Laurie N. Taylor, Librarian

As I pack in preparation to move from Gainesville, my home of 22 years (half of my life), I’ve been thinking about what Gainesville and UF have meant to me. It’s a lot. I don’t have totally coherent thoughts. I have strong feelings of joy for what these years have been for me and anticipatory joy for my future in Connecticut. I’ve been thinking about belonging and home, and what these mean about being in and with any given place. The robins just passed through Gainesville. I love seeing them in the air, and seeing all of the leaves, twigs, and berries they knock downRead More →

I’ve been working on understanding how to be a calmer person with a simple life. With adopting our second rescue pup (Olivia, who joins Gertie), we get to see them learn and play together. And, they need more support to be gentle with each other while ensorcelled with so much puppy energy. We’re doing more obedience training, and I started reading on dog-to-dog communication, and found a book on calming signals. For dogs, calming signals include yawning, licking lips, walking in a curve, play bows, and more. As Wikipedia explains: Calming signals is a term conceived by Norwegian dog trainer and canine ethologist, Turid Rugaas,Read More →

I am thrilled to share that I will soon be the Associate University Librarian for Collections & Discovery at the University of Connecticut! While this is bittersweet news because I have loved the people, communities, and work at the University of Florida and in the city of Gainesville, I share this with a joyous heart for the wonderful new opportunities as my career and life move north. At the University of Connecticut, I am joining an amazing team! I will be responsible for Acquisitions & Discovery, Archives and Special Collections, Digital Imaging and Conservation, and Collections Strategies. I am excited to learn and grow inRead More →

I infrequently make new year resolutions. This year, I resolve to see fireflies. I remember fireflies in Florida only rarely and many decades ago. I remember them well in more recent years in Georgia, Michigan, and Trinidad. I’ve talked a lot about fireflies in recent years, enough that folks have shared their stories of fireflies, and to learn that they are called cucullo in Spanish in Puerto Rico. I’ve asked folks who live in places with fireflies if they’ve seen them. In a few instances, my question clearly did not make sense, and instead of a simple “yes, last summer,” people gifted me with storiesRead More →

Happy Holidays from Digital Partnerships & Strategies! This card features Le Spectacle Asiatique Danse et Voltige sur la Corde avec sans Balancier by J. Pintard, Paris, 1835. For more about this treasure, the Baldwin Library, and the evolution of children’s literature, download for free B Is for Baldwin: An Alphabet Tour of the Baldwin Library, a LP@UF publication. Enjoy our holiday card by clicking on the image above.Read More →

It is always wonderful to see important new publications come out as Open Access, and Julian Chambliss and Ellen Moll have just released their edited collection, Making Sense of Digital Humanities: Transformations and Interventions in Technocultures!  I have not yet had time tor ead the full volume. The volume includes many familiar names for digital humanities, and some new names for me. After the opening materials, the sections are: I. Data, Ethics, and Society II. Global Digital Humanities III. Community and Digital Humanities IV. Teaching and Learning I’m not sure when I’ll teach a Digital Humanities class in the future. I am happy to knowRead More →

ACURIL is amazing! To join, fill out the form at the bottom of this page: https://acuril.org/membership/ Then, the Treasurer will be in contact for the membership fee, which is only $25/year for personal members. By joining, you’ll receive emails on the annual conference, webinars, and other events. You’ll be better connected with the truly awe-inspiring community of Caribbean librarianship. I identify professionally as a librarian because of ACURIL. This is a generous, kind, joyous community. The conferences are educational and fun. I especially encourage ACURIL for folks passionate about DEI, justice, and solidarity,.Read More →

ACURIL is the Association of Caribbean University, Research, and Institutional Libraries. ACURIL is amazing! If you do anything related to Caribbean libraries, please join ACURIL in Kingston, Jamaica, June 4-8, 2023. If you aren’t sure what ACURIL is like, please see the awesome video from ACURIL 2022!Read More →

I learned about explaining commitments in terms of glass and rubber balls from the amazing Chelsea Johston. I had not heard this analogy prior. In googling it, it looks like this comes to us from (at least one source, not sure if first, and good ideas normally have multiple firsts) Nora Roberts, who explained commitments as either glass or plastic/rubber balls. It’s fine to drop the ones that bounce, or at least that won’t break. But, the glass ones have to be handled. Since the pandemic and in our current age of late capitalism, a lot of us have more glass balls than ever before,Read More →

The wonderful Digital Development Team within the Library Technology Services Department has released another major update to the digital collections systems, which power the UF Digital Collections (UFDC), Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), and Florida Digital Newspaper Library. I see this time of year as a time for giving thanks and gifts, and this is definitely a gift to us all! Huge thanks to the team! The full list is below. I want to pull out just a couple of things: Serial navigation view for items that are within a serial title This has been wanted for years! While within a single issue ofRead More →