Digital Library Center Blog | UF

Chronicling America, the amazing historical newspaper digital collection from the Library of Congress and NEH, has added “Topics“. With over a million pages of historical newspapers online, “Topics” are an essential need–helping users who aren’t sure what they’re looking for find a way into so much content and helping to showcase some of the highlights of so much great content for all users.

Some of the topics that include Florida content (as the Interim Director for the University of Florida Digital Library Center, which supports the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, the ones with Florida content are those of greatest interest to me):

• Baseball’s Modern World Series, 1903-1910
• From Territory to Statehood - The West
• Patent Medicines
• Pullman Porters

We’re nearing the end of the fiscal year, a time of due dates for many reports. Luckily, UFDC has many happy accomplishments that I want to share which makes report writing easy and even pleasant.

UFDC Materials in Motion, Mapped, & More
UFDC saw many improvements (thanks to Mark Sullivan’s programming) that have enabled many new ways to see and use materials in the all of the digital collections, including:

• Embedded Flash views
• Map-It view for items
• Google-maps based searching
• Embedded PDF views
• Metadata-only searching, for improved searching of collections which have very little full text
• Usage statistics now available online for everyone to track usage and patron interests

The UF Digital Collection (UFDC) records now load into the UF Libraries catalog with thumbnails!

The University of Florida’s Digital Library Center regularly receives requests for copies of digital files. The UF Digital Collections contain many items not in the public domain, but for which the rights owners have granted permissions and for those we refer requests to the rights holders. If the files are UF’s and in the public domain, the DLC is happy to share the files. We do ask for attribution to the UF Libraries so that users of the new materials can find more related items and we ask for news of where the images are being used so we can share that information with our current users as well.

Recently, files for two Baldwin books were requested for translation into Catalan and republishing into new volumes by Editorial Flamboyant, a publisher whose goal is to bring small literary gems to children and parents. Editorial Flamboyant has done a wonderful job and the new books are now available online from their website. Their blog includes more information on these books and their plans for the future, and the blog is here and translated with Google translate into English here.

Google recently released the Google Translator Toolkit. The Translator Toolkit allows users to easily upload text, has Google Translate’s existing functionality to automatically translate the text, and then adds “Translation Memories” which is a database of prior human translations.

A translation memory (TM) is a database of human translations. As you translate new sentences, we automatically search all available translation memories for previous translations similar to your new sentence. If such sentences exist, we rank and then show them to you. Comparing your translation to previous human translations improves consistency and saves you time: you can reuse previous translations or adjust them to create new, more contextually appropriate translations. When you finish translating documents in Google Translator Toolkit, we save your translations to a translation memory so you or other translators can avoid duplicating work.

Translation Memories is an excellent example of a smart technological idea because its service is embedded within a use case that could sustainably and equitably support all involved. Users are provided with an easy tool to do translations, and a tool that will continue to improve as they use it. Google gains access to translations and translations in context. This is the type of data that can easily be used (or much more easily than most) to better train computer translations, which can in turn improve Google’s translations overall and Google’s search engine results in other languages.

The Google Translator Toolkit has a limited set of languages right now, but it should improve as more texts in more languages are available overall and as the Google Translator Toolkit improves. The Google Translator Toolkit is a smart example of aiding small, current needs–current needs for an easy, online, collaborative tool for translations–to aid larger concerns like the need for better translations overall which requires human translations to improve automatic translations and which will be an ongoing process.

My current interest is in hoping that the Google Translator Toolkit soon adds Papiemento and Papiementu because the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) already includes texts in Papiemento and Papiementu. As dLOC adds more partners and more languages, more translations will be needed and more tools–especially those that ease collaborative work and shared results–are always welcome.

Internet Archive has a video on the history of the Government Printing Office (GPO).

ACLS has a number of fellowships and applications are due by September 30, 2009. The information on the fellowship programs won’t be updated until July, but it’s not too early to start planning a project. I’m hoping that someone is already planning a fellowship proposal on Caribbean Studies, Florida history, newspapers, children’s literature, or another topic that connects easily to the the Digital Library of the Caribbean, the Florida History and Heritage Digital Collections, the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Digital Collection or another of the collections supported by UFDC.

The ACLS/SSRC/NEH International and Area Studies Fellowships, the ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowships, and the ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowships could all support research using digital collections and libraries in UFDC and I’m happy to provide information on any of the collections to anyone planning or considering submitting a fellowship application to study the materials in or to conduct research with the digital collections and libraries in UFDC.