Digital Library Center Blog | UF

Laurie N. Taylor January 21st, 2008

Augment or alternative reality games combine the digital and the physical to create innovative and interactive games. Notable examples could include geocaching games, and games where players decode information on websites to find information on other websites, call or email the “decrypted” phone numbers or email addresses, or any one of many other activities based on the information learned from the digital site. The real play of ARGs comes through in the back-and-forth from digital to non-digital and in the gaming communities these types of games create. While I’m familiar with ARGs from game studies, it seems like some library and archival materials almost invoke the concept with as oddities that seem to need to be used in some way.

The image above is an example from the USX National Defense Program, Identification Card Listings - 1940’s Series (Source: UE/Labor 91:6, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.). The University of Pittsburgh Library’s website explains the origin of these ID cards:

In the 1940’s, workers at US Steel’s National Works (sometimes known as the Tube Works) in McKeesport, were photographed for identification cards, which also provide social data on individual workers. The Archives Service Center is hereby making available a name index to its collection of these cards, numbering more than 10,000 in all, approximately 25% of which contain the abovementioned thumb-nail sized photographs. The social data on the cards have thus far been used for a variety of scholarly research projects: e.g. for a study and oral history on women crane operators at the National Works during WWII and for a book on Jews of Hungarian background who worked there. By combining cards belonging to members of a given, defined group, one can form conclusions about the connections between race/ethnicity and job classification or promotion, or about the geographic origins of selected groups.

The card almost calls out to be used in a game that requires additional research, making it perfect fodder or inspiration for an ARG. With so many related materials on the University of Pittsburgh Library’s site, and with material from places like the Typographical Union,
I’m amazed this hasn’t yet figured into an ARG already. Of course maybe it has, but I just haven’t found it yet. At any rate, wondrous materials like this seem to hide or simply sit waiting in all libraries and museums. Given their historical significance, ability to inspire, and usability for projects like ARGs, it’s hopefully only a matter of time until we all stumble across them through a game or an internet search.

• objects , play , geocaching , games , Collection Items , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor December 20th, 2007

The Digital Library has been experimenting with pop-up and movable books, in part to abstract methods for working with movables into optimum ways for representing books as textual objects. One of the projects that came of the work with pop-ups is this version of a Cinderella Panoramic Book.

We’re also looking at a Flash page flipper for some of the scrapbooks and other flip-like books. We’ll be working to create files and then reconstruct the Flash page-flipping in Open Laszlo (so we can migrate it forward in DHTML and in Flash as the versions change).

• design , book arts , materiality , objects , exhibit , Collection Items
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Laurie N. Taylor December 19th, 2007

The Comics Digital Collection is slowly building, and the scans of the Imagerie d’Epinal broadsheets will soon be online. While they’re still processing, they’re also online within Picasa so that others can see them even if only the smaller versions. It’s great to have rare materials added online so that others can use them and it’s even better knowing that these are only some of the many materials being added.

These pictorial broadsheets known as the Imagerie d’Epinal sheets told simple tales and were made by the Imagerie Pellerin of France, and then reprinted by the Humoristic Publishing Co. in Kansas, Missouri. These are the reprints and are important for the history of comics and printing. In Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer, David Kunzle compares Töpffer’s “kind of graphic naïvete and that of the truly unschooled and awkward Imagerie d’Epinal” (77). Kunzle argues “the subsequent history of the comic strip occupies this middle groudm but inclining more to Töpffer than imagerie populaire” (77). Kunzle’s overall analysis places Töpffer alongside the likes of Gustave Doré, William Hogarth, Willhelm Busch, and George Cruikshank in publications like Punch, Le Charivari, L’Illustration, and Illustrated London News.

References: Kunzle, David. Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer. Jackson, MS: UP of MS, 2007.

• comics , imagetext , Collection Items , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor November 27th, 2007

In the 1970s Gainesville, Florida was home to many of the radical women of the Women’s Movement. Despite a rich web of activity and impact, much of this history is in danger of being lost or at least obscured by a lack-of-presence from current and accessible avenues. Luckily, researchers like Leila Adams are not only collecting the archival materials but also digitizing the materials to ensure preservation and access, thereby ensuring proper representation of the Women’s Movement.

The Radical Women in Gainesville collection is rapidly growing and more materials will be added soon. As materials are added and slowly populate through the web, hopefully articles like “From Barricades to Blogs” questioning the contemporary relevance of the Women’s Movement will have their answers and a whole slew of better questions, like “what can the current battles for equality and social justice learn from the Women’s Movement?”

• preservation , Collection Items , Library , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor November 20th, 2007

UF’s Digital Library Center is working on digitizing videos and putting them into the Digital Collections. In order to make sure these videos are preserved for the long run, we’re saving large and small files and taking the necessary steps. In order to make sure they’re found and used as soon as possible, we’re loading them into Youtube. While many of the videos are standard educational and institutional materials (interesting, but not email-forwarding type stuff), we have one wonderful video of books vs. bugs.

Bugs vs. Books Techno
Bugs vs. Books Darker

The video was made by the Preservation Department and the Nematology and Entomology Department and it’s three minutes of bugs eating books. The video was made so that people know about how dangerous bugs can be for books, but it’s also just a wonderful video. It’s also wonderful to see what sort of conversations these videos spark. When Cathy, our Preservation Officer, showed the video Erich, our former Preservation officer and now head of the Digital Library Center, noted that smoky brown roaches normally won’t eat books, since they normally live outside and generally prefer books older books that used animal byproducts in their binding. This led to a great discussion of bugs versus books and I learned that cockroaches normally eat books only when other food isn’t available, and that this happens when students leave and thus close the “bug cafeterias,” otherwise known as the food and drink in trash cans. The discussion also covered our worst case of roach-book-killing, which was years ago in an older building where duplicate law books had been stored by a well-meaning scholar. Then, the books were left alone while the building was renovated. When the misplaced books were found again, the bugs had eaten through the covers leaving only the pages inside. Luckily, the books were duplicates, but all of those folks saving things in Florida garages and mini-storage units should take heed–when bugs attack books, books lose. Or do they?

I’ve uploaded two versions of the video with audio (from Creative Commons-licensed music) and the short video clips from the video. These clips are for anyone to use in making remixes! Please make and share your own stories of bugs versus books. For music, there are loads of Creative Commons fair-to use music sources and CC lists many of them: http://creativecommons.org/audio.

The video citation information is: “Books vs. American Cockroaches (Periplaneta Americana)” by the University of Florida Smathers Library Preservation Dept. and University of Florida Entomology & Nematology Dept., Producer Cathy Martyniak, Videography & editing Richard Martyniak. Music online for the techno version and darker music.

Share your stories of bugs vs. books! Do bugs win?

• video , preservation , objects , Collection Items , Library , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor November 19th, 2007

The UF Libraries’ Preservation Department has started a retrospective dissertation scanning project to help solve problems of access to research, but UF needs permission for Internet Distribution from each author. Authors can grant permissions by completing this form and sending it to the address on the form.

UF requires all new dissertations to be submitted electronically, but that leaves decades upon decades of paper and microfilm-only versions. Finding all of the UF alumni to assign permissions is a monumental task. The retrospective dissertation scanning project has been featured in various news venues (newsletters and the newspaper, emails have been sent to alumni with email addresses on file, letters have been sent to addresses on file) and more communications are planned. Other efforts to get the word out include working through departmental and college contacts and larger and smaller news venues, but this is a slow process so anything automated or anything that easily grows on its own would be a major help. With all of this work the response is slowly building, but I’m hoping that this blog post helps get the word out, too.

Having the dissertations and theses online will be great for researchers and society because it will build the overall pool of shared and available knowledge. Like the picture above, having these materials online will also show a bit of history - UF’s history; the history of a particular idea, research topic, field, researcher; and more. Making high quality research, even older research, openly available to everyone changes the information landscape and opening new doors and allowing for many new possibilities.

If anyone has ideas for more keywords or ways to share the information through faster channels, please add comments to help the project. Authors can give permissions through this online form and mailing it to the address at the bottom of the form, and those who know authors can share the form with the authors. For more information, see the Preservation Department’s page on the Retrospective Dissertation Scanning Project or see this example of a digitized dissertation.

To best help this message get to past authors, here are keywords to further it along through the magic inner workings of the Internet and search engines: UF dissertation, dissertations, thesis, PhD, EdD, doctorate, doctoral, graduates, alumni, former graduates, graduate students, research, retrospective, online, microfilm, print, past, online, digitize, share, archives, scanning, prior, past, old, database, University of Florida, UF, gators, Florida alumni, alumnus, open access, online, openly accessible, make available, share, digitization, digital

• open access , uf , Academia , Collection Items , Library , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor November 16th, 2007

One of the major benefits of large digitization projects is that important and amazing artifacts, hidden in the archives, come to the surface and are easy to access not just by themselves but also within their overall context. One of these amazing artifacts is Droopy the Drew Field Mosquito by Harry Lampert. Harry Lampert is best known as co-creator of the DC Comics superhero The Flash. Lampert began his career at the Fleischer studios and worked on comics - including Betty Boop, Popeye, and KoKo the Clown - wrote humor comic books, worked on gag cartoons for many periodicals - including The New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, and Time - and taught cartooning at the New York School of Visual Arts.

Harry Lampert’s Droopy the Drew Field Mosquito was published in the Drew Field Echoes, the newspaper for the Drew Field Army Airbase (in Tampa, Florida). The University of South Florida holds the physical issues and now the Digital Collections contain the first strip, published in August 1942, and all following strips through February 3, 1944, as well as an article on Droopy from August 13, 1943. The Droopy comics are important for comics scholars because of their popularity and influence, their place within Lampert’s work, and their role within the larger history of military comics and publications. Within the Drew Field Echoes papers, studies of fan cultures also benefit because the paper includes articles that specifically show the fan/community-support culture with articles like “Droopy’s Daddy Takes Himself a Wife.”

The individual Droopy comics are compiled on this page, and each is linked to the Drew Field Echoes issue in which it appears.

As the Digital Collections continue to grow, more treasures will certainly be found. Most fortuitously Will Canova, the project coordinator for the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, happens to be an excellent comics reader who ensures that important comics get the attention they rightly deserve.

• comics , Collection Items , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor October 30th, 2007

UF’s public awareness campaign is “The University of Florida is the foundation for The Gator Nation” and then sub-campaign taglines like “The Gator Nation is everywhere.” While it does sound a little sci-fi overlord-esque, it’s actually true in that UF does have land everywhere and does have projects conducted all over the state and all over the world. UF is also one of the largest public schools and has alumni everywhere. If Gator fans are counted, then this becomes even more validated because Gator fans are everywhere. I’m not a sports person, so I only know about any of the sports when people tell me or when my students are on the teams (the students work so hard that it’s almost an ethical imperative to keep up as a teacher). However, I’m so often on phone calls or emails with someone and they hear/read “UF” or “Gainesville” and I hear/read “Go Gators!” in return. It happens so often that it almost no longer seems strange, even when they’re in California or Texas or Canada or wherever. What had seemed strange was not that the recognition of UF and the general friendliness of the response, but that the people were actually Gator fans.

Looking at the image from Puerto Rico, with the grounds keeper in a Gator shirt seems so fitting for UF’s presence across the globe and for Halloween (Dia de Los Muertos).

• holiday , uf , Collection Items
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Laurie N. Taylor October 28th, 2007

UF is a partner in the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), so I was excited to see that the book Caribbean Libraries in the 21st Century: Changes, Challenges, and Choices edited by Shamin Renwick and Cheryl Peltier-Davis is available. The table of contents with all twenty-five chapter titles and authors is listed on the Library of Congress website and gives an useful sense of the full book, and I hope to grab the UF Library copy tomorrow and I’ll post a review as soon as I’ve read it. It looks really interesting for my more pragmatic purposes and for all interested in library collaborations and in the evolution of libraries.

• references , dloc , Collection Items , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor October 22nd, 2007

UF’s Digital Library Center has digitized this Grebo Mask. I’m not a mask expert of any sort, but the description tells that the Grebo Mask is possibly Kru (Liberia and Ivory Coast), in the shape of a bird with four eyes, representing a seer (Wood) circa 1960.

The Grebo Mask alone is a beautiful artifact, but what’s more interesting is that the Digital Library Center is working on a standard method for putting these images together in a looping clip, where users can click to stop the clip or to zoom in on the object. A number of museum websites offer spinning objects or objects that can be zoomed in on, but I haven’t found any examples as good as our full 360-rotation and depth of zooming. As museums and libraries move to digitize more materials, the best methods not only make materials accessible in the same ways as they would have been in non-digital format, but in ways that improve their usability through digitization.

Masks and other object-artifacts are often presented in museums encased in glass, so that only parts of the objects are viewable and the detail of the view is hindered by lighting, glass or ropes defining the space, and eyesight. Digitizing objects in ways that respect the materiality of objects allows users to see and study the objects in new ways while working within the traditional constraints of not handling, and thus not damaging the objects.

Digitization approaches that respect the materiality of object dovetails into digital preservation initiatives and into more recent studies on the importance of objects-as-objects, like Sherry Turkle’s edited collection Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, which studies the importance of objects for inspiration and thought patterns (it’s much like Donald Norman’s work on how designs affect the way users think about and use objects in Things that Make Us Smart and The Design of Everyday Things). I’m excited to see where this project takes us and to see the many problems and solutions we find in presenting digital versions of objects.

• objects , materiality , exhibit , museum , Collection Items , Academia , Digital Library
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