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).
The Association of Research Libraries recently released a new book, Celebrating Research. The book includes UF’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, among many others as a
compendium is a sampling of the remarkable abundance of collections available for use in the member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). It is not a comprehensive view or a directory but instead an array of profiles that exemplify a spectrum of rare and special collections in research libraries. Special collections have been broadly construed to encompass the distinctive, the rare and unique, emerging media, born-digital, digitized materials, uncommon, non-standard, primary, and heritage materials. (”Preface”)
While many of these rare materials are available in reprint or online, far more are not available other than in physical form. This compendium is like a traveling guide, highlighting only some of the particular treasures held by research libraries. For those interested in seeing some of the Baldwin Library’s gems, we’re continuously working to digitizing more materials for the Baldwin Library Digital Collection. However despite our work, many more books remain in the closed stacks, some of which aren’t even haven’t even made it to being listed in the library catalog.
Some of UF’s video archives are now online. While most of the sports videos are in copyright and can’t be loaded online, there are tons of great videos that can be and we’re starting to slowly load them.
I switched to the new name so that it was clear that these are UF Libraries’ archival videos, but I don’t yet know how to transfer the videos from the other two accounts, so if anyone knows an easy way to do this, please let me know.
Progress on loading these will continue to be slow because of the time involved. We’re processing for preservation (converting to a normal format, saving, and loading to UFDC for online access, and then saving to another format and sometimes editing for YouTube since the videos have to be under 10MB and under 10 minutes for each upload). It’s a long process, but it’s nice to see some of the videos up!
The Gainesville Sun has an article on the Sanborn Maps of Florida. The maps in public domain (prior to 1923) are online in UF’s Digital Collections and the Map Library–which houses all sorts of fabulous antique, literary, flood, and other maps–holds the rest. The Map Library is a treasure trove of wonderful, playful materials and this page lists some of the main categories for all of the wonders. The image to the left is from one of those wonders.
UF’s Libraries is a great work environment, as is the Digital Library Center in particular. We’re all friendly and fun, and this week we’re having a triple birthday celebration with three people having birthdays within the week. In light of our collective birthdays, and our hard work with nearly 1.5 million pages in the Digital Collections and more loading each day (and many audio and video files that can’t be counted in pages), these pictures are for us!
In working toward the new virtual libraries pages, the UF Libraries’ Library 2.0 Group is also working on tools so that users can use library services more easily. These tools are on the new tools page, and include links to a Firefox toolbar that searches the library catalog, library services related to games, and how to get RSS feeds from the catalog for use in readers and how to add them to web pages. These are small, useful tools for users and we’re also working on the larger virtual library pages which will incorporate these and loads of other resources. Other libraries have tons of tools as well, and it’s amazing to see the variety and diversity of tools, so as we get feedback from patrons we will add to or alter existing tools to best meet their needs.
Librarian subject specialists build guides based on subject area to help students and researchers quickly find all of the most relevant resources available at a particular library easily. Given the cost of commercial databases, different libraries will necessarily have different databases, and some of the most popular resources are in multiple databases. Thus, researchers going to a new school may find their key journals in a different database, in different databases, or in the same database but one with such an updated interface that it’s basically a new database. Finding the right resources in the right way becomes a complicated act of mapping needs to resources within the correct service frameworks.
Given this complex meshed-mapped of resources, a quick reference is essential. Some librarians are looking at commercial services like LibGuides. Services like this are useful because they allow the specialists to spend time optimizing content instead of working on the nitty-gritty of site design. I’m hoping that there’s an almost-as-easy solution that’s also Open Source and nearly free (other than setup and related costs). I’ve been looking at Drupal, since I’m familiar with it, but I haven’t found a set-up made exactly for subject/content guides in libraries. The UF Libraries already have awesome content, so we’re just looking for the best way to deliver it–that could be a content management system like Drupal, a wiki like MediaWiki, or a service like LibGuides.
In evaluating the different tools for presentation and delivery, we need a simple, yet flexible framework that’s easy for the subject specialists to update and that’s just as easy for patrons to use, and one that also has a consistent look and feel across the many subject guides. The sheer abundance and variety of information requires this to be a solid, elegant design, as shown through the pages for psychology. The pages cover basic resources on using the library resources, tutorials on using those resources and on using the resources for completing common research projects, explanations of what to use and why, links to help from a subject specialist, information on related fields, space for comments on all of these resources, further details on some of the materials, and more. These pages are currently divided on the UF Libraries’ webspace and a separate wiki because we don’t have a dedicated service for supporting the diverse needs of the subject specialist guides, but we’re in the process of selecting what to use and how to use it to best serve our needs.
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.
The discovery of Kryptonite, or at least a new mineral matching the chemistry described in Superman Returns, was found earlier this year. As a feral librarian (a librarian who hasn’t attended library school) I haven’t had a cataloging course, so I’m curious as to how articles on the new mineral will be cataloged for both its scientific and humanistic uses. Articles on a regular new mineral would just need to be listed via scientific categories, or so I’d think. But the hierarchical nature of subject headings would seem strange–at least to me–if the full scientific and full literary/popular culture hierarchy were included in the same manner. However, the popular culture study might intersect with the scientific so it could also be beneficial to list both on even footing.
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.
