Re-discovering Florida’s literary legacy — or not

Posted on 15 March 2008
Filed under Academia, Florida, Libraries, Open access, Publishing

Out of curiosity, I went Googling for literary magazines published at my alma mater, the University of Florida. What I found:

As far as I can tell, none of these are available in UF’s Digital Collections; although the library does have their back issues, it hasn’t digitized them (at least not yet; probably for permissions issues or lack of resources).

So, of at least 3 literary magazines published at UF (who knows how many others there have been over the years?), none of them are available online. It’s not just that they’re not open access: you couldn’t pay for access if you wanted to. Two of the three appear not to even have Web sites.

It must be said that this is a terrible strategy for sharing the magazines’ contents with the public.

If any readers have information about these or other literary magazines, or any plans to digitize them, please add them in the comments.

Rumors of other literary magazines from UF’s past:

In the process, I turned up all sorts of other stuff…

…Like TSK, published by the Science Fiction Society in 1979 and 1985; filed under “bibliography” and “history and criticism” (maybe they were writing about the then-recent Star Wars?).

Also interesting is the library’s collection of student newspapers. Sure, you know the Independent Florida Alligator and its earlier incarnations, the Florida Alligator (1912-1973) and the University News (1906-1912); but do you know Summer School News (1924-1929); The Gator Times (beginning in 2000; not to be confused with the more recent UF-sponsored site and newsletter) and its predecessor, The Orange and Blue (beginning in 1999; not to be confused with Orange & Blue magazine); Der Buzzard (1936); The Crocodile (beginning in 1966); and The Florida Conservative (beginning in 1965)? Not included is the more recent Florida Frontier, another conservative newspaper (Web site formerly at this address; see past versions in the Internet Archive) or the other Alligator “rivals” mentioned on Wikipedia. You can find some of these in UF Digital Collections. (The library’s collection of newspapers from Alachua County is also a neat slice of history.)

Then there’s the (mostly non-literary) magazines: Orange Peel and The New Orange Peel, Florida Review (and take 2), The Reveille, The East Florida Seminary Exponent, The Orange and Blue Bulletin, University of Florida Blue Gator …

In the course of my search, I also encountered a number of literary magazines from other Florida colleges, which I would list here but for exhaustion. Suffice to say, there is enough to warrant digitization by colleges statewide.

In the interest of fairness: Essence, the literary magazine I edited in high school, barely has a Web site and certainly doesn’t have issues online. With that said, the standards between high school and college publications are oceans apart, but full disclosure nonetheless.

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