Digital Library Center Blog | UF

“The Longtail of News” by the Toronto Star’s public editor Kathy English is an excellent report for the effects of networked, persistent access to information in respect to the public good and the accuracy of current and archived information.

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.

[The job posting below is from FCLA. FCLA is the Florida Center for Library Automation and they're also in Gainesville, like the University of Florida. However, FCLA is a central office that reports to all of the State University Libraries. The UF Digital Library Center (which is where I am and what I write about on this blog) is part of the University of Florida Libraries in Gainesville. The State University Libraries in Florida all work together on various projects and with FCLA, so joining any of the libraries means working with the others and getting to know great people and projects throughout the State. Gainesville is a particularly lovely city, so anyone interested in working with great people, in great libraries, and on great projects in Florida would only see further benefits from living and working in a great city like Gainesville.]

Reports to: Assistant Director for Digital Library Services

About FCLA
The Florida Center for Library Automation is an off-campus center of the State University System of Florida. We are located in Gainesville, Florida, consistently rated one of the best places to live in the United States. For more information on visiting Gainesville click here: visitgainesville.com. We are administratively associated with the University of Florida. For an overview, link to University of Florida Employment Information.

FCLA provides automation services to the university libraries of the Florida Board of Governors, State University System of Florida. These include running the Ex Libris ALEPH 500 library management system to support cataloging, acquisitions, circulation and other staff functions of the libraries; supporting consortial purchase and electronic access to databases of article indexes, full-text journals, and other resources; and providing digital library services in support of local collections of digital text, images, and other media. FCLA also supports SFX, Metalib and Verde for some of the universities.

Job Summary
The Librarian will be part of the Digital Library Services Group, which helps the libraries of the public university system of Florida create, manage and preserve digital information resources. The incumbent will provide support for digital special collections, electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), archival finding aids (EADs), and other born-digital and retrospectively digitized materials. S/he will work with DigiTool, Archon, OAI data and service providers, and other commercial, open source, and locally-developed content management applications. The incumbent will provide expertise in describing digital resources (cataloging and metadata) to FCLA and library staff.

Responsibilities

1. Provide support to users of programs and services provided by Digital Library Services, including digital content management, finding aid creation and electronic theses and dissertations. Be the primary support contact for one or more services.
2. Perform analysis and design for programs, processes and workflows. Draft specifications for data, data conversions, user interfaces and/or application programs, and work with programmers to develop, test and implement them.
3. Provide expertise on metadata, resource description, and related topics to FCLA and library staff.
4. Participate on state-wide committees and task forces of library staff concerned with the description and management of digital resources.
5. Provide web-based and on-site training and training materials for library staff in the use of FCLA-provided applications.
6. Run and monitor production operations such as data preparation and ingest, and/or supervise staff who do these functions.
7. Contribute to the general design and operation of applications and services to enhance the digital capabilities of the public university libraries.
8. Related duties as assigned.

Qualifications
Required: Masters degree in library and/or information science from an ALA-accredited program; in-depth knowledge of MARC, Dublin Core, EAD and METS standards; excellent oral and written communications skills in English; demonstrated aptitude for computer technology; demonstrated analytic ability; energy and enthusiasm.

Preferred: Two or more years of experience in an academic library environment; direct experience with digital initiatives (digitization projects, digital content management systems and/or Web-based delivery of digital objects); background in special collections and/or cataloging; working knowledge of XML, XSL, and Unix; programming or Web development experience; teaching or training experience.

Rank & Salary
Assistant-in-Libraries; non-tenured; salary commensurate with experience, minimum $42,000.

Benefits
We offer a casual work environment, ample free parking, flexible hours, and full State of Florida benefits including: Twelve month appointment on an annual contract; twenty-two days vacation, thirteen days sick-leave and nine paid holidays per year; retirement plan options, group health plan, and life insurance available. No local or state income tax.
Deadline
Open until filled. To ensure full consideration, vitas, dossiers and statements of intent to apply should be submitted by August 7, 2009. Applications received after this date may be considered at the discretion of the Committee.
To Apply
Send email letter of application referencing LP 859180, a resume, and contact information for three professional references to:
Astrid Terman
Chair, Search Committee
Florida Center for Library Automation
aterman@ufl.edu
The selection process will be conducted under the provisions of Florida’s “Government in the Sunshine” and Public Records Laws. If an accommodation is required to apply, please call (352) 392-9020 or TDD (352)392-7734. AA/EA/EEO.

President Barack Obama has already begun implementing important changes, including restoring public access to presidential records by revoking the Bush administration’s Executive Order 13233. The text for President Obama’s executive order is available on the Whitehouse website.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) issued a call for President Obama’s administration to support large-scale digitization initiatives. The brief call from the ARL Newsletter is online as is the full letter.

As an addendum to to ARL’s call for “a large-scale initiative to digitize public domain collections,” let’s also make sure these initiatives include all holdings that are in the public domain in however many selected US institutions, including the millions upon millions of pages published in other countries and collected by the US. The US has so many collections that would benefit the US and so many collections that, if shared openly, would benefit the world and international relations overall. Presenting and sharing these materials, especially in a way that makes sure they’re sustainable, will create new national resources and new sources for global collaboration.

My personal dream would be to see the public domain documents acquired through foreign cooperative acquisitions plans digitized as part of the larger US institution holdings where they can be found. In the Farmington Plan different US institutions collected materials by area or country so that the materials would be accessible in the US and preserved. The Farmington plan was formulated with the fear of data loss (paper data loss) from war and the first official Farmington meeting was in the 1940s in Farmington Connecticut. The Farmington Plan was official in 1948, but it’s official operations didn’t come with the necessary official funding so it only formalized work that had already been going on.

The cooperative collection plans formalized in the Farmington Plan date back far earlier. The reason I know any of this history is because the University of Florida, for instance, had been collecting Caribbean material for decades prior to the Farmington Plan (see this article) and continues to do so today. UF became the official institution responsible for the Caribbean in 1952 when a “modification of the subject basis for assignment was suggested when it was recommended that libraries accept total responsibility for publications issued by a given country or area not presently covered by the Plan. Thus, the Caribbean area was accepted by the University of Florida” (source). According to all of the documentation I’ve found (and this is still new research for me), the University of Florida had been collecting Caribbean materials and so UF was simply asked and added to the Farmington Plan for what it was already doing. Because of the existing relationships in the Caribbean, UF was able to acquire copies of documents–in print and in microfilm through “mobile microfilming units” (meaning barges with microfilm cameras that traveled the Caribbean and made microfilm copies of important documents and books)–and in at least one case, UF’s microfilm was the last copy in the world (hurricanes and tropical weather are a constant danger to archives now and were much more so before air conditioning). In the last copy instance, UF was able to digitize the materials through the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and return the cultural materials to their rightful owners while also sharing the materials with the world. The last copy became one of many copies and became inaccessible to easily accessible.

The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a wonderful and downright amazing project in terms of technology, history, and significance. It’s successful because it took the cooperative collection plan and made it work digitally. Yet there are so many other existing projects that are or could also build on parts of earlier cooperative collection plans. Funding is needed though and these materials are needed and are not otherwise accessible. The purpose of cooperative collection plans was to ensure that someone would have a copy in the US and to avoid purchasing multiple copies and possibly overspending on always underfunded budgets (and this is going back past the 1940s discussions and earlier). The majority of materials in research libraries are unique because libraries couldn’t afford to get extra copies. Digitizing full collections is wonderful, but we need to digitize everything in all of them or very nearly. The uniqueness means that each library collection only has a tiny portion of the whole. Google scanning entire university libraries is only beginning to hint at scratching the surface and we need so much more.

ARL’s call for a large-scale digitization initiative is so right because the need is so huge, the benefits so great, and the possibilities so enormous. As ARL states, the initiative “will lay a foundation for innovation and national competitiveness in the decades ahead.” To that I would add “and a spirit of international cooperation and collaboration” to ensure that past brilliance and innovation are included. While the Farmington Plan wasn’t funded as it needed to be, it’s hard to imagine how much funding would be needed to support essentially an Internet of data made of microfilm, so many copies, mailed to institutions for all to access. The costs remain high, but are much lower and the potential rewards so much greater.

The US National Archives are celebrating their 75th anniversary this year! Since 1934, the National Archives has maintained centralized federal record keeping and the National Archives, now known as the National Archives and Records Administration, administers 37 facilities covering regional archives, Presidential libraries, the National Historical and Publications Commission, and muc more!

National Archives History
National Archives Celebrating 75 Years

On the Open Library General Discussion List, Edward Betts recently posted that, while tidying author records in Open Library, he found 248 authors-as-spirits. Not unknown ghosts or muses, but the spirit of a particular person listed as a spirit. He included the examples below in the post and the full list on his website.

$a Abraham $c (Spirit)
$a Churchill, Winston $c Sir $d 1874-1965 $c (Spirit)
$a Doyle, Arthur Conan $c Sir $d 1859-1930 $c (Spirit)
$a Jesus Christ $c (Spirit)
$a Shakespeare, William $d 1564-1616 $c (Spirit)

For all those fascinated by dead (and undead) media, this is wonderfully rich. Not only do the dead speak through media (and issues of telepresence continue as we read, hear, and watch, from telegraph to home video–there’s a real horror movies and games are so populated by letters, diaries, books, histories, and the like) but their voices as the dead and even cataloged as such. When I learn bits of wonder like the spirit authors, I wish I had more experience in libraries and archives because there’s so much more to know and I’m so fascinated by the change of technologies, perceptions of the technologies, and the seemingly mundane ways in which people have dealt with the oddities.

I’m not interested in the large scale glam or beliefs in the paranormal or excitement over media revolutions because, while all of those are interesting, I’m so curious about how exceptional beliefs (as the outside-the-curve use cases, unintended uses and consequences, cultural beliefs, sheer oddities) are handled within day to day dealings and how those exceptions inform and shape the mundane and familiar. Noting “(Spirit)” inside a MARC record for ghostly authors–especially when including their birth and death dates–is wonderful. I’m sure there were meetings to discuss whether or not to include the first sighting of the spirit in a spirit birth date, but that was likely decided to be too cumbersome and too subject to interpretation. I’d absolutely love to read any archival files on how the inclusion of “(Spirit)” came about and what all was left out of the addition and why, and now I know to be on the lookout for it.

Go Gators! Congratulations!

Someday we’ll be archiving photos of tonight’s game in the University Archives Digital Collection, but tonight is for rejoicing by Gators everywhere!

After finding so many great New Year’s images, I quickly scanned the University of Florida Digital Collections for images of Christmas and found these. Santa’s mighty large book of naughty and nice is from a book in the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, one of the Special Collections in the University of Florida Libraries, and the black and white photograph is from the University Archives, another Special Collection in the University of Florida Libraries.