Digital Library Center Blog | UF

With three iPhone apps out, downloads have increased, with 45 downloads of the main SobekPH App from 3/1-3/7/2010, 14 downloads of the Baldwin SobekPH app, and 5 downloads of the UF Archives SobekPH App. Given that the Baldwin and UF Archives apps were only out for 1/2 of the week, 19 downloads in just a few days means we’re already showing great results for sharing the UF Digital Collections more widely.

Hopefully all of the folks downloading the apps are also showing the apps and sharing with friends!

More content is almost always better, so the SobekPH App for accessing multiple collections from the UF Digital Collections is best for more content. However because each of the collections already has such a vast supply of content to offer, we’re also starting to release iPhone Apps for each of the individual collections.

Two new iPhone Apps are now available, one for UF’s University Archives photographs and another for the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Digital Collection. Check them out in the App store (SobekPH UF Archives and SobekPH Baldwin), or see them online in the UF Digital Collections!

As usage of the self-submittal and online metadata editing systems for the UF Digital Collections have continued to increase, new supports were needed to support the additional users. To provide those supports, the former UFDC_CM application has been integrated into UFDC/SobekCM and additional functionality has been added.

These improvements are releasing next week, but most users won’t notice any changes. For internal users these are immensely helpful, and worthy of announcing and celebrating.

With this upgrade, UFDC will now include administrator options so that:

• Admin users can adjust permissions on existing UFDC users (help page)
• Admin users can add new aggregation aliases for forwarding purposes
• Admin users can add new item aggregations (collections, subcollections, institutions) and edit basic information on existing aggregations.  (help page)
• Admin users can add new HTML interfaces and edit existing interfaces (help page)
• Admin users can add new projects and edit the complete metadata for project METS files online (help page)
• Admin users can add/edit wordmarks and delete wordmarks not linked to any digital resources (help page)

Thanks once again to Mark Sullivan for designing and programming these enhancements, and for writing the supporting help pages as well!

Excerpt from UF’s Latin American Collection News, 2/16/10:

DIGITIZATION UPDATE
While much of the digitization work at UF has concentrated on the Federally-funded Digital Library of the Caribbean, this is by no means the only effort here to make documents related to Latin American Studies available online.

The UF Digital Center is developing other projects, such as:

Women in Development:
An interdisciplinary collection enjoying the generous support of individuals who pioneered this field in the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa

Panama and the Canal:
Initial site for a developing partnership between the UF Libraries and the Panama Canal Museum

UF Institutional Repository:
See instructions here for including your thesis, dissertation or other UF research reports

World Studies Collections:
Miscellaneous digitized items, including many related to non-Caribbean South America (Andes, Brazil, etc.)

One of the advantages of digital collection-building is that items are easily “shared” between collections, making them available to interested users no matter where they begin their search.  This means that many items can be found in more than one collection.  Begin at: http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc/ to search across collections.

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.

Mark Sullivan, the DLC programmer who supports the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and the UF Digital Collections, pulled these images together with the new satellite imagery just released. These are images of the dLOC partner buildings before and after the Earthquake from Google Earth. There is obvious damage, but it appears as though all but the BHPSE look to be fairly intact.  The National Library looks to have a good bit of damage, especially in the back where the newspaper archives are.  The FIC (“Christian Brothers” ) library seems fine and the historic archives building is still standing as well.

From the Digital Library of the Caribbean:

Our thoughts are with our partners and friends in Haiti.  Please consider donating to one of the many trusted relief organizations on behalf of Haiti.

Nos pensées sont avec nos partenaires et amis en Haïti. S’il vous plaît envisager de faire don à l’une des nombreuses organisations de confiance de secours en faveur d’Haïti.

Nuestros pensamientos están con nuestros socios y amigos en Haiti.  Por favor, considerar cualquier donación a una de las organizaciones voluntarios de ayuda a favor de Haiti.

Médecins Sans Frontières / Doctors Without Borders
International Committee of the Red Cross
UNICEF USA
World Food Program (United Nations)

Open Source METS Metadata Editor: Download

About the Open Source METS Metadata Editor

One of the newest of the continual upgrades to the UF Digital Collections is online metadata editing. To make that fully operational our programmer, Mark Sullivan, revised the current standalone METS Metadata Editor application to ensure it remained in parallel. In doing so, Mark noticed that he could quickly adapt our METS Metadata Editor to serve the needs of all of the State University Libraries in Florida. Mark made those updates and the METS Metadata Editor is now available for download here.

The METS Metadata Editor is an Open Source .NET application and features:

• METS Object and METS Reader
  • Good object-oriented example, plug and play for .NET users
  • METS mappings
  • MARC ? METS/MODS ? MARC
  • METS/MODS ? Greenstone file
  • METS/MODS ? Dublin Core (could easily include Dublin core ? METS/MODS)

The METS Metadata Editor is available as an Open Source download for the Windows application from here.

In the near future, the code for the METS Metadata Editor Web application will also be available for download. The code for the  METS Metadata Editor Web application is already powering online metadata editing for the UF Digital Collections, but it’s still new and we’re gathering and incorporating user feedback to further optimize the interface right now. Once released, the METS Editor Web Application will allow users to enter and edit METS files. It probably will not include a logon system, but will instead save into a folder by IP or session number. Then, users will be able to create an item, view it, edit it, download METS, MARC, etc. A bulk importer from MARC and spreadsheets will also be available as a bundled part of the standalone and web application. The Digital Library Center already uses the importer as part of our production toolkit.

As we release more Open Source tools, please note that we’re revising our documentation but it may have different names for some of the same tools until we finish editing. The different names are all for our production toolkit, which is sometimes referred to as the DLC Toolkit, the UFDC Toolkit, the Digital Library of the Caribbean or dLOC Toolkit, and the SobekCM Toolkit. The SobekCM Toolkit has many names because the coding is brilliantly architected and modular, with the same code powering multiple tools and customized tool sets, multiple production scenarios, and multiple versions of the same applications customized for the different user groups.  Translating among the names our users know for their tools and the system components causes confusion, so we’re now referring to the collections by their names and the system-parts by the name SobekCM. The CM is for collection and content management, and Sobek is the name of an Egyptian crocodile god (because even crocodiles are Gators in Gainesville).

To help aid with any possible confusion on terminology, we have definition pages for general terms and for specific metadata fields. We’re still working on the pages for the metadata fields, because they provide a lot more than just a definition.

Each of the definitional metadata pages includes:

• Definition(s)
• Form Element
• Best Practices
• Examples
• UFDC / MODS Encoding
• Metadata Mapping
• Links to reference materials

Examples in process:

• Main Title
• Other Title
• Type
• Physical Description
• Complex Note
• Complex Abstract
• Complex Creator
• Complex Publisher
• Complex Manufacturer
• Genre
• Holding Location
• Language
• Publication Date
• Subject Scheme
• Complex Temporal
• Coordinate Points
• Spatial
• Target Audience
• Source

The UF Digital Collections (UFDC) now have fully functioning online metadata editing!

It’s only been a few weeks since the UFDC self-submittal tool for  faculty to use to load materials to the Institutional Repository and for UFDC partners to use to load materials to their collections went live and now we’ve already added  full online metadata editing.  Mark Sullivan, the programmer who created the internal metadata editor originally as a desktop tool and who has now made the online tool with the same and even enhanced functionality over the desktop tool, released the online metadata editing earlier this week. We’ve been keeping the release quiet for a few days to check for bugs and problems internally before sharing the good news with everyone.We haven’t found any bugs and we’ve found a whole lot to love, so we’re pleased to be able to share the news of the online metadata editing tool with everyone!

See the screenshots below to see how it works (annotations coming soon), or UF faculty, UF researchers, and UFDC partners can sign up for  myUFDC accounts to begin loading and editing.

Online Metadata Editing (some of the preview views run across in my Firefox for the screenshots, but it looks great in use)

SobekPH, the free UFDC iPhone App (available from iTunes here) for the UF Digital Collections has been downloaded 76 times since it was released on November 23. Most of the downloads have been in the US, but there are downloads from all around the world already!