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In: Collection Items, comics, Digital Library

One of the major benefits of large digitization projects is that important and amazing artifacts, hidden in the archives, come to the surface and are easy to access not just by themselves but also within their overall context. One of these amazing artifacts is Droopy the Drew Field Mosquito by Harry Lampert. Harry Lampert is best known as co-creator of the DC Comics superhero The Flash. Lampert began his career at the Fleischer studios and worked on comics – including Betty Boop, Popeye, and KoKo the Clown – wrote humor comic books, worked on gag cartoons for many periodicals – including The New York Times,Read More →

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In: Digital Library, Library, video

UF’s Digital Library Center is still working on making video files work properly through our Digital Collections. In the meantime, we’re adding videos to Youtube so that people can access the videos since some of them are really neat. Thus far, we’ve loaded the Preservation Book Care video in two parts because of Youtube’s file size and length limitations: part 1 and part 2. I also separated out a very short clip of a roach eating a book part because it’s great. The clip is super-zoomed in on the roach and it just looks wonderfully sci-fi. The Library Preservation Officer has an entomology video connectionRead More →

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In: design, Digital Library, interface, Library

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an post about libraries in the digital age. The post notes that digitization projects often lead to a patchwork of online materials that aren’t available within an integrated interface. This is certainly true for the time being, but steps toward integration can be seen in the WorldCat’s full catalog listings for so many different libraries and from corporations as they attempt to catalog or at least extract catalog-style metadata from information sources. For instance, Microsoft Live Labs’ pages have a note on their work on entity abstraction and the image of it is listed here. I started noticing theRead More →

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In: design, Digital Library, exhibit, gis, Library, UF

While the map linked from this slideshow isn’t actually accurate because nearly all of the images are from the University of Florida’s original Library, Smathers East, and I spread them out for easier viewing, the map does accurately show why there’s reason to be excited because Picasa has improved once again. Not only can the images in Picasa be mapped, the images now show as small icons of the images instead of the generic picture icon, and the individual images can be clicked on and enlarged and they can be played in a slide-show format across the map. The slideshow with the map is aRead More →

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In: Collection Items, Digital Library, dloc, references

UF is a partner in the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), so I was excited to see that the book Caribbean Libraries in the 21st Century: Changes, Challenges, and Choices edited by Shamin Renwick and Cheryl Peltier-Davis is available. The table of contents with all twenty-five chapter titles and authors is listed on the Library of Congress website and gives an useful sense of the full book, and I hope to grab the UF Library copy tomorrow and I’ll post a review as soon as I’ve read it. It looks really interesting for my more pragmatic purposes and for all interested in library collaborationsRead 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: Digital Library, geocaching, gis, Library

The Spatial Information Services Unit of the George A. Smathers Libraries is hosting UF’s inaugural GIS Day on Wednesday, November 14, 2007 from 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. This all day event will showcase the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to the academic community and the public. The event will include guest speakers from UF’s Geomatics Department and the Geoplan Center as well as interactive geocaching opportunities. It will be an opportunity to meet with professional and expert users of GIS technology. Lectures and poster sessions are open to the public and unrestricted. No registration fee required for any session or activity. Registration isRead More →

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In: Collection Items, comics, Digital Library, exhibit, imagetext, Library

In working on some of the comics materials here and setting up the Alice exhibit, I was looking at other online exhibits and kept stumbling across online comics exhibits. Each of these are different in terms of material covered and scope, but together these are absolutely fantastic for comics research. The exhibits I’ve found so far (in random order) are: The Yale Library exhibit collection on comics, with the collection group titled the Illustrated Word Library of Congress’ exhibit on Blondie and UF’s exhibit on Blondie UF Exhibit on Superhero Comics Early Comic Strips at Duke Several from San Diego State University including work byRead More →