Laurie N. Taylor August 11th, 2008
Last week, UC Santa Barbara announced that they received a massive collection of aerial photography, valued at $14.3 Million, from Pacific Western Aerial Surveys of Santa Barbara. The collection includes more than 500,000 aerial images of 65 major metropolitan areas in the United States at the turn of the 21st Century (1999-2002). This is really amazing, especially so because UCSB Map & Imagery Library is home to the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL), so these materials will be preserved and accessible in the future.
Laurie N. Taylor July 18th, 2008
The US National Archives announced earlier this week that they will be contributing materials to the World Digital Library! This is not unexpected, but still wonderful news because it will place so many resources together in a convenient interface, and each time one collection is contributed to another mismatches and other conflicts occur that result in better interoperability.
Laurie N. Taylor June 24th, 2008
In our ongoing work to improve the findability of books in the UF Digital Collections (UFDC), we now have an RSS page with feeds for each of the collections. The RSS feed page is http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc2/rss/.
Please sign up for a feed or two to learn about the great materials added daily, and please share the RSS feeds with others!
Laurie N. Taylor June 17th, 2008
Now that the University of Florida Digital Collections is optimized for internal coding, we’re trying to start optimizing for search engines. We currently use robots.txt to request that search engines do not crawl our site. Doing so was a hard choice because we want our materials to be accessible and used. However, we were forced to stop the search engines because they were crashing our server. We had a number of overzealous search engines that crawled and re-crawled, and crawled in strange ways. With our JPG2000 images, the over-crawling and overly quick crawling ate too much memory and we couldn’t do it and remain functional. This overcrawling happened even with a site map and all of the proper webmaster configurations. Because the normal right way wasn’t working, we’ve chosen a secondary right way. We hope that this method works until we can make the normal right way work.
We’re currently in the process of building a separate single-page for every item in the collection, and we’ll create these weekly until the normal search indexing works. These pages will live on www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc2 as opposed to our real site www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc. These pages will have the basic information for each item and the links will go over to the main site (UFDC). By allowing search engines to crawl and index the information on UFDC2, we hope that the search engines will include our information so that site will be more findable without creating huge server memory drains.
We’re not sure what the search engine problems were exactly, just that the engines (from multiple companies) were overcrawling. The University of Florida has an internal Google search appliance. Theoretically - and I haven’t read anything on this, but I would appreciate more information if anyone can help - Google’s main bots and UF’s instance could have simultaneously crawled, driving up their apparent traffic. However, this doesn’t explain why multiple search engines were overcrawling even with a validated sitemap in use.
Most of the information online explains issues with deep folder hierarchies, dynamic URLs, and masses of pages, but there doesn’t seem to be an easy solution. We’re hoping UFDC2 serves as a solution for now. In the meantime, if anyone has recommendations for other options that have worked for search engine optimization of deep websites, and especially for digital libraries with millions of pages, please let me know (via comments or email).
Also in the meantime, search engines should start crawling UFDC2, and the static pages will be finishing building later today. We’re hoping this works!
Laurie N. Taylor June 8th, 2008
The University of Florida supports the Florida Digital Newspaper Library and the Caribbean Newspaper Imaging Project. By preserving and digitizing the news of the past, these projects make the news new again.
The Caribbean Newspaper Imaging Project includes papers like Haiti’s Le Nouvelliste, with issues from 1899 - 1902 now online. While the early issues online are imperfect (because of materials and processing with newspaper paper, microfilming, and then digitizing from microfilm) the pages are easily readable. If I could read Haitian Creole, or at least enough French to understand with savvy use of Google’s translator, I’d be able to read the December 30, 1899 Le Nouvelliste and learn how Port-au-Prince was handling the shift into 1900, or perhaps the December 31, 1900 issue would be more interesting because its news would be that of Haiti poised for the start of the Twentieth Century.
The news of the past show has history is made. On a much more localized scale, so too do the photographs of the news in the making. Many issues of the University of Florida’s Florida Alligator newspaper, which later became the Independent Florida Alligator, is included in the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, as are photographs from its early days.
One of the Florida Alligator issues online is from September 21, 1945 and it seems surprisingly mundane when scanned quickly. However, the first page includes two articles on the first page, one on General Van Fleet explaining that the human element he gained at the University of Florida was pivotal for his successes in World War II and the second on the University officially going co-ed, after “Legislature broke down and played ‘Lady Bountiful’ by saying veterans’ wives could come, provided their husbands were here first.” Bits of history are told in these pages, just as they are in photograph above. The University of Florida Digital Newspaper Library has digitized issues from 1945 - 1948, and others await along with additional titles and issues intended for the Florida Digital Newspaper Library and the Caribbean Newspaper Imaging Project.
Laurie N. Taylor June 8th, 2008
The Association of Caribbean University, Research and Institutional Libraries (ACURIL) 2008 Conference included many presentations, at least two of which spoke on the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC). Brooke Wooldridge and Marilyn Ochoa (both of dLOC, from FIU and UF respectively) held a workshop on usability for the dLOC contributor tools entitled “dLOC Toolkit and Usability Testing: A User-Centered Approach to Improve Electronic Resource Design.” OCLC’s Karen Calhoun presented “Digital Library Dreams,” on ways that research resources are being brought to student and researchers of and in the Caribbean, and how the dreams of effective resource delivery are coming true, with the Digital Library of the Caribbean among other resources fulfilling those dreams.
The American Library Association’s (ALA) annual conference will feature another presentation on dLOC, within the OCLC sponsored “Microfilm to Digital Roadshow.” Within this program, I’ll be presenting on dLOC’s success as a large microfilm digitization project, among its many other successes. I haven’t prepared my presentation notes yet, and this month is awfully busy so I may not post them until after the conference. In the meantime, I’ll be working with the University of Florida Libraries’ Latin American Collection experts, who are essential in all aspects of the dLOC’s microfilm digitization, as well they are for aspects of UF’s contributions to dLOC.
While we’re working on continued digitization, collection enhancement, collaboration with partners, and my presentation, dLOC is readily available for everyone. dLOC allows Open Access (no signons, passwords or anything of the sort) to over 3,400 titles with 9,641 items and 386,475 pages. We’re nearing the half-million pages mark for dLOC and we’ve really just gotten started in some senses. Because digitization is so labor-intensive, even as aided by the wonderful dLOC toolkit, because many partners have only recently joined, and because microfilm digitization is time-intensive, we’re essentially still only ramping up our production speed. We should expect to see both more materials to continue loading and materials to load at a more rapid pace in the future. For now, see what we’ve already loaded on www.dloc.com, which includes an “all items list” in text and thumbnail image views.
