The George A. Smathers Libraries have digitized materials held at UF and with partners for preservation and access for over 20 years, providing free and global access through the University of Florida Digital Collections (https://ufdc.ufl.edu/). Over the years, we have celebrated the vast array of materials we share in outstanding digital collections, containing millions of pages, covering tens of thousands of subjects in rare books, manuscripts, global and generic maps, children’s literature, newspapers, theses and dissertations, data sets, photographs, oral histories and more for permanent access and preservation.
Today, we celebrate a new milestone, with 1 million items! This is an inflection point, representing years of work in building rich and deep collections, where the collections have enabled research into new areas and where the collections-as-data are also available to support computational and AI-driven research.
