UBorrow has been quite successful in its early operation. During the fall 2011 semester, 12,067 items were loaned statewide among all the state universities. Through UBorrow, 2,191 items were loaned in the first two weeks of January 2012, up from 2,948 for all of August 2011. Requests for items have come from undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staff, and the initial feedback about UBorrow from users has been very positive.

Developed by the Council of State University Libraries (CSUL) and the Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA), UBorrow is easy to navigate and simple to use. If a book is unavailable at one SUS library but available at another one, the UBorrow icon will appear on the search page. The user follows this link to the statewide catalog, requests the item using his or her library credentials, and has it delivered to and available for pick up at the user’s specified library location in just a few days.

This unmediated borrowing service creates a virtual statewide library of 16 million items and delivers materials more quickly and efficiently than standard interlibrary loan. Studies have shown reductions of as much as 90 percent in the cost of sharing books when systems like UBorrow are used instead of traditional interlibrary loan services.

In addition to cost savings, this collaboration between state university libraries aims to satisfy more patron requests. Library staff at all of Florida’s public universities worked together to streamline processes, resulting in decreased turnaround time for sharing materials and improved patron satisfaction. Libraries are able to reduce duplication of items and buy more unique materials that benefit the scholarship of students and faculty statewide.

The State University Libraries, individually and collectively, provide access to collections and services that directly support the teaching, research and service missions of Florida’s state universities and the communities they serve. The libraries, in settings both physical and virtual, inspire intellectual inquiry, facilitate learning and serve as a catalyst for the creation of new knowledge.

Library West, room 211
Register at http://apps.uflib.ufl.edu/Registration/
•     Thursday, May 24, 9:30-11:00 am
•     Wednesday, June 6, 2:30-4:00 pm
•     Thursday, July 12, 2-3:30 pm
•     Wednesday, July 18, 9:30-11:00 am

Education Library, classroom
No registration is necessary.
•     Wednesday, May 23, 12:00-1:30 pm
•     Tuesday, June 5, 12:00-1:30 pm
•     Monday, June 11, 12:00-1:30 pm
•     Thursday, June 28, 12:00-1:30 pm
•     Thursday, July 19, 12:00-1:30 pm

For more information contact:
Blake Landor, Library West, at landor@ufl.edu
Marilyn Ochoa, Education Library, at mnochoa@ufl.edu

Any questions about your Gatorlink account can be directed to the UF Computing
Help Desk at 392-HELP.

To prepare  for the 450th anniversary of the founding of St. Augustine in 2015, the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries has been awarded $265,000 to build an online collection of hidden and fragile resources related to colonial St. Augustine.

The grant from  the National Endowment for the Humanitiesis the largest and one of only four NEH grants in Florida this year. There are 34 nationally.

The “Unearthing St. Augustine” grant, led by project director Thomas Caswell and co-director James Cusick, will establish a specialized computer digitization lab at the Government House in St. Augustine. This two-year project will create an interactive digital collection or database consisting of 10,000 maps, drawings, photographs and documents available freely online.

Partnering with the Smathers Libraries to realize this project are the City of St. Augustine departments of Heritage Tourism and Archaeology Program, the St. Augustine Historical Society, the UF College of Design, Construction and Planning and the Government House, which is managed by UF.

The “Unearthing St. Augustine” materials are scattered among four  repositories  that have been previously inaccessible to researchers worldwide. Among the important items to be “unearthed,” which date from the 16th century to the present, include archival materials from the following:

• Government House – maps and overlays of the city, architectural drawings of historic structures and related government documents
• St. Augustine Historical Society – Spanish documents, transcriptions and English language translations
• City of St. Augustine Archaeology Program – records, photographs and site summaries for 100 excavations conducted over the past 20 years
• Herschel Shepard Collection at UF – drawings, photos and documents related to Shepard’s restoration and reconstruction of the city’s colonial buildings

The collection will support research in a broad range of subjects: Florida and U.S. history, Spanish colonies, Native Americans, slavery, exploration, architecture and urban planning, social and economic development, missionary work, military defenses and warfare. When completed, “Unearthing St. Augustine” will not only satisfy the needs of a wide variety of researchers including historians, archaeologists, architects and historic preservationists, but the project will also help in telling St. Augustine’s unique “story” on a global scale.

In support of the grant, Kathleen Deagan, distinguished research curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History, wrote: “Digital access to primary materials is probably the single most important factor in stimulating new and diverse scholarship on St. Augustine’s colonial history. This is also a very timely project, in that the 450th anniversary of St. Augustine’s founding will occur in 2015, providing an opportunity to focus both public and scholarly attention on the role of Florida in our nation’s history.”

Jane Landers, professor of history at Vanderbilt University, added: “I have long recognized the international significance of St. Augustine, as well as its importance in our national history. I can attest to the unique nature of the city’s historical documents, maps, and artifacts and firmly believe they constitute a national treasure that should be made more accessible to a wider public. These records and archaeological reports document much about the material culture, economy and social and political organization of St. Augustine and its indigenous and African hinterlands.”

Government House is one of 38 separate historic buildings and 23 state-owned historic parcels located in the City of St. Augustine and managed by the University of Florida in support of programs in preservation, education and interpretation.

For more information contact Tom Caswell, associate university librarian and curator of St. Augustine Government House Research Collections, at (352) 273-2805 or tcaswell@ufl.edu.

The Kai Lai Chung Papers consists of correspondence, both incoming and outgoing, and notebooks for Chung’s lectures, research and publications. The collection reflects Chung’s contribution to the study of mathematics and also his interest in the historical contributions of others, in particular Pao Lu Hsu and French mathematician Wolfgang (Vincent) Doeblin. In later years, Chung made annotations and comments to his files. These are found throughout the collection in the margins of documents and as post-it notes attached to files. A keyword index for the letters and notebooks is available.

Kai Lai Chung was born in Hangzhou in the Zhejiang Province of China in 1917. He entered Tsinghua University in 1936 to study physics. Later, he attended the National Southwestern Associated University where he earned a degree in mathematics. He studied number theory with Lo Keng Hua and probability theory with Pao Lu Hsu. Chung did his doctoral work at Princeton University. His dissertation, “On the maximum partial sum of sequences of independent random variables” was completed in 1947. Chung taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, the University of California, Cornell University and Syracuse University before securing a position at Stanford University in 1961. His primary work was in probability theory, specifically Brownian motion and the theory of Markov chains. He was one of the founders of the Seminars on Stochastic Processes. Chung died in 2009.

All materials in the Kai Lai Chung Papers within the UF Digital Collections (http://ufdc.ufl.edu/) are freely and fully accessible. See the Kai Lai Chung Papers at http://ufdc.ufl.edu/chung

The functionalities and features of the UF Digital Collections are supported using the UF-developed SobekCM software. SobekCM is released as open source software under the GNU GPL license and can be downloaded from the SobekCM Software Download Site: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/software. To learn more about the technologies, please visit the SobekCM page: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/sobekcm.

For more information contact:
Carl Van Ness, head of manuscripts and archives, carvann@uflib.ufl.edu, 352-273-2764
Laurie Taylor, UF Digital Collections, Laurien@ufl.edu, 352-273-2902

Opening reception:
Wednesday April 25 5:00-7:00pm, Smathers Library 1A

Special Guest Marcia Jo Zerivitz will speak on “Jewish Jacksonville within 250 Years of Florida Jewish History.” Zerivitz is the Founding Executive Director of the Jewish Museum of Florida and has been a leader in the organized Florida Jewish community for 50 years. She initiated the legislation for both a Florida Jewish History Month in 2003 (each January) and a Jewish American Heritage Month in 2006 (each May) to increase awareness of the contributions by Jews to the state and nation.

Curator Guided Tour:
Sunday May 20, 2012 4:00-5:00pm
Smathers Library Gallery, 2^nd Floor

The exhibition features late 19th-century through end of the 20th century Jacksonville materials from from the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica and the George A. Smathers Libraries Special Collections.

Prior to the 1930s, the Jewish community of Jacksonville represented Florida’s largest and most significant Jewish population. Yet, in spite of its former preeminence, the story of this community is still little known, and the rich history of Jewish Jacksonville is just beginning to unfold. Elements of Jewish family, communal and institutional life, as well as some of the ways in which Jewish people have impacted the development and structure of Jacksonville itself are highlighted.

The exhibition includes unique manuscripts from the recently donated Safer family archives, a special Torah scroll from the former Beth Shalom synagogue, and previously unseen and un-cataloged Temple bulletins, yearbooks and newsletters held only in the Price Library.

Curator: Rebecca Jefferson
Exhibition Designer: Lourdes Santamaria-Wheeler
Online: http://exhibits.uflib.ufl.edu/jewishjacksonville

Contact the library staff for assistance: (Please note that the phone numbers remain unchanged)

Lisa Chinn, library head: 352.273.2769; lchinn@ufl.edu – L301A, Marston Science Library
Paul Kirk: 352.273.2772; pkirk@uflib.ufl.edu – L215D, Marston Science Library

International and New York Times best-selling author and 2012 National Preservation Week spokesperson Steve Berry will  give a talk about his suspense novels in celebration of Preservation Week 2012 (April 22-28). Berry will speak at the Millhopper Branch Library on Monday, April 23 from 4:00-5:30 p.m.

Berry, author of “The Jefferson Key,” his most recent novel, and the forthcoming “The Columbus Affair” (Ballantine, May 15, 2012), will talk about the importance of preserving our personal and community cultural heritage. In a recent Wall Street Journal interview (Nov. 2, 2011), Berry notes, “What are we losing when that happens [on being told of the rapid loss of our historical record], we’re losing windows to the past, thoughts to the past and ideas to the past, and that really affected me.”

Berry’s works have been translated into 40 languages with more than 14 million books in print in 51 countries, worldwide.  Besides the “The Jefferson Key,” his titles include “The Emperor’s Tomb,” “The Paris Vendetta,” “The Alexandria Link” and “The Venetian Betrayal.”

A devoted student of history, Berry and his wife, Elizabeth, founded History Matters, a foundation dedicated to aiding the preservation of the fragile reminders of our past. Since then, they have traveled the world raising much-needed funds for a wide range of historic preservation projects.

A native of Georgia, Berry graduated from the Walter F. George School of Law at Mercer University. You can learn more about Steve Berry and History Matters at steveberry.org.

Preservation Week, a joint initiative of the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS), the Library of Congress and IMLS, encourages libraries and other institutions to connect our communities through events, activities and resources that highlight what we can do, individually and together, to preserve our personal and shared collections. Visit the Preservation Week 2012 website for more information or how to get involved.

ALCTS is a division of the American Library Association.

Join the University of Florida Libraries, the Alachua County Library District and the Matheson Museum, as thousands of libraries throughout the country host special events in celebration of Preservation Week @ your library.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information contact Betsy Simpson at
(352) 273-2730 or bstsys@uflib.ufl.edu

THE ICPSR (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research) WORKSHOP
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Library West, Room 211
10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Registration Info: RSVP to dschwieder@uflib.ufl.edu; walk-ins also welcome

What Will You Learn?

• What’s in the ICPSR archive including data, citations, teaching materials and student research opportunities
• How to locate and access data on demand
• Data management plan services that meet NSF and NIH requirements
• ICPSR’s emerging restricted-data management services

ICPSR resources support students, faculty and academic research scientists who seek to:

• Write articles, papers or theses to fulfill undergraudate or graduate requirements
• Conduct secondary research to better understand results of a study, support findings of primary research, or generate new findings
• Study or teach statistical ethods in quantitative analysis

ICPSR is a unit within the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan
www.icpsr.umich.edu

For more information contact David Schwieder at dschwieder@uflib.ufl.edu; 273-2660