While Google and Wikipedia protest a congressional anti-piracy bill, students can now find resources about a different type of piracy on the George A. Smathers Libraries site.
A pirate-themed page promoting primary resources available to UF students launched Jan. 9, said U.S.-British History Librarian Shelley Arlen.
The project, funded by a $5,000 mini-grant awarded by the libraries, aims to teach students about primary documents as research sources, said Arlen, who headed the project.
"That's one of the issues that comes up a lot in our freshman English classes: What are primary documents? People get confused," she said. "So that's the way it started."
The project's three librarians collaborated with UF's Digital Worlds Institute, which provided animations for the tutorial site.
The site contains videos and images about pirates to engage students with the libraries' collections, Arlen said.
She said she wanted students to understand that primary documents are created at the time of the event in question.
"But I'd also like them to get interested in primary documents themselves, maybe start off with an interest in pirates ... or maybe other interests they have," she said.
Arlen said the team thought pirates would be a mass-appeal theme.
Antoinette Hicks, however, didn't get it.
"I don't know, it's like, of all things, pirates?" said Hicks, a family youth and communication sciences senior. "They couldn't do gators?"
Criminology junior Ann Diskin liked the idea because the pirate theme stands out.
"It definitely grabs your attention," she said.
Arlen said the project could eventually expand to cover bibliographies, depending on funding. For more information, visit: guides.uflib.ufl.edu/tales.
