Happy Birthday to the UF Digital Collections (UFDC) and SobekCM, which is the system powering UFDC and so much more! UFDC and the beginnings of SobekCM started in March 2006. In February 2008, I wrote about UFDC turning 2. At that time, UFDC had “nearly 1.5 million pages.” Now, UFDC supports more than 300 digital collections and more than 7.6 million pages of open access to unique manuscripts and letters, antique maps, rare children’s literature books, theses and dissertations, newspapers, historic photographs, oral histories, audio and video, and so much more.  UFDC has grown in content, scope, and impact. Alongside UFDC, SobekCM has grown dramatically as well. SobekCM is the system poweringRead More →

At the end of April, arXiv posted an update on their sustainability initiative. This and all arXiv sustainability work should be mandatory reading for all who are working on large, collaborative digital initiatives. Recent updates include the 2011 projected budget and the full support documentation are also available.Read More →

The news item below is from the newslib list-serve. I’m posting it because it connects to the work being done at the Price Library of Judaica at the University of Florida to build a Newspaper Digital Collection from the Price Library of Judaica. One of the projects is to build the Price Library of Judaica Anniversary Collection, which represents the first stage of a project to digitize a unique and important collection of over 200 anniversary editions of Jewish newspapers held in the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica. These jubilee issues have never been catalogued by the Library and until now have remainedRead More →

On Alan Liu’s website, he provides an overview of RoSE, a research-oriented social environment: Created as an outcome of the Transliteracies Project, RoSE is a Web-based knowledge-exploration system that fuses a social-computing model to humanities bibliographical resources to allow users to explore the present and past of the human record as one “social network.” Stocked with initial information data-mined from YAGO and Project Gutenberg (with plans for data-mining the SNAC Project), RoSE provides profile pages about persons and documents, keywords and other data, and visualizations that help users see the relationships between people and documents. Uniquely, it also allows users (humanities students, scholars, and researchRead More →

?The first version of the Archives Portal Europe is now online: www.archivesportaleurope.eu Archives Portal Europe allows users to search across the: the holdings of 47 institutions 7.794.952 descriptive units 725.406 digital archival objects The site is still in beta, but it already looks great and more great things are sure to come based on the site’s excellent documentation.Read More →

The Council on Library and Information Resources’ Digital Library Federation program and centerNet are delighted to announce today their formal alliance. Established in 1995, the Digital Library Federation is a community of library practitioners engaged and committed to building and sustaining digital libraries through collaborative effort and establishing best practices. The DLF community includes project managers, code developers, and digital curators. The affiliation will focus on areas where digital libraries and digital humanities converge and need further exploration and understanding of each community’s roles and responsibilities. Areas of likely collaboration include the following: Data Curation–examining options for the preservation of digital scholarship objects and workflows,Read More →

News Release: Digital Library Federation Launches New Web Site March 7, 2011—The Digital Library Federation (DLF), a program of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), today launched its new Web site at http://www.diglib.org. The site provides a dedicated space for the DLF community, while also serving as a resource and communication hub around important ideas and trends developing in the broader digital library community. “The new DLF site will facilitate conversations, raise awareness, and provide a space for collaboration,” said DLF Program Director Rachel Frick. “It is where you learn not only what is being done, but also how to actively contribute toRead More →

News posting from here. Berkman Center Announces Digital Public Library Planning Initiative December 13, 2010 – The Berkman Center for Internet and Society today announced that it will host a research and planning initiative for a “Digital Public Library of America.” With funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Berkman will convene a large and diverse group of stakeholders in a planning program to define the scope, architecture, costs and administration for a proposed Digital Public Library of America. “We’re grateful to Berkman for coordinating this historic effort to create a Digital Public Library of America and to fulfill the vision of an open, distributedRead More →

JISC’s Understanding the Costs of Digitisation (full report and briefing paper) offers an excellent summary of some of the core difficulties facing budgeting for digitization projects. For those not already mired in digitization project operations, the graphed cost estimates for different projects on pages 44-47 are perhaps the best place to begin. In 3 of the 5 examples, overhead amounted to twice of the actual digitization costs. To ensure we don’t suffer similar overages, we develop prototypes to estimate costs and associated requirements for projects. In doing so, we still encounter overhead – pushing technology is equal parts exciting and frustrating – but the overheadRead More →

America’s Swamp: the Historic Everglades, a new collection within the University of Florida Digital Collections should be up this week. In the meantime, we’ve already started loading some of the photos to Flickr. If the photos on Flickr aren’t enough, the Everglades Digital Library from FIU’s Digital Collections Center is already a massive digital collection of amazing material, and it’s always growing.Read More →