Digital Library Center Blog | UF

Collection Development/Resource Sharing (CDRS) Conference, March 26-27, 2009
Florida State University Alumni Center; Tallahassee, Florida
Information about the CDRS conference is available online and below.

Call for Proposals
Florida State University and the Panhandle Library Access Network (PLAN) are co-sponsoring a two day event that is based on the Janus Challenges. The Steering Committee for the Collection Development/Resources Sharing Conference is accepting presentation proposals that address some aspect of the Janus Challenges.  Presentations may demonstrate projects that have been successfully implemented at a local level and have the potential to scale to multi-institutional and/or multi-type groups, or propose innovative new approaches to collection development practices and resource sharing. Panels Sessions, Project or Idea Sessions, Poster Sessions and the hosting of Roundtable Discussions will all be considered. The Call for Proposals closes on October 31, 2008.  The committee will notify applicants of the status of proposals no later than December 1, 2008. Please send inquiries and completed proposals to Roy Ziegler at: rziegler@fsu.edu.

Proposal Submission Criteria:

1. Type of presentation (Panel Session, Project/Idea Session, Poster Session, Roundtable Discussion Leader)
2. Presenter(s) contact information (name, job title, institution, mailing address, e-mail address, phone)
3. Presentation title
4. Program track (Recon, Procon, Core Collections, Licensing, Archiving, Scholarly Communications, multiple tracks, other)
5. Brief program description (less than 75 words)
6. Major learning outcomes (brief statement)
7. Media requirements
8. If proposal is accepted, a full program description (less than 500 words)

About the CDRS Conference
In January 2007 a Collection Planning Committee task force was charged by the deans and directors of Florida’s statewide Council of State University Libraries (CSUL) to explore challenges and opportunities for building library collections in the digital age based on the Janus Conference held at Cornell University in October of 2005.  At that conference Ross Atkinson presented the major components that were critical for academic libraries to have a sustainable future: 1) Coordinated retrospective conversion of print collections (Recon), 2) Acceleration of transition from print to  electronic collections (Procon), 3) Importance of defining and building core collections, 4) Expansion of library partnerships and redefinition of the library marketplace for the licensing of electronic resources, 5) Development of mechanisms to archive print and digital content and 6) Creation of an infrastructure for alternative channels for scholarly communication.* Currently there are six statewide CSUL task forces working on the Janus Challenges with the goal of enhancing our ability to develop and share collections, practices and ideas beyond our individual institutions.  The goal of the CDRS Conference is to expand this collaborative discussion to all academic institutions and research libraries within the State of Florida and the Southeast region. Individuals and groups from Florida and neighboring state universities, community colleges, and private institutions are encouraged to participate.

*For additional reading on the Janus Conference, refer to the following article by Ross Atkinson, “Six Key Challenges for the Future of Collection Development,”  Library Resources & Technical Services vol. 50 (4), p.244-251.

Antonio Prohías is best known for creating MAD Magazine’s Spy vs. Spy. Spy vs. Spy is immediately recognizable by any age group because of its amazing minimalist yet non-reductive portrayal of political conflict. It should come as no surprise that its creator Antonio Prohías honed his skills inking political cartoons for newspapers like El Avance Criollo.

We found these cartoons thanks to Will Canova, the Digital Library Center’s newspaper digitization coordinator. Will was processing El Avance Criollo and, noticing the incredibly well styled political cartoons, quickly noted that these cartoons were done by none other than Spy vs. Spy’s creator Antonio Prohías.

The University of Florida Libraries’ copies of 1960-1961 issues of El Avance Criollo are currently being digitized and will soon be online here. The cartoons themselves are available right now through our Flickr Photostream and will also soon be in the UF Digital Collections within the El Avance Criollo issues and separately (as JPEG and JPEG2000 images and as a downloadable PDF).

For more on Antonio Prohías, listen to NPR’s program on him, read his obituary in the New York Times, and check out Spy vs Spy: the Complete Casebook  which includes historical and biographical essays.

I haven’t been blogging as much lately, but it’s not because I don’t have much to share. The adage “still waters run deep” seems fitting for the University of Florida Digital Collections of late. In recent months, we’ve upgraded our infrastructure repeatedly and we continue to make progress on working through our digitized-yet-unprocessed materials and in working through the files in need of migration. One collection’s history perhaps speaks best to our current and ongoing efforts, as our Digital Library Center Director explained in 2000:

“The Governor’s gift enables the creation and delivery of electronic library resources via the Internet in support of the University of Florida’s teaching and research objectives,” explains Erich Kesse, director of the Digital Library Center. “But, perhaps most important, Gov. Bryant’s gift provides the hardware infrastructure to develop and serve these and other resources to the people of the state of Florida.” (UF News Bureau)

The Governor’s gift founded the Papers of Governor C. Farris Bryant Collection, which began at PALMM (the statewide digital collection). Soon after, with technological advances, the former PALMM system came up against limitations. The old system is still operational, but PALMM’s new system has been deployed and collections are migrating. Similarly, the University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) didn’t even exist in 2000 as a separate entity and now that it does, we’ve migrated the Papers of Governor C. Farris Bryant Collection to the University of Florida Digital Collections.

Adding these 33,000+ pages to UFDC required additional infrastructure in terms of hardware with more server space and software from our programmer to people to process the materials. The infrastructure developed for this collection now also benefits all of UFDC and all of the state of Florida and the world through the over 2 million pages now online, and more adding daily. The 2 million pages from so many titles and collections are each much like the Papers of Governor C. Farris Bryant Collection in that the sheer quantity can’t explain the quality even though each added page adds to the overall quality of the existing materials.

The Governor’s papers tell the stories of the state of Florida, Florida’s citizens, a changing world with the explosive growth of Florida tourism and the US space program, a man and his family, the importance of the media, the influence of the University of Florida on its graduates and the influence of University of Florida graduates on the world and the University of Florida, and much more. The Governor’s papers support the Florida Law Collections and the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, respectively chronicling Florida’s laws and the state’s application and response to them. Even more directly, the Governor’s papers support The Floridians Collection which includes a vast array of writings - history, literature, community and political activism - from and about Florida. Florida will be a swing state in the coming election as it so often is because Florida is a state with many tales and ideas, orange groves and astronauts, St. Augustine as the oldest city and Disney World as a land outside of time.

William Faulkner is quoted with “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The statement couldn’t be more true when dealing with technology - we never finish with our past because all digital creation includes the trace of prior technology and the continuing needs of that the prior technology supported - and it couldn’t be more true in dealing with Florida. The Papers of Governor C. Farris Bryant tell the stories of building the highways and across Florida (the roads that supported Florida tourism and the current concept of Florida) and of building higher education in Florida. The digital collection for those papers supports the information highway and all of education by building supporting UFDC and all of its collections, including UFDC’s role in building international collections like the Digital Library of the Caribbean.

Now that the Governor’s papers are loaded, we’ve begun work to connect the existing finding aid to the digital collection items in the best way possible, to allow both to operate separately and together while benefiting from and without inhibiting the unique benefits of each. This work also supports the proposal for a new digital collection on papers from the Everglades. The Everglades also capture Florida’s history in the balance of railroads, Florida’s development, and their sensitive ecology. Infrastructure for information access benefits the coming events in each of these stories of Florida’s history. The past will never be dead, but through the necessary infrastructure we can harness the strength of the past for the present and future, from the vast orange groves of Florida building the road to tomorrow.

I’ve been so busy the past year (or 14 months to be completely accurate) since joining UF’s Digital Library Center that it’s hard to see what all we’ve accomplished. The time has flown by with loads of wonderful work, and wonderful progress. I decided to review some of our documentation and to note a few of the highlights:

• More stuff! We hit the 1 million page mark in September 2007, and as of today we’re at 2.12 million with so many more to load!
• More types of stuff! Improvements to UFDC that include support for audio and video files, better multi-language support!
• Better ways to see the stuff! Optimized code for a faster UFDC, thumbnails for new all book images for faster quick-viewing, a better interface for usability!
• Better connections to find stuff! Optimizing UFDC for search engines so we’re crawled properly, created RSS feeds for the collections within UFDC, set up external accounts to share content and to connect users to UFDC (this blog, our Flickr account, our YouTube presence, Wikipedia links for items and entries on authors, books, people, and places related to the collections connecting context with actual items).
• More work to tell people about our stuff! Multiple presentations internally and at national and international conferences, interns, class tours, working with faculty, students, staff, and organizations to tell them about UFDC and to show them how it can help their work. We made exhibits, contributed digital materials to exhibits and other events and publications, and worked with the Libraries’ Public Information Officer to write and distribute press releases and other materials.
• More projects to keep going! Working with other groups at the UF Libraries for particular collections, including: Retrospective Dissertation Scanning; Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Collection; Romanies Collection; Gainesville Bands; British Parliamentary Debates; Asia Collection; Women in Development; and many more, including further developing existing collections like the Florida Digital Newspaper Library and the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) with partners at the UF Libraries, at UF, and elsewhere. In addition to projects based on partners, we’ve also defined some projects chronologically with grant and time-based projects and this we’ve finished some grants, started new ones, applied for others, are preparing to apply for even others, and migrating some of our older projects from other technology to UFDC.

All of this and much more happened during the past year, but the Digital Library Center has been around since 1999 so it all grows from that ongoing work. That’s still the more recent history because the Digital Library Center grew out of the Preservation Department (founded in 1987, I think, based on the  “News from the Preservation Office” newsletters now online in UFDC). By 1993, the Preservation Department was already looking toward a comprehensive method for preservation, around the same time that the Mosaic browser was helping generate interest in the World Wide Web, heralding the promise of the digital revolution to come. There’s so much more to the history and the future of the Digital Library Center, but it’s too much to try to put in one blog post so it’ll have to wait for later.

In our ongoing work to improve the findability of books in the UF Digital Collections (UFDC), we now have an RSS page with feeds for each of the collections. The RSS feed page is http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc2/rss/.

Please sign up for a feed or two to learn about the great materials added daily, and please share the RSS feeds with others!

The press release is below, and this is great news for the many growing comics programs across the country. as we edge ever closer to critical mass for full, mainstream recognition of the importance of comics studies and collections.

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The Special Collections Research Center (SCRC), Syracuse University Library has been awarded a grant of $79,440 by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to support the arrangement and description of the library’s 134 unprocessed collections of original cartoon art. The funds will help support a full-time project archivist for a period of two years. The award to Syracuse was one of six “Detailed Processing Grants” awarded by NHPRC and the Archivist of the United States. Other recipients included Princeton University and the University of Chicago.

Syracuse’s collection of original cartoon art is among the most comprehensive in America. It includes original work by approximately 173 artists (more than 20,000 items) and comprises more than 1,000 linear feet of material. Spanning the course of the 20^th century, it includes both serial and editorial cartoons. Among the serial cartoonists represented are: Bud Fisher, whose Mutt and Jeff was the earliest successful daily comic strip; Mort Walker, whose Beetle Bailey anticipated the changing notions of American masculinity and militarism during the Cold War; Hal Foster, whose lavishly illustrated Prince Valiant elevated the artistic ambitions of the genre; and Morrie Turner whose Wee Pals was the first comic strip to chronicle the lives of racial and ethnic minorities in American life. The editorial and political cartoonists represented in the collection include: William Gropper, whose leftist political cartoons in the Daily Worker raised working class consciousness during World War II; F.O. Alexander, whose everyman alter-ego “Joe Doakes” experienced the turbulence of the 1960s in the pages of the Philadelphia Bulletin; and Carey Orr, whose editorial cartoons appeared in the Chicago Tribune for nearly fifty years straight.

The physical cartoons in Syracuse’s collection are as wide-ranging and diverse as the artists that created them, assuming countless shapes, sizes, and media including pencil, pen, and gouache on paper. Over the next two years, the project archivist will take steps to ensure that the cartoons are housed in archival-quality containers. He or she will also draft online, searchable finding aids so that curious individuals all over the world can access them. The NHPRC grant is exciting news for scholars who specialize in the genre, casual fans, and, of course, for Syracuse University, which has held many of these collections since the 1960s.

About the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library

With more than 100,000 printed works and 2,000 manuscript and archival collections, SCRC holds some of Syracuse University’s most precious treasures, including early printed editions of Gutenberg, Galileo, and Sir Isaac Newton as well as the library of 19^th century German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886). SCRC’s holdings are particularly strong in the 20^th century; they include the personal papers and manuscripts of such luminaries as artist Grace Hartigan (1922- ), inspirational preacher Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993), author Joyce Carol Oates (1938- ), photojournalist Margaret Bourke White (1904-1971), and architect Marcel Breuer (1902-1981). SCRC strives to be a “humanities laboratory” where librarians and scholars collaborate with the artifacts of history in an ongoing and vital learning process. Home to a new, state-of-the-art instructional seminar room, SCRC also regularly hosts exhibitions, lectures and classes focusing on its collections.

The University of Florida supports the Florida Digital Newspaper Library and the Caribbean Newspaper Imaging Project. By preserving and digitizing the news of the past, these projects make the news new again.

The Caribbean Newspaper Imaging Project includes papers like Haiti’s Le Nouvelliste, with issues from 1899 - 1902 now online. While the early issues online are imperfect (because of materials and processing with newspaper paper, microfilming, and then digitizing from microfilm) the pages are easily readable. If I could read Haitian Creole, or at least enough French to understand with savvy use of Google’s translator, I’d be able to read the December 30, 1899 Le Nouvelliste and learn how Port-au-Prince was handling the shift into 1900, or perhaps the December 31, 1900 issue would be more interesting because its news would be that of Haiti poised for the start of the Twentieth Century.

The news of the past show has history is made. On a much more localized scale, so too do the photographs of the news in the making. Many issues of the University of Florida’s Florida Alligator newspaper, which later became the Independent Florida Alligator, is included in the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, as are photographs from its early days.

One of the Florida Alligator issues online is from September 21, 1945 and it seems surprisingly mundane when scanned quickly. However, the first page includes two articles on the first page, one on General Van Fleet explaining that the human element he gained at the University of Florida was pivotal for his successes in World War II and the second on the University officially going co-ed, after “Legislature broke down and played ‘Lady Bountiful’ by saying veterans’ wives could come, provided their husbands were here first.” Bits of history are told in these pages, just as they are in photograph above. The University of Florida Digital Newspaper Library has digitized issues from 1945 - 1948, and others await along with additional titles and issues intended for the Florida Digital Newspaper Library and the Caribbean Newspaper Imaging Project.

Finger Plays for Nursery and Kindergarten by Emilie Poulsson is a playbook of sorts, with technical writing style guides for finger plays. As wonderfully silly as this image is, the purpose of Finger Plays as explained in the “Preface” is even more wonderful:

“WHAT the child imitates,” says Froebel, “he begins to understand. Let him represent the flying of birds and he enters partially into the life of birds. Let him imitate the rapid motion of fishes in the water and his sympathy with fishes is quickened. Let him reproduce the activities of farmer, miller and baker, and his eyes open to the meaning of their work. In one word let him reflect in his play the varied aspects of life and his’ thought will begin to grapple with their significance.”

Of course, then the “Preface” returns to wonderfully silly again as it proclaims that babies need finger plays to strengthen small, “lax” hands. Play is always good, and reading about play is also wonderful, whether or not it strengthens hands of any size.

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.