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In: Academia, archives, Digital Library, dloc, Library, open access, preservation

In working on other projects, I stumbled across this poster on the Digital Library of the Caribbean from last year. The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) is a cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. All materials in dLOC are Open Access for everyone to see, but any rights remain with the owners or with the contributing partners. This is a great example of collaboration creating materials for all to use, while supporting the creators and their communities and nations. The digitized materials include Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections. TheRead More →

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In: Academia, archives, Collection Items, Library, UF, video

Some of UF’s video archives are now online. While most of the sports videos are in copyright and can’t be loaded online, there are tons of great videos that can be and we’re starting to slowly load them. We don’t have that many yet, but what we do have is here: http://www.youtube.com/user/laurientaylor http://www.youtube.com/user/lntaylor78 http://www.youtube.com/user/UFlibraries I switched to the new name so that it was clear that these are UF Libraries’ archival videos, but I don’t yet know how to transfer the videos from the other two accounts, so if anyone knows an easy way to do this, please let me know. Progress on loading theseRead More →

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In: Academia, gis, metadata, semantic web, web 2.0

The Mobile World Congress is coming up soon (February 11-14) and it should lead to exciting new advances for libraries, and general mobile users as well. A recent AP story covered the rise of geotagging photos and creating mashups from the geographically referenced photos. While this is wonderful for small projects and for much larger projects (of the scale that will later build into Web 3.0 or the Semantic Web), it’s also great for the middle area of development where academic institutions like libraries are slowly building geographical information into our collections. It’s great to see a friend’s vacation images tagged with locations, but it’sRead More →

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In: Academia, conference, Digital Library

Like many other librarians, I’m going to the ALA Midwinter conference. ALA is the American Libraries Association and its conferences are massive. I’m really excited to attend both this conference and the annual conference. I’m more excited about this conference because I’ll be there tomorrow and because the midwinter conference deals with more of the business-meeting concerns and so it’s smaller than the annual conference. For a first-time attendee and a feral librarian (who are librarians without official library training), the smaller conference size will be helpful. Even with the smaller size the conference has loads of great programs, many of which run simultaneously. I’mRead 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: Academia, Collection Items, Digital Library, Library, open access, UF

The UF Libraries’ Preservation Department has started a retrospective dissertation scanning project to help solve problems of access to research, but UF needs permission for Internet Distribution from each author. Authors can grant permissions by completing this form and sending it to the address on the form. UF requires all new dissertations to be submitted electronically, but that leaves decades upon decades of paper and microfilm-only versions. Finding all of the UF alumni to assign permissions is a monumental task. The retrospective dissertation scanning project has been featured in various news venues (newsletters and the newspaper, emails have been sent to alumni with email addressesRead More →

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In: Academia, design, Digital Library, interface, Library

This is the mindmap I made for the Baldwin Digital Library Project using Mind42, which is a new online mindmapping service. Mind42 is free and allows for collaboration, so it’s a nice service for many uses. However, I’m hoping to find something that will display the nodes in motion (like the Visual Thesaurus but I’m not looking for the search/query functionality). I want the motion purely for visual interest, but I’m having trouble finding something free and easy for use in creating the visual-motion mindmap. I’m guessing a simple Flash animation would be best for my needs, but I’d appreciate any recommendations for something thatRead More →

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In: Academia, Commons, Digital Library, open access

On November 15, Stephanie Haas (the Assistant Director for UF’s Digital Library Center) and Matt Mariner (our Institutional Repository coordinator) will be presenting at UF on UF’s Institutional Repository. Underlying their presentation and the IR itself is Open Access. Open Access is the academic’s version of Open Source, it demands that scholarly materials be presented at no cost, quickly, permanently, and completely (full-text) online. This PowerPoint video shows how the Open Access movement is growing as it spreads across the world. UF is one node in the larger Open Access network, which shares information for all. Stephanie and Matt’s presentation on UF’s IR will beRead More →

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In: Academia, Collection Items, Digital Library, exhibit, materiality, museum, objects

UF’s Digital Library Center has digitized this Grebo Mask. I’m not a mask expert of any sort, but the description tells that the Grebo Mask is possibly Kru (Liberia and Ivory Coast), in the shape of a bird with four eyes, representing a seer (Wood) circa 1960. The Grebo Mask alone is a beautiful artifact, but what’s more interesting is that the Digital Library Center is working on a standard method for putting these images together in a looping clip, where users can click to stop the clip or to zoom in on the object. A number of museum websites offer spinning objects or objectsRead More →

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In: Academia, comics, Digital Library, imagetext

I’ve started working on digitizing photographs of comics creators. Don Ault, a professor at UF and a major comics scholar, is also a friend and he’s loaned me some of his materials. What’s really interesting about these photos is that they aren’t available elsewhere. Don has devoted a great deal of his life to the study of comics and so he’s amassed tons of photographs that span academic interests, comics collector-fan interests, and his personal academic-family chronology. For instance, a number of the photographs have Don in them and/or members of his family and members of the comics creators families. These personal, non-commercial photos areRead More →