By:
On:
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 →

By:
On:
In: digital collections, Digital Library, UF, UFDC

Well, our infrastructural updates went faster than expected thanks to Mark putting in long hours for several days, but we’re now loading again. Right now, we’re sitting at 1,804,535 pages, from 54,260 titles and 71,597 items, and counting. Plus, these can now all be viewed within the slightly updated interface (with tabs for views and additional collection-based pages) and within the better overall structure with optimized code for speed, accessibility, and interoperability.Read More →

By:
On:
In: Academia, Digital Library, Library, stamps, UF

In order to simplify our internal systems through a complete overhaul, we won’t be loading any items for the next week. A week from now, users will notice subtle, yet significant changes in terms of the overall design and in terms of speed. Most of the changes appear small, but they’re all part of the optimization process which will greatly enhance the infrastructure supporting the Digital Collections, stripping out additional code, enhancing system memory usage, and speeding and cleaning the whole process for human users and robots for search engine indexing. While we’re completing this process, we won’t be loading any items, but as soonRead More →

By:
On:
In: campus, flickr, photos, UF

We’ve updated our Flickr images! We’re still working on adding in an auto-load to Flickr which should be simple, but we need some controls on it so bandwidth and server space aren’t issues and so that we load in a systematic manner. Right now, it’s just loading to have another venue for access and one that we’ll continue to build in the future. The updated photos are old black and white images of campus. We still need to add the labels for these, so hopefully Flickr users could help us on some of these. I’m interested to see if users label these buildings before weRead More →

By:
On:
In: Academia, Digital Library, Library, UF, web 2.0

The UF Libraries now have a multi-user install of WordPress (known as WordPress MU). The blogs that the Libraries have been using externally from various other sites, including this one, are now being centralized for ease and improved communication. Blogs at the UF Libraries are here: http://blogs.uflib.ufl.edu. The Blogroll for the main blog includes only the blogs at the UF Libraries, so the first page is an easy entry into the rest of blogs. Right now, many of the blogs are still being pulled in and other non-blog areas of the Libraries are being tested for reformatting  as blogs. After all, blogs are great forRead More →

By:
On:
In: Library, UF

LibX is a browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer that provides direct access to your library’s resources. It’s an Open Source framework from which editions for specific libraries can be built. Currently, 330 academic and public libraries have created public LibX editions, and UF is one of them. The toolbar is wonderful because it allows searching of the Library’s catalog from the browser without navigating to the UF Libraries page. That’s one minor plus, but then it also adds the UF icon to WebPages with book identifiers (Amazon, Barnes and Nobles, or other booksellers) so that when searching for a book in Amazon, it’sRead More →

By:
On:
In: Commons, Digital Library, Library, UF

In August, the Digital Library Center proudly announced breaking the one million page mark, with over a million pages online for more than “20 collections, representing more than 44,000 titles in more than 52,000 volumes.” Now, just 7 months later we’ve added slightly over another 60% of that to the collections for a total of 1,621,841 pages, over 5,1746 titles (up from 44,000) and 67,487 volumes (up from 52,000). That means we’ve been producing almost 10% of our total holdings each month for the past 7 at nearly 100,000 pages a month! The incredible production rate is far more incredible when the types of pagesRead More →

By:
On:
In: archives, Digital Library, preservation, UF

Google is having another design-a-campus contest in SketchUp. It’s the Google 2008 International Model Your Campus Competition! Students around the world can compete by modeling their school’s campus buildings in Google SketchUp, geo-reference them in Google Earth, and submitting them by uploading to the Google 3D Warehouse. Students at higher education institutions almost anywhere in the world can submit individually or in teams of students. In addition to Google’s prices, for those modeling schools in Florida or the Caribbean or circum-Caribbean, please also submit your designs to the University of Florida Digital Collections or the Digital Library of the Caribbean, or your own school’s digitalRead More →

By:
On:
In: Academia, archives, Collection Items, Library, UF, video

Some of UF’s video archives are now online. While most of the sports videos are in copyright and can’t be loaded online, there are tons of great videos that can be and we’re starting to slowly load them. We don’t have that many yet, but what we do have is here: http://www.youtube.com/user/laurientaylor http://www.youtube.com/user/lntaylor78 http://www.youtube.com/user/UFlibraries I switched to the new name so that it was clear that these are UF Libraries’ archival videos, but I don’t yet know how to transfer the videos from the other two accounts, so if anyone knows an easy way to do this, please let me know. Progress on loading theseRead More →

By:
On:
In: Library, play, UF

UF’s Libraries is a great work environment, as is the Digital Library Center in particular. We’re all friendly and fun, and this week we’re having a triple birthday celebration with three people having birthdays within the week. In light of our collective birthdays, and our hard work with nearly 1.5 million pages in the Digital Collections and more loading each day (and many audio and video files that can’t be counted in pages), these pictures are for us! There are more birthday-related pictures here.Read More →