September 22, 2008 Invitation to Participate in Caribbean Newspaper Digitization Project The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is issuing a call for partners in a new effort to ensure preservation of and increase access to newspapers in the Caribbean. Newspapers offer valuable information to researchers on a broad range of topics. Digitized newspapers with full text searching capabilities are revolutionizing the ability of scholars to discover information. Due to the natural tendency of newspapers to deteriorate more quickly over time than other resources, confounded by the climate in the Caribbean, digitization provides a mechanism to ensure that these valuable resources are available not onlyRead More →

The Alachua County Historic Trust: Matheson Museum, Inc. and the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries need help identifying historic photographs taken in Gainesville from 1920-1970. The photographs were taken by Elmer Harvey Bone and they’re all online within the Elmer Harvey Bone Collection here. The Elmer Harvey Bone Collection is particularly important to the Digital Library Center because the collection is shared between the Matheson Museum and the University Archives, and because our own Lourdes Santamaria-Wheeler chosen this collection for her graduate work in museum studies because of the way it connects traditional library and museum collections. The Gainesville Sun newspaper has anRead More →

The University of the Netherlands Antilles is hosting a Seminar for Libraries in the Dutch Caribbean this week and it will include a session on the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC). The full program is online, and Brooke Wooldridge (the dLOC Coordinator) and I will both be attending and we’re excited to share about dLOC and to further develop connections and representations of the Dutch Caribbean in dLOC. Currently, dLOC already includes a number of maps like the one here, travel books, and many other items related to the Dutch Caribbean with many more materials in process to be added. Please see the materialsRead More →

Yale is hiring for a Librarian for Digital Humanities Research and some of the job announcement information is below. The Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA) still has an opening for a Digital Services Librarian and they’re awesome and working at FCLA means working with UF (and we’re great too!). While the two positions are very different, all digital library positions include some level of digital humanities research because as more stuff goes online, it’s even easier to do more with it. While a few old maps, newspapers, and photos may not seem to be essential humanities materials aside from their particular area relevance, havingRead More →

Antonio Prohías is best known for creating MAD Magazine‘s Spy vs. Spy. Spy vs. Spy is immediately recognizable by any age group because of its amazing minimalist yet non-reductive portrayal of political conflict. It should come as no surprise that its creator Antonio Prohías honed his skills inking political cartoons for newspapers like El Avance Criollo. We found these cartoons thanks to Will Canova, the Digital Library Center’s newspaper digitization coordinator. Will was processing El Avance Criollo and, noticing the incredibly well styled political cartoons, quickly noted that these cartoons were done by none other than Spy vs. Spy’s creator Antonio Prohías. The University ofRead More →

UF’s Digital Library Center is currently loading more historic newspapers into UFDC (the University of Florida Digital Collections) and they look incredible! The newspaper here is The Weekly Miami Metropolis from June 26, 1908. Even though it’s over 100 years old, it’s one of the more recent issues from the historic papers being loaded. Like many of the historic papers, it features a political cartoon prominently on the first page. This and many other newspapers were digitized through the “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers” joint program by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress. I’m still only beginning to explore theseRead More →

I’ve stolen the title of this post from Shawn Rider’s article “Why Nintendo Gets It” because the title explains the whole point of this post and because of the parallels between Google and Nintendo. Nintendo gets it because they understand that games are about playability more so than technological innovation and because they understand that innovation can be  evolutionary or sustaining as well as disruptive. Evolutionary or sustaining innovations build incrementally on existing structures, but disruptive innovation changes the whole landscape. The 8-bit NES to the Super Nintendo was an evolutionary or sustaining innovation, largely technological, but that technology enabled longer and deeper games. TheRead More →

I haven’t been blogging as much lately, but it’s not because I don’t have much to share. The adage “still waters run deep” seems fitting for the University of Florida Digital Collections of late. In recent months, we’ve upgraded our infrastructure repeatedly and we continue to make progress on working through our digitized-yet-unprocessed materials and in working through the files in need of migration. One collection’s history perhaps speaks best to our current and ongoing efforts, as our Digital Library Center Director explained in 2000: “The Governor’s gift enables the creation and delivery of electronic library resources via the Internet in support of the UniversityRead More →

Washington, DC – August 28, 2008 – SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and Students for FreeCulture have jointly announced the first international Open Access Day. Building on the worldwide momentum toward Open Access to publicly funded research, Open Access Day will create a key opportunity for the higher education community and the general public to understand more clearly the opportunities of wider access and use of content. Open Access Day will invite researchers, educators, librarians, students, and the public to participate in live, worldwide broadcasts of events. In North America, events will be held at 7:00Read More →

This is another news release. Normally I don’t like to re-post news since it’s already handled by RSS feeds. However,  at the start of the University of Florida’s fall semester, there’s so much news with so many new people that it’s good to share to help get the word out through the clamor. The newness of the fall semester should start to quiet down in the next few weeks though. *** The Library Virtual Worlds Group at the University of Florida Libraries will be hosting a virtual lecture by Paul Fishwick, Professor of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the University of Florida, onRead More →