Thursday, October 18, 2007

"Just Read, Florida"

That text is on the top of a building on Tallahassee, FL and is the view from my hotel room. Tomorrow I'm giving a digitization workshop for the Florida-Caribbean Chapter of the Special Libraries Association. There are over 50 people registered for the workshop and, hopefully, the threat of bad weather (thunderstorms) doesn't deter people from attending. Today there have been tornadoes in Pensacola (two hours west).

I have no idea what digitization programs are going on in Tallahassee, but I hope that I'll find out in the next two days. A quick Internet search found the Florida Memory Project, which was done by the State Library and Archives of Florida (which I should be able to see from my window, too). What is unfortunate, it that I've seen nothing in the hotel or around the city that tells me of the online resources that are available. If I wanted to read about Florida or see images of Florida, where should I go online? Yes, I've griped about this before. It seems to me that projects that contain local history should market themselves to tourists and those who are passing through the area. I won't have time to tour museums, etc., here but I would have time to tour a digital collection about local history, if I knew that it existed.

Perhaps projects could find sponsors to help them place marketing materials in hotels. Or how about "ads" in publications aimed at tourists that tell people of the online resources that are available?

The bottom line is that our projects need to be more visible.

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