• A Halloween treat from the National Archives: pumpkin carving templates. And if you use one of their templates and upload and tag (use “National Archives pumpkin”) an image of your pumpkin on Flickr, they’ll add it to their set [via Jennifer Wright, SIA].
• Why can’t I read this file? Check out a presentation by the Archives’ Digital Archivist, Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, about the challenges of born-digital collections at the Archives, which she gave recently at this year’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference.
• The Balboa Park Online Collaborative talks about some of the open source software they’ve been developing for the museum community, including an image uploader that helps museums export metadata from their collections and add it automatically to uploads of their collection images on Flickr.
• The National Air and Space Museum archives holds many of former Smithsonian Secretary Samuel P. Langley's papers in their collections, since Langley was a pioneer in aeronautics. In honor of Archives Month, they blog about some of the interesting gems in this collection, including Langley's opinion on what it takes to make a good cup of coffee (a man after my own heart, it seems...).
• It seems like a lot of folks (including us!) are using crowdsourcing efforts lately for their collection images. In the most recent effort, the George Eastman House archive teams up with Clickworker, an international crowdsourcing company, to tag more than 400,000 images from their collections [via Jennifer Wright, SIA].
• @AdsofYore: “Charles Forde's Bile Beans for Biliousness. Cures headaches, indigestion, sallow complexions and female weaknesses.” The Birmingham Archives in the UK has a new Twitter feed featuring advertisements found in their collections for products that were offered in local newspapers in the past, illustrating how advertising has changed over the years.
• Mwahhahaa… and finally, some Halloween trivia: is the Smithsonian really haunted? Our historian, Pam Henson, tells all in an interview she did not too long ago with Federal News Radio:

"Was the Smithsonian haunted?" Interview with Smithsonian Historian, Pam Henson, Courtesy of Federal News Radio, July 19, 2011.