The Mali government has begun work to create a library that will house material from Timbuktu’s golden age. Material consists of works of law, history, poetry, and science, much of which has been gathered from private collections, and storerooms, many having been in danger of decay for lack of proper care.

The material is being made available on the web through Aluka, a project which works to make digital content from and about Africa available on the web. Aluka does require users to be members to access their content. The project also counts with the help of the Mellon Foundation and Northwestern University.

You can read more about this story form an article in the NYT.

Image from the NYT.

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.

You can listen to the actual recording here.

You can read an article about this from the BBC here, and from Wired Magazine here.

Image info here.

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 4^th Battalion 9^th 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.

Photographs by colombianflowers.

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).

This morning the New York Times had an article about two parallel art exhibits displaying art looted during WWII. The exhibit is a collaboration between France and Israel in aims at reconnecting these pieces with their original owners. Most of the art on display was either outright looted or forcefully “bought” by the Nazi, and so far has gone unclaimed, presumably because the original owners were likely killed in the Holocaust. The collections contain a number of “common” pieces, but also works from renown artist such as Cézanne, Manet, Degas, Chagall, Delacroix, and Monet among others.

Art and other cultural pieces are often looted during times of war and much has been written and discussed on the subject. Actually a couple semesters ago I attended a lecture by Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, a Harvard professor who has written extensively on collections held in Russian archives which previously belong to other nations. Her book, “Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II and the International Politics of Restitution” discusses the complexities of restitution and why countries loot other nations’ cultural treasures.

Fortunately there are efforts around the globe to stop this practice. The Lost Art Internet Database is a project from the Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste which is working to reconnect lost cultural property to its original owners. Looted Art is another such initiative, and while many of these efforts circle the Holocaust this is not a phenomenon seen exclusively around WWII, Chile recently returned a number of book taken from the Peruvian National Library about 100 years ago. And it’s not just armies who walk away with cultural property that belongs to others. Some of the largest and best endowed universities and museums around the world have gotten some of their material in such a matter. Egypt has been demanding the return of the Rosetta Stone for years, to name just one example (You can read about this from an article in the BBC). Unfortunately we are still seeing this practice in current times; the National Museum of Iraq was gravely looted during the USA invasion. (You can read about the Iraqi National Museum from an article in the Guardian.)

Memory Archive is an online project that is gathering memoirs from everyday people. The site allows you to search for memoirs indexed for particular words (either in the title or in the text), or you can brows various collections through category pages (here is an examples of the category page for “places“). Another good way of browsing through the site is with the “Random” bottom at the far left of the page.

Some of the writings I saw were fairly short, being made up of no more than a paragraph or two, while others went on for much longer. Some comment on life changing events like the San Francisco earthquake, while others reminisce on some of life’s simples pleasures, such as getting a new kitten.

Currently there are close to 1,300 memoirs, and growing. The site allows you to contribute from their main page, and warn people that entries are edited for format issues, and will index as needed. Once an entry is up, it will not be modified again unless the creator specifically requests a change. Under the page giving teachers ideas of how to use this site in the classroom there is also a cautionary note reminding users to be careful about including personal information in their narrative.

While looking around the site I was very pleased to see that there is talk of expanding the project to into languages other than English. Currently there are proposals to gather memories in French, Polish, and Russian.

I started out being hesitant to go down the road that is making OPACs and other library related tools look more like Google, Amazon.com and the like, but the more I learn about what these new tools can achieve the more I’m growing to like them. One of the latest examples of these new initiatives is The Commons, the Library of Congress‘ (LOC) Flickr page. The collections’ subtitle perfectly summarizes this project, “Your opportunity to contribute to describing the world’s public photos collections.”

LOC has started out by making two collections available on Flickr, the first titled 1930s-40s in Color, and the second one is News in the 1910s. The idea behind this project is to make these collections available to much larger groups of people that those who can actually visit the LOC. Second the fact that users can add tags to these photos as they please means that they have more accessible than they had previously been. Library of Congress Subject Headings are very useful to people who know how to use them, but can be rather frustrating to those who don’t. For example LOC uses “cookery” while cataloging cookbooks. How many of us would have guesses this to begin with? Being this the case, having user provided tags in everyday language and spelling can help make material more accessible. The user provided tags on Flickr are doing just this for these two collections.

Both collections hold material for which that LOC has determined to have “no known copyright restrictions.” LOC defines this label in two ways; Material for which copyright has not been renewed, or material from the late 19th and 20th century for which there is no evidence of a copyright holder. (You can read more about LOCs copyright standards here.)

Image info here.

01. 27. 08 - There is a similar collection of photographs of the battle at Normandie on Flickr. The collection includes close to 3,000 images documenting the event; information and tags for this collection are all in French. This was a project led by Conseil Régional de Basse-Normandie (Regional Council of Basse-Normandie) in 2004, for the D-Day 60th anniversary. The photo source for the project is the Archives Normandie 1939-1945. You can access the Flickr collection here.

Photograph credits are with the “Conseil Régional de Basse-Normandie / National Archives USA”

Image info here.

The Boston Public Library (BPL) has joined forces with PublicResource.org and the Internet Archive in order to begin digitizing the library’s large collection of government documents. This project has first envisioned by Mr. Carl Malamud and Mr. Brewster Kahle, the founders of these two collaborating organizations. Mr. Malamud hopes to eventually digitize the entire USA government document collection, which holds around 100 millions pages. The project is expected to take two years, at a cost of $6 million.

This project also hopes to gather a number of other digital collections which are already accessible online, but at a cost. The intent is to buy access to these collections and make their content freely available to everyone. The BPL wants to begin this project by digitizing their holdings relating to the Committee on Un-American Activities hearings from the 1950s, as well as a substantial collection of Congressional Hearings recently donated by Harvard.

In the future the BPL wishes to begins their own digital archive for holdings relating to local Boston and Massachusetts documents.

Here’s to hoping that initiatives such as these continue to prosper, and to make government more accessible and transparent.

You can read more about this from an article in the NYT here.

In the 1970’s the various Apollo missions took a number of highly detailed photographs of the moon which have been seen only by a handful of scientist. For three decades these photographs have been preserved in a freezer, but now Arizona State is making these images available through the web.

The photographs are being scanned at a 14 bit resolution, meaning that digital versions of the these black and white images have about 16,000 shades of gray, there are also a few highly detailed color images. The high resolution will allow for maximum conservation of detail, and accurate geometric fidelity.

NASA expects to gather many more images of the moon with their 2008 lunar reconnaissance mission. You can see some of the Apollo images at The Project Apollo Image Gallery (although they aren’t very well labeled); or try Google Moon.

You can read an article on the subject from the BBC here.

Image from The Apollo Image Gallery.

Earlier this week I attended a lecture that addressed social tagging and its use to libraries. Today more and more libraries and archives are trying to make themselves more visible by creating engaging websites, starting blog and posting photographs on flickr. While many of these are started to attract people to the library, it was fascinating to see the information that is coming out of these open spaces.

Take for example the Beyond Brown Paper site. This is a project based out of Plymouth State University, and it aims to digitize and preserve a photography collection about the paper mills that used to function in the area. The collection contains about 11,000 photographs that are gradually making their way on to their site. The fascinating thing is that the site allows for comments and collaboration, and this has brought new information to the project. Locals who used to work at these mills have seen some of the photographs, and through their comments have started to fill in the information gaps.

Item # 718 is an image of two men working on some equipment. The subject headings that were initially allocated are “Tightening, Securing lid on digester, Wrenches, Digester, and Burgess Mill.” In early March someone posted a comment giving us more information on what the digester does. Later in the month someone else identified one of the men in the photograph.

In cataloging, usually the more information we provide the better since it provides more access points to the item. But librarians, archivers and the like don’t know everything, so it’s fascinating that we can get help from the people who lived and experienced the history and documents we are trying to help manage. And while there can be a concern of people volunteering inaccurate information, I think the risk isn’t a serious one. Besides we can always acknowledge where the information came from.

A similar case was seen on flickr. Here someone posted their pictures of vacation in Newfoundland, which included a close up of a Humpback Whale’s tail. Another person who knew about whales was later able to identify this particular whale as one that scientist had been following under the “name” of HWC#2943, last seen in 1984!

You can learn more about this project and how it came about at maisonbisson. Bisson is also behind the Cook Memorial Library project which is also based on WordPress.

- Photograph used with permission-