Digital Library Center Blog | UF

More content is almost always better, so the SobekPH App for accessing multiple collections from the UF Digital Collections is best for more content. However because each of the collections already has such a vast supply of content to offer, we’re also starting to release iPhone Apps for each of the individual collections.

Two new iPhone Apps are now available, one for UF’s University Archives photographs and another for the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Digital Collection. Check them out in the App store (SobekPH UF Archives and SobekPH Baldwin), or see them online in the UF Digital Collections!

The Rose Hill Manor Park & Children’s Museum in Frederick, Maryland will soon be printing new copies of historic children’s books from the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Digital Collection. The children’s books will be used for their story hour program where they read stories to children and let them act out part of the story and do a craft; their Playtime Monday programs that encourage children and parents to explore their facilities and spend time reading and playing together; tours; and history camp programs where they teach kids about school days for children in the past.

It’s always exciting to share old materials from the University of Florida Libraries in new ways, whether digitally or in print once again!

The University of Florida’s Digital Library Center regularly receives requests for copies of digital files. The UF Digital Collections contain many items not in the public domain, but for which the rights owners have granted permissions and for those we refer requests to the rights holders. If the files are UF’s and in the public domain, the DLC is happy to share the files. We do ask for attribution to the UF Libraries so that users of the new materials can find more related items and we ask for news of where the images are being used so we can share that information with our current users as well.

Recently, files for two Baldwin books were requested for translation into Catalan and republishing into new volumes by Editorial Flamboyant, a publisher whose goal is to bring small literary gems to children and parents. Editorial Flamboyant has done a wonderful job and the new books are now available online from their website. Their blog includes more information on these books and their plans for the future, and the blog is here and translated with Google translate into English here.

I haven’t had quite as much exciting news to share lately because the Digital Library Center has been focusing any free time–aside from keeping up with current projects–on trying to load some old files for the most recent segment of a multi-phased grant. The older files are from 1998-2004 and were included in the earlier grant phases, and were microfilmed instead of being digitized. The microfilm was later digitized, but the color pages still had to be scanned and so now we’re re-combining the grayscale and color pages, processing the images, adding bibliographic metadata, and loading and archiving the files. The process is slow going and often unexpected problems or just confusing oddities come up that require more time than these already time-consuming files require. While this sort of work isn’t as fast, easy, or fun as the rest of what we do, it’s still worth the extra effort to restore color to rare, colorful books and to enable access online and instead of on a microfilm reader.

Here’s another great title with a correspondingly excellent illustration from the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Digital Collection in UFDC:

Almanack for 1884

Happy St. Patrick’s Day (tomorrow)! To celebrate, enjoy some of the related books (or at least a few that appear related based on searching for “St. Patrick”) in UFDC:

• The Youth’s History of Ireland
• Paddy O’Learey and His Learned Pig
• The Brownies in Ireland
• Celtic Fairy Tales
• Honor Bright, or, The four-Leaved Shamrock
• “Magic Clovers” in St. Nicholas
• Almanack for 1884

The Louise Bechtel Fellowship provides a $4,000 grant to a qualified children’s librarian to spend a month or more reading and studying at the Baldwin Library of the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville. The Baldwin Library contains a special collection of 85,000 volumes of children’s literature published mostly before 1950. The fellowship is endowed in memory of Louise Seaman Bechtel and Ruth M. Baldwin. This year’s winner is Mary Elizabeth Beardsley Land, director of the Abbeville County Library System, who will be studying “Home for the Holidays: the Depiction of Holiday Themes in Books for Children.”

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.

The title says it all–or as much as can be said with any brevity. The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) now have 3 million pages!

Or to be exact 3,012,406 which means that since October 4 we’ve added over 500,000 pages and that we’ve added a full million pages since July. Our largest collection is the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Digital Collection, which now has 749,686 pages. The Baldwin’s many pages have been digitized through NEH grants and the current grant is coming to a close so we’ll see comparatively fewer books load in the near future, but the many wonders of the Baldwin’s beautifully illustrated children’s books have so much to explore that there’s always something more to see. The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is the next largest with 568,139 pages contributed by the many dLOC partners, including the University of Florida Libraries. The third largest is the Florida Digital Newspaper Library with 491,330 pages of Florida newspapers, historic to current.

We won’t be loading as much soon–with holiday vacations and closing days–but we’ll continue to see more pages and wonders load even if at a slightly slower pace.