Digital Library Center Blog | UF

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 Alachua County Historic Trust: Matheson Museum, Inc. and the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries need help identifying historic photographs taken in Gainesville from 1920-1970. The photographs were taken by Elmer Harvey Bone and they’re all online within the Elmer Harvey Bone Collection here.

The Elmer Harvey Bone Collection is particularly important to the Digital Library Center because the collection is shared between the Matheson Museum and the University Archives, and because our own Lourdes Santamaria-Wheeler chosen this collection for her graduate work in museum studies because of the way it connects traditional library and museum collections. The Gainesville Sun newspaper has an article on the collection, and please dive into the collection and let help us find the names of the men in the “Best Beard” contest, the names of the people in the Brown Wedding party, and all of the others!

The University of Florida Digital Collections have a number of collaborative partnerships with the Digital Library of the Caribbean, the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, and other projects. One of our local partners is the Matheson Museum. The picture above comes from one of their photograph collections, the E. H. Bone Collection, and many other photos are in the Matheson Museum and in the University Archives, so this is a great partnership to help preserve the history of the Gainesville, Florida area and to preserve the early history of the University of Florida while also showing how the town and school developed together. This particular picture seems like a great image for a Friday Gainesville’s quirky side.