It's been awhile...

Funny how time often slips by so quickly. Despite good intentions, I have been neglecting this and my other blog, Writing It All Down, for quite some time--well, to be exact it's going on close to three years now. That isn't to say I haven't been just as engaged with exploring new social media resources, figuring out ways to incorporate them into library and information literacy practices, and design work. To the contrary, I have actually been involved with some very exciting work, but my energy has been focused on the planning, research, articles, presentations, deliverables, and social media use specific to those projects.

Despite my hiatus having dragged on a bit longer than originally anticipated--and let's face it, there are plenty of well-intentioned but unfinished and abandoned personal and institutional resources out there--I am back with renewed excitement and many things to share.

First, I thought I'd jump in with a micro update on my recent activities so I am including some links to recent library projects:

Stereographs of the Panama Canal:

 

Loading Drill-Holes with Dynamite. Preparatory to Blasting - Near Empire on the Panama Canal Route. Keystone View Company. 1909. Panama Canal Museum Collection, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. http://ufdc.ufl.edu/PCMI003509/00001.

In my work with the Panama Canal Museum Collection at the University of Florida, I wrote a grant proposal to digitize a set of important resources from the collection. This grant provided funds to scan (front and back--trust me, scanning the back is important and was often not done in the past), process, enhance metadata, run OCR, create animated gif files (a huge thanks goes to Jimmy Barnett for the creation of these), and create associated educational resources.
Sub-collection of stereographs:
http://ufdc.ufl.edu/ps

Grant proposal:
http://ufdc.ufl.edu/IR00003179/00001
Panama and the Canal:
Some of the day-to-day work I perform includes selecting and digitizing, or sending for digitization, important materials from the collection to build the digital library space. Much of this work includes enhancing the metadata and creating original records and finding aids for the archival collection.

Panama and the Canal digital library:

http://ufdc.ufl.edu/pcm

Panama Canal Centennial Celebration:Much of the work I currently do is tied up in a museum-library merger, a part of which is the cultivation and partnership of a dedicated museum community. A huge part of that has been planning for a Panama Canal Centennial Celebration weekend, which was held in late August and included exhibits, lectures, museum family days, and performances.

Photos and information from the museum day:
http://cms.uflib.ufl.edu/PanamaCanalCentennial/PCZDay

Just a few of the exhibits:
I curated and installed the exhibit in the Education Library at UF: The Everyday and the Extraordinary: Molas and Ritual Objects of the Kuna People:

My colleagues Lourdes and Amara and I co-curated and installed Panama: Tropical Ecosystem at the Florida Museum of Natural History:


I will save other projects for a later time, but having given a capsule review here it's time to move on! I'm looking forward to connecting and re-connecting to discuss, debate, and share all kinds of new things. Next up: a bit of redesign and redirection.