Digital Library Center Blog | UF

The usage statistics for January 2010 for the UF Digital Collections are now online here: http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc/?m=htu

The top collections continue to be the Digital Library of the Caribbean, the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, and the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, with nearly 100.000 hits each in January alone.

The most used collections, and the total numbers with over 10 million hits to the UF Digital Collections since March of 2006, are always impressive. However, my favorite statistics are the most popular items by collection (available for all collections here). For instance, the Digital Library of the Caribbean’s most popular item is Sus mejores poemas by Rubén Darío. It’s been online since April 2008. In that time, it’s had over 30,000 hits.  Similarly, An A B C, for baby patriots has been online only since September of 2008 and it’s already had over 47,000 hits.

The usage statistics for January 2010 are posted alongside all of the prior usage statistics, back to when the UF Digital Collections began in March 2006. The statistics provide a nice quantification of the extensive known usage from the increasingly more frequent patron emails, requests, and compliments. It’s great to see exactly how many more people the UF Digital Collections are reaching, and how much more the UF Digital Collections are assisting with research and creative inquiry.

The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) has grown from September 2007’s 1 million pages (pages of books, newspapers, archival materials, maps, posters, audio, video, photos, and more) to 2 million in July 2008, 3 million in December 2008 (thanks to ingesting microfilm digitized by a vendor) and then to 4 million in July 2009. Right now - and UFDC is loading so this will be higher by morning - UFDC has 4,134,392 pages.

Four million, one hundred and thirty-four thousand, three hundred and ninety-two pages.

It sounds impressive because it is. Yet, it’s so much more than that even when only on a quantity level. Page counts are helpful for a general sense of “big-ness” because they prove critical mass. It’s a way of saying “if you’re not sure this is the digital collection you’re looking for, this collection is big enough to have something you’re interested in”. Page counts aren’t helpful in dealing with multiple formats. For instance, right now 1 page =

• 1 page of a journal article, born digital and submitted electronically
• 1 10 ft. x 12 ft. blueprint from 1905
• 1 video, one hour long, digitized from VHS
• 1 audio interview, one hour long, converted from reel to reel tapes

These aren’t equivalent in terms of the work to create them, the interface variety and sophistication to present them, or the use-value to patrons and for preservation.

Page counts aren’t perfect, and neither are item counts, but is there an easy and accurate way to explain any complex, diverse, and varied collections with 4 million + pieces?

The value created from having critical mass makes the entire scenario more complicated. There’s no good way to explain the value of  being able to search for an illustrator and seeing examples of the work in multiple books, finding reviews of the illustrator’s work in a literary journal, seeing articles by the illustrator’s peers in newspapers from the same time period, and more without a narrative-style example, and that’s not short or easy.

Given the size, scope, and wealth contained in UFDC, I’m at a loss for words to explain just how wonderful UFDC is. For now, I plan to focus on adding more materials and adding more contextual guides (exhibits, highlighted items of the week, guides, and then on to authority records). I’d still like to have something short and quick to explain UFDC like the page counts, but perhaps those were never good enough explanations and I was just more comfortable with them when they were less blatantly inaccurate. Whatever the case, UFDC continues to grow at an astonishing rate by any measure I can imagine.

I’ve blogged quite a bit about UFDC’s page count as we reached 1 million, 2 million, and 3 million pages, digitizing 100,000 pages and more a month. I’m equally excited by every new milestone, but with so many pages online UFDC has reached critical mass overall and in many individual collections like the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, and the Digital Library of the Caribbean.

By reaching critical mass, UFDC is now large enough to bring in new users and to offer something for everyone who comes to UFDC. Every page and every item that now loads adds exponentially to the connections and depth of the materials already in UFDC and so counting by pages and items no longer speaks to UFDC’s true wealth of materials.

Critical mass is oddly wonderful because we have more to share than ever before, but we now lack any adequate way to express the value and quality of materials in UFDC. Of course, this simply means the Digital Library Center will need to spend even more time sharing information about UFDC and searching for better ways to share.

I haven’t posted on UF Digital Collections (UFDC) stats lately, so while there’s no milestone, I like to share frequently. Since July 1, UFDC has added 76,152 items in 8,837 titles (newspapers have lots of issues under a single title) with 1,215,009 pages to the UF Digital Collections. I love seeing that many digits for pages loaded this year alone, and the year isn’t over yet!

The UFDC usage stats are now online in great detail. The stats include overall, collections by date, items by date, collection history, items by collection, and definitions to sort out what all of this means. The items by collection is particularly interesting where you can see how many hits are on particular items, like this page for the Baldwin. Some collections, like the newspapers, are by title and issue, so I assumed the hits would skew to the first issue of any of the titles and they do in some cases, but in others the 157th issue is the most hit.

We’re still interpreting the data, but we’re already learning from it. For instance, Lourdes noticed that one of the University Archives Photos had significantly more hits than any of the others and in trying to find what made it special, she noticed it was the highlight image on the landing page for that collection. We’ve now added more highlight images for the collection that will alternate on reloads to help distribute the hits and provide more data to users. We normally try to provide multiple highlight images, but it hasn’t been a significant priority in the past and now we know it needs to be.

We now have usage statistics for our collections as a whole and by collection! They’re online here in an Excel spreadsheet. Our overall usage stats, while good, are far smaller than they will be because so much of our content is recent (over a million pages since July alone) and because UFDC was forced to deny search engine robots entirely for several months in early 2008 because the search engines were behaving improperly and overly taxing the database.

As expected, our most used collections are the oldest and largest, with the Baldwin, the Florida Newspaper Digital Library, and the Digital Library of the Caribbean.

Given the addition of so much content and the static pages, UFDC’s hits should double (or more) in the next year!

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.

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!

We had a drive fail on our development box, which runs our loader. This wouldn’t have caused much of a delay, but we had people out and the drive should have recovered with a disk check (or at least that’s how it appeared). With the holiday yesterday, we’re running hopefully the last of the checks possible and we’ll either have the development server back up and running tomorrow or we’ll restore from the last backup. While it’s been a long delay–thanks to a weekend and another day off–we’ll soon be loading again and we have lots to load. With all of the files ready to load and the fact that we’re currently sitting at 2.87 million pages, we’ll soon be over 3 million pages. Any delays tend to depressing because we have so much to share that it’s hard to wait. Once we start loading, though, it will once again be wonderful and in the meantime we’re holding steady.

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.