Digital Library Center Blog | UF

The UF Digital Library Center has a number of homegrown tools for digitization, and we’ve refined these tools working with our partners in the Digital Library of the Caribbean. Our digitization tools for the digitization process are available online with general documentation as well as a full manual with tools available for download.  We also have documentation on our servers and general infrastructure as well as on our internal equipment and our day-to-day operations.

Much of this was created in response to our small team and for the Digital Library of the Caribbean, and some of it comes from our ever-changing needs and operations. In looking for documentation on other digitization projects, I haven’t found as much as I’d like in terms of available tools or documentation.

Currently, the new tools we’re evaluating include Fedora Commons (the library system and not the Fedora Linux flavor) and we’re trying to decide what other tools we need most critically right now and what tools we’ll most likely need in the near future if we do use Fedora. Given the coincidental Fedora-naming overlap, Stephanie Haas (the Assistant Director of UF’s Digital Library Center) suggested that we start calling our digitization software “hat rack” or “the hat rack suite” to note how these tools create objects that are then contained and displayed on Fedora Commons and on Fedora Linux. We’re actually running Unbuntu, but it seemed close enough, and “hat rack” presents a nice image showing the need for more rack components, more hats, and more flair for those hats.

If anyone has suggestions on where to look, please let me know. If anyone has documentation or applications that aren’t really ‘finished’, alpha and beta versions are still helpful for our team to evaluate other systems and possibilities.

The Alice and Wonderland Special Collections exhibit is coming along nicely. We have almost all of the images ready for the posters and most of the text ready for the exhibit cases. I’ve loaded small versions of the images into Picasa for easy reference and the image above is a screenshot of the thumbnails in Picasa. All of the images are online here.

The exhibit will be up October 15 – December 15, but the most fun part, the tea party, is November 7. We should soon have a white rabbit running about, leading to the exhibit.