Digital Library Center Blog | UF

The Robert Goldwater Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a resource blog and earlier this week they blogged about the UF Digital Collections and the Between the Beads Exhibit!

The UF Digital Collections are in the newest issue of Florida, UF Alumni Magazine on “Gator Bytes” with a note on the Baldwin Library Digital Collection and with a four page story on postcards from UF and Gainesville, from the Matheson Museum Collection hosted by UFDC. The story includes beautiful images of the postcard covers and their backs, with personal messages from 1917, 1915, 1949 and more. The UF Libraries are in InsideUF for the African Beadwork exhibit,  “Between the Beads: Reading African Beadwork” that just opened!

Every digital item and collection is built through our work across the UF Libraries and our connections with our partners. For me, it’s especially nice to see so many news stories for so many collections all at one. It’s also especially nice because UFDC is still developing. Online sites normally take awhile for critical mass to build for  links, general traffic, search engine rankings, and so on. Then, those build and the knowledge about sites results in more links and more traffic and the site popularity starts to grow on its own. UFDC has only been in existence since 2006, so it looks to me that we’re just finding another crest of popularity that will continue to grow as we continue to load more and more!  Oh, and we’re up to 2.9 million pages–we’re so close to three million only a little over a year after reaching one million!

The Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida has been awarded a Collections Stewardship grant from IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services). The project abstract is online along with the abstracts for the many other winners, and the Harn’s project is “Digitization of the Harn Museum Collection.” For the project, the Harn Museum will be taking digital images for 2,000 items and adding them to their collections management system. These digital images are necessary for practical purposes of access right now, but they’ll also create the foundation for building larger projects like digitizing exhibits and entire collections later on.

Congratulations to the Harn!