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In: Digital Library, interface, Library, preservation

Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Library of Babel” told of a fictional library with every possible book. Within the vast library, all useful books and books of gibberish would be included together putting the process of finding information into a desperate state. The rise in digital archives without a corresponding rise in organizational structures could lead to a “Servers of Babel” scenario, at least for awhile, when we’re archiving 27 exabytes (27,000 petabytes, or 27 billion gigabytes) of data in the next two years. Finding new ways to organize and create useful means for accessing this information–and finding ways to preserve decaying, deprecated, andRead More →

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In: interface, museum, objects, play, video

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth is now on YouTube. Since there’s so much in terms of historical footage and in terms of history within that footage, I’m excited to see what this will mean for museums and historical materials. The Queen is on YouTube on The Royal Channel: The Official Channel of the British Monarchy. While many official organizations – political, governmental, and other – have released videos through museums and libraries, it’s interesting to see those materials being added into the regular-user interfaces where people can stumbled across them through the official-and-popular format. Seeing historical footage like “Roses for the Rose Queen” are interesting in themselvesRead More →

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In: Academia, Commons, open access

The technology and popular culture criticism blog Boing Boing had a recent post on search rankings. It mentions that five years ago, a bet was made that blogs would rank higher than the New York Times website. This indeed came true, largely because the New York Times chose to restrict their content through a signup and paid subscriptions rather than to make the information free. Now, the New York Times has changed their methods and made their site open, but they’ve already lost out on the advertising revenue and on the reputation value for being a free information source. In an online environment, information thatRead More →

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In: book arts, Collection Items, design, exhibit, materiality, objects

The Digital Library has been experimenting with pop-up and movable books, in part to abstract methods for working with movables into optimum ways for representing books as textual objects. One of the projects that came of the work with pop-ups is this version of a Cinderella Panoramic Book. We’re also looking at a Flash page flipper for some of the scrapbooks and other flip-like books. We’ll be working to create files and then reconstruct the Flash page-flipping in Open Laszlo (so we can migrate it forward in DHTML and in Flash as the versions change).Read More →

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In: Collection Items, comics, Digital Library, imagetext

The Comics Digital Collection is slowly building, and the scans of the Imagerie d’Epinal broadsheets will soon be online. While they’re still processing, they’re also online within Picasa so that others can see them even if only the smaller versions. It’s great to have rare materials added online so that others can use them and it’s even better knowing that these are only some of the many materials being added. These pictorial broadsheets known as the Imagerie d’Epinal sheets told simple tales and were made by the Imagerie Pellerin of France, and then reprinted by the Humoristic Publishing Co. in Kansas, Missouri. These are theRead More →

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In: Digital Library, games, Library, play

UF’s Libraries are testing different methods and uses of the library-buildings as third spaces (the not home and not work, where you go for social time and a break from the confines of home&work). This Thursday we’re testing Guitar Hero in Library West (third floor from 12-2pm). We’ve also set up a game section of our website for events like this and for game-like approaches to traditional library services. It’s fun for us to hone our skills and develop new ones through connecting games and the library, and games are an easy way to break traditional assumptions on what should and should not be inRead More →

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In: Commons, Library, open access, video

Matthew Daley and Chris McHale (along with other UF Library folks, and maybe others–I only know a couple of the people in the video so I’m not sure who everyone is) made an INFO ZOMBIES film for the SPARC Video Contest. Since the SPARC contest centers around information sharing, the idea of sharing information as a viral-need, like the Zombie urge to eat brains, is a nice, funny combination of information needs and zombies. It’s also neat to see a zombie-cure in the form of information. Zombies are always fun, especially when they’re INFO ZOMBIES!Read More →

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In: book arts, design, exhibit, museum

One of the more interesting new Web 2.0-style mashups are library and museum partnerships. Both have large collections that need to be interconnected and digitized for easier and expanded access. However, libraries have traditionally focused on information access and museums on exhibit-access with the display significant to the materials. As more special collections go online and more information in general, display and access are both becoming more important for libraries and museums. The image above is a shot from a SketchUp file of Gallery B in the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. This is just oneRead More →

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In: Collection Items, Digital Library, Library, preservation

In the 1970s Gainesville, Florida was home to many of the radical women of the Women’s Movement. Despite a rich web of activity and impact, much of this history is in danger of being lost or at least obscured by a lack-of-presence from current and accessible avenues. Luckily, researchers like Leila Adams are not only collecting the archival materials but also digitizing the materials to ensure preservation and access, thereby ensuring proper representation of the Women’s Movement. The Radical Women in Gainesville collection is rapidly growing and more materials will be added soon. As materials are added and slowly populate through the web, hopefully articlesRead More →