“In order to be really good as a librarian, everything counts towards your work, every play you go see, every concert you hear, every trip you take, everything you read, everything you know.” – Allen Smith, PhD
Audio historian David Giovannoni, who from First Sound, seemed to have found the first human voice recording in a French patent office. The recording is of a human signing “Au Claire de la Lune” and is dated back to 1860, almost two decades earlier than Thomas Edison’s recoding of “Mary had a little lamb.” The clip is only ten seconds long, and the quality is not great, but it is amazing that the recoding exists.
The audio was captured using a phonautograph, a machine invented by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, which created visual recordings from sound waves. The machine has a needle that recorded sound waves onto paper coated in soot from an oil lamp. Now the sound was extracted at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory by creating digital scans of the original papers and a “virtual stylus”, and then compensated for the fact that the original machine was hand cranked which created a distortion because the turning wasn’t always constant.
Earlier this week Footnote.com and the National Archives and Records Administration offered a new Interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The actual memorial consist of two large granite walls inscribed with the names of over 58,000 American casualties of the way, the online version, which was created by combining over 2,000 photographs of the actual site, make the walls searchable from your home computer. The new version also allows you to link each name to the person’s service record, and add content to the record.
This project is different from a previous one called The Wall, which is maintained by the veterans of the 4th Battalion 9th Infantry Regiment. The Wall originally went online back in 1996, and has been evolving ever since. The Wall allows you to search by name, but in addition offers links to “Today’s Wall Birthdays” and “Today’s Wall Causalities,” and provides some basic facts of the war.
The physical Vietnam Veterans Memorial is located in Washington DC, was designed by Maya Lin, and holds 58,249 names, it is managed by the National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior. Each day rangers gather items left at the site (except food and flowers), which are then tagged and taken to the Archive for future preservation. Although the full archive is not open to the public, selections of it are on display at the American History Museum.
The Interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial site does warn that is has been experiencing high traffic, so connections might be slow.
You can read more about the online Vietnam Memorial from an article in Wired Magazine here, and read the Wikipedia entry here.
Stanford law professor Larry Lessing has come up with a new tool (still in beta) to try and keep the USA government clean and honest. The Change Congress aims to enlist the help of volunteers across the country to keep track on their representatives’ responses on a variety of issues, and then make this seemingly abstract information, concrete through Google mash-ups. Lessing wants congress representatives to commit to four different issues; 1) to promise to not take money from lobbyist and Political Action Committees (PAC), 2) support publicly financed elections, 3) help pass legislation to stop spending money on questionable projects in their districts, and 4) to help make Congress a more transparent place over all. Candidates who wish to be measured by these guidelines can do so by filling out a form on the website.
It is hoped that the project will have bi-partisan appeal, and that volunteers across the country will participate. The project anticipates that there is wide ranging dissatisfaction with congress in general, and that this energy can be channeled into making congress a more accountable place for all of us.
You can read more about this project from an article in Wired Magazine here. You can read Lessig’s blog here, and his Youtube page here.
Yesterday Wired magazine had an interesting article titled “Web Has Unexpected Effect on Journalism,” about the effect that the web has had on journalism, and it’s not what I would have initially thought. The article explains that, rather than making journalism more democratic, the web instead serves as a medium for recycling many of the same stories over and over. Some of the examples given include how “international news” has been boiled down almost exclusively to Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan, leaving the rest of the world uncovered.
On the flip side, the article does mention that many journalists are adaptation to new environments and using the web to their advantage. Apparently many journalists have taken to writing blogs and many appreciate readers input on their stories.Still there seems to be a difference between how large “mainstream media” and “private, personal” blog treat participation; curiously the “mainstream” blog seem to allow more participation from readers, while owners of personal blogs tend to limit comments to those deemed more palatable.
You can read the complete article by David Bauder here.
Back in late February Álvaro Colom (official website), Guatemala’s president announced that he would be opening the country’s military archives to the public. The announcement was made in honor of Guatemala’s Día Nacional de la Dignidad de las Víctimas del Conflicto Armado Interno (National Day for the Dignity of Victims of Internal Armed Conflict). During his speech Colom acknowledge that the country will not be able to heal unless the state assumes responsibility for the violence that was perpetuated against the country’s indigenous population.
The archives should contain information on military activities during the country’s civil which lasted over 30 years, between 1960 and 1996. It is estimated that at the time as many as 2000,000 civilians were killed and about 50,000 were disappeared. The archives should also shed light as to the location of unnamed graves. In 1999 the UN truth commission estimated that about 90% of these deaths could be attributed to the army and state.
The military establishment and former national leaders have not welcomed this announcement, although it is expected that the opening of these archives will go forth since is it mandated by a presidential decree.
You can read more about this from a BBC article here, and from a Voltairenet article here (in Spanish).
Medellin’s neighborhood of Santo Domingo Savio is changing its face thanks to a new library that was inaugurated back in August 2007. The library includes a computer room, daycare center, art gallery and an auditorium. The library also offers training for adults, workshops for personal expression and story time for children.
In the past this area of the city was made famous (or infamous) though its depiction as one of the most violent places in the country at the hight of the country’s drug war. The city and its people have been included in books and movie that exhorted only its high levels of violence. Novels such as Fernando Vallejo’s “La Virgen de los Sicarios”, and Jorge Franco’s “Rosario Tijeras”, as well as the documentary “La Sierra” have shown the brutality of life in the region. Yet today things are turning around; today Medellin is a much safer and quieter city where residents are once again able to enjoy the city. This new renaissance is also being felt in the poorest areas of the city such as Santo Domingo Savio.
The new library has gained a significant amount of attention because of its unusual architecture, but hopefully soon news will come out as to how the collection is impacting the community. The library resembles three large borders siting precariously on the edge of a steep incline that overlooks Medellin. You can read -in Spanish- a detailed explanation of the architecture, including photographs here). The library fits into the overall renovation the city has been undergoing which aims at creating more public spaces that encourage people to come out, enjoy the city, and meet their neighbors.
This library is also part of an ongoing initiative to promote libraries in Colombia. In February of this year Japan donated enough money to build 13 new libraries (read the article -in Spanish- here), to be build in various cities through the country. There is also a heavy emphasis on promoting public libraries, something that certainly wasn’t the case when I lived there. You can access Senderos, the web portal -in Spanish- for Colombia’s public libraries here.
The video above -in Spanish- show the inauguration of the library and describes how the community has been changing in recent years.
Audio historian David Giovannoni, who from First Sound, seemed to have found the first human voice recording in a French patent office. The recording is of a human signing “Au Claire de la Lune” and is dated back to 1860, almost two decades earlier than Thomas Edison’s recoding of “Mary had a little lamb.” The clip is only ten seconds long, and the quality is not great, but it is amazing that the recoding exists. 
