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 →

On Monday morning, Val Davis (from the University of Florida Marston Science Library) and I presented on “Bioactive: A Library Game” (currently online here) that several UF librarians made as an alternative to the standard 40 minute library intro tutorial to increase student engagement with the actual work of learning about using library resources. Bioactive was originally designed in Inform and it’s now moved to a web quest design, which is an even greater simplificiation from the earlier text-based Inform format. The simplicity of the design is for sustainability and ease of maintenance, but it’s more importantly used to ensure that the interface doesn’t getRead More →

The State Library and Archives of Florida have released a number of new items and exhibits, including Alligators in the Backyard. The “popular culture” section is particularly rewarding for anyone who’s ever been to Florida and seen Florida’s wonders or its wonderful  kitsch. Some of the best images from the page are below, but there are many great images on the State Libraries and Archives site as well as in the many digital collections throughout the state by universities, museums, and others.Read More →

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 →

“Staying Alive: Books through Print on Demand Technology,” an ALA/ALCTS/PARS Program  (Saturday, June 29, 2008, ACC Room 304a-b) Presenters include: Brian from Bridgeport National Bindery Lynne Terhune, Wiley & Sons, Print on Demand Beth, New York Public Library, head of access, espresso book machine University Conservator from the University of Iowa, and that will be posted on the ALA wiki. Brian from Bridgeport National Bindery Brian began by speaking with the importance of the printing press in the history of inventions, and the lose-ability of books. With digitization, how print on demand works. Conceptually, take a collection of print files, order them, have them printed.Read More →

The ALA Annual Conference begins tomorrow in Anaheim. I’ve been too busy to put together my schedule thus far, but I’ll soon have my days planned out and I’ll add them here. In case anyone else is still reading and re-reading the schedules (and for my own quick reference), LITA has a quick list here and ALCTS has a quick list here.Read More →

In our ongoing work to improve the findability of books in the UF Digital Collections (UFDC), we now have an RSS page with feeds for each of the collections. The RSS feed page is http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc2/rss/. Please sign up for a feed or two to learn about the great materials added daily, and please share the RSS feeds with others!Read More →

On June 6, I posted about the University of Florida Digital Collection (UFDC) statistics. At that time, UFDC included 55,072 titles with 74,341 items and 1,896,811 pages. UFDC has been growing by an average of 100,000 pages pages a month, and I was hopeful that we could–even if by only a small margin–surpass that rate from April 20 to June 20. I’m happy to note that we’ve done it! As of April 20, the UF Digital Collections had 1.718 million pages. With today’s load on June 19, even before the evening loading occurs, we have 1.92 million pages. The University of Florida Digital Collections nowRead More →

With the new Florida College System developing where a handful of current community colleges will soon begin offering four year degrees, maybe changes for colleges and universities in the state of Florida. Florida needs the Florida College System to serve the public, but even in positive budget years major change is a great deal of work. Far too many factors are at play to know exactly what elements will have the greatest impact or what that impact will be on how the Florida College System will shape the future of Florida’s higher ed. Knowing the past, though, can offer insight into complicated situations and booksRead More →

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 →