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.

A few days ago the Christian Science Monitor had an interesting article about conservation efforts for bufeos, (also known boto, pink dolphins, or fresh water dolphins). Scientist Fernando Trujillo from the Colombian based Omacha Foundation is behind a five nation project which also includes Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Their research hopes to gather information on population numbers and the current state of the species in order to help project it, and to use the bufeo as the poster child for a larger preservation campaign of the Amazon and Orinoco rivers.

Hopefully these efforts won’t be coming too little too late, as was the case just last week with the less fortunate fresh water dolphin in the Yangtze River whose extinction seems to have been confirmed. The Indus, Ganges and Mekon rivers also have fresh water dolphins, the populations of none of which are in good shape.

I’ve been lucky enough to have seen pink dolphin while drifting down the Orinoco river many years ago, but the memories are as fresh as if it had been just yesterday; they really are an impressive sight, and hopefully this charisma will help preserve them and the larger river ecosystem in which they live.

The International Society for the Preservation of the Tropical Rainforest has some more information on pink river dolphins here, so does Project Boto, here. A good book on the subject is the Journey of the Pink River Dolphin by Sy Montgomery.

Boto image by Pasajero on Flickr.

Open Library is a new project starting out in San Francisco, CA, but global in scope. It aims at creating a single database for all book ever published! This massive project expects to function in wiki format and hopes to gather help from enthusiast all around the globe, much like Wikipedia has done in recent years. They are part of the Open Content Alliance.

The projects wishes to be complete open and free, allowing contributors to create and alter book records as the database grows. The final project will provide a form of authority page for each book, and will allow user to link back to this database as a reference, instead of having to link back to a corporate site.

The project is also working on getting libraries around the world to share their catalogs with them, although some, like the British Library are a little skeptical of the project, and therefore hesitant to release their catalog. The British Library in particular is nervous that the project might eventually become commercial; Right now the project receives most of their funding from the Internet Archive, but in the future they will be more reliant on donations, and a percentage of sales they help direct to book sellers. Google is also weary of this project, since basically both aim at gathering the same information, except Google doesn’t want to make it freely available.

As the project develops, the aim is to provide, searchable, digital copies of complete books, and in as much as copyright allows you might be able to download a complete copy or send it to a third party for printing. There is also the ability link to other project that can provide more information, such as Project Gutenberg to digitize cultural works. These digital copies will also help preserve intellectual content, if not physical books for the future.

You can read more about this project in an article from the BBC. Find out more about The Open Library project through the table of content of their website. You can also see a little presentation of what happens behind the scenes when digitizing book, along with a detailed explanation of the project.

You can view some of there demo projects, including The Koran, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Harry Potter.

IRENE (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, etc.) is a new technological development that will help in the preservation of millions of sound recordings that are currently being lost because of lack of usable equipment to play them on, and because the audio recordings are becoming increasingly frail.

IRENE was developed by scientist Carl Haber, and other scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Basically it works by creating a digital audio file from an analog information in a disk’s groves without ever touching the record. This is done by using a tool called the Smart Scope, which is basically a high-resolution digital camera attached to a microscope. IRENE therefore can extract sounds from material that was previously too fragile to play. It can also “remove” scratches and “mend” broken phonograph records. The final product will play in near-real time. There is also discussion on developing a new device called the “Confocal Scanning Probe” which would be able to create sound file from three-dimensional items such as wax cylinders.

IRENE has been in use at the Library of Congress since last year, where many are hopefully that this new technology will help save millions of old sound recordings that the library holds, but which are too frail to handle.

You can read more about IRENE form the Library of Congress’ blog, from a story that aired on NPR this morning, and from another story on ACFNewsource.

Earlier this week UNESCO had a couple of additions to their World Heritage Site list. World Heritage Sites can include natural locations, buildings, monuments, and entire cities, and are believed to be of significant interest for humanity. In 1972, UNESCO created the program, initially know as the Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage, and it aimed at identifying significant sites, cataloging and conserve them for all our of enjoyment. On occasion this new status can obtain funds from the World Heritage Fund for preservation. As of last year there were a total of 830 designated sites.

This week the Sydney Opera House, built in 1973, and was declared a “great artistic monument accessible to society at large” by UNESCO, and India’s Red Fort Complex, completed in 1648 was said to include “all phases of Indian history from the Mughal period to independence”.

Other sites that to have been previously designated World Heritage Sites include the Iwami Ginzan Silver Mines on Honshu Island, Japan, Richtersveld mountainous desert region in South Africa, and Namibia’s Twyfelfontein. Click here for the complete list.

You can read more about this in the recent BBC article.

Image info here.

This weekend I was in Philly to see the Tutankhamen exhibit at the Franklin Institute Science Museum. My mom saw this exhibit when it toured the USA back in the 1970s and she still raves about it today, so we met-up and saw the exhibit together.

I had read a good amount about the exhibit for a paper I wrote a while back and found out that this time around the exhibit was being promoted more as a rock concert than a cultural event. This was very much the case. The exhibit is surrounded by a lot of fanfare, and lots of publicity. It is being hosted by a partnership between the L.A. based Anschultz Entertainment Group (AEG) (better known for promoting rock concerts), Egypt’s Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, and National Geographic.

While it might be another 30 years before we are able to see world treasure such as Tutankhamen, this exhibit wasn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. My mom says that the first time around there were a lot more objects, and that while the museum was crowded, one could still enjoy the exhibit and see things in a leisurely manner. This time some of the more famous pieces were missing, including Tutankhamen himself along with his many sarcophagus, and seeing the pieces was challenging in the overly crowded rooms. I also saw a guy in a wheel chair who probably spend the entire time looking at people’s backs since he wasn’t able to get up close to the cases because there were so many people there. These short-comings might give credence to some of the criticism that has surrounded the exhibit, among them the challenge that AEG has outsourced museum curatorial jobs to others outside the field.

The Egyptian Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities Dr. Zahi Hawass explains that Egypt has a wealth of treasures that need to be preserved, not all as flashy as Tutankhamen, so the motivation behind the exhibit is to raise much needed funds to help with this preservation initiative.

In interviews, several Egyptologist said that most of what Dr. Hawass was doing for their field was long overdue, things as simple as installing air conditioning at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. He has instituted zoning around major antiquity sites and built visitor centers to prevent further degradation. He also has plans to build a regional museum in Egypt, including a sprawling new structure besides the pyramids (Waxman, 2005).

While this effort is certainly much needed, a tricky situation has been created whereby the hosting museums are needing to charge significantly higher admission prices than usual in an effort to brake even, since the Egyptian government must make 10 million per stop before the museum makes a penny. The Egyptian government claims that all the hosting museums made money during the first tour, while they made none, although this is contested.

I guess some balance needs to be found by which poor nations with treasures of importance to the world should be able to access needed funds for preservation and promoting education, but doing so in a way that doesn’t limit the amount of people who can see them because they have been priced out of the market. Treasures like Tutankhamen, in a way, belong to all of humanity and should be accessible to everyone, not just those with deep pockets.

Image info here.

Just a couple of weeks after the incidents at Virginia Tech, the university’s Center for Digital Discourse and Culture (CDDC) with help from George Mason University’s Center for History of New Media (CHNM) have created the April 16 Archive, an electronic archive to share and preserve related information in digital format. Their press release announces that people from around the world are encourage to look at the site and contribute as desired.

This site has been created using technologies previously used in projects such as The September 11 Digital Archive, Mozilla Digital Memory Bank, and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (full list of projects). These technologies arose from the CHNM, and have been created to democratize history by including a wide variety of voices to the narrative that will eventually make it to posterity. Among the tools that you can access for free to create a similar site, are tools to build a web scrapbook, create polls, and others to help you keep track of the websites you’ve visited for citation purposes. There are also other tools specifically designed for historians, which include help with understanding history preservation in digital format, blogs, and wikis. All of these tools can be used for free (I assume they are based on opensource software, but I can’t find anything on their website that clearly states this).

All of these digital banks clearly show just how technology has evolved to allow us to witness history as it is unfolding. They also help diversify accounts, including the voices of literally anyone, not just those in power. It’s a perfect example of Wed 2.0.

This week I got to meet Dan Hazen, Associate Librarian of Harvard College for collection development, and what a treat it was! I was most interested in learning about his involvement in international programs to promote libraries. We talked about PLALA (Program for Latin American Libraries and Archives), which he co-founded with Norman Fiering from the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, and Ignacio de Larramendi, head of Fundación Histórica Tavera. The initial committee, along with a grant from the Mellon Foundation set out to provide help, at the most basic level, to small libraries and archives throughout Latin America. Grants tend to be around $10,000 and are used for projects such as buying shelves to get material off the floor, to fix leaking roofs, or in some cases for converting collection to microform. This program has also been effective in encouraging others to help out. In Argentina, Fundación Antorchas has taken the challenge and has matched a few of PLALA’s grants in the region (sadly they have since gone out of business). They have created their own competition for microfilming projects. Libraries and archives that have benefited from these grants have also publicized them, and have therefore created renewed interests in their institutions and collections.

Hazen’s enthusiasm for the library world is positively infectious and has been greatly inspiring. I’m going to start working on getting my own hands involved in similar initiatives.

- This post was approved by Dan Hazen -