Latest Posts

Introducing the Born-Digital Archives Toolkit

Reading Time: 3 minutesIn a world where so little of our knowledge creation is done with pen and paper, how are libraries and archives preserving the history of today? That question is top-of-mind for many curators, librarians, and archivists who are seeing a rapid increase in donations of digital files and a wide range of media formats. Proactive planning and skill development can help manage the growth of what archives refer to as born-digital collections.

Enhancing Archival Access: USF Libraries Implements Ethical AI for Handwritten Document Transcription

Reading Time: 2 minutesThe University of South Florida Libraries is proud to announce a major advancement in its Digital Initiatives: the adoption of QDox, an AI transcription solution developed by Quantiphi and powered with AWS Textract. This technology is being used to transcribe handwritten archival documents with greater efficiency and ethical oversight.

Baking the Archives: Composition Cake

Reading Time: 7 minutesThe USF Libraries’ 1864 printing of American Kitchen, Directory and Housewife by Ann Howe is a later edition of a popular book first published as American Housewife in 1839. The recipe for “Composition Cake” as it is written in the clipping above requires “five cups of shifted flour, three of sugar, two of butter, a tea spoonful of soda, a tea cup of sweet milk, a wine-glass of wine, one of brandy, five eggs, one nutmeg; add a point of seeded raising if you want the cake quite rich.”

The Haunted House on the Harlem

Reading Time: 5 minutesRichard Schmidt, Digitization Coordinator in the Digital Initiatives unit, Special Collections takes us on a Halloweenie journey through the USF Library Special Collections’ spookiest dime novels wit his review of “The Haunted House on the Harlem” from Pluck and Luck issue 1074, dated January 1st, 1919.