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.
Tag: USF Digital Collections
Enhancing Archival Access: USF Libraries Implements Ethical AI for Handwritten Document Transcription
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe University of South Florida Libraries is proud to announce a major advancement in its Digital Initiatives: the adoption of QDox, an AI transcription solution developed by Quantiphi and powered with AWS Textract. This technology is being used to transcribe handwritten archival documents with greater efficiency and ethical oversight.
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.”
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