Digital Library Center Blog | UF

This blog is moving to www.laurientaylor.org. My apologies in advance for any oddities during the transition.

This is a fabulous new position in the University of Florida Libraries. The job will entail primarily web work, but also working on the UF Digital Collections and other digital development. The position entails great colleagues, meaningful work, and technical work where things get implemented and used (so you can really see the benefits and impact of your work).

Full Announcement

POSITION: Information Technology Expert – (Digital Development unit member, developer)
REPORTS TO: Information Technology Senior
SALARY: Anticipated salary is $55,442.79 annually
Requisition #: 0810081
DEADLINE DATE: January 9, 2012

JOB SUMMARY:
The Information Technology department serves as the focal point for planning, managing and coordinating computer based information resources that support library operations. The networked environment that exists in the Libraries is switched ethernet. The Libraries’ Information Technology department manages approximately 24 servers that support 800 workstations used by 250 staff and over 3 million annual patrons and dozens of printers spread over nine different buildings.

As a member of the Digital Development unit, this position oversees the Libraries Web site and coordinates with all facets of the Libraries to develop an integrated web content management system that includes web access to the libraries electronic resources. Implements library and UF web standards by providing instruction and tools to support library site organization, layout, content and interactive search tools. The IT Expert (Digital Development unit member, developer) provides training and technical guidance to library staff.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Develops web applications, implementation and maintenance of Library’ web presence
• Reviews content management and open systems to determine what system is most flexible for the Libraries’ web site with an appreciation for the development cycles and protocols inherent in open source communities;
• Leads or co-chairs a committee or taskforce to redesign and revise library web presence;
• Performs analysis and programming to develop, document, and maintain web-based applications as needed by the various library units as appropriate;
• Improves the visual design of websites by working closely with the general Library staff;
• Develops applications and layouts which improve the users’ web experience;
• Conducts usability testing;
• Creates user surveys and collates relevant feedback concerning the web experience;
• Communicates, shares, and instructs others in web site development/design;
• Maintains existing web pages and applications;
• Creates systems which deliver digital resources to the public, improves the public’s ability to locate and use library resources, improves staff productivity, and facilitates the compilation of analytical data.

Develops other web and windows applications as necessary for special projects

• Works with other departments within the library to provide support as needed;
• Provides backup support for digitization and digitized materials (including the institutional repository);
• Assists with testing and deployment of special applications
• Coordinates Aleph (Library Catalog) technical issues
• Manages uploads/downloads/upgrades and technical changes in the Aleph catalog, room reservation, system modifications etc.
• Coordinates technical duties of assigned staff who manage circulation, acquisitions, Mango (Aleph) reports, electronic resources, permissions, uborrow, self-check, print daemons etc.

Provides training, instruction and tools for maintaining library websites

• Instructs staff about various desktop and web-based software packages (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Fireworks, Illustrator, Flash, Acrobat, Adobe Bridge, Front Row, Picasa, Google Analytics, Google Calendar, Camtasia, Morae);
• Develops and maintains web related training materials and documentation.

Increases personal knowledge of the field through professional development activities

• Conducts reading and research in information technology, library automation, and other technical issues as appropriate to the job;
• Takes online or other courses;
• Monitors professional discussion lists and participates in professional meetings related to programming, database, or internet topics.

Other duties as assigned

QUALIFICATIONS:
Required:
High school diploma and four years of any combination of relevant experience, education and/or certification. The level of expertise and skill required to qualify for a position in this classification is generally attained through combinations of education and experience in the field. While such employees commonly have a bachelor’s or higher degree, no particular academic degree is required.

Preferred:

• Extensive development experienceâ??particularly with academic and/or library entities;
• Excellent communication skills and demonstrated experience in the preparation of documentation;
• Strong critical thinking, problem-solving and prioritization skills in the midst of multiple tasks while retaining attentiveness to detail;
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or Graphic/Web Design;
• Demonstrated experience with HTML and CSS;
• Experience with web scripting languages, in particular javascript;
• Experience working with existing libraries, such as jQuery, to enhance the web user’s experience;
• Experience with multiple programming languages. Preference given to experience with C# and Java;
• Experience with Microsoft Visual Studio (.NET coding environment);
• Knowledge of relational database models and SQL or other database query equivalent.
• Experience with Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Fireworks, In-Design;
• Experience with web-page development software (Contribute, Dreamweaver, etc);
• Demonstrated knowledge of User-Interface Design: layout overall UI display, utilizing UI elements (icons, buttons, toggles, sliders, etc.);
• Experience with Microsoft Windows systems and familiarity with Windows server operating systems;
• Familiarity with Microsoft SQL Server and/or Internet Information Server.

The University of Florida
The University of Florida (UF) is a major, public, comprehensive, land-grant, research university. The state’s oldest and most comprehensive university, UF is among the nation’s most academically diverse public universities. UF has a long history of established programs in international education, research and service. It is one of only 17 public, land-grant universities that belong to the Association of American Universities. UF traces its beginnings to a small seminary in 1853 and is now one of the largest universities in the nation, with more than 50,000 students. For more information, please consult the UF homepage at http://www.ufl.edu.

The George A. Smathers Libraries is a member of the Association of Research Libraries, the Center for Research Libraries, the Research Libraries Group, and LYRASIS. The library staff consists of more than 400 FTE librarians, technical/clerical staff and student assistants. The George A. Smathers Libraries organizational chart is available at: http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/backpage.html. For more information about the Libraries, please visithttp://www.uflib.ufl.edu.

COMMUNITY:
Gainesville, Florida and the surrounding community are home to approximately 240,000 people and both the University of Florida and Santa Fe College. Situated just over an hour from the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, the city is surrounded by over 40 nature parks, including many spring-fed lakes and rivers. In 2007, Gainesville was ranked as the “Best Place to Live and Work” by Frommer’s Cities Ranked and Rated and as one of the “Best Places to Live and Play” by National Geographic Adventure. Gainesville is known as an innovative municipal government and an innovative city. Gainesville continues to receive national recognition as a top-rated city. Some of Gainesville’s accolades are listed at the following link: http://www.cityofgainesville.org/VISITOR/GainesvilleAwardsRecognition/tabid/494/Default.aspxThe area has numerous cultural institutions and is a haven for sports fans. Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa, Tallahassee, and St. Augustine are all within a two hour drive.

Benefits:
Vacation days, paid holidays, and sick leave days; retirement plan options; insurance benefits; tuition fee waiver program; no state or local income tax. Prospective employees should review the information about employment and benefits at UF available at
http://www.hr.ufl.edu/training/neo/default.asp.

Application Process:
The University of Florida is an equal opportunity employer and is strongly committed to the diversity of our faculty and staff. Applicants from a broad spectrum of people, including members of ethnic minorities and disabled persons, are especially encouraged to apply. As part of the application process, applicants are invited to complete an on-line confidential and voluntary demographic self-disclosure form which can be found at: http://www.hr.ufl.edu/job/datacard.htm. This information is collected by the University of Florida’s Faculty Development Office to track applicant trends and is in no way considered by the Smathers Libraries in the selection process.

If you are interested in these positions please apply online at http://jobs.ufl.edu referring to requisition number 0810081.

For further details about this position please contact Tina L. Pruitt at (352)273-2595.

Just once month after announcing the highest ever usage for the UF Digital Collections (UFDC) with 3.2 million hits in October 2011, we saw another dramatic increase with 4 million hits for November 2011!

The UF Digital Collections (UFDC)  have seen continuous, steady increases in usage thanks to the abundance of amazing content and ongoing search engine optimization work. November was another milestone with nearly 4.1 million human hits to the UF Digital Collections (UFDC) and associated collections and libraries, as with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC).

• October usage: 3,196,063 views
• November usage: 4,076,673 views

Here’s to upcoming months of increased exposure, usage, and impact for the UF Digital Collections and for all those who work with and support open access to digitized materials as well as to digital scholarship!

This post is a bit late, but UNC-Chapel Hill officially launched their Digital Innovation Lab in October. The Digital Innovation Lab focuses:

on the collaborative production of digital public goods:  digital projects, products, tools, and applications that are

1. of special social and cultural value,
2. can be produced for free public use (or at a minimal marginal cost)
3. are scalable,
4. are reusable and repurposable, and/or
5. serve multiple audiences/end-users.

The development of these digital public goods might arise from individual faculty research, teaching, or public engagement activities within the humanities and social sciences, or from projects, processes, and technologies developed in other areas of the university’s work and for other purposes.

The “Digital Lab” is innovative in its structure as well as its output.  It combines the project-focused organizational model of the laboratory with the social model of the network.  Unlike a traditional center or institute, the “Digital Lab” is a virtual unit without a dedicated physical trialing new tools for project administration, collaboration, curricular adaptation, and pedagogy. The DIL is designed to operate with minimal physical and human infrastructure costs and to be symbiotic in relation to institutional resources rather than resource-redundant.  Its project-based approach to digital humanities/social sciences means that it will constantly seek ways to leverage externally funded projects to the benefit of other aspects of its work: curriculum development, pedagogy, graduate-student training, etc.

This is an excellent model and one seen with library-center partnerships at other institutions. The need for sustainability, usability, extensibility, and overall institutional/mission alignment with an academic institution and academia as a whole is critical for digital scholarship to really return on its potential. Digital scholarship, and the digital humanities in particular, are exciting for their ability to support and extend traditional scholarship as well as to develop new ways of doing scholarship and new areas of inquiry. In order to be successful, digital scholarship must be able to exist and function as scholarship, and this requires support for access, preservation, and connection to all forms of scholarship. It’s exciting to see places like UNC-Chapel Hill making this possible, and exciting to be part of similar work in connection to the University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC).

The UF Digital Collections have seen continuous, steady usage thanks to loads and loads (and loads) of wonderful content and ongoing search engine optimization work. October was another milestone with nearly 3.2 million human hits to the UF Digital Collections (UFDC) and associated collections and libraries, as with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC).

October usage: 3,196,063 views. Here’s to the coming months with increased exposure, usage, and impact for the UF Digital Collections and all who work with and support open access to digitized cultural and historical materials as well as to digital scholarship.

The story below is from the most recent Library News from the UF Libraries for UF Faculty. NewspaperCat is powered and hosted within the UF Digital Collections (powered by SobekCM). This has been a great project for the UF Digital Collections to support because it was an active and valid use case for a record-only collection portal, which is often a wanted option for different research, teaching, and public service needs. There’s more in the story below and check out NewspaperCat to see it in action!

Libraries create catalog of digital historical newspapers

The Catalog of Digital Historical Newspapers (NewspaperCat) is available at www.newspapercat.org. NewspaperCat is an online database providing links to over 1,000 full-text digital newspapers in the United States and Caribbean. The project’s current coverage, which began with the Southeastern United States, is growing rapidly and will soon cover all fifty states.

The purpose of NewspaperCat is to improve access to historical newspapers digitized by libraries, archives, historical societies and other non-profit organizations that remain buried within search engine returns such as Google PageRank. These newspapers represent a rich source of primary research material for researchers, students and the general public. The project to build NewspaperCat was funded by the George A. Smathers Libraries and developed with the cooperation of the Digital Library Center of the University of Florida.

As a free-standing online resource with a unique web address, it is hoped that NewspaperCat will improve access to these important primary resource materials by collectively improving their Google PageRank for online researchers seeking historical newspaper content.

Over the summer semester the project has benefited from the work of master of library and information science graduate students from Florida State University and their coordinator, Dana Loving, who have added material and improved access to even more online digital newspaper content. Through their contributions, in the weeks ahead, NewspaperCat will become the first index of its kind to ingest and provide access to the Google News Archive as well as newspaper titles from across the United States and Canada.

– Matthew Loving Romance Languages/ Area Studies Librarian

For August 2011, the UF Digital Collections (UFDC) saw another sharp rise in usage with 2.6 million views for August alone. This is another record high, up by nearly 200,000 views in a single month. More importantly, it’s on track for continued growth!

Statistics like this are important for what they show and what they point to. Usage statistics show usage, but they indicate greater significance with impact. Digitizing and curating digital materials must be done for preservation and access. Beyond the necessity, the significance of those materials can be seen with the impact of the materials. Impact can be assessed quantitatively (e.g.; usage statistics, reference counts) and qualitatively (e.g.; how these resources or the services associated with them helped researchers in their work, how UFDC was the foundation for new work in the digital humanities and digital scholarship).

The UF Digital Collections are excelling in both quantitative and qualitative measures. In the near-ish future, I hope to have more time to post some of the more interesting qualitative examples here, perhaps as longer anecdotes and perhaps as full case studies.

The post below is by Paul Losch, from the UF Latin American Collection newsletter.

Football season begins tomorrow and Gator fans may be interested to know that the UF football team visited Havana in December 1912, nearly 99 years ago. They went on a kind of informal athletic excursion that was relatively common before the modern system of post-season bowl games was instituted.

Someone on that 1912 trip brought back some Cuban newspapers as souvenirs, and these ended up in the University Archives. The UF Digital Collections recently put them online as a small but valuable addition to the collection of historical newspapers already available in the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC).

Two games were arranged against private athletic clubs. The result of the first game was Florida 27, Vedado Tennis Club 0, and the event is described in the articles below.

• Cuba – “Los Floridanos Aniquilaron al V.T.C.”
• Havana Post -  “Florida University Eleven Puts It All Over Vedado Tennis Club”
• La Lucha -  “Florida Footballers”
• La Noche -  “27 Puntos el Florida”

We also have a program from the first game, online in the UF Digital Collections here.

The second game, against the Club Atlético, was not as successful as the first. It was forfeited by the UF team on account of a dispute over rules, and the police were called because of complaints from paying spectators who felt cheated out of the price of admission.

• La Prensa -  “Espectáculo Bochornoso en Almendares Park”
• La Lucha -  “Los Patos Se Rajaron” (UF team referred to not as “Gators” but as “Ducks,” like the ones that migrate seasonally between the peninsula and the island).

Despite this unfortunate first attempt at international relations, friendly athletic exchanges between UF and the Universidad de la Habana eventually did take place on various occasions.

The James Patton Anderson Digital Collection within the UF Digital Collections (UFDC) was recently featured on History Detectives. The video of it is online and the segment starts at around 22:21.

It’s always wonderful to see how people are finding and using materials available in UFDC!

In April, Europeana announced that they would be releasing a number of additional online exhibits this year. They’ve already released quite a few including:

• From Dada to Surrealism Exhibition Live
• Yiddish Theatre in London Virtual Exhibition Live

These are wonderful online exhibits on their own. It’s also wonderful to see Europeana’s dedication to supporting online exhibits because online exhibits allow people to see, use, and understand materials in new ways that enhance the experience with the online exhibit and the collections it draws upon. The process of creation online exhibits itself is also requires scholarly and creative work for the curation and design. The UF Digital Collections and Digital Library of the Caribbean have released and constantly at work on new online exhibits in collaboration with researchers, and we’re always amazed at how positive the response is to the online exhibits.