Digital Library Center Blog | UF

Laurie N. Taylor December 26th, 2007

The technology and popular culture criticism blog Boing Boing had a recent post on search rankings. It mentions that five years ago, a bet was made that blogs would rank higher than the New York Times website. This indeed came true, largely because the New York Times chose to restrict their content through a signup and paid subscriptions rather than to make the information free. Now, the New York Times has changed their methods and made their site open, but they’ve already lost out on the advertising revenue and on the reputation value for being a free information source.

In an online environment, information that can be most accessed is most valuable, so free information has more value by being freely available and then mashed/added to another system that generates revenue. Making money from free information does mean learning new ways to work and new ways to use information, and that’s been a difficult change for many companies. Hopefully, more corporations will soon see that information should be free and that new, emerging markets which make information more usable, entertaining, or comprehensible can be marketed at a higher rate.

The new online economics could also make for greater recognition of usability, which could enhance information vendors and sources and then reverberate into other areas. Ideally, small changes like this could build into a cultural recognition of the value of giving-things-for-free in terms of the return of reputation and community. Gift economies do seem to have a system where things are given for free, but that concept of “free” still results in a return on investment (ROI) and that’s what companies should soon be leveraging in their online information ventures.

• open access , Commons , Academia
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Laurie N. Taylor November 19th, 2007

The UF Libraries’ Preservation Department has started a retrospective dissertation scanning project to help solve problems of access to research, but UF needs permission for Internet Distribution from each author. Authors can grant permissions by completing this form and sending it to the address on the form.

UF requires all new dissertations to be submitted electronically, but that leaves decades upon decades of paper and microfilm-only versions. Finding all of the UF alumni to assign permissions is a monumental task. The retrospective dissertation scanning project has been featured in various news venues (newsletters and the newspaper, emails have been sent to alumni with email addresses on file, letters have been sent to addresses on file) and more communications are planned. Other efforts to get the word out include working through departmental and college contacts and larger and smaller news venues, but this is a slow process so anything automated or anything that easily grows on its own would be a major help. With all of this work the response is slowly building, but I’m hoping that this blog post helps get the word out, too.

Having the dissertations and theses online will be great for researchers and society because it will build the overall pool of shared and available knowledge. Like the picture above, having these materials online will also show a bit of history - UF’s history; the history of a particular idea, research topic, field, researcher; and more. Making high quality research, even older research, openly available to everyone changes the information landscape and opening new doors and allowing for many new possibilities.

If anyone has ideas for more keywords or ways to share the information through faster channels, please add comments to help the project. Authors can give permissions through this online form and mailing it to the address at the bottom of the form, and those who know authors can share the form with the authors. For more information, see the Preservation Department’s page on the Retrospective Dissertation Scanning Project or see this example of a digitized dissertation.

To best help this message get to past authors, here are keywords to further it along through the magic inner workings of the Internet and search engines: UF dissertation, dissertations, thesis, PhD, EdD, doctorate, doctoral, graduates, alumni, former graduates, graduate students, research, retrospective, online, microfilm, print, past, online, digitize, share, archives, scanning, prior, past, old, database, University of Florida, UF, gators, Florida alumni, alumnus, open access, online, openly accessible, make available, share, digitization, digital

• open access , uf , Academia , Collection Items , Library , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor October 28th, 2007

This is the mindmap I made for the Baldwin Digital Library Project using Mind42, which is a new online mindmapping service. Mind42 is free and allows for collaboration, so it’s a nice service for many uses. However, I’m hoping to find something that will display the nodes in motion (like the Visual Thesaurus but I’m not looking for the search/query functionality). I want the motion purely for visual interest, but I’m having trouble finding something free and easy for use in creating the visual-motion mindmap. I’m guessing a simple Flash animation would be best for my needs, but I’d appreciate any recommendations for something that I could recommend to folks who don’t have Flash so that I can get people interested in mapping their workflows and then playing with them for efficiency.

• design , interface , Academia , Library , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor October 25th, 2007

On November 15, Stephanie Haas (the Assistant Director for UF’s Digital Library Center) and Matt Mariner (our Institutional Repository coordinator) will be presenting at UF on UF’s Institutional Repository. Underlying their presentation and the IR itself is Open Access. Open Access is the academic’s version of Open Source, it demands that scholarly materials be presented at no cost, quickly, permanently, and completely (full-text) online.

This PowerPoint video shows how the Open Access movement is growing as it spreads across the world. UF is one node in the larger Open Access network, which shares information for all. Stephanie and Matt’s presentation on UF’s IR will be November 15 at 1pm in

UF’s IR is the next step in a long process of moving materials to Open Access to ensure that the materials are freely available in the Smathers Library Conference Room. The presentation will cover all the work that’s been done and all the work left to do. It will be a great presentation for anyone interested in Open Access, Institutional Repositories, or data collection or organization more generally.

• open access , Commons , Academia , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor October 22nd, 2007

UF’s Digital Library Center has digitized this Grebo Mask. I’m not a mask expert of any sort, but the description tells that the Grebo Mask is possibly Kru (Liberia and Ivory Coast), in the shape of a bird with four eyes, representing a seer (Wood) circa 1960.

The Grebo Mask alone is a beautiful artifact, but what’s more interesting is that the Digital Library Center is working on a standard method for putting these images together in a looping clip, where users can click to stop the clip or to zoom in on the object. A number of museum websites offer spinning objects or objects that can be zoomed in on, but I haven’t found any examples as good as our full 360-rotation and depth of zooming. As museums and libraries move to digitize more materials, the best methods not only make materials accessible in the same ways as they would have been in non-digital format, but in ways that improve their usability through digitization.

Masks and other object-artifacts are often presented in museums encased in glass, so that only parts of the objects are viewable and the detail of the view is hindered by lighting, glass or ropes defining the space, and eyesight. Digitizing objects in ways that respect the materiality of objects allows users to see and study the objects in new ways while working within the traditional constraints of not handling, and thus not damaging the objects.

Digitization approaches that respect the materiality of object dovetails into digital preservation initiatives and into more recent studies on the importance of objects-as-objects, like Sherry Turkle’s edited collection Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, which studies the importance of objects for inspiration and thought patterns (it’s much like Donald Norman’s work on how designs affect the way users think about and use objects in Things that Make Us Smart and The Design of Everyday Things). I’m excited to see where this project takes us and to see the many problems and solutions we find in presenting digital versions of objects.

• objects , materiality , exhibit , museum , Collection Items , Academia , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor October 1st, 2007

I’ve started working on digitizing photographs of comics creators. Don Ault, a professor at UF and a major comics scholar, is also a friend and he’s loaned me some of his materials. What’s really interesting about these photos is that they aren’t available elsewhere. Don has devoted a great deal of his life to the study of comics and so he’s amassed tons of photographs that span academic interests, comics collector-fan interests, and his personal academic-family chronology. For instance, a number of the photographs have Don in them and/or members of his family and members of the comics creators families. These personal, non-commercial photos are interesting for what they show of the people in them as well as for what they show about the history of comics and academia. I hope to have more of these online soon, and there are many, many to load.

Right now and for the next few days, the links to the larger versions of these images in UF’s Digital Collections won’t link properly. Until then, the images are in my Picasa.

• comics , imagetext , Academia , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor September 19th, 2007

The Times Select is now free, which is great even if it is a little late. What’s better than this material being free is the reasoning behind it, which recognizes that having the material freely accessible is more valuable than requiring people to pay for the material.

As more businesses realized that creating and sharing information openly can be profitable–as with Open Source Software where the software is free, but industries are built on top of them selling optimal support documentation, support services, and more–then hopefully, hopefully, businesses could soon function with more awareness of gift economies and their model for operation. This in turn could be helpful for academia because the current, and very poorly applied, business-capitalism-market model fails when applied to academia. If more businesses realize the profit involved in gift economies, then perhaps the market metaphor could adapt as well and academia could again be viewed under the larger lens of building the information commons through a gift economy.

The only problem is that academia, like the New York Times’ Times Select, still requires money invested up front. After that, businesses can create a self-sustaining system. However, academia returns on investments to society, creating a structure that requires constant investments, albeit investments that have excellent returns. While the market metaphor will likely continue to be mis-applied to academia–in part because academia’s larger returns can be more difficult to trace–hopefully a modified market metaphor that at least includes the concept of a gift economy could aid academia as a whole.

• Commons , Academia
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Laurie N. Taylor September 11th, 2007

I won’t be able to attend this, but it looks wonderful and I wish I could!

The program for the Second Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science has now been set, and you can see it here. The Colloquium will take place on Sunday and Monday, October 21-22, 2007 at the Hotel Orrington in Evanston, Illinois. This event jointly sponsored by the Illinois Institute for Technology, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. Registration is free, and you are cordially invited to attend. Information about logistics is available on the web site.

The theme of this year’s colloquium is “Exploring the scholarly query potential of high quality text and image archives in a collaborative environment.” The presentations range widely across cultures and technologies, with topics including:

• Digital surrogates of Mesopotamian cylinder seals and of 3,000 clay statuettes from a Chinese Buddhist temple that make you see things you could not easily see “in the flesh.”
• How to find readable and manipulable representations of the symbols that appear in Isaac Newton’s alchemical writings.
• How to explore the “countless links” that are at the heart of the Orlando Project about Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the
  Beginnings to the Present.
• How to make the history of North Carolina speak in different ways when the print records (a massive work of late nineteenth century scholarship) are translated into a digital medium.

A special session on Monday will explore the different ways in which quite similar technologies of text mining support different goals in legal, literary, and business analysis, and it will ask what these different approaches can learn from each other.

The keynote speakers, Matt Kirschenbaum (The Remaking of Reading) and Lew Lancaster (Beyond 2-D Text/Plan: The Chinese Buddhist in 3-D) nicely define the range of topics. Ray Siemens will sum it all up.

• Academia , Library
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Laurie N. Taylor August 21st, 2007

There’s a new article in First Monday that surveys Google Books by looking at multiple versions of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.* The intent of the article is that the oddities of the book form make it difficult to digitize; however, this good and useful point gets a bit lost in the details.

The article argues that many of the books in Google Books have issues with quality control and it argues that “quality assurance on the Web is provided either through innovation or through “inheritance” and that the inheritance for Google Books comes from the quality of the libraries. The seems to conflate two types of inheritance. Quality assurance can certainly come from innovation (think of the difficult to OCR text now being used to ensure that people are humans and not spam-bots while also then using the people as OCR conglomerates). Inheritance also makes sense from one technology to another instance of/within that technology, like inheriting whatever attribute from a parent object to an instance of that parent. It even makes sense rhetorically to see quality being inherited from qualified creators to the works they create (ethos, seeing the author as credible and therefore the work as credible). However, mashing these together so that personal/entity credibility for quality flows into technology–especially still relatively new technology with changing standards, requirements, and functions–doesn’t make sense. It’s like arguing that because a local bookstore has a pleasant environment and is good at having materials in their physical store, they’d be good at mailing them out and having a friendly online presence. It just doesn’t really work.

My other issue with the article is that it spends too much time on the details. Albeit important, the details point to the larger issue which the article does include–that books are weird and unwieldy and hard to work with. The weirdness of the books and the incredible effort it take to digitize books (especially if they aren’t disbinding) means that there will be huge issues. But, getting some of the work done is still good and the problems are a good lesson in the messiness of digital media. In my work, we disbind some books and not others (based on the importance of the form of the book; books from particular collections, rare editions, significant binding, significant for time period, desire for a bound version within the library). If we disbind, the messy process involves metadata creation, cutting the books with various tools, including machetes for the large-format materials, scanning them in high speed scanners or flatbeds (dependent on size), image correcting, quality control, OCRing, archiving, and loading. This takes an incredible amount of time and person-power and it’s messy. We end up with scraps of paper around, the materials leave dust everywhere, OCRing isn’t perfect and weird characters show up in the text, and all sorts of weird problems come up at every stage. Google Books likely has a different system, but one likely plagued by the same sorts of difficulties.

Arguing that books are funky, finicky creatures is great and more people need to hear it. However, the argument in this article seems to be lost to the details of one book and how it presents issues that aren’t yet solved. Perhaps I’m being overly defensive of Google Books, but the technology is changing rapidly and even if the digitized books are horribly broken, they already are for many people. Digitizing the books–especially in full text–means that they can easily be used by screen readers and viewed via screen zooming applications. The book’s paper form has long been a problem for those with impaired vision and only a small subset of books are available in audio, large text, or braille format. Digitizing books–no matter how badly–makes books usable for more people. That said, Google’s correcting poor copies by offering others, like this issue of Tristram Shandy. Overall, I think the article in First Monday is useful, but it needs several caveats because of the often unfair and irrational arguments against digitizing books and because of the defensiveness often shown for the book form as it is–despite the many who can’t or can only partially use the print versions.

All that said, I’m also a bit of a Google fan-girl because I think they do great work, so my response will be colored by that.

*(Oddly enough, some of the readings for the Nintendo DS in Brain Age are from the same book–I’m not sure why it was chosen as opposed to so many other possible books.)

• Academia , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor July 21st, 2007

One of my current goals is to get materials online from awesome scholars who have the copyright to their work (often academic books return the copyright to authors after a set period of time). I’m extremely happy that the first book I’ve gotten to do this with is Donald Ault’s Narrative Unbound. Not only is Narrative Unbound important for Blake studies and imagetext/visual rhetoric/comics/textual studies, it’s also an important book because of what it shows about copyright and because it’s by Donald Ault, a great scholar who I’ve been lucky enough to work with.

There’s so much more that I could say about Narrative Unbound, but the book speaks more clearly for itself.

• comics , imagetext , Academia , Collection Items
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