Digital Library Center Blog | UF

In Curator: the Museum Journal, Nancy Proctor has an excellent article on the Google Art Project and its implications for displaying, using, and exploring museum items and museums online. This is an important and useful article for its specific review of the Google Art Project and for the way it points toward future implications of imaging, interface, and interactivity for museum items and museums overall. The University of Florida Libraries explored related issues with the “Arts of Africa” project to digitize museum objects in the round. Many other museums and libraries are working on similar concerns related to artifactuality and technology, with interrelated implications for cultural heritage institutions.

We’ve frequently heard requests from internal users and patrons for a flipbook style view. In researching options, the Gnubook’s javascript-based page turner looked best and the Library of Congress came out with a clean implementation in October that was easy to emulate. Mark Sullivan, programmer for SobekCM, reviewed it and added the view in under a day. The new view is enabled within SobekCM so all collections, including the UF Digital Collections and the Digital Library of the Caribbean, have it enabled.

The flipbook view is active for the entire Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Digital Collection and this is an example: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00089012/00001/pageturner

The view is accessible from the “page turner” tab on all Baldwin items. This page shows the tab: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00088831/00001
This is the direct link format for the page turner: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00088831/00001/pageturner Notice the wonderfully simplified URL structure remains even with the newly added feature.

The flipbook view will expand to other collections later, but it was most requested for and the best fit for the Baldwin books (because of the haptic nature of children’s books, beautiful images, and lack of small print overall). This sort of view is also very important to ensure that SobekCM easily supports the next generation of touch interfaces.

Not only does the new interface for the Florida Aerial Photography Digital Collection support searching using the Google Map interface (complete with drag and drop pins for search refinement), it also supports searching by address. If that weren’t enough, Mark Sullivan (UF Digital Collections and Digital Library Center Programmer) now has the location circled on the images.

Drawing something on the images may seem easy, but it isn’t. Drawing on a normal image is easy – image size, where to draw, calculate, etc.  The images in the Florida Aerial Photography Digital Collection are being delivered by a JPEG2000 server. The server allows people to select the size of the image, the zoom level, and the area to focus on. Drawing on these images thus requires interaction with the JPEG2000 server to know the size and location on the image in all permutations. This is impressive alone, and made all the more impressive by having it along with so many other improvements, all of which work seamlessly together.

Other improvements include enhancements to the left-side navigation bar. It now includes a list of the specific resulting tiles by area, a thumbnail image of the complete tile for use in re-positioning on the tile, and a small Google Map for use in positioning in context.

Try out the new interface for the Florida Aerial Photography Digital Collection using the map search here!

I’ve stolen the title of this post from Shawn Rider’s article “Why Nintendo Gets It” because the title explains the whole point of this post and because of the parallels between Google and Nintendo. Nintendo gets it because they understand that games are about playability more so than technological innovation and because they understand that innovation can be  evolutionary or sustaining as well as disruptive. Evolutionary or sustaining innovations build incrementally on existing structures, but disruptive innovation changes the whole landscape.

The 8-bit NES to the Super Nintendo was an evolutionary or sustaining innovation, largely technological, but that technology enabled longer and deeper games. The current console gaming market changed in response to the Sony PlayStation 2 both because of the system and because so many had grown up with games. In the last console release, however, Nintendo showed how they got it by releasing the Wii and inviting all non-players and casual players to get into gaming and inviting existing players to learn to play in new ways. Nintendo used a disruptive technology to their advantage–investing in its development instead of in the best graphics card on the market and instead of pushing an ever-increasing polygon count, they focused on playability and leveraged it for an even greater market share and for a community of Nintendo followers.

Google announced yesterday that they’re scanning microfilm to digitize historical newspapers, which is just the latest of their work to get more content online. This could be seen as an evolutionary innovation, where Google has digitized books and now they’re working on newspapers. However, Google gets it because they make interoperable and open content. Google is digitizing whatever it can and indexing whatever it can to ensure that it has access to the most data for use by Google’s search engine and for Google’s paid services like advertisements. Google isn’t simply adding newspapers into this collective vat of information, though. Google has shown time and again that they’re adding and indexing content so that it can be faceted–for searching only by news or only by places with mapped locations–and that they’re allowing those facets to be connected together in context.

Placing content in context is an enormous task, especially when context means historical, spatial, cultural, social, and personal. Some of the existing components in traditional library records (if complete) can be extended and mined to create a basic infrastructure that can then be further enhanced, mined, and adapted for further use and this is what Google has done. This enhancement, mining, and adaptation are also what UF’s Digital Library Center has been doing for several years beginning in earnest with the Ephemeral Cities Project. The Ephemeral Cities Project began before I came to the Digital Library Center and its goals are only now beginning to be fully realized with the Map It! feature for items in the UF Digital Collections, enabled through KML becoming an Open Standard in 2008 leading to our use of the Google Maps API.

We’ve also been digitizing newspapers for the Florida Digital Newspaper Library and the Caribbean Newspaper Imaging Project, the same reasons Google is interested. Newspapers tell the stories of history in the making, connecting the current social and personal concerns to the larger cultural and historical movements and eras, and newspapers tell the local stories of their areas, along with the larger national and international stories of their days.

What surprises me most is not that Google gets it in terms of seeing the immediate need and the long tail future goals for massive amounts of interoperable data, but that there are so many people who got it and were working toward so much earlier than I’d have expected. In UF’s Digital Library Center alone, Director Erich Kesse first proposed the Ephemeral Cities Project in 2003 and Mark Sullivan (our wonderful programmer at the time who’s still with us as well) began developing the digital library software for users to access such data and for the digital library staff to most easily create the necessary metadata within the digitization process. I can’t say that I got it in 2003, but I’m glad so many others did so that the infrastructure is in place to help support the wonderful projects to come.

I’m also extremely happy that Google gets it in particular because they have the business infrastructure to make the incredibly tedious and expensive work of digitizing materials in context affordable and sustainable through ads which have a return on investment value. Universities return investments from society in the form of knowledge, a more educated and capable workforce and community, and through the infrastructure necessary for other advances, but in difficult economic times the investment itself becomes more difficult. Luckily for all, Google gets the full context of their investment and knows that digitized materials have more value when they can easily be used, thus ensuring greater usage. The smart business plan for Google requires keeping materials open and usable by as many others as possible,making it good business for Google to do what’s already in the public interest. Of course, Google is facing monopolistic concerns and smart business models can go bad with changes in leadership, so its smartest public institutions like universities to continue getting it and ensuring that the digital revolution brings as many benefits as it can for accessing, using, and understanding information while building the infrastructure for the next innovations be they sustaining or disruptive.

This is another news release. Normally I don’t like to re-post news since it’s already handled by RSS feeds. However,  at the start of the University of Florida’s fall semester, there’s so much news with so many new people that it’s good to share to help get the word out through the clamor. The newness of the fall semester should start to quiet down in the next few weeks though.

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The Library Virtual Worlds Group at the University of Florida Libraries will be hosting a virtual lecture by Paul Fishwick, Professor of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida, on Friday, September 12, 11am-12pm. Prof.
Fishwick will be leading a discussion on the role of libraries in virtual worlds as well as providing a tour of his recent work in Second China. Pre-lecture questions posed by Prof. Fishwick will be posted on the Virtual Worlds Group wiki by September 8.

Prof. Fishwick received his B.S. in Mathematics from the Pennsylvania State University, M.S. in Applied Science from the College of William and Mary, and Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986. He is a Fellow of the Society for Computer Simulation (SCS) and a Senior Member of the IEEE. He has also had much experience working with games and simulations for learning and cognition.

Come join us in Second Life at (Cybrary City, 97 x 15 x 24; slurl), or come join us in West 212 for a live simulcast. Questions about the event may be directed to Laura Jordan.
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The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) now include a “Map It” feature! With the “Map It” option, all items with geographic information are now displayed on a map using the Google Maps API. For instance, users can now see this photo of Gainesville mapped by clicking on the “Map It” tab, which shows a Google Map view of the photo’s location with a placemark.

See the Citadelle Henri Christophe in Haiti, and then see the satellite imagery map for it, which still clearly shows the structure, along with the surrounding area!

In case the maps aren’t exciting enough, UFDC also allows displays Flash files now so that items like this Beaded Coronet can be seen quickly with all of its thumbnails, in zoomable high definition, and in motion!

These improvements build from UFDC’s strong infrastructure with defined metadata for each item, to make research more fun, playful, and easier to understand. Instead of having to puzzle through the structured citation information for location, users can see the item along with the location. Only a small portion of the information already available in UFDC is really being utilized so far, so there’s much work to be done and many benefits to be gained!

Check out the maps, the objects in motion, and keep a lookout for much more to come!

I’m currently at the Center for Literary Studies (CLC) Codework: Exploring relations between creative writing practices and software engineering workshop, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, held at West Virginia University (and it’s April 3-6, 2008 and there’s more on it here). Ted Nelson, coiner of the word hypertext and media studies visionary spoke. Sandy Baldwin opened by introducing Nelson – describing Nelson as a luminary, and having him speak as astronomical – and then describing how Nelson influenced his own English practice and work.

Nelson began by explaining his preference for open ended speaking, and then introduced his new book-in-progress “geeks bearing gifts” on the false rhetoric surrounding current software. Nelson continued on, explaining that current software and applications aren’t about technology, but are really packages of conventions selected by someone, with an agenda, and mentioned OOXML as an example, that he’s been fascinated with making a document system and not the fake paper simulators we have now, and he showed latest version of the Xanadu Project (xanarama.net). Nelson’s reputation as a visionary and a great speaker are well earned, so well earned that I stopped taking notes after realizing that my notes would not do his presentation justice in the slightest. I believe the presentation was recorded, though, so once that’s posted I’ll add a link to it.

“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.

Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel” told of a fictional library with every possible book. Within the vast library, all useful books and books of gibberish would be included together putting the process of finding information into a desperate state.

The rise in digital archives without a corresponding rise in organizational structures could lead to a “Servers of Babel” scenario, at least for awhile, when we’re archiving 27 exabytes (27,000 petabytes, or 27 billion gigabytes) of data in the next two years. Finding new ways to organize and create useful means for accessing this information–and finding ways to preserve decaying, deprecated, and dying files and formats–will make for exciting research and work for 2008 and beyond.

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth is now on YouTube. Since there’s so much in terms of historical footage and in terms of history within that footage, I’m excited to see what this will mean for museums and historical materials. The Queen is on YouTube on The Royal Channel: The Official Channel of the British Monarchy. While many official organizations – political, governmental, and other – have released videos through museums and libraries, it’s interesting to see those materials being added into the regular-user interfaces where people can stumbled across them through the official-and-popular format. Seeing historical footage like “Roses for the Rose Queen” are interesting in themselves and it will be more interesting to see what others do with them, using them for teaching, research, and hopefully new creative projects.

In thinking about the Queen on YouTube, it also seems like Queen Elizabeth is always the correct queen-size, being large and small enough for any format, like the always one and more of the royal “we”. While queen-sized on US women’s clothing is used to mean large or plus-sized, it’s often a normal woman’s size. Like the large-yet-normal-size known as queen-size, Queen Elizabeth seems to be sized appropriately for any media format. Hopefully, other public figures will learn from her appropriate-sizing and size themselves to speak through different media formats in the most appropriate and productive ways possible.