Reading Time: 2 minutesGuest post by Jason Boczar, Digital Scholarship and Publishing Librarian As it celebrates its fifteenth year, SPARC’s International Open Access Week aims to “raise awareness” about the “importance of community control of knowledge sharing systems.” To celebrate, the team behind USF Library’s …Continue Reading
Category: Latest Dialogs
Digital Commons Data @ USF: Our New Data Repository
Reading Time: 2 minutesEarlier this year, USF Libraries rolled out Digital Commons Data Repository @ USF (DCD), a new data platform that stores and shares datasets produced by University of South Florida researchers. Overview A data repository is a tool used to share and store …Continue Reading
Generative AI resources at the Libraries
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe USF Libraries have been following recent developments in publicly available generative AI tools. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) system that generates text, images, and other media in response to user prompts. Interfaces like ChatGTP have brought advances …Continue Reading
Digital Commons Roadshow: Learn More About Library Digital Services
Reading Time: < 1 minuteUSF Libraries’ Digital Commons at USF is more than just a repository for research and archives. It is also a valuable tool, backed by a team of experts, to help you achieve your goals for tenure and promotion. In addition to free …Continue Reading
Food Conservation in the Home and Recipes in the Archives
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.
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.