Reading Time: 2 minutesExtreme environmental and climate changes have caught the attention of politics and the news, pushing environmental sciences into the spotlight. Like the USF Libraries Florida Environment and Natural History collections, the Atlas of Florida Plants from the Institute of Systematic Botany and USF Species Catalog have been documenting environmental studies for decades. Both resources collect information on plant species and provide a background against which to observe changes in the botanical world.
Category: Latest Dialogs
Introducing Digital Commons @ USF
Reading Time: 2 minutesWe are happy to announce a new, consolidated, Institutional Repository at the USF Libraries! The new repository, Digital Commons at the University of South Florida, highlights the research of USF faculty, students, and staff across our three campuses as well as features conferences, scholar profiles, digital collections, theses and dissertations, and open access textbooks and journals.
#Creekshed – USF Creek Shed Digital Collection
Reading Time: 2 minutesUSF Libraries is collaborating with Dr. Thomas Hallock (USF St. Petersburg campus) and Dr. Amanda Hagood (Eckerd College) to archive a series of columns called City Wilds for the newspaper Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. The articles are intended to highlight various creek sheds around the Tampa Bay area. Dr. Hallock finds it important to make sure the conversation on this topic is sustained. In an effort to get the word out on these pieces, Dr. Hallock and Dr. Hagood created and put into use an easily taggable hashtag name, #creekshed.
Enjoying Real and Imagined Florida Landscapes in the Hampton Dunn Collection of Florida Postcards
Reading Time: 5 minutesOver a hundred years ago, postcards became popular souvenirs when visiting far off destinations. The images depicted on their backs provided vivid glimpses into the landscapes seen by family members and friends. The postcards from the Hampton Dunn Collection of Florida Postcards, housed in USF Libraries’ Special Collections—Tampa campus, show Florida at its finest and most whimsical… (Continue Reading)
Millions of Years in the Making: A New Platform for the Karst Information Portal
Reading Time: 3 minutesBy: Amanda Boczar, Curator for Digital Collections and Jason Boczar, Digital Scholarship and Publishing Librarian June 6th is the National Day of Caves and Karst, and we’re celebrating with the official launch of the newly redesigned Karst Information Portal (KIP). For …Continue Reading
The Oracle in the Archives: The Grim Reaper of Pizza
Reading Time: 6 minutesGuest post from Richard Schmidt, Collection Specialist for Special Collections– Tampa campus. Richard specializes in digitization of rare materials.
The push for the USF Libraries to digitize the college’s student newspaper, The USF Oracle, began several years before I was hired as a staff member in the building. Alumni and researchers alike have always been interested in being able to view campus newspapers, and the more that they could view online, the better. By the time I started working on the Digitization team in Special Collections in 2007, the effort to capture the day-to-day goings-on, as recorded by the newspaper, was well under way… (Continue Reading)
National Bicycle Month 2022
Reading Time: 2 minutesMay is National Bike Month! In 1956, the League of American Bicyclists established national bicycle month to promote cycling in communities around the United States. Bike to Work Week is going to be May 16 – 22, 2022, with Bike to Work …Continue Reading
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.