If you’re the type of person who has trouble throwing anything out, then the job of collections reviewer at the University College London’s museums might not be for you. The college is embarking upon a purge of its assorted collections, some 250,000 items in total, only 2% of which are currently on display. A gargantuan task, surely, but the college is not doing it on its own — officials have taken the unusual step of opening the process up to the public. They’re asking visitors what they should keep, what they should give away to other museums — one institution’s trash is another’s treasure — or, as a last resort, what they should just throw away.

Source: Time

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has selected the University of Denver and the Denver Art Museum to plan and co-host the 2010 and 2011 WebWise Conferences on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World. The next WebWise conference will take place in Denver, March 3-5, 2010, and will focus on the theme Imagining the Digital Future.

Online registration for all events will be available through the IMLS Web site in early December.

[Snip]

Each year, the WebWise Conference brings together approximately 350 representatives of museums, libraries, archives, information and systems science, and other fields interested in the future of high-quality online content for inquiry and education. In 2010, the conference will focus on the future of collaborative digitization programs, the use of new technologies to more deeply engage audiences, and the training of a 21st century cultural heritage information workforce.

It will highlight digital projects and programs in libraries, museums, and cultural heritage organizations funded through IMLS’s National Leadership Grants. [Our emphasis] In addition to the conference, the University of Denver’s Penrose Library and School of Library and Information Science will launch an oral history program called “Digital Pioneers,” based on interviews with leading figures who have taken part in the creation of digital library and museum activities.

Webcasts from the 2009 WebWise Conference are available online.

Webcasts from the 2008 conference are also available. This conference featured a series of six sessions titled, “Introduction to Web 2.0.”

All videos are free to access and view.

Source: The Institute of Museum and Library Services

The Institute of Museum and Library Service (IMLS) has selected five museums and five libraries to receive the 2009 National Medal for Museum and Library Service. The National Medal is the nation’s highest honor for museums and libraries that make extraordinary civic, educational, economic, environmental, and social contributions.

[Snip]

As the primary source of federal funding for the nation’s museums and libraries, the Institute has a unique perspective on the vital role these institutions play in American society. The National Medal for Museum and Library Service was created to underscore that role. The winners are as diverse as the nation’s cultural landscape: small and large, urban and rural. They have one thing in common: they have developed innovative ways to serve their communities. Winners of the 2009 National Medal for Museum and Library Service are:

1. Braille Institute Library Services, Los Angeles, CA

2. Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA

3. Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal, Cincinnati, OH

4. Gail Borden Public Library, Elgin, IL

5. Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN

6. Multnomah County Library, Portland, OR

7. Museum of Science & Industry, Tampa, FL

8. Pritzker Military Library, Chicago, IL

9. Stark County District Library, Canton, OH

10. Tennessee Aquarium, Chattanooga, TN

Click on a library or museum name to read a brief profile of that institution.

ResourceShelf congratulates all of the 2009 winners!

Here what the medal looks like. Winners receive the medal along with $10,000 award.

See Also: Nominate a Library or Museum for the 2010 Award. The deadline is February 16, 2010.

Source: Institute of Museum and Library Services

The National Museum of the American Indian — the 16th Smithsonian Institution museum — which opened on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 2004, is the first U.S. national museum dedicated solely to Native Americans. And we think teachers, scholars, librarians and researchers everywhere will be interested in the excellent collection search tool available on the museum’s website.

Welcome to NMAI Collections Search, which includes a representative sample of NMAI’s object and historic photo collections. Each item is accompanied by basic, standardized information. To become familiar with the site, start with one of the Collection Highlight tours or search the website using this page or the tabs at the top.

Our goal is to include as many items as possible, but objects and photos will be added only when NMAI staff have reviewed the accuracy of accompanying information. Items identified as culturally sensitive or which are no longer part of NMAI’s collections will not appear on this website. Please contact NMAI about providing additional information or correcting any errors.

Records for many objects include their original catalog cards, which often date to the early 1900s. These cards may include tribal names and terminology considered unacceptable or offensive today but they have been included to illustrate the information that originally accompanied the objects.

Five different search options are available:

• Peoples/Culture
• Artists/Individuals
• Places
• Object Specifics
• Advanced Search

There are different functions available depending upon which search option you’re using, but under all of them are check boxes that allow you to restrict your search to any combination of the following: archaeological Items, ethnographic Items, modern and contemporary arts, photographic collections. Or you can just check “All of the above categories” if you want to cast the widest net possible. Search help is just a click away.

We enjoyed browsing the collection highlights area at the bottom right of the page, which included such categories of interest as beadwork and toys and games.

Bibliographers and catalogers will be interested in the thesaurus:

The following reference lists represent NMAI controlled terminologies in their respective hierarchies. Use these reference lists if you are in doubt about what terms are used or how they should be entered for searches. If you cannot quickly locate a term you may use your browser’s “Find” (”Ctrl” + “F”) option combination to see if a term is listed. When you click on a term in a Reference List, a search is automatically performed across all applicable collections categories.

Even if this is not a subject area of interest to you, the site as a whole is well worth browsing just because it’s so…elegantly done.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the primary source of federal funds for the nation’s museums and libraries, announces the 51 institutions receiving National Leadership Grants (NLG) totaling $17,894,475. Projects by these institutions will advance the ability of museums and libraries to preserve culture, heritage, and knowledge while enhancing learning.

For a complete list of National Leadership Grants (organized by State) and descriptions visit this page.

Here are just a few of the projects that received grants. In many cases, the abstracts below are not full text.

+ The Boston TV News Digital Library: 1960-2000

The WGBH Media Library and Archives, in collaboration with Northeast Historic Film, Cambridge Community Television, and the Boston Public Library, will develop the Boston TV News Digital Library: 1960–2000, the first online resource offering a city’s commercial, noncommercial, and community cable TV news heritage to educators and the public. The purpose of the collaboration is to use, test, and demonstrate open source tools to assist custodians of similar resources, while creating an online library offering 40 years of urban moving image materials, resulting in approximately 70,000 news records…

+ Creating a Virtual Terrapin Station: Blending Traditional & Socially Constructed Archives for Research, Teaching

The University of California, Santa Cruz Campus will digitize materials from its Grateful Dead Archive and make them available in a unique and cutting-edge Web site, the Virtual Terrapin Station. The Virtual Terrapin Station will provide access to Grateful Dead Archive materials and tools to facilitate public contributions to the archive. This project will enable the university to convert a significant part of a traditional archive to digital form and make it available online while simultaneously experimenting with the impact of fostering, creating, and curating a large, socially constructed archive. The project will develop a click-through permissions form for content contributors and will extend the reach of the Grateful Dead Archive to the academic research community. It will also implement and contribute to the development of the IMLS-funded exhibition tool, Omeka

+ Creating Global Learning and Cultural Centers through Advancing Digital Resources in our School Libraries

Bridgeport Roman Catholic Diocesan Corp., working with the State Library of Connecticut, will investigate strategies to enhance parochial school libraries and build strategic partnerships with other school libraries and public libraries. They will explore issues around broadcast redistribution of synchronous and asynchronous learning tools, the capacity to network library holdings and access workflows, and resource sharing among partner institutions. The goal is to develop a plan to make the school libraries a hub through which the individual student on a laptop, or a team working in a connected classroom, can access international learners and global resources.

Many More Entries After the Jump

+ Collaborative Planning (Co-Plan) to Support an Infrastructure for Humanities Scholarship

The Council on Library and Information Resources, in partnership with Tufts University, will lead a collaborative planning process engaging scholars and academic librarians to examine the services and digital objects classicists have developed, their future research needs, and the roles of libraries and other curatorial institutions in fostering the infrastructure on which the core intellectual activities of classics and many other disciplines depend. On the basis of extensive consultation with librarians, archivists, and humanities scholars, they will identify and describe a set of shared services layered over a distributed storage architecture that is seamless to end users, allows multiple contributors, and leverages institutional resources and facilities…

+ Cultural Imaginings: the creation of the Arab World in the Western Mind

The libraries of George Washington University and Georgetown University will digitize their jointly held collections of Western literature on the Middle East and works by Middle East and North African authors comprising more than 2,500 volumes. The collections will be freely accessible to scholars and the general public worldwide. As part of the digitization process, the project team will test and evaluate the performance of a Kirtas 2400 book scanner and assess its capacity to produce high-quality/high-volume digital scans of bound volumes. Both libraries will produce enriched metadata records necessary for discovery, access, and long-term management and preservation of the digital content created, using robust metadata standards.

+ ASERL Collaborative Federal Depository Project

The Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL), in partnership with the University of Kentucky and the University of South Carolina, will create collaborative centers of excellence among federally designated regional depository libraries to improve access to federal government publications and create a model for improving depository library services and operations. Working within the current legal mandate and policies of the Federal Depository Library Program, ASERL and its partners will test a plan to create a comprehensive collection of tangible, legacy federal documents in two subject areas, with cataloging and provision of expert subject-based reference support services…

+ The GALILEO Knowledge Repository: Advancing the Access and Management of Scholarly Digital ContenT

The Georgia Institute of Technology, in partnership with the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, the Medical College of Georgia, Georgia Southern University, Valdosta State University, Albany State University, North Georgia College and State University, and the College of Coastal Georgia, will build a statewide institutional repository (IR) called the GALILEO Knowledge Repository. The partners will also host a national symposium on statewide and consortial repositories, create instructional materials, conduct consortial IR training, and offer consulting services. This project will advance scholarly communication by expanding the use of IRs by U.S. colleges and universities and by increasing the number of professionals with knowledge and skills in managing consortial IRs.

+ Information Literacy for Future Island Leaders

The University of Guam (UOG) library will create a comprehensive system of graduate student support through new bibliographic instruction (BI) classes, research services, and digital resources. The UOG library team will design services and instruction to support graduate programs and research using both traditional and digital resources…

+ Louisiana Legacy Library of Digital Moving Images Planning Project

Louisiana’s Old State Capitol Museum of Political History will partner with the Louisiana State Archives and Louisiana Public Broadcasting to preserve and catalogue the state’s film and video according to accepted preservation/archive standards for moving images and to expand public access to this invaluable resource. The project will plan for the preservation and access to endangered video recordings of the history and culture of the people of Louisiana over the past half-century, drawn from television and news broadcasts…

+ A Policy Based Archival Replication System for Libraries, Archives, and Museums using a Virtual Private LOCKSS

Working with the Odum Institute for Research (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), the Roper Center for Public Opinion (University of Connecticut), and the Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (University of Michigan), Harvard will develop and distribute a production-ready open source tool for verified distributed replication of digital collection data, based on an existing prototype. The tool will allow any library, museum, or archive to audit replication of its content across an existing LOCKSS network and will allow groups of collaborating institutions to automatically and verifiably replicate each others’ content. Project partners will develop the prototype tool into a self-contained system that can be installed, used and maintained by institutional staff with limited technical expertise. The result will be a set of widely dissemination open source (OSI licensed) tools that can be used easily by libraries, museums, and archives

+ Rescuing and Archiving Social Science Data

Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world’s largest social science data archive, will work with members of the institutional repositories (IR) community to preserve and reuse legacy social science data. Over the last 50 years, improvement in data processing technology has resulted in increased amounts, formats, and complexities of research data on a variety of social, economic, and political subjects. Through its participation in the Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences (www.digitalpreservation.gov/partners/datapass/datapass.html), funded through the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program, ICPSR has discovered hundreds of social science data sets that are in danger of being lost forever and that could be reanalyzed with current techniques. The project will salvage many important legacy studies and their supporting data sets by converting them to new formats and will at the same time develop tools and workflows to improve the archiving of current data…

+ Oral History in the Digital Age

New technologies offer great potential for advancing the practice of oral history. However, they also introduce new questions and issues. Michigan State University, through the MATRIX Center and the Michigan State University Museum, will partner with the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center, the American Folklore Society, and the Oral History Association to recommend standards and best practices for digital oral history…

+ Supporting Early Literacy Learning: A Model Partnership between Children’s Museum and Public Libraries

The Minnesota Children’s Museum, in partnership with the Dakota County Library System, Hennepin County Library System, Saint Paul Public Library System, and other partners in the region, will develop and test an innovative early literacy program. Project partners will work closely with nationally recognized experts in early literacy and with local teachers and educational system administrators to ensure that the program is relevant and useful for those communities. The project will explore new ways that libraries and museums can bring their unique expertise together for new collaborations.

+ The St. Louis Freedom Suits Legal Encoding Project”

The Washington University Libraries, in partnership with the Missouri History Museum and other contributors within and outside Washington University, will digitize, transcribe, and encode the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project and supplementary materials…

+ The Next Generation Sheet Music Consortium

The University of California and its partner, Indiana University, will develop tools and services to meet the needs of both data providers (libraries, museums, historical societies, and other curators of sheet music collections) and users of sheet music (musicologists, performers, cultural and art historians, etc.) as identified from a needs analysis that was funded by a 2007 planning grant from the IMLS National Leadership Grant program. Tools and services developed in the project will enable institutions with limited technical knowledge to participate in the metadata aggregation service of the Sheet Music Consortium (http://digital.library.ucla.edu/sheetmusic) and will provide users with a richer set of services, including the ability to contribute structured metadata to the collection, write annotations, and link to related materials of interest across consortium collections.

+ Bringing Oral Histories to Life – Unlocking the Power of the Spoken Word

The National World War II Museum will partner with National History Day to design and implement a methodology to enable video oral histories to be accessed and explored in innovative ways. Content will be made available to a wider audience, which will have the ability to participate in describing and referencing oral histories in a manner not currently possible. This project will develop methods of digitizing, indexing, and segmenting oral histories that can be used by other institutions to perform the same activities with their own holdings.

+ Refining a Digital Production Workflow in Public Television to Aggregate Video Assets for Educational Use

Educational Broadcasting Corporation (EBC) is taking the next step toward refining the digital workflow for its television productions. Creating a set of Media Asset Management (MAM)-based tools will allow multiple groups of users to package digital video content easily for distribution over multiple nonbroadcast channels. EBC’s ongoing preliminary efforts to create a fully digital workflow put the organization in a position to take the logical next steps toward integrating a number of related, but often uncoordinated, trends in digital preservation and archiving across the public media landscape. Digital audiovisual material is often harder to store, access, and preserve than analogue video tape and film…

+ Policy-Driven Repository Interoperability (PoDRI)

The University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill and the DuraSpace organization (formerly DSpace and the Fedora Commons) are partnering on the Policy-Driven Repository Interoperability (PoDRI) project. The principal focus of PoDRI is to investigate the feasibility of interoperability mechanisms between repositories at the policy level. There is a growing trend toward cross-repository integration, driven by the need for scalable, open, and distributed environments, in which content can be leveraged in a variety of storage spaces…

+ Classification of Government Websites in the End-of-Term Archive: Extending Depository Libraries’ Collection Development Practices

As the Web becomes the dissemination tool of choice for many information producers, many libraries will be collecting materials from this important yet unpreserved information source. Librarians need the capability to identify and select materials in accordance with their established collection development policies, and they also need common metrics to characterize these resources. Organizing the content in Web archives using established schemes is a promising solution to enable the extension of collection development practices to this new class of materials. The development of common metrics will also enable librarians to communicate the scope and value of these materials in the context of their current collections and collecting priorities. In this project, the University of North Texas is partnering with the Internet Archive to investigate these two needs in the area of government information…

+ Creating Collaborative Catalogs: Using Digital Technologies to Expand Museum

This three-year project [UCLA] will develop an innovative open-source, online collaborative catalog system and set of best practices that will dynamically expand the cultural and historical knowledge of Native American objects held in museum collections.

Publishing TEI Documents for Small Liberal Arts Colleges: Planning a Service, Building a Community

[Wheaton College] The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has become the main vehicle for transcribing and encoding primary source and archival texts. TEI is the ideal standard for preserving archival documents, representing them digitally for teaching, learning, and research, as well as making them available to scholars. The long-term goal of this planning project is to identify and develop an implementation plan to allow scholars and archivists from a wide array of liberal arts schools to store and display their TEI-enhanced digitized texts…

Source: Institute of Museum and Library Services

From the Summary:

For many years, art museums have been at the forefront of offering their visitors learning experiences that extend beyond traditional exhibit labels with gallery kiosks and audio guides. More recently, art museums continue leading the way by adding cell phone tours, podcasts, and platform-specific applications in an effort to capitalize on the commonly-owned portable devices—iPods, MP3 players, Blackberries, cell phones—that visitors already carry in their pockets. Museum professionals see great potential in reaching new audiences and pleasing old ones by providing content and social interaction via mobile devices. The biggest challenge is that many museums do not quite know where to begin when working with a small budget and small staff with limited technical knowledge. This site addresses those needs by proving a brief overview of what is being done in the mobile museum world and offers suggestions based on this research on how to economically provide mobile users with a positive experience with your museum.

Findings
+ Overview
+ Assessment of the Field
+ Development Recommendations
+ Implementation and Prototypes
++ Omeka Plugins for Mobiles
++ Sites Optimized for Mobiles
+++ Native Cross-Platform Applications
+ Resources

If you’re a Zotero user (a favorite web research tool), you can also access an annotated bibliography

Source: Center for History and New Media
Hat Tip: Mobile Libraries

The ancient city of Rome was not built in a day. It took nearly a decade to build the Colosseum, and almost a century to construct St. Peter’s Basilica. But now the city, including these landmarks, can be digitized in just a matter of hours.

A new computer algorithm developed at the University of Washington uses hundreds of thousands of tourist photos to automatically reconstruct an entire city in about a day.

The tool is the most recent in a series developed at the UW to harness the increasingly large digital photo collections available on photo-sharing Web sites. The digital Rome was built from 150,000 tourist photos tagged with the word “Rome” or “Roma” that were downloaded from the popular photo-sharing Web site, Flickr.

Earlier versions of the UW photo-stitching technology are known as Photo Tourism. That technology was licensed in 2006 to Microsoft, which now offers it as a free tool called Photosynth.

“With Photosynth and Photo Tourism, we basically reconstruct individual landmarks. Here we’re trying to reconstruct entire cities,” said co-author Noah Snavely, who developed Photo Tourism as his UW doctoral work and is now an assistant professor at Cornell University.

Source: Science Daily

+ Access and Use Photosynth (via Microsoft)

+ Various Photosynth’s of Rome

These new images [and video] are just a few minutes among hundreds of hours of amateur video and images being collected by the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center which has launched a website containing examples of citizen journalism of the tragedy.

According to today’s press release the museum has issued a world-wide invitation for the public to submit media related to the 9/11 events through a new online initiative “Make History.” 911History.org will become a permanent digital archive and help build an interactive, mapped time line of events on the web.

[Snip]

Each photo will be placed alongside current Google “Street View” photos of various locations. Users can click on locations, themes or time of day to view the footage or images from the locations they were actually taken reports Sky News.

Source: Digital Journal

Access National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center (Home Page)

A Few Web-Based Resources to Assist in Remembering the Tragedy of September 11, 2001

+ September11.Archive.Org (via Internet Archive)

+ September 11 Television Archive (via Internet Archive)

+ September 11 Digital Archive (Center for History and New Media and American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning)

+ Remembering 9/11 (Library of Congress)

+ America Transformed (NPR)
NPR Coverage Sept. 11 – Oct. 8, 2001. Includes audio archives.

+ Voices of Reflection National Public Radio 9/11 Coverage
From September 11, 2002.

+ Audio: Understanding America A Year After 9/11 (Minnesota Public Radio)

+ The Sonic Memorial Project

+ Audio: Commission Hearings (via NPR)

+ 9/11 Commission Web Site

+ 9/11 Commission Records (via National Archives and Records Administration)

See Also: 9/11 National Day of Service and Remembrance
What you can do.

Foundation Grants for Preservation in Libraries, Archives, and Museums, 2009 Edition is a collaborative project of the Library of Congress and the Foundation Center. This publication lists 1,944 grants of $5,000 or more awarded by 488 foundations, from 2004 through the publication date of this guide. It covers grants to public, academic, research, school, and special libraries, and to archives and museums for activities related to conservation and preservation. This publication includes:

+ an introduction that explains the book’s coverage, arrangement, entries, and how to research using the volume. Note: This PDF file contains hotlinks to free online tutorials that cover grant writing and provide an insight into the world of U.S. foundation giving offered by the Foundation Center, as well as to some other widely used non-profit guidance on preservation grants found on the Conservation Online web site.

+ a statistical analysis of grant funding in the area of preservation by foundation, recipient location, subject, recipient type (e.g., Library), grant size, and foundation generosity nationwide.

+ state-by-state descriptions of projects funded in preservation nationwide including the foundation’s name, limitations on giving, recipient(s), size of grants, and purpose of the grant described. Note: This section is hot linked in the PDF version directly to more detailed descriptions of the foundations.

+ indexes by recipient, geographic area of the recipient, and subject. Note: If you do not find what you are looking for in the indices, use the find feature to search the text for your term.

+ a list of all foundations that have donated to preservation and conservation with their contact information and limitations on giving.

Access the Complete Document (125 pages; PDF)

Source: Library of Congress, Foundation Center

Wayne Clough pulls a thumb-sized computer flash drive from his pocket and marvels at how many of the Smithsonian Institution’s millions of objects can be captured on it.

The device holds sounds from endangered frogs, images from an archive of Depression-era paintings, a 360-degree view inside a Concorde supersonic jet and much more. The mini archive reflects one way the former engineer, now head of the institution, aims to share the collection of the world’s largest museum complex online with more people than ever before.

[Snip]

For example, Clough has urged staffers to engage visitors on Twitter or other social networks and build online games that feature museum collections.

“I worry about museums becoming less relevant to society,” Clough said. “While it’s a magnificent thing that 25 million visits are made to our museums each year, there’s still over 300 million people out there who aren’t visiting. So how do we reach the other 300 million?”

Source: AP (via Charlotte Observer)

In the 21st century, workers and students need more diverse skills to compete in a global economy. The Obama Administration has called for the development of 21st century skills like problem-solving, critical thinking, entrepreneurship and creativity. At the same time the capacity of cultural institutions to engage the public in innovative learning experiences has created a new dynamic for delivering library and museum service. Libraries and museums that adapt to these changes are playing a significant role in delivering 21st century skills to learners of all ages.

As part of its mission to engage libraries and museums, community stakeholders and policy makers at the national, state and local level in a concerted effort to meet the educational, economic, civic, and cultural needs of communities, IMLS is releasing Museums, Libraries and 21st Century Skills. The website provides a quick online assessment for libraries and museums to evaluate their readiness to engage the public and to deliver 21st century skills, a downloadable pdf of a report and in-depth assessment matrix for library and museum practioners and policy makers.

+ Museums, Libraries, and 21st Century Skills

Source: Institute of Museum and Library Services

The Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and Wikimedia Netherlands will join hands to present an exhibition Art of Survival about Maroon culture of Suriname. As part of this collaboration, the museum will make approximately 2100 pictures available through Wikimedia Commons, the shared image repository used for Wikipedia and related projects.

By involving multiple language editions of Wikipedia at the exhibition, the Tropenmuseum reaches
out to new audiences and invites them to add to the available information on the subject in the
online encyclopaedias. The Tropenmuseum will incorporate valuable contributions into its
exhibition when it becomes available through Wikipedia.

Source: Wikimedia Blog

Europeana is an ambitious collaborative project between European archives, libraries and museums. First launched in November 2008, the initial interest was so great that it overwhelmed the site. The current version is described as a prototype, with the full-scale launch now expected in 2010. But even at this stage, it is a most interesting resource, claiming currently to provide access to four million digital items but anticipating this to have grown to 10 million by next year.

The types of items collected in Europeana are in the broad categories of Text, Images, Video, and Sound. Text, for instance, may include books, articles and music scores. However, although the site can be searched in a preferred language (26 in all), it is important to note that all items are presented as originally created (e.g., a Hungarian text will remain in Hungarian). From that point of view, the most international aspect of the site is the range of images, such as paintings, photographs and maps, and access to some music recordings. Similarly the site spans the centuries, with artists like Giotto, Watteau and Picasso, and composers like Mozart and Debussy among those represented.

All items are thoroughly catalogued, which helps make for productive searches. However some contributing organisations are more generous in the access they allow than others. The British Library’s images can be freely viewed at a good size, whereas those provided by Scran, a Scottish source, are only thumbnails: anything more requires a licence.

Basic searching can be refined by Language, Country, Date, Provider or Type, or a combination of these. There is also an Advanced Search facility which allows the site to be investigated in other modes, namely by Title, Creator, Date, or Subject. Again, the fields can be combined. But it would be a mistake to assume that searching by an artist’s country will necessarily produce the best results. The items provided by French sources tend to be the most relevant and plentiful, at least at the moment. Apart from the richness of their collections, this may be explained by the greater progress achieved in digitisation by some countries and their institutions compared to others.

By clicking on “View in original context” (displayed beneath any selected result), you are taken to the originating website — a way of opening up the possibilities of discovery beyond Europeana, although facilitated by it. Complimenting this, a very useful gateway page brings together links to all of the websites of Partners and Contributors of content.

There are also customisation possibilities available to registered users, such as the ability to save particular searches, add tags, or share items.

The subtitle to Europeana is “Think culture,” and its strength lies in its vast range of historical and artistic materials. As the project develops, this can only become even more the case. It is certainly a real collaborative achievement, but would be even more useful if the amount of access granted to items by the contributors was equalised. Nevertheless, this collaboration amongst such a diversity of institutions, languages, and countries is both heartening in itself, and also suggests exciting possibilities for parallel projects in other areas of European expertise, like science or medicine.

See also:
+ European Online Library Launches
+ EuropeanaLocal to expand participation in European Digital Library
+ New Portal from from the European Digital Library: Europeana Demo Goes Live

Discover books, photographs, artwork, films, maps, music, archival documents, government records and much more in our online collections and exhibitions.

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has created more than 100 virtual exhibitions over an eight-year span through the Canadian Culture Online Program.

We have selected our six most popular themes to showcase LAC online collections and exhibitions:

+ Aboriginal Peoples
+ Art and Photography
+ Ethno-cultural Groups
+ Exploration and Settlement
+ Military and Peacekeeping
+ Politics and Government

Visit this Page for a Complete List of Themes

Source: Library and Archives Canada

A panel of trained archivists will discuss the use the spectrum of Web 2.0 tools and innovation as how it creates mechanisms to promote the access and use of archival and rare materials. They will discuss their own innovations in their own repositories, and some of the successful projects and tools being used today, as well as discussing the potential for creative collaboration between historians and archivists in academe using Web 2.0 tools and resources

Direct to PowerPoint Slides

Source: dList

United States Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey announced that the U.S. Department of Justice is donating copies of trial transcripts and decisions created in connection with the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the Justice Department to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. These records were created over the past three decades in connection with OSI’s litigation against United States citizens or residents who were alleged to have participated in acts of persecution in collaboration with the Nazis or their allies.
…
With the exception of records created immediately after the war, this collection will constitute the largest body of English-language, primary source material relating to the persecution of Nazi criminals publicly available anywhere in the world. The Museum has assisted OSI by granting access to key documentation that the Museum has microfilmed in archives in Germany, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union; by providing expert historian witness testimony in prosecutions initiated and tried by OSI; and in other ways.

The donation consists of well over 50,000 pages of transcripts of the more than 40 World War II-related denaturalization and removal cases that OSI litigated to trial as well as the transcripts of hearings in three contested extradition matters in which the OSI participated. The Justice Department is also donating copies of decisions, published and unpublished, that have been rendered in OSI’s denaturalization, removal and extradition cases. The decisions are bound in a multivolume set created for this purpose and donated by Thomson Reuters/West Publishing.

Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

These front pages were among those considered for The Poynter Institute’s book on the 2008 presidential election.

Hundreds of pages were reviewed. Ultimately, we could publish only 75 in the book. The selection was extremely difficult — a balance of design, geographic diversity, political and historical importance.

A great deal of memorable journalism was published after the election. We wish we could have included it all. Please enjoy these fine pages.

Pages can be sorted by state, country or type (alternative, college, daily, ethnic).

Source: Poynter Institute

Note: Shirl Kennedy, ResourceShelf senior editor, is a news researcher at the St. Petersburg Times, which is owned by the Poynter Institute.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) today returned cultural artifacts to the Government of Egypt. The 79 ancient artifacts came from a region in Egypt known as Ma’adi, which is an archeological site in Egypt identifying an ancient civilization dating back to 3,900 – 3,600 B.C.

The objects were returned in a repatriation ceremony this morning by Peter J. Smith, ICE special agent-in-charge in New York, and were received on behalf of the Egyptian Government by the Honorable Ambassador Hussein Mubarak, Consul General for Egypt in New York, and Mr. Attiya Radwan, the Head of the Central Department for Upper Egypt Monuments.

In October 2006, ICE received a tip from the Art Loss Register, a London-based company with offices in New York, about the sale of the Ma’adi artifacts to a U.S. antiquities dealer. A subsequent ICE investigation resulted in the federal criminal conviction of Edward George Johnson, who pleaded guilty to the charge of possessing and selling stolen antiquities.

“When Edward George Johnson stole these items from Egypt, he robbed a nation of part of its history,” said Peter J. Smith, special agent-in-charge of ICE’s Office of Investigations in New York. “The repatriation of the Ma’adi artifacts reunites the people of Egypt with an important piece of their cultural heritage.”

Source: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

Welcome to the Florida “Museums in the Sea” website. Here you will find information about all of Florida’s Underwater Archaeological Preserves. Click on the name of a ship to explore the remains located at that site.

Source: Florida Department of State, Division of Historical Resources, Bureau of Archaeological Research

“The assignment… simple. The objective… illusive. The cost… immeasurable. We are the men and women who go through great risks to get the shot. We extraordinary videographers and photojournalists train with the best, operate in the worst and get noticed the least. Our mission is to be there when history happens. Ever notice that photo or video clip in the news, book, or documentary? Well, someone had to be there. Someone had to get the shot. Someone had to tell the story. We are that someone.”

Nice collection of slideshows.

Source: U.S. Department of Defense