Entries Tagged 'Digitization' ↓

I'm happy to pass on the news that my former employer, the Niels Bohr Library & Archives of the American Institute of Physics, has received funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to digitize the entirety of the Samuel Goudsmit papers. From the announcement on the Center for History of Physics/Niels Bohr Library & Archives Facebook page:

Goudsmit (1902–1978) was a Dutch-educated physicist who spent his career in the US and was involved at the cutting edge of physics for over 50 years. He was an important player in the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s and 1930s; he then served as scientific head of the Alsos Mission during World War II, which assessed the progress of the German atomic bomb project. Goudsmit became a senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and editor-in-chief of the American Physical Society. The papers consist of an estimated 66,000 documents, which include correspondence, research notebooks, lectures, reports, and captured German war documents; the collection is the most used in the library.  This is the first manuscript collection that we will digitize, and it will become one of the few complete history-of-physics collections online. We plan to make the collection freely available online by summer 2010.

First, via my associates at booktruck.org, I came across a review of the comic book Demonslayer v. 2.2, by a certain Marat Mychaels, et al. at Comics Should Be Good. While the fact that the reviewers pan the comic book seems only marginally of interest to those of us wading in archivy, I should draw your attention to a specific part of this issue. Apparently one of the characters goes to visit the Director of Archives at the New York Museum of Natural History, who has chosen to decorate his office in the style of some seemingly life-sized works by (fellow Peruvian) Boris Vallejo.

Secondly, everyone knows how much of a pain digital preservation is, particularly in terms of born-digital cultural materials. So, who should archivists and curators look to for guidance? Kurt Bollacker, digital research manager at the Long Now Foundation (and formerly of the Internet Archive), holds up the pornography industry as a potential leader of the pack. He states that he guarantees "that a wealth of pornography from the late 20th century will survive in digital distributed form (because) it's a social model that's working extremely well." If you read the rest of the article it's not clear if he's talking about just the producers trailblazing these distribution paths or the "consumers" as well (e.g. using peer-to-peer file sharing). Either way, though, I think this idea is a lot like the LOCKSS model for distributed preservation and Dan Chudnov's idea for preserving blogs using METS (or Atom) and BitTorrent. I've intended for a few weeks now to dedicate an entire post to Dan's idea, but after mentioning it in this one I feel like I've covered that sufficiently.