Webinar: Preserving Your Personal Digital Photographs

The Association for Library Collections and Technical Services has a webinar about personal digital photos available online.

From ALCTS: Digital photos are fragile and require special care to keep them accessible. But preserving any kind of digital information is a new concept that most people have little experience with. Technologies change over time and become obsolete, making it difficult to access older digital photos. Learn about the nature of the problem and hear about some simple, practical tips and tools to help you keep your digital photos safe.

Read more...

The Arkansas Studies Institute is on Facebook

The Arkansas Studies Institute is now on Facebook. Become a fan and stay posted on upcoming events, new resources added to our collections, Butler Center Books, and what's going on in the art galleries. Also, please help us spread the word about our new Facebook page.

Read more...

Home Movie Day

October 18, 2008 was National Home Movie Day. The Butler Center has participated in Home Movie Day since 2006 and has created an electronic archive of home movie footage. This year, we are adding a page to our Digital Collections to highlight selections from our home movie collection. Included in the highlights are Fort Smith parade scenes with Eleanor Roosevelt and comedian Bob Burns, clips from the first Razorback football game at War Memorial Stadium, scenes from the Little Rock Central High desegregation crisis, and footage of the implosion of the Marion Hotel.

To view selected clips from the Butler Center home movie collection, go to the Butler Center homepage and select Digital Collections, or direct your browser straight to the home movie footage.

Our home movie project is a year-round event. We invite anyone with home movies of Arkansas families and Arkansas-related events to send us movies that we will transfer to DVD at no charge. We will keep one copy of the movies for our collection and return a DVD copy and the originals to the owner. We can transfer any type of film, VHS, Hi-8, and miniDV tapes.

Please give us feedback on the webpage and help us spread the word about our film and video-transfer service. For more information contact Chris Stewart at 501-918-3088.

Read more...

In the News. . .

"Israel to Display the Dead Sea Scrolls on the Internet" by Ethan Bonner
From The New York Times, August 26, 2008

JERUSALEM — In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a cave, half a dozen specialists embarked this week on a historic undertaking: digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file — among the most sought-after and examined documents on earth — available to all on the Internet. Read More. .

See Also:
"Dead Sea Scrolls go from parchment to the Internet" from CNN
"Dead Sea Scrolls to be displayed on Internet" from The Associated Press

Contributed by Stephanie Bayless, Manuscripts Department.

Read more...

Preserving Government Web Sites

August 14, 2008

Library Partnership Preserves End-of-Term Government Web Sites

The Library of Congress, the California Digital Library, the University of North Texas Libraries, the Internet Archive and the U.S. Government Printing Office today announced a collaborative project to preserve public United States Government web sites at the end of the current presidential administration ending January 19, 2009. This harvest is intended to document federal agencies' online archive during the transition of government and to enhance the existing collections of the five partner institutions. Read the rest. . .

Contributed by Stephanie Bayless, Manuscripts Department.

Read more...

Things of Interest. . .

First, check out this New York Times article about a sound recording predating Edison's recordings with the phonograph. And hear a clip of the audio from 1860.

Then, read about the Maryland plantation attic that held documents dating from the 1660s to World War II in this Washington Post article. Then visit the Poplar Glove Project blog to learn about the processing of the documents (with photographs!).

Next, check out this blog entry at Everything is Miscellaneous about the Boston Public Library's gigantic digitization project.

And finally, visit the Butler Center's website to listen to podcasts from the 2008 Arkansas Literary Festival.

Contributed by Stephanie Bayless, Manuscripts Department.

Read more...

Nevada Test Site Oral History Project

From the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project Website:

"The Nevada Test Site Oral History Project at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas is a comprehensive program dedicated to documenting, preserving and disseminating the remembered past of persons affiliated with and affected by the Nevada Test Site during the era of Cold War nuclear testing. From September 2003 through January 2008 a wide range of oral history narrators participated in the project including: national laboratory scientists & engineers; labor trades and support personnel; cabinet-level officials, military personnel & corporate executives; Native American tribal & spiritual leaders; peace activists and protesters; Nevada ranchers, families & communities downwind of the test site. Interviews with more than 150 people totaling 335 hours, related transcripts, documents and photographs are housed in UNLV Lied Library's Department of Special Collections. Searchable transcripts, selected audio and video clips, scanned photographs and images are available on this website."

Contributed by Stephanie Bayless, Manuscripts Department.

Read more...

Microsoft Ends Live Search Books and Live Search Academic

Microsoft announced on Friday that the company will close its book digitization project. According to the official Live Search blog:

"Today we informed our partners that we are ending the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects and that both sites will be taken down next week. Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes. . . . With Live Search Books and Live Search Academic, we digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries. With our investments, the technology to create these repositories is now available at lower costs for those with the commercial interest or public mandate to digitize book content. We will continue to track the evolution of the industry and evaluate future opportunities. "
Read more about the announcement and see the full email from Microsoft at the Washington Post. You can also read the email on the Live Search Books Publisher Program site.

Read a reaction to the announcement at Digitization 101, Archivalia and TeleRead. And find out more about book digitization by reading this New York Times article from last year.

Haven't had enough of digitization? Check out the National Archives and Records Administration’s Strategy for Digitizing Archival Materials.

Contributed by Stephanie Bayless, Manuscripts Department.

Read more...

The YouTube* of Arkansas History

The AV/AR is a database with Arkansas related oral history interviews, lectures and video footage. Not only can you listen to a clip concerning the tie between Barack Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and that respective church affliation, but you can also watch video clips of the climatic events unfolding as Central High School tried to desegregate in 1957.

In the days of rising gas prices, the beauty of this archive is that it’s available online to access from the comfort of your own home. You can use this tool to learn more about Arkansas history, to find quotes about historical events, to watch history happen, and to hear personal anecdotes of Arkansans or of things happening in Arkansas.

You have access to full interviews and lectures, but these have also been divided into smaller clips that average less than two minutes. To search through the AV/AR, you have two options. First, you can search by subject term by scrolling through the list and clicking on the word you’re most interested in. Second, you can search by speaker/interviewee by scrolling through the list of people if you know their insight is something you are looking for.

Left: Speaker/Interviewee Search
Right: Subject Term Search
This project has been going for a year and right now is focused on race relations in Arkansas. In the future, the database plans to extend to all areas of Arkansas history. Clips are added frequently so stay tuned!

Contributed by Sara Thompson, Audio Visual Archivist
*Note: The AV/AR is by no means affiliated with YouTube. We are using the term here strictly as a descriptor. Clever, no?

Read more...

Online Access to the Papers of the Founding Fathers

From a Press Release by the National Archives and Records Adminstration:

"On Tuesday, May 6, 2008, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein submitted a report, entitled The Founders Online, to the Committees on Appropriations of the U.S. Congress. This report is the National Archives response to concerns raised by the Committees that the complete papers of America’s Founding Fathers are not available online. The Founders Online is a plan for providing online access, within a reasonable timeframe, to researchers, students and the general public. The report is available electronically on the National Archives web site."

Click here to read the rest of the press release and see the full report.

Read more...