Laurie N. Taylor March 12th, 2008
In working on other projects, I stumbled across this poster on the Digital Library of the Caribbean from last year. The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. All materials in dLOC are Open Access for everyone to see, but any rights remain with the owners or with the contributing partners. This is a great example of collaboration creating materials for all to use, while supporting the creators and their communities and nations. The digitized materials include Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections.
The poster describes this all more fully, but I’m most impressed with the rights management and with the centralized technical infrastructure, which provides a scaffolding for new projects to begin digitization as well as an umbrella collection online to ensure that even new collections contribute to the growing critical mass of resources in a single space, allowing the searching across collections, while also allowing for individual collections to be searched on their own once ready. The poster says more though, so check it out (in Google Presentation Mode and the slide alone).
Laurie N. Taylor March 8th, 2008
Google is having another design-a-campus contest in SketchUp. It’s the Google 2008 International Model Your Campus Competition! Students around the world can compete by modeling their school’s campus buildings in Google SketchUp, geo-reference them in Google Earth, and submitting them by uploading to the Google 3D Warehouse. Students at higher education institutions almost anywhere in the world can submit individually or in teams of students. In addition to Google’s prices, for those modeling schools in Florida or the Caribbean or circum-Caribbean, please also submit your designs to the University of Florida Digital Collections or the Digital Library of the Caribbean, or your own school’s digital collections as applicable so that the schools can also host and archive your designs for current viewers and for posterity.
If you’re a University of Florida student designing the University of Florida campus, please let us know. We’re the folks at the Digital Library Center we’d love to lend moral support and positive thoughts throughout the competition and to host and archive the campus in 3D after the contest ends!
Laurie N. Taylor March 4th, 2008
I’m currently in the Bahamas visiting the College of the Bahamas. I got in yesterday and was lucky enough to be here in time for the 10th Annual Lenten Tea Party, at Dr. Rhonda Chipman-Johnson’s residence on Emery Street in Highland Park, with Mrs. Mavis Collie as the MC. I really wish I had brought any sort of audio recording equipment with me so I could have captured and shared more from the event because it was wonderful. The tea party was not only enjoyable and entertaining, it also included Bahamanian History on Grant’s Town, Over the Hill, and future shock from welcome progress (and the less welcome new problems that come along with progress). Today I learned more about the College of the Bahamas Library. The College of the Bahamas Library is facing the same needs and challenges that so many libraries, including the University of Florida Libraries, are facing. The need for more information commons space with computers with internet access for students and the need to put more materials online so students and others can access those materials from anywhere.
The College of the Bahamas Library has the College Archives (with photos, catalogs, fliers on speakers and events, and more) and Special Collections, in addition to the General Collections, Reference, Circulation, IT support, and Technical Services. It was great to see the Library and see how much it contained even outside of specific collections, with historical photos framed and hanging on the walls, paintings celebrating important events also adorning the walls, and other artifacts explaining the history of the College and the Bahamas exhibited throughout the Library. I’m still processing all of the materials I’ve seen and all that I’ve learned, but the photo above is from the tree outside the Library, which has a birdhouse and a sign that reads “Soothing Moments.” The tree with its own beauty and its friendly sign and practical and aesthetically pleasing birdhouse parallels the Library at the College of the Bahamas because both the tree and the Library are friendly, welcoming, beautiful, and incredibly impressive in their ability to multi-task for the benefit of those around. I love what the tree says and represents with its sign and birdhouse, and I’m hoping the University of Florida Libraries might be able to take note and perhaps put up our own birdhouse.
Laurie N. Taylor February 22nd, 2008
A few weeks ago I was talking to a student about how the Digital Library Center grew out of the Preservation Department and its work in microfilming. The student asked me to explain what microfilm was because she’d heard of it, but didn’t know. I explained through older movies when people are researching crimes and go to the library and sit in front of a big screen and use a knob to flip through pages. Later on, I thought about how others unfamiliar with microfilm will need to know what microfilm is and why it’s important, so I went to YouTube to try and find an example. I found great “how to” videos like this one are available to help new users, but not fun clips from movies. I expected to find those clips from media studies classes doing media archaeology or research on dead media.
Is microfilm considered a dead media yet, or is it just waiting to be fully reborn in digital form? Given user preference it seems dead, but it can’t die because so much information only exists on microfilm. In fact, before the Digital Library Center began, preserving and sharing materials at the University of Florida was accomplished through microfilming. While microfilm is a tedious and unextensible form, many materials are on it that aren’t available in their original form or any other than the film. This is especially true of the masses of fragile materials like newspapers, where there’s simply too much to save it all in the original form given the sheer volume and given the high level of work needed because of the weak material type.
In honor of microfilm’s importance and it’s slow demise, these are some of the many cinematic moments that use microfilm to show research (on mysteries! on monsters):
- Silence of the Lambs (1991)
- The Amityville Horror (1979)
- The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1991)
- The Changeling (1980)
Laurie N. Taylor February 22nd, 2008
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.
Laurie N. Taylor February 5th, 2008
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.
Laurie N. Taylor February 3rd, 2008
“This is crucial, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there, durable, indefinitely reuseable, an object of value.”
The quote above is from page 38 of “Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading,” by Ursula K. Le Guin in Harper’s Magazine (Vol. 316, No. 1983, February 2008, p. 33-38), and it speaks to the issue of materiality for digitization. Digital initiatives have rightfully focused on access to book contents, or access to information. Given the technological limitations for even this, with the difficulties from copyright and costs of mass digitization, access to information has been a lofty goal alone. Now however, with ever-increasing screen sizes and touch screens entering popular use through the MacAir, iPhone, Nintendo DS, and others, the object-ness of the book must be further considered.
In Evocative Objects, Sherry Turkle explains “We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with” (5) and this love includes the object of the book. The design of an interface impacts its usability based on the way the user feels about the interface. Donald Norman has shown that people find “prettier” interfaces easier to use, so the interface is also a consideration in working through to a means for representing the book-as-object in a digital form. I don’t have any easy answers for how to best go about this representation, but I’m working on it for my upcoming presentation at the University of Florida’s Comics Conference, and I hope to post more about it soon. In the meantime, I’m considering the object qualities of digitized comics, the interface(s) in which they are represented, and the relation of digital libraries and museums in terms of needs and problems for showing the qualities of objects and addressing the users’ desires for those object-qualities.
Laurie N. Taylor January 26th, 2008
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
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.
Laurie N. Taylor January 17th, 2008
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.