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In: Academia, Commons, Digital Library

I’m the digital projects librarian in the University of Florida’s Digital Library Center. This blog chronicles my work with the Digital Library Center. In the DLC, I get to digitize various materials including books, paintings, manuscripts, objects (like this biscuit), audio, and more. Digitizing materials is only part of my work, though. I’m largely working on projects to help people better access and use the collections, which includes writing lesson plans, grants, creating learning objects, creating mashups (like adding materials from the digital collections to Google Earth and Maps), and more.
Working in the Digital Library Center is fascinating and it’s not what many people would expect. While we’re digitizing materials and putting them online, it isn’t a fast or an easy process. We have all sorts of equipment and we work closely with Special Collections (rare books and amazing materials) and with Preservation (book binding, chemical additives to de-acidify and preserve materials, and all sorts of exciting tools, even some from the early 1900s).
The library work, materials, and tools are all fascinating, and the work helps build the information commons that helps everyone, including academia itself at a time when many people have lost sight of what higher education does–creates knowledge and adds that to the foundations of society, forever building more information for use by society. Digitizing materials, especially through things like the Institutional Repository, helps to make academia more visible (instead of existing as a powerful, but largely invisible force in terms of direct, significant impact).
As this blog begins to build, I hope it will become a space for discussion of digital libraries and digital media repositories in general. I’m also a game studies scholar, which is how I’m affiliated with Gameology, but I didn’t think all of the information I wanted to share would be relevant to games and even digital media studies. So, this is a separate blog for all of the exciting digital library happenings.