Archive for the ‘Archives and Special Collections’ Category
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)
Posted in Archives and Special Collections | No Comments »
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
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Digitization Projects, Libraries and Librarianship | No Comments »
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…)
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Digital Repositories | No Comments »
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
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Arts and Humanities, History, Resources | No Comments »
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
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Digital Preservation, Preservation/Conservation | No Comments »
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
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Arts and Humanities, History | No Comments »
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
Posted in Access to Information, Archives and Special Collections | No Comments »
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
Posted in Archives and Special Collections | No Comments »
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
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Arts and Humanities, Resources | No Comments »
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
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Digital Preservation, Information Industry, Search News, Technology and Internet | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
Cool!
Internet Archive News alerts us to the fact that the essential Wayback Machine (TWM) (a service of the Internet Archive) was mentioned on Law and Order SVU in the past couple of weeks.
The IA blog post has a text summary of the show and includes the TWM mention (via the All Things Law and Order Blog). If you want to view the complete episode, it’s available via iTunes. The title is “Sugar.”
Source: Internet Archive Blog
See Also: Milestones: The Wayback Machine Grows in Size (June 4, 2009)
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Technology and Internet | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009
Access the Baseball Resources at the Library of Congress Web Guide
From the Introduction:
Baseball Resources at the Library of Congress is a [new] guide [released on September 25, 2009] to baseball resources available on the Library’s Web site and in its physical collections. The breadth and depth of materials highlighted will appeal to baseball researchers, while casual and diehard fans alike will find many digitized items documenting the history of baseball to fuel their passion for the game.
The guide is divided into four major sections: Library of Congress Online Resources, which presents baseball materials freely available on the Library’s Web site; Conducting Baseball Research at the Library, for researchers interested in locating baseball materials off-site through the Library’s online catalog and on-site through the Library’s subscription databases and divisional holdings; External Resources, a gateway to other baseball Web sites; and Bibliography, a selected bibliography of print resources about baseball for adults and younger readers.
This Web Guide was compiled by Peter Armenti, Digital Reference Specialist.
Access the Baseball Resources at the Library of Congress Web Guide
See Also:
Topics in Chronicling America – Baseball’s Modern World Series
The information and sample article links [in this guide] provide access to a sampling of articles from historic newspapers that can be found in the Chronicling America: American Historic Newspapers digital collection [online, at no charge]. Use the Suggested Search Terms and Dates to explore this topic further in Chronicling America.
Source: Library of Congress
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Bibliographies, Webliographies, Databases, Directories, and Guides, History, Resources | No Comments »
Monday, October 5th, 2009
From an Article:
The National Archives and Records Administration this week submitted a report to Congress detailing alternative models to the current Presidential Library system.
The Presidential Historical Records Preservation Act of 2008 [PL 110-404] had tasked NARA with developing plans to reduce the financial burden of the libraries on the Federal Government, improve the preservation of Presidential records, and reduces delays in public access to Presidential records.
You Can Read a Summary of the Report Written by the Coalition for History and/or Access the Full Text Report from NARA (87 pages; PDF)
Source: Coalition for History
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Libraries and Librarianship | No Comments »
Monday, October 5th, 2009
From the Article:
Digital literature, online scientific research and internet journalism that should have been saved in the nation’s main libraries over the past five years may have been lost because ministers have failed to give them the legal power to copy and archive websites, the Guardian has learned.
Lost digital archive: ‘It’s taken 6 years to begin consultation’ Link to this audio Senior executives at the British Library and the National Library of Scotland (NLS) are dismayed that legislation giving them the right to collect online and digital material is still not in force, more than six years after it was passed by parliament.
The omission has meant the libraries – which are legally required to archive books, newspapers and journals – have failed to record online coverage of major events such as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the release of the Lockerbie bomber and the MPs’ expenses scandal.
[Snip]
Phil Spence, head of operations at the British Library, said the failure had left a major “digital black hole” in the library’s collections, with huge gaps in the archives for researchers, scientists and historians.
It meant the British Library was unable to store the BBC’s website, the National Gallery or British Museum website, any UK newspapers’ websites, or scientific journals published online because of copyright issues. Blogs, community pages, government and business websites can only be archived after laborious voluntary agreements. The act would protect the libraries against copying defamatory material, but would also protect a publisher’s copyright.
“We’ve lost five years of digital content which is gone potentially for ever, and the ability of the nation to capitalise on that as well,” he said.
Much More in the Full Text Article Including a 3.5 Minute Audio Report
Source: The Guardian
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Digital Preservation, Libraries and Librarianship, Technology and Internet | No Comments »
Monday, October 5th, 2009
From the Web Site Home Page:
Over 12,000 images from various collections of rare books, manuscripts, papyri, photographs and sheet music are available for your viewing. Each collection has its own web site that is unrestricted in the interests of knowledge and learning.
You can learn more about each collection by beginning with this page.
Each “about” page also contains a direct link to that specific collection. 17 collections are listed.
Direct links to to the search interfaces for some of the collections are also available (via a drop down menu on the home page).
Source: SCETI (from the University of Pennsylvania Libraries)
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Arts and Humanities, Databases, Directories, and Guides, Digital Repositories, Digitization Projects, History, Info Management and Retrieval, Resources, Resources for Educators | No Comments »
Monday, October 5th, 2009
From the Report:
Over twenty Library of Congress staff had an opportunity to participate in a special workshop, Digital Preservation Management: Implementing Short-term Strategies for Long-term Problems, hosted by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, held September 21-22, 2009 in Washington, DC.
Initially developed at the Cornell University Library and supported with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Digital Preservation Management workshops are structured curricula geared toward managing digital preservation planning and policies for libraries, archives, and other cultural heritage institutions. The goal of the workshop is to provide those managers and staff responsible for digital assets the practical means to exercise stewardship in an age of technological change. Many institutions struggle with the initial stages of developing digital preservation policies, and the workshop aides participants in understanding the fundamental pieces of how to think about and enact planning for organizations.
[Snip]
The next five-day workshops will be held October 11-16, 2009 at the University of Michigan – where Martha Anderson, director of program management for the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, will be the keynote speaker – and June 13-18, 2010 at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For more information about the workshops, please visit: www.icpsr.umich.edu/dpm/workshops/fiveday.html.
Source: National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program / Library of Congress
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Digital Preservation, Libraries and Librarianship | No Comments »
Saturday, October 3rd, 2009
From the Introduction:
The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (P&P) has numerous varied and unique collections of Middle East images. This visual material includes photographic prints, negatives, albums, book illustrations, posters, architectural drawings, and cartoons. The majority of images were created between 1840 and 1970, although some earlier and later materials are also available.
The images portray a broad geographic area from Algiers in North Africa to Samarqand in present-day Uzbekistan. The collections are particularly strong in coverage of Turkey, Israel, the West Bank (the Palestinian territories), Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Central Asia. Many images of Iran, Iraq, and North Africa, including Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, can be found along with some images of Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states such as Kuwait and Bahrain.
[Snip]
The Middle East visual materials came to P&P through copyright deposit, gift, and purchase, and today total about 75,000 items. [Our Emphasis] As of 2009, most of these have images or descriptive information available in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) Researchers can view original materials, including pictures not yet digitized, in the P&P Reading Room. We recommend that patrons first search PPOC and consult a librarian before coming on site to do research.
Sections of the overview include:
+ Subject Overview
+ Search Tips (very useful)
+ Other Places to Look for Middle East Images
+ Bibliography
+ Online Resources
Access the Complete Overview
Access the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC)
Over 1.2 digitized images (and growing) in this database. The database is not limited to only Middle East imagery. It’s very easy to spend a lot of time here. This is a resources to share with library/info center users. It’s also great for educators.
Source: Prints and Photographs Division (P&P), Library of Congress
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Arts and Humanities, Bibliographies, Webliographies, Databases, Directories, and Guides, Digitization Projects, History, Info Management and Retrieval, Resources, Resources for Educators, Search News | No Comments »
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
From the Article:‘
The inspector general of the National Archives and Records Administration is investigating a potential data breach affecting tens of millions of records about U.S. military veterans, Wired.com has learned. The issue involves a defective hard drive the agency sent back to its vendor for repair and recycling without first destroying the data.
The hard drive helped power eVetRecs, the system veterans use to request copies of their health records and discharge papers. When the drive failed in November of last year, the agency returned the drive to GMRI, the contractor that sold it to them, for repair. GMRI determined it couldn’t be fixed, and ultimately passed it to another firm to be recycled.
Direct to Web Site of NARA’s Inspector General
Much More in the Complete Article
Source: Wired
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Government Documents and Political Information | No Comments »
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
You have to wonder how many other universities of all shapes and sizes are in the same shape (or worse) than IU?
From the Announcement:
Indiana University Bloomington holds more than 560,000 audio and video recordings and film reels, many of which are historically significant, all of which are actively deteriorating. And the window of time to save these materials is closing fast; most archivists agree that such audio and video materials could be lost forever in 20 years or less.
That’s the urgent conclusion of the just-released IU Bloomington Media Preservation Survey, a comprehensive study produced by a task force of archival experts drawn from around the campus.
[Snip]
The final report presents a detailed look at the characteristics and condition of audio, video, and film media on the campus, including numbers of holdings, general condition, and preservation risks. (This survey focused on one class of media and did not include photographs or other physical objects in special collections.) Among its major findings, the report reveals that IU Bloomington:
* Has media holdings dating back to wax cylinder recordings of Native Americans made in the early 1890s
* Holds an estimated 154,136 unique (one-of-a-kind) items
* Holds an estimated 94,993 rare items
* Holds a larger and more diverse film collection than almost any other U.S. university
* Has at least 180,000 items that are at high or very high risk for loss of content
“Large portions of IUB holdings are seriously endangered due to inadequate storage, degradation of media, and format obsolescence,” says [Mike] Casey [associate director for recording services at the Archives of Traditional Music] in his introduction to the survey report. “Some media preservation efforts on campus exist, but none are sustainable, and none are at a scale or pace that will allow them to preserve more than a tiny fraction of their holdings before it is too late.”
(more…)
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Libraries and Librarianship, Preservation/Conservation | No Comments »
Thursday, October 1st, 2009
From a Post by Brewster Kahle:
The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at UMass Amherst, the Perseus Digital Library Project at Tufts, and the Internet Archive are investigating large-scale information extraction and retrieval technologies for digitized book collections. The NSF has awarded a grant of $2.7 million for a project to apply advanced OCR, topic modeling and metadata extraction techniques to over one million books at the Internet Archive.
Source: IA
See Also: NSF Grant Document
See Also: Scanning: Internet Archive Text Collection Passes 1.5 Million Titles (August 10, 2009)
Note: The Internet Archive is constantly adding new content so these numbers are a bit out of date.
Posted in Archives and Special Collections, Cataloging and Metadata, Digitization Projects, Info Management and Retrieval, Information Science | No Comments »
