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In: innovation, interface, museum

In Curator: the Museum Journal, Nancy Proctor has an excellent article on the Google Art Project and its implications for displaying, using, and exploring museum items and museums online. This is an important and useful article for its specific review of the Google Art Project and for the way it points toward future implications of imaging, interface, and interactivity for museum items and museums overall. The University of Florida Libraries explored related issues with the “Arts of Africa” project to digitize museum objects in the round. Many other museums and libraries are working on similar concerns related to artifactuality and technology, with interrelated implications forRead More →

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In: Bone, matheson, museum, photos, UFDC

The Alachua County Historic Trust: Matheson Museum, Inc. and the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries need help identifying historic photographs taken in Gainesville from 1920-1970. The photographs were taken by Elmer Harvey Bone and they’re all online within the Elmer Harvey Bone Collection here. The Elmer Harvey Bone Collection is particularly important to the Digital Library Center because the collection is shared between the Matheson Museum and the University Archives, and because our own Lourdes Santamaria-Wheeler chosen this collection for her graduate work in museum studies because of the way it connects traditional library and museum collections. The Gainesville Sun newspaper has anRead More →

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In: harn, museum, UF

The Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida has been awarded a Collections Stewardship grant from IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services). The project abstract is online along with the abstracts for the many other winners, and the Harn’s project is “Digitization of the Harn Museum Collection.” For the project, the Harn Museum will be taking digital images for 2,000 items and adding them to their collections management system. These digital images are necessary for practical purposes of access right now, but they’ll also create the foundation for building larger projects like digitizing exhibits and entire collections later on. CongratulationsRead More →

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In: Academia, comics, exhibit, Library, museum

Comics studies and comics collections continue to grow, and now there’s more great news. Ohio State University’s Cartoon Research Library is acquiring the International Museum of Cartoon Art’s collection. Currently, OSU’s gallery space is small (or so this article says–I haven’t been lucky enough to see it yet, but it’s on my list of places to go as soon as I can) so OSU’s Cartoon Research Library is planning a larger gallery space to display more of their already excellent, and now growing, collection. This is great news for comics studies as a whole–it means more resources will be available in a centralized and organizedRead More →

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In: digital collections, Digital Library, gainesville, matheson, museum, partners

The University of Florida Digital Collections have a number of collaborative partnerships with the Digital Library of the Caribbean, the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, and other projects. One of our local partners is the Matheson Museum. The picture above comes from one of their photograph collections, the E. H. Bone Collection, and many other photos are in the Matheson Museum and in the University Archives, so this is a great partnership to help preserve the history of the Gainesville, Florida area and to preserve the early history of the University of Florida while also showing how the town and school developed together. This particular pictureRead More →

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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 →

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In: Digital Library, exhibit, interface, museum, objects

“This is crucial, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there, durable, indefinitely reuseable, an object of value.” The quote above is from page 38 of “Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading,” by Ursula K. Le Guin in Harper’s Magazine (Vol. 316, No. 1983, February 2008, p. 33-38), and it speaks to the issue of materiality for digitization. Digital initiatives have rightfully focused on access to book contents, or access to information. Given the technological limitations for even this, with the difficulties from copyright and costs of mass digitization, access to information has been a lofty goal alone. Now however,Read More →

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In: Collection Items, Commons, Digital Library, museum

Like the Library of Congress, the National Museum of Health and Medicine has also been exploring using Flickr to share images. The images are great and include historical photos and documents. Some, like the Malaria Joe comic are humorous images from their eras, but some of the photos are strikingly beautiful, painful, haunting, and inspiring snapshots of life, offering glimpses into their time and into people’s lives. Everyone should be able to wander through these images, and it’s an amazing gift to have them online for us to see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/99129398@N00 http://www.flickr.com/photos/7438870@N04 http://www.flickr.com/photos/22719239@N04Read More →

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In: interface, museum, objects, play, video

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth is now on YouTube. Since there’s so much in terms of historical footage and in terms of history within that footage, I’m excited to see what this will mean for museums and historical materials. The Queen is on YouTube on The Royal Channel: The Official Channel of the British Monarchy. While many official organizations – political, governmental, and other – have released videos through museums and libraries, it’s interesting to see those materials being added into the regular-user interfaces where people can stumbled across them through the official-and-popular format. Seeing historical footage like “Roses for the Rose Queen” are interesting in themselvesRead More →

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In: book arts, design, exhibit, museum

One of the more interesting new Web 2.0-style mashups are library and museum partnerships. Both have large collections that need to be interconnected and digitized for easier and expanded access. However, libraries have traditionally focused on information access and museums on exhibit-access with the display significant to the materials. As more special collections go online and more information in general, display and access are both becoming more important for libraries and museums. The image above is a shot from a SketchUp file of Gallery B in the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. This is just oneRead More →