Digital Library Center Blog | UF

Browse By Metadata (i.e., list of all publishers in an item aggregation)

The UF Digital Collections (UFDC) have more new features. These are all in progress, as is the norm with the perpetual beta of growing and evolving systems, but the “Browse By” feature is already publicly viewable here for the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Digital Collection.

This is still in process as we test to see how to be display so much rich metadata with significant distinctions, as when an author is also an editor and printer – should it all be collapsed into one, if so then should all types be listed at the end, should they all remain, what about when there are multiple types and then another unclear not on the affiliation? We’ll be working through these questions and more, and we’ll be doing so with abundant feedback from users.

Further Simplification for Simplified URLs

UFDC’s already simplified URLs are even simpler, with the base now http://ufdc.ufl.edu instead of http://ufdc.uflib.ufl.edu. The longer version is still fully supported.

Features for Internal Users

Internal Header

Internal Header

UFDC now has an internal header (internal meaning it’s only for internal folks who are logged in). It allows internal users to easily search by BibID. Right now, this can also be done using the main search box, but the internal header will eventually allow for specialized internal searches and for searching the records for items in process that are not yet online. This is part of the merging of offline workflows into the SobekCM system.

Export to XLS or CSV

Export to Excel

This is also internal-only and it allows internal users to export a list of items directly from SobekCM/UFDC. This complements an update to the UFDC_CM (currently an offline-only tool) which can now pull MARC records for items online. Both of these changes are part of the work to add reporting to SobekCM and the work to integrate existing tools into one system (for greater efficiency for supporting and using the tools).

Related

Like these, other seemingly internal-only enhancements also benefit external users by increasing SobekCM’s capabilities as a system and the Digital Library Center’s ability to work more effectively in digitizing materials and adding them to the UF Digital Collections.

The UF Digital Collections include Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” & the Robinsonades, a digital collection of various editions of Robinson Crusoe and similarly themed texts such as the popular The Swiss Family Robinson, all from the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. The collection is an excellent resource for scholars and Digital Defoe is an excellent scholarly journal that has just announced the publication of it’s second issue, as detailed below.

News Announcement:

We are excited to announce the publication of the second issue of Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries, the peer-reviewed online journal of the Defoe Society that celebrates the works and culture of the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century. You can now access the second issue of the journal at http://www.english.ilstu.edu/digitaldefoe.

This issue, “Strangers, Gods, & Monsters,” features scholarly and pedagogical articles, two book reviews, a note, and recent dissertation and conference paper abstracts. We are also very pleased to feature a special online collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critical writings on Defoe researched and compiled by Penny Pritchard.  The articles, book reviews and note are as follows:

Geoffrey Sill, “Defoe and the Birth of the Imaginary”
Maximillian E. Novak, “Defoe’s Spirits, Apparitions and the Occult”
Joshua Grasso, “The Providence of Pirates: Defoe and the ‘True-Bred Merchant’”
Scott Nowka, “Building the Wall: Crusoe and the Other”
Allison Muri, “Digital Natives or Digital Strangers’ Teaching the Eighteenth Century Online, from Ctrl-F to Digital Editions”
George E. Haggerty’s Review of Defoe’s Writing and Manliness: Contrary Men, by Stephen H. Gregg
Gabriel Cervantes’s Review of A Critical Study of Daniel Defoe’s Verse: Recovering the Neglected Corpus of His Poetic Work, by Andreas K. E. Mueller
Patrick Tonks’s Note on “Robinson Crusoe’s Brazilian Expedition and The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database”

Each work is accompanied by a downloadable and print-friendly PDF.  On the site you will also find our submission guidelines and copyright information, an introduction to our editorial board, announcements of upcoming events, and the CFP for our third issue, “Eighteenth-Century Studies and the State of Education,” with a submission deadline of April 1, 2011 (please send submissions as Word .doc files following MLA citation to Katherine Ellison at keellis@ilstu.edu and Holly Faith Nelson at hnelson@sfu.ca). We welcome multimedia submissions that push the boundaries of scholarship in our field as well as more traditional essays, reviews, notes, and dissertation and conference abstracts.

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.