Posts tagged with: Digitization
Link Love: 4/12/2013
- A royal task, the British Library is set to archive all British websites. [via InfoDocket]
- Can't make it to Rochester, New York to visit the George Eastman House? You can now visit them via Google Art Project. [via PetaPixel]
- Smithsonian American Art Museum's Michael Mansfield, Associate Curator for Film and Media Art, talks about the challenges of preserving time based media art with the National Archives. [via The Signal: Digital Preservation]
- If you are in Washington, DC be sure to check out the Searching for the Seventies: The DOCUMERICA Photography Project exhibition at the National Archives. [via Prologue: Pieces of History]
- Ever wonder where the red sandstone used to build the Smithsonian Castle came from? The Smithsonian Magazine has the answer. [via Around the Mall]
- For the World War II history buff, check out PhotosNormandie, a collaborative collection of over 3,000 creative commons licensed photos from the Battle of Normandy and its aftermath. [via PetaPixel]
- You probably won't find this at your local Starbucks, but barista Mike Breach creates incredible small coffee and milk foam portraits for customers to enjoy. [via This is Colossal]
Link Love: 3/8/2013
- OCLC's WorldCat contains almost 300 million bibliographic records and is the largest aggregation of shared library data in the world. OCLC Senior Program Officer, Roy Tennant gives an exilarating look at what new and exciting things can be done with this data. [via InfoDocket]
- Maps are a treasure trove of historical data and extracting that information for the digital realm is getting easier with projects such as the New York Public Library's New York City Historical GIS Project and the Map Warper tool. [via The Signal: Digital Preservation, LOC]
- Rock On! From Eddie Van Halen's Frankenstein guitar to the Supreme's dresses, curators at the National Museum of American History collect materials that represent the American musical landscape. [The Torch, Smithsonian Institution]
- Just as a scientists's field notes document their collecting and research, the diaries and photographs of individuals document their life experience. Actor, Matthew Modine, shares his experience while shooting Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, through the journal he kept and the photographs he took. [via Unframed, LACMA]
- The Library of Congress tackles the important question, "What Resolution Should I Use?" when one scans photographs or documents that are meant to be enlarged. [via The Signal: Digital Preservation, LOC]
- Information retrieval and databases, check. Awesome new ideas, ready to go. 20 videos about Harvard Library Lab projects. [via InfoDocket]
Link Love: 2/15/2013
- A sound for sore ears, the Library of Congress unveiled their National Recording Preservation Plan, a framework for saving America's recorded sound heritage for future generations. [via Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, SIA]
- Twitter and scholarly research? A new tool being developed at George Washington University Libraries allows social media researchers to gather data from Twitter. [via InfoDocket]
- All is not lost, Operation Photo Rescue was recently in New York City to help people restore photographs that were damaged by Hurricane Sandy. [via Marcel LaFollete, SIA]
- The British Library recently announced the digitization of some of its most important works in their collections. [via Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, SIA]
- With the London 2012 Summer Olympics a distant memory, and with the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics on the horizon, photographer David Burnett shares some of his decidley unique images of the games that he took with a 1940s Speed Graphic camera and a 1943 Aerial reconnaissance lens. [via PetaPixel]
- Bringing museum collections, children, and a little mystery together, at the National Museum of American History the Tooth Fairy makes dental deposits. [via O say can you see?, NMAH]
- Are you getting overwhelmed by all of the digital information in your life? If so, check out the upcoming Personal Digital Archiving 2013 program at the University of Maryland, College Park. See video below. [via Effie Kapsalis, SIA]
Link Love: 2/8/2013
- The folks at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, answer a very important quest: Does a Sculpture Need Shoes? [via Eye Level, SAAM]
- Coming up in a couple of weeks, the Smithsonian Channel will be airing Lincoln's Washington at War, to which includes contributions by the Archives' Nora Lockshin and Pam Henson.
- Embedding data to your audio files is a prudent step in documenting and displaying information about them. [via The Signal: Digital Preservation, LOC]
- Congratulations!!! The Smithsonian Collections blog celebrates their 500th post with staff picks of their favorite posts.
- The inherent chracteristics, or affordances, of electronic records allows them to be easily subjected to data visualizations which enables people to manage and discover digital collections in ways not possible with physical records. [via The Signal: Digital Preservation, LOC]
- Inspired by a lecture by Institutional Historian, Pam Henson, Chris Lane at the Antique Prints Blog, examines how historic prints that illustrate the last moments of Abraham Linoln on his deathbed are composed to tell different stories of the event. [via Courtney Bellizi, SIA]
- The Archives recently added digitized content to its findings aids online, with some of the video finding its way to USA Today! [via Marcel LaFollette, SIA]
- The first of many, the oldest surving photograph of a president, a daguerreotype of John Quincy Adams, is held at the National Portrait Gallery. [via The Atlantic]
Audio, Video, and PDF's, Oh My!
This is an exciting time for all of us here at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, and for me especially, as I am proud to announce that several of our online finding aids now contain links to our digitized material! Linking digital material to our finding aids allows us to provide greater access to our collections.
Among the materials available are video clips of a white tiger being presented to President Eisenhower in 1960 and a driving tour of the National Zoological Park from 1959. You can also peruse the transcript and listen to audio clips from an interview with Alexander Wetmore, the sixth Secretary of the Smithsonian.
In addition to the audio and video clips, we also have a number of finding aids with links to print materials. One of my favorites is a collection of Egyptian Bombyliids, or bee flies, which was recently digitized by my intern, Krista Anderson Peim. The collection is from the 1930s and consists of eighty-four beautifully executed watercolor paintings that represent the highly varied range of species that make up the Bombyliidae family. The paintings were originally created for inclusion in a manuscript about Egyptian Bombyliids by H.C. Efflatoun, a leading entymologist of the mid-twentieth century by three Russian artists, Roman Strekalovsky, Nicholas Strekalovsky, and E. Kassessinoff. A PDF copy of the manuscript, entitled “A Monograph of Egyptian Diptera. Part VII: Family Bombiliidae,” is included in the first folder of the collection (scroll down to the 'Container List').
Following the addition of detailed catalog records from the Field Book Project to the Smithsonian Collection Search Center, we have also added links to the PDFs of digitized field books to our finding aids. For example, it is now possible to view all three of Edward Chapin’s field books that are held here at SIA from the comfort of your very own home (or office)!
We will continue to update our finding aids with new material as it becomes available, so keep checking back for more!
Related Collections
- SIA RU000395, National Zoological Park (U.S.) Office of Education, Motion Pictures and Videotapes, circa 1938-1980 and undated
- SIA RU009504, Oral history interviews with Alexander Wetmore 1974
- SIA RU007468, Egyptian Bombyliids Collection, 1930s Watercolor
- SIA Acc. 11-085, Chapin, Edward Albert 1894-, Edward Albert Chapin Field Notebooks, 1937-1947
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