miscellanies and sundries

Boy oh boy, there I was last week lamenting the lack of stories and a whole bunch came out this week.

First up: Not really an archives story but they discovered weapons-grade plutonium in a US dump

from Project Manhattan. This is one of the earliest batches of plutonium-239 ever created. This headline made me wonder "if they had a good records management program, would this have happened?" That 'this' being leaving the plutonium behind in a safe. BUT they did use records to discover what the substance was contained in the glass. According to the article,

"His team read that a safe matching the description of the one unearthed in 2004 was sealed in 1945 because of radioactive contamination. It was disposed of in 1951, and remained lost for the next 50 years."

What entailed this disposal?

Next cool story I found was a Canadian one where the National Film Board made its vaults available online. It seems this is an ongoing project, but there are tonnes of live action, cartoon and other types of films. Check it out here.

You can also watch other awesome clips that I'm sure you remember like the Big Snit, the Log Driver's Waltz and the Cat Came Back. I salute you NFB, other Canadian institutions seem to be so cautious about using the Internet and you just make it all accessible. Fantastic!!

From the NY Times, it seems that Wikipedia may introduce stricter rules for changing the entries. I think this is probably necessary but it's a tad irksome as Wikipedia is one of the most interesting and large scle forms of web 2.0 technology, and all it took was a few attention seekers who wanted to post erroneous information to cause a change. Typical, the troublemakers always wreck it for the rest of us.....but to ensure its legitimacy as an information source, this might be a timely move for Wikipedia.

A subject close to my heart, Monty Python now has an official youtube channel. Now you too can watch your favourite shorts. I'm still waiting for Confuse a Cat, Dinsdale and the Bishop!

The newest large archive to enter into mass digitization for the people is the German Federal Archives, or Bundesarchiv who have hooked up with the Wikipedia Commons. they will be uploading between a few hundred to a few thousand omages a month. The Bundesarchiv is going at this with more enthusiasm than the Library of Commons, as they are only uploading about 50 images a week. The gallery also comes with the following warning:

Please keep in mind that many photographs were produced for propaganda, especially pictures from Germany during the National Socialist ("Third Reich") period and from the German Democratic Republic ("East Germany"). The Federal Archive usually retains the original or historical descriptions. These descriptions can be wrong, dated, politically extreme or offensive.

This is valid and should make people aware that they are portrying history as best they can, warts and all. Especially when dealing wth the history of Germany, there will be some awkward moments, to use a profound understatement. This seems like a very cool project and having all these accessible photographs now makes me wonder what school projects will be like in time.

I rather wish LAC or some other venerable Canadian institution would get in on this as well!

Happy new year

And all that stuff. I have been trying to fond something interesting to discuss since coming back, and the archives blogs have really only started being interesting this week. But I won't be using them as I don't really care too much who the new US Archivist will be (it is important, but less so in Canuckistan). However, good times were found by Rebecka and myself so here we go:

Firstly: awesome article from the CBC about public domain and Wallace McLean. I'm not 100% sure what this guy does as although I have seen him on the ARCANL listserv, I don't think he is an archivist by trade. What he does do is keep a blog that tracks works that enter the public domain which isn't easy to track due to the differing times in each country. Grey Owl's writings have been in the public domain in Canada for some time, but are now jut available in Europe.

One thing I didn't know is that although in Canada published works enter the public domain 50 years after the death of the individual, there is this waiting period of another 50 years for unpublished items, that is archival material. This has never been mentioned in class, so I'm going to do some digging to see what this is all about.

In addition to this, turns out Gandhi's writings are now in the public domain in India.

The other story that I have been finding endlessly interesting is the firewall they are attempting around Australia. I may be wrong but it seems the main point of crafting such a security effort is to protect the children from porn and other nasty bits of the internet. There is already the great Firewall of China where they protect their citizens from silly things like protests and democracy. I'm not sure I follow the logic in having a country pretending to be a parent to its citizens. I think it would be far more effective to encourage information literacy and good choices than just making it all illicit, as that adds in more of a cachet. I also know the interwebz isn't so great to begin with in Australia, so adding in another level of throttling will not help.

Don't forget, if you want to participate in the ACA conference in Calgary, submit an abstract for a paper to be considered!!