Posts Tagged ‘archives’
The Conservation Center for Art & Historical Artifacts (CCAHA) offers training programs to help preserve Pennsylvania’s at-risk collections. The programs are offered in connection with the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and are supported by an Institute of Museum and Library Services Connecting to Collections Statewide Implementation Grant.
CCAHA will hold a Digitization Basics Workshop on April 3, 2012 in Philadelphia, PA at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Registration is required two weeks before the workshop and is $25 for PA institutions, $75 for out of state institutions.
Every institution struggles with pressure to be visible on the web and to make its collections accessible to wider audiences, and many face daunting hurdles to implementing digitization programs. This program will cover basic issues in digital preservation, including an introduction to digitization, and will provide information on handling guidelines for digitization, selection of materials, conducting pilot projects, creating access to digitized materials, funding sources, and the benefits of collaborating with other institutions.
A second workshop, Understanding Archives: An Introduction to Archival Basics will be held on May 10, 2012, in Philadelphia, PA at Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Registration is required, and is $25 for PA institutions, $75 for out of state institutions.
Proper archival procedures enable safe and effective management of collections. Participants will learn about the fundamentals of archival appraisal, acquisition, and access; proper storage materials; and the most common preservation problems associated with paper-based archival collections. This program will touch briefly on processing, arrangement, and description. Volunteers, historians, and those with archival responsibilities in addition to other duties may find themselves in the position of “archivist” without formal training in the profession; this program offers an introduction to best practices in the field.
From blog.readex.com:
January 16, 2012 (NAPLES, FL) – A digital edition ofAfro-Americana, 1535-1922: From the Library Company of Philadelphia will be introduced in late Spring 2012 by Readex, a division of NewsBank. Created from the Library Company’s acclaimed collection—an accumulation that began with Benjamin Franklin and has steadily increased throughout its entire history—this unique new online resource will provide researchers with more than 12,000 wide-ranging printed works about African American history. Critically important subjects covered include the West’s discovery and exploitation of Africa; the rise of slavery in the New World along with the growth and success of abolitionist movements; the development of racial thought and racism; descriptions of African American life—slave and free—throughout the Americas; and slavery and race in fiction and drama. Also featured are printed works of African American individuals and organizations.
For more information on this forthcoming project see the Readex press release.
December 8, 2011: Brooklyn, NY – Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) is proud to launch An American Family Grows in Brooklyn: The Lefferts Family Papers at Brooklyn Historical Society. This new digital exhibit examines Brooklyn’s complex history through the eyes of one family and includes an image gallery showcasing high-quality reproductions of seventy-seven items from the Lefferts family papers. In collaboration with BHS librarians and archivists, BHS’s public historian Julie Golia drew on the institution’s rich archival collections to tell the compelling history of Brooklyn over the centuries.
An American Family Grows in Brooklyn tells the story of one of Kings County’s oldest families. The digital exhibit chronicles the Lefferts family members’ arrival to frontier Flatbush in 1660 from the Netherlands; the family’s role in building Kings County’s booming agricultural economy; their use of enslaved laborers up until New York’s Emancipation Day in 1827; and their relationships with other Dutch families in the region. Items like a nineteenth-century cookbook or a list of expenses from a 1791 funeral reveal the material conditions that shaped the everyday lives of members of the Lefferts clan. Other documents, like the dozens of slave indentures held in the collection, offer glimpses into the experiences of a less-chronicled but equally important group of Brooklynites: enslaved African Americans. Read more.
The White House Historical Association announced a gift of $10 million from philanthropist and former White House aide David Rubenstein. The gift will be used to establish The David M. Rubenstein National Center for White House History. As a center for education and research for White House history, it will feature an innovative digital and online resource center, interactive and immersive educational experiences and programming focused on community engagement. The center will be located at the Decatur House.
Read more.
Monmouth University will be the new home for the Bruce Springsteen Special Collection. The collection, which contains nearly 14,900 documents from forty-four countries finishes its move from the Asbury Park Public Library November 1. It includes books, concert programs, magazine and newspaper articles and other printed ephemera dedicated to the careers of Bruce Springsteen and members of his bands. Read more.
The New York Times photography blog Lens featured a good example of the power of crowdsourcing this past week.
Lens published a post about a World War II-era photo album owned by a New Jersey man who wanted help learning more about the album’s provenance. The 214 photographs (some of which you can see in this post), include amazing images of prisoners, Adolph Hitler, Berlin, Minsk, and more. The New York Times asked a few experts for their opinions, and then posed the question to the public in a joint effort with the German publication Spiegel Online.
Within a few hours, a historian from Hamburg, Germany had identified the photographer (Franz Krieger) and helped to solve this small modern mystery. You can read the full explanation on Lens here.
I was especially struck by the story because just one day earlier, the Times had published another article that foretold this success: “Upending Anonymity, These Days the Web Unmasks Everyone.”
That’s the beauty (and the horror, to some) of social media. Harnessing the knowledge, time, and power of the crowd can accomplish a lot in a relatively short period of time.
For public history institutions, this power of the crowd can turn an otherwise impossible task into a manageable goal.
The New York Public Library, for example, is using online volunteers to geocode historical maps to align with modern digital maps. For another project, NYPL is using the crowd to transcribe thousands of digitized historical restaurant menus.
The Center for History and New Media is using online volunteers to help transcribe 45,000 documents from the War Department.
The Center for History and New Media is testing out its new open-source crowdsourcing transcription tool, Scripto, on a project to transcribe the late eighteenth-century papers of the War Department. You can read more about their motivations here.
Is it worth the effort? To give you a sense of possibilities, FamilySearch.org‘s volunteers have transcribed 548 MILLION genealogical records since 2006.
Congratulations to the newly elected officers of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference:
- Chair: Ed Galloway
- Vice-Chair: Mary Mannix
- Members at Large: Rebecca Collier, Tammy Hamilton, Dan Linke, Jordon Steele
- Arline Custer Memorial Award Committee: Molly Tighe, Marilyn Parrish
- Distinguished Service Award Committee: Jennie Knies, Catherine OBrion
- Nominations & Elections Committee: Christopher Hartten, Jennifer McDaid, Linda Ries
MARAC’s next conference is scheduled for October 20-22 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
