Posts tagged with: World History
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: 3/30/2012
Knitting your way across the Flickr Commons.- The Nelson Mandela Digital Archive Project has launched, with more than 1,900 documents, photographs, and films of South Africa's first black president available online [via Michael Edson, Smithsonian].
- This week in Smithsonian history: the Barro Colorado Island Biological Laboratory opened in Panama as the Institute for Research in Tropical America. Read more about this Smithsonian research center in a guest blog post by our own Courtney Esposito over at the Smithsonian Collections Blog.
- What do you think about our updated Facebook page? Our new “milestones” features momentous occasions and historic photographs from Smithsonian history.
- An interesting and sad piece of history: this week the discovery of two original albums of photographs of paintings and furniture looted by the Nazis was announced. The US National Archives blog talks about the discovery, and the importance of these albums.
- What do our books, newspapers, blogs, and tweets say about us? The New York Times talks about the development of computer-based tools that comb through the words of written works to find common themes.
- Beginning in the late 1880s, Thomas Edison's labs not only built the equipment for filming and projecting films, but produced popular content for the new medium. Here, the earliest surviving copyrighted motion picture, the Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze is a short film made by W. K. L. Dickson in January 1894 for advertising purposes. Just one of many film nuggets from the Library of Congress’ Edison Company early films collection.
Link Love: 3/2/2012
- The Flickr Commons group always has interesting conversations about the photographic gems from various institutions on the Commons. We just added a recent discovery to this thread on “personal connections” made with photos on the Commons—we were contacted by the future child of the little boy above.
- If you haven’t heard yet, you likely will soon: the New York Times has a new photo blog, Lively Morgue, featuring photographs from their archives.
- The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has launched a new blog in anticipation of the Space Shuttle Discovery’s acquisition and arrival.
- A beautiful interface: Old Maps Online—as the name suggests, an easy-to-use resource allowing the user to browse many beautiful and detailed historic maps by typing a place-name or by clicking in a map window [via Digital Humanities Now].
- We were reminded that our friends at the Society of American Archivists have a plethora of useful resources, including this guide on using archives for effective research.
- The difficulties of preserving footage of protests, and a project that aims to teach protestors to protect and preserve the videos that they shoot [via @DavidRowntree]:
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