Jessi Fishman Blog 1: UF's Alice in Wonderland Exhibit

The Afterlife of Alice in Wonderland was an exhibit held in the Fall of 2007 at the University of Florida's George A. Smathers Libraries. This is where I went to college but unfortunately I never got to see these materials up close. The exhibit included numerous versions of the text, texts that reference Alice, and physical objects from popular culture such as teacups and dolls. After the physical exhibit, UF created a digital exhibit, which is a collection of various editions of both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There as well as similarly themed texts.

Collection Principles
Considering that this online exhibit was created post-physical exhibit, it is pretty clear that there were good collection principles intact. UF's libraries are fortunate enough to have these rare and priceless Alice in Wonderland materials on hand, and elected to digitize them to share with the world and demonstrate how they are valued as much for their popular use in American culture as in the creation of the American childhood.

Each page of the exhibit has links to all the important pages regarding the UF libraries, including contact information, permissions for use, technical aspects and resources, statistics, and privacy policies, as well as updated copyright information and exhibit-specific acceptable use and disclaimer information.

Object Characteristics

Each digitized object has both a "group title" and a title. The group title for each object is the name of the collection, "Afterlife of Alive in Wonderland exhibit materials". Each title consists of both a descriptive element and the type of format the object was originally in. For example, the object to the right has a title of "Reincarnations of Alice vignette poster", and the title shows up in the web browser to facilitate keeping your place as you browse or search the collection. I could not find information about how these objects were digitized, and therefore can not assume that they will remain useful and interoperable for posterity, but there is a link to a "permanent location" for each one on the University of Florida's server, so that relays a little more confidence in the preservation of these online materials.

For each item you can look at just the basic digitized image itself (with a drop-down menu box to quickly get to the rest of the digitized book), the citation information, and a zoomable view, where you can choose whatever page or cover of the book you want to zoom, zoom and rotate part or all of the image, and recenter (from the sidebar) at any time to facilitate easy viewing.

Metadata
A place where this online exhibit really shines is in the metadata it provides for each item. When you click on the "citation" tab for each item, it provides full bibliographic, descriptive, institutional, and technical information. There is also a MARC record, Library of Congress METS file in XML format that opens in the same window, and a Greenstone XML file as well. Each MARC record also has a link to the contact section so that you can attempt to edit or at least help with metadata creation if you see yourself as so qualified.

Intended Audience
This exhibit is part of the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature, a subfacet of the Smathers Libraries. Therefore, a clear intended audience could be children or parents or teachers looking for rare and historical children's literature information. Other intended users would be researchers and students of children's literature, Alice in Wonderland or Lewis Carroll scholars, or anyone interested in the Alice mythos at all.