Archive for the ‘Archives and Special Collections’ Category

Using Special Collections as Teaching Tools

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

From a Blog Post:

Panelists at a session on “An Age of Discovery: Special Collections in the Digital Age” — part of the Coalition for Networked Information’s fall forum, co-hosted by the Association of Research Libraries — laid out case studies of what can happen when you turn undergraduates loose in special collections. Barbara Rockenbach, director of undergraduate and library education at Yale University Library, described how students in an urban-studies course, “The Mediated City,” created annotated digital city guides as part of their class work. In a history class, “Otherwise Engaged: Intellectuals, Politics, Education,” undergraduates created online narrative exhibits that illustrated specific moments in time.

[Snip]

At some point, Ms. [Sarah L.] Shreeves [coordinator of Illinois's Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (Ideals),] said, librarians have to tackle the question of when the digital accumulation of student work becomes a special collection with its own curatorial demands.

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (Wired Campus Blog)

Nirvanix Provides Permanent Digital Archive for National September 11 Memorial & Museum

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

From the Announcement:

Nirvanix today announced that the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network (SDN) is being used as the main digital archive platform for the National September 11 Memorial & Museum’s permanent collection of audio, video and photographs that chronicle the events of the day and their aftermath through the eyes of those who experienced it – both at the attack sites and around the world.

The Museum is actively acquiring materials for its permanent collection from the general public and those directly impacted by the attacks. The collection includes audio recordings of personal experiences of the attacks of September 11, 2001 left by visitors at the 9/11 Memorial Preview Site located next to the World Trade Center. The Museum is actively collecting photographs, audio, video and other 9/11 related material through a number of outreach initiatives, including a “Call to Remember.” This program is designed for 9/11 victims’ family and friends to leave voice mail messages with remembrances about their loved ones. In addition, the Museum has collected thousands of photos submitted by the public through an online initiative, “Make History,” as well as hundreds of hours of video. All of this material will be kept as a permanent digital archive of content that will be an evolving historical record of the day’s events.

Source: Nirvanix
Hat Tip: AMIA Newsbriefs

Online Resources: The George Palmer Putnam Collection of Amelia Earhart Papers at Purdue University

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

This Friday (in the U.S.) a new movie opens about the life of aviator, Amelia Earhart.

At Purdue University, the George Palmer Putnam Collection is the world’s largest collection of Amelia Earhart papers, photos, memorabilia and artifacts. Several resources from the collection are available online.

1) Searchable Digital Library (Images, cards, ephemera, newspaper articles, etc.), over 2200 entries

2) Biographical Sketch

3) Map of Second World Flight Attempt, 1937

4) Medals
Note: Some medals require Quicktime to view them.

5) Timeline

6) Learn About the Collection

7) Collection of Web Resources about Amelia Earhart

8) Select Bibliography

9) Bibliography for Children

10) Amelia Earhart at Purdue (Digitized Materials, Over 400 entries)

Source: Purdue University Libraries, Archives and Special Collections

Cool! Revelations from the Russian Archives: Exhibit Publications from the Library of Congress

Friday, October 16th, 2009

From the Web Site:

With the sudden and unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, ownership of the huge archival legacy of the entire Soviet period (both of the government of the USSR and of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), located in large centralized archives in Moscow and Leningrad, passed to the now-independent Russian Federation. Russian archivists turned to American colleagues, including Librarian of Congress James Billington, in early 1992 to request assistance in declassifying and organizing the formerly secret and inaccessible party archives.

In exchange for assistance and advice offered by Americans, including the Library of Congress, the new Russian Commission on Archives offered the Library of Congress the remarkable opportunity to exhibit in Washington original, formerly top-secret, documents from the Communist Party archives. The exhibit, termed “Revelations from the Russian Archives,” was the first of the Library’s exhibits to be put online, in the very early days of the Internet. The exhibit opened in June 1992 with a symposium of Russian and American historians, librarians, and archivists presenting views on the significance of the epochal changes occurring since the then-recent collapse of the USSR and the consequences of these changes for archival documents from the entire Soviet period, 1917-1991.

IIn 1997 the Library published Revelations from the Russian Archives: Documents in English Translation, a compendium of translations of all the documents in the exhibit. This richly illustrated book presents 343 documents on a broad range of subjects with commentary to make their significance clear.

The three publications digitized here were published at the time of the June 1992 exhibit at the Madison Gallery of the Library of Congress’ Madison Building. They detail the items shown in the exhibit and present a summary of the symposium of scholars discussing the documents.

+ Access the Revelations from the Russian Archive

+ Revelations from the Russian Archives: A Report from the Library of Congress (Page Images, View Online) ||| (70 pages; PDF)

+ Revelations from the Russian Archives: a Checklist (Page Images, View Online) ||| (32 pages; PDF)

Source: Library of Congress

From the Library of Congress: Geography and Maps: An Illustrated Guide

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

This illustrated guide (converted into a web document) offers an interesting read about LC’s map collection. Numerous images are included.

Sections include:

+ Atlases

+ Special Collections

+ General Collections

+ Globes and Terrain Models

+ Aerial Photographs and Remote Sensing Images

+ Digital Data and Geographic Information Systems

+ List of Special Collections

A concordance of images is also available.

See Also: Online Map Collections via the Library of Congress (American Memory)

Source: Geography and Maps Division, Library of Congress

Milner Library at Illinois State University Home to a Brady Bunch Special Collection

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

If you’re a Brady Bunch geek, you might want to consider a trip to Normal, IL. (-:

From the Article:

llinois State University announced Tuesday its library will house a special collections archive about the 1960s pop culture phenomena.

“As far as I know, this will be the first of its kind,” said Ted Nichelson, an ISU alum and author of “Love to Love You Bradys,” a book focusing on the sitcom’s 1970s variety hour spin-off.

Nichelson spoke at ISU’s Milner Library on Tuesday as part of homecoming week, and signed copies of the book. He said he hopes donating his research materials acts as a seed.

[Snip]

Among items Nichelson gives to ISU are scripts and sheet music from the variety show, as well as original newspaper and magazine clips.
Toni Tucker, an ISU librarian, said possibilities for its use include the School of Communication using the materials in courses on television. Nichelson worked in Milner’s special collections area while an ISU grad student.

Source: The Pantagraph

Mandela Opens Archives for New Memoir & Related Mandela Web Resources

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

From the Article:

Nelson Mandela plans to open his personal archives to create a new memoir that will reveal how he preserved his values during the fight against apartheid in South Africa.

British, European and international publishing deals for the memoir by the former South African president were announced Wednesday at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

[Snip]

The [Nelson Mandela F]oundation holds an archive of
diaries, notebooks and calendar jottings that include Mandela’s speeches and musings during his time as an activist, his time in prison on Robben Island and his time in office.

Source: CBC

+ Access the Nelson Mandela Foundation Web Site
+ Anti-Apartheid Movement Archives
+ Mandela Materials (Speeches, lectures, etc.) Database
+ South African Histories
+ Nelson Mandela Bibliography (Searchable)
+ Nelson Mandela Filmography (Searchable)
+ Nelson Mandela Timeline

The Leon Levy Foundation: Helping Organizations to Collect, Conserve, and Digitize Archival Collections

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

From the Article:

The National Park Service found the original deed from 1695 for the homestead in Virginia where George Washington was born and copies of John Peter Zenger’s New-York Weekly Journal from 1735 reporting on his landmark trial affirming freedom of the press. The Center for Jewish History discovered the 1944 document in which Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide. The Morgan Library turned up a 1913 letter from the sister of Virginia Woolf saying that “Virginia was very much depressed yesterday” and attempted suicide — three decades before she would kill herself.

Those are among the nearly two dozen institutions that have received grants from the Leon Levy Foundation since 2007 to identify, preserve and digitize their archival collections and to make them available online to scholars and to the public.

The foundation’s archives and catalogs program has awarded more than $10.3 million, including two grants this week: $3.5 million to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., to collect and conserve the papers of its present and former scholars, including George F. Kennan, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein; and [our emphasis] $2.4 million to the New York Philharmonic, where archivists will digitize 1.3 million pages, including a 1909 Mahler score for his First Symphony originally marked up by the composer and further annotated 50 years later by Leonard Bernstein.

Much Much More in the Complete Article

Source: NY Times

See Also: Learn More via the Leon Levy Foundation Web Site

Online Video Archive from The Institute of Politics at Harvard University

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

Back in 2006, ResourceShelf posted an item about Harvard University and the John F. Kennedy School of Government making available to the public a video archive of lectures and presentations from the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.

Some three years later, the archive is still online and now home to over 1300 events, exclusive Q&A sessions, and student produced pieces on politics, policy, culture, and academic life. However, it has a new URL. You can now find the archive here. It’s keyword searchable and you can limit your search to a specific year (1978-Present). Also, if you want to see all of the video available from a certain year, leave the search box empty, select a year and then then enter (or the “go” button next to the search box).

For example, here’s a speech by Rev. Desmond Tutu (1986) and an address by Representative John Lewis (D-GA) from 2008.

They also do a nice job of keeping the database up to date. Here’s anaddress by Newt Gingrich from last week (October 8th).

Source: Harvard University Institute of Politics

Preserving Internet Content

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

From the Web Site:

On October 7, 2009, the IIPC [International Internet Preservation Consortium] sponsored a free, one-day event, Active Solutions for Preserving Internet Content, following iPRES 2009, the 6th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects, held at the Mission Bay Conference Center, San Francisco. Slide presentations are available on the conference program page.

Presentations with Slides Include:

+ Billions and billions of objects, METS, PREMIS, oh my! (Gina Jones)

+ Preserving Access-Making more informed guesses about what works (David Pearson)

+ “Here be dragons” – Strategies for dealing with viruses in the web archive (Matt Holden)

+ Say Emulate; He Says Migrate (David Pearson)

+ Keep Websites Alive (Jeffrey van der Hoeven)

+ What do web archivers (or is it archivists) really do? (Gina Jones)

+ Web Archives Are Forever: defining a workflow for long term preservation of web archives (Maureen Pennock)

+ Square pegs? Fitting web archives into the digital preservation repository of the National Library of New Zealand (Kevin De Vorsey)

+ Continuity and Preservation: The National Archives approach to maintaining permanent access to the web presence of UK Central Government
(Amanda Spencer and Alison Heatherington)

+ It’s the end of a project, as we know it: a leading discussion on experiences and issues in embedding web archiving and preservation in an organization (Marcel Ras and Hilde van Wijngaarden)

Source: netpreserve

A Leaky Roof Puts Historic Materials in Peril at Indiana State Archives

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

From the Article:

The repository for some of the state’s most treasured documents is plagued by a leaky roof that has resulted in parts of the collection getting wet at least three times this year.

Officials say they’re worried about protecting the archives, which include the state constitution, John Dillinger’s prison records and the 1964 contract between the Indiana State Fair Board and the Beatles. But the state budget approved by lawmakers in an overtime session this year did not include money for repairs to the building.

The Department of Administration had included $2.4 million for that purpose in its budget, but Gov. Mitch Daniels nixed the plan.

[Snip]

I didn’t get the job done in making clear how precarious this situation is,” said Rep. Matt Pierce, D-Bloomington, who introduced a bill allocating $500,000 for the study. “Unfortunately it got put into the category: ‘It’d be nice, but it’s not a necessity.”

[Snip]

A 2007 report by the Council of State Archivists shows Indiana’s $500,000 annual budget for archives is among the nation’s lowest. Only 12 states have smaller staff than Indiana, which has eight archivists. Washington state has a $10 million budget.

Washington archivist Jerry Handfield, who served as Indiana’s archivist in the 1990s, said Indiana’s building is “an accident waiting to happen.”

Access the Complete Article

Source: AP

See Also: Access the Indiana State Archives Web Site

See Also: Council of State Archivists

See Also: Archives are at the Mercy of Nature (via Indianapolis Star)

Harvard, National Library of China Embark on Digitization Project

Friday, October 9th, 2009

From the Gazette Article

One of the most extensive collections of rare Chinese books outside China will be digitized and made freely available to scholars worldwide as part of a six-year cooperative project between the Harvard College Library (HCL) and the National Library of China.

Nancy Cline, the Roy E. Larsen Librarian of Harvard College, and Furui Zhan, director of the National Library, signed an agreement detailing the project today (Oct. 9).

[Snip]

Among the largest cooperative projects of its kind ever between China and U.S. libraries, the project will digitize Harvard-Yenching Library’s entire 51,500-volume Chinese rare-book collection. Harvard-Yenching is the largest university library for East Asian research in the Western world. When completed, the project will have a transformative effect on scholarship involving rare Chinese texts, Harvard-Yenching Librarian James Cheng predicted.

“Scholars come from all over the world to use our rare book collection because many of these titles are not available anywhere else,” he said. “I think this project will be a huge contribution to scholarship by making these materials available to a much broader audience. We need to change the mindset that rare materials must be kept behind closed doors. A library is not a museum.”

Source: Harvard Gazette

See Also: Announcement from the Harvard College Libraries

UK: Digital Archives: East London Lives 2012 – a Living Archive Launches

Friday, October 9th, 2009

From the JISC Blog Post:

East London Lives 2012, a digital archive project which aims to document some aspects of change in the lives of East Londoners towards the hosting of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The archive hosts content from research projects based at the University of East London and other contextualising material about London and specifically the five East London boroughs and the bid promises that were made about the impact of the Olympics.

Importantly the archive also contains a wealth of community generated content, including oral histories, image, video and interviews.

The blog post also contains a brief introductory video.

Access East London Lives 2012 – a Living Archive
(more…)

Online Searchable Collection: World War I Posters

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

This online collection of digitized World War I posters comes from the Prints & Photographs Division at the Library of Congress.

From the Home Page:

During World War I, the impact of the poster as a means of communication was greater than at any other time during history. The ability of posters to inspire, inform, and persuade combined with vibrant design trends in many of the participating countries to produce thousands of interesting visual works. The Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division makes available online approximately 1,900 posters created between 1914 and 1920. Most relate directly to the war, but some German posters date from the post-war period and illustrate events such as the rise of Bolshevism and Communism, the 1919 General Assembly election and various plebiscites.

The majority of the posters were printed in the United States. Posters from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Russia are included as well. The posters range in style from anonymous broadsides (predominantly text) to graphically vibrant works by well-known designers. The Library acquired these posters through gift, purchase, and exchange or transfer from other government institutions, and continues to add to the collection.

Information about obtaining copies is available through the “How to Order” link near the top of each catalog record.

The home page also contains rights info, background and scope of the collection, related resources, and a bibliography

To access the collection, search the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog subset of World War I posters.
All entries have catalog records and most have images available online.

Source: Library of Congress

See Also: Access the Complete Prints & Photographs Online Catalog

A Look at the Major League Baseball Video Library Film Archive

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

If you’re a baseball fan, this is a “must read.”

From the Article:

No American sport has a past as deep and cherished as baseball’s. But precious little of the sport’s history is preserved in moving images. Much occurred before the television age, leaving only grainy, scattershot clips culled from newsreels and home movies — and rarely does it show a player of [Babe] Ruth’s stature.

The newly arrived Ruth film is part of the video collection of Major League Baseball Productions, the league’s official archivist, which spans more than 100 years and includes about 150,000 hours of moving images. Most of the collection is stored in plastic cases that line metal shelves of a room labeled “Major League Baseball Film and Video Archive.” The overflow rests in storage a few miles away, in Fort Lee, N.J.

The article goes on describe how Frank Caputo, manager of the MLB Network video library film archive and Joe Porciello research a newly discovered 8-millimeter clip (it was found by a New Hanpshire man in his grandfathers home movie collection).

Source: The New York Times

See Also: Just in Time for the Major League Playoffs and World Series: Baseball Resources at the Library of Congress Web Guide

Digitization: Yale Library Gets Grant to Create Virtual Gallery of Islamic Manuscripts

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

From the Announcement:

Yale University Library and the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) have received a joint grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the United Kingdom to create a virtual gallery of Islamic manuscripts.
[Snip]
Manuscript catalogues and dictionaries, most of which exist only in print, are important sources for locating individual manuscripts and manuscript collections. Drawing on the expertise of faculty, librarians and information specialists in both Britain and the United States, the project will scan approximately 20,000 pages in Arabic, Persian and Western scripts and will make them available in a sophisticated searchable repository. Yale and SOAS will also digitize and index historical manuscripts from their collections that highlight the contribution to world knowledge made by Islamic philosophers, physicians and scientists. The Gallery will also serve as a model for other special collections and libraries with manuscript and reference material holdings.

Ann Okerson, Yale’s Associate University Librarian for Collections and International Programs and principal investigator on the project, noted, “Our success in this very competitive grant process is a tribute to the significant efforts of Yale’s and SOAS’s expert technical managers and curatorial leaders.”

Source: Yale University

Critics: National Archives Lax in Records Management Enforcement

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

From the Article by Aliya Sternstein:

The National Archives and Records Administration on Oct. 2 issued new regulations that provide more information on managing electronic records. The guidance also tries to make the somewhat arcane subject matter more comprehensible through a question-and-answer format.

But some specialists and open government advocates said the problems that NARA and other agencies experience with storing and retrieving a growing number of e-records are due to a lack of policing, not an absence of rules. One measure that would go a long way toward safeguarding valuable information is baking automated archiving filters into the design of a system at inception, rather than later on in the system’s life cycle.

Access the New Regulations (58 pages; PDF)

Source: nextgov

University of Minnesota: University’s Rare Book Collection Held Deep Underground

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

From the Article:

Elmer L. Andersen Library is home to one of the world’s foremost rare book collections, containing 120 special collections and additional archives that make up nearly 3 million volumes in total, including Andersen’s vast personal collection.

“Our Sherlock Holmes collection is one of the largest, if not the largest in the world,” said Kris Kiesling, director of archives and special collections at the University libraries.

The volumes are held in two main caverns that protect them from four major threats: temperature, humidity, dust and light. This protection includes filtered ventilation, low-flow fire sprinklers, pressurized halls and chemical detectors used to discern fires before they happen.

[Snip]

“There’s just no way to get across its value in any type of virtual mode. It has an artistic value; it has a tactile value,” said graduate instructor Kevin Mummey, who recently took his students to the library to view 3,000-year-old stone tablets.

Much More in the Complete Article

Source: Minnesota Daily

John Updike Papers Acquired by Houghton Library at Harvard

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

From the Story:

Harvard University has acquired a massive treasure trove of papers from one of its most famous literary graduates, John Updike ’54, the multifaceted novelist, short-story writer, poet, and critic who died last January.

Manuscripts, books, photographs, correspondence, artwork, and other papers are contained in the vast John Updike Archive, making it the definitive collection of Updike material, said Leslie Morris, curator of modern books and manuscripts at Harvard’s Houghton Library, which acquired the collection. Houghton is Harvard’s primary repository for rare books and manuscripts. The acquisition means the library will become the center for studies on the author’s life and work.

Source: Harvard Gazette

On Google and Usenet

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

The article begins with one paragraph about Google Book Search but the story actually focuses on the Usenet archive (Google Groups).

From the Article by Kevin Poulsen:

…a few geeks with long memories remember the last time Google assembled a giant library that promised to rescue orphaned content for future generations. And the tattered remnants of that online archive are a cautionary tale in what happens when Google simply loses interest.

That library is Usenet, a vast internet- and dial-up-based message board system erected in 1980. Though moribund today, for decades Usenet was the paper of record for the online world, and its hundreds of millions of “newsgroup” postings chronicle everything from the birth of the web to the rise of Microsoft, as well as more trivial matters.

In February 2001, Google rescued that history when it acquired the New York-based Deja.com, and with it a Usenet archive going back to 1995. It turned the archive into Google Groups, in a move that was cheered by net geeks who had seen Deja’s reliability declining, and were certain that the supremely competent Google would save it.

[Snip]

Flash forward nearly eight years, and visiting Google Groups is like touring ancient ruins.

[Snip]

Searching within a newsgroup, even one with thousands of posts, produces no results at all. Confining a search to a range of dates also fails silently, bulldozing the most obvious path to exploring an archive.

[Snip]

“The search results are extremely poor,” says network pioneer Brad Templeton. “Like nobody cares.”

Henry Spencer, whose Usenet archive forms much of Google Groups, is troubled by the company’s curatorship. “Google does get a lot of credit for putting it together and making it available,” Spencer says. “But search capabilities are important for such a large collection of data. The archive’s value to the community is considerably reduced if it’s not conveniently searchable.”

Source: Wired