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. 

Reading Time: 2 minutesThe Library of Congress has addressed the challenge of keyword searching manuscript texts by opening its archives to citizen historians and asking for help to make their online collections more accessible by transcribing materials and providing transcription reviews through their program, called By the People!

Reading Time: 2 minutesAuthors, who take extra steps after publication by sharing and advertising their work, can help to increase the impact of their publications.  One method of increasing a journal article’s audience is to make use of the publisher’s author rights or author posting policies by contributing an Author’s Approved Manuscript (AAM) to an institutional repository.

Reading Time: 2 minutesExtreme environmental and climate changes have caught the attention of politics and the news, pushing environmental sciences into the spotlight.  Like the USF Libraries Florida Environment and Natural History collections, the Atlas of Florida Plants from the Institute of Systematic Botany and USF Species Catalog have been documenting environmental studies for decades.  Both resources collect information on plant species and provide a background against which to observe changes in the botanical world.

Reading Time: 2 minutesMay is National Bike Month! In 1956, the League of American Bicyclists established national bicycle month to promote cycling in communities around the United States. Bike to Work Week is going to be May 16 – 22, 2022, with Bike to Work …Continue Reading

Reading Time: 2 minutesFair Use/Fair Dealing week is an international celebration of exceptions in copyright laws that allow for certain uses of copyrighted material in order to encourage new art and creativity.  Fair use week runs from February 21–25, 2022 and was originally supported by the Association of Research Libraries.

Reading Time: 3 minutesA donation agreement can smooth the way for future digitization of a collection or hinder future uses of collection material. With all of the variables possible in donation agreements, it shouldn’t be surprising that some donor stipulations on older collections can take an archive or special collections by surprise.

Reading Time: < 1 minuteHave a new class or assignment that requires a software you have never used before?  Do you want to improve your skills in research, communication, and design?  Linked-in Learning is an excellent place to augment the skills you have begun to develop in your courses or career.

Reading Time: 2 minutesThis year Open Access Week is from Oct. 25-31, 2021.  The theme is “It Matters How We Open Knowledge: Building Structural Equity.” SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, organizes Open Access Week each year.  It started as Open Access Day in 2007 and has …Continue Reading

Reading Time: 2 minutesOktoberfest is just around the corner!  What started as a horse race celebrating the marriage of King Louis I, the king of Bavaria, in 1810 grew into a food and beer celebration in 1818.  It is now a world-famous two-week celebration of German beer in Munich, Germany.  Many cities in …Continue Reading

Reading Time: 4 minutesPost written by Lesley Brooks, Carla Fotherby, and LeEtta Schmidt USF Libraries Digital Collections seek to curate unique and impactful collections that provide researchers and scholars with access to new and historical information on environmental studies and natural history.  The Florida Environmental Interface has been created to enhance access to environmental resources including digital collections that we have described in a recent four part series, “USF Digital Collections for Environmental and Natural Sciences Research”… (Continue Reading)

Reading Time: 2 minutesPost written by LeEtta Schmidt, Carla Fotherby, Barbara Lewis, Jane Duncan, and Lesley Brooks Supplementing the instruction received in the class with online resources is not new, and it has become even more important now that most, or all, of a student’s educational experience has been pushed online as institutions try to mitigate the deleterious effects of COVID-19 on the lives of students.  Libraries and institutions of learning around the world have risen to the challenge of updating and improving their catalogue of online learning resources. The Digital Dialogs team has cobbled together a list of helpful tools and resources… (Continue Reading)

Reading Time: 4 minutes How could a museum claim copyright over the scan of a tapestry from the 1500s? The question can often encounter a lot of debate, and many museums have added to the confusion by claiming rights when they may not have grounds to do so.

Reading Time: 2 minutesCopyright law originated with the printed word and many feel that it most easily and accurately applies when dealing with written works.  The digital world has opened new avenues to creators, however, and the concept of copying is expanding from just paper …Continue Reading

Reading Time: 2 minutesWhat does it mean to be a good digital citizen? Fundamentally, being a good digital citizen reminds us that our digital footprint, or the sum total of information we post and share on the internet, can follow us throughout our lifetime. Photos …Continue Reading

Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe Digital Library Federation (https://www.diglib.org/) is a library member group that works together to advance research and the development of digital library technologies.  Every year DLF has a forum, open to members and non-members alike, where digital library practitioners can gather, share …Continue Reading

Reading Time: 3 minutesDigital collections have the exciting ability to shed light upon and provide accessibility to materials that had previously been hidden within locked rooms in the library building.  By digitizing and sharing material online, libraries can facilitate advancements in research that were hindered …Continue Reading

Reading Time: < 1 minuteBefore 1976, copyright protection was a lot different than it is today.  Material published with a © notice and registered with the U.S. Copyright Office between 1923 and 1963 were only granted 28 years of copyright protection with an optional 28 year …Continue Reading

Reading Time: 2 minutesImagine you are putting together the slides for a presentation.  Knowing that it is much better to use the slides as dynamic visual aids and not load them with text, you are looking for a picture to help get your point across.  …Continue Reading

Reading Time: 2 minutesOur online world has made finding information and media easier than ever, but knowing what can be done with that material, legally, isn’t always clear.  U.S. Copyright law and international trade agreements mean that most of the material you may find online …Continue Reading

Reading Time: 2 minutes“I know I have the bodie, but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and Stomach of a King, and of a King of England, too.” Elizabeth I, The Tilbury speech, 1588 I discovered this delightful quote in …Continue Reading

Reading Time: < 1 minuteFair Use week, from February 25 to March 1 in 2019, is a community celebration of fair use coordinated by the Association of Research Libraries.  Each day teachers, students, researchers and consumers benefit from copyrighted information because of the fair use exception …Continue Reading

Reading Time: < 1 minuteOn October 8th, the Global Citizens Project Student Association screened the film Columbus Day Legacy at the Marshall Center. The film explores the tensions between the Native Americans and Italian Americans in Denver, Colorado, concerning the celebration of Columbus Day. This controversy …Continue Reading

Reading Time: 2 minutesA few decades ago, a chance discovery by a wandering Bedouin brought the Dead Sea Scrolls out of the caves near Khirbet Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea and eventually to the Shrine of the Book at the Israel …Continue Reading

Reading Time: < 1 minuteMany of the materials released to or shared on the internet today are openly accessible due to the very nature of the internet itself.  This does not mean that they are free from copyright protection or released with any open use provisions.  …Continue Reading

Reading Time: 2 minutesAh, Firenze!  Located in the Tuscan region of Italy, this ancient city was a center of trade, finance, and culture in medieval times.  Home to the Medici family, whose power and control over the region began in the mid-15th century, Florence is …Continue Reading

Reading Time: < 1 minuteAre you starting on a research project where you know you are going to include some material created by someone else?  Or including copyright content in your thesis or dissertation? The library has a new tutorial video that gives an introduction to …Continue Reading

Reading Time: 2 minutesAs more collections are digitized or born-digital and as new tools are developed for collecting, processing, analyzing, and disseminating scholars’ work, we have a multitude of opportunities to experience scholarship in new ways.  Each month, “Across the Academy” will, in the hopes …Continue Reading