The National Library’s Australian Newspapers service has recently made available https://mail.google.com/mail/?zx=1rjv366gqucji&shva=1#inbox/1250a7f37fa96144early editions of The Sydney Morning Herald.

The digitisation of The Sydney Morning Herald was made possible by a $1 million contribution from the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation. Eventually, all out-of-copyright editions of the Herald will be available, from its inception in 1831 to 1954.

It is now just over a year since Australian Newspapers was released to the public and there are 8.5 million articles available from 33 newspaper titles. A community of volunteer ‘text correctors’ has now corrected 7 million lines of the electronically translated text in 318 000 articles, enabling more accurate search results.

Access the Collection (via Trove)

Btw, what is Trove?

“one search…a wealth of information”

Trove is our new free online service that gathers information about Australia and Australians in a single search.

Discover:
+ Digitised Australian newspapers, 1803 – 1954
+ Books, magazines and articles
+ Pictures and photographs
+ Music, oral histories and videos
+ Maps
+ Archived websites
+ Biographical information

Source: National Library of Australia

The last great archives of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency may soon be available to researchers and the public – 14 boxes of handwritten notes, gifts and correspondence, including a letter from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini congratulating him on his 1933 inauguration.

The House on Monday approved a bill to clear the way for the memorabilia to be donated to Roosevelt’s presidential library and museum in Hyde Park, N.Y.

While the House bill is identical to legislation the Senate passed in October, it will still have to return to the Senate for one more vote before it goes to the president

Read and Track the Legislation
House Bill ||| Senate Bill
Source: GovTrack.us

Source: Washington Post

The National Archives has joined the National Recreation Reservation Service (NRRS), a Federal interagency reservation service, provided under contract by the U.S. Forest Service. Participating in the NRRS online reservation service, www.Recreation.gov, will make it easier for individuals, families, and large groups alike to visit the National Archives. By simply going online, visitors can now reserve their choice of dates and times in a matter of minutes. While reservations are not required to visit the National Archives, this new service will offer another option for those who wish to plan ahead and beat the crowds.

Source: NARA

Here’s a list of some of the topics covered. Access the full text to get all of the details.

Ingest

HathiTrust ingested a record 553,963 volumes in October. These included nearly 5,000 volumes from Penn State and initial loads of volumes from the University of California’s Santa Cruz and San Diego campuses. Ingest of volumes from Penn State will continue in November. Subsequent shipments of metadata for up to 600,000 additional volumes from UC campuses are expected in November. Ingest of these volumes will begin shortly thereafter.

HathiTrust participates in grant from Mellon Foundation

Google Summit and Internet Archive Ingest

Large-scale Search

Staff at the University of Michigan successfully indexed all volumes in HathiTrust using the newly acquired hardware. However, the official launch of the large-scale search application was postponed in order to acquire additional hardware to accommodate new index growth.

HathiTrust/OCLC Catalog

After finalizing metadata requirements for the version 1 catalog in September, the HathiTrust/OCLC Catalog team turned its attention in October to interface requirements. The team is currently finalizing interface requirements for version 1 of the catalog and has agreed to engage in collaborative usability testing during the first quarter of 2010. Meanwhile, OCLC’s e-content synchronization work for HathiTrust remains on schedule, and is expected to be completed by the end of the calendar year.

New Growth: Number of Volumes Added
Indiana University
64,614 volumes added in October, 84,132 Total
Penn State University
4,675 volumes added in October, 4,675 Total
University of California
264,710 volumes added in October, 786,414 Total
University of Michigan
206,283 volumes added in October, 3,417,264 Total
University of Wisconsin
20,430 volumes added in October, 242,705 Total
Totals
553,963 volumes added in October, 4,535,190 Total

Source: Hathi Trust

Three NARA blogs

+ Collaborate (Blog and Forum for Teachers)
+ NARAtions (A Blog about Online Public Access to the Records of the U.S. National Archives)
+ RACO 2009 Blog (Records Administration Conference)

Eight Facebook Pages

+ US National Archives
+ Research at the US National Archives
+ Federal Register
+ Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum
+ John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
+ Jimmy Carter Presidential Library
+ George Bush Presidential Library Foundation
+ Clinton Presidential Center

One Flickr Account

Four RSS Feeds

+ National Archives News Subscribe
+ Prologue Magazine Subscribe
+ The Federal Register Public Inspection List Subscribe
+ Today’s Document from the National Archives Subscribe

Three Twitter Feeds

+ National Archives News
+ Federal Register
+ RACO 2009 on Twitter (Records Administration Conference)

Four YouTube Channels

+ National Archives on YouTube
+ John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
+ Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum
+ Harry S. Truman Library and Museum

Access the Complete List (with Links)

Source: NARA

One of the most important troves of African-American historical materials became the subject of national ire and hand wringing this week, when the student newspaper at Howard University reported that the university library’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center — considered one of the foremost repositories of artifacts and manuscripts related to black history — could close due to an inadequate budget and a shortage of staff.

[Snip]

Moorland-Spingarn’s 80 percent personnel reduction over the past 15 years is not attributable merely to the evolution of new technologies, [Thomas C.] Battle [retiring director of Moorland-Spingarn] said. “Ours is not the kind of repository that can simply rely on the digitization of materials,” he said. Meanwhile, the center’s collections — which include photographs, letters, music recordings, and other artifacts — have grown. Its 10 remaining staff members need additional space to properly store the materials, process collections, and handle artifacts, Battle said. “We are in an old facility and need to be in a modern facility,” he said.

Access the Complete Article

Source: Inside Higher Ed

It’s a complicated story. But if you want to know why the Newport Jazz Festival has been so important to American music, it’s easy: you just have to hear the recorded evidence. Bits and pieces have emerged over the years, in live recordings by Ellington, Coltrane and others. Now Wolfgang’s Vault, the online concert-recording archive, intends to fill in the gaps.

The company, based in San Francisco, bought the archives of the Newport festivals from the Festival Network last year. Bill Sagan, founder and chief executive of Wolfgang’s Vault, says the archives include many, many tapes: 1,000 to 1,200 individual performances, dating at least to 1955, the festival’s second year, and continuing to the end of the century.

Since the purchase, Wolfgang’s Vault has spent almost $5 million, Mr. Sagan said, on making audio transfers and mixes of the tapes. (Neither Mr. Sagan nor Chris Shields of the Festival Network would reveal the amount spent on acquiring the archive itself.) On Wednesday the company will begin posting free streams of a handful of performances from the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival, at wolfgangsvault.com: the first offerings include Count Basie, Dakota Staton and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. By next Tuesday, when more are added, there will be 27 sets from that year’s jazz festival, including some by Ahmad Jamal, Joe Williams, Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver.

Newport Jazz Festival Page (via Wolfgang’s Vault)

Access Wolfgangs Vault (It’s home to rock and Jazz performances)

Much More in the Complete Article

Source: The New York Times

From the About Page:

For three decades following World War II, J.W. Fulbright represented Arkansas in the Congress of the United States. His single term in the House and four terms in the Senate saw Fulbright rise to become the foremost congressional authority on American foreign policy. From the beginning, Fulbright was a voice of calmness in the halls of congress, counseling international cooperation, the exchange of information, and support for the United Nations.

This digital collection contains fifty speeches Fulbright made during his congressional career. While the speeches deal with many topics, the emphasis is given to foreign affairs.

In order to put the speeches into their historical context, a variety of resources are included—including a detailed time line, a bibliography on the senator, and a selection of photographs.

Readers are reminded that these 50 speeches and related materials included on this site represent only a tiny fraction of the J.W. Fulbright Papers, comprised of over 1400 linear feet, held by the University of Arkansas Libraries. Serious students of Senator Fulbright and his era are urged to consult the full collection at the University. The collection, and a partial guide to the collection, may be accessed
[here].

Access: A Calm Voice in a Strident World:Senator J.W. Fulbright Speaks

See Also: More Digital Collections from the University of Arkansas

More in this News Release from the U. of Arkansas

Source: U. of Arkansas Libraries

Today, more news from UC Santa Cruz. We came a cross a post with news that the Grateful Dead Archive is looking for an archivist. If you’re a Deadhead archivist this might be the job for you. Here’s what the item in Relix says:

The University Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, which currently houses the Grateful Dead Archives, is searching for an archivist for its lauded collection. According to an advertisement, “the University Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, seeks an enterprising, creative, and service-oriented archivist to join the staff of Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) as Archivist for the Grateful Dead Archive. This is a potential career status position.

Here’s theactual job posting via the SAA (Society of American Archivists) web site.
The posting went online November 6th.

Source: Relix, Archivist.org

See Also: Access The Grateful Dead Archive Web Site

From the Article:

Handling congressional papers is no easy task. While presidential libraries maintain a relatively static collection, the Center for Legislative Archives’ holdings increase every time Congress passes a bill, discusses proposed legislation, confirms a presidential appointee, or does anything at all.

When the House closes its congressional sessions every two years, all the House’s related documents—paper or otherwise—are organized, held on site for four years, and then shipped to the National Archives Building for storage.

The Senate delivers the boxes in accessions sporadically. “Accessions can vary from a box to 300 boxes” explains Matt Fulghum, the Center’s assistant director, adding that the Center receives “four or five hundred accessions in one year.”

More than 13 million pages will arrive this year, says Richard Hunt, the Center’s director. “From the 1980s up to the present, our holdings of House and Senate records have been doubling every 10 to 15 years,” a nearly incomprehensible amount considering the Center currently has a half-billion documents to track, enough to circle the globe three times, if one laid the pages end-to-end.

As if organizing and storing these documents weren’t difficult enough, the Center’s team has 24 hours to fill requests from committees. They made 187 of these loans—totaling more than 1 million pages—in fiscal year 2008 alone. And that’s not all.

Much More in the Full Text Article

Source: Prologue (National Archives and Records Administration)

See Also: Center for Legislative Archives Web Page

NARA has completed two of five planned increments of ERA, but has experienced schedule delays and cost overruns, and several functions planned for the system’s initial release were deferred. Although NARA initially planned for the system to be capable of ingesting federal and presidential records in September 2007, the two system increments to support those records did not achieve initial operating capability until June 2008 and December 2008, respectively. In addition, NARA reportedly spent about $80 million on the base increment, compared to its planned cost of about $60 million. Finally, a number of functions originally planned for the base increment were deferred to later increments, including the ability to delete records and to ingest redacted records. In fiscal year 2010, NARA plans to complete the third increment, which is to include new systems for Congressional records and public access, and begin work on the fourth.

Source: Government Accountability Office (David A. Powner, director, information technology management issues, before the Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census and National Archives, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform)

Today, the United States Senate voted to confirm David Ferriero as the 10th Archivist of the United States. Mr. Ferriero was the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Libraries and is a leader in the field of library science. Mr. Ferriero, who was nominated by President Obama on July 28, 2009, will succeed Professor Allen Weinstein who resigned as Archivist in December 2008 for health reasons. Deputy Archivist Adrienne Thomas is serving as the Acting Archivist until Mr. Ferriero assumes his duties.

As the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Libraries (NYPL), Mr. Ferriero was part of the leadership team responsible for integrating the four research libraries and 87 branch libraries into one seamless service for users, creating the largest public library system in the United States and one of the largest research libraries in the world. Mr. Ferriero was in charge of collection strategy; conservation; digital experience; reference and research services; and education, programming, and exhibitions.

The announcement goes on to provide additional information about Mr. Ferriero’s as well as background about NARA.

Source: NARA
Hat Tip: Debra Bade

Web content changes all the time. If we don’t save that content before it disappears, a major part of our cultural history will be lost.

The Library of Congress is working to provide permanent access to web content of historical importance. It selects websites for collection, requests permissions from the website owners, addresses the technology of collecting websites and preserves the websites and makes them available.

This video examines those four challenges.

Access the Video (embedded here)

A text transcript is also available (PDF)

Source: National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program

From the Web Site:

Open Images is an open media platform that offers online access to a selection of audiovisual archive material to stimulate creative reuse.

As part of Images for the Future, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and Knowledgeland are developing Open Images. [Our emphasis] The aim of this project is to offer online access to a selection of archive material to stimulate creative reuse. Reuse includes remixing of archive footage in new videos. Open Images also supports interlinking with other data sources (like Wikipedia), allowing the easy creation of mashups. Access to the content will be based on the Creative Commons model, which proposes a middle way to rights management, rather than the extremes of the pure public domain or the reservation of all rights. The ‘open’ nature of the project is underscored by adapting open formats and using open source software for its infrastructure. Software resulting from Open Images will also be released under an open source license.

The Media Page

At the present time, 371 films are available. Look for images and audio to be added going forward. The database offers numerous ways to find what you’re looking for.

For example you can search by:
+ Keyword
+ User
+ Source
+ Length
+ Language
+ License.

You can refine results by the same criteria.

An API is also available (Documentation is in Dutch).

Source: Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and Knowledgeland
Hat Tip: AMIA News Briefs

From the Article:

“We have to have universal access to everything, just like a library,” he says. “Do we want that under a single corporation’s control? It is openness, not corporate control, that propels capitalism.”

[Snip]

Digital libraries will shape education, creativity and our shared intellectual heritage, Kahle declares. As founder and director of the Internet Archive, Kahle has posted online digital copies of 1.7 million books, 100,000 hours of television, 200,000 video clips, 70,000 concerts and 415,000 audio recordings. All that material can be downloaded for free from the Archive’s Web site.

[Snip]

Bookserver* uses a range of open source and proprietary electronic book standards, search algorithms, editing tools and libraries. The architecture, as Kahle calls it, potentially separates manufacturers of devices from control over much of the content inside them. It also preserves the idea of the lending library–if you “check out” a volume, others cannot access it in the time allowed to you. Publishers sell their books in the system using credit cards.

The article continues with more about Google Book Search and Kahle’s background.

We were surprised not to see The Wayback Machine mentioned in the stats about the Internet Archive listed above. At the moment (and we know of nothing coming), “Wayback” is probably the best chance a researcher has to access a page no longer on the Internet. Material in “Wayback” dates back to 1996 and as of today, contains more than 150 BILLION archived pages. The Internet Archive also offers a fee-based service that helps organizations organize and archive their web content. It’s called, Archive-It.

* See Also: We Have an In-Depth Post About Bookserver on ResourceShelf
It Includes an comprehensive press review the day after the Bookserver announcement.