Digital Library Center Blog | UF

Laurie N. Taylor May 18th, 2008

Comics studies and comics collections continue to grow, and now there’s more great news. Ohio State University’s Cartoon Research Library is acquiring the International Museum of Cartoon Art’s collection. Currently, OSU’s gallery space is small (or so this article says–I haven’t been lucky enough to see it yet, but it’s on my list of places to go as soon as I can) so OSU’s Cartoon Research Library is planning a larger gallery space to display more of their already excellent, and now growing, collection. This is great news for comics studies as a whole–it means more resources will be available in a centralized and organized place–and it means that the International Museum of Cartoon Art’s materials will again be available and in a place with lots of human, institutional, and printed friends. This is also great news for OSU and the International Museum of Cartoon Art because it will allow them to more easily continue their work in comic studies together.

• exhibit , museum , comics , Academia , Library
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Laurie N. Taylor May 16th, 2008

The University of Florida Digital Collections have a number of collaborative partnerships with the Digital Library of the Caribbean, the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, and other projects. One of our local partners is the Matheson Museum. The picture above comes from one of their photograph collections, the E. H. Bone Collection, and many other photos are in the Matheson Museum and in the University Archives, so this is a great partnership to help preserve the history of the Gainesville, Florida area and to preserve the early history of the University of Florida while also showing how the town and school developed together. This particular picture seems like a great image for a Friday Gainesville’s quirky side.

• matheson , gainesville , digital collections , partners , museum , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor May 9th, 2008

Well, our infrastructural updates went faster than expected thanks to Mark putting in long hours for several days, but we’re now loading again. Right now, we’re sitting at 1,804,535 pages, from 54,260 titles and 71,597 items, and counting. Plus, these can now all be viewed within the slightly updated interface (with tabs for views and additional collection-based pages) and within the better overall structure with optimized code for speed, accessibility, and interoperability.

• ufdc , digital collections , uf , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor May 8th, 2008

In order to simplify our internal systems through a complete overhaul, we won’t be loading any items for the next week. A week from now, users will notice subtle, yet significant changes in terms of the overall design and in terms of speed. Most of the changes appear small, but they’re all part of the optimization process which will greatly enhance the infrastructure supporting the Digital Collections, stripping out additional code, enhancing system memory usage, and speeding and cleaning the whole process for human users and robots for search engine indexing.

While we’re completing this process, we won’t be loading any items, but as soon as we’re done, the many new items we’re processing will start to load and there are a lot. We’re already sitting at 1,797,881 so we will hit the 2 million mark rather soon. Don’t be dismayed while we’re holding for the next week. In the meantime, check out the many wonderful materials we have online, like the image above, which comes from the digital Archive of the Rossica Society, a world-wide society devoted to all aspects of Russian philately, from the pre-stamp days of Imperial Russia to current post-Soviet philately.

• stamps , uf , Academia , Library , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor May 8th, 2008

The second annual ALA TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium will take place on November 2-4, 2008, in Oak Brook, IL (a western suburb of Chicago). The website has preliminary information about registration, the location, keynote speakers, and the Call for Presenters. The call is for all libraries doing innovative work with gaming and games studies in relation to libraries. The deadline is June 15, 2008, and they’ll respond by July 1–this sounds like a great conference, with an upcoming deadline, so don’t miss it!

• cfp , games
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Laurie N. Taylor May 7th, 2008

The Webby Award winners and nominees for 2008 are out and one of the nominees was “The Calligraphic World of Mi Fu’s Art” from the National Palace Museum, and it’s on calligraphy. UF’s Digital Collections don’t have as much related material as we’d like (but we’re digitizing 100,000 pages a month so we’ll get there), but we do have the 24-volume set of “Qin ding xi Qing gu jian” and we made a few pages into a Flash flipbook to help display the beauty of the volumes.

Jane Pen has been instrumental in getting “Qin ding xi Qing gu jian” digitized and she’ll be visiting Taiwan this May 24-31, and meeting with the library at Tamkang University. Hopefully this will lead to more partnerships with libraries and museums, especially with so many museums in Taiwan are actively involved in digitization projects.

“The Calligraphic World of Mi Fu’s Art” is an excellent site because it does something that couldn’t easily be done without the technologies it uses. For many of the other Webby Award sites this is also true, but many others are aesthetically pleasing first and then accessible second or not at all. For some sites like the National Palace Museum’s site tools to recognize calligraphy or handwriting akin to Optical Character Recognition simply aren’t yet available at the level they’re needed to make the site as accessible as possible, but the site still has a great deal of other accessible information. In the meantime, “The Calligraphic World of Mi Fu’s Art” is a beautiful site and one that will hopefully be enriched even further in the near future with new technologies.

• flipbook , calligraphy , flash , archives , exhibit , museum
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Laurie N. Taylor May 5th, 2008

I just saw this announcement and it’s great news, so I’m sharing! Open Access has done so much and has so much to, so more support is always wonderful.

Open Access Directory: A wiki to organize information about the open access movement

Boston, April 30, 2008. Peter Suber and Robin Peek have launched the Open Access Directory (OAD), a wiki where the open access community can create and maintain simple factual lists about open access to science and scholarship. Suber, a Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Peek, an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, conceived the project in order to collect OA-related lists for one-stop reference and searching.

The wiki will start operating with about half a dozen lists –for example, conferences devoted to open access, discussion forums devoted to open access, and journal “declarations of independence”– and add more over time.

The goal is to harness the knowledge and energy of the open access community itself to enlarge and correct the lists. A list on a wiki, revised continuously by its users, can be more comprehensive and up to date than the same list maintained by an individual. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD will make it easier for users, especially newcomers, to discover them and use them for reference. The easier they are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can spread useful, accurate information about open access.

The URL for the Open Access Directory is http://oad.simmons.edu

To contact us, email Athanasia Pontika, the Assistant Editor (OAD.contact@gmail.com), or the Editorial Board (OAD.editors@gmail.com).

The wiki is represented by an editorial board consisting of prominent figures in the open access movement. The Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at Simmons College hosts and provides technical support to the OAD. http://www.simmons.edu/gslis/

• open access , Academia
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Laurie N. Taylor May 3rd, 2008

Quintura offers a tag cloud-style visual search for websites, which is below. It looks really nice, so hopefully it works for all the folks who’ve been looking for something like it. Right now I’ll be testing, but it does look nice and useful so here’s hoping.

• visualization , web 2.0 , design
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Laurie N. Taylor May 1st, 2008

We’ve updated our Flickr images! We’re still working on adding in an auto-load to Flickr which should be simple, but we need some controls on it so bandwidth and server space aren’t issues and so that we load in a systematic manner. Right now, it’s just loading to have another venue for access and one that we’ll continue to build in the future.

The updated photos are old black and white images of campus. We still need to add the labels for these, so hopefully Flickr users could help us on some of these. I’m interested to see if users label these buildings before we have time to, and which buildings get labeled or commented on and what types of comments are posted. Check out our Flickr pages, and label a few if you know what they are!

Also, subscribe to our feed to know when new images are loaded.

www.flickr.com Go to University of Florida Digital Collections’ photostream

• flickr , campus , photos , uf
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Laurie N. Taylor April 30th, 2008

In the next few months, folks from the Digital Library Center will be traveling to meet with some of our partners, and to meet new friends. Our upcoming travel includes:

• May 8: Erich Kesse (director), Mark Sullivan (programmer), and Brooke Wooldridge (dLOC Coordinator, from Florida International University) are going to Washington, DC to meet with the World Digital Library based at the Library of Congress about the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC)
• May 11-14: Erich, Brooke, and Mark are off to meet with the US Embassy in Haiti and the National Archives in Haiti about the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and establishing a digitization center in Haiti
• May 14-18: Mark joins Brooke to travel to Guyana to meet with CARICOM
• May 24-31: Jane Pen (Metadata & Quality Control) is visiting Taiwan and will be meeting with the library at Tamkang University (淡江大學).
• June 26-July 2: Laurie Taylor (Digital Projects Librarian) will be going to the American Library Association Conference in Anaheim, California where she’s hoping to see the Disney Archives and to find a partner for the comics collection and the Barks’ materials

We’ll probably have other meetings and explorations in the near future, so let us know if you’ll be in the same area and would like to meet for coffee and great conversation about digital projects.

• partners , caribbean , dloc , friends
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