Digital Library Center Blog | UF

News from the Florida Archivist Newsletter:

FREE ARCHIVAL WORKSHOPS FOR ARCHIVISTS, LIBRARIANS AND MUSEUM STAFF WORKING IN FLORIDA’S CULTURAL HERITAGE REPOSITORIES

Florida will host four FREE Society of American Archivists workshops (SAA) this year thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Over the past nine years, several Florida repositories and institutions have partnered in an initiative called Opening Archives in Florida, which provides education and training to archivists and others who care for historical records. In December, the Opening Archives team was awarded an NEH Preservation and Access Education and Training Grant to support our statewide education and training program, Advancing Access and Preservation Best Practices in Florida.

The primary goal of this education project is to provide training to archivists and others who care for historical records through a series of workshops covering preservation and access standards and practices including: basic arrangement and description, minimal level processing, archival information systems, and descriptive standards. SAA will conduct four workshops in Miami, Tampa and either Orlando or Gainesville on the topics listed below. Seating will be limited, but it will be at no cost to attendees.

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Thanks to the financial support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the following archival education workshops are available free of charge to staff working in Florida’s libraries, museums, archives, and other cultural heritage repositories. Students and interns in Florida also are eligible for free workshop registration. These workshops are organized by the Opening Archives team, which included members from the Florida Center for Library Automation, the University of Florida, the University of Miami, the University of Central Florida, Florida State University, the University of South Florida, and others. The workshops are co-sponsored by SFA, and the second workshop, DACS, will be held in conjunction with the SFA Annual Meeting in Tampa in May.

The first three workshops, which are described in greater detail below, are:

• Arrangement and Description of Manuscript Collections
• Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS)
• Introduction to Archon Archives Management Software

Information on the fourth workshop, MPLP, is forthcoming.

WORKSHOPS INFORMATION:

Arrangement and Description of Manuscript Collections #0148

Details:
Thu, Mar 18, 2010,through Fri, Mar 19, 2010 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Instructors: Pam Hackbart-Dean and Susan Potts McDonald
University of Miami
Coral Gables, FL
DESCRIPTION:
This workshop focuses on the day-to-day decisions you’re making in arranging and describing manuscript collections! That includes developing processing work plans, identifying common arrangement schemes for particular types of collections, as well as physically organizing materials during processing. Pinpointing the essential elements of a finding aid, applying descriptive standards, and creatively constructing container lists will also be highlighted.
REGISTRATION:

If you work for an archive, library, museum, or other cultural heritage organization in Florida, you are eligible for free registration for this workshop, sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access. If so, please contact John Nemmers (jnemmers@ufl.edu, 352-273-2766) for more information on free registration. Registrations will be accepted and confirmed on a first-come, first-served basis. You will be notified by email about registration confirmation.

Attendance is limited to a maximum of 20 participants. Registration will be limited to a maximum of 2 participants from any Florida repository.
More information on the SAA website here.

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Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) #0149

DETAILS:
Tue, May 04, 2010 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM
Instructors: Roslyn Holdzkom
Tampa, FL
Note: This will be held as a pre-conference workshop for the SFA Annual Meeting in Tampa in May.

DESCRIPTION:
Want practical strategies for implementing DACS? This is the introductory workshop for you! Get an in-depth, practical consideration of the key concepts and descriptive elements in Describing Archives: A Content Standard , the U.S. standard. Explore strategies for incorporating this standard into workflows for accessioning, arrangement, and description through discussions and hands-on work with a variety of exercises, culminating in a DACS-based analysis of existing finding aids. This workshop, a basic introduction to the standard, focuses on application of DACS rules and concepts, which participants can apply to repository processes and descriptive outputs.

REGISTRATION:
If you work for an archive, library, museum, or other cultural heritage organization in Florida, you are eligible for free registration for this workshop, sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access. If so, please contact John Nemmers (jnemmers@ufl.edu, 352-273-2766) for more information on free registration. Registrations will be accepted and confirmed on a first-come, first-served basis. You will be notified by email about registration confirmation.
Attendance is limited to a maximum of 20 participants. Registration will be limited to a maximum of 2 participants from any organization.

More information on the SAA website here.

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Implement DACS in Integrated CMS: Using Archon

DETAILS:
Thu, Aug 19, 2010,through Fri, Aug 20, 2010 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Instructors: Kyle Rimkus and Scott Schwartz
University of Miami
Coral Gables, FL

DESCRIPTION:
In this 2-day hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to describe your collections according to the rules of DACS, the national content standard for preparing such descriptions, within the context of an integrated content management system using Archon™ *, an open-source application available for managing descriptive information about archival records and manuscript collections. The archival data elements and rules supplied by DACS are an integral component of Archon, providing you with an easy way to integrate standards-based description into your repository’s processing workflow. Practical exercises, lecture, class discussions, and demonstrations will assist you in learning Archon’s basic functions and relationships to DACS.

REGISTRATION:
If you work for an archive, library, museum, or other cultural heritage organization in Florida, you are eligible for free registration for this workshop, sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access. If so, please contact John Nemmers (jnemmers@ufl.edu, 352-273-2766) for more information on free registration. Registrations will be accepted and confirmed on a first-come, first-served basis. You will be notified by email about registration confirmation.

Attendance is limited to a maximum of 25 participants. Registration will be limited to a maximum of 2 participants from any organization.

More information on the SAA website here.

The Wakulla News from October 22, 2009 has a news story on their archives in the Florida Digital Newspaper Library.

Waterfront News, March 2009

UFDC is only three, but it’s already made lots of friends including The Waterfront News, which celebrates its 25th birthday this year!

The Waterfront News began in March 1984 and grew to become “South Florida’s Nautical Newspaper” and they’re asking for stories from their readers for next month’s memorial edition.

The Waterfront News is one of the many local Florida newspapers archived for preservation and access through by the University of Florida Digital Collections’ Florida Digital Newspaper Library.  See their archives, 1984-2007 (with more recent issues being added) online in UFDC here!

The Florida Digital Newspaper Library has grown enormously in the past year, adding 384,238 pages since July 1 for a grand total of 504,773 pages!

Those many pages capture history in the making, including  New Year’s Day across the years and across Florida. Front-page news covers the then-current events, often including a New Year’s baby.

For more news of the day, see the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, supported by the Smathers Libraries, which exists to provide free access to the news and history of Florida. The Florida Digital Newspaper Library ensures long-term digital preservation of Florida’s news, making the news available to everyone over the Internet and adding accessibility functions - zoomable page images for detail and searchable text for enhanced usability.

For a faster overview, UFDC’s Flickr account has a small selection of New Year’s Day front pages.

These two news items from the Florida History Collections at the University of Florida Libraries:

Cecilia L. Johnson Library Grant for Visiting Graduate Scholars

The Cecilia L. Johnson grant provides funds for out-of-state researchers who wish to come to the University of Florida to work in the UF Libraries’ Florida history collections. Application is open to all graduate students at higher institutions of learning. Awards are for $1000. Researchers are required to spend at least one week (five working days) on the University of Florida campus making use of materials in the George A. Smathers Libraries. Preference will be given to students who are currently working on an article, thesis, or book dealing with some aspect of Florida history, or in which Florida is a major component of research. All applications will be reviewed by a judging panel composed of archivists and historians at the University of Florida. Similar awards are available for faculty through the Julian Pleasants Visiting Scholar Grant offered through the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program.

For information on how to apply see the Application Instructions or contact James Cusick at jgcusick@ufl.edu. Application deadline is January 15, 2009.

Upcoming Events for Stewards of Florida History

Stewards is hosting a Sunday talk series with the Florida Museum of Natural History for Spring Semester 2009. Please see the Events PDF for full details. All events are free and open to the public.

• Sunday, February 15, 2009.Leslie Poole (Adjunct Professor in Environmental Studies, Rollins College) will speak on the origins of the Florida Audubon Society and the plume trade in the Everglades. 2:30 p.m., Classroom, Florida Museum of Natural History.
• Sunday, March 22, 2009. Frederick Rowe Davis (Associate Professor, Florida State University) will speak on his book The Man who Saved Sea Turtles: Archie Carr and the Origins of Conservation Biology. 2:30 p.m., Classroom, Florida Museum of Natural History.
• Sunday, April 19, 2009. Jackson Walker (Artist in Residence, Museum of Florida Art, DeLand) will discuss how he chooses and recreates scenes from Florida’s past in his award-winning Legenary Florida series. 2:30 p.m., Classroom, Florida Museum of Natural History.

On Dec. 11, the National Digital Newspaper Program added 183,698 historic newspaper pages (including 14 new titles) to the Chronicling America Web site, hosted by the Library of Congress. The site now provides free and open access to 864,509 pages from 108 titles, that were published in 9 states (CA, FL, KY, MN, NE, NY, TX, UT, VA) and the District of Columbia between 1880 and 1910. Six additional states–Arizona, Hawaii, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington–will be contributing content in 2009. Chronicling America is a project of the National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress…. Read more about it!

The University of Florida’s Florida Free Culture Group has a meeting coming up soon, on Monday, December 8 at 7pm in the Reitz Union (room 288). I know this isn’t that soon, but the Assistant Director for the Digital Library Center Stephanie Haas will be speaking (and maybe with others, maybe me!) and at this point in the semester everything books up quickly so it really is approaching soon for anyone taking or teaching classes. I hope to be there!

UF’s Florida Free Culture student group will be having it’s first meeting of the semester on Monday, October 13, at 7:00 pm in Reitz Union 288. FFC is an organization that advocates for copyright law reform, the use of open source software, and fights for your rights online. Free food will be provided! For more information about FFC, see their website: http://uf.freeculture.org/.

While I can’t make this meeting, I’d recommend it to anyone who can. FFC is a great advocacy group to promote awareness and as a ways for finding the means to do needed work. Copyright law reform is desperately needed, as is a greater awareness of copyright (many academic authors have their rights returned to them for published books and they often aren’t even aware of it; academic authors often have the right to put their pre-prints on their website or in their institutional repository), and greater awareness of the costs of free culture (”free as in freedom, not free beer”) and greater advocacy is also needed to develop support for the much cheaper and more beneficial free culture as opposed to proprietary, closed, and expensive systems that hold too much information right now.

Like the other collections in UFDC, the Florida Digital Newspaper Library is expanding rapidly. The Florida Digital Newspaper has added 158,989 pages, doubling the previous size for a total page count of 279,507. Sometimes I prefer to post statistics like page and item counts because those can speak more effectively to how much mass is there and to its usefulness even if people aren’t sure what they might be looking for or why–just knowing that there’s enough stuff can help indicate critical mass and use value. For the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, the number of pages is useful as are examples of the titles and coverage. However, what I think is most useful right now is being able to see the full (or nearly full) runs of select newspaper titles. Many of the newspapers in Florida only had a few publication years before closing or merging with other papers so while the long and continuous issues are impressive, they’re impressive becausethey speak to the coverage across the years even through the many different titles.

For instance, for the Jax Air News, a military newspaper for the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida (most often referred to as NAS or NAS Jax), the Florida Digital Newspaper Library has issues loaded for these years: 1945-46; 1951-57; 1961-62; 1964-67; 1969-1971; 1973; 1975; and 2005. We have many more years to load and we’ll have them online soon, but the papers already loaded give glimpses into different eras, and the histories of those times as they were being experienced. With a similarly long coverage, The Star newspaper for Port St. Joe, Florida has 1937-1985 and 1988-2005. The Star has sixty-six years of newspapers online allowing its full sixty-six years of print to speak to the stories of the past. The Clewiston News has 1928-1945 and 2005-6 online and The Bradford County Telegraph has 1888-1893; 1895-1898; 1900; 1902; 1906-7; 1910; 1926-7; 1932-3; 1940-41; 1962; 1985; 2005-06.

The long runs with sporadically spaced years loaded may seem strange, but because the newspapers were old and Florida’s hot, many of the newspapers were digitized from microfilm by a vendor and then those papers were transferred to us (UF’s Digital Library Center) on hard drives to process. To maximize space (which is always too limited even with many, many terabytes in use), the papers are spaced by size so a paper with so many years and so many pages may have select years on one drive and other years on another. We process these all as quickly as we can, but we have more to go then we’ve loaded so far so we’ll certainly be over half a million pages just by loading the drives.  In the meantime, enjoy the papers that are online and know that more are loaded daily.

In fact, some of my personal favorites don’t have as many years loaded, like The Florida Alligator which was UF’s student newspaper before it became the Independent Florida Alligator (1990 and 2005 online). The Florida Alligator’s issues for 1945-8 and 1964 are online.  Also, for Orlando, the 1914-1915 issues of The Morning Sentinel are online and so are the 1947 issues of the Orlando Morning Sentinel, papers from a time when Orlando wasn’t huge. I don’t know if I can really think of Orlando as something other than a sprawling city, but these papers definitely make that more possible in my mind by helping to show an Orlando I’ve never met but would like to know.

The Florida Humanities Council has funded a project by the University of West Florida (and involving the University of South Florida and the University of Florida according to the The Gainesville Sun article) to create podcasts about historic Florida. The project will create these “Pastcasts” (I love the name!) for historic Florida towns and the programs will be available for download from the Florida Humanities Council website.

I’m excited to hear all of the programs, but most excited to hear the Pastcasts for Alachua County, and to hear the rest with an eye on ways to connect them to the photos, maps, and other materials related to historic Florida already in the University of Florida Digital Collections. Then, I get to work on mapping them within a spatial, audiovisual, textual format, but I have to wait until I can steal some free time since I have a few other mappings to make first. It’s very exciting to have these Pastcasts and to have a venue for more of them and for enriching them and using them to enrich other materials.