Digital Library Center Blog | UF

I haven’t had quite as much exciting news to share lately because the Digital Library Center has been focusing any free time–aside from keeping up with current projects–on trying to load some old files for the most recent segment of a multi-phased grant. The older files are from 1998-2004 and were included in the earlier grant phases, and were microfilmed instead of being digitized. The microfilm was later digitized, but the color pages still had to be scanned and so now we’re re-combining the grayscale and color pages, processing the images, adding bibliographic metadata, and loading and archiving the files. The process is slow going and often unexpected problems or just confusing oddities come up that require more time than these already time-consuming files require. While this sort of work isn’t as fast, easy, or fun as the rest of what we do, it’s still worth the extra effort to restore color to rare, colorful books and to enable access online and instead of on a microfilm reader.

Like the other collections in UFDC, the Florida Digital Newspaper Library is expanding rapidly. The Florida Digital Newspaper has added 158,989 pages, doubling the previous size for a total page count of 279,507. Sometimes I prefer to post statistics like page and item counts because those can speak more effectively to how much mass is there and to its usefulness even if people aren’t sure what they might be looking for or why–just knowing that there’s enough stuff can help indicate critical mass and use value. For the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, the number of pages is useful as are examples of the titles and coverage. However, what I think is most useful right now is being able to see the full (or nearly full) runs of select newspaper titles. Many of the newspapers in Florida only had a few publication years before closing or merging with other papers so while the long and continuous issues are impressive, they’re impressive becausethey speak to the coverage across the years even through the many different titles.

For instance, for the Jax Air News, a military newspaper for the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida (most often referred to as NAS or NAS Jax), the Florida Digital Newspaper Library has issues loaded for these years: 1945-46; 1951-57; 1961-62; 1964-67; 1969-1971; 1973; 1975; and 2005. We have many more years to load and we’ll have them online soon, but the papers already loaded give glimpses into different eras, and the histories of those times as they were being experienced. With a similarly long coverage, The Star newspaper for Port St. Joe, Florida has 1937-1985 and 1988-2005. The Star has sixty-six years of newspapers online allowing its full sixty-six years of print to speak to the stories of the past. The Clewiston News has 1928-1945 and 2005-6 online and The Bradford County Telegraph has 1888-1893; 1895-1898; 1900; 1902; 1906-7; 1910; 1926-7; 1932-3; 1940-41; 1962; 1985; 2005-06.

The long runs with sporadically spaced years loaded may seem strange, but because the newspapers were old and Florida’s hot, many of the newspapers were digitized from microfilm by a vendor and then those papers were transferred to us (UF’s Digital Library Center) on hard drives to process. To maximize space (which is always too limited even with many, many terabytes in use), the papers are spaced by size so a paper with so many years and so many pages may have select years on one drive and other years on another. We process these all as quickly as we can, but we have more to go then we’ve loaded so far so we’ll certainly be over half a million pages just by loading the drives.  In the meantime, enjoy the papers that are online and know that more are loaded daily.

In fact, some of my personal favorites don’t have as many years loaded, like The Florida Alligator which was UF’s student newspaper before it became the Independent Florida Alligator (1990 and 2005 online). The Florida Alligator’s issues for 1945-8 and 1964 are online.  Also, for Orlando, the 1914-1915 issues of The Morning Sentinel are online and so are the 1947 issues of the Orlando Morning Sentinel, papers from a time when Orlando wasn’t huge. I don’t know if I can really think of Orlando as something other than a sprawling city, but these papers definitely make that more possible in my mind by helping to show an Orlando I’ve never met but would like to know.

In looking at our scheduling for the past few months–with many people out for training, illness, and vacation and a much smaller student workforce due to summer schedules and budget cuts–I was worried that we’d fall far behind our optimum production level. Instead, we’re producing even more. We hit 2 million pages on July 9, and had already loaded another 100,000 pages to reach 2.1 million pages by July 28, and now we show 2,235,174 pages online, and we have more loading right now.

This higher production level with lower staffing is only possible because we have so much that’s already partially done, with scanning and other steps completed, and with less constantly coming in, we’re more able to move through some of the older items from the backlog.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean everything in the backlog because much of it needs special handling. Fortunately, though, it does mean that more is going up and that will help us process more efficiently later on when we do have more people and it means there’s a lot more online that wasn’t there before.

With so many new items, our improved processing also means we’re searchable by Google and other search engines through the static UFDC2 pages, and the Cataloging and Metadata department has been working hard to help our materials show in the library catalog. This is an interoperability nightmare because our items are item-level listings and library catalogs aren’t designed or normally used to see every picture in a collection. Cataloging is doing great work to sort through the different types of materials and different workflows necessary for each to make sure the most materials can be represented in the most useful ways.  This will be continue to be an ongoing process, but it’s already showing progress with the individual Digital Collections being added to the catalog.

We’re moving along rapidly on many fronts, but there’s so much left to do. It would be absolutely overwhelming if it weren’t so wonderful to see so many rare items not available anywhere suddenly available for everyone online!

The Library of Congress has loaded even more newspapers! The press release below has more information, and it’s great news!

CONTENT UPDATED: 73,000 newspaper pages added - now includes papers published 1890-1910 and 2 new states - Nebraska and Texas

On August 1, more than 73,000 newly digitized newspaper pages were added to the Chronicling America Web site at www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/, including content from 2 new states - Nebraska and Texas - and expanding coverage in the 1890s. With this update, the site now provides access to more than 642,000 digitized newspaper pages, published between 1890 and 1910, and representing 74 newspapers from California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Kentucky, Nebraska, New York, Texas, Utah and Virginia. Chronicling America is a project of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), which is a partnership between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

We still have more pages to give them and we’re working on it, so this number will keep climbing!

I’m at ALA (still today and through some of tomorrow before a red eye flight home) and this morning I attended and presented within the OCLC Sponsored “Microfilm to Digitization Roadshow.” This included presentations from Kelly Barrall and Joan DaShiel on the ins and outs of their microfilm and microfilm digitization processing and Katherine Walter from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on her work with the Nebraska Public Documents project. Katherine is the Co-Director for the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and Chair of the Digital Initiatives & Special Collections Department, and my presentation on digitizing from microfilm for the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC). These were great presentations, but it was especially great to chat with the presenters and attendees both before and after. One of the projects I’m working on is an “adopt a reel” option for donors to fund microfilm digitization by reel, and learning more about Preservation Resources and processing is helping me build that project proposal which will hopefully be successful and lauch before the end of 2008. While there’s a lot to be done before that can happen, this was one more step in the process building toward that project and toward other projects as well.