Description: Very early "big data" tracking mortality rates in 17th-century London. [via Smithsonian Magazine]The Mellon Foundation has funded an $887,000 project to develop community-driven archives! [via Info Docket]See what questions archivists across the country answered yesterday for #AskAnArchivist. [via SAA]What album would you be....if you could preserve yourself in a vinyl record.
Description: If you are a regular reader, or someone who works for a museum, library, or archive, you intimately understand the difficulty in managing big collections. If you’re not in this world, you do understand how hard it is to manage family photographs, a collection of email love letters, or the folder tucked in the bottom of your closet with old college papers. When you multiply
Description: So you know those thousand words a picture is worth? It’s true! Though my idea of what those thousand words should be might differ from yours and that’s why we’re going to talk about descriptive metadata, controlled vocabularies, and levels of access. Boy howdy, sounds like a wild ride, eh? When I was younger and infinitely more creative with how I spent my time I used to
Description: Get ready for this summer's big installation at the National Building Museum: Hive. [via WAPO]Want to play old school games like Frogger? The Internet Archive has a Mac game emulator for you! [via Wired]Produce art. [via Colossal]A series of tutorials from the American Alliance of Museums, Becoming a Data Startup (for museums). [via AAM]470,000 images from Europeana are now
Description: Public domain infographics of African Americans in the 1900s by W. E. B. Du Bois. [via Public Domain Review]Big open cultural heritage news - the Met has released 375k public domain collections for free and unrestricted use! [via ARTNEWS]A world map of archives (and we're on the map!) [via Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig]Some guidance on managing your digital photos and video. [via
Description: Ever heard of The Impossible Project? When Polaroid announced they would stop production of instant film, these folks saved the last Polaroid production plant in the Netherlands, and started to develop new instant film with a small team of former Polaroid employees. Check out some shots of Smithsonian museums taken by Aaron Dunn and created with the fruits of their labor. What
Description: Did you know that April is Records and Information Management Month? What is records and information management? Glad you asked! [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Dan Brown Books, by Federico Filacchione, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."][/caption] Information is collected data, thoughts, ideas, or memories. Records are documents that contain information
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Beauty is forever, by Just Warr, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0 Generic."][/caption] At THE BIGGER PICTURE, we often write about the challenges of maintaining the data in digital archives. But a recent article bundled in the informative daily arts newsletter compiled by Jeff Weiss—you can subscribe by sending a request