Laurie N. Taylor November 3rd, 2008
The UF Digital Collections (UFDC) have grown so dramatically that we critically need more resources to both promote and explain the many materials and their use. As of November 1, UFDC includes over 2.79 million pages. This means we’ve added 1.79 million pages in 13 months. Our existing training materials, tutorials, and help pages haven’t been able to keep up with the variety and quantity of materials, nor with documenting and explaining the other technical improvements we’ve implemented.
We’re working on making online tutorials that will explain the basics of using UFDC and that will highlight a few of the largest collections. While we’re actively working on these, we have far too many materials to cover in the near future so I’m also on the lookout for any existing training or contextual materials from other digital collections that could support UFDC. I found a great online tutorial on the Sanborn Maps from the Colorado Library Consortium.
UFDC includes the Sanborn Fire Insurances Maps of Florida Digital Collection and, while the Colorado Library Consortium’s tutorial is clearly focused on Colorado’s maps, the background it provides on what the Sanborn maps are and why people would use them applies equally well for any Sanborn Map Digital Collection.While this first screencast from the Colorado Library Consortium is wonderful for the history of the Sanborn Maps, we still need to develop our own tutorial for how to use our Sanborn Map Digital Collection. While we have a great deal of work ahead of us developing this and other tutorials, it’s still wonderful to be able to find wonderful resources already available.
Check out UFDC’s Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of Florida for Florida’s Sanborn Maps and the Accidental Map Librarian Workshops, a wiki with many resources that explain the fascinating history of the Sanborn maps for all of the many Sanborn Map Digital Collections. Hopefully as we develop resources for UFDC, we’ll also be able to share resources as wonderful as those from the Accidental Map Librarian Workshops that will benefit digital collections!
Laurie N. Taylor August 26th, 2008
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!
Laurie N. Taylor August 11th, 2008
Last week, UC Santa Barbara announced that they received a massive collection of aerial photography, valued at $14.3 Million, from Pacific Western Aerial Surveys of Santa Barbara. The collection includes more than 500,000 aerial images of 65 major metropolitan areas in the United States at the turn of the 21st Century (1999-2002). This is really amazing, especially so because UCSB Map & Imagery Library is home to the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL), so these materials will be preserved and accessible in the future.
Laurie N. Taylor July 27th, 2008
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.