Digital Library Center Blog | UF

In addition to great added functionality like item-level statistics for external users, the UF Digital Collections‘ underlying SobekCM system is always improving in terms of internal infrastructure. One recent major enhancement is the “Directory” view.

The Directory View is very important to ensure we can easily and quickly check and verify all files, including all metadata files, and locate, copy, and send any files per patron request. This was a very small technical change, with significant day-to-day operational benefits. In keeping with principles for smart design, the internal Directory View is built within the same external user views – ensuring that we trouble-shoot and verify all systems are operating properly simply as part of doing our work.

Plus, it’s neat to see the different files that enable each item to be displayed in so many ways and to be interoperable with so many other systems.

The UFDC Programmer, Mark Sullivan, put a browse by thumbnail cover in place not too recently, but so many other wonderful items have been loading and so many other improvements have been made that I’m just now catching up to mention the cover browse.

The cover browse allows anyone to see the thumbnail images for the covers or first pages of all issues/volumes in an item. This means users can browse all of the first pages of a newspaper or all of the covers of a journal.

The cover browse is an excellent example of elegant simplicity. It uses existing information and functionality–the thumbnails for all pages and the browse by thumbnail for an individual item like a single newspaper issue–and then it adds functionality that’s incredibly helpful for users. For instance, if a researcher wanted to quickly get a sense of a newspaper and it’s evolution over time, what better way than to flip through all of the first pages? If a researcher had been reading  wanted a journal article and then couldn’t remember the volume or issue number and could only remember the cover, the researcher could choose to use the full text search to find the exact article wanted or the researcher could choose to browse through the issues, creating an opportunity for serendipity.

We’d planning to add the browse by cover as a part of a larger move to browse by shelf (a visual display to show the spines of books, or the typical arrangement of books by call number or size), but then we saw that Chronicling America had already added the browse by cover images. It was better than we’d imagined, and we bumped up the timeline and added it immediately. Thanks to Mark’s savvy programming and the elegant simplicity of this addition, he was able to add the browse by cover images in under a single workday.  We also owe thanks to Chronicling America for showing us how useful the cover images browse is, and giving us the nudge we needed to get it added.

I encourage everyone to browse the local Florida newspapers in the Florida Digital Newspaper Library by cover image to see how useful it really is!

The photos above are of our Digital Library Sign, and they’re now online in UFDC (which is harvestable by robots as UFDC2) and online in our Flickr account. These pictures are particularly nice because they include so many of the other images we’ve worked on over the years. It’s also nice to show off some of our office, most of which doesn’t show as well as our work, as shown through the boxes in the photo above, but our messy daily work leads to gorgeously finished materials available online.

On Monday morning, Val Davis (from the University of Florida Marston Science Library) and I presented on “Bioactive: A Library Game” (currently online here) that several UF librarians made as an alternative to the standard 40 minute library intro tutorial to increase student engagement with the actual work of learning about using library resources.

Bioactive was originally designed in Inform and it’s now moved to a web quest design, which is an even greater simplificiation from the earlier text-based Inform format. The simplicity of the design is for sustainability and ease of maintenance, but it’s more importantly used to ensure that the interface doesn’t get in the way of the learning objectives.

Our presentation was incredibly fun thanks to the wonderful crowd, and great set up from all of STS and especially Margaret Mellinger and Barbara MacApline. We were not only lucky in the great setup for our own presentation, but we also got to see Felice Frankel’s presentation. Frankel presented on her work in scientific photography, capturing the beauty and scientific information in her photographs and then using scientific photography to aid in working toward creating a visual scientific language for scientific literacy. Frankel also spoke on how many images have become too computer-focused in many senses, and this is true. Her photographs are computational, like good flowcharts and paralleling much of the current thought on computational modeling and representation (UF’s own Paul Fishwick’s work on aesthetic computing; Ian Bogost’s work on procedural rhetoric and situational/contextual modeling for interaction/testing; James Paul Gee’s work on situational learning in games; and many others). Even with all of this wonderful work, often the computer as artifice/interface seems to encourage the wrong inds of computation where computationally cleaned/corrected is favored over computationally modeled/accurately presented. Frankel’s work is especially excellent because it offers the visual equivalent of what a sound bite should be–even a glimpse and viewers are hooked into wanting to see and know more. Frankel mentioned a number of sites that showcase her work and methodology, including PicturingtoLearn.org and ImageAndMeaning.org.

Frankel also mentioned her interest in capturing the images for a book on the “science of cooking” and I can’t wait for her to do it! So much of gaming and new media is about the appropriate design of the interface to conceal and reveal the underlying structure to generate interest and to pull players/users in at a set pace. Frankel’s work pulls viewers in through its sheer beauty and then each images teaches how to look by making us want to continue looking and understanding what we’re seeing. These ways of seeing relate to aesthetics that communicate as well as the use of metaphor, with metaphor as a reduction/abstraction of information that still remains true to the integrity of the information and the image, the need for the transparency of the interface or the exposing of the interface to show context while editing noise (unnecessary/confusing information), and all to develop images that speak to multiple viewpoints and the modeled system as a method/view. Frankel’s work essentially exposes variables in play and combining this with the additional motivation of making/playing with something tasty through cooking is brilliant. The hands-on play using concepts best known from computing within real world style crafts continues to grow rapidly in popularity, including the knitting/hacking with sites like Ravelry (thanks to Merrie Davidson for pointing this out in our Library 2.0 meetings, otherwise I wouldn’t have known to read up on Ravelry and I could have missed the story on the success of Ravelry community funding drive) and on more traditionally tech-oriented sites like O’Reilly launching Makezine and on yet other sites like Boing Boing that are technologically agnostic in their fusions of hack/make cultures.

I’m too tired and jet-lagged to write more now, but the STS session was wonderful and I’m already looking forward to the next one!

37Signals’ blog recently featured a discussion of path vs hierarchical navigation. As many of the commentators noted, hierarchies and paths both have their uses and a mixture of both based on need and site are often useful. For many websites, creating paths is a relatively straightforward process. For UF’s Digital Collections,
we create paths by allowing users to sort their results and to link to similar from the results, but most notably by organizing all of the collections into thematic collections (historical children’s literature, newspapers, Florida photographs) and by providing starting points into more manageable sub-collections through these groupings. We also create direct links from other relevant content pages (Wikipedia, Amazon, OCLC, publisher pages, instruction and research websites). These navigational landing pages help create entry points into each of the collections and, through them, to all of the collections.

Quintura offers a tag cloud-style visual search for websites, which is below. It looks really nice, so hopefully it works for all the folks who’ve been looking for something like it. Right now I’ll be testing, but it does look nice and useful so here’s hoping.

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).

One of the more interesting new Web 2.0-style mashups are library and museum partnerships. Both have large collections that need to be interconnected and digitized for easier and expanded access. However, libraries have traditionally focused on information access and museums on exhibit-access with the display significant to the materials. As more special collections go online and more information in general, display and access are both becoming more important for libraries and museums. The image above is a shot from a SketchUp file of Gallery B in the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. This is just one small work-in-progress, but it’s an artifact of a much larger process and it’s also really neat to explore the inside of a museum from outside the museum.

We also have these files for a virtual exhibit using the Special Collections Exhibit Area for an exhibit on the Art of Letterpress. Hopefully we’ll soon be adding more contextual materials on exhibits and exhibit design, as well as more exhibits themselves.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an post about libraries in the digital age. The post notes that digitization projects often lead to a patchwork of online materials that aren’t available within an integrated interface. This is certainly true for the time being, but steps toward integration can be seen in the WorldCat’s full catalog listings for so many different libraries and from corporations as they attempt to catalog or at least extract catalog-style metadata from information sources. For instance, Microsoft Live Labs’ pages have a note on their work on entity abstraction and the image of it is listed here. I started noticing the same sort of information in Google Search results, and here’s another sample image.

While the map linked from this slideshow isn’t actually accurate because nearly all of the images are from the University of Florida’s original Library, Smathers East, and I spread them out for easier viewing, the map does accurately show why there’s reason to be excited because Picasa has improved once again. Not only can the images in Picasa be mapped, the images now show as small icons of the images instead of the generic picture icon, and the individual images can be clicked on and enlarged and they can be played in a slide-show format across the map.

The slideshow with the map is a great way to embed complicated information (this picture taken here, before this picture which was here, and after these pictures which were taken in this sequence in these places) and makes it allow easily visible. Plus, this is all available online without requiring any additional software so it’s even easier for users. This sort of elegant design is exactly what more programs need and it’s exactly what the Digital Library Center needs for many of our projects. We need ways that our users can easily access our materials in ways that contextualize the materials. While we still need more functionality because we need the same material-mapping onto a real map and we need it added to a chronological mapping system so we can locate materials in space and time, and over time (years, time periods, timeline-event markers). Other downloadable applications like Google Earth offer us more functionality and almost as much ease for our users, and each step toward more data integration and ease takes us closer to our current goal of modeling systems for a historical virtual world that users can see through time and space.