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.”
Tag: USF Digital Collections
Baking the Archives: Wisconsin Crumb Cake
Reading Time: 4 minutesToday’s bake takes us back to 1908, when the Woman’s Club of Jacksonville, Florida published its Woman’s Club Cook Book, a 220-page community collection spanning everything from soups to “chafing dish recipes” to “diet[s] for the sick.” These early 20th-century cookbooks are more than just recipe compilations, they’re cultural documents of women’s lives, networks, and foodways.
Annual Vote for the Public Domain
Reading Time: < 1 minuteEach year, more material reaches the end of its copyright protection and falls into the public domain. And each year, the USF Libraries invite our community to participate in selecting which public domain works from the Libraries’ collections will be digitized and made freely available online.
Preservation Spotlight: Turning Negatives into a Positive with the Skip Gandy Collection
Reading Time: 3 minutesFor Preservation Week 2025, we are excited to provide an update on the digitization of the Gandy Collection of Commercial and Aerial Photography. With more than 125,000 photographs, the collection showcases more than 50 years of Tampa history from behind the lens of Skip and Sandy Gandy.
National Reading Month: Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson, and Olympians
Reading Time: 5 minutesIn honor of National Reading Month, Digital Dialogs asked members of USF Libraries’ faculty and staff to share a story about a book sparked their love of reading. Read one of these stories below! This post was guest authored by Henesis Veras, …Continue Reading
Helping the 3 A.M. Researcher: Linking Digitized Material to Finding Aids
Reading Time: 3 minutesThis post was guest authored by Ann Abney, Digital Initiatives Metadata Librarian in Collections & Discovery at the Tampa Library One of the most frequent questions I was asked in my previous job as an archivist was “What’s available online?” followed …Continue Reading
This Day in USF History: Gasohol
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe USF Oracle has been the student newspaper of USF since 1966, when it replaced the Campus Edition of the Tampa Daily Times. The USF Libraries have been digitizing the print editions of the Oracle from 1966 onward and adding them to the USF Oracle Archive in our online digital collections