The UFDC usage stats are now online in great detail. The stats include overall, collections by date, items by date, collection history, items by collection, and definitions to sort out what all of this means. The items by collection is particularly interesting where you can see how many hits are on particular items, like this page for the Baldwin. Some collections, like the newspapers, are by title and issue, so I assumed the hits would skew to the first issue of any of the titles and they do in some cases, but in others the 157th issue is the most hit. We’re still interpreting theRead More →

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) issued a call for President Obama’s administration to support large-scale digitization initiatives. The brief call from the ARL Newsletter is online as is the full letter. As an addendum to to ARL’s call for “a large-scale initiative to digitize public domain collections,” let’s also make sure these initiatives include all holdings that are in the public domain in however many selected US institutions, including the millions upon millions of pages published in other countries and collected by the US. The US has so many collections that would benefit the US and so many collections that, if shared openly, wouldRead More →

Because so many people have PDFs that they’d like mounted online and because so many people want PDFs and because PDFs are imperfect for preservation, I’m looking for a free or inexpensive (for non-profit, public educational institutions) software solution to convert from PDF to TIFF and TIFF to PDF. I know ImageMagick will do this, but I need the PDFs-made-using-TIFFs-in-hand to be compressed and to have as few artifacts/problems as possible and I haven’t seen how to best do that with ImageMagick. For TIFFs-extracted-from-PDFs-in-hand, I need the extracted TIFFs to be settable as RGB or Grayscale, 300 dpi, no compression, and single page (so aRead More →

************(Press Release)************ The Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library is pleased to announce the availability of a new open access monograph, Economics and Usage of Digital Libraries: Byting the Bullet, edited by Wendy Pradt Lougee (University Librarian, University of Minnesota) and Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason (Arthur W. Burks Collegiate Professor of Information and Computer Science, School of Information, University of Michigan). In the late 1990’s, researchers and digital  library production staff at the University of Michigan collaborated on deploying the Pricing Economic Access to Knowledge project (PEAK), a full-scale production-quality digital access system to enable usage of content  from all of Elsevier’s (thenRead More →

LOC Press Release: The Library of Congress is among a dozen federal agencies launching an initiative to establish a common set of guidelines for digitizing historical materials. Basing its efforts on a combination of collaborative research and combined experience, the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative will address a variety of issues related to the complex activities involved in the digitization of cultural heritage items. Two working groups have been formed, one addressing content that can be captured in still images, the other involved with content categorizing sound, video, or motion-picture film. The initiative includes a just-launched Web site, www.digitizationguidelines.gov. The Federal Agencies Still Image DigitizationRead 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 →

The First Executive Director of the Open Content Alliance has been appointed and CIDE (Data Intensive Cyber Environments group) has joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science. These are two recent news releases that show the expanding happenings and possibilities for digital libraries, collections, and collaboration! *** Maura Marx Named First Executive Director of the Open Content Alliance The Internet Archive and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced today the appointment of Maura Marx as the first Executive Director of the Open Content Alliance (OCA). A search committee representing OCA member institutions made the appointment after anRead More →

The photos above are of our Digital Library Sign, and they’re now online in UFDC (which is harvestable by robots as UFDC2) and online in our Flickr account. These pictures are particularly nice because they include so many of the other images we’ve worked on over the years. It’s also nice to show off some of our office, most of which doesn’t show as well as our work, as shown through the boxes in the photo above, but our messy daily work leads to gorgeously finished materials available online.Read More →

The Library of Congress has loaded even more newspapers! The press release below has more information, and it’s great news! CONTENT UPDATED: 73,000 newspaper pages added – now includes papers published 1890-1910 and 2 new states – Nebraska and Texas On August 1, more than 73,000 newly digitized newspaper pages were added to the Chronicling America Web site at www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/, including content from 2 new states – Nebraska and Texas – and expanding coverage in the 1890s. With this update, the site now provides access to more than 642,000 digitized newspaper pages, published between 1890 and 1910, and representing 74 newspapers from California, the DistrictRead More →

I’ve been so busy the past year (or 14 months to be completely accurate) since joining UF’s Digital Library Center that it’s hard to see what all we’ve accomplished. The time has flown by with loads of wonderful work, and wonderful progress. I decided to review some of our documentation and to note a few of the highlights: More stuff! We hit the 1 million page mark in September 2007, and as of today we’re at 2.12 million with so many more to load! More types of stuff! Improvements to UFDC that include support for audio and video files, better multi-language support! Better ways toRead More →