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In: Collection Items, Digital Library, Library, objects, preservation, video

UF’s Digital Library Center is working on digitizing videos and putting them into the Digital Collections. In order to make sure these videos are preserved for the long run, we’re saving large and small files and taking the necessary steps. In order to make sure they’re found and used as soon as possible, we’re loading them into Youtube. While many of the videos are standard educational and institutional materials (interesting, but not email-forwarding type stuff), we have one wonderful video of books vs. bugs. Bugs vs. Books Techno Bugs vs. Books Darker The video was made by the Preservation Department and the Nematology and EntomologyRead More →

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In: Academia, Collection Items, Digital Library, Library, open access, UF

The UF Libraries’ Preservation Department has started a retrospective dissertation scanning project to help solve problems of access to research, but UF needs permission for Internet Distribution from each author. Authors can grant permissions by completing this form and sending it to the address on the form. UF requires all new dissertations to be submitted electronically, but that leaves decades upon decades of paper and microfilm-only versions. Finding all of the UF alumni to assign permissions is a monumental task. The retrospective dissertation scanning project has been featured in various news venues (newsletters and the newspaper, emails have been sent to alumni with email addressesRead More →

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In: Collection Items, comics, Digital Library

One of the major benefits of large digitization projects is that important and amazing artifacts, hidden in the archives, come to the surface and are easy to access not just by themselves but also within their overall context. One of these amazing artifacts is Droopy the Drew Field Mosquito by Harry Lampert. Harry Lampert is best known as co-creator of the DC Comics superhero The Flash. Lampert began his career at the Fleischer studios and worked on comics – including Betty Boop, Popeye, and KoKo the Clown – wrote humor comic books, worked on gag cartoons for many periodicals – including The New York Times,Read More →

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In: Digital Library, Library, video

UF’s Digital Library Center is still working on making video files work properly through our Digital Collections. In the meantime, we’re adding videos to Youtube so that people can access the videos since some of them are really neat. Thus far, we’ve loaded the Preservation Book Care video in two parts because of Youtube’s file size and length limitations: part 1 and part 2. I also separated out a very short clip of a roach eating a book part because it’s great. The clip is super-zoomed in on the roach and it just looks wonderfully sci-fi. The Library Preservation Officer has an entomology video connectionRead More →

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In: design, Digital Library, interface, Library

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an post about libraries in the digital age. The post notes that digitization projects often lead to a patchwork of online materials that aren’t available within an integrated interface. This is certainly true for the time being, but steps toward integration can be seen in the WorldCat’s full catalog listings for so many different libraries and from corporations as they attempt to catalog or at least extract catalog-style metadata from information sources. For instance, Microsoft Live Labs’ pages have a note on their work on entity abstraction and the image of it is listed here. I started noticing theRead More →

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In: design, Digital Library, exhibit, gis, Library, UF

While the map linked from this slideshow isn’t actually accurate because nearly all of the images are from the University of Florida’s original Library, Smathers East, and I spread them out for easier viewing, the map does accurately show why there’s reason to be excited because Picasa has improved once again. Not only can the images in Picasa be mapped, the images now show as small icons of the images instead of the generic picture icon, and the individual images can be clicked on and enlarged and they can be played in a slide-show format across the map. The slideshow with the map is aRead More →

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In: Collection Items, holiday, UF

UF’s public awareness campaign is “The University of Florida is the foundation for The Gator Nation” and then sub-campaign taglines like “The Gator Nation is everywhere.” While it does sound a little sci-fi overlord-esque, it’s actually true in that UF does have land everywhere and does have projects conducted all over the state and all over the world. UF is also one of the largest public schools and has alumni everywhere. If Gator fans are counted, then this becomes even more validated because Gator fans are everywhere. I’m not a sports person, so I only know about any of the sports when people tell meRead More →

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In: Collection Items, Digital Library, dloc, references

UF is a partner in the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), so I was excited to see that the book Caribbean Libraries in the 21st Century: Changes, Challenges, and Choices edited by Shamin Renwick and Cheryl Peltier-Davis is available. The table of contents with all twenty-five chapter titles and authors is listed on the Library of Congress website and gives an useful sense of the full book, and I hope to grab the UF Library copy tomorrow and I’ll post a review as soon as I’ve read it. It looks really interesting for my more pragmatic purposes and for all interested in library collaborationsRead More →

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In: Academia, design, Digital Library, interface, Library

This is the mindmap I made for the Baldwin Digital Library Project using Mind42, which is a new online mindmapping service. Mind42 is free and allows for collaboration, so it’s a nice service for many uses. However, I’m hoping to find something that will display the nodes in motion (like the Visual Thesaurus but I’m not looking for the search/query functionality). I want the motion purely for visual interest, but I’m having trouble finding something free and easy for use in creating the visual-motion mindmap. I’m guessing a simple Flash animation would be best for my needs, but I’d appreciate any recommendations for something thatRead More →

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In: book arts, design, imagetext, materiality, open access

I’m obviously behind in my fan-reading of all things Google because I just noticed that they have Walter Crane’s Line and Form online (and I was planning to scan it next week when I noticed I couldn’t find it online to view or purchase easily). They don’t seem to have the cover of it, either that or they’re choosing not to show it in their cover browse view. At any rate, it’s wonderful that they have this online solving the issue of access to this important work for art, design, book history, and so many other fields.Read More →