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In: dloc, gators, UFDC

The post below is by Paul Losch, from the UF Latin American Collection newsletter. Football season begins tomorrow and Gator fans may be interested to know that the UF football team visited Havana in December 1912, nearly 99 years ago. They went on a kind of informal athletic excursion that was relatively common before the modern system of post-season bowl games was instituted. Someone on that 1912 trip brought back some Cuban newspapers as souvenirs, and these ended up in the University Archives. The UF Digital Collections recently put them online as a small but valuable addition to the collection of historical newspapers already availableRead More →

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In: DigitalCuration, dloc, exhibit, UFDC

In April, Europeana announced that they would be releasing a number of additional online exhibits this year. They’ve already released quite a few including: From Dada to Surrealism Exhibition Live Yiddish Theatre in London Virtual Exhibition Live These are wonderful online exhibits on their own. It’s also wonderful to see Europeana’s dedication to supporting online exhibits because online exhibits allow people to see, use, and understand materials in new ways that enhance the experience with the online exhibit and the collections it draws upon. The process of creation online exhibits itself is also requires scholarly and creative work for the curation and design. The UFRead More →

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In: processing, SobekCM, statistics, tools, UFDC

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 →

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In: digitalhumanities, UFDC

The new FSU E-Science librarian visited UF recently. I mentioned this in conversation to a friend who hadn’t heard of E-Science. I explained it simply as the Science parallel to the Digital Humanities. In thinking this over later, it’s a very easy explanation for the Digital Humanities and is explained in various publications and presentations. However, I haven’t yet seen this explanation from a scientific venue. I’ll be discussing this with colleagues soon and these are my notes in thinking about the discussion. As ARL’s “E-Science and Data Support Services: A Study of ARL Member Institutions” defines E-Science as: those new methods that are large-scale,Read More →

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In: Baldwin, SobekCM, tools, UFDC

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 →

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In: preservation, processing, UFDC

The UF Libraries are collaborating with Flagler College on a two-year project to conserve and digitize the earliest architectural drawings of John Carrère and Thomas Hastings, designers of the Hotel Ponce de Leon and the Flagler Memorial Presbyterian Church in St. Augustine, Florida. All digitized materials will be openly available in the Carrère & Hastings Digital Collection, which is within the UF Digital Collections. During the project, keep up with the work in-process by project team members working at UF in Special Collections, Conservation, and the Digital Library Center on the project blog here.Read More →

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In: UFDC, usability

The URLs for the UF Digital Collections are now shorter and easier. The new programming, by Mark Sullivan, to support simplified URLs: Shortens the base URL for UFDC Prevents server names from showing (an ongoing issue during the major server move) Removes the need for the aggregation code type indicator (the a, c , g, or s to indicate the aggregation between the “?” and “=”) Removes the requirement for the aggregation query (which is “?=” and very confusing) Enables the ability to assign new, persistent names for aggregation codes With these now in place, the persistent URL displayed for the main collection pages haveRead More →

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In: design, SobekCM, technologies, UFDC

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 →

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In: statistics, UFDC

The UF Digital Collections (UFDC) greatly benefit from the statistical tracking of items, pages, and usage. Most recently, those statistics were augmented at the item level for easy item-level statistics for each and every item.  The item-level statistics, like all of the usage statistics for UFDC, are cleaned for robots and other automated systems to ensure that the usage is actual usage by humans and not simply machine checks. One of our favorite examples is a particular version of The 3 Little Kittens, which has been viewed over 15,000 times since it loaded in 2008.  The full item-level statistics for the item are shown inRead More →