Digital Library Center Blog | UF

The US Government Printing Office (GPO) is celebrating its 150th anniversary! Congratulations GPO!

And, congratulations to all of us, who benefit from GPO’s work and from the closely related Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP). FDLP is an early and brilliant program in collaborative library operations to ensure access and preservation.

The University of Florida Libraries is the FDLP Regional Depository Library for Florida, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. The University of Florida is also a core partner in similar collaborative programs that date back multiple decades, like the current Digital Library of the Caribbean which has an over 80 year history of collaborative preservation and access work using microfilm and now digital technologies.

The FDLP website explains FDLP:

The Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) was established by Congress to ensure that the American public has access to its Government’s information. Since 1813, depository libraries have safeguarded the public’s right to know by collecting, organizing, maintaining, preserving, and assisting users with information from the Federal Government. The FDLP provides Government information at no cost to designated depository libraries throughout the country and territories. These depository libraries, in turn, provide local, no-fee access to Government information in an impartial environment with professional assistance.

As institutions committed to equity of access and dedicated to free and unrestricted public use, the nation’s nearly 1,250 depository libraries serve as one of the vital links between “We the people” and our Government. Anyone can visit Federal depository libraries and use the Federal depository collections which are filled with information on careers, business opportunities, consumer information, health and nutrition, legal and regulatory information, demographics, and numerous other subjects. (citation)

News story below from FDLP.gov:

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) kicked off its 150 year anniversary celebration on June 23, 2010. GPO was created when President James Buchanan signed Joint Resolution 25 on June 23, 1860. GPO opened its doors for business nine months later on March 4, 1861, the same day Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office becoming the 16th President of the United States. GPO began celebrating this milestone with an event that honored its current and retired employees. Public Printer Bob Tapella and Archivist David Ferriero unveiled a facsimile of the seven-page handwritten document that created the agency.

“When you think about GPO’s rich history and what has made GPO successful for the past 150 years, it’s our hardworking employees,” said Public Printer Bob Tapella. “GPO is a family business. We have families who have contributed to this agency that span three and four generations. It’s that dedication which has made GPO one of the largest printing, secure credentialing and digital information facilities in the world.”

As part of the celebration, GPO launched a Web page devoted to the agency’s 150 year history that includes portraits of past public printers as well as a video of the history of GPO. To learn more about the history of the GPO, GPO has reissued 100 GPO Years, 1861-1961, which can be purchased from the U.S. Government Bookstore. Read the GPO press release.

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Congrats again to GPO, and to all of those who participate in FDLP!

A new CLIR Report, The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship includes a report, “On the Cost of Keeping a Book,” by Paul Courant and Matthew “Buzzy” Nielsen. This report examines the costs of keeping physical books (pbooks) and electronic books (ebooks) and finds a significant cost savings in ebooks over print-based libraries.

Particularly worth noting is the statement on the overall cost savings when digitizing pbooks and then storing them as ebooks:

If the cost of digitization is less than the difference in present value between print storage and digital storage, adding back in the cost of maintaining a shared print archive, there will be a net gain to the university sector of digitizing print collections and using the digitized versions for access. For most of our estimates of the cost of ebook and pbook storage, these conditions would hold. If another party, for example, Google or the Internet Archive, undertakes the digitization and provides the access, the argument becomes all the stronger.

Europeana just released their first white page, “Knowledge = Information in Context.”

The paper covers the importance of data standards, clean data, linked data, and tools and ways to link data (more standards and APIs). The paper is an excellent paper on the importance of making digitized materials useful by creating context.*

The article as a whole discusses different standards and principles (RDF triples, Linked Data, FOAF, SKOS, semantic connections), all of which are integral parts of the web but which are not necessarily part of many cultural heritage collections. Open Library has been intensively working on issues related to linked data, as has the Library of Congress, and the University of Florida Digital Collections are connecting more metadata in the database for linked subject terms, citation fields, and facets, and much more is in the works.

* The paper appears to have been written for translatability – sometimes odd language usage is necessary for ease of translating, and this is common in technical manuals for ubiquitous software – so some of the wording is a bit unusual, but the overall shape of the argument is accurate.

Europeana has released their Public Domain Charter. The document seeks not be be prescriptive, but to foster discussion and innovation to aid cultural heritage institutions in meeting their core missions with costly digitization as a new and growing part of that mission.

This is one of the best documents I’ve seen in terms of explaining the necessity and difficulty of balancing support for open and free public access with the costs of creating and maintaining digitized content.

See the excerpt from the Public Domain Charter below, with my bolding of significant portions for emphasis:

This Charter is a policy statement [...]

[T]he transformation from guardians of analogue collections to providers of digital services places enormous challenges on these organisations. Creating and maintaining digital collections is expensive; the cultural heritage sector may lack resources for this new responsibility. Government sponsors may encourage or require organisations to generate income by way of licensing content to a wide variety of commercial users.

Public-Private Partnerships have become one option for funding large scale digitisation efforts. Commercial content aggregators pay for the digitisation in exchange for privileged access to the digitised collections. These activities are seen as a reason for attempting to exercise as much control as possible over digital reproductions of Public Domain works. Organisations are claiming exclusive rights in digitised versions of Public Domain works and are entering into exclusive relationships with commercial partners that hinder free access.

When this exclusivity locks down digital content and inhibits access and re-use by teachers, innovators and citizens, memory organisations may be compromising their core mission and undermining their relationship with their users. Works that are in the Public Domain in analogue form must remain freely available in digital form and digitisation of such works must lead to increased access by the public instead of new restrictions. To remain relevant in the digital age, cultural and scientific heritage organisations must strive to increase access to our shared knowledge and culture by being the primary points of access to the works that they have in their collections. Value-added services can be developed around content without the need to claim exclusive rights over works that have been in the Public Domain in analogue form.

Ultimately, at a political and policy-making level, it is in the interests of society that Public Domain knowledge and information be digitised. Once digitised, it should be freely available to creative enterprise, R&D innovators and technical entrepreneurs to use as the basis for generating ideas and applications yet to be envisaged.

The aim of this Charter is to give a clear signal to content providers, policy makers and the public that Europeana and the Europeana Foundation believe in and wish to strengthen the concept of the Public Domain in the digitised world.
(direct link to English online version of the Charter)

The  University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) now have over 5 million pages!

The more than 5 million pages – maps, aerials, audio, video, books, historic documents, museum objects, herbarium specimens, photographs, newspapers, oral histories, and more – are all openly and freely online for the world!

Check out the collections: www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc

The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) are always improving. Most of our current improvements at the moment are from moving servers to newer, more stable equipment (and making updates required from the server move). Despite the time that the server move requires, listed below are some of our recent and particularly great new enhancements to share!

Facets

The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) now has facets to help refine searches and browses by language, subject terms, and more. See this page for an example http://ufdcweb1.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc/?a=fdnl1&m=lbball

Citation Links

Key components of the citations for each item are now also linked for easy searching, as in this example.

User Contributed Descriptions

UFDC now allows for user contributed descriptions. The descriptions can be activated for any collection (they’re turned off by default). When activated, this allows any logged in user to add a description to an item. The description is added in a note field, and the username and date that the description was added are automatically added as well.

Coming Soon

The next project (aside from the server move and related updates) is EAC/EAD integration. That’s expected soon and more details will be available as it gets closer to implementation.