The University of Florida Digital Collections are still relatively young, established separately only recently. Since March 23 of this year, we’ve added another 100,000 pages, up from 1.62 million on March 23 and now we’re at 1.718 million (and counting) and it’s only April 20. The full stats–as of today–are: 53,682 titles; 70,323 items; and 1,718,050 pages. Our statistics are dynamically updated, listed online here, and the statistics are broken down by collection.
The statistics are a handy gauge of how our collections are developing, but they can’t reflect the quality of materials online. For reflecting a more complete sense of the materials online, new items are shown on a regular (daily to every few days) on the “browse new items” view, available here and dynamically updated with new items.
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.
Meridian International center is hosting an exhibition, Jam Session: America’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World, on Thursday, April 3, 2008. The exhibition will feature photographs and documents drawn from archives around the country. The brochure cover image, shown above, includes Dizzy Gillespie’s horn from a Cuban magazine, held at the University of Florida and scanned for especially for Jam Session. Unfortunately, the magazine is under copyright so we couldn’t put it online, but the Jam Session exhibit will be filled with many important items not online, but far too wonderful to miss. The exhibit:
chronicles the tours of American jazz legends as they traveled the globe on behalf of the U.S. State Department. From the mid-1950s through the 1970s, Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and others served as cultural diplomats. They toured through over 35 foreign countries in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Middle East and North Africa, where they played their world-famous music and interacted with citizens—promoting a positive view of the United States at a time when Cold War tensions were at their height.
The exhibit even opens with a concert on April 3, at 6:30pm. See more about the exhibit and related events here.I wish I could make it, but if someone else does, please share comments and photos of the exhibit!
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.
Books based on Girl and Boy Scouts have grown popular recently with the release of The Daring Book for Girls and The Dangerous Book for Boys. Complementing those scout-style guides are the actual Scout materials, like the Eagle Scout Book of Gold from which the page above comes.
This wonderful artifact, the Eagle Scout Book of Gold is from the Alachua County Public Library’s Heritage Collection. The book shows Eagle Scouts in Gainesville, Florida from 1941-1965 (the cover says it only goes until 1955, but the contents cover through 1965). The pictures of each of the Scouts and their short letters on what becoming an Eagle Scout has meant to each of them is a wonderful snapshot of history, of the individual Scouts, and of the Gainesville community.
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!
The Gainesville Sun has an article on the Sanborn Maps of Florida. The maps in public domain (prior to 1923) are online in UF’s Digital Collections and the Map Library–which houses all sorts of fabulous antique, literary, flood, and other maps–holds the rest. The Map Library is a treasure trove of wonderful, playful materials and this page lists some of the main categories for all of the wonders. The image to the left is from one of those wonders.
We’re still working on implementing OpenLaszlo for creating film objects, but I wanted to share the Grebo Mask in Flash (in part so I can always find it when people ask). The photos for the mask are already online, so this is just the in-motion version. The full version of the mask in motion is here.
Like the Library of Congress, the National Museum of Health and Medicine has also been exploring using Flickr to share images. The images are great and include historical photos and documents. Some, like the Malaria Joe comic are humorous images from their eras, but some of the photos are strikingly beautiful, painful, haunting, and inspiring snapshots of life, offering glimpses into their time and into people’s lives. Everyone should be able to wander through these images, and it’s an amazing gift to have them online for us to see:
