Happy Birthday to the UF Digital Collections (UFDC) and SobekCM, which is the system powering UFDC and so much more! UFDC and the beginnings of SobekCM started in March 2006. In February 2008, I wrote about UFDC turning 2. At that time, UFDC had “nearly 1.5 million pages.” Now, UFDC supports more than 300 digital collections and more than 7.6 million pages of open access to unique manuscripts and letters, antique maps, rare children’s literature books, theses and dissertations, newspapers, historic photographs, oral histories, audio and video, and so much more.  UFDC has grown in content, scope, and impact. Alongside UFDC, SobekCM has grown dramatically as well. SobekCM is the system poweringRead More →

The MARC Library (SobekCM) is a C# library that contains classes for working in memory with MARC records: This allows records to be read from MARCXML and MARC21 formats. Once in memory any field or subfield can be edited, added, or deleted. Then the record can be queried or saved again in either a MarcXML or Marc21 file format. Features Ability to read MARC records into memory from a Marc21 or MarcXML file or stream Ability to manipulate the MARC record in memory Ability to save the record to a Marc21 or MarcXML file (UPCOMING) Plan to add Z39.50 ability into this library The MARC Library (SobekCM) evolved out ofRead More →

The story below is from the most recent Library News from the UF Libraries for UF Faculty. NewspaperCat is powered and hosted within the UF Digital Collections (powered by SobekCM). This has been a great project for the UF Digital Collections to support because it was an active and valid use case for a record-only collection portal, which is often a wanted option for different research, teaching, and public service needs. There’s more in the story below and check out NewspaperCat to see it in action! Libraries create catalog of digital historical newspapers The Catalog of Digital Historical Newspapers (NewspaperCat) is available at www.newspapercat.org. NewspaperCatRead More →

The UF Digital Collections System, SobekCM, is always being enhanced to better meet user and internal needs. Normally the vast majority of time is spent on the user side because user support is the priority. With dozens of partners who use the online and locally installed tools to manage their digitization work and to contribute digitized items to the collaborative digital collections hosted on SobekCM, user support also includes many of the internal tools. Most recently, however, the very-internal users received a major boost in support through the addition of a tracking system within SobekCM. Before, we had a legacy tracking system that was riddledRead More →

We’ve frequently heard requests from internal users and patrons for a flipbook style view. In researching options, the Gnubook’s javascript-based page turner looked best and the Library of Congress came out with a clean implementation in October that was easy to emulate. Mark Sullivan, programmer for SobekCM, reviewed it and added the view in under a day. The new view is enabled within SobekCM so all collections, including the UF Digital Collections and the Digital Library of the Caribbean, have it enabled. The flipbook view is active for the entire Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Digital Collection and this is an example: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00089012/00001/pageturner TheRead More →

SobekCM – the system powering the UF Digital Collections, the Digital Library of the Caribbean, and many other rich collections – will soon have advanced support for finding guides in EAD. This has been in process as a complete solution for the full workflow and it’s nearing completion. Check out the EADs we’re testing with here. The benefits from fully supporting EAD within the same digital library system supporting digital objects is enormous: Finding guides can be displayed, searched, and used within the same system as the digital objects they reference (increases usability from consistent navigation, ease of searching a single system, additional benefits fromRead More →

Browse By Metadata (i.e., list of all publishers in an item aggregation) The UF Digital Collections (UFDC) have more new features. These are all in progress, as is the norm with the perpetual beta of growing and evolving systems, but the “Browse By” feature is already publicly viewable here for the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Digital Collection. This is still in process as we test to see how to be display so much rich metadata with significant distinctions, as when an author is also an editor and printer – should it all be collapsed into one, if so then should all types beRead More →

In addition to great added functionality like item-level statistics for external users, the UF Digital Collections‘ underlying SobekCM system is always improving in terms of internal infrastructure. One recent major enhancement is the “Directory” view. The Directory View is very important to ensure we can easily and quickly check and verify all files, including all metadata files, and locate, copy, and send any files per patron request. This was a very small technical change, with significant day-to-day operational benefits. In keeping with principles for smart design, the internal Directory View is built within the same external user views – ensuring that we trouble-shoot and verifyRead More →

Mark Sullivan, the UFDC/DLC/dLOC programmer, recently shared this information. It’s exciting to see that SobekCM (our digital asset management system, digital library system, and digital production tool set) is such a streamlined solution with so much functionality. There are seven projects which make up the SobekCM solution. In those projects, there are: 113,643 lines of code ( not comments or empty lines ) 23,452 lines of comments 420 files 60 folders 544 classes ( 55 abstract classes, 1 windows form, 5 ASPX pages ) 14 interfaces The main two projects are: 1) SobekCM_Bib_Package which has all the code to represent digital objects, read metadata, writeRead More →

The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) are always improving. Most of our current improvements at the moment are from moving servers to newer, more stable equipment (and making updates required from the server move). Despite the time that the server move requires, listed below are some of our recent and particularly great new enhancements to share! Facets The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) now has facets to help refine searches and browses by language, subject terms, and more. See this page for an example http://ufdcweb1.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc/?a=fdnl1&m=lbball Citation Links Key components of the citations for each item are now also linked for easy searching, as in this example. User ContributedRead More →