Word of the Day (or maybe even year): autotechnogeoglyphics

Laurie N. Taylor April 27th, 2008

Autotechnogeoglyphics

I’m not sure how I came across the “Pruned” blog’s post on autotechnogeoglyphics, but it’s the most wonderful word I’ve seen in sme time. auto-techno-geo-glyphics sounds of steampunk, science fiction, fantasy, epic world building and world altering technology, histories of giants, and it holds so much promise, so much potential for exploration. While the definition speaks more to reality, the word speaks to fantasy worlds of stone like Shadow of the Colossus, science-fiction worlds of steel, and ancient worlds of myth and reality, of stone, sediment, and things long lost.

“Pruned” explains autotechnogeoglyphics from the CLUI newsletter as:

Among the many wonderful things worth noting, there is their aerial photographs of automotive test tracks — those concrete hieroglyphs, in the fringes of urban sprawls, recording “the condition of America, land of the automobile, a syndrome that transformed the landscape of the nation, and the world, more than any other.”

As an information addict, I normally value words by utility. However, there are those words that go beyond the possible into the impossible, seeking for more than they can possibly find and finding all that they can in the process. autotechnogeoglyphics is one of those; it speaks to what it is and what it could be, helping to define studies of large-scale, made-designs in the Earth, made only over time with parts intentional and parts their sum unforeseeable in their planning, and all seen only with enough correct distance. It only seems right in all lowercase, perhaps because weighting the first letter seems to give priority to the auto over the rest, or perhaps the font isn’t right for a word of this magnitude. Hopefully autotechnogeoglyphics will appear enough to find its fit for font and scale, and hopefully it will also find and share new words that similarly sing.

Blogs at the UF Libraries

Laurie N. Taylor April 27th, 2008

The UF Libraries now have a multi-user install of WordPress (known as WordPress MU). The blogs that the Libraries have been using externally from various other sites, including this one, are now being centralized for ease and improved communication. Blogs at the UF Libraries are here: http://blogs.uflib.ufl.edu.

The Blogroll for the main blog includes only the blogs at the UF Libraries, so the first page is an easy entry into the rest of blogs. Right now, many of the blogs are still being pulled in and other non-blog areas of the Libraries are being tested for reformatting  as blogs. After all, blogs are great for any chronological style information site and for sites that are heavily populated by events, dates, and other happenings.  This blog will likely remain here. It may become a more personal-professional chronicle of my work (which is unlikely given that my information addiction makes the professional the personal so the two aren’t really separable); or I may simply clone the blog so that it’s easily accessible in either area (more likely); or the other blog may host the day-to-day technical update blog and this may stay as it is for my reflections; or I may pursue some blend of the possible options.

PS Magazine online, at VCU (and UF)!

Laurie N. Taylor April 23rd, 2008

VCU Libraries have announced a full digital run of Will Eisner’s work on PS* Preventive Maintenance Magazine! Here’s their press release:

psmagazinecoverVCU Libraries is honored to present these rare examples of the incomparable art work of the late Will Eisner. In an effort to encourage soldiers to keep better care of their equipment, the US Army hired Eisner’s American Visuals Corporation to do a digest-sized publication focusing on preventive maintenance. Each issue consisted of a color comic book style cover; eight pages of four color comic continuity story in the middle; and a wealth of technical, safety, and policy information printed in two color. Eisner drew and was artistic editor for PS Magazine from its inception in 1951 until 1972. Presented here are complete scans for 145 regular issues, 3 special issues, and 14 index issues.

The University of Florida just finished scanning our issues of PS, and we have them all openly online as well. UF has far fewer issues, and we were scanning them in hopes of soon partnering with other institutions to locate and digitize the other volumes, so it’s all the more wonderful that VCU both had all of the issues and was able to scan them and add them to an open access Digital Collection. In doing so, it lays an even stronger foundation for other projects involving comics. PS is especially important because these early issues were well read, well loved, and well used. They’re excellent sources for any study of visual rhetoric, technical writing, literature, media studies, the military, American culture, and more. Will Eisner is the father of the modern graphic novel, popularizing the term and showing what it could be, and his work in all fields is so relevant and so important that it’s essential to have access to materials like PS. Hopefully, we’ll continue to see more great materials go online like VCU’s complete run of Will Eisner’s PS.

SPARC-ACRL Forum addresses Harvard open access policy

Laurie N. Taylor April 23rd, 2008

Washington, DC & CHICAGO ­ April 22, 2008 ­ SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) announce that the SPARC-ACRL Forum during the 2008 American Library Annual Conference in Anaheim, Calif., will provide a timely look at Campus Open Access Policies: The Harvard Experience and How to Get There. Co-sponsored by the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services up-close look at the recent vote by Harvard¹s Faculty of Arts and Sciences enabling open access to their scholarly articles in an institutional repository.The Harvard vote grants the university the rights necessary to archive and make freely available on the Internet articles written by Arts and Sciences faculty members. It is the first time the faculty of a U.S. university has voted for an open access directive and the first time a faculty has granted permission to the university to make its articles available through open access.

The forum will offer an exploration of the motivations behind the Harvard policy, the groundwork invested in its creation, reactions and outcomes to date, and the broader implications of this historic step. Headlining the event will be Stuart M. Shieber, professor of computer science at Harvard, director of the Center for Research on Computation and Society, faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the key architect of the policy.

Shieber will be joined by Catherine Candee, executive director, Strategic Publishing and Broadcast Initiatives, from the office of the president of the University of California, who will relate similar activity in the UC system; and by Kevin L. Smith, JD, scholarly communications officer at Duke University, who will suggest legal considerations for institutions following the open access policy path.

The 17th biennial SPARC-ACRL Forum will be held from 4 ­ 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 28, in room 210 A-C of the Anaheim Convention Center. The ACRL Scholarly Communications Discussion Group will additionally host an open conversation about issues that surface at the Forum from 4 ­ 5:30 p.m. on Sunday, June 29, in room 203 B. Please consult the final program to verify room assignments.

The Forum will be available via SPARC podcast at a later date. For more information, visit the SPARC Web site.

LibX: Browser Plugins for Libraries

Laurie N. Taylor April 22nd, 2008

LibX is a browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer that provides direct access to your library’s resources. It’s an Open Source framework from which editions for specific libraries can be built. Currently, 330 academic and public libraries have created public LibX editions, and UF is one of them.

The toolbar is wonderful because it allows searching of the Library’s catalog from the browser without navigating to the UF Libraries page. That’s one minor plus, but then it also adds the UF icon to WebPages with book identifiers (Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, or other booksellers) so that when searching for a book in Amazon, it’s only once click to see if the Libraries have the book. The toolbar allows you to search the catalog, UF Digital Collections, databases, for articles, and through Google Scholar and UF’s Research Gateway.

There are many major bonuses, but one is the ability to reload a page using the Library Proxy. No longer will you have to return to the library page and search for an article after searching the web from off campus and finding an article you want. Now, you can simply reload the journal page with the proxy to have full access!

Read more about it here or on the Libraries website to see related tools as well.

100,000 pages a month

Laurie N. Taylor April 20th, 2008

The University of Florida Digital Collections are still relatively young, established separately only recently. Since March 23 of this year, we’ve added another 100,000 pages, up from 1.62 million on March 23 and now we’re at 1.718 million (and counting) and it’s only April 20. The full stats–as of today–are: 53,682 titles; 70,323 items; and 1,718,050 pages. Our statistics are dynamically updated, listed online here, and the statistics are broken down by collection.

The statistics are a handy gauge of how our collections are developing, but they can’t reflect the quality of materials online. For reflecting a more complete sense of the materials online, new items are shown on a regular (daily to every few days) on the “browse new items” view, available here and dynamically updated with new items.

Darwin Online

Laurie N. Taylor April 18th, 2008

The complete works of Charles Darwin are now online in one place, appropriately named “Charles Darwin: the Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online.” This one place includes:

Darwin’s complete publications, thousands of handwritten manuscripts and the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue ever published; also hundreds of supplementary works: biographies, obituaries, reviews, reference works and more.

This work is related to the “Darwin Correspondence Project,” which includes over has over 5,000 letters online and is working to locate as many letters as possible and to make them all available, and they’ve found around 14,500 already. Locating, collecting, and digitizing all of this material is wonderful and projects like this are amazing for their contents and for their structure which gives users an easy way into the materials.

It’s always exciting to see excellent projects like this, and the University of Florida even has a few connections because of our work in digitizing works related to the reception of Charles Darwin’s work in the comic magazine Fun (a contemporary to Punch).

Response to Darwin in Fun Magazine

A Story of Stops

Laurie N. Taylor April 11th, 2008

A story of stops The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature has many amazing materials, but I’ve never before seen one quite like A Story of Stops. The book itself is wonderfully illustrated, so wonderfully in fact that I haven’t yet read it. I can’t get over the idea of a “story of stops,” written in 1891 for children. A “story of stops” for children or all ages now could be many things–a story of missed messages and miscommunications (stops in communication, stops in transmission, especially with telegraphs), travel and adventure stories (stops along a train route, or an exploration), and so much more. But a “story of stops” in 1891? I almost don’t want to read it and want to instead imagine what it could be.

The subject terms only encourage me further:

Children — Juvenile fiction. — Conduct of life
Conduct of life — Juvenile fiction.
Adventure and adventurers — Juvenile fiction.
Voyages and travels — Juvenile fiction.
Goblins — Juvenile fiction.
Billiards — Juvenile fiction.
Twins — Juvenile fiction.
Friendship — Juvenile fiction.
Sisters — Juvenile fiction.
Bldn — 1891.

A Story of Stops is available for all online, from those wanting to read the story or those simply wanting to explore the many possibilities of the story. A Story of Stops was written by Mrs. Davidson of Tulloch, and a Google search explains that Mrs. Davidson is Gwendoline Davidson, and that she also wrote “Kitten Goblins,” which I can’t wait to see.

Pamphlets from the French Revolution

Laurie N. Taylor April 10th, 2008

00001thm.jpgThe University of Florida has a collection of French Revolutionary pamphlets and a small few have been digitized and are now loading online. The full collection is quite large, and one of the digital collection items is a list of all of the pamphlets. It’s wonderful to see these materials online because having them online allows people to see what they are and to use them. The list of pamphlets is helpful on a basic level, like so many bibliographies and lists of holdings, but being able to see and use materials is exponentially better than only knowing that an archive has an object.

Law and Life, with Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates and Caribbean Law

Laurie N. Taylor April 7th, 2008

Proclamation par Toussaint Louverture, General en Chef de l’armee de Saint-Domingue, aux Administrations Municipales de la Colonie et a ses ConcitoyenThe Digital Library Center has been working on getting legal materials online for the Caribbean and from other areas in our collections. Most recently, we’ve added to our law collection with Hansard’s British Parliamentary Debates, which are one of the best sources of the political record for the United Kingdom [1803-1891]. We’re almost done digitizing the 2nd series [1820-1830, 25 volumes] of the Debates, and later projects will digitize the rest provided they’re still in need. The University of Southampton is also working on Parliamentary Publications and related materials.

In addition to Hansard’s, the University of Florida Digital Collections includes Florida Law, with publications from the Florida House of Representatives and Florida Water Law, a cooperative project to develop and maintain a history of water management in Florida.

The Digital Collections also include law and legal materials from many Caribbean countries and organizations:

Along with the legal materials for the Caribbean, the Digital Library of the Caribbean includes newspapers (with historical newspapers like The Mid-Ocean from Hamilton, Bermuda in 1899, more recent news with Unite published in English and French from the Haitian Unity Council and the Dominica Star, and recent newspapers as well), audio, video, and all sorts of other materials like Annales du Conseil Souverain de la Martinique (Annals of the Sovereign Council of Martinique) and Nouvelliste, a daily journal for Haitian commercial, agricultural, and literary information.

Even with all of these materials, we’re actively much, much more including British Caribbean materials for countries when they were British Colonies. As we load more materials, it’s really interesting to see how the law is influenced by and impacts everyday life in the newspapers and art in the literature of the time and after.

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