Technologies & Updates for Partners » Uncategorized

MARCXML Files

laurien — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:44:57 +0000

The process to map UFDC METS to MARCXML is complete (or complete enough) that the ingest to the catalog has begun in test. I’ll keep posting as this progresses, but we have further notes here.

FTP Up Later Today or Tomorrow

laurien — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 14:54:20 +0000

Our Systems Administrator said FTP should be up and working later today (so today or tomorrow) for partners to start sending again. We’re sorry for the delay on this and excited to know we’ll be back up soon!

Development and Production Boxes Updated, Greenstone 2.81

laurien — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 02:16:42 +0000

The Development and Production boxes are both online and updated with Greenstone 2.81. Lucene should be operational soon and then all systems will be stable for awhile without any planned changes.

Running from the Development Box

laurien — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 20:09:22 +0000

We’re currently running on the Development Server. This should look identical to all users, but if anyone notices any glitches or problems, please let me know so we can check into them.

RSS Feeds by Institution!

laurien — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:37:10 +0000

Mark Sullivan (our wonderful UFDC Programmer) just added RSS feeds by institution to UFDC!

For each institution (other than ones we suppressed, such as UF), we have a complete RSS feed with every item, and a feed with just the last 20 items added. This is a feed for all items tagged to this institution from all of their collections within UFDC.

Check out these great RSS feeds for:

We’re Loading Again!

laurien — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:31:08 +0000

After 14 long days, UFDC is finally loading again. We had bad hardware and had to restore from a backup and with so many files (and permissions to be reset) it took a long time. Thankfully, UFDC is finally loading again.

It shouldn’t be that important–not so important that it pains me when we don’t load for even 24 hours–but it is. Loading means seeing all of our work, our meticulous, time-consuming efforts realized. Without loading, we work without seeing or sharing the fruits of our labors and it’s actually depressing. Thankfully, UFDC is loading again and goodness is there a lot to load. We’ll be loading constantly for the next several days, so please check UFDC and see what we have to share.

Florida Digital Newspaper Library, RSS

laurien — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:11:48 +0000

We now have the Florida Digital Newspaper Library RSS feed up and we have the current queue online so that our processing is more transparent for everyone.

Grebo Mask, Part II

laurien — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 16:01:54 +0000

We’re still working on implementing OpenLaszlo for creating film objects, but I wanted to share the Grebo Mask in Flash (in part so I can always find it when people ask). The photos for the mask are already online, so this is just the in-motion version. The full version of the mask in motion is here.

Book as Object

laurien — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 21:00:07 +0000

“This is crucial, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there, durable, indefinitely reuseable, an object of value.”

The quote above is from page 38 of “Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading,” by Ursula K. Le Guin in Harper’s Magazine (Vol. 316, No. 1983, February 2008, p. 33-38), and it speaks to the issue of materiality for digitization. Digital initiatives have rightfully focused on access to book contents, or access to information. Given the technological limitations for even this, with the difficulties from copyright and costs of mass digitization, access to information has been a lofty goal alone. Now however, with ever-increasing screen sizes and touch screens entering popular use through the MacAir, iPhone, Nintendo DS, and others, the object-ness of the book must be further considered.

In Evocative Objects, Sherry Turkle explains “We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with” (5) and this love includes the object of the book. The design of an interface impacts its usability based on the way the user feels about the interface. Donald Norman has shown that people find “prettier” interfaces easier to use, so the interface is also a consideration in working through to a means for representing the book-as-object in a digital form. I don’t have any easy answers for how to best go about this representation, but I’m working on it for my upcoming presentation at the University of Florida’s Comics Conference, and I hope to post more about it soon. In the meantime, I’m considering the object qualities of digitized comics, the interface(s) in which they are represented, and the relation of digital libraries and museums in terms of needs and problems for showing the qualities of objects and addressing the users’ desires for those object-qualities.

Surgical Appliances, Malaria, and Sexually Transmitted Diseases

laurien — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 21:56:22 +0000

Like the Library of Congress, the National Museum of Health and Medicine has also been exploring using Flickr to share images. The images are great and include historical photos and documents. Some, like the Malaria Joe comic are humorous images from their eras, but some of the photos are strikingly beautiful, painful, haunting, and inspiring snapshots of life, offering glimpses into their time and into people’s lives. Everyone should be able to wander through these images, and it’s an amazing gift to have them online for us to see:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/99129398@N00
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7438870@N04
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22719239@N04