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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 →

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In: archives, comics, Digital Library

VCU Libraries have announced a full digital run of Will Eisner’s work on PS* Preventive Maintenance Magazine! Here’s their press release: VCU Libraries is honored to present these rare examples of the incomparable art work of the late Will Eisner. In an effort to encourage soldiers to keep better care of their equipment, the US Army hired Eisner’s American Visuals Corporation to do a digest-sized publication focusing on preventive maintenance. Each issue consisted of a color comic book style cover; eight pages of four color comic continuity story in the middle; and a wealth of technical, safety, and policy information printed in two color. EisnerRead More →

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In: Academia, ir, open access

Washington, DC & CHICAGO ­ April 22, 2008 ­ SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) announce that the SPARC-ACRL Forum during the 2008 American Library Annual Conference in Anaheim, Calif., will provide a timely look at Campus Open Access Policies: The Harvard Experience and How to Get There. Co-sponsored by the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services up-close look at the recent vote by Harvard¹s Faculty of Arts and Sciences enabling open access to their scholarly articles in an institutional repository.The Harvard vote grants the university the rights necessary to archive and makeRead More →

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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 →

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In: Collection Items, datamining, Digital Library, statistics

The University of Florida Digital Collections are still relatively young, established separately only recently. Since March 23 of this year, we’ve added another 100,000 pages, up from 1.62 million on March 23 and now we’re at 1.718 million (and counting) and it’s only April 20. The full stats–as of today–are: 53,682 titles; 70,323 items; and 1,718,050 pages. Our statistics are dynamically updated, listed online here, and the statistics are broken down by collection. The statistics are a handy gauge of how our collections are developing, but they can’t reflect the quality of materials online. For reflecting a more complete sense of the materials online, newRead More →

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In: Commons, Digital Library

The complete works of Charles Darwin are now online in one place, appropriately named “Charles Darwin: the Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online.” This one place includes: Darwin’s complete publications, thousands of handwritten manuscripts and the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue ever published; also hundreds of supplementary works: biographies, obituaries, reviews, reference works and more. This work is related to the “Darwin Correspondence Project,” which includes over has over 5,000 letters online and is working to locate as many letters as possible and to make them all available, and they’ve found around 14,500 already. Locating, collecting, and digitizing all of this material is wonderfulRead More →

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In: archives, Collection Items, Digital Library, objects

The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature has many amazing materials, but I’ve never before seen one quite like A Story of Stops. The book itself is wonderfully illustrated, so wonderfully in fact that I haven’t yet read it. I can’t get over the idea of a “story of stops,” written in 1891 for children. A “story of stops” for children or all ages now could be many things–a story of missed messages and miscommunications (stops in communication, stops in transmission, especially with telegraphs), travel and adventure stories (stops along a train route, or an exploration), and so much more. But a “story of stops”Read More →

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In: archives, Collection Items, Digital Library

The University of Florida has a collection of French Revolutionary pamphlets and a small few have been digitized and are now loading online. The full collection is quite large, and one of the digital collection items is a list of all of the pamphlets. It’s wonderful to see these materials online because having them online allows people to see what they are and to use them. The list of pamphlets is helpful on a basic level, like so many bibliographies and lists of holdings, but being able to see and use materials is exponentially better than only knowing that an archive has an object.Read More →

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In: Caribbean, dloc, newspapers, preservation

The Digital Library Center has been working on getting legal materials online for the Caribbean and from other areas in our collections. Most recently, we’ve added to our law collection with Hansard’s British Parliamentary Debates, which are one of the best sources of the political record for the United Kingdom [1803-1891]. We’re almost done digitizing the 2nd series [1820-1830, 25 volumes] of the Debates, and later projects will digitize the rest provided they’re still in need. The University of Southampton is also working on Parliamentary Publications and related materials. In addition to Hansard’s, the University of Florida Digital Collections includes Florida Law, with publications fromRead More →

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In: Academia, data sets, datamining, interface, visualization

I’m currently at the Center for Literary Studies (CLC) Codework: Exploring relations between creative writing practices and software engineering workshop, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, held at West Virginia University (and it’s April 3-6, 2008 and there’s more on it here). Ted Nelson, coiner of the word hypertext and media studies visionary spoke. Sandy Baldwin opened by introducing Nelson – describing Nelson as a luminary, and having him speak as astronomical – and then describing how Nelson influenced his own English practice and work. Nelson began by explaining his preference for open ended speaking, and then introduced his new book-in-progress “geeks bearing gifts” onRead More →