Digital Library Center Blog | UF

The Library of Congress has announced that they’re now loading videos to YouTube. They’ve already loaded a ton of videos and they plan to load many more, seeing YouTube as a parallel to their successful and ongoing Flickr project. Check out their wonderful and ever-increasing number of videos here: http://www.youtube.com/user/LibraryOfCongress.

Everyone benefits from greater access and greater opportunities for serendipity. Imagine all the people who will be browsing or searching YouTube for one video and finding others from the Library of Congress! This is a great learning, teaching, and sharing opportunity and that’s also why the UF Libraries also have YouTube and Flickr accounts. Even as a drastically smaller contributor, it’s nice to be participating in the same wonderful process with the massive and monumental Library of Congress.

Thanks go to the Library of Congress for working so diligently to preserve and make materials accessible. Also, thanks go to the Library of Congress for further validating the use of “fun” technologies/services like YouTube and Flickr for real work and as part of the work of libraries everywhere that work to make information, learning, thinking, and the entire process of inquiry fun!

America’s Swamp: the Historic Everglades, a new collection within the University of Florida Digital Collections should be up this week. In the meantime, we’ve already started loading some of the photos to Flickr. If the photos on Flickr aren’t enough, the Everglades Digital Library from FIU’s Digital Collections Center is already a massive digital collection of amazing material, and it’s always growing.

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.

We’ve updated our Flickr images! We’re still working on adding in an auto-load to Flickr which should be simple, but we need some controls on it so bandwidth and server space aren’t issues and so that we load in a systematic manner. Right now, it’s just loading to have another venue for access and one that we’ll continue to build in the future.

The updated photos are old black and white images of campus. We still need to add the labels for these, so hopefully Flickr users could help us on some of these. I’m interested to see if users label these buildings before we have time to, and which buildings get labeled or commented on and what types of comments are posted. Check out our Flickr pages, and label a few if you know what they are!

Also, subscribe to our feed to know when new images are loaded.

www.flickr.com Go to University of Florida Digital Collections’ photostream