The UF Digital Collections include many, many rich collections, including the University Archives Photograph Collection. One of the more exciting recent uses of the collection has been in rephotography like that done by Pam Marlin: While evocative and powerful, rephotography isn’t always easy or fast in  terms of time for setup to get the correct angle for a new photo. Historypin.com has an app that makes this process simpler. There are probably many apps and tools for rephotography, but I’m most familiar with Historypin because images from the University Archives Photograph Collection in the UF Digital Collections have been loaded there. This page shows many ofRead More →

The University of Virginia Libraries has announced the launch of “Spatial Humanities,” a community-driven resource for place-based digital scholarship: http://spatial.scholarslab.org/ The site was developed in response to needs identified by faculty and the site includes: an evolving, crowdsourced catalog of research resources, projects, and organizations a set of framing essays on the spatial turn across the disciplines by Dr. Jo Guldi of the Harvard Society of Fellows GIS-related feeds from Q&A sites and other forms of social media a peer-reviewed, occasional publication for step-by-step tutorials in spatial tools and methods UVa is inviting everyone to participate: use Zotero to freely upload research citations, projects, andRead More →

Not only does the new interface for the Florida Aerial Photography Digital Collection support searching using the Google Map interface (complete with drag and drop pins for search refinement), it also supports searching by address. If that weren’t enough, Mark Sullivan (UF Digital Collections and Digital Library Center Programmer) now has the location circled on the images. Drawing something on the images may seem easy, but it isn’t. Drawing on a normal image is easy – image size, where to draw, calculate, etc.  The images in the Florida Aerial Photography Digital Collection are being delivered by a JPEG2000 server. The server allows people to selectRead More →

The UF Digital Collections now has a new map interface. It’s only out in beta right now, but it’s already awesome. The new map interface is explained here and active in beta here. The new interface allows users to: Search by address Search by selecting a point on a map Search by selecting an area on a map The new interface is for the Florida historical aerial photographs, which people often use to find information on land use for a small area. The aerials are taken in flight lines, and so they cover large areas. To make them usable in the ideal manner, people needRead More →

The UF Digital Collections (UFDC) have grown so dramatically that we critically need more resources to both promote and explain the many materials and their use. As of November 1, UFDC includes over 2.79 million pages. This means we’ve added 1.79 million pages in 13 months. Our existing training materials, tutorials, and help pages haven’t been able to keep up with the variety and quantity of materials, nor with documenting and explaining the other technical improvements we’ve implemented. We’re working on making online tutorials that will explain the basics of using UFDC and that will highlight a few of the largest collections. While we’re activelyRead More →

The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) now include a “Map It” feature! With the “Map It” option, all items with geographic information are now displayed on a map using the Google Maps API. For instance, users can now see this photo of Gainesville mapped by clicking on the “Map It” tab, which shows a Google Map view of the photo’s location with a placemark. See the Citadelle Henri Christophe in Haiti, and then see the satellite imagery map for it, which still clearly shows the structure, along with the surrounding area! In case the maps aren’t exciting enough, UFDC also allows displays Flash filesRead More →

Last week, UC Santa Barbara announced that they received a massive collection of aerial photography, valued at $14.3 Million, from Pacific Western Aerial Surveys of Santa Barbara. The collection includes more than 500,000 aerial images of 65 major metropolitan areas in the United States at the turn of the 21st Century (1999-2002). This is really amazing, especially so because UCSB Map & Imagery Library is home to the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL), so these materials will be preserved and accessible in the future.Read More →

The Florida Humanities Council has funded a project by the University of West Florida (and involving the University of South Florida and the University of Florida according to the The Gainesville Sun article) to create podcasts about historic Florida. The project will create these “Pastcasts” (I love the name!) for historic Florida towns and the programs will be available for download from the Florida Humanities Council website. I’m excited to hear all of the programs, but most excited to hear the Pastcasts for Alachua County, and to hear the rest with an eye on ways to connect them to the photos, maps, and other materialsRead More →