Digital Library Center Blog | UF

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.

Press Release from FSU:

FSU’s PALM Center to partner in Library of Congress grant

The PALM Center at the Florida State University School of Library and Information Studies is part of a team that has been awarded a $300,000 grant by the Library of Congress. The collaborative project, Successfully Teaching Educators about Primary Sources, will extend the work of the Library of Congress initiative Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS).

“Kids improve their analytical skills—higher-order critical thinking and inquiry-oriented activities—by working with primary source, first-hand information,” said Dr. Nancy Everhart, director of the PALM Center. “And they become inspired to learn more about history by working with primary source documents, such as the extraordinary collection held by the Library of Congress. It has over 16 million primary sources—from those documenting the founding of our county, through the history of the immigrant experience and the civil rights movement, to those reflecting this very day.”

The PALM Center will work as a member of the Florida Education Inquiry Primary Source Team (FEIPST), a collaborative effort of the University of Central Florida’s College of Education SUNLINK, the Florida Association for Media in Education, the Florida Association of Supervisors of Media, The State Library of Florida, and school districts throughout Florida.

“A selection committee reviewed a number of proposals submitted by institutions in Florida, Georgia, and Texas for a Teaching with Primary Sources grant. FEIPST’s application offered the best plan to use technology and its large institutional network to help disseminate the Library’s TPS program,” said to Laura Campbell, Associate Librarian for Strategic Initiatives for the Library of Congress. Only two proposals were funded nationally.

The expertise of the PALM Center in external evaluation will be their major contribution to the team. The PALM Center is the only organization known to specialize in the evaluation of school library projects and programs while doing research in the area. According to Dr. Mardis, the Center will provide evaluation services over the two years of the project. “This project is a great example of the potential school library media specialists have to transform student learning in vital ways,” said Mardis. “As evaluators, we will learn ways that school libraries can better support learning with the use of primary sources.”

“We will also benefit from the experience of two of our Florida State doctoral students at PALM, Melissa Johnston and Janice Newsum, who were members of the prestigious Library of Congress National Curriculum Review Panel (2008–2009).” said Dr. Everhart. “They will provide field training for the project.”

The team plans to provide college/university and K-12 educators with a professional development model, along with lesson plans and teaching materials, to improve their abilities to:

• design learning experiences that are primary source-based and inquiry-oriented,
• implement those experiences in their classrooms,
• evaluate the educational experiences and learning outcomes, and
• share their expertise.

Established in 2007, the PALM Center conducts internationally recognized interdisciplinary research on library media specialist leadership and technology integration. It offers services that support school library media specialists and educators in the improvement of their districts and schools in Florida, the United States, and throughout the world.

The Wakulla News from October 22, 2009 has a news story on their archives in the Florida Digital Newspaper Library.

The Fourth Paradigm: Data Intensive Scientific Discovery, has just been released by Microsoft Research and is available for download under a Creative Commons license here. The book is edited by Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley and Kirstin Tolle and it’s being released in conjunction with the Microsoft E-science meeting being held at Carnegie-Mellon.

While I’ve read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, I’d only ever seen it in book format, until now. It’s always nice to find exciting new materials from the UF Digital Collections, but it’s equally wonderful to find amazingly interesting versions of familiar materials, especially with cover page political cartoons like this.

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

The Robert Goldwater Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a resource blog and earlier this week they blogged about the UF Digital Collections and the Between the Beads Exhibit!

The Florida Digital Newspaper Library has grown enormously in the past year, adding 384,238 pages since July 1 for a grand total of 504,773 pages!

Those many pages capture history in the making, including  New Year’s Day across the years and across Florida. Front-page news covers the then-current events, often including a New Year’s baby.

For more news of the day, see the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, supported by the Smathers Libraries, which exists to provide free access to the news and history of Florida. The Florida Digital Newspaper Library ensures long-term digital preservation of Florida’s news, making the news available to everyone over the Internet and adding accessibility functions - zoomable page images for detail and searchable text for enhanced usability.

For a faster overview, UFDC’s Flickr account has a small selection of New Year’s Day front pages.

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 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!