German Web Archiving Initiatives

Here's an interesting article on how the Germans are thinking about capturing and archiving web content. In June of 2006, "the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek received the task of collecting, cataloguing, indexing and archiving non-physical media works (online publications)." Here is the bit about long term preservation . I don't have time to fully wrap my mind around all of this, but wanted to share it with you.

Thank you to the fabulous Kathryn Lybarger for speaking to our student chapter a couple of weeks ago and apologies for the delay in posting the following links.

Kathryn graciously offers a link to her PowerPoint slides

Here are some links to items she discussed in her talk:

Trusted Digital Repository report

TRAC checklist

Projects to volunteer with:

Wikipedia
Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
Librivox

A friendly invitation:

"Feel free to contact me if you are interested in working with these projects
and don't know where to start, or if you'd like to help with the Daily
Racing Form project. Unfortunately I don't have any positions that pay
tuition, but I am still hiring for student and work-study positions, and accept
volunteer work as well. :)"

The mystique of the archive

The Harry Ransom Center has put together an interesting online exhibit about archives. Check out the slideshow showing the archivists as they unpack and inspect a newly arrived collection. The exhibit also includes a reading list of fiction and non-fiction featuring archives and archivists.

Photo identification fun!

Here's a great post from the archives and archivists listserv administered by SAA. The story the writer refers to is in the Wall Street Journal about Special Collections librarian Claudia Rivers at the University of Texas-El Paso. The short version is that she lent a photo from a huge collection of unidentified photos to the El Paso newspaper for a piece they ran on immigrationn and readers called in with identifications of the subjects. Since then the paper publishes a photo every Tuesday and Ms. Rivers gets 5 or 6 identifications a week. Mr. Webb responds with his own amazing story:

Great story. We've been doing this for years at the annual Utah Ski
Archives fundraiser, the Ski Affair. I print out unidentified images of
skiers and resorts and ski teams and dogs and whatever, and put them
into binders, arranged by whatever little amounts of info we might have.
Then I sit at a table with a couple of copies of the binders and a bunch
of pencils and a sign that says "Who Am I? Help Us Identify These
Skiers!" It works like a charm, I always get a lot of people sitting
down and going through them, plus you get a lot of good stories and
great contacts for new collections. People really enjoy it. I usually
get over 100 IDs, sometimes many more, depending on who's being honored
that year. Then I make all the changes in our database so that the
images appear online with the correct identification.

My favorite story, since it's sort of Friday for me (Western History
Association tomorrow, I'm doin' a paper): there was a photo of two guys
giving another guy a trophy. No idea who they were. A guy comes up and
looks at it and says "That's Bill!" [whom, oddly enough, it turned out I
knew from the Grand Canyon, as he was a guide down there, but didn't
recognize him in his ski-i-ness] Bill has only one leg; the other he
lost after breaking it so many times skiing, the docs cut it off. But
that didn't stop him; he would go off the gelande jump--which was what
the trophy was for, as it turned out later--and kick his prosthetic leg
off in mid-air and land on one ski. The guy telling me the story said
he was just a little boy at the time and seeing that gave him nightmares
for years.



Roy Webb, C.A.
Multimedia Archivist

Provocative Archives Next Post

Please check out this post on Archives Next. I haven't had a chance to fully digest or consider all the points but the comments are lively and thought provoking and are being made by prominent members of the archives community. Kathleen Roe at the bottom published a great book on archival arrangement and description.

I met the writer of this blog, Kate Theimer, at the SAA conference in San Francisco in September. She had presented at one of the better sessions I attended on Archives and Web 2.0 technologies. She's also a fan of the Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century blog created by UK's own Jason Flahardy.

Keeneland Report

Bill, Krista and I had an excellent day at the track on Friday!

First,we met Cathy Schenk, UK SLIS alum, at 10:30 and enjoyed a tour of the library. Built in 2002, the Keeneland Library contains more than 10,000 books, 100,000 news and trade publication, 225,000 photos and photo negatives, 1,500 videocassettes and 3,000 files of newspaper clippings.

Formerly housed in a 3,300 square-foot section of the General Administration building, incentive to build a new library came in 2000 when the Daily Racing Form donated its entire archival collection, almost none of which had been preserved on microfilm. In order to fulfill the library's mission to collect and preserve the heritage of the Thoroughbred and Thoroughbred racing and breeding, the Keeneland administration decided to build a new facility complete with proper temperature and humidity control, water-free fire protection, and appropriate lighting.

In the spring of 2007, Keeneland and UK Libraries embarked on a project to preserve and provide access to this invaluable resource. UK SLIS alum Kathryn Lybarger manages the project. The photos linked below contain some related images.

After our library tour, we ate lunch at the colorful track kitchen where the real track people eat. We enjoyed succotash, fried fish, bar-b-q, bean soup and Krista and Bill completed their meals with that down-home delicacy: banana pudding garnished with nilla wafers! We spent the rest of the day losing money, meeting people, taking photos and having an all around good time. The day was perfect, the company was excellent and the surroundings were pure Kentucky.

Click here to view the photos of our trip. Cathy welcomes visitors and encourages questions. Having worked in the library for 30 years, she has a wealth of experience related to cataloging, collection development, library management, preservation and reference. Krista and I discussed trying to organize another trip for the spring meet. Let us know if you are interested.

Keeneland

Please join the group at Keeneland this Friday for a tour of the library and a day at the races. We're meeting at 10:30 at the library. Contact Krista King for carpooling information.