By:
On:
In: archives, Florida, gators, Library

The State Library and Archives of Florida have released a number of new items and exhibits, including Alligators in the Backyard. The “popular culture” section is particularly rewarding for anyone who’s ever been to Florida and seen Florida’s wonders or its wonderful  kitsch. Some of the best images from the page are below, but there are many great images on the State Libraries and Archives site as well as in the many digital collections throughout the state by universities, museums, and others.Read More →

By:
On:
In: archives, digital collections, Digital Library

On June 6, I posted about the University of Florida Digital Collection (UFDC) statistics. At that time, UFDC included 55,072 titles with 74,341 items and 1,896,811 pages. UFDC has been growing by an average of 100,000 pages pages a month, and I was hopeful that we could–even if by only a small margin–surpass that rate from April 20 to June 20. I’m happy to note that we’ve done it! As of April 20, the UF Digital Collections had 1.718 million pages. With today’s load on June 19, even before the evening loading occurs, we have 1.92 million pages. The University of Florida Digital Collections nowRead More →

By:
On:
In: archives, digital collections, Digital Library

The Digital Library Center has been awfully busy lately digitizing more materials and loading materials digitized earlier that we’re just now working through. It’s difficult to explain the sheer volume of materials or the wonders held within them, but sometimes real instead of web spiders can help. Soon after waking up this morning, I found a wolf spider in my house. I carefully scooped her (or him) up and dropped the spider outside. I’m quite a fan of wolf spiders since they’re such interesting characters. They don’t weave webs and instead they stalk and chase their prey, jumping to catch meals, and they’re fast! They’reRead More →

By:
On:
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 →

By:
On:
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 →

By:
On:
In: archives, comics, Digital Library

VCU Libraries have announced a full digital run of Will Eisner’s work on PS* Preventive Maintenance Magazine! Here’s their press release: VCU Libraries is honored to present these rare examples of the incomparable art work of the late Will Eisner. In an effort to encourage soldiers to keep better care of their equipment, the US Army hired Eisner’s American Visuals Corporation to do a digest-sized publication focusing on preventive maintenance. Each issue consisted of a color comic book style cover; eight pages of four color comic continuity story in the middle; and a wealth of technical, safety, and policy information printed in two color. EisnerRead More →

By:
On:
In: archives, Collection Items, Digital Library, objects

The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature has many amazing materials, but I’ve never before seen one quite like A Story of Stops. The book itself is wonderfully illustrated, so wonderfully in fact that I haven’t yet read it. I can’t get over the idea of a “story of stops,” written in 1891 for children. A “story of stops” for children or all ages now could be many things–a story of missed messages and miscommunications (stops in communication, stops in transmission, especially with telegraphs), travel and adventure stories (stops along a train route, or an exploration), and so much more. But a “story of stops”Read More →

By:
On:
In: archives, Collection Items, Digital Library

The University of Florida has a collection of French Revolutionary pamphlets and a small few have been digitized and are now loading online. The full collection is quite large, and one of the digital collection items is a list of all of the pamphlets. It’s wonderful to see these materials online because having them online allows people to see what they are and to use them. The list of pamphlets is helpful on a basic level, like so many bibliographies and lists of holdings, but being able to see and use materials is exponentially better than only knowing that an archive has an object.Read More →

By:
On:
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 →

By:
On:
In: archives, Digital Library, preservation, UF

Google is having another design-a-campus contest in SketchUp. It’s the Google 2008 International Model Your Campus Competition! Students around the world can compete by modeling their school’s campus buildings in Google SketchUp, geo-reference them in Google Earth, and submitting them by uploading to the Google 3D Warehouse. Students at higher education institutions almost anywhere in the world can submit individually or in teams of students. In addition to Google’s prices, for those modeling schools in Florida or the Caribbean or circum-Caribbean, please also submit your designs to the University of Florida Digital Collections or the Digital Library of the Caribbean, or your own school’s digitalRead More →