Reading Time: 3 minutes Dahlia Thomas, Stephanie Mackin, and Natalie Kazmin showcase the newly digitized Dignity collection.
Digital Dialogs
Gandy Digitization Project: Completing 100 Years of Tampa Photography
Reading Time: 3 minutes George “Skip” Gandy IV, 1942-2020, captured images of a Tampa Bay very much in transition. In 2012, Gandy donated over 80,000 images to Special Collections as photographic negatives, slides, and prints. A small sample of 218 of these have been reformatted and …Continue Reading
Reading Challenged Books
Reading Time: 3 minutes Book challenges of the past can seem eerily similar to book challenges today. During the John’s Committee Investigations at the University of South Florida (USF) in the mid-1960s, a number of books and readings, including some written by USF faculty, came under scrutiny for vulgarity, anti-religious sentiment, communist leanings, and pornography.
Arsenic in the Archives
Reading Time: 3 minutes The 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.
2023 Virtual Undergraduate Research Conference
Reading Time: 2 minutes This year, the 2023 Virtual Undergraduate Research Conference takes place on April 13th. It is the second year the library has worked with the Office of High Impact Practices and Undergraduate Research (HIPUR) to host the virtual event. For the 2022 Virtual …Continue Reading
Pets in the Archives: Cats and Dogs and Alligators… Oh my!
Reading Time: 4 minutes From cats and dogs to lizards and snakes, pets enrich our lives and bring us happiness on a daily basis. Nothing is better than coming home after a long day and being met at the door by an excited pet, ready to give you snuggles. As proud pet moms, the authors of Digital Dialogs would like to celebrate National Pet Day with a look at beloved pets as seen through our USF Libraries’ Digital Collections.
Celebrating Jazz Appreciation Month with Spencer Williams
Reading Time: 5 minutes You may not know Spencer Williams by name, but I bet you know “Everybody Loves My Baby, but My Baby Don’t Love Nobody but Me,” or maybe “Basin Street Blues.” Perhaps you can even sing a few lines of “I Ain’t Got Nobody.” Spencer Williams composed from 200-500 songs, many of which were imbued with a deep sense of nostalgia for the New Orleans he knew in the 1910s (Edwards, n.d.; Chilla, 2022). He was known for being an original, and though some might warmly critique his ideas as ‘shortwinded’ and his harmonies as ‘modest,’ they would still agree “he could write a tune that got to the subject” (“Quite a Moment,” 1965).
Celebrating Women’s History Month with the Burn Bosses of Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary
Reading Time: 8 minutes Beginning in 2021 Dr. Ann Hodgson, scientist, ornithologist, and affiliated faculty at USF sat down with a number of Audubon employees, researchers, and volunteers to discuss their efforts within and beyond the organization to support environmental conservation and restoration in Florida. As …Continue Reading
Dion Boucicault, Irish immigrants, and USF Libraries Special Collections
Reading Time: 6 minutes Dr. Matthew Knight gives an introduction to Dion Boucicault and the updated Dion Boucicault Theatre Collection hub for Irish-American Heritage Month.
Dr. John Ogden Caribbean and Coral Reef Collection
Reading Time: 4 minutes Guest post from John Clarke, Coordinator for Florida Environmental and Natural History collections at Special Collections, USF Libraries, Tampa campus highlights the Dr. John Ogden Caribbean and Coral Reef collection as an important collection of marine science research materials.