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In: archives, MARC

On the Open Library General Discussion List, Edward Betts recently posted that, while tidying author records in Open Library, he found 248 authors-as-spirits. Not unknown ghosts or muses, but the spirit of a particular person listed as a spirit. He included the examples below in the post and the full list on his website. $a Abraham $c (Spirit) $a Churchill, Winston $c Sir $d 1874-1965 $c (Spirit) $a Doyle, Arthur Conan $c Sir $d 1859-1930 $c (Spirit) $a Jesus Christ $c (Spirit) $a Shakespeare, William $d 1564-1616 $c (Spirit) For all those fascinated by dead (and undead) media, this is wonderfully rich. Not only doRead More →

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In: events, Library, UF

President Obama’s Presidential Inauguration can be viewed live on Tuesday on large screens–in addition to the many computer screens it will fill–at three of the UF Libraries: Library West in the InfoCommons (3rd floor) Education Library (limited seating) Large screen just outside the Journalism & Communications LibraryRead More →

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In: CRL, dloc, newspapers

In addition to the ongoing work by all partners that constantly adds new materials to the Digital Library of the Caribbean, the University of Florida is participating with the Center for Research Libraries’ (CRL) World Newspaper Archive. By participating, CRL will return copies of the digital files for the newspapers that will be digitized so that UF can include them the Digital Library of the Caribbean, so that these papers will always be freely and openly accessible for all! Under this program, the titles to be added to the Digital Library of the Caribbean will be (pre-1923 years only): Diario de la Marina Jornal doRead More →

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In: statistics, UFDC

We now have usage statistics for our collections as a whole and by collection! They’re online here in an Excel spreadsheet. Our overall usage stats, while good, are far smaller than they will be because so much of our content is recent (over a million pages since July alone) and because UFDC was forced to deny search engine robots entirely for several months in early 2008 because the search engines were behaving improperly and overly taxing the database. As expected, our most used collections are the oldest and largest, with the Baldwin, the Florida Newspaper Digital Library, and the Digital Library of the Caribbean. GivenRead More →

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In: Digital Library, processing

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 →

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In: access, findability, interlibraryloan, Library, open access

Before the Internet made information access faster and easier (and it continues to improve), libraries were already mass-sharing information through interlibrary loan. Interlibrary loan is such a simple concept–libraries share books with other libraries–but it was and continues to be carefully planned and implemented to ensure availability and access through cooperative collection plans, lists of records and methods for disseminating them (National Union Catalog, publishing bibliographies of what books were where), and agreements to make sure users know about the materials in order to request them. Thanks to interlibrary loan systems everywhere for making information available and accessible. Making information findable, available, and usable isRead More →

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In: archives, Baldwin, holiday, UFDC

After finding so many great New Year’s images, I quickly scanned the University of Florida Digital Collections for images of Christmas and found these. Santa’s mighty large book of naughty and nice is from a book in the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, one of the Special Collections in the University of Florida Libraries, and the black and white photograph is from the University Archives, another Special Collection in the University of Florida Libraries.Read More →

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In: Florida, history, news, newspapers

The Florida Digital Newspaper Library has grown enormously in the past year, adding 384,238 pages since July 1 for a grand total of 504,773 pages! Those many pages capture history in the making, including  New Year’s Day across the years and across Florida. Front-page news covers the then-current events, often including a New Year’s baby. For more news of the day, see the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, supported by the Smathers Libraries, which exists to provide free access to the news and history of Florida. The Florida Digital Newspaper Library ensures long-term digital preservation of Florida’s news, making the news available to everyone over theRead More →

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In: video, web 2.0, youtube

Well maybe not featured, but at least mentioned in the wiki for a graduate library science course (LIS 5313) at Florida State University. It’s great to get noticed, but it’s far better and more important to have that recognition become a resource that the UF Libraries and others can use in deciding and refining how to best use resources like YouTube to support existing projects and needs. The videos on the UF Libraries YouTube Channel are all available in the UF Digital Collections, but the UF Libraries’ YouTube Channel has links to friends in UF News Bureau and the USF Libraries, so it’s worth checkingRead More →