Digital Library Center Blog | UF

With the upcoming release of Google Voice for everyone, extending from current Grandcentral users to include new users, transcribing audio could soon become a lot less difficult. In light of the potential for increased ease, people may soon be even more interested in conducting  oral histories. For those looking for information on how to conduct oral histories, Mark Greenberg at the University of South Florida has developed a number of great resources that are all conveniently organized together and printable from here.

Read more about the project that made it possible here, or skip right to the audio. I’m not sure if 1,000 files sound incredibly impressive to most users or not, but it should or we need to develop new methods of counting. 1,000 audio files is a lot of work and audio files have depth. With so many people working to lay the foundation for access by digitizing materials, so many others have already been building from and on them. We need more open materials to build with, and for a sense of space, place, time, and movement, we need music we can share, use, incorporate, recombine, and these 1,000 represent the files themselves and thousands upon thousands of connections and constellations.

Almanack for 1884

Happy St. Patrick’s Day (tomorrow)! To celebrate, enjoy some of the related books (or at least a few that appear related based on searching for “St. Patrick”) in UFDC:

• The Youth’s History of Ireland
• Paddy O’Learey and His Learned Pig
• The Brownies in Ireland
• Celtic Fairy Tales
• Honor Bright, or, The four-Leaved Shamrock
• “Magic Clovers” in St. Nicholas
• Almanack for 1884

The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is doing training on the dLOC Toolkit in Jamaica. Brooke Wooldridge (dLOC/FIU), Mark Sullivan (UF), and Lee Dotson (UCF) are all enjoying spending time in Jamaica and soon the world will benefit from even greater access to more materials.

See materials from all of the partners on dLOC now and check back frequently to see the many new items loading daily!

I’ve blogged quite a bit about UFDC’s page count as we reached 1 million, 2 million, and 3 million pages, digitizing 100,000 pages and more a month. I’m equally excited by every new milestone, but with so many pages online UFDC has reached critical mass overall and in many individual collections like the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, and the Digital Library of the Caribbean.

By reaching critical mass, UFDC is now large enough to bring in new users and to offer something for everyone who comes to UFDC. Every page and every item that now loads adds exponentially to the connections and depth of the materials already in UFDC and so counting by pages and items no longer speaks to UFDC’s true wealth of materials.

Critical mass is oddly wonderful because we have more to share than ever before, but we now lack any adequate way to express the value and quality of materials in UFDC. Of course, this simply means the Digital Library Center will need to spend even more time sharing information about UFDC and searching for better ways to share.

Waterfront News, March 2009

UFDC is only three, but it’s already made lots of friends including The Waterfront News, which celebrates its 25th birthday this year!

The Waterfront News began in March 1984 and grew to become “South Florida’s Nautical Newspaper” and they’re asking for stories from their readers for next month’s memorial edition.

The Waterfront News is one of the many local Florida newspapers archived for preservation and access through by the University of Florida Digital Collections’ Florida Digital Newspaper Library.  See their archives, 1984-2007 (with more recent issues being added) online in UFDC here!

I think the post title about says it all. March is the birthday month for the University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) and this year UFDC turns 3!

Where most three year olds aren’t yet learning to read, UFDC is already onto using Lucene for indexing (it’s like reading, so this metaphor sort of works) and UFDC already has well over a million pages for each year. Those millions of pages weren’t added evenly throughout UFDC’s early year and a half or so, but UFDC is now growing and thriving.

As we look forward to the next year and the next series of millions of pages, many new plans are in development. Some are more exciting like the Caribbean Newspaper Digital Library proposal, and some are less glamourous but still rather exciting like the move to put UF’s internal FilmLog database online so that others can see just how many reels of microfilm of what are available. I know microfilm doesn’t sound exciting, but many materials are no longer available in paper (at least in Florida, thanks to the weather) so microfilm may be the only copy. Plus, we’ve already digitized and are processing bunches of reels of that microfilm so it’s good for people to know what else might be coming and what else they might want to know more about.

In addition to more content, UFDC’s third birthday is a time to look forward to many new technological improvements and many more ways to share and explore the millions of pages of content, audio files, video, and images with others.

Happy Birthday UFDC!