Reading Time: 2 minutesFood is a way to understand a place and a culture. Sharing a meal is a bonding ritual that transcends many cultural boundaries. The recipes of the past can also teach us about history, with useful tips for today’s challenges. That is the case for Blanche Armwood Perkins’ Food Conservation in the Home: A Collection of War-Time Recipes.
Category: Latest Dialogs
Gandy Digitization Project: Completing 100 Years of Tampa Photography
Reading Time: 3 minutesGeorge “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 minutesBook 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 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.
2023 Virtual Undergraduate Research Conference
Reading Time: 2 minutesThis 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 minutesFrom 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 minutesYou 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 minutesBeginning 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
