Digital Library Center Blog | UF

News Release: Flagler receives prestigious ‘Save America’s Treasures’ grant (December 17, 2009)

St. Augustine, Fla. — Flagler College recently received a prestigious grant to help preserve drawings from the architects of the treasured National Historic Landmark Hotel Ponce de Leon.

Flagler College President William T. Abare Jr., Ed.D., announced receipt of the prestigious “Save America’s Treasures” (SAT) grant administered through the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Saving St. Augustine’s Architectural Treasures project, a partnership with the University of Florida Libraries, will conserve and digitally preserve an irreplaceable collection of the earliest architectural drawings of John Carrère (1858-1911) and Thomas Hastings (1860-1929), the designers of Henry Flagler’s famed Hotel Ponce de Leon.

Carrère and Hastings were two of the most significant American architects of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Their firm designed more than 600 buildings, including the New York Public Library (1902-11) and the House and Senate office buildings in Washington, D.C. (1908-09). According to Charles D. Warren, co-author of “Carrère & Hastings Architects,” they were “innovators in both technology and aesthetics.”

Regrettably, as Janet Parks, Curator of Drawings & Archives, Columbia University, said: “Most of the archive of [their] office was destroyed in the 1920’s.” The St. Augustine collection offers significant potential to yield unique information with enduring value.

Comprised of 267 original, fragile drawings on cloth, silk and paper, as well as blueprints and copies, the collection is the largest known archives documenting the firm’s earliest work. Among these fragile drawings are the blueprints for their first commission, the Hotel Ponce de Leon, which launched their careers.

This is Flagler College’s second largest award at $49,562 and was one of only five conservation projects funded nationwide. The funds will assist with the preservation of these recently rediscovered records and make them accessible to researchers.

Additional conservation projects include Friendly Association Papers, Haverford, Penn.; Paley Center for Media, New York; “This I Believe” Collection, Medford, Mass.; and William Still Collection, Philadelphia.

Original news release on Flagler College’s website.

Open Source METS Metadata Editor: Download

About the Open Source METS Metadata Editor

One of the newest of the continual upgrades to the UF Digital Collections is online metadata editing. To make that fully operational our programmer, Mark Sullivan, revised the current standalone METS Metadata Editor application to ensure it remained in parallel. In doing so, Mark noticed that he could quickly adapt our METS Metadata Editor to serve the needs of all of the State University Libraries in Florida. Mark made those updates and the METS Metadata Editor is now available for download here.

The METS Metadata Editor is an Open Source .NET application and features:

• METS Object and METS Reader
  • Good object-oriented example, plug and play for .NET users
  • METS mappings
  • MARC ? METS/MODS ? MARC
  • METS/MODS ? Greenstone file
  • METS/MODS ? Dublin Core (could easily include Dublin core ? METS/MODS)

The METS Metadata Editor is available as an Open Source download for the Windows application from here.

In the near future, the code for the METS Metadata Editor Web application will also be available for download. The code for the  METS Metadata Editor Web application is already powering online metadata editing for the UF Digital Collections, but it’s still new and we’re gathering and incorporating user feedback to further optimize the interface right now. Once released, the METS Editor Web Application will allow users to enter and edit METS files. It probably will not include a logon system, but will instead save into a folder by IP or session number. Then, users will be able to create an item, view it, edit it, download METS, MARC, etc. A bulk importer from MARC and spreadsheets will also be available as a bundled part of the standalone and web application. The Digital Library Center already uses the importer as part of our production toolkit.

As we release more Open Source tools, please note that we’re revising our documentation but it may have different names for some of the same tools until we finish editing. The different names are all for our production toolkit, which is sometimes referred to as the DLC Toolkit, the UFDC Toolkit, the Digital Library of the Caribbean or dLOC Toolkit, and the SobekCM Toolkit. The SobekCM Toolkit has many names because the coding is brilliantly architected and modular, with the same code powering multiple tools and customized tool sets, multiple production scenarios, and multiple versions of the same applications customized for the different user groups.  Translating among the names our users know for their tools and the system components causes confusion, so we’re now referring to the collections by their names and the system-parts by the name SobekCM. The CM is for collection and content management, and Sobek is the name of an Egyptian crocodile god (because even crocodiles are Gators in Gainesville).

To help aid with any possible confusion on terminology, we have definition pages for general terms and for specific metadata fields. We’re still working on the pages for the metadata fields, because they provide a lot more than just a definition.

Each of the definitional metadata pages includes:

• Definition(s)
• Form Element
• Best Practices
• Examples
• UFDC / MODS Encoding
• Metadata Mapping
• Links to reference materials

Examples in process:

• Main Title
• Other Title
• Type
• Physical Description
• Complex Note
• Complex Abstract
• Complex Creator
• Complex Publisher
• Complex Manufacturer
• Genre
• Holding Location
• Language
• Publication Date
• Subject Scheme
• Complex Temporal
• Coordinate Points
• Spatial
• Target Audience
• Source

Press Release from FSU:

FSU’s PALM Center to partner in Library of Congress grant

The PALM Center at the Florida State University School of Library and Information Studies is part of a team that has been awarded a $300,000 grant by the Library of Congress. The collaborative project, Successfully Teaching Educators about Primary Sources, will extend the work of the Library of Congress initiative Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS).

“Kids improve their analytical skills—higher-order critical thinking and inquiry-oriented activities—by working with primary source, first-hand information,” said Dr. Nancy Everhart, director of the PALM Center. “And they become inspired to learn more about history by working with primary source documents, such as the extraordinary collection held by the Library of Congress. It has over 16 million primary sources—from those documenting the founding of our county, through the history of the immigrant experience and the civil rights movement, to those reflecting this very day.”

The PALM Center will work as a member of the Florida Education Inquiry Primary Source Team (FEIPST), a collaborative effort of the University of Central Florida’s College of Education SUNLINK, the Florida Association for Media in Education, the Florida Association of Supervisors of Media, The State Library of Florida, and school districts throughout Florida.

“A selection committee reviewed a number of proposals submitted by institutions in Florida, Georgia, and Texas for a Teaching with Primary Sources grant. FEIPST’s application offered the best plan to use technology and its large institutional network to help disseminate the Library’s TPS program,” said to Laura Campbell, Associate Librarian for Strategic Initiatives for the Library of Congress. Only two proposals were funded nationally.

The expertise of the PALM Center in external evaluation will be their major contribution to the team. The PALM Center is the only organization known to specialize in the evaluation of school library projects and programs while doing research in the area. According to Dr. Mardis, the Center will provide evaluation services over the two years of the project. “This project is a great example of the potential school library media specialists have to transform student learning in vital ways,” said Mardis. “As evaluators, we will learn ways that school libraries can better support learning with the use of primary sources.”

“We will also benefit from the experience of two of our Florida State doctoral students at PALM, Melissa Johnston and Janice Newsum, who were members of the prestigious Library of Congress National Curriculum Review Panel (2008–2009).” said Dr. Everhart. “They will provide field training for the project.”

The team plans to provide college/university and K-12 educators with a professional development model, along with lesson plans and teaching materials, to improve their abilities to:

• design learning experiences that are primary source-based and inquiry-oriented,
• implement those experiences in their classrooms,
• evaluate the educational experiences and learning outcomes, and
• share their expertise.

Established in 2007, the PALM Center conducts internationally recognized interdisciplinary research on library media specialist leadership and technology integration. It offers services that support school library media specialists and educators in the improvement of their districts and schools in Florida, the United States, and throughout the world.

The UF Digital Collections (UFDC) now have fully functioning online metadata editing!

It’s only been a few weeks since the UFDC self-submittal tool for  faculty to use to load materials to the Institutional Repository and for UFDC partners to use to load materials to their collections went live and now we’ve already added  full online metadata editing.  Mark Sullivan, the programmer who created the internal metadata editor originally as a desktop tool and who has now made the online tool with the same and even enhanced functionality over the desktop tool, released the online metadata editing earlier this week. We’ve been keeping the release quiet for a few days to check for bugs and problems internally before sharing the good news with everyone.We haven’t found any bugs and we’ve found a whole lot to love, so we’re pleased to be able to share the news of the online metadata editing tool with everyone!

See the screenshots below to see how it works (annotations coming soon), or UF faculty, UF researchers, and UFDC partners can sign up for  myUFDC accounts to begin loading and editing.

Online Metadata Editing (some of the preview views run across in my Firefox for the screenshots, but it looks great in use)

SobekPH, the free UFDC iPhone App (available from iTunes here) for the UF Digital Collections has been downloaded 76 times since it was released on November 23. Most of the downloads have been in the US, but there are downloads from all around the world already!

The Modern Language Association (MLA) has released a wiki on the evaluation of digital work for scholars in and doing digital humanities work. This is a critical building block in the foundation for ongoing digital humanities research.