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Annual Vote for Public Domain Digitization: Tell us what to digitize for our 2023 celebration of the public domain

Reading Time: < 1 minuteEvery year in January, a new group of material will have their copyrights expire and become part of the public domain, where creative work is free to use by anyone for any purpose. We have poured over the list of items in our collection that will have their copyright expire in 2023, finding the rarest titles we have that fit into our Digital Collections. We need your help to decide which 23 items we should digitize.

Citation Management Tools

Reading Time: < 1 minuteCitation tools, which you might see referred to as “citation management tools”, help researchers by managing, organizing, and formatting references for research projects. The University of South Florida Libraries supports three of these tools, including Endnote, Mendeley, and Zotero. 

Zarzuela in honor of World Theater Day

Reading Time: 4 minutesUSF Libraries’ Special Collections is home to many different types of physical items and ephemera. From books and journals to newspapers, yearbooks, sheet music, and plays, the collections are vast and varied. One item type that is not widely highlighted is the zarzuela. Zarzuelas are Spanish lyric drama’s that alternate between spoken and sung scenes accompanied by dance numbers (“Zarzuela,” 2022). 

Celebrating Women’s History Month with Snapshots of Women at Work

Reading Time: 8 minutesThe twentieth century marked a watershed century for the women’s labor movement, starting with the progressive era and evolving as world wars and the women’s rights movements reshaped how society responded to a gender-integrated workforce. As we continue to celebrate the history and accomplishments of women, this week we’re taking a look at this evolution through documents… (Continue Reading)

Fair Use Week 2022

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.

‘We Wanted Some Basic Human Rights: The Civil Rights Struggle in Tampa’ exhibit

Reading Time: 3 minutesThe USF Libraries host several exhibits that highlight a variety of collections, providing context to material that is often only publicly accessed via a finding aid. The exhibits come from many different sources. Some come from grant funded research, some from library personnel or library partnerships, and some from student work under the guidance of USF faculty. The exhibit: ‘We Wanted Some Basic Human Rights: The Civil Rights Struggle in Tampa’ was created during a Spring seminar on the Civil Rights Movement taught by Dr. K. Stephen Prince of the USF History Department in 2016. Students of the seminar worked with Special Collections personnel and consulted fifteen archival collections housed in USF Tampa Special Collections.

Celebrating the Public Domain in 2022

Reading Time: 4 minutesJoin the USF Libraries in our fourth year of celebrating the public domain through digitization! Once again, we asked the USF community what it would like to see digitized for the 2022 celebration.  414 votes decided the 22 titles that would be selected from a curated list drawn from the USF Libraries collections. The digitized materials fall into four existing Digital Collections foci: Florida Studies, Environmental Collections, Sheet Music, and Children’s Literature. 

USF Curiosities: A faculty airplane?

Reading Time: 3 minutesHow do you normally get to campus? A car, a bicycle, a bus, or walk… 
What about an airplane? Well, that’s just what USF faculty members did in the early 1980s. While the Tampa campus had permanent faculty members, its sister campus at Ft. Myers did not. Initially, Tampa campus faculty members would make a 24 to 48 hour round trip in a car just to teach a three hour class… (Continue Reading)