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!!

On this last day of 2008

I can say it's been an interesting year! I have a few things to post about that I have been meaning to mention, but they fell by the wayside with the end of term and family illness.

First on the roster; the use of flickr commons by libraries and archives. I do believe the Library of Congress released images here a while back and now the New York Public Library has done so as well. From this boingboing mention, it seem really cool that large institutions are releasing their images to the world. Taken from a blog from the NY library:

About a year ago Flickr launched the Flickr Commons, a project dedicated to sharing and describing the public photo collections of the world's leading cultural heritage institutions. Starting this past January with The Library of Congress, and continuing with places such as The Smithsonian Institution, The Brooklyn Museum, The National Maritime Museum, The National Library of New Zealand, the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands and numerous others, the Commons has grown steadily over the past year into a truly remarkable public photography resource

I mean what isn't awesome about cyanotypes of algae? I think this is a brilliant use of the interwebz and all this web 2.0 jazz we hear about over and over. This is designed to encourage use and description of the images, but this also provides another method of marketing (yes I did say that!) for these institutions in showing off some of the rich collections they hold.

A quick search of flickr did not show any loads from the LAC, which is too bad, so I hope it is on the horizon. I did come across an image of one workstation I used in the Staff Resource Centre in someone's photostream....

Next up; I really goofed on this one as I saw it posted on boing boing and it didn't even register that this was an ARCHIVE. D'oh. The LIFE magazine photo archive is now posted up on Google image search (click here to scope it out). I am quite sorry I came late to this magazine as I adore the photographs, and when the magazine folded, I was very upset. Now, all can access these images. As indicated in the spellbound blog, to search only the LIFE images, you type in source:LIFE as one of the search terms. The images are fascinating as it seems like you get far more shots than what would have appeared in the finished story. I looked up fashion and then clicked dresses from one linked story about Hermes trompe l'oeil dresses from 1952, and there are easily half a dozen more variations on each shot. Just fascinating.
My only quibble from this is I would love to have the stories there as well to know the context for the images as they would have been in the magazine. But this is another whole project full of copyrights and other nonsense that I'll stay away from. Do note that this project is different from the aforementioned flickr commons one where tagging and interaction is encouraged. Google has already come up with all the links, tags, and organization for this giant set of images. I did note in looking at these dresses, there was only about say ten similar images indicated by Google, but there were far more related images in my search...

I thought I had more to share but the pickings have been slim and I haven't been anxiously hunting down the stories as a good blogger should. So enjoy this last five minutes of 2008!

Boing boing Gadgets just informed me that 2009 is the International Year of Natural Fibres so have a good one!

Bored? Need a video?

Here are two videos I stumbled across this morning:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu6sRNpnDSU


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06gZ3QSpds4

Now you know all about archives!

For all of you who think the interwebz isn't popular...

We haz the Europeana site!! Ok, no more lolspeak today, but this is a really cool initiative where the European Commission has invested just scads of euros to create a Europe wide digital library available online 24/7. Cool right?

Well, it is until you get 10 million hits per hour when you launch causing the site to crash.....

So the site is recalibrating and should be relaunched in mid December. You can click here for the future site

I find this just fascinating for two reasons; firstly, wow, ten MILLION hits an hour? That's a popular website. I wonder if we can learn from something like this and have more efforts being put forth into digitization on a large scale. They will be featuring items from the Louvre and the British Museum to name but two museums. According to one article,"the images online include the Magna Carta from Britain, the Vermeer painting “Girl With a Pearl Earring” from the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague and a copy of Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”" (NYT Nov 20, 2008).

The second reason this fascinates me is due to the fact that France apparently dominates submissions to the Digital Library. I lived there four years ago and found the internet to be a little lame on French websites. I have to take that view back since I used Les Archives du Rennes last year for a project and it was a fabulous website. The website for La Ville du Rennes is also quite good. And France had submitted over half of the two million articles that were up on Europeana, even writing other countries' histories for them (NYT Nov 20, 2008). I'm not sure if this is part of trying to protect the French Culture, or if France has placed a great emphasis on being part of digital initiatives, but they have so much culture to draw upon.....I can see why they submitted so much!

I look forward to going on the new version of the Europeana website to see what it's like. And I'd also be curious to see what sorts of bells and whistles they are using, as maybe those could be used here in Canada. Well, that is if we ever got digitization funding again.....

so I was busy doing another project for an archives course

and trying to find images of Jenkinson and Schellenberg as I became curious to know what these famous names looked like. Google pointed me to this little gem: Archivopedia! Looks like we have our own little wikipedia to call out own. It seems to be in the beta testing phase, and although I only tried searching two things, this could be a fun little encyclopedia to which we all could refer.

My wish: drop the 1986 colour scheme of teal and dusty rose (?) or lavender with rounded edges... Not modern looking at all.

Would a logo help?

Another good posting by the Records Junkie, this time suggesting archives need a logo akin to what is used for hospitals or libraries. He states:

A logo will let our researchers and our donors know who and what we are. There will be people who don't know what an archivist is who will recognize the archives logo (symbol?) as a place that safeguards and preserves historical materials. They will know who we are, what we do, what we stand for.

Although this is a good idea, I always chuckle when I hear words like "they will know what we do". Right, like the name change we just underwent to become the Faculty of Information. Our old dean tried to tell us it would become like medicine or law, so when asked what we study, all would understand information....(another debate for another time....). But the Records Junkie has a point, had I not become a student in this program, I would never have known what an archives does or where they were. A little logo like the L man reading a book could help the public understand archives or at least know that we're some sort of cultural institution.

I wonder what would work, an "A" made of documents? A magnifying glass? White gloves? A filing cabinet? Something to ponder.