Category: What Gets Saved
Link Love: 5/11/2012
- Smithsonian Magazine writes about how newfound negatives provide what are believed to be the only pictures of a living nestling of an ivory-billed woodpecker—America’s rarest bird.
- A digital archivist’s horror story. How the movie Toy Story 2 was accidentally deleted (and then restored). Moral of the story? Back up those files! [via Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, SIA]
- A little late for May Day, but getting me in the Spring spirit nevertheless: maypoles across the Flickr Commons [via Susannah Wells, SIA].
- John Gray, former president of the Autry National Center of the American West, has been named director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
- “The Hemingway Papers” Digital Archive is now available, and features newspaper articles written by the famous author during his tenure as a columnist at the Toronto Star newspaper from 1920–1924 on subjects like fishing, sports and war [via INFOdocket].
- The National Portrait Gallery on the tricky science of conserving some Civil War era prints in their collections.
- Why do old books smell? [via swissmiss]
Link Love: 5/4/2012
- Smithsonian Secretary, Wayne Clough, talks about the living legacy of field research at the Smithsonian over at our sister blog, The Field Book Project blog.
- Harvard is making more than 12 million catalog records from its 73 libraries publicly available under a Creative Commons public domain license.
- Vanderbilt University unveils a digital archive, combining collections from multiple institutions, of recordings with civil rights era leaders, and some four thousand pages of searchable interview transcripts and photographs.
- The recent acquisition of the space shuttle Discovery leads the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History blog to ponder what first Smithsonian Secretary, Joseph Henry (1797-1878), would’ve thought about the advances in aeronautical engineering in the last 150 years.
- The Library of Congress’ Digital Preservation blog waxes poetic about a common archives conundrum: how to describe the size of one’s collections.
- Sixty years in sixty seconds: Historypin takes a jaunt through Queen Elizabeth II’s many world travels, and invites you to contribute any images you may have of the Queen in honor of her Diamond Jubilee (that’s the 60th anniversary of the accession of Queen to the throne).
- The US National Archives holds 1.28 million case files of the dependents of Civil War Union soldiers who applied to the federal government for pensions. This video profiles the dedicated team of more than sixty volunteers at the National Archives that are helping to digitize Civil War widows’ pension files:
Link Love: 4/27/2012
- A Springtime slideshow—a selection of gorgeous photographs of flowers from across the Flickr Commons.
- Movie studios are forcing Hollywood to abandon 35mm film, but what are the consequences of going digital? [via Jennifer Wright, SIA].
- The Library of Congress is celebrating Preservation Week with public events and many resources to help you learn to care for you personal collections at home.
- From our sister blog The Field Book Project blog—the remarkable travels and field books of naturalist Edmund Heller, and how the Field Book Project is bringing together his field notes, scattered across many institutions, into one place on the web.
- Milton Friedman on the future of capitalism, Ronald Reagan campaign speeches, and debates on morality—Pepperdine University’s Historic Sound Recordings collections contain some fascinating sound clips.
- The State Library and North Carolina State Archives has an Inform U. project—a group of tutorials online to help you with your digital preservation issues, as well as a series of video tutorials including the following on how to save your Facebook data [via InfoDocket]:
Link Love: 4/20/2012
From archiving video footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall and preserving emails from China during Tiananmen Square protests, to crowdsourcing photo ids on the Smithsonian Flickr Commons: a wonderful profile of our director, Anne Van Camp, on the Library of Congress’ Digital Preservation blog.- So exciting! Our Wikipedian-in-Residence, Sarah Steirch, talks about her mission to increase the presence of women on Wikipedia on the Canadian Broadcast Corporation’s culture show Q with Jian Ghomeshi. Listen
abovehere (the embedded mp3 was autoplaying, so click through to listen instead). - A collection of food and other product packaging from the Hagley Library imparts important lessons and information about how our packaging effects the environment, and the jobs of conservationists [via Marcel Chotowski LaFollette, SIA].
- A familiar problem for parents and high schools? A conservator writes for Archives Outside about how to remove chewing gum stuck on paper.
- Fires, floods, scary animals, and dashing bravery . . . An Indiana Jones movie marathon? No silly, exciting accounts from our field notes collections at our sister blog The Field Book Project.
- Speaking of scary movies, here’s a bit on the restoration of the original JAWS negatives [via Marguerite Roby, SIA].
- The Space Shuttle Discovery arrived at the Smithsonian this week! It was mounted atop a modified 747 jet, and made several passes over the National Mall in Washington, DC before landing at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia. Check out the video below:
Link Love: 4/13/2012
- One of our archivists writes a guest post for sister blog, Field Book Project Blog, about a 19th century field note book and gorgeous sketches of plants, shells, fish, and mammals found in the Archives’ collections and created by naturalist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque.
- Before I moved to Washington, DC, I wasn’t aware of Emancipation Day. Learn more about this upcoming DC-related holiday, which commemorates the historic piece of legislation that ended “the national shame” of slavery in the nation’s capital, which was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on April 16, 1862.
- A conservation intern at the Smithsonian’s National Musuem of the American Indian talks about an unusual repair she recently made to the fur trim on a beautiful pair of Athabaskan mittens created by Gwich'in artist Leah Roberts.
- The “archival gold” of MoMA’s PS1 art institute will open to the public at the end of 2012. One of their archivists talks about how “dated publicity materials and trinkets” and other seemingly unimportant exhibition ephemera play an important role in understanding legacy of an art institution (something we can relate to here at the Archives!) [via @EphemeraSociety].
- DIY inspiration from the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives: making banana beer in Burundi, Africa.
- A hundred years on from the Titanic disaster, we’re all still fascinated. The US National Archives’ branch in New York City, which holds records related to Titanic, showcases some of their favorite Titanic documents in the holdings:
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