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In: access, archives, digital collections, interoperability, worlddigitallibrary

The US National Archives announced earlier this week that they will be contributing materials to the World Digital Library! This is not unexpected, but still wonderful news because it will place so many resources together in a convenient interface, and each time one collection is contributed to another mismatches and other conflicts occur that result in better interoperability.Read More →

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In: access, Collection Items, deep web, digital collections, findability, rss, seo

In our ongoing work to improve the findability of books in the UF Digital Collections (UFDC), we now have an RSS page with feeds for each of the collections. The RSS feed page is http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc2/rss/. Please sign up for a feed or two to learn about the great materials added daily, and please share the RSS feeds with others!Read More →

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In: access, datamining, deep web, digital collections, Digital Library, seo, UFDC

Now that the University of Florida Digital Collections is optimized for internal coding, we’re trying to start optimizing for search engines. We currently use robots.txt to request that search engines do not crawl our site. Doing so was a hard choice because we want our materials to be accessible and used. However, we were forced to stop the search engines because they were crashing our server.  We had a number of overzealous search engines that crawled and re-crawled, and crawled in strange ways. With our JPG2000 images, the over-crawling and overly quick crawling ate too much memory and we couldn’t do it and remain functional.Read More →

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In: access, Caribbean, Collection Items, newspapers, preservation

The University of Florida supports the Florida Digital Newspaper Library and the Caribbean Newspaper Imaging Project. By preserving and digitizing the news of the past, these projects make the news new again. The Caribbean Newspaper Imaging Project includes papers like Haiti’s Le Nouvelliste, with issues from 1899 – 1902 now online. While the early issues online are imperfect (because of materials and processing with newspaper paper, microfilming, and then digitizing from microfilm) the pages are easily readable. If I could read Haitian Creole, or at least enough French to understand with savvy use of Google’s translator, I’d be able to read the December 30, 1899Read More →

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In: access, Caribbean, digital collections, Digital Library, dloc, preservation

The Association of Caribbean University, Research and Institutional Libraries (ACURIL) 2008 Conference included many presentations, at least two of which spoke on the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC). Brooke Wooldridge and Marilyn Ochoa (both of dLOC, from FIU and UF respectively) held a workshop on usability for the dLOC contributor tools entitled “dLOC Toolkit and Usability Testing: A User-­Centered Approach to Improve Electronic Resource Design.” OCLC’s Karen Calhoun presented “Digital Library Dreams,” on ways that research resources are being brought to student and researchers of and in the Caribbean, and how the dreams of effective resource delivery are coming true, with the Digital LibraryRead More →