Digital Library Center Blog | UF

News from the Florida Archivist Newsletter:

FREE ARCHIVAL WORKSHOPS FOR ARCHIVISTS, LIBRARIANS AND MUSEUM STAFF WORKING IN FLORIDA’S CULTURAL HERITAGE REPOSITORIES

Florida will host four FREE Society of American Archivists workshops (SAA) this year thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Over the past nine years, several Florida repositories and institutions have partnered in an initiative called Opening Archives in Florida, which provides education and training to archivists and others who care for historical records. In December, the Opening Archives team was awarded an NEH Preservation and Access Education and Training Grant to support our statewide education and training program, Advancing Access and Preservation Best Practices in Florida.

The primary goal of this education project is to provide training to archivists and others who care for historical records through a series of workshops covering preservation and access standards and practices including: basic arrangement and description, minimal level processing, archival information systems, and descriptive standards. SAA will conduct four workshops in Miami, Tampa and either Orlando or Gainesville on the topics listed below. Seating will be limited, but it will be at no cost to attendees.

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Thanks to the financial support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the following archival education workshops are available free of charge to staff working in Florida’s libraries, museums, archives, and other cultural heritage repositories. Students and interns in Florida also are eligible for free workshop registration. These workshops are organized by the Opening Archives team, which included members from the Florida Center for Library Automation, the University of Florida, the University of Miami, the University of Central Florida, Florida State University, the University of South Florida, and others. The workshops are co-sponsored by SFA, and the second workshop, DACS, will be held in conjunction with the SFA Annual Meeting in Tampa in May.

The first three workshops, which are described in greater detail below, are:

• Arrangement and Description of Manuscript Collections
• Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS)
• Introduction to Archon Archives Management Software

Information on the fourth workshop, MPLP, is forthcoming.

WORKSHOPS INFORMATION:

Arrangement and Description of Manuscript Collections #0148

Details:
Thu, Mar 18, 2010,through Fri, Mar 19, 2010 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Instructors: Pam Hackbart-Dean and Susan Potts McDonald
University of Miami
Coral Gables, FL
DESCRIPTION:
This workshop focuses on the day-to-day decisions you’re making in arranging and describing manuscript collections! That includes developing processing work plans, identifying common arrangement schemes for particular types of collections, as well as physically organizing materials during processing. Pinpointing the essential elements of a finding aid, applying descriptive standards, and creatively constructing container lists will also be highlighted.
REGISTRATION:

If you work for an archive, library, museum, or other cultural heritage organization in Florida, you are eligible for free registration for this workshop, sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access. If so, please contact John Nemmers (jnemmers@ufl.edu, 352-273-2766) for more information on free registration. Registrations will be accepted and confirmed on a first-come, first-served basis. You will be notified by email about registration confirmation.

Attendance is limited to a maximum of 20 participants. Registration will be limited to a maximum of 2 participants from any Florida repository.
More information on the SAA website here.

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Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) #0149

DETAILS:
Tue, May 04, 2010 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM
Instructors: Roslyn Holdzkom
Tampa, FL
Note: This will be held as a pre-conference workshop for the SFA Annual Meeting in Tampa in May.

DESCRIPTION:
Want practical strategies for implementing DACS? This is the introductory workshop for you! Get an in-depth, practical consideration of the key concepts and descriptive elements in Describing Archives: A Content Standard , the U.S. standard. Explore strategies for incorporating this standard into workflows for accessioning, arrangement, and description through discussions and hands-on work with a variety of exercises, culminating in a DACS-based analysis of existing finding aids. This workshop, a basic introduction to the standard, focuses on application of DACS rules and concepts, which participants can apply to repository processes and descriptive outputs.

REGISTRATION:
If you work for an archive, library, museum, or other cultural heritage organization in Florida, you are eligible for free registration for this workshop, sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access. If so, please contact John Nemmers (jnemmers@ufl.edu, 352-273-2766) for more information on free registration. Registrations will be accepted and confirmed on a first-come, first-served basis. You will be notified by email about registration confirmation.
Attendance is limited to a maximum of 20 participants. Registration will be limited to a maximum of 2 participants from any organization.

More information on the SAA website here.

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Implement DACS in Integrated CMS: Using Archon

DETAILS:
Thu, Aug 19, 2010,through Fri, Aug 20, 2010 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Instructors: Kyle Rimkus and Scott Schwartz
University of Miami
Coral Gables, FL

DESCRIPTION:
In this 2-day hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to describe your collections according to the rules of DACS, the national content standard for preparing such descriptions, within the context of an integrated content management system using Archon™ *, an open-source application available for managing descriptive information about archival records and manuscript collections. The archival data elements and rules supplied by DACS are an integral component of Archon, providing you with an easy way to integrate standards-based description into your repository’s processing workflow. Practical exercises, lecture, class discussions, and demonstrations will assist you in learning Archon’s basic functions and relationships to DACS.

REGISTRATION:
If you work for an archive, library, museum, or other cultural heritage organization in Florida, you are eligible for free registration for this workshop, sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access. If so, please contact John Nemmers (jnemmers@ufl.edu, 352-273-2766) for more information on free registration. Registrations will be accepted and confirmed on a first-come, first-served basis. You will be notified by email about registration confirmation.

Attendance is limited to a maximum of 25 participants. Registration will be limited to a maximum of 2 participants from any organization.

More information on the SAA website here.

News Release: Flagler receives prestigious ‘Save America’s Treasures’ grant (December 17, 2009)

St. Augustine, Fla. — Flagler College recently received a prestigious grant to help preserve drawings from the architects of the treasured National Historic Landmark Hotel Ponce de Leon.

Flagler College President William T. Abare Jr., Ed.D., announced receipt of the prestigious “Save America’s Treasures” (SAT) grant administered through the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Saving St. Augustine’s Architectural Treasures project, a partnership with the University of Florida Libraries, will conserve and digitally preserve an irreplaceable collection of the earliest architectural drawings of John Carrère (1858-1911) and Thomas Hastings (1860-1929), the designers of Henry Flagler’s famed Hotel Ponce de Leon.

Carrère and Hastings were two of the most significant American architects of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Their firm designed more than 600 buildings, including the New York Public Library (1902-11) and the House and Senate office buildings in Washington, D.C. (1908-09). According to Charles D. Warren, co-author of “Carrère & Hastings Architects,” they were “innovators in both technology and aesthetics.”

Regrettably, as Janet Parks, Curator of Drawings & Archives, Columbia University, said: “Most of the archive of [their] office was destroyed in the 1920’s.” The St. Augustine collection offers significant potential to yield unique information with enduring value.

Comprised of 267 original, fragile drawings on cloth, silk and paper, as well as blueprints and copies, the collection is the largest known archives documenting the firm’s earliest work. Among these fragile drawings are the blueprints for their first commission, the Hotel Ponce de Leon, which launched their careers.

This is Flagler College’s second largest award at $49,562 and was one of only five conservation projects funded nationwide. The funds will assist with the preservation of these recently rediscovered records and make them accessible to researchers.

Additional conservation projects include Friendly Association Papers, Haverford, Penn.; Paley Center for Media, New York; “This I Believe” Collection, Medford, Mass.; and William Still Collection, Philadelphia.

Original news release on Flagler College’s website.

Brown University’s Center for Digital Scholarship (http://dl.lib.brown.edu.revproxy.brown.edu) (CDS) and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage (http://www.brown.edu/jnbc) (JNBC) are seeking individuals to apply for a fellowship to direct the digital aspects of the Fox Point Community History Project. The digital fellow will work with faculty and staff in both the CDS and JNBC as well as other Brown faculty and students undertaking related work to develop an online public history resource that incorporates oral history, primary documents (photographs, letters, clippings), geospatial data, documentary film, statistical data and other materials. This multidimensional, interactive framework will provide avenues for both scholarly and public engagement. This fellowship is contingent upon funding from the NEH Fellowships at Digital Humanities Centers program (http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/fdhc.html).

Interested individuals should provide a 2 page curriculum vitae as well as a statement of interest that provides an overview of relevant experience by September 5. Please submit applications and/or any questions to Patrick Yott, Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship, at Patrick_Yott@brown.edu.

More information at http://proteus.brown.edu/jnbc/819

Chronicling America, the amazing historical newspaper digital collection from the Library of Congress and NEH, has added “Topics“. With over a million pages of historical newspapers online, “Topics” are an essential need–helping users who aren’t sure what they’re looking for find a way into so much content and helping to showcase some of the highlights of so much great content for all users.

Some of the topics that include Florida content (as the Interim Director for the University of Florida Digital Library Center, which supports the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, the ones with Florida content are those of greatest interest to me):

• Baseball’s Modern World Series, 1903-1910
• From Territory to Statehood - The West
• Patent Medicines
• Pullman Porters

On Dec. 11, the National Digital Newspaper Program added 183,698 historic newspaper pages (including 14 new titles) to the Chronicling America Web site, hosted by the Library of Congress. The site now provides free and open access to 864,509 pages from 108 titles, that were published in 9 states (CA, FL, KY, MN, NE, NY, TX, UT, VA) and the District of Columbia between 1880 and 1910. Six additional states–Arizona, Hawaii, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington–will be contributing content in 2009. Chronicling America is a project of the National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress…. Read more about it!

The title says it all–or as much as can be said with any brevity. The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) now have 3 million pages!

Or to be exact 3,012,406 which means that since October 4 we’ve added over 500,000 pages and that we’ve added a full million pages since July. Our largest collection is the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Digital Collection, which now has 749,686 pages. The Baldwin’s many pages have been digitized through NEH grants and the current grant is coming to a close so we’ll see comparatively fewer books load in the near future, but the many wonders of the Baldwin’s beautifully illustrated children’s books have so much to explore that there’s always something more to see. The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is the next largest with 568,139 pages contributed by the many dLOC partners, including the University of Florida Libraries. The third largest is the Florida Digital Newspaper Library with 491,330 pages of Florida newspapers, historic to current.

We won’t be loading as much soon–with holiday vacations and closing days–but we’ll continue to see more pages and wonders load even if at a slightly slower pace.

UF’s Digital Library Center is currently loading more historic newspapers into UFDC (the University of Florida Digital Collections) and they look incredible! The newspaper here is The Weekly Miami Metropolis from June 26, 1908. Even though it’s over 100 years old, it’s one of the more recent issues from the historic papers being loaded. Like many of the historic papers, it features a political cartoon prominently on the first page.

This and many other newspapers were digitized through the “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers” joint program by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress. I’m still only beginning to explore these papers, but I expect to link to various titles and issues as I have time to read through them and to explore historic Florida in the making.

To see the newly loaded historic newspapers,  go to the new items browse in the Florida Digital Newspaper Library (one of the collections in UFDC) or to the all items browse.