Group items tagged

Beginning November 1st only limited public appointments will be allowed to see the State of Georgia's archives, and the staff of 10 may be reduced. The move is in response to a $730,000 budget cut. The reduction still has to be approved by the legislature, it's unclear how many operating hours the archives will have; state law mandates only every Saturday.

A somewhat lighthearted response to all the excitement about the "discovery" of the Leale report, a report made to the Surgeon General by the first doctor to treat Abraham Lincoln after he was shot at Ford's Theater.   It's very interesting that, even though it was in the collection, where it should be, no one thought to use it in research until now.  

Predicted for a long time, this may be either good or bad for libraries. Good as it may drive some traffic back to libraries, bad as it may end up shutting off the archiving of online news articles and aggregation services that allow a quick overview of what the media is talking about. If news articles continue to be archived in services libraries have access to then it would be a win-win.

The Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC) is a project that aims to bring together online resources and archival materials on historical person, to basically allow a researcher to know where all the records are to understand a person. What I found in the prototype is that it resembled a catalog of sophisticated authority records. This could be useful for someone needing quick information or seeing how a historical figure fits in context, but I question if in the end it doesn't repeat information found almost as readily in other resources such as Wikipedia.

The Internet Archice is now offering over one million items as peer to peer BitTorrent downloads. While in one sense it is only a different download method for materials that are copyright and royalty free, it is Torrents have been controversial as they are often used to download pirated movies and software. However, the Internet Archive does have a point in that it improves access for users with limited bandwidth. Downloads include 1.2 million books and 9,000 videos and movies.

Researchers found a nearly linear relationship between time of sharing of the resource and the percentage lost, with a slightly less linear relationship between time of sharing and archiving coverage of the resource. From this model we conclude that after the first year of publishing, nearly 11% of shared resources will be lost and after that we will continue to lose 0.02% per day.

This sounds like a good choice, and makes me even more excited for what the DPLA could have in store.

An interesting re-purposing of a card catalog into a collectoin called "Artists in the Archives: A Collection of Card Catalogs." Card catalogs have been redone so they include artwork that is either contributions from other artists or the public, or visual representations of what the cards originally described.

A CBS video about how items from the National Archives are being targeted by thieves--in this case by a noted historian who used his access to steal material.

I was a little surprised the number of tweets is at 170 billion , with 400 million a day, but the Library of Congress has been archiving them. Part of the problem in displaying them is simply how; the size and continual growth of the collection would make a massive indexing collection. But also, I wonder about tweets that have been deleted for legal reasons or because of privacy, and whether those would appear in the database.

An interesting blog about various approaches to visualizing archival data sets and large cultural collections.

A summary of the October 17, 2012 Facebook Q&A about preserving your treasures. Great for the DIY archivist in us all.

An interesting organization but sounds ultimately like a variation of the LOCKKS concept, namely preserving a digital archive by means of multiple copies on data nodes, so if one fails others step in to replace it.

A short article about Aaron Swartz, one of the founders of Reddit who committed suicide recently. At issue is not that he was accessing an archive of unauthorized articles from Jstor, but if the prosecution and potential sentence fit the the crime and if overall more information should be free

A set of recommendations from BOAI (Budapest Open Access Initiative) for open access to research, including self archiving and open access journals.

I'm just learning of this today. Apparently they are only offering 1GB of free storage, which puts them at half of what Dropbox offers for free. That said, Dropbox is painfully slow at upload and download and Google storage is insanely cheap. I just bought 20GB of storage for my photo archive and it costs me a WHOPPING $5/year - and the extra storage is shared by all my Google apps which I'm guessing will include Drive. 

An interesting page from an interactive News Museum that shows the daily front pages from approximately 900 newspapers worldwide. While not as useful as Google as it doesn't include full articles and the archive is only selected "of interest" topics it does give a quick view of what is important in the world today.

With eBooks having taken off in the past few years I was curious about the current status of Project Gutenberg, the original resource of online books. Starting in 1971 with the Declaration of Independence Gutenberg initially relied on manually typing in royalty free books into a text format. The project is still continuing, but the founder died last year and as of July 8th the archive is only 40,000 books, an almost miniscule number compared to the digitization efforts of Google.

This is a highly critical but reasoned examination of the state of the Library and Archives Canada. The author feels that the national library is losing focus by breaking up parts of it's collection, putting undigitized materials into remote storage where they are harder to access, cutting hours, and reducing staff by up to 20 percent--all of which contribute to the dissolution of the country's past and heritage. What he doesn't offer is an examination of what brought the national library to this state (unavoidable funding cuts or bad decisions to streamline or both) and what can be done to fix it.

"Our online history is disappearing at an astonishing rate, creating a black hole for future historians. "