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)
Tag: USF Digital Collections
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.
Zarzuela in honor of World Theater Day
Reading Time: 4 minutesUSF Libraries’ Special Collections is home to many different types of physical items and ephemera. From books and journals to newspapers, yearbooks, sheet music, and plays, the collections are vast and varied. One item type that is not widely highlighted is the zarzuela. Zarzuelas are Spanish lyric drama’s that alternate between spoken and sung scenes accompanied by dance numbers (“Zarzuela,” 2022).
Womyn’s Words and the Women’s Energy Bank Collections
Reading Time: 4 minutesBy: Amanda Boczar and Sydney Jordan March is Women’s History Month, a time to reflect on, give voice to, and celebrate the lives of women throughout history. Women of the Tampa Bay area have no shortage of stories to tell, and many …Continue Reading
Celebrating the Public Domain in 2022
Reading Time: 4 minutesJoin the USF Libraries in our fourth year of celebrating the public domain through digitization! Once again, we asked the USF community what it would like to see digitized for the 2022 celebration. 414 votes decided the 22 titles that would be selected from a curated list drawn from the USF Libraries collections. The digitized materials fall into four existing Digital Collections foci: Florida Studies, Environmental Collections, Sheet Music, and Children’s Literature.
Preserving Media: The Sam Gibbons Collection
Reading Time: 2 minutesUSF Libraries – Tampa Special Collections is home to all types of exciting resources from historic documents to rare books, vintage photographs, and digital recordings. Preserving and providing access to these materials requires periodic evaluation of the collections, media types, and their …Continue Reading
USF Curiosities: Chariot races?
Reading Time: 2 minutesWhen you think of student activities on our campuses, what comes to mind? Basketball games, charity drives, bake sales, jogging, walking with friends, maybe lunches on the lawn… But…. what about chariot races?
In 1966, the Tampa Times reported that the opening of Greek Week, the “Festival of Dionysus,” was full of last-minute preparations for the chariot race, including lighthearted “sabotage” attempts by rival participants… (Continue Reading)
USF Curiosities: A Pablo Picasso sculpture 10 stories tall?
Reading Time: 7 minutesIn 1971, a small-scale model of a Pablo Picasso sculpture, “Bust of a Woman,” was donated to the University of South Florida. Fifty years later, it received new attention from researchers after it was spotted on a shelf in the Tampa Library in 2018. Afterwards, Special Collections staff dug into the sculpture’s history and the intriguing story behind the model resurfaced… (Continue Reading)
Celebrating National Estuaries Week with Florida Environmental & Natural History Digital Resources
Reading Time: 6 minutesIn honor of National Estuaries Week, Digital Dialogs is celebrating with a collection of digital resources related to the environmental history, conservation, and study of Florida environments and ecosystems… (Continue Reading)