Three interesting tidbits to highlight: 1) Someone in Australia has found Schindler's list in a donation from the author of a book that detailed Oskar Schindler's efforts well before the famous movie. This is just amazing as it's a real piece of history someone found, which saved over 800 people from death in 1945. Check out more information at this link here
2) I think this is the same dude who was a complete jerk to me when I commented on the CASLIS blog over the summer who writes this commentary about the lack of leadership at Library and Archives Canada. It deates from January, but does have some interesting thoughts packed inside a questionably written metaphor. Satire is never for the faint of heart. My intial reaction was "well who cares if Canada isn't on the cutting edge of librarianship? No one cares about us anyways unless they wish to emigrate here". He seems to have a lot of issues with LAC looking into electronic files and how ones deals with them; I fail to see what is wrong with this as this is the future of records, and no one has come up with any system for dealing with electronically born files. To see what his hullabaloo is all about, click this link . I personally think Gillian handled it brilliantly!
3) Oldie but this bring up a good discussion on what to do when the catastrophic happens: the State Archives in Cologne, Germany completely collapsed on March 3, 2009. And when I say , completely, I mean flat building with lots of rubble. See this article written soon after the accident from Der Spiegel.
Cologne's historical archive is the largest such municipal collection north of the Alps. It contains some 65,000 documents pertaining to the city's history, including one dating all the way back to the year 922. The archive also contains some half a million photographs. The building which collapsed on Tuesday was built in 1971 to house the archive.This article written last week states that the metro that is blamed for causign the building to collapse will continue its construction, but it seems there is a huge investigation ongoing into the cause. I did see some pictures of the recovery of some archival documents but I woudl be very curious to see some statistics on what was able to be recovered. If you do not have a disaster plan in place, make it a priority!!
I wish all my fellow students luck in this last week of classes; it's been a busy semester but it is almost over. See you out this week at the end of the year party, or at the ACA pub night!!
