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In: design, digital collections, Digital Library, UFDC, web 2.0

37Signals’ blog recently featured a discussion of path vs hierarchical navigation. As many of the commentators noted, hierarchies and paths both have their uses and a mixture of both based on need and site are often useful. For many websites, creating paths is a relatively straightforward process. For UF’s Digital Collections, we create paths by allowing users to sort their results and to link to similar from the results, but most notably by organizing all of the collections into thematic collections (historical children’s literature, newspapers, Florida photographs) and by providing starting points into more manageable sub-collections through these groupings. We also create direct links fromRead More →

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In: archives, education, preservation

The Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) has created an online preservation class, “Preservation 101: Preservation Basics for Paper and Media Collections”. “Preservation 101” covers the basics of preservation for small and moderately-sized collections, for the preservation of paper collections and related formats (which includes film and electronic media and glass slides). The course homepage explains “Learn how to identify deteriorated materials, how to properly care for collections, and how to set priorities for preservation.” This is a wonderful service for all libraries, museums, archives, and personal collectors because it advocates for the value of learning about and supporting preservation, while also supporting others in preservation.Read More →

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In: Academia, comics, exhibit, Library, museum

Comics studies and comics collections continue to grow, and now there’s more great news. Ohio State University’s Cartoon Research Library is acquiring the International Museum of Cartoon Art’s collection. Currently, OSU’s gallery space is small (or so this article says–I haven’t been lucky enough to see it yet, but it’s on my list of places to go as soon as I can) so OSU’s Cartoon Research Library is planning a larger gallery space to display more of their already excellent, and now growing, collection. This is great news for comics studies as a whole–it means more resources will be available in a centralized and organizedRead More →

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In: digital collections, Digital Library, gainesville, matheson, museum, partners

The University of Florida Digital Collections have a number of collaborative partnerships with the Digital Library of the Caribbean, the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, and other projects. One of our local partners is the Matheson Museum. The picture above comes from one of their photograph collections, the E. H. Bone Collection, and many other photos are in the Matheson Museum and in the University Archives, so this is a great partnership to help preserve the history of the Gainesville, Florida area and to preserve the early history of the University of Florida while also showing how the town and school developed together. This particular pictureRead More →

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In: digital collections, Digital Library, UF, UFDC

Well, our infrastructural updates went faster than expected thanks to Mark putting in long hours for several days, but we’re now loading again. Right now, we’re sitting at 1,804,535 pages, from 54,260 titles and 71,597 items, and counting. Plus, these can now all be viewed within the slightly updated interface (with tabs for views and additional collection-based pages) and within the better overall structure with optimized code for speed, accessibility, and interoperability.Read More →

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In: Academia, Digital Library, Library, stamps, UF

In order to simplify our internal systems through a complete overhaul, we won’t be loading any items for the next week. A week from now, users will notice subtle, yet significant changes in terms of the overall design and in terms of speed. Most of the changes appear small, but they’re all part of the optimization process which will greatly enhance the infrastructure supporting the Digital Collections, stripping out additional code, enhancing system memory usage, and speeding and cleaning the whole process for human users and robots for search engine indexing. While we’re completing this process, we won’t be loading any items, but as soonRead More →

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In: cfp, games

The second annual ALA TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium will take place on November 2-4, 2008, in Oak Brook, IL (a western suburb of Chicago). The website has preliminary information about registration, the location, keynote speakers, and the Call for Presenters. The call is for all libraries doing innovative work with gaming and games studies in relation to libraries. The deadline is June 15, 2008, and they’ll respond by July 1–this sounds like a great conference, with an upcoming deadline, so don’t miss it!Read More →

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In: archives, calligraphy, exhibit, flash, flipbook, museum

The Webby Award winners and nominees for 2008 are out and one of the nominees was “The Calligraphic World of Mi Fu’s Art” from the National Palace Museum, and it’s on calligraphy. UF’s Digital Collections don’t have as much related material as we’d like (but we’re digitizing 100,000 pages a month so we’ll get there), but we do have the 24-volume set of “Qin ding xi Qing gu jian” and we made a few pages into a Flash flipbook to help display the beauty of the volumes. Jane Pen has been instrumental in getting “Qin ding xi Qing gu jian” digitized and she’ll be visitingRead More →

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In: Academia, open access

I just saw this announcement and it’s great news, so I’m sharing! Open Access has done so much and has so much to, so more support is always wonderful. Open Access Directory: A wiki to organize information about the open access movement Boston, April 30, 2008. Peter Suber and Robin Peek have launched the Open Access Directory (OAD), a wiki where the open access community can create and maintain simple factual lists about open access to science and scholarship. Suber, a Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Peek, an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, conceived the project inRead More →