Digital Library Center Blog | UF

Laurie N. Taylor July 22nd, 2008

The Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida has been awarded a Collections Stewardship grant from IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services). The project abstract is online along with the abstracts for the many other winners, and the Harn’s project is “Digitization of the Harn Museum Collection.” For the project, the Harn Museum will be taking digital images for 2,000 items and adding them to their collections management system. These digital images are necessary for practical purposes of access right now, but they’ll also create the foundation for building larger projects like digitizing exhibits and entire collections later on.

Congratulations to the Harn!

• harn , uf , museum
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Laurie N. Taylor July 21st, 2008

One of Zotero’s tag lines, “citation management is only the beginning,” explains its current and coming abilities rather well. The most needed component for Zotero’s widespread adopting is almost officially here with Sync Preview’s online backup and synchronization of each user’s Zotero library. Zotero 1.5 includes other improvements as well, but the most important first changes are the ability to save online and synchronize from multiple computers. That strong, centralized core offers so many amazing possibilities, especially given Zotero’s already impressive abilities.

Applications like this are exactly what web-top, Web 2.0, innovative/emerging scholarly style technologies should be. While Zotero’s Sync Preview is still under development, it’s exciting to see it coming along and so close to being here as a feature!

• interoperability , innovation , tools
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Laurie N. Taylor July 18th, 2008

The US National Archives announced earlier this week that they will be contributing materials to the World Digital Library! This is not unexpected, but still wonderful news because it will place so many resources together in a convenient interface, and each time one collection is contributed to another mismatches and other conflicts occur that result in better interoperability.

• interoperability , worlddigitallibrary , access , digital collections , archives
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Laurie N. Taylor July 11th, 2008

Now that the UF Digital Collections have worked through a bit more of the backlog–and gotten 2 million pages online!–I’ve started catching up on reading. Many great new (or maybe new-ish) ideas are being realized with sites like Foodsville, which repurposes digitized historical cookbooks to create a cookbook community and herald in innovations in printing, Interactive Relighting technologies that bring new information to life (which is amazing for so many historical documents!), Mscape keeps getting better, IBM and Linden Labs are moving toward virtual world interoperability (which is especially great with Google’s new 3D chat), and Google’s Map Maker has been out for awhile now but it’s also worth mentioning. Even with all of these and so many other new and improving technologies (I *heart* R&D!), the more exciting change, to me, is the shift where more and more people, companies, and entities are starting to “get” the information age.

“Getting it,” of course includes that more people have access, but it also means that more people understand the changes from that information and technology. A recent IBM news release explains it rather well in a single sentence “Data has become the new currency in today’s information economy.” For libraries and other non-profit information holders, this is critical. Too many areas of the commons–libraries, museums, education–have been trapped in a funding nightmare with limited public funds (and not wanting to tax the public they serve) and the lack of a “product” to sell.

The whole point of a “commons” is that it’s for everyone–it’s a public good, like a city park. The problem has always been how to support something that benefits everyone with the least cost to everyone and this is especially difficult when the work is invisible (which non-profits so often try to do–making their work hidden to better showcase their services and contents). In the information age, data has value as a public good and as a source to be mined, coallated, repurposed, and reconfigured into other services and products. As more people “get it”, funding should be available that doesn’t “buy” pubilc goods, but that pays to support it and to use it for other purposes. For instance, a library could digitize materials as funding permits, but then a company could cover the costs of digitizing materials and then return the materials to a library to be openly accessible on the library site and the company could recoup their costs by presenting the newly “acquired” data within an existing service, compiling the new materials within a larger analytical data set, or many other possibilities and then reselling that service as a new or improved service–made possible by improvements in finding, collecting, and using information. We’ve heard “Information Age” and “Internet Age” but the real information age is still gaining momentum and I’m anxiously awaiting what we can really do when we teach our information to dance.

(Of course, there’s a lot of work to go and that’s exciting as well, especially with items that don’t exist online–Googling finds zero results, Worldcat has nothing–from projects like the Digital Library of the Caribbean. There’s so much more to gather, and all the while we get to refine our methods. The real information age means more available to learn, new ways to learn, and an infinitely expanding horizon for playing with information!)

• innovation , dloc , Commons , Digital Library
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Laurie N. Taylor July 10th, 2008

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, selected Samuel P. Harn Museum objects, and Samuel Proctor Oral History Program interviews can now be viewed online without restriction.  Microfilmed books and newspapers have been freed from the vertigo of microfilm.  Additionally, UFDC accepts contributions from partners throughout Florida, the Caribbean, and Central and South America, mitigating travel time and costs.

Digitization is funded by the state, federal and international granting agencies, through library, museum and faculty research, and from donations from the Gator Nation. See the collections online at www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc and help them grow! For more information on supporting growth see http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/admin/giving

• ufdc , digital collections , statistics
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Laurie N. Taylor July 2nd, 2008

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 get in the way of the learning objectives.

Our presentation was incredibly fun thanks to the wonderful crowd, and great set up from all of STS and especially Margaret Mellinger and Barbara MacApline. We were not only lucky in the great setup for our own presentation, but we also got to see Felice Frankel’s presentation. Frankel presented on her work in scientific photography, capturing the beauty and scientific information in her photographs and then using scientific photography to aid in working toward creating a visual scientific language for scientific literacy. Frankel also spoke on how many images have become too computer-focused in many senses, and this is true. Her photographs are computational, like good flowcharts and paralleling much of the current thought on computational modeling and representation (UF’s own Paul Fishwick’s work on aesthetic computing; Ian Bogost’s work on procedural rhetoric and situational/contextual modeling for interaction/testing; James Paul Gee’s work on situational learning in games; and many others). Even with all of this wonderful work, often the computer as artifice/interface seems to encourage the wrong inds of computation where computationally cleaned/corrected is favored over computationally modeled/accurately presented. Frankel’s work is especially excellent because it offers the visual equivalent of what a sound bite should be–even a glimpse and viewers are hooked into wanting to see and know more. Frankel mentioned a number of sites that showcase her work and methodology, including PicturingtoLearn.org and ImageAndMeaning.org.

Frankel also mentioned her interest in capturing the images for a book on the “science of cooking” and I can’t wait for her to do it! So much of gaming and new media is about the appropriate design of the interface to conceal and reveal the underlying structure to generate interest and to pull players/users in at a set pace. Frankel’s work pulls viewers in through its sheer beauty and then each images teaches how to look by making us want to continue looking and understanding what we’re seeing. These ways of seeing relate to aesthetics that communicate as well as the use of metaphor, with metaphor as a reduction/abstraction of information that still remains true to the integrity of the information and the image, the need for the transparency of the interface or the exposing of the interface to show context while editing noise (unnecessary/confusing information), and all to develop images that speak to multiple viewpoints and the modeled system as a method/view. Frankel’s work essentially exposes variables in play and combining this with the additional motivation of making/playing with something tasty through cooking is brilliant. The hands-on play using concepts best known from computing within real world style crafts continues to grow rapidly in popularity, including the knitting/hacking with sites like Ravelry (thanks to Merrie Davidson for pointing this out in our Library 2.0 meetings, otherwise I wouldn’t have known to read up on Ravelry and I could have missed the story on the success of Ravelry community funding drive) and on more traditionally tech-oriented sites like O’Reilly launching Makezine and on yet other sites like Boing Boing that are technologically agnostic in their fusions of hack/make cultures.

I’m too tired and jet-lagged to write more now, but the STS session was wonderful and I’m already looking forward to the next one!

• visualization , presentations , conference , design , games , Library
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Laurie N. Taylor July 2nd, 2008

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.

• Florida , gators , archives , Library
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Laurie N. Taylor June 29th, 2008

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 the Caribbean (dLOC). These were great presentations, but it was especially great to chat with the presenters and attendees both before and after. One of the projects I’m working on is an “adopt a reel” option for donors to fund microfilm digitization by reel, and learning more about Preservation Resources and processing is helping me build that project proposal which will hopefully be successful and lauch before the end of 2008. While there’s a lot to be done before that can happen, this was one more step in the process building toward that project and toward other projects as well.

• ala , microfilm , presentations , ufdc , conference , dloc
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Laurie N. Taylor June 28th, 2008

“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. Print file can come from many sources (author, digitization, existing electronic files), to get people interested make the lists from bookstores, catalogs, company websites, others. Printing and binding the books has to be done quickly, hours and not days. POD, customer normally doesn’t know where the book comes from.

Keys to successful POD:  rapid and high quality copies

Strengths of POD:

• Low inventories
• No/low production costs until order is placed
• Highly dynamic; allows rapid changes to content
• Allows nearly all titles to be ‘in print’

Weaknesses

• Production costs per title are more expensive
• Not as effective for instantaneous wide distribution (Harry Potter stock everywhere at once).
• Some limits in size, print quality, and binding options

What Option to Choose: Choose by cost effectiveness

Now librarians don’t need to buy a rare book when finding it. In his experience with Brittle and SlavCopy at the University of Kansas, would make multiple preservation photocopies of books using a list-serve to see who was interested.

Bridgeport doing microfilm digitization, also doing printing and binding of ETDs, and doing retrospective dissertation scanning, POD will get larger as more people want print from digital more easily.

Lynne, Wiley & Sons, Print on Demand
Lynne Terhune, spoke on Wiley’s Global POD/USR Program, and they want all items available through it. POD is not inventoried nor returnable, but USR materials are. Print on demand/Ultra-short Run Library to fill orders, materials all available, no more out of stock, order ships the same day just like it was on the shelf. Some books have increased sales when put online, cash flow has improved, working with authors, no obsolescence, green advantage. Sales are doubling or tripling by year for the items in POD, from 2004-2007 went from 5 to 50 thousand. Industry-costing means that POD is generally a penny and up per page.

Beth, New York Public Library, head of access, espresso book machine
Beth spoke on NYPL’s experiment printing books from OpenLibrary using an Espresso machine for patrons. On Demand is the company that sells the Espresso Machine. When the NYPL team visited On Demand, they knew they’d need faq sheets and they’d need to pre-select titles to keep from overwhelming the public. Ultimately, they offered 13 books, 11 from Open Content Alliance, and two contemporary books were from authors who allowed their books to be printed this way. They also limited by book length, and titles were limited because almost all needed some tweaking, and of course quality going in determines quality coming out. Before the machine is usable, need to make upfront decisions and digital files need editing. The 1.5 machine espresso version is around $150,000, but version 2.0 may be cheaper, however it’s still expensive to digitize and format materials for print.

• printondemand , conference , preservation
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Laurie N. Taylor June 25th, 2008

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.

• conference , Library
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