Digital Library Center Blog | UF

Now that the UF Digital Collections have worked through a bit more of the backlog–and gotten 2 million pages online!–I’ve started catching up on reading. Many great new (or maybe new-ish) ideas are being realized with sites like Foodsville, which repurposes digitized historical cookbooks to create a cookbook community and herald in innovations in printing, Interactive Relighting technologies that bring new information to life (which is amazing for so many historical documents!), Mscape keeps getting better, IBM and Linden Labs are moving toward virtual world interoperability (which is especially great with Google’s new 3D chat), and Google’s Map Maker has been out for awhile now but it’s also worth mentioning. Even with all of these and so many other new and improving technologies (I *heart* R&D!), the more exciting change, to me, is the shift where more and more people, companies, and entities are starting to “get” the information age.

“Getting it,” of course includes that more people have access, but it also means that more people understand the changes from that information and technology. A recent IBM news release explains it rather well in a single sentence “Data has become the new currency in today’s information economy.” For libraries and other non-profit information holders, this is critical. Too many areas of the commons–libraries, museums, education–have been trapped in a funding nightmare with limited public funds (and not wanting to tax the public they serve) and the lack of a “product” to sell.

The whole point of a “commons” is that it’s for everyone–it’s a public good, like a city park. The problem has always been how to support something that benefits everyone with the least cost to everyone and this is especially difficult when the work is invisible (which non-profits so often try to do–making their work hidden to better showcase their services and contents). In the information age, data has value as a public good and as a source to be mined, coallated, repurposed, and reconfigured into other services and products. As more people “get it”, funding should be available that doesn’t “buy” pubilc goods, but that pays to support it and to use it for other purposes. For instance, a library could digitize materials as funding permits, but then a company could cover the costs of digitizing materials and then return the materials to a library to be openly accessible on the library site and the company could recoup their costs by presenting the newly “acquired” data within an existing service, compiling the new materials within a larger analytical data set, or many other possibilities and then reselling that service as a new or improved service–made possible by improvements in finding, collecting, and using information. We’ve heard “Information Age” and “Internet Age” but the real information age is still gaining momentum and I’m anxiously awaiting what we can really do when we teach our information to dance.

(Of course, there’s a lot of work to go and that’s exciting as well, especially with items that don’t exist online–Googling finds zero results, Worldcat has nothing–from projects like the Digital Library of the Caribbean. There’s so much more to gather, and all the while we get to refine our methods. The real information age means more available to learn, new ways to learn, and an infinitely expanding horizon for playing with information!)

The complete works of Charles Darwin are now online in one place, appropriately named “Charles Darwin: the Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online.” This one place includes:

Darwin’s complete publications, thousands of handwritten manuscripts and the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue ever published; also hundreds of supplementary works: biographies, obituaries, reviews, reference works and more.

This work is related to the “Darwin Correspondence Project,” which includes over has over 5,000 letters online and is working to locate as many letters as possible and to make them all available, and they’ve found around 14,500 already. Locating, collecting, and digitizing all of this material is wonderful and projects like this are amazing for their contents and for their structure which gives users an easy way into the materials.

It’s always exciting to see excellent projects like this, and the University of Florida even has a few connections because of our work in digitizing works related to the reception of Charles Darwin’s work in the comic magazine Fun (a contemporary to Punch).

In August, the Digital Library Center proudly announced breaking the one million page mark, with over a million pages online for more than “20 collections, representing more than 44,000 titles in more than 52,000 volumes.” Now, just 7 months later we’ve added slightly over another 60% of that to the collections for a total of 1,621,841 pages, over 5,1746 titles (up from 44,000) and 67,487 volumes (up from 52,000). That means we’ve been producing almost 10% of our total holdings each month for the past 7 at nearly 100,000 pages a month!

The incredible production rate is far more incredible when the types of pages are considered. Large scale digitization initiatives produce far more pages than this, but any comparison would be apples to alligators because our pages are from all sorts of documents, photographs, maps, video, audio, and more. Each file requires metadata (title, author, and a lot more) so books are relatively quick per item for page count. Letters, maps, and photographs are much slower with the same information often required for each page. Plus the 100,000 pages have been produced over the fall to spring semester break and spring break, times when student workers are in short supply, and when many staff people take their own vacations. The page count also can’t accurately reflect the audio and video files, which are counted as a single file for any video or audio clip, even if that one page really means an hour long video, with all of the required processing. Even large printed materials skew aren’t accurately represented by pages given that a single page map will often be several square feet in size, requiring additional processing and time for a single page. Despite the difficulties in reporting fully accurate statistics, the production rate remains extremely impressive and what’s even more impressive is thinking about how many people all of these pages, and all of these materials, will help. Of course, many of the materials are also books like the cover image above, which is from Susan Proudleigh by Herbert G. de Lisser. The book is well out of print and was rare and hard to find, so hard to find that this was actually digitized from a photocopy because that’s what was readily available. But now Susan Proudleigh is available for all.

The fast and steady production is due to a great crew of dedicated workers (including students, some of whom have been at the DLC for multiple years), great technologies that we all work to constantly improve, and constant work to streamline digitization work flows. While we may not be able to much faster than this current speed of roughly 100,000 pages a month, and we may go slower during the summer with missing student workers, 100,000 pages is still a great service for the University of Florida, the University Libraries, and every citizen as all benefit from more information being openly available.

Librarian subject specialists build guides based on subject area to help students and researchers quickly find all of the most relevant resources available at a particular library easily. Given the cost of commercial databases, different libraries will necessarily have different databases, and some of the most popular resources are in multiple databases. Thus, researchers going to a new school may find their key journals in a different database, in different databases, or in the same database but one with such an updated interface that it’s basically a new database. Finding the right resources in the right way becomes a complicated act of mapping needs to resources within the correct service frameworks.

Given this complex meshed-mapped of resources, a quick reference is essential. Some librarians are looking at commercial services like LibGuides. Services like this are useful because they allow the specialists to spend time optimizing content instead of working on the nitty-gritty of site design. I’m hoping that there’s an almost-as-easy solution that’s also Open Source and nearly free (other than setup and related costs). I’ve been looking at Drupal, since I’m familiar with it, but I haven’t found a set-up made exactly for subject/content guides in libraries. The UF Libraries already have awesome content, so we’re just looking for the best way to deliver it–that could be a content management system like Drupal, a wiki like MediaWiki, or a service like LibGuides.

In evaluating the different tools for presentation and delivery, we need a simple, yet flexible framework that’s easy for the subject specialists to update and that’s just as easy for patrons to use, and one that also has a consistent look and feel across the many subject guides. The sheer abundance and variety of information requires this to be a solid, elegant design, as shown through the pages for psychology. The pages cover basic resources on using the library resources, tutorials on using those resources and on using the resources for completing common research projects, explanations of what to use and why, links to help from a subject specialist, information on related fields, space for comments on all of these resources, further details on some of the materials, and more. These pages are currently divided on the UF Libraries’ webspace and a separate wiki because we don’t have a dedicated service for supporting the diverse needs of the subject specialist guides, but we’re in the process of selecting what to use and how to use it to best serve our needs.

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:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/99129398@N00
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7438870@N04
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22719239@N04

The Library of Congress is now using Flickr, and Flickr’s new commons area, to load images for collaborative tagging. This is wonderful because the Library of Congress has built so much core infrastructure using hierarchical definitions and adding Web 2.0-style folksonomy information to that is exactly what the Semantic Web (sometimes called Web 3.0) is all about.

The Library of Congress has a Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (with more than 1 million images and growing) that have been available online for over 10 years and now they are also selling some of their materials via print-on-demand. Because the Library of Congress is so important to the history of libraries and information architectures, any new project they get involved with matters a great deal to the content of that project and to all related systems of information. While it could seem that this is “just another” site testing Web 2.0 tools, the Library of Congress has defined so much of the commons and information sharing that even their frivolities are important.

The Harvard Law School Library just announced a new digital collection highlighting crime broadsides. The collection is online here and the collection description is: “Just as programs are sold at sporting events today, broadsides–styled at the time as “Last Dying Speeches” or “Bloody Murders”–were sold to the audience that gathered to witness public executions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.” The broadsides span 1707 to 1891 and include accounts of executions for various common and uncommon crimes. Now, researchers can see both the cultural reception of sentences as well as the court documents from London’s central criminal court, the Old Bailey (the proceedings of which are now online). Having these materials online is a boon to researchers for seeing the culture at the time in terms of law, news, and media. The entire broadside, zine-esque form is also interesting in light of blogs and online newszines.

While it’s a bit late, January 1 is normally the magical day when new items pass into the public domain. It doesn’t mean too much for the United States–and in fact it won’t mean much until 2019 because of the way our copyright laws are designed–but it’s still something to celebrate. Everybody’s Libraries has a nice overview of January 1’s significance and new gifts to the public domain.

For anyone holding copyright, Creative Commons has ready-made licenses available for easy use to ensure that new works are available before 2019. UF’s Digital Library Center also has handy forms for granting Internet Distribution permissions to UF. The forms are easily formatted to assign permissions to the public organization of anyone’s choice and  our copyright information page even has a nice draft request letter and links to other copyright resources.

The technology and popular culture criticism blog Boing Boing had a recent post on search rankings. It mentions that five years ago, a bet was made that blogs would rank higher than the New York Times website. This indeed came true, largely because the New York Times chose to restrict their content through a signup and paid subscriptions rather than to make the information free. Now, the New York Times has changed their methods and made their site open, but they’ve already lost out on the advertising revenue and on the reputation value for being a free information source.

In an online environment, information that can be most accessed is most valuable, so free information has more value by being freely available and then mashed/added to another system that generates revenue. Making money from free information does mean learning new ways to work and new ways to use information, and that’s been a difficult change for many companies. Hopefully, more corporations will soon see that information should be free and that new, emerging markets which make information more usable, entertaining, or comprehensible can be marketed at a higher rate.

The new online economics could also make for greater recognition of usability, which could enhance information vendors and sources and then reverberate into other areas. Ideally, small changes like this could build into a cultural recognition of the value of giving-things-for-free in terms of the return of reputation and community. Gift economies do seem to have a system where things are given for free, but that concept of “free” still results in a return on investment (ROI) and that’s what companies should soon be leveraging in their online information ventures.

Matthew Daley and Chris McHale (along with other UF Library folks, and maybe others–I only know a couple of the people in the video so I’m not sure who everyone is) made an INFO ZOMBIES film for the SPARC Video Contest. Since the SPARC contest centers around information sharing, the idea of sharing information as a viral-need, like the Zombie urge to eat brains, is a nice, funny combination of information needs and zombies. It’s also neat to see a zombie-cure in the form of information.

Zombies are always fun, especially when they’re INFO ZOMBIES!