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In: archives, digital collections, Digital Library, dloc, Library

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) issued a call for President Obama’s administration to support large-scale digitization initiatives. The brief call from the ARL Newsletter is online as is the full letter. As an addendum to to ARL’s call for “a large-scale initiative to digitize public domain collections,” let’s also make sure these initiatives include all holdings that are in the public domain in however many selected US institutions, including the millions upon millions of pages published in other countries and collected by the US. The US has so many collections that would benefit the US and so many collections that, if shared openly, wouldRead More →

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In: digital collections, Florida, microfilm, newspapers

Like the other collections in UFDC, the Florida Digital Newspaper Library is expanding rapidly. The Florida Digital Newspaper has added 158,989 pages, doubling the previous size for a total page count of 279,507. Sometimes I prefer to post statistics like page and item counts because those can speak more effectively to how much mass is there and to its usefulness even if people aren’t sure what they might be looking for or why–just knowing that there’s enough stuff can help indicate critical mass and use value. For the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, the number of pages is useful as are examples of the titles andRead More →

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In: digital collections, Digital Library, education, innovation, OCA, open access, OpenContentAlliance

The First Executive Director of the Open Content Alliance has been appointed and CIDE (Data Intensive Cyber Environments group) has joined the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science. These are two recent news releases that show the expanding happenings and possibilities for digital libraries, collections, and collaboration! *** Maura Marx Named First Executive Director of the Open Content Alliance The Internet Archive and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced today the appointment of Maura Marx as the first Executive Director of the Open Content Alliance (OCA). A search committee representing OCA member institutions made the appointment after anRead More →

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In: context, digital collections, interface, mapping, UFDC

The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) now include a “Map It” feature! With the “Map It” option, all items with geographic information are now displayed on a map using the Google Maps API. For instance, users can now see this photo of Gainesville mapped by clicking on the “Map It” tab, which shows a Google Map view of the photo’s location with a placemark. See the Citadelle Henri Christophe in Haiti, and then see the satellite imagery map for it, which still clearly shows the structure, along with the surrounding area! In case the maps aren’t exciting enough, UFDC also allows displays Flash filesRead More →

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In: Academia, digital collections, education, language, UFDC

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a posting on Bolivia’s plans to open three universities teaching indigenous languages, including Aymara, Quechua, and Guarani. MJ Hardman from the University of Florida has been researching Aymara, Jaqaru, and Kawki for decades. Her extensive research and teaching materials will help support this and other efforts to protect endangered languages, and many of her earlier materials are even in the process of being digitized for the Jaqi Collection within the University of Florida Digital Collections. It’s always wonderful to hear about how newly digitized materials have been or will be used!Read More →

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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: digital collections, statistics, UFDC

UF Digital Collections (UFDC) now provides free online access to more than two million pages converted from the Libraries’ paper collections, as well as from UF museums and other UF programs. UFDC hit the 1 million page mark in September 2007 and continues steady growth. It is now the largest university based digital library in the southeast and one of the largest in the country. UFDC (www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc) can be text-searched or browsed online. Titles available in UFDC are not commercially available and are often difficult to access or use in their original state.  Library archives and special collections, Florida Museum of Natural History Herbarium specimens,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: 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 →

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In: Academia, digital collections

With the new Florida College System developing where a handful of current community colleges will soon begin offering four year degrees, maybe changes for colleges and universities in the state of Florida. Florida needs the Florida College System to serve the public, but even in positive budget years major change is a great deal of work. Far too many factors are at play to know exactly what elements will have the greatest impact or what that impact will be on how the Florida College System will shape the future of Florida’s higher ed. Knowing the past, though, can offer insight into complicated situations and booksRead More →