Blog fail

Yeah, so you can sure tell things got busy over the semester as this is my first post in about a month and a half. Blog fail.

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!!

It's the most wonderful time of the year

As you and your colleagues duke it out for jobs!! Kidding aside, I am VERY curious to see how this will work itself out for everyone. We have the Job fair this Friday for the U of T students, but with all this talk of recessions and such, I'm curious to knwo if the 30+ organizations are indeed hiring, or are there just to be seen.... I'll be there in suit and heels!

One interesting nugget I found on the archives blogs was this posting about a completely online program from the University of Arizona. It's called the Digital Information Management certificate (or DigIn) and because it's all online, can be done from the comfort of your domicile. Sounds VERY intriguing, but I wonder what they charge for out of country students?? If you're really into web technologies or are usure of how to sell yourself in the profession, this might be a good goal to have in mind.

We had a successful trip to LAC last week. Myself and six other students were in Ottawa to visit the Nation's Capital and see the Preservation Centre out in Gatineau. Although there were few people out on the roads (contrary to my summer experience), we had a superb tour and got to speak with archivists. I appreciated their candour about trying to find a job with the feds as they love what they do but hate the bureaucracy. As someone who just completely messed up a job opportunity, it was nice to know I can still work there. It was also good to know that the Portrait Gallery is not dead; it's just in limbo. We also got to see the Staff Resource Centre and 395 Wellington. It was a BUSY day but worth the trip. I just hope someone will do the same for the new students next year.

I leave you with a spoof on the famous Obama poster, now embroiled in a silly copyright dispute:

Happy 200 years Darwin!!!

Darwin's Birthday

Well I can't pass up a moment to mention one of the greatest minds in science. Today would have marked his 200th birthday (a concept that always makes me chuckle, as no one lives 200 yrs! A Victorian would have a conniption in times like these). Check out this special section at New Scientist for more reading pleasure.

This week saw two postings about digital preservation. Turns out they were about this story from the New York Times which highlight the position of digital preservation officer (or some combination of the words 'digital' 'archives' 'preservation' etc). One of the people profiled feels that barring some gargantuan economic slowdown, there should be huge increases in the numbers of people working in the field. Sounds promising, barring economic slowdowns....

On a similar vein, the BBC is going to try and digitize all publicly held paintings and make them available online for all to see. This would be a real coup for art historians, but more importantly for people who cannot get to England and see them in person. This is truly a herculean uptaking, but this collaboration with the Public Catalogue Foundation would create a fantastic resource.

Just a quick post this week, as I am off to see LAC next week with students from U of T. We should learn a lot.

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!