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In: Academia, digital collections, education, language, UFDC

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a posting on Bolivia’s plans to open three universities teaching indigenous languages, including Aymara, Quechua, and Guarani. MJ Hardman from the University of Florida has been researching Aymara, Jaqaru, and Kawki for decades. Her extensive research and teaching materials will help support this and other efforts to protect endangered languages, and many of her earlier materials are even in the process of being digitized for the Jaqi Collection within the University of Florida Digital Collections. It’s always wonderful to hear about how newly digitized materials have been or will be used!Read More →

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In: design, Digital Library, digitalcollections, UF, UFDC

The photos above are of our Digital Library Sign, and they’re now online in UFDC (which is harvestable by robots as UFDC2) and online in our Flickr account. These pictures are particularly nice because they include so many of the other images we’ve worked on over the years. It’s also nice to show off some of our office, most of which doesn’t show as well as our work, as shown through the boxes in the photo above, but our messy daily work leads to gorgeously finished materials available online.Read More →

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In: games, UF, UFDC, video, web 2.0

UF students, faculty, and staff are invited to the Library Tech Expo, hosted by the InfoCommons @ West, which will take place on Wednesday, August 27, from 10-2 in the InfoCommons @ West (3rd floor of LW).  We will be showcasing various tech trends offered by our libraries, including Bioactive (a library video game), InfoZombies and other library YouTube videos, RefWorks, Ask-a-Librarian, and much more!  We will also be offering Guitar Hero during this time for students to play while they view our new tech trends.  Snacks will be provided.Read More →

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In: Digital Library, microfilm, newspapers, UFDC

The Library of Congress has loaded even more newspapers! The press release below has more information, and it’s great news! CONTENT UPDATED: 73,000 newspaper pages added – now includes papers published 1890-1910 and 2 new states – Nebraska and Texas On August 1, more than 73,000 newly digitized newspaper pages were added to the Chronicling America Web site at www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/, including content from 2 new states – Nebraska and Texas – and expanding coverage in the 1890s. With this update, the site now provides access to more than 642,000 digitized newspaper pages, published between 1890 and 1910, and representing 74 newspapers from California, the DistrictRead More →

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In: Caribbean, dloc, law, UFDC

The Haiti Press Network has an article on the digitization of Hatian law (in French, or translated with Google Translate). Digitizing Haitian law is a major project with great significance because like all democratic societies, access to the law and legal information is necessary for the public to be involved in the democratic process. Many countries, including the US, are still struggling with making laws accessible and comprehensible, and Haiti’s digitization project faces the same challenges and will reap the same rewards. The Haitian law digitization project will present a complete inventory of Haitian law from 1804 within a clear and ease to use databaseRead More →

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In: archives, Collection Items, Digital Library, digitalcollections, dloc, flickr, newspapers, preservation, seo, statistics, UF, UFDC

I’ve been so busy the past year (or 14 months to be completely accurate) since joining UF’s Digital Library Center that it’s hard to see what all we’ve accomplished. The time has flown by with loads of wonderful work, and wonderful progress. I decided to review some of our documentation and to note a few of the highlights: More stuff! We hit the 1 million page mark in September 2007, and as of today we’re at 2.12 million with so many more to load! More types of stuff! Improvements to UFDC that include support for audio and video files, better multi-language support! Better ways toRead More →

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In: digital collections, statistics, UFDC

UF Digital Collections (UFDC) now provides free online access to more than two million pages converted from the Libraries’ paper collections, as well as from UF museums and other UF programs. UFDC hit the 1 million page mark in September 2007 and continues steady growth. It is now the largest university based digital library in the southeast and one of the largest in the country. UFDC (www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc) can be text-searched or browsed online. Titles available in UFDC are not commercially available and are often difficult to access or use in their original state.  Library archives and special collections, Florida Museum of Natural History Herbarium specimens,Read More →

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In: ALA, conference, dloc, microfilm, presentations, UFDC

I’m at ALA (still today and through some of tomorrow before a red eye flight home) and this morning I attended and presented within the OCLC Sponsored “Microfilm to Digitization Roadshow.” This included presentations from Kelly Barrall and Joan DaShiel on the ins and outs of their microfilm and microfilm digitization processing and Katherine Walter from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln on her work with the Nebraska Public Documents project. Katherine is the Co-Director for the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and Chair of the Digital Initiatives & Special Collections Department, and my presentation on digitizing from microfilm for the Digital Library of theRead More →

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In: deep web, digital collections, findability, seo, UFDC

In addition to our UFDC search engine optimization, we’re working on RSS feeds for all new items and for new items from each of the collections. Our RSS feed page will be here: http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc2/rss/ but it’s still in development right now. RSS feeds take advantage of the power of the web to syndicate and share content and the methods search engines use for ranking content. While this has been arguably problematic as traditional media takes its time in changing, using RSS feeds makes sense and especially so for sites that the University of Florida Digital Collections where we want to share content as widely andRead More →

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In: access, datamining, deep web, digital collections, Digital Library, seo, UFDC

Now that the University of Florida Digital Collections is optimized for internal coding, we’re trying to start optimizing for search engines. We currently use robots.txt to request that search engines do not crawl our site. Doing so was a hard choice because we want our materials to be accessible and used. However, we were forced to stop the search engines because they were crashing our server.  We had a number of overzealous search engines that crawled and re-crawled, and crawled in strange ways. With our JPG2000 images, the over-crawling and overly quick crawling ate too much memory and we couldn’t do it and remain functional.Read More →