items, like this page for the Baldwin. Some collections, like the newspapers, are by title and issue, so I assumed the hits would skew to the first issue of any of the titles and they do in some cases, but in others the 157th issue is the most hit.

We’re still interpreting the data, but we’re already learning from it. For instance, Lourdes noticed that one of the University Archives Photos had significantly more hits than any of the others and in trying to find what made it special, she noticed it was the highlight image on the landing page for that collection. We’ve now added more highlight images for the collection that will alternate on reloads to help distribute the hits and provide more data to users. We normally try to provide multiple highlight images, but it hasn’t been a significant priority in the past and now we know it needs to be.

Along with thousands of other folks working in or around libraries and information services, I’ll be in Denver this weekend of the ALA Midwinter conference. ALA will have lots of great presentations and great folks who have lots to information to share! Jan. 25, update: I came down with the flu the flu on Jan. 23 (the day before my flight), but soon I’ll be better and reading all the blogs and posts from others who did go (and learning vicariously of all that I missed).

President Barack Obama has already begun implementing important changes, including restoring public access to presidential records by revoking the Bush administration’s Executive Order 13233. The text for President Obama’s executive order is available on the Whitehouse website.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) issued a call for President Obama’s administration to support large-scale digitization initiatives. The brief call from the ARL Newsletter is online as is the full letter.

As an addendum to to ARL’s call for “a large-scale initiative to digitize public domain collections,” let’s also make sure these initiatives include all holdings that are in the public domain in however many selected US institutions, including the millions upon millions of pages published in other countries and collected by the US. The US has so many collections that would benefit the US and so many collections that, if shared openly, would benefit the world and international relations overall. Presenting and sharing these materials, especially in a way that makes sure they’re sustainable, will create new national resources and new sources for global collaboration.

My personal dream would be to see the public domain documents acquired through foreign cooperative acquisitions plans digitized as part of the larger US institution holdings where they can be found. In the Farmington Plan different US institutions collected materials by area or country so that the materials would be accessible in the US and preserved. The Farmington plan was formulated with the fear of data loss (paper data loss) from war and the first official Farmington meeting was in the 1940s in Farmington Connecticut. The Farmington Plan was official in 1948, but it’s official operations didn’t come with the necessary official funding so it only formalized work that had already been going on.

The cooperative collection plans formalized in the Farmington Plan date back far earlier. The reason I know any of this history is because the University of Florida, for instance, had been collecting Caribbean material for decades prior to the Farmington Plan (see this article) and continues to do so today. UF became the official institution responsible for the Caribbean in 1952 when a “modification of the subject basis for assignment was suggested when it was recommended that libraries accept total responsibility for publications issued by a given country or area not presently covered by the Plan. Thus, the Caribbean area was accepted by the University of Florida” (source). According to all of the documentation I’ve found (and this is still new research for me), the University of Florida had been collecting Caribbean materials and so UF was simply asked and added to the Farmington Plan for what it was already doing. Because of the existing relationships in the Caribbean, UF was able to acquire copies of documents–in print and in microfilm through “mobile microfilming units” (meaning barges with microfilm cameras that traveled the Caribbean and made microfilm copies of important documents and books)–and in at least one case, UF’s microfilm was the last copy in the world (hurricanes and tropical weather are a constant danger to archives now and were much more so before air conditioning). In the last copy instance, UF was able to digitize the materials through the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and return the cultural materials to their rightful owners while also sharing the materials with the world. The last copy became one of many copies and became inaccessible to easily accessible.

The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a wonderful and downright amazing project in terms of technology, history, and significance. It’s successful because it took the cooperative collection plan and made it work digitally. Yet there are so many other existing projects that are or could also build on parts of earlier cooperative collection plans. Funding is needed though and these materials are needed and are not otherwise accessible. The purpose of cooperative collection plans was to ensure that someone would have a copy in the US and to avoid purchasing multiple copies and possibly overspending on always underfunded budgets (and this is going back past the 1940s discussions and earlier). The majority of materials in research libraries are unique because libraries couldn’t afford to get extra copies. Digitizing full collections is wonderful, but we need to digitize everything in all of them or very nearly. The uniqueness means that each library collection only has a tiny portion of the whole. Google scanning entire university libraries is only beginning to hint at scratching the surface and we need so much more.

ARL’s call for a large-scale digitization initiative is so right because the need is so huge, the benefits so great, and the possibilities so enormous. As ARL states, the initiative “will lay a foundation for innovation and national competitiveness in the decades ahead.” To that I would add “and a spirit of international cooperation and collaboration” to ensure that past brilliance and innovation are included. While the Farmington Plan wasn’t funded as it needed to be, it’s hard to imagine how much funding would be needed to support essentially an Internet of data made of microfilm, so many copies, mailed to institutions for all to access. The costs remain high, but are much lower and the potential rewards so much greater.

The US National Archives are celebrating their 75th anniversary this year! Since 1934, the National Archives has maintained centralized federal record keeping and the National Archives, now known as the National Archives and Records Administration, administers 37 facilities covering regional archives, Presidential libraries, the National Historical and Publications Commission, and muc more!

National Archives History
National Archives Celebrating 75 Years

On the Open Library General Discussion List, Edward Betts recently posted that, while tidying author records in Open Library, he found 248 authors-as-spirits. Not unknown ghosts or muses, but the spirit of a particular person listed as a spirit. He included the examples below in the post and the full list on his website.

$a Abraham $c (Spirit)
$a Churchill, Winston $c Sir $d 1874-1965 $c (Spirit)
$a Doyle, Arthur Conan $c Sir $d 1859-1930 $c (Spirit)
$a Jesus Christ $c (Spirit)
$a Shakespeare, William $d 1564-1616 $c (Spirit)

For all those fascinated by dead (and undead) media, this is wonderfully rich. Not only do the dead speak through media (and issues of telepresence continue as we read, hear, and watch, from telegraph to home video–there’s a real horror movies and games are so populated by letters, diaries, books, histories, and the like) but their voices as the dead and even cataloged as such. When I learn bits of wonder like the spirit authors, I wish I had more experience in libraries and archives because there’s so much more to know and I’m so fascinated by the change of technologies, perceptions of the technologies, and the seemingly mundane ways in which people have dealt with the oddities.

I’m not interested in the large scale glam or beliefs in the paranormal or excitement over media revolutions because, while all of those are interesting, I’m so curious about how exceptional beliefs (as the outside-the-curve use cases, unintended uses and consequences, cultural beliefs, sheer oddities) are handled within day to day dealings and how those exceptions inform and shape the mundane and familiar. Noting “(Spirit)” inside a MARC record for ghostly authors–especially when including their birth and death dates–is wonderful. I’m sure there were meetings to discuss whether or not to include the first sighting of the spirit in a spirit birth date, but that was likely decided to be too cumbersome and too subject to interpretation. I’d absolutely love to read any archival files on how the inclusion of “(Spirit)” came about and what all was left out of the addition and why, and now I know to be on the lookout for it.

President Obama’s Presidential Inauguration can be viewed live on Tuesday on large screens–in addition to the many computer screens it will fill–at three of the UF Libraries:

• Library West in the InfoCommons (3rd floor)
• Education Library (limited seating)
• Large screen just outside the Journalism & Communications Library

In addition to the ongoing work by all partners that constantly adds new materials to the Digital Library of the Caribbean, the University of Florida is participating with the Center for Research Libraries’ (CRL) World Newspaper Archive. By participating, CRL will return copies of the digital files for the newspapers that will be digitized so that UF can include them the Digital Library of the Caribbean, so that these papers will always be freely and openly accessible for all!

Under this program, the titles to be added to the Digital Library of the Caribbean will be (pre-1923 years only):

• Diario de la Marina
• Jornal do Commercio
• Port of Spain Gazette

CRL’s World Newspaper Archive currently only plans to cover pre-1923 issues, but the University of Florida Libraries and other partners in the Digital Library of the Caribbean will continue working on digitizing all years of these newspapers to have them all openly and freely online!

Many issues of the Diario de la Marina from the 1940s-1960s are already online and many others are in process. By participating in CRL’s project, even more will be added even sooner than expected. While sooner than expected, this still may take quite some time because UF hasn’t even begun the process of shipping the microfilm to be digitized and that has to be underway before we can start seeing digital files returned and then those will need to be processed before they can be loaded. It still means sooner, though, and that we can ensure more materials are all online sooner.

We now have usage statistics for our collections as a whole and by collection! They’re online here in an Excel spreadsheet. Our overall usage stats, while good, are far smaller than they will be because so much of our content is recent (over a million pages since July alone) and because UFDC was forced to deny search engine robots entirely for several months in early 2008 because the search engines were behaving improperly and overly taxing the database.

As expected, our most used collections are the oldest and largest, with the Baldwin, the Florida Newspaper Digital Library, and the Digital Library of the Caribbean.

Given the addition of so much content and the static pages, UFDC’s hits should double (or more) in the next year!

Go Gators! Congratulations!

Someday we’ll be archiving photos of tonight’s game in the University Archives Digital Collection, but tonight is for rejoicing by Gators everywhere!