Digital Library Center Blog | UF

The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature has many amazing materials, but I’ve never before seen one quite like A Story of Stops. The book itself is wonderfully illustrated, so wonderfully in fact that I haven’t yet read it. I can’t get over the idea of a “story of stops,” written in 1891 for children. A “story of stops” for children or all ages now could be many things–a story of missed messages and miscommunications (stops in communication, stops in transmission, especially with telegraphs), travel and adventure stories (stops along a train route, or an exploration), and so much more. But a “story of stops” in 1891? I almost don’t want to read it and want to instead imagine what it could be.

The subject terms only encourage me further:

Children — Juvenile fiction. — Conduct of life
Conduct of life — Juvenile fiction.
Adventure and adventurers — Juvenile fiction.
Voyages and travels — Juvenile fiction.
Goblins — Juvenile fiction.
Billiards — Juvenile fiction.
Twins — Juvenile fiction.
Friendship — Juvenile fiction.
Sisters — Juvenile fiction.
Bldn — 1891.

A Story of Stops is available for all online, from those wanting to read the story or those simply wanting to explore the many possibilities of the story. A Story of Stops was written by Mrs. Davidson of Tulloch, and a Google search explains that Mrs. Davidson is Gwendoline Davidson, and that she also wrote “Kitten Goblins,” which I can’t wait to see.

A few weeks ago I was talking to a student about how the Digital Library Center grew out of the Preservation Department and its work in microfilming. The student asked me to explain what microfilm was because she’d heard of it, but didn’t know. I explained through older movies when people are researching crimes and go to the library and sit in front of a big screen and use a knob to flip through pages. Later on, I thought about how others unfamiliar with microfilm will need to know what microfilm is and why it’s important, so I went to YouTube to try and find an example. I found great “how to” videos like this one are available to help new users, but not fun clips from movies. I expected to find those clips from media studies classes doing media archaeology or research on dead media.

Is microfilm considered a dead media yet, or is it just waiting to be fully reborn in digital form? Given user preference it seems dead, but it can’t die because so much information only exists on microfilm. In fact, before the Digital Library Center began, preserving and sharing materials at the University of Florida was accomplished through microfilming. While microfilm is a tedious and unextensible form, many materials are on it that aren’t available in their original form or any other than the film. This is especially true of the masses of fragile materials like newspapers, where there’s simply too much to save it all in the original form given the sheer volume and given the high level of work needed because of the weak material type.

In honor of microfilm’s importance and it’s slow demise, these are some of the many cinematic moments that use microfilm to show research (on mysteries! on monsters):

• Silence of the Lambs (1991)
• The Amityville Horror (1979)
• The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (1991)
• The Changeling (1980)

The Gainesville Sun has an article on the Sanborn Maps of Florida. The maps in public domain (prior to 1923) are online in UF’s Digital Collections and the Map Library–which houses all sorts of fabulous antique, literary, flood, and other maps–holds the rest. The Map Library is a treasure trove of wonderful, playful materials and this page lists some of the main categories for all of the wonders. The image to the left is from one of those wonders.

We’re still working on implementing OpenLaszlo for creating film objects, but I wanted to share the Grebo Mask in Flash (in part so I can always find it when people ask). The photos for the mask are already online, so this is just the in-motion version. The full version of the mask in motion is here.

“This is crucial, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there, durable, indefinitely reuseable, an object of value.”

The quote above is from page 38 of “Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading,” by Ursula K. Le Guin in Harper’s Magazine (Vol. 316, No. 1983, February 2008, p. 33-38), and it speaks to the issue of materiality for digitization. Digital initiatives have rightfully focused on access to book contents, or access to information. Given the technological limitations for even this, with the difficulties from copyright and costs of mass digitization, access to information has been a lofty goal alone. Now however, with ever-increasing screen sizes and touch screens entering popular use through the MacAir, iPhone, Nintendo DS, and others, the object-ness of the book must be further considered.

In Evocative Objects, Sherry Turkle explains “We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with” (5) and this love includes the object of the book. The design of an interface impacts its usability based on the way the user feels about the interface. Donald Norman has shown that people find “prettier” interfaces easier to use, so the interface is also a consideration in working through to a means for representing the book-as-object in a digital form. I don’t have any easy answers for how to best go about this representation, but I’m working on it for my upcoming presentation at the University of Florida’s Comics Conference, and I hope to post more about it soon. In the meantime, I’m considering the object qualities of digitized comics, the interface(s) in which they are represented, and the relation of digital libraries and museums in terms of needs and problems for showing the qualities of objects and addressing the users’ desires for those object-qualities.

Augment or alternative reality games combine the digital and the physical to create innovative and interactive games. Notable examples could include geocaching games, and games where players decode information on websites to find information on other websites, call or email the “decrypted” phone numbers or email addresses, or any one of many other activities based on the information learned from the digital site. The real play of ARGs comes through in the back-and-forth from digital to non-digital and in the gaming communities these types of games create. While I’m familiar with ARGs from game studies, it seems like some library and archival materials almost invoke the concept with as oddities that seem to need to be used in some way.

The image above is an example from the USX National Defense Program, Identification Card Listings - 1940’s Series (Source: UE/Labor 91:6, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh.). The University of Pittsburgh Library’s website explains the origin of these ID cards:

In the 1940’s, workers at US Steel’s National Works (sometimes known as the Tube Works) in McKeesport, were photographed for identification cards, which also provide social data on individual workers. The Archives Service Center is hereby making available a name index to its collection of these cards, numbering more than 10,000 in all, approximately 25% of which contain the abovementioned thumb-nail sized photographs. The social data on the cards have thus far been used for a variety of scholarly research projects: e.g. for a study and oral history on women crane operators at the National Works during WWII and for a book on Jews of Hungarian background who worked there. By combining cards belonging to members of a given, defined group, one can form conclusions about the connections between race/ethnicity and job classification or promotion, or about the geographic origins of selected groups.

The card almost calls out to be used in a game that requires additional research, making it perfect fodder or inspiration for an ARG. With so many related materials on the University of Pittsburgh Library’s site, and with material from places like the Typographical Union,
I’m amazed this hasn’t yet figured into an ARG already. Of course maybe it has, but I just haven’t found it yet. At any rate, wondrous materials like this seem to hide or simply sit waiting in all libraries and museums. Given their historical significance, ability to inspire, and usability for projects like ARGs, it’s hopefully only a matter of time until we all stumble across them through a game or an internet search.

The discovery of Kryptonite, or at least a new mineral matching the chemistry described in Superman Returns, was found earlier this year. As a feral librarian (a librarian who hasn’t attended library school) I haven’t had a cataloging course, so I’m curious as to how articles on the new mineral will be cataloged for both its scientific and humanistic uses. Articles on a regular new mineral would just need to be listed via scientific categories, or so I’d think. But the hierarchical nature of subject headings would seem strange–at least to me–if the full scientific and full literary/popular culture hierarchy were included in the same manner. However, the popular culture study might intersect with the scientific so it could also be beneficial to list both on even footing.

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth is now on YouTube. Since there’s so much in terms of historical footage and in terms of history within that footage, I’m excited to see what this will mean for museums and historical materials. The Queen is on YouTube on The Royal Channel: The Official Channel of the British Monarchy. While many official organizations - political, governmental, and other - have released videos through museums and libraries, it’s interesting to see those materials being added into the regular-user interfaces where people can stumbled across them through the official-and-popular format. Seeing historical footage like “Roses for the Rose Queen” are interesting in themselves and it will be more interesting to see what others do with them, using them for teaching, research, and hopefully new creative projects.

In thinking about the Queen on YouTube, it also seems like Queen Elizabeth is always the correct queen-size, being large and small enough for any format, like the always one and more of the royal “we”. While queen-sized on US women’s clothing is used to mean large or plus-sized, it’s often a normal woman’s size. Like the large-yet-normal-size known as queen-size, Queen Elizabeth seems to be sized appropriately for any media format. Hopefully, other public figures will learn from her appropriate-sizing and size themselves to speak through different media formats in the most appropriate and productive ways possible.

The Digital Library has been experimenting with pop-up and movable books, in part to abstract methods for working with movables into optimum ways for representing books as textual objects. One of the projects that came of the work with pop-ups is this version of a Cinderella Panoramic Book.

We’re also looking at a Flash page flipper for some of the scrapbooks and other flip-like books. We’ll be working to create files and then reconstruct the Flash page-flipping in Open Laszlo (so we can migrate it forward in DHTML and in Flash as the versions change).

UF’s Digital Library Center is working on digitizing videos and putting them into the Digital Collections. In order to make sure these videos are preserved for the long run, we’re saving large and small files and taking the necessary steps. In order to make sure they’re found and used as soon as possible, we’re loading them into Youtube. While many of the videos are standard educational and institutional materials (interesting, but not email-forwarding type stuff), we have one wonderful video of books vs. bugs.

Bugs vs. Books Techno
Bugs vs. Books Darker

The video was made by the Preservation Department and the Nematology and Entomology Department and it’s three minutes of bugs eating books. The video was made so that people know about how dangerous bugs can be for books, but it’s also just a wonderful video. It’s also wonderful to see what sort of conversations these videos spark. When Cathy, our Preservation Officer, showed the video Erich, our former Preservation officer and now head of the Digital Library Center, noted that smoky brown roaches normally won’t eat books, since they normally live outside and generally prefer books older books that used animal byproducts in their binding. This led to a great discussion of bugs versus books and I learned that cockroaches normally eat books only when other food isn’t available, and that this happens when students leave and thus close the “bug cafeterias,” otherwise known as the food and drink in trash cans. The discussion also covered our worst case of roach-book-killing, which was years ago in an older building where duplicate law books had been stored by a well-meaning scholar. Then, the books were left alone while the building was renovated. When the misplaced books were found again, the bugs had eaten through the covers leaving only the pages inside. Luckily, the books were duplicates, but all of those folks saving things in Florida garages and mini-storage units should take heed–when bugs attack books, books lose. Or do they?

I’ve uploaded two versions of the video with audio (from Creative Commons-licensed music) and the short video clips from the video. These clips are for anyone to use in making remixes! Please make and share your own stories of bugs versus books. For music, there are loads of Creative Commons fair-to use music sources and CC lists many of them: http://creativecommons.org/audio.

The video citation information is: “Books vs. American Cockroaches (Periplaneta Americana)” by the University of Florida Smathers Library Preservation Dept. and University of Florida Entomology & Nematology Dept., Producer Cathy Martyniak, Videography & editing Richard Martyniak. Music online for the techno version and darker music.

Share your stories of bugs vs. books! Do bugs win?