UF Libraries participating in Digging into Data challenge

The University of Florida Libraries’ Digital Library Center (http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/ufdc) is participating in the Digging into Data Challenge and invites researchers to use the online collections. With well over three million pages in the Digital Collections and all of them open to the world, the Digging into Data Challenge will help us to learn about ourselves and help others to learn about the UF Libraries.

The Digging into Data Challenge is an international grant competition sponsored by four leading research agencies, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada.

The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question “what do you do with a million books?” Or a million pages of newspaper? Or a million photographs of artwork? That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitized data — far more than they could read in a lifetime — what does that mean for research? Check out the competition website: http://www.diggingintodata.org/.

Other digital repositories participating in the challenge include the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the University of Utah and the University of North Texas.