Nice find. (-:
From a Brief Article:
Hours of TV news film recorded by a US news agency in the 1960s and 70s has been discovered in an empty London office. The material includes some famous names and some revealing glimpses of how we lived 40 years ago
Source: BBC News
Hat Tip: Amia Newsbriefs
1) Our Story: How the National Archives Evolved Over 75 Years of Change and Challenges
The chief executive gave his 131st press conference, but made little news. Then he held a cabinet meeting, met with a number of individual lawmakers, and left just before midnight for an overnight trip to New Haven, Connecticut, where the next day he would receive an honorary degree at Yale University.
Congress had adjourned the day before and left him with many bills to sign. One of them created the Federal Communications Commission. Another was an emergency appropriations bill. Yet another one dealt with how the Post Office should deal with letters with no or insufficient postage.
Sometime during the day, he also signed legislation creating the National Archives, whose massive headquarters in downtown Washington, DC, was already rising along Pennsylvania Avenue.
The idea of a national archives, a repository for the most important records of the nation, had been debated in and out of Congress for decades. Now, finally, legislation creating that entity had arrived at the President’s desk after the nation, already more than a century and a half old, had lost many of its early records to fires, mishandling, improper storage, and other natural and man-made events
2) Reflecting on the Archives’ growth into a world class archives
Adrienne Thomas, Acting Archivist of the United States, discusses the growth of the National Archives during the past 75 years.
Source: Prologue (Summer 2009)
It is the largest rare book collection in North America, housed in the largest library in the world, a “huge theme park of materials,” as he describes it. The division contains some 850,000 items—including Charles Dickens’ walking stick, the contents of Abraham Lincoln’s pockets on the night he was assassinated, and The Bay Psalm Book, published in 1640, the first book printed in what became the United States.
Source: Finebooks & Collections
Hat Tip: LC Blog
This could be quite a find if the story is accurate. Make sure to read the complete article. It discusses how and where the imagery was found.
Ecstatic space officials at NASA could be about to unveil one of their most stunning discoveries for 40 years — new and amazingly clear footage of the first moon landing.
The release of the new images next month could be one of the most talked about events of the summer.
[Snip]
The Sunday Express can now reveal that the missing tapes containing the original high quality images have been found.If the visual data can be retrieved, NASA is set to reveal them to the world as a key plank of celebrations to mark the 40th anniversary of the landings next month.
The tapes show in much more detail than almost anyone has previously seen the surface of the moon beneath the patriotic symbol of the US flag.
Source: The Express (UK)
For centuries the archival community has understood and practiced the art of adding contextual information while preserving an artifact. The question now is how these practices can be transferred to the digital domain. With the growing expansion of production and consumption of digital objects (documents, audio, video, etc.) it has become essential to identify and study issues related to their representation. A curator in the digital realm may be said to have the same responsibilities as one in a traditional archival domain. However, with the mass production and spread of digital objects, it may be difficult to do all the work manually. In the present article this problem is considered in the area of digital video preservation. We show how this problem can be formulated and propose a framework for capturing contextual information for ephemeral digital video preservation. This proposal is realized in a system called ContextMiner, which allows us to cater to a digital curator’s needs with its four components: digital video curation, collection visualization, browsing interfaces, and video harvesting and monitoring. While the issues and systems described here are geared toward digital videos, they can easily be applied to other kinds of digital objects.
Direct to Complete Article (18 pages; PDF)
Source: The International Journal of Digital Curation
NASA Announces Request For Information On Von Braun Collection
On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the historic first moon landing, NASA is seeking ideas from the public, academia, and industry about how to analyze and catalog notes from spaceflight pioneer Wernher von Braun into an electronic, searchable database or other system.
Von Braun was the first director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and a key figure in the development of the Saturn V rocket and NASA’s Apollo program. NASA has a full collection of “Weekly Notes” von Braun wrote during the 1960s and 1970s. These notes were used to track programmatic and institutional issues at Marshall, and are considered by many historians to be a valuable source of data.
NASA has issued a request for information and is looking for concepts that will provide an innovative resource for agency engineers and scientists, as well as researchers in academia and industry.
+ Request For Information (PDF; 1.9 MB)
+ Appendix 1 (PDF; 1.9 MB)
+ Biography — Dr. Wernher von Braun
Source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
On June 23, 2009, the Nixon Presidential Library will be opening approximately 154 hours of tape recordings from the Nixon White House recorded in January and February 1973 and consisting of approximately 994 conversations. The conversations cover topics such as the conclusion of a peace settlement between the United States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the return of American POWs, President Nixon’s second inauguration, the U.S. and Europe, the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, energy policy, the reorganization of the executive branch, and the first Watergate trial.
This is the 13th opening of Nixon White House tapes since 1980 and with this release, approximately 2,371 hours of tape recordings from the Nixon White House are now available to the public.
The opening will also consist of approximately 10.5 cubic feet of previously restricted materials from the White House Special Files, Staff Member and Office Files; the National Security Files; and the Henry A. Kissinger Files. The materials include documents on U.S. policy toward Europe, on U.S. policy in the Middle East, on the investigation of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on the investigation of Jack Anderson, also known as the Radford Affair, and on the conduct of the war in Cambodia and Vietnam. The opening also includes CIA Bay of Pigs materials personally delivered to the White House in 1971 by the Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, at President Nixon’s request.
Direct to Recorded Material and Finding Aids
&
A Representative Sample of Text Documents
See Also: A Detailed List of What’s Available
Sources: National Archives and Records Administration and Nixon Library
Wow! This is one to bookmark and explore! Over 250 projects, grouped by state, and by topic are listed. ResouceShelf plans to start monitoring some of these sites for new content.
This list contains over 250 libraries and archives that focus mainly on localized, regional, and U.S. history, but it also includes larger collections, eText and eBook repositories, and a short list of directories to help you continue your research efforts.
The sites listed here are mainly open access, which means that the digital formats are viewable and usable by the general public. So, such sites as the Connecticut Digital Library (iCONN) are not listed, as they operate on the premise that the user has a Connecticut library card in his or her possession.
Efforts were made to go to the root source for these collections. In other words, if you’re seeking the American Memory Project, which was created and housed at the Library of Congress, then you’ll find the link for the Library of Congress rather than the link for American Memory (although we included that link in the description of the Library of Congress listing). The root sources, in most cases, will lead you to collections that are too numerous to list here. In fact, it would be impossible to list all sources and we know we may have missed some favorites.
Source: OEDB.com
…the National Archives [has] formally launch[ed] a YouTube channel to showcase popular archived films, inform the public about upcoming events around the country, and bring National Archives exhibits to the people. The launch will coincide with the National Archives 75th Anniversary. The URL is
www.youtube.com/USNationalArchives.
Every week the National Archives will roll out a new film on one or more of its YouTube channel playlists. These include the following:
+ From the Archives to the Moon: This video playlist features footage from the start of the space race through the landing of a man on the moon.
+ Favorite Things: What’s at Your Presidential Libraries: Over a series of 14 videos, directors from 12 separate presidential libraries discuss their ‘favorite things’ from their respective Presidential Libraries including Air Force One and the famous rooftop staircase from the embassy evacuation in Vietnam.
+ Tracing World War II: Released in chronological order, these War Department reels follow American progress through World War II from the bombing at Pearl Harbor to Armistice.
+ Touring 1930s America: Combining well-crafted, first-hand accounts from the Great Depression and sweeping footage from the Department of Interior taken in the 1930s, this playlist guides viewers through Depression-era America.
See Also: Looking for More U.S. Government Video? Learn about the FedFlix (Another Free Service)
Source: NARA
Hat Tip: LS
HBO Archives is making complete episodes from The March of Time newsreel and documentary series, produced from 1935 to 1967, available for online viewing at its stock footage portal.
The award-winning series, produced by Time Inc., contains original footage shot in the 1930s through 1960s, with historic footage dating back to 1913. HBO Archives, launched in 2002, reintroduced The March of Time in 2007 and has been re-cataloging, restoring and transferring the original 35mm films to HD video. HBO Archives has also been developing additional The March of Time productions.
“We are thrilled to put portions of this vast, unique collection online for instant access to researchers,” said Barbara Thomas, the senior VP of HBO Sports. “Unlike the traditional news-style featurettes of the Hollywood newsreels, the long-form documentary style of The March of Time newsreels stood out from its competitors. This series is priceless for all of today’s storytellers.”
Direct to The March of Time Collection
To view online you must register (takes about 2 minutes). Viewing the online video appears to be free.
Source: WorldsSreen (via AMIA)
The Library of Congress intends to compile all tweets about U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor during the confirmation process.
The LOC announcement was made—where else?—in a tweet today on Twitter, reports the Hill’s Twitter Room.
Source: ABA Journal
You can follow SAA happenings via Twitter by heading to: http://twitter.com/archivists_org. The SAA also has a Facebook page. You can “friend them” here.
SAA signed an agreement in April to have American Archivist participate in JSTOR, an independent not-for-profit organization that is dedicated to making a wide range of intellectual content available in a trusted digital archive. Currently the JSTOR archive includes the complete back runs of more than 800 journals, which are available to libraries. American Archivist would be part of the newly developing Arts and Sciences VII collection under “Library and Information Sciences.” The entire run of the journal is projected to debut in 2010. The recently retired Charles Schultz has generously donated his back issues of the journal (1963 through 2008) to SAA for use by JSTOR. Issues prior to 1963 will dovetail with the OCLC digitization project.
Source: Society of American Archivists
See Also: Learn More About the OCLC Project Mentioned in the Post
National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis Opens Civilian Personnel Records to the Public
The National Archives’ National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) opened more than 6 million individual personnel files of former Federal civilian employees from the mid-1800s through 1951. These records will be of special interest to genealogists, family members, researchers, sociologists, and historians.
Among the records are the files of prominent individuals who worked for the federal government, such as Walt Disney, Ansel Adams, Eliot Ness, Calvin Coolidge, J. Edgar Hoover, Gifford Pinchot, Walker Evans, and Albert Einstein.
Ronald L. Hindman, Director of NPRC characterized these records “as a veritable treasure-trove of information for researchers and genealogists.” He continued, “There are records from more than one hundred government agencies now available for discovery. They showcase the careers of government employees who investigated bootleggers; taught at Indian schools; worked in Japanese-American interment camps, in prisons, and on anti-prostitution boards, and created and implemented initiatives in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies, among others.”
Source: National Archives
This audio only podcast discusses finding business records in the National Archives. This presentation is part of the National Archives podcast series.
Source: National Archives (UK)
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