Jane Pen has been instrumental in getting “Qin ding xi Qing gu jian” digitized and she’ll be visiting Taiwan this May 24-31, and meeting with the library at Tamkang University. Hopefully this will lead to more partnerships with libraries and museums, especially with so many museums in Taiwan are actively involved in digitization projects.
“The Calligraphic World of Mi Fu’s Art” is an excellent site because it does something that couldn’t easily be done without the technologies it uses. For many of the other Webby Award sites this is also true, but many others are aesthetically pleasing first and then accessible second or not at all. For some sites like the National Palace Museum’s site tools to recognize calligraphy or handwriting akin to Optical Character Recognition simply aren’t yet available at the level they’re needed to make the site as accessible as possible, but the site still has a great deal of other accessible information. In the meantime, “The Calligraphic World of Mi Fu’s Art” is a beautiful site and one that will hopefully be enriched even further in the near future with new technologies.
VCU Libraries have announced a full digital run of Will Eisner’s work on PS* Preventive Maintenance Magazine! Here’s their press release:
VCU Libraries is honored to present these rare examples of the incomparable art work of the late Will Eisner. In an effort to encourage soldiers to keep better care of their equipment, the US Army hired Eisner’s American Visuals Corporation to do a digest-sized publication focusing on preventive maintenance. Each issue consisted of a color comic book style cover; eight pages of four color comic continuity story in the middle; and a wealth of technical, safety, and policy information printed in two color. Eisner drew and was artistic editor for PS Magazine from its inception in 1951 until 1972. Presented here are complete scans for 145 regular issues, 3 special issues, and 14 index issues.
The University of Florida just finished scanning our issues of PS, and we have them all openly online as well. UF has far fewer issues, and we were scanning them in hopes of soon partnering with other institutions to locate and digitize the other volumes, so it’s all the more wonderful that VCU both had all of the issues and was able to scan them and add them to an open access Digital Collection. In doing so, it lays an even stronger foundation for other projects involving comics. PS is especially important because these early issues were well read, well loved, and well used. They’re excellent sources for any study of visual rhetoric, technical writing, literature, media studies, the military, American culture, and more. Will Eisner is the father of the modern graphic novel, popularizing the term and showing what it could be, and his work in all fields is so relevant and so important that it’s essential to have access to materials like PS. Hopefully, we’ll continue to see more great materials go online like VCU’s complete run of Will Eisner’s PS.
The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature has many amazing materials, but I’ve never before seen one quite like A Story of Stops. The book itself is wonderfully illustrated, so wonderfully in fact that I haven’t yet read it. I can’t get over the idea of a “story of stops,” written in 1891 for children. A “story of stops” for children or all ages now could be many things–a story of missed messages and miscommunications (stops in communication, stops in transmission, especially with telegraphs), travel and adventure stories (stops along a train route, or an exploration), and so much more. But a “story of stops” in 1891? I almost don’t want to read it and want to instead imagine what it could be.
The subject terms only encourage me further:
Children — Juvenile fiction. — Conduct of life
Conduct of life — Juvenile fiction.
Adventure and adventurers — Juvenile fiction.
Voyages and travels — Juvenile fiction.
Goblins — Juvenile fiction.
Billiards — Juvenile fiction.
Twins — Juvenile fiction.
Friendship — Juvenile fiction.
Sisters — Juvenile fiction.
Bldn — 1891.
A Story of Stops is available for all online, from those wanting to read the story or those simply wanting to explore the many possibilities of the story. A Story of Stops was written by Mrs. Davidson of Tulloch, and a Google search explains that Mrs. Davidson is Gwendoline Davidson, and that she also wrote “Kitten Goblins,” which I can’t wait to see.
The University of Florida has a collection of French Revolutionary pamphlets and a small few have been digitized and are now loading online. The full collection is quite large, and one of the digital collection items is a list of all of the pamphlets. It’s wonderful to see these materials online because having them online allows people to see what they are and to use them. The list of pamphlets is helpful on a basic level, like so many bibliographies and lists of holdings, but being able to see and use materials is exponentially better than only knowing that an archive has an object.
In working on other projects, I stumbled across this poster on the Digital Library of the Caribbean from last year. The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. All materials in dLOC are Open Access for everyone to see, but any rights remain with the owners or with the contributing partners. This is a great example of collaboration creating materials for all to use, while supporting the creators and their communities and nations. The digitized materials include Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections.
The poster describes this all more fully, but I’m most impressed with the rights management and with the centralized technical infrastructure, which provides a scaffolding for new projects to begin digitization as well as an umbrella collection online to ensure that even new collections contribute to the growing critical mass of resources in a single space, allowing the searching across collections, while also allowing for individual collections to be searched on their own once ready. The poster says more though, so check it out (in Google Presentation Mode and the slide alone).
Google is having another design-a-campus contest in SketchUp. It’s the Google 2008 International Model Your Campus Competition! Students around the world can compete by modeling their school’s campus buildings in Google SketchUp, geo-reference them in Google Earth, and submitting them by uploading to the Google 3D Warehouse. Students at higher education institutions almost anywhere in the world can submit individually or in teams of students. In addition to Google’s prices, for those modeling schools in Florida or the Caribbean or circum-Caribbean, please also submit your designs to the University of Florida Digital Collections or the Digital Library of the Caribbean, or your own school’s digital collections as applicable so that the schools can also host and archive your designs for current viewers and for posterity.
If you’re a University of Florida student designing the University of Florida campus, please let us know. We’re the folks at the Digital Library Center we’d love to lend moral support and positive thoughts throughout the competition and to host and archive the campus in 3D after the contest ends!
I’m currently in the Bahamas visiting the College of the Bahamas. I got in yesterday and was lucky enough to be here in time for the 10th Annual Lenten Tea Party, at Dr. Rhonda Chipman-Johnson’s residence on Emery Street in Highland Park, with Mrs. Mavis Collie as the MC. I really wish I had brought any sort of audio recording equipment with me so I could have captured and shared more from the event because it was wonderful. The tea party was not only enjoyable and entertaining, it also included Bahamanian History on Grant’s Town, Over the Hill, and future shock from welcome progress (and the less welcome new problems that come along with progress). Today I learned more about the College of the Bahamas Library. The College of the Bahamas Library is facing the same needs and challenges that so many libraries, including the University of Florida Libraries, are facing. The need for more information commons space with computers with internet access for students and the need to put more materials online so students and others can access those materials from anywhere.
The College of the Bahamas Library has the College Archives (with photos, catalogs, fliers on speakers and events, and more) and Special Collections, in addition to the General Collections, Reference, Circulation, IT support, and Technical Services. It was great to see the Library and see how much it contained even outside of specific collections, with historical photos framed and hanging on the walls, paintings celebrating important events also adorning the walls, and other artifacts explaining the history of the College and the Bahamas exhibited throughout the Library. I’m still processing all of the materials I’ve seen and all that I’ve learned, but the photo above is from the tree outside the Library, which has a birdhouse and a sign that reads “Soothing Moments.” The tree with its own beauty and its friendly sign and practical and aesthetically pleasing birdhouse parallels the Library at the College of the Bahamas because both the tree and the Library are friendly, welcoming, beautiful, and incredibly impressive in their ability to multi-task for the benefit of those around. I love what the tree says and represents with its sign and birdhouse, and I’m hoping the University of Florida Libraries might be able to take note and perhaps put up our own birdhouse.
The Association of Research Libraries recently released a new book, Celebrating Research. The book includes UF’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, among many others as a
compendium is a sampling of the remarkable abundance of collections available for use in the member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). It is not a comprehensive view or a directory but instead an array of profiles that exemplify a spectrum of rare and special collections in research libraries. Special collections have been broadly construed to encompass the distinctive, the rare and unique, emerging media, born-digital, digitized materials, uncommon, non-standard, primary, and heritage materials. (”Preface”)
While many of these rare materials are available in reprint or online, far more are not available other than in physical form. This compendium is like a traveling guide, highlighting only some of the particular treasures held by research libraries. For those interested in seeing some of the Baldwin Library’s gems, we’re continuously working to digitizing more materials for the Baldwin Library Digital Collection. However despite our work, many more books remain in the closed stacks, some of which aren’t even haven’t even made it to being listed in the library catalog.
A few weeks ago I was talking to a student about how the Digital Library Center grew out of the Preservation Department and its work in microfilming. The student asked me to explain what microfilm was because she’d heard of it, but didn’t know. I explained through older movies when people are researching crimes and go to the library and sit in front of a big screen and use a knob to flip through pages. Later on, I thought about how others unfamiliar with microfilm will need to know what microfilm is and why it’s important, so I went to YouTube to try and find an example. I found great “how to” videos like this one are available to help new users, but not fun clips from movies. I expected to find those clips from media studies classes doing media archaeology or research on dead media.
Is microfilm considered a dead media yet, or is it just waiting to be fully reborn in digital form? Given user preference it seems dead, but it can’t die because so much information only exists on microfilm. In fact, before the Digital Library Center began, preserving and sharing materials at the University of Florida was accomplished through microfilming. While microfilm is a tedious and unextensible form, many materials are on it that aren’t available in their original form or any other than the film. This is especially true of the masses of fragile materials like newspapers, where there’s simply too much to save it all in the original form given the sheer volume and given the high level of work needed because of the weak material type.
In honor of microfilm’s importance and it’s slow demise, these are some of the many cinematic moments that use microfilm to show research (on mysteries! on monsters):
Some of UF’s video archives are now online. While most of the sports videos are in copyright and can’t be loaded online, there are tons of great videos that can be and we’re starting to slowly load them.
I switched to the new name so that it was clear that these are UF Libraries’ archival videos, but I don’t yet know how to transfer the videos from the other two accounts, so if anyone knows an easy way to do this, please let me know.
Progress on loading these will continue to be slow because of the time involved. We’re processing for preservation (converting to a normal format, saving, and loading to UFDC for online access, and then saving to another format and sometimes editing for YouTube since the videos have to be under 10MB and under 10 minutes for each upload). It’s a long process, but it’s nice to see some of the videos up!
