The University of Florida Center for Latin American Studies will sponsor Library Travel Research Grants for summer 2011. Their purpose is to enable faculty researchers from other U.S. colleges and universities to use the extensive resources of the Latin American Collection in the University of Florida Libraries, thereby enhancing its value as a national resource.  The grants are funded by a Title VI National Resource Center grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Six or more travel grants of up to $1250 each will be made to cover travel and lodging expenses. Grantees are expected to remain in Gainesville for at least one week and,Read More →

Press release from the USDA National Agricultural Library (PDF here) United States Department of Agriculture Research, Education, and Economics Agricultural Research Service January 20, 2010 Dear Friends and Colleagues of the USDA National Agricultural Library: It gives me great pleasure to announce the appointment of Dr. Simon Y. Liu as the new Director of the National Agricultural Library (NAL), effective February 14, 2010. Dr. Liu currently is an Associate Director of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the Director of NLM Computer and Communications Systems in Bethesda, Maryland, a position he has held since May 2000. In addition to a wealth of leadership, programRead More →

From: UF Center for Latin American Studies The University of Florida Center for Latin American Studies will sponsor Library Travel Research Grants for summer 2010. Their purpose is to enable faculty researchers from other U.S. colleges and universities to use the extensive resources of the Latin American Collection in the University of Florida Libraries, thereby enhancing its value as a national resource.  The grants are funded by a Title VI National Resource Center grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Six or more travel grants of up to $1250 each will be made to cover travel and lodging expenses. Grantees are expected to remain inRead More →

From: UF Libraries’ News, Events, and Updates A $2.38 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to Indiana University (IU) will be used to develop software created specifically for the management of print and electronic collections for academic and research libraries around the world. The University of Florida is the lead partner for the Florida Consortium (Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, Rollins College, University of Central Florida, University of Miami, University of South Florida and the Florida Center for Library Automation), which is a founding member of a national coalition of libraries which will shape and implement the software.Read More →

The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) has grown from September 2007’s 1 million pages (pages of books, newspapers, archival materials, maps, posters, audio, video, photos, and more) to 2 million in July 2008, 3 million in December 2008 (thanks to ingesting microfilm digitized by a vendor) and then to 4 million in July 2009. Right now – and UFDC is loading so this will be higher by morning – UFDC has 4,134,392 pages. Four million, one hundred and thirty-four thousand, three hundred and ninety-two pages. It sounds impressive because it is. Yet, it’s so much more than that even when only on a quantityRead More →

I’d always assumed that catalog records were based on MARC, and that MARC was a guideline or standard like METS, MODS, or TEI, or even HTML or XML. After all, SGML is one heck of a powerful grandparent for modern record formats, right? And for printing, TeX, LaTeX, and BibTeX have been around for ages, so there’s no way that an archaic punch-card style technology could be in use at almost every library in the US, right? Sadly, no, I was wrong. My assumptions on what MARC must be have kept me from helping to fix the problems that stem from what it actually is.Read More →

The Rose Hill Manor Park & Children’s Museum in Frederick, Maryland will soon be printing new copies of historic children’s books from the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Digital Collection. The children’s books will be used for their story hour program where they read stories to children and let them act out part of the story and do a craft; their Playtime Monday programs that encourage children and parents to explore their facilities and spend time reading and playing together; tours; and history camp programs where they teach kids about school days for children in the past. It’s always exciting to share old materialsRead More →

The Research Library Leadership Fellows (RLLF) Program is an executive leadership program jointly designed and sponsored by ARL member libraries. The pilot program was sponsored by the University of California at Los Angeles; Columbia University; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; University of Texas at Austin; and University of Washington. The second offering was sponsored by six ARL member libraries: University of California, Berkeley and the California Digital Library; Harvard University; University of Minnesota; North Carolina State University; Pennsylvania State University; and the University of Toronto. The 2009-2010 program is being jointly sponsored and designed by Brigham Young University, University of Florida, Georgia Institute of Technology,Read More →

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 →

President Obama’s Presidential Inauguration can be viewed live on Tuesday on large screens–in addition to the many computer screens it will fill–at three of the UF Libraries: Library West in the InfoCommons (3rd floor) Education Library (limited seating) Large screen just outside the Journalism & Communications LibraryRead More →