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’ve blogged quite a bit about UFDC’s page count as we reached 1 million, 2 million, and 3 million pages, digitizing 100,000 pages and more a month. I’m equally excited by every new milestone, but with so many pages online UFDC has reached critical mass overall and in many individual collections like the Florida Digital Newspaper Library, the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature, and the Digital Library of the Caribbean. By reaching critical mass, UFDC is now large enough to bring in new users and to offer something for everyone who comes to UFDC. Every page and every item that now loads adds exponentiallyRead More →

I haven’t posted on UF Digital Collections (UFDC) stats lately, so while there’s no milestone, I like to share frequently. Since July 1, UFDC has added 76,152 items in 8,837 titles (newspapers have lots of issues under a single title) with 1,215,009 pages to the UF Digital Collections. I love seeing that many digits for pages loaded this year alone, and the year isn’t over yet!Read More →

The UFDC usage stats are now online in great detail. The stats include overall, collections by date, items by date, collection history, items by collection, and definitions to sort out what all of this means. The items by collection is particularly interesting where you can see how many hits are on particular items, like this page for the Baldwin. Some collections, like the newspapers, are by title and issue, so I assumed the hits would skew to the first issue of any of the titles and they do in some cases, but in others the 157th issue is the most hit. We’re still interpreting theRead More →

We now have usage statistics for our collections as a whole and by collection! They’re online here in an Excel spreadsheet. Our overall usage stats, while good, are far smaller than they will be because so much of our content is recent (over a million pages since July alone) and because UFDC was forced to deny search engine robots entirely for several months in early 2008 because the search engines were behaving improperly and overly taxing the database. As expected, our most used collections are the oldest and largest, with the Baldwin, the Florida Newspaper Digital Library, and the Digital Library of the Caribbean. GivenRead More →

The title says it all–or as much as can be said with any brevity. The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) now have 3 million pages! Or to be exact 3,012,406 which means that since October 4 we’ve added over 500,000 pages and that we’ve added a full million pages since July. Our largest collection is the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Digital Collection, which now has 749,686 pages. The Baldwin’s many pages have been digitized through NEH grants and the current grant is coming to a close so we’ll see comparatively fewer books load in the near future, but the many wonders ofRead More →

The UF Digital Collections are in the newest issue of Florida, UF Alumni Magazine on “Gator Bytes” with a note on the Baldwin Library Digital Collection and with a four page story on postcards from UF and Gainesville, from the Matheson Museum Collection hosted by UFDC. The story includes beautiful images of the postcard covers and their backs, with personal messages from 1917, 1915, 1949 and more. The UF Libraries are in InsideUF for the African Beadwork exhibit,  “Between the Beads: Reading African Beadwork” that just opened! Every digital item and collection is built through our work across the UF Libraries and our connections withRead More →

We had a drive fail on our development box, which runs our loader. This wouldn’t have caused much of a delay, but we had people out and the drive should have recovered with a disk check (or at least that’s how it appeared). With the holiday yesterday, we’re running hopefully the last of the checks possible and we’ll either have the development server back up and running tomorrow or we’ll restore from the last backup. While it’s been a long delay–thanks to a weekend and another day off–we’ll soon be loading again and we have lots to load. With all of the files ready toRead More →

UFDC now has more RSS feeds! The feeds are available here, http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc2/rss/, and can be added to readers or webpages of your choice (and these are again thanks to our ever-working, industrious and creative programmer)! The new RSS feeds and other improvements include ongoing optimization for faster loading online and for faster internal processing. Plus, we’re working rapidly and now have 2,60,4573 pages online from 61,108 titles and 116,492 volumes! The Digital Library of the Caribbean now stands poised to hit half a million pages with 475,992 pages online and the Florida Newspapers now include a whopping 306,702 pages. We’re loading quickly, so using anRead More →

The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) currently has 109,991 total items, which make up 60,664 different titles (newspapers, serials, and so forth mean one title can have thousands of items so that’s why these numbers differ), for 2,471,489 total pages. Of that total 34,578 items in 5,067 titles with 512,204 pages have been added since July 1. Meaning, in only slightly over 3 little-ole months, we added 512,204 pages! That’s over my hoped-for goal–which was set intentionally too high based on what I thought we could do–of 150,000 pages a month! I don’t think I should keep setting unrealistic goals, but it sure isRead More →