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In: archives, Collection Items, Digital Library

The 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.Read More →

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In: Collection Items, exhibit

Meridian International center is hosting an exhibition, Jam Session: America’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World, on Thursday, April 3, 2008. The exhibition will feature photographs and documents drawn from archives around the country. The brochure cover image, shown above, includes Dizzy Gillespie’s horn from a Cuban magazine, held at the University of Florida and scanned for especially for Jam Session. Unfortunately, the magazine is under copyright so we couldn’t put it online, but the Jam Session exhibit will be filled with many important items not online, but far too wonderful to miss. The exhibit: chronicles the tours of American jazz legends as they traveled theRead More →

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In: archives, Collection Items, Library

The Association of Research Libraries recently released a new book, Celebrating Research. The book includes UF’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, among many others as a compendium is a sampling of the remarkable abundance of collections available for use in the member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). It is not a comprehensive view or a directory but instead an array of profiles that exemplify a spectrum of rare and special collections in research libraries. Special collections have been broadly construed to encompass the distinctive, the rare and unique, emerging media, born-digital, digitized materials, uncommon, non-standard, primary, and heritage materials. (“Preface”) WhileRead More →

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In: Collection Items, Digital Library

Books based on Girl and Boy Scouts have grown popular recently with the release of The Daring Book for Girls and The Dangerous Book for Boys. Complementing those scout-style guides are the actual Scout materials, like the Eagle Scout Book of Gold from which the page above comes. This wonderful artifact, the Eagle Scout Book of Gold is from the Alachua County Public Library’s Heritage Collection. The book shows Eagle Scouts in Gainesville, Florida from 1941-1965 (the cover says it only goes until 1955, but the contents cover through 1965). The pictures of each of the Scouts and their short letters on what becoming anRead More →

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In: Academia, archives, Collection Items, Library, UF, video

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 theseRead More →

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In: archives, Collection Items, Library, objects

The Gainesville Sun has an article on the Sanborn Maps of Florida. The maps in public domain (prior to 1923) are online in UF’s Digital Collections and the Map Library–which houses all sorts of fabulous antique, literary, flood, and other maps–holds the rest. The Map Library is a treasure trove of wonderful, playful materials and this page lists some of the main categories for all of the wonders. The image to the left is from one of those wonders.Read More →

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In: Collection Items, Commons, Digital Library, museum

Like the Library of Congress, the National Museum of Health and Medicine has also been exploring using Flickr to share images. The images are great and include historical photos and documents. Some, like the Malaria Joe comic are humorous images from their eras, but some of the photos are strikingly beautiful, painful, haunting, and inspiring snapshots of life, offering glimpses into their time and into people’s lives. Everyone should be able to wander through these images, and it’s an amazing gift to have them online for us to see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/99129398@N00 http://www.flickr.com/photos/7438870@N04 http://www.flickr.com/photos/22719239@N04Read More →

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In: Collection Items, Digital Library, games, geocaching, objects, play

Augment or alternative reality games combine the digital and the physical to create innovative and interactive games. Notable examples could include geocaching games, and games where players decode information on websites to find information on other websites, call or email the “decrypted” phone numbers or email addresses, or any one of many other activities based on the information learned from the digital site. The real play of ARGs comes through in the back-and-forth from digital to non-digital and in the gaming communities these types of games create. While I’m familiar with ARGs from game studies, it seems like some library and archival materials almost invokeRead More →

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In: book arts, Collection Items, design, exhibit, materiality, objects

The Digital Library has been experimenting with pop-up and movable books, in part to abstract methods for working with movables into optimum ways for representing books as textual objects. One of the projects that came of the work with pop-ups is this version of a Cinderella Panoramic Book. We’re also looking at a Flash page flipper for some of the scrapbooks and other flip-like books. We’ll be working to create files and then reconstruct the Flash page-flipping in Open Laszlo (so we can migrate it forward in DHTML and in Flash as the versions change).Read More →