Digital Library Center Blog | UF

Videos of presentation:

• “Politics and Resistance in Twentieth Century Haiti” by Dr. Matthew J. Smith, presentation sponsored by the Digital Library of the Caribbean as part of the 12th Annual Haitian Studies Institute of Florida International University.
• Red and Black in Haiti,  presented at book launch by Dr. Matthew J. Smith

The Library of Congress has announced that they’re now loading videos to YouTube. They’ve already loaded a ton of videos and they plan to load many more, seeing YouTube as a parallel to their successful and ongoing Flickr project. Check out their wonderful and ever-increasing number of videos here: http://www.youtube.com/user/LibraryOfCongress.

Everyone benefits from greater access and greater opportunities for serendipity. Imagine all the people who will be browsing or searching YouTube for one video and finding others from the Library of Congress! This is a great learning, teaching, and sharing opportunity and that’s also why the UF Libraries also have YouTube and Flickr accounts. Even as a drastically smaller contributor, it’s nice to be participating in the same wonderful process with the massive and monumental Library of Congress.

Thanks go to the Library of Congress for working so diligently to preserve and make materials accessible. Also, thanks go to the Library of Congress for further validating the use of “fun” technologies/services like YouTube and Flickr for real work and as part of the work of libraries everywhere that work to make information, learning, thinking, and the entire process of inquiry fun!

Well maybe not featured, but at least mentioned in the wiki for a graduate library science course (LIS 5313) at Florida State University. It’s great to get noticed, but it’s far better and more important to have that recognition become a resource that the UF Libraries and others can use in deciding and refining how to best use resources like YouTube to support existing projects and needs.

The videos on the UF Libraries YouTube Channel are all available in the UF Digital Collections, but the UF Libraries’ YouTube Channel has links to friends in UF News Bureau and the USF Libraries, so it’s worth checking out for the social network and the videos!

UF students, faculty, and staff are invited to the Library Tech Expo, hosted by the InfoCommons @ West, which will take place on Wednesday, August 27, from 10-2 in the InfoCommons @ West (3rd floor of LW).  We will be showcasing various tech trends offered by our libraries, including Bioactive (a library video game), InfoZombies and other library YouTube videos, RefWorks, Ask-a-Librarian, and much more!  We will also be offering Guitar Hero during this time for students to play while they view our new tech trends.  Snacks will be provided.

Some of UF’s video archives are now online. While most of the sports videos are in copyright and can’t be loaded online, there are tons of great videos that can be and we’re starting to slowly load them.

We don’t have that many yet, but what we do have is here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/laurientaylor
http://www.youtube.com/user/lntaylor78
http://www.youtube.com/user/UFlibraries

I switched to the new name so that it was clear that these are UF Libraries’ archival videos, but I don’t yet know how to transfer the videos from the other two accounts, so if anyone knows an easy way to do this, please let me know.

Progress on loading these will continue to be slow because of the time involved. We’re processing for preservation (converting to a normal format, saving, and loading to UFDC for online access, and then saving to another format and sometimes editing for YouTube since the videos have to be under 10MB and under 10 minutes for each upload). It’s a long process, but it’s nice to see some of the videos up!

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.

Matthew Daley and Chris McHale (along with other UF Library folks, and maybe others–I only know a couple of the people in the video so I’m not sure who everyone is) made an INFO ZOMBIES film for the SPARC Video Contest. Since the SPARC contest centers around information sharing, the idea of sharing information as a viral-need, like the Zombie urge to eat brains, is a nice, funny combination of information needs and zombies. It’s also neat to see a zombie-cure in the form of information.

Zombies are always fun, especially when they’re INFO ZOMBIES!

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?

UF’s Digital Library Center is still working on making video files work properly through our Digital Collections. In the meantime, we’re adding videos to Youtube so that people can access the videos since some of them are really neat.

Thus far, we’ve loaded the Preservation Book Care video in two parts because of Youtube’s file size and length limitations: part 1 and part 2.

I also separated out a very short clip of a roach eating a book part because it’s great. The clip is super-zoomed in on the roach and it just looks wonderfully sci-fi. The Library Preservation Officer has an entomology video connection and so we’ll hopefully have more wonderful videos like this soon.