News & Blog

Lee Dotson, Digital Initiatives Librarian and manager of STARS (Showcase of Text, Archives, Research & Scholarship), UCF’s institutional digital repository, has been accepted into the prestigious Digital POWRR Peer Assessment Program for the year 2024. POWRR stands for Preserving (digital) Objects with Restricted Resources. This program is sponsored by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). 

The Digital POWRR Peer Assessment Program is an exclusive initiative that is designed to empower individuals to address the challenges of preserving digital assets, especially when faced with limited resources. Lee will engage with a cohort in a year-long comprehensive assessment process, collaborating to evaluate and improve digital preservation strategies and practices. Participants will work closely with peers and mentors, conduct an institutional case study, generate a longer peer assessment report, present findings through a final project showcase, and write a white paper that will be published.  
 

Participants also receive a participation stipend as well as a “Technology Start Up” award that can be provisioned towards helping to jump start digital preservation activities. 

Congratulations to Lee on this significant achievement! Her participation in this Program is an investment in both her personal and our organizational growth. The digital preservation skills acquired, coupled with her strengthened network and gained leadership capabilities, will contribute significantly to advancing the digital preservation efforts of the UCF Libraries and facilitate deeper collaboration with Special Collections and University Archives. 

Open access amplifies the impact of scholarly work and ensures that knowledge is not confined within the walls of academia but is freely accessible to educators, learners, and researchers globally. This democratization of information aligns with UCF’s values and its commitment to fostering a collaborative and inclusive learning environment. 

Faculty at the University of Central Florida (UCF) are invested in teaching and learning with generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and committed to open access by making scholarly works freely available to the public. The combination of these forces has led to the creation of the book ChatGPT Assignments to Use in Your Classroom Today. Authored by Kevin Yee, Kirby Whittington, Erin Doggette, and Laurie Uttich, this open access book is now freely available in the University’s digital repository, STARS (Showcase of Text, Archives, Research & Scholarship), ushering in a new era for AI education. 

At its core, STARS serves as a centralized hub for storing, archiving, and sharing a diverse array of scholarly outputs. From digitized special collections and datasets to educational resources and publications, STARS breaks down traditional barriers, allowing knowledge to flow freely within and beyond academic circles. ChatGPT Assignments to Use in Your Classroom Today, which has exploded with over 8K downloads since it was added to STARS on October 23, 2023 (and over 1K downloads in the first 24 hours), stands as a testament to the profound impact of open access on scholarship and research on campus.  

Data is everywhere, an ever-growing and pervasive feature from our everyday lives to cutting-edge research across a myriad of disciplines. According to Forbes, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were generated daily, and as of 2018, 90% of all data gathered occurred between 2016 and 2018! Love (Your) Data Week is an annual celebration and ode to data acquisition, processing, analysis, and visualization. Individuals, academic, and research institutions can participate in data-related activities throughout the week to be a part of the changing landscape of data. Love Data Week 2022 is from February 14th-18th, 2022, and this year’s theme is “Data is for Everyone.” Given the technological revolution in which we are actively a part, it’s more vital than ever for individuals to come together with information that can help us better our world. Explore the information, resources, and activity ideas below during this year’s Love Data Week and share your knowledge with your communities. Together, we can make information streamlined and accessible for the future.

The UCF Libraries presents a Spring 2022 Foundations of Data Management Library Workshop Series starting in February. These workshops are a part of the Research Computing and Data Workshop Series, which is being jointly presented by UCF Library, UCF Graduate and Research IT, and UCF Advanced Research Computing Center (ARCC). The UCF Libraries will hold workshops in February and March 2022 remotely via Zoom. Topics include: managing your data and maximizing the impact of your data post-publication. Come join us!

The UCF Libraries’ Special Collections & University Archives and Digital Initiatives departments are pleased to announce the completion of a project to digitize the University of Central Florida’s student newspaper. The publication ran from 1968 to 2016.   

The newspaper’s first issue appeared on October 7, 1968, to coincide with the first day of classes at the newly opened Florida Technological University (FTU), now the University of Central Florida (UCF). The first five issues of the publication did not have a name. Instead, the paper referred to itself as F.T.U.???. By the fifth issue, it became known as the FuTUre. Despite the university changing names from FTU to UCF in 1978, the newspaper’s name did not change to the Central Florida Future until 1985.  

In the early 1990s, the newspaper became unaffiliated with the university. Over the next two decades, it was bought and sold to multiple different companies. It eventually became an entity of Gannett, the owner of USA Today and Florida Today. Sadly, Gannett shut down the Central Florida Future in 2016. 

Since 2012, the UCF Libraries has been digitizing 48-years’ worth of this publication. Unfortunately, due to copyright, only the issues from 1968 to 2010 are available publicly online at https://stars.library.ucf.edu/centralfloridafuture/. 

The university’s history covered in the Central Florida Future is an amazing resource. We are so happy to have it available and preserved.