Digital Library Center Blog | UF

“The Longtail of News” by the Toronto Star’s public editor Kathy English is an excellent report for the effects of networked, persistent access to information in respect to the public good and the accuracy of current and archived information.

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

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 American Historical Association has a recent blog post over the problems caused by the lack of access to certain newspapers during transition from “Paper of Record” to Google’s news archives. The blog post notes:

Regrettably, this proves yet again Roy Rosenzweig’s warning to the profession six years ago about the “the fragility of evidence in the digital era.” While it may be beyond our capacity to adjust copyright laws and the behavior of large corporations (however well meaning), as a profession we can and perhaps should develop new habits for working with digital materials—by copying down information when we see it online, and not becoming overly dependent on any one data source or having illusions about its permanence.

Seeing the problems from the Paper of Record transitioning to Google as a call to “develop new habits for working with digital materials—by copying down information when we see it online, and not becoming overly dependent on any one data source or having illusions about its permanence,” is essentially a call to develop personal copies of existing archives and it’s a poor solution to the larger problem.*

In this particular instance, there are several concerns related to technology, trust, and the public good. For technology, the transition is a normal instance of downtime (which is still normal for any technology related transition, and its normalcy is why so many of the tech folks were amazed at the speed and elegance of the most recent Whitehouse.gov transition that overcame the normal problems). However, technical issues are a parallel to the very real potential for loss if digital records are not supported and the very real problem of lost access if digital records are not supported as a need for the public good. One of the respondents to the blog post notes that perhaps newspapers should be moved into the public domain, which is a concern because copyright is often an obstacle to access, but even papers in the public domain still need financial support to ensure access to them whether in digital or physical form.

Even after covering the initial costs for requesting permissions, digitization, and hosting, new costs emerge. For instance, the University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) has grown by leaps and bounds in the past two years and now has over 664,269 pages of Florida newspapers alone. These newspapers include historic newspapers and current newspapers. The Digital Library Center has successfully requested and received permissions to digitize over 60 current newspapers, newspapers that in many cases were microfilmed and that are now being digitized for online access and longterm preservation (and we’re also slowly digitizing earlier years from the microfilm and will continue to do so until all of the microfilm holdings are digital).

All of the collections in UFDC, including the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, continue to grow and that growth encourages a growth in usage that, in turn, requires UFDC have more resources to support the higher usage rates. In March 2009, UFDC had 618,148 unique hits and that many hits along with the knowledge that the hits are only going to increase means that the UF Libraries have to implement additional programming to ensure the server memory usage can handle the increased load without problems for users. Other digital collections will have similar needs as they grow, and that will require support from users and the public.

Rather than attempting to copy existing resources (which would reduce the resource to a single item photocopy instead of a point within the full context and content of the database), the emphasis should be on building and supporting trusted digital archives to ensure access. The Florida Digital Newspaper Library presents one of many models, housing historic and current newspapers for open online access for all in perpetuity (and it was luck enough to build the digital model from that same model for microfilm, allowing it to utilize the existing support infrastructure that was already available).  Many archives already offer the same promises for access in perpetuity, albeit for physical access to items not yet digital, and those archives will need support to ensure they place the same importance on access and preservation for their digital collections.

Digital collections and archives need support for new and existing digital collections to build and sustain the infrastructure needed to ensure open access in perpetuity. As La Asociación Mexicana de Historia Económica (AMHE) explains in their protest to the lack of access to Mexican newspapers, the newspapers on Paper of Record are essential reference materials for research. The removal of access–even if only a delay for technical reasons–does harm. The public needs to have trust in their archival institutions, and ensuring access to physical and digital archives is a necessity to build and maintain that trust.

*{Copying single items or even attempting to copy masses of materials without infrastructure is still like photocopying. The materials would not be structured (or minimally so) and would not benefit from organization and identification. If a physical archive was in danger and photocopying was the only option, then photocopying the resource makes sense. This is not to say that photocopying is a bad solution in all cases–researches regularly photocopy materials from archives and those photocopies are then copied and shared and, in some cases, those are the only available copies for access. Photocopying is a poor solution to the overall problem, but for researchers who need access to the materials right now and who cannot wait for a new trusted archive to built over years of advocacy and funding, photocopying style solutions are wise temporary options. Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine maintains copies of many web sites and pages for just this reason.}

Waterfront News, March 2009

UFDC is only three, but it’s already made lots of friends including The Waterfront News, which celebrates its 25th birthday this year!

The Waterfront News began in March 1984 and grew to become “South Florida’s Nautical Newspaper” and they’re asking for stories from their readers for next month’s memorial edition.

The Waterfront News is one of the many local Florida newspapers archived for preservation and access through by the University of Florida Digital Collections’ Florida Digital Newspaper Library.  See their archives, 1984-2007 (with more recent issues being added) online in UFDC here!

In addition to the ongoing work by all partners that constantly adds new materials to the Digital Library of the Caribbean, the University of Florida is participating with the Center for Research Libraries’ (CRL) World Newspaper Archive. By participating, CRL will return copies of the digital files for the newspapers that will be digitized so that UF can include them the Digital Library of the Caribbean, so that these papers will always be freely and openly accessible for all!

Under this program, the titles to be added to the Digital Library of the Caribbean will be (pre-1923 years only):

• Diario de la Marina
• Jornal do Commercio
• Port of Spain Gazette

CRL’s World Newspaper Archive currently only plans to cover pre-1923 issues, but the University of Florida Libraries and other partners in the Digital Library of the Caribbean will continue working on digitizing all years of these newspapers to have them all openly and freely online!

Many issues of the Diario de la Marina from the 1940s-1960s are already online and many others are in process. By participating in CRL’s project, even more will be added even sooner than expected. While sooner than expected, this still may take quite some time because UF hasn’t even begun the process of shipping the microfilm to be digitized and that has to be underway before we can start seeing digital files returned and then those will need to be processed before they can be loaded. It still means sooner, though, and that we can ensure more materials are all online sooner.

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!

UFDC now has more RSS feeds! The feeds are available here, http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc2/rss/, and can be added to readers or webpages of your choice (and these are again thanks to our ever-working, industrious and creative programmer)!

The new RSS feeds and other improvements include ongoing optimization for faster loading online and for faster internal processing. Plus, we’re working rapidly and now have 2,60,4573 pages online from 61,108 titles and 116,492 volumes! The Digital Library of the Caribbean now stands poised to hit half a million pages with 475,992 pages online and the Florida Newspapers now include a whopping 306,702 pages. We’re loading quickly, so using an RSS feed or two (or maybe even an even dozen) is smart for those looking to keep up on the items being loaded.