Digital Library Center Blog | UF

The National Archives of Australia developed and maintain Vroom – Virtual Reading Room (http://vrroom.naa.gov.au/). Vrroom is like many systems in that it provides access to archival collection records and digitized materials. To those, Vrroom has added educational and contextual materials for a number of the items. Also, items are presented together in groups with more educational context for the group of items; thus, people can learn more about specific things/people/etc as well as the larger context for those items in relation to other items all in context together.

From this description, Vrroom may seem like many educational websites. It is, but it is also an excellent example of policy needs can dictate technology (and the opposite should never be true; technology should not dictate policy) to provide needed supports that enable access. As a website, Vrroom enables access in expected ways. As a cultural heritage website, Vrroom enables access by supporting cultural heritage protections specifically by blurring thumbnail images of people and providing a warning before showing the full image and text. The warning states: “Warning. Indigenous Australians are advised that this document includes images or names of people now deceased.” (example). Technologically, this is simple. While simple, it’s also very important because enabling access means more than simply putting materials online.

Enabling access means ensuring materials can be found (outreach, promotion, search engine optimization, etc) and that the materials are usable (usability studies, help documents, etc), as well as ensuring that the materials can be made sense of and used (contextual supports, educational guides, exhibits, cultural heritage supports, etc).  Vrroom is an excellent resource for archival research and teaching, as well as being an excellent example of how cultural heritage institutions support access and what supporting access really means.

 

This week the UF Libraries celebrate the first finding guide for an archival collection in both Spanish and English. The finding guide is:

• Guide to the Rafael Martínez Pupo Papers Relating to Comandos Mambises
• Guía de los Documentos de Rafael Martínez Pupo en relación a los Comandos Mambises

The finding guide and collection were prepared by Margarita Vargas-Betancourt, the new Caribbean Basin Archivist in the UF Latin American Collection.

The news item below is from the newslib list-serve. I’m posting it because it connects to the work being done at the Price Library of Judaica at the University of Florida to build a Newspaper Digital Collection from the Price Library of Judaica. One of the projects is to build the Price Library of Judaica Anniversary Collection, which represents the first stage of a project to digitize a unique and important collection of over 200 anniversary editions of Jewish newspapers held in the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica. These jubilee issues have never been catalogued by the Library and until now have remained ‘hidden’ from Library users.

News from the newslib list-serve:

The remarkable collection of JTA news reports from 1923 to the present is now available for free at archive.jta.org. Formerly the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, now JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People, the organization is a not-for-profit media company similar to the Associated Press. The tag line is “Writing the first draft of Jewish history”. The archive of original reporting from around the world documents the Jewish experience of the 20th century, much of it not written about in the mainstream media.

There are more than 7,000 contemporaneous articles reported from Europe between 1937-1945 that document the Holocaust on a daily basis, at least that many documenting the experience of Russian Jews throughout entire reign of Communism, coverage of life in then-Palestine before the new state was inaugurated in 1948, and much more.

http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/05/04/3087568/jta-launches-online-archive-containing-quarter-million-articles

Cool YouTube video:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yB5I5wiL41A&feature=youtu.be

?The first version of the Archives Portal Europe is now online: www.archivesportaleurope.eu

Archives Portal Europe allows users to search across the:

• the holdings of 47 institutions
• 7.794.952 descriptive units
• 725.406 digital archival objects

The site is still in beta, but it already looks great and more great things are sure to come based on the site’s excellent documentation.

Awesome news from CDL, so reposting below. The original is here.

Prototype interface released for searching archival authority records

CDL’s Digital Special Collections program is pleased to announce the public release of a draft prototype historical access system for the Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC).

SNAC is a two-year research project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, that is creating a set of authority records by extracting information from archival finding aids and enhancing it with other sources.  The project uses the new standard Encoded Archival Context—Corporate bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF).  Data for the research is being provided by the Online Archive of California, among several other sources.  Learn more about SNAC.

CDL’s role in the SNAC project is to build a prototype interface that links the authority records in a “historical social network.”  Such a system has the potential to significantly expand access to a range of humanities resources, as well as our knowledge of the connections between people, families, and organizations over time.

The user prototype is being developed using an iterative approach.  This first release of the system provides the most basic functionality required for researchers to imagine how they might interact with archival authority records.  Development of further iterations of the prototype will continue through Spring 2012.

Tell us what you think!

We welcome your suggestions on both the design of the prototype interface and the processing of the data.  What features do you think would be most useful for researchers?

Direct access to the prototype system, a description of project work to date, and a link to the feedback forum can be found at http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/prototype.html.

SobekCM – the system powering the UF Digital Collections, the Digital Library of the Caribbean, and many other rich collections – will soon have advanced support for finding guides in EAD. This has been in process as a complete solution for the full workflow and it’s nearing completion. Check out the EADs we’re testing with here.

The benefits from fully supporting EAD within the same digital library system supporting digital objects is enormous:

• Finding guides can be displayed, searched, and used within the same system as the digital objects they reference (increases usability from consistent navigation, ease of searching a single system, additional benefits from any applicable system enhancements)
• Finding guides benefit from existing automation. For SobekCM this includes the automatic creation of MARC records from the EADs and the automatic record feed of MARC records into the library catalog.

SobekCM’s support for EADs has been enabled through programming by Mark Sullivan. The programming created an EAD reader for importing the data into the standard SobekCM digital resource object and then reading the description and container list and importing as much information as possible into the digital resource object. Sections in the EAD are autodetected to create the table of contents.

With the support for importing, SobekCM supports the EADs as digital resources that can be searched for within the digital collections. When a user selects any digital resource to view in SobekCM, the METS file is read.  This provides some basic information like wordmarks and the type of digital resource it is. If the digital resource is a finding guide (defined by being Archival/collection and having an EAD listed as one of the downloads ) the EAD is then read into the SobekCM digital resource object.  While the container list will be read identically, the top portion of the EAD is pulled into the display and stored as one large block of text/xml with the XSL transform applied to display the description.

The auto-created table of contents is a bit different from any of the existing table of contents because it floats to the left constantly (scrolling down, it floats down to stay onscreen at all times), and this is needed for reading longer HTML-style documents that have a lot of scrolling, as opposed to our normal page-turner model.

When EAD results show after a search, the search terms are highlighted. This is still being refined, but it’s active in test already and will soon be fully active. After that, the final steps are for handling the container list.

To see it in test (which will only be active for awhile, since this will soon be live):

• Go here: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/testcol
• Search for RAWLINGS
• Click on the EAD
• The search terms are highlighted.

“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.]

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Job Posting: Librarian, Digital Library Services, Florida Center for Library Automation

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.