Reading Time: 2 minutesFollowing USF Libraries’ incredible GIS Day 2024 event in November, we are thrilled to announce that the presentation recordings are available for viewing in Digital Commons. This annual event brought together students, faculty, and GIS enthusiasts to explore the latest advancements in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and their applications across various fields.

Reading Time: 3 minutesSusan Ariew and Evan Fruehauf discuss information privilege, the availability of scholarship, and open access.

Reading Time: 2 minutesFair Use Week 2025 takes place from February 24-28, 2025.  This year, we are continuing to watch several court cases that could decide how generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools function or establish new understanding of how U.S. copyright law enables innovation and creative uses of copyrighted content through an exception known as fair use.

Reading Time: 2 minutesDuring the last full week of October each year, members of the research community come together for Open Access Week. Librarians and researchers around the globe take time to discuss the impact open access (OA) has had over the last few decades, identify recent trends in OA, and tackle new issues and problems in open access.

Reading Time: 2 minutesSarah Swiger, MLIS, USF Libraries Purchasing Administrator, introduces a new library project for putting license terms in the library catalog.

Reading Time: 3 minutesDigital Dialogs has often featured posts on the public domain and the USF Libraries’ new public domain materials.  For our annual digitization the Libraries’ selects material with a publication date that indicates it would fall in to the public domain by its copyright expiration. No matter how straightforward this may seem, determining what is public domain can be quite complicated.

Reading Time: 2 minutesFair Use/Fair Dealing Week, February 26th-March 1st, 2024, is a celebration of this exception in copyright law.  Every year, fairuseweek.org provides a central location where libraries, museums, and related institutions can share the events and programming that they have planned as a celebration of fair use. 

Reading Time: 6 minutesIn honor of Library Lovers’ Day, Digital Dialogs asked members of USF Libraries’ faculty and staff to share a story about a book that impacted their life. Read one of these stories below! This guest post was written by Zibby Wilder, Assistant …Continue Reading

Reading Time: 3 minutesIn honor of Library Lovers’ Day, Digital Dialogs asked members of USF Libraries’ faculty and staff to share a story about a book that impacted their life. Read one of these stories below! This guest post was written by Jessica Szempruch, Assistant …Continue Reading

Reading Time: 4 minutesIn honor of Library Lovers’ Day, Digital Dialogs asked members of USF Libraries’ faculty and staff to share a story about a book that impacted their life. Read one of these stories below! This guest post was written by Charlayne Sullivan, HR …Continue Reading

Reading Time: 4 minutesGuest Post by Alex Neff, Director of Data Analytics and Textbook Affordability (DATA) at USF Libraries Building upon the previous post on Florida’s textbook affordability environment, this entry will cover several of the most popular initiatives implemented by the Textbook Affordability Project (TAP) at …Continue Reading

Reading Time: 2 minutesGuest Post by Alex Neff, Director of Data Analytics and Textbook Affordability (DATA) at USF Libraries The Textbook Affordability Project (TAP) at the University of South Florida (USF) has been a vital advocate for addressing the challenges of rising textbook costs since …Continue Reading

Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe USF Libraries have been following recent developments in publicly available generative AI tools.  Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) system that generates text, images, and other media in response to user prompts. Interfaces like ChatGTP have brought advances …Continue Reading

Reading Time: 3 minutesThe Poison Book Project at Winterthur Library is an “ongoing investigation to explore the materiality of Victorian-era publishers’ bindings, with a focus on the identification of potentially toxic pigments used as book cloth colorants.”  By using the Arsenical Books Database created by the project, USF Libraries Tampa Special Collections have identified a few books in our own archives that are likely colored with arsenic.