Reading Time: 2 minutesThe Digital Initiatives team is proud to announce the completion of a major digitization project: over 4,400 items from the Florida Ornithological Society (FOS) Records are now available online. These materials, selected for their research value and copyright status, represent a significant portion of the 38-box archival collection donated to USF Libraries by the Florida Ornithological Society.
Category: Collections of Interest
Leisure Reading Collection
Reading Time: 2 minutesResearch has shown that reading for pleasure, even as little as 6 minutes a day, can reduce your stress levels by 68%, more than listening to music or taking a walk (Chiles, 2009). Your dedicated librarians over at USF Libraries appreciate the various stressors that are involved during the semester. We understand that life as a student can be hectic and does not always allow time to run to the public library, so we wanted to bring a little slice of that here to USF. The Leisure Reading Collection (LRC) was created to encourage students, faculty, and staff to pick up a good book and relax whether that be for a few minutes between classes or to wind down on a Friday evening after an incredibly busy week.
Florida’s Great Hurricanes Exhibit Migration and Updates
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe USF Libraries’ Florida’s Great Hurricanes Exhibit offers insights into six of these influential storms. The original online exhibit has been migrated to a new platform and updated to include enhanced navigation on a site that will allow for more interactive features to be added in the years to come.
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.
Baking the Archives: A Ginger Loaf to Remember
Reading Time: 6 minutesThis post was guest authored by Mikayla Osso, Collections Operations Supervisor in Collections & Discovery at the Tampa Library When I was a little girl, there were two toys that I wanted more than anything: a Baby Alive doll and an …Continue Reading
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.”
National Author’s Day: 2025 Staff Recommendations
Reading Time: 2 minutesIn honor of National Author’s Day, Digital Dialogs wanted to share with you some of our favorite authors. The recommendations below were submitted by our very own USF Libraries’ staff and faculty. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry… this list really has something for everyone! …Continue Reading
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.
Boucicault’s Newly Digitized “The Vampire”
Reading Time: 2 minutesDion Boucicault (1820-1890) was a prolific and innovative playwright, actor, producer, manager, and director of the 19th-century, English-speaking stage. This year, the collection gained a newly digitized play, just in time for Halloween. The Vampire, a supernatural melodrama explores two encounters with a mysterious phantom, blending elements of the supernatural with dramatic tension.