Digital Library Center Blog | UF

Press Release

Port of Spain, TRINIDAD and TOBAGO (September 10, 2009)

The Eric Williams Memorial Collection (EWMC) at The University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago, announces the biennial “Eric Williams ‘School Bags’ Essay Competition.” Since 2009 marks the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, Caribbean students are being asked to assess its successes and failures and to comment on their relevance to today.

This year, the EWMC is partnering with UNESCO offices in Trinidad and Tobago; Jamaica; Guyana; Grenada and the British Virgin Islands in encouraging eligible schools in those countries to participate.

Throughout his life, Dr Eric Williams, noted scholar/historian and the first Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, gave special emphasis to learning. “To educate is to emancipate,” he famously said, and on August 30, 1962, the eve of his country’s Independence from Britain, he exhorted:

“You, the children, yours is the great responsibility to educate your parents, teach them to live together in harmony…To your tender and loving hands, the future of the Nation is entrusted. In your innocent hearts, the pride of the Nation is enshrined. On your scholastic development, the salvation of the Nation is dependent…you carry the future of Trinidad and Tobago in your school bags.”

The contest is being offered to all final year Sixth Form students (or equivalent) in the former and current British-colonized Caribbean countries: Anguilla, Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turks and Caicos. It will be held from September 2009 through January 31, 2010. Winners will be announced on April 30, 2010.

The first prize winner will receive a four-day trip for two to Trinidad and Tobago with airfare, hotel accommodations and two meals daily; a tour of The Eric Williams Memorial Collection and University of the West Indies campus; a US $1000 educational voucher; courtesy calls on the President of Trinidad and Tobago and the Speaker of the House of Representatives; a tour of Parliament; a set of Eric Williams’ books; a framed certificate and a 2010 African American Black History Calendar. In the event of a Trinidad and Tobago winner, a trip to Jamaica will be substituted.

The winning essay will also be published in CARICOM’s Newsletter and the Miami Herald Newspaper’s online edition.

2007 Competition winners were: Dexnell Peters, Trinity College, Trinidad and Tobago (First); Patrina Pink (Second) and Machela Osagboro (Third), both of Wolmer’s School, Jamaica.

Patrons of the Eric Williams Memorial Collection’s ‘School Bags’ Essay Competition are: Caribbean Airlines, Ltd.; CARICOM; Digicel Trinidad & Tobago, Ltd.; Encyclopedia of the Caribbean – Professor John Garrigus; IOKTS Productions; Journal of African American History; LIAT (1974) Ltd.; Miami-Dade County Public Schools System; Miami Herald Newspaper; Trinidad Hilton; UNESCO.

The Eric Williams Memorial Collection constitutes the Research Library, Archives & Museum of Eric Williams. It was inaugurated by former US Secretary of State Colin Powell in 1998, and named to UNESCO’s prestigious Memory of the World Register in 1999.

For more information, please contact Erica Williams Connell, The Eric Williams Memorial Collection; P.O. Box 561631; Miami, FL 33256-1631, USA. Fax: (305) 271-4160; Websites: www.ericwilliamsmemorialcollection.org; http://dloc.com/?c=dloc&m=hiteew

I was reading the latest issue of UF Today, and it had the wonderful photograph above of one man shaving another with an axe. The story next to it explains that the photo is from a Department of Forestry Field Day from 1937. It’s such a great photo, I wanted to be sure to ask Carl Van Ness (the Head of Manuscripts in Special Collections and the University Archivist) when I noticed the caption that states the photo is in the UF Digital Collections. Finding the photo was already findable was a nice surprise, and a nice reminder of the importance of the work being done by the UF Libraries and the UF Digital Collections.
Browse the University Archive Photographs Digital Collection here. The Digital Collection represents only a small portion of the University Archives’ massive collection, but more are added on a regularly.

Job Posting: Senior Archivist, University of Central Florida Libraries (UCF), Orlando

Responsibilities:
Under the general supervision of the Special Collections and University Archives Department Head, the Senior Archivist completes records surveys of University administrative offices, colleges, centers and institutes, reviews collections of private organizational and personal papers, coordinates transfer and accession of archival documents to the University Archives or Special Collections; and is responsible for the physical and intellectual control of acquired records. Sets processing priorities; trains and coordinates students and interns in processing records to archival standards, creating description including EAD finding aids and performing basic preservation functions. Processes records to archival standards, creates description including EAD finding aids, and works with cataloging to create MARC records for the collections. Assists with development of description and content for departmental website. Provides outreach and research assistance to campus offices, researchers and private donors. Assists with coordination of archival records transfers and accession of University Records and manuscript collections

Qualifications: Required: a high schools diploma and seven years of appropriate experience. Appropriate college coursework or vocational/technical training may substitute at an equivalent rate for the required experience. Preferred: Graduate level coursework; demonstrated ability to inventory, process, arrange, and describe historic public records series; ability to undertake outreach to campus offices, create archival records series transfer policies, accession series, and perform basic preservation functions; experience processing manuscripts and university archives; demonstrated experience to create descriptions including finding aids, specifically using EAD, and metadata creation and management, specifically using Dublin Core and CONTENTdm; ability to work with cataloging to create MARC records for the collections; ability to assist with development of description and content for Special Collections & University Archives website; experience supervising students and other employees; demonstrated ability to work with a diverse group of people and in a team environment; demonstrated ability to balance multiple projects, meet deadlines, express ideas clearly, orally and in writing, attend to detail, and self-motivate and take initiative. Demonstrated ability to represent Special Collections and University Archives, to UCF Libraries, to the UCF community, and to the general public.

Environment: The Department of Special Collections and University Archives maintains materials in a variety of formats including rare and special books, manuscripts, ephemera, photographs, maps, media, fine art, and university archival records. The collections emphasize 19th and 20th century materials. Strengths include the Bryant West Indies Collection of over 1800 books and periodicals, as well as maps, music, realia, and approximately 400 paintings and sculptures. Other collecting strengths include the African Americana, Book Arts,
Floridiana, and tourism. The staff includes 1 faculty, 1 professional archivist, and 1 support staff. A percentage of the library materials budget including endowments is assigned to the department. For more information: http://library.ucf.edu/SpecialCollections.

The University of Central Florida is a metropolitan research university enrolling 52,000 students. The main UCF library, regional sites and branches have a collection of 1.9 million volumes, a subscription base of 18,000 serials, and serve as a partial depository for government documents and patents. The library materials budget is $5.5 million. Full-time staff of 110 includes 37 faculty. For more information see http://library.ucf.edu/.

Position Information: This is a full-time permanent University Support Personnel System appointment with benefits. Class code #093 Senior Archivist salary is $33,660/$1289.66 biweekly.

To Apply: Apply between September 25, and October 8, 2009 for USPS position number 32342 at
http://jobswithucf.com OR https://www.jobswithucf.com/applicants/jsp/shared/frameset/Frameset.jsp?time=1253025093149

Searches are conducted in accordance with the state of Florida open-records laws. UCF is an equal opportunity, equal access, affirmative action employer.

Caribbean Scholarship in the Digital Age
September 15, 2009
2:00 - 4:00 pm
Graham Center 150
Florida International University
11200 SW 8th St.
Miami, FL 33199

The Digital Library of the Caribbean will host three speakers on the use of digital resources for Caribbean teaching and research.   The speakers will highlight how digital access to Caribbean research materials is opening new paths for both research and teaching.

• Dr. JoAnne Harris, Brittain Fellow, School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, Georgia Tech
• Dr. Nicola Foote, Assistant Professor of Latin American and Caribbean History, Florida Gulf Coast University
• Mr. Patrick Tardieu, Curator, Fathers of the Holy Spirit Library, Port au Prince, Haiti

Event is free and open to the public.
For more information, contact 305.348.3008 or dloc@fiu.edu.

The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) has grown from September 2007’s 1 million pages (pages of books, newspapers, archival materials, maps, posters, audio, video, photos, and more) to 2 million in July 2008, 3 million in December 2008 (thanks to ingesting microfilm digitized by a vendor) and then to 4 million in July 2009. Right now - and UFDC is loading so this will be higher by morning - UFDC has 4,134,392 pages.

Four million, one hundred and thirty-four thousand, three hundred and ninety-two pages.

It sounds impressive because it is. Yet, it’s so much more than that even when only on a quantity level. Page counts are helpful for a general sense of “big-ness” because they prove critical mass. It’s a way of saying “if you’re not sure this is the digital collection you’re looking for, this collection is big enough to have something you’re interested in”. Page counts aren’t helpful in dealing with multiple formats. For instance, right now 1 page =

• 1 page of a journal article, born digital and submitted electronically
• 1 10 ft. x 12 ft. blueprint from 1905
• 1 video, one hour long, digitized from VHS
• 1 audio interview, one hour long, converted from reel to reel tapes

These aren’t equivalent in terms of the work to create them, the interface variety and sophistication to present them, or the use-value to patrons and for preservation.

Page counts aren’t perfect, and neither are item counts, but is there an easy and accurate way to explain any complex, diverse, and varied collections with 4 million + pieces?

The value created from having critical mass makes the entire scenario more complicated. There’s no good way to explain the value of  being able to search for an illustrator and seeing examples of the work in multiple books, finding reviews of the illustrator’s work in a literary journal, seeing articles by the illustrator’s peers in newspapers from the same time period, and more without a narrative-style example, and that’s not short or easy.

Given the size, scope, and wealth contained in UFDC, I’m at a loss for words to explain just how wonderful UFDC is. For now, I plan to focus on adding more materials and adding more contextual guides (exhibits, highlighted items of the week, guides, and then on to authority records). I’d still like to have something short and quick to explain UFDC like the page counts, but perhaps those were never good enough explanations and I was just more comfortable with them when they were less blatantly inaccurate. Whatever the case, UFDC continues to grow at an astonishing rate by any measure I can imagine.

Old technologies can be fascinating and informative for best practices for new technologies. However, they can also be broken systems that burden users and developers who are trying to use them and work around them. PURL servers are one of the broken ones in need of replacement.

Like MARC, PURL servers are a dated concept that lead to failures. Yet, now PURLs are PURLz and are gaining new adopters, even though the US Government Printing Office had a PURL server outage that lasted over a week (Aug. 28 and still in process of correction Sept. 4). The design of PURL servers makes mirroring difficult. Thus, using PURLs to have persistent uniform resource locators can result in link failures even when resources are available, as is the case with the GPO documents right now.

With limited budgets and limited people resources, replacing a technology that isn’t clearly and provably broken can be difficult, even for the technologists who see the broken technology as looming disasters waiting to happen. While GPO’s painful downtime (and downtime is always painful) is awful, that pain could be harnessed to form a wonderfully clear argument that articulates the problems with PURL servers and advocates for their replacement. Hopefully GPO will be able to use this to replace their PURL server, as they’ve considered. Then, hopefully they can help others in migrating to technology that is more resilient and then won’t subject us all to unnecessary and painful downtime.

I’d always assumed that catalog records were based on MARC, and that MARC was a guideline or standard like METS, MODS, or TEI, or even HTML or XML. After all, SGML is one heck of a powerful grandparent for modern record formats, right? And for printing, TeX, LaTeX, and BibTeX have been around for ages, so there’s no way that an archaic punch-card style technology could be in use at almost every library in the US, right? Sadly, no, I was wrong.

My assumptions on what MARC must be have kept me from helping to fix the problems that stem from what it actually is. I’m also now worried about what other dead technologies might be in widespread use that are directly related to library operations. Please note that I’m not in any way attacking the ideas that underly MARC records. We need bibliographic records, and metadata and organizational systems are essential. MARC is just a mix of the transfer protocol, data definition, data structure, data display, and actual data content. It’s a thing optimized to print card catalog cards in a card catalog world.

Cards in card catalogs have defined data elements (author, title subject, call number, etc) and they have an organizational method and so extrapolating that to defined fields should be easy. Except, defined fields in MARC are always within the record. The minimum part of a MARC record is a single full MARC record read line by line. You can’t skip ahead because the field leaders note where the field begins and how long it will be. I saw the weird number sequences and leaders for elements, and I assumed that those were either shorthand or they were habit-based preferences that people chose to use. After all, the catalog record has defined data components for bibliographic and authority records (named people, corporations, other entities), so it had to be a matter of preference to displaying an author like this:

ME:Pers Name     100 1# $a Brenner, Richard J.,
                        $d 1941-

The $a for author had to be a shorthand, and so must be the 100 1#, because they had to be. It could not be the case that this shorthand was actually needed and that almost every library with an electronic catalog was still wedded to the technology made to optimize the printing of card catalog cards in the 1970s (or before? it’s updated to deal with unicode, at least MARC21 is, but this is punch card or telegraph style technology).

Take a look at this MARC record:

01041cam  2200265 a 450000100200000000300040002000
50017000240080041000410100024000820200025001060200
04400131040001800175050002400193082001800217100003
20023524500870026724600360035425000120039026000370
04023000029004395000042004685200220005106500033007
30650001200763^###89048230#/AC/r91^DLC^19911106082
810.9^891101s1990####maua###j######000#0#eng##^##$
a###89048230#/AC/r91^##$a0316107514 :$c$12.95^##$a
0316107506 (pbk.) :$c$5.95 ($6.95 Can.)^##$aDLC$cD
LC$dDLC^00$aGV943.25$b.B74 1990^00$a796.334/2$220^
10$aBrenner, Richard J.,$d1941-^10$aMake the team.
$pSoccer :$ba heads up guide to super soccer! /$cR
ichard J. Brenner.^30$aHeads up guide to super soc
cer.^##$a1st ed.^##$aBoston :$bLittle, Brown,$cc19
90.^##$a127 p. :$bill. ;$c19 cm.^##$a"A Sports ill
ustrated for kids book."^##$aInstructions for impr
oving soccer skills. Discusses dribbling, heading,
 playmaking, defense, conditioning, mental attitud
e, how to handle problems with coaches, parents, a
nd other players, and the history of soccer.^#0$aS
occer$vJuvenile literature.^#1$aSoccer.^\

(source)

Sure, that can be formatted nicely, but imagine a modern system having to read all of this to be able to allow users to search by author, title, keyword, and have facets for years, material type, etc. A program then reads all of the records in, indexing all of them and then running purely off of the index, except when forced to look at the MARC records because people are still doing something to/with them, or it somehow queries the records-as-blobs. I’m not even sure how older catalogs actually worked because the format of these is impossible for my concepts of computerized search.

I don’t know how common it must be for people familiar with normal standards to unquestioningly assume that MARC must be a normal standard, but I had trouble even understanding that something as broken as the MARC record could still exist. Now, I understand why people would tell me “that’s not possible” or “that’s not the way the system works” when I’d ask questions about what should be simple tasks. I’d often reply “but it has to be because that’s the way computers work” and I’d keep asking, thinking MARC must be an elaborate way to define data, with ties to legacy systems that made it confusing. That’s true-ish, but the real problem is that MARC is an archaic legacy form, so much so that I couldn’t comprehend when people tried to explain it to me.

When explaining MARC records to those familiar with normal technology standards, Karen Coyle notes hearing “virtual sighs” as  the programmers who “were not familiar with the standard library metadata record, and the standards were not compatible with the general suite of tools that the programmers commonly work with, such as HTML, CSS, and a host of XML-based tools” (source). In my mind, a metadata standard - especially one for library materials, whether books or audio or maps or whatnot - cannot be incompatible with XML.

It looks like the phenomenon of not knowing how to define MARC is fairly common for folks who work regularly with current computing. Hopefully we’ll all learn just enough about MARC to replace it quickly with RDA (or even something that seems like MARC to those who like it, but something that functions as a real data model). Once the archaic MARC-technology-underpinnings - whether or not other aspects of it remain - can be replaced, library data will be so much easier to access, use, and connect for everyone from catalogers to patrons. I feel awful that I didn’t understand how broken MARC was as it tried to act as protocol/structure/display/format/record, and I’m only now learning what MARC is, so I don’t yet know how many problems it’s created or how many innovations or aids it’s prevented.