MetaFilter posts tagged with archive

1989: The Lost Year

cog_nate — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:02:51 -0800

1989: The Lost Year. "Twenty years after the Berlin Wall came down, the end of the Cold War still inspires euphoria and triumphalism in the West. But even as we lift toasts once again to the victory of 1989, we should re-examine that momentous year. Documents, memoirs, and other evidence that have come to light suggest that for relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, it was also a time of missed opportunity." The first article in a series by Foreign Policy. Also, check out the National Security Archive's Electronic Briefing Books section to access "critical declassified records on issues including U.S. national security, foreign policy, diplomatic and military history, intelligence policy, and more."

Archive Team

stbalbach — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:45:59 -0800

Archive Team: We are going to rescue your shit. (previously)

British Library's world music archive goes online for free

MajorDundee — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:01:30 -0800

British Library's world music archive goes online for free. Amounts to around 28,000 recordings dating from 1898 onwards, according to The Guardian this equates with "about 2,000 hours of singing, speaking, yelling, chanting, blowing, banging, tinkling and many other verbs associated with what is a uniquely rich sound archive" The weirdest one? - possibly the recording of an Assamese woodworm munching its way through a window frame in the dead of night.......

Old Time Radio Revival Round-up

filthy light thief — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:47:59 -0800

Old-time radio (often abbreviated as "OTR," also known as the Golden Age of Radio) refers to a period of radio programming in the United States lasting from the proliferation of radio broadcasting in the early 1920s until television's replacement of radio as the dominant home entertainment medium in the 1950s, with some programs continuing into the early 1960s. The origin of radio dramas in the United States is hard to pin down, but there is evidence of a remote broadcast of a play in 1914 at Normal College (now California State University at San José), and the first serial radio drama was an adaptation of a play by Eugene Walter, entitled "The Wolf," which aired in September 1922. Given the age of the programs and the fact that home reel-to-reel recording started in the 1950s (followed by Philips "compact cassettes" in 1963), it might be surprising that quite a few of these old shows have survived. Thanks in part to original radio station-sourced recordings made on aluminum discs, acetates, and glass recordings and other unnamed sources, many radio dramas and newscasts from decades past are available online, and more are being digitized and restored to this day. Though the term "old-time radio" may be focused on the United States, the history of radio recordings and radio dramas is international. England's first broadcast radio drama was 'Five Birds in a Cage' (Gertrude Jennings), a 1915 stage play, a social comedy, which was broadcast on November 29, 1923 in London. This play is also considered the first instance of 'gay' radio, for the the inclusion of a gay character. Canada's first national radio drama, broadcast in 1931, was Romance of Canada. Savoy Hill hosts a history of British radio dramas and the British Radio Drama History Database, where you can sort by actors, players, playwrights, years, stations, and other details. The site also has guides on radio drama writing and production. Looking for more tips on radio production? Do-It-Yourself Radio Drama is a blog post from the modern drama creators at Decoder Ring Theater. The post has loads of links for further investigation. If you're collecting radio dramas, you might find it hard to catalog recordings, as there is no accepted agreement on naming episodes that have no 'official' titles. The OTR Researchers Group’s Wiki has a section devoted to listing shows by one distinct characteristic: First lines of dialogue. If you happen to find an old 16 inch transcription disk, playback isn't the same as modern vinyl, requiring a custom stylus, and the material is much more fragile than modern media, requiring special handling and care. Old-time Radio Actors Orson Wells' radio career was previously discussed. Fred Gwynne and E.G. Marshall were remembered in reference to their roles in CBS Radio Mystery Theater (episodes are available from Old Time Radio Fans, and Internet Archive). Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding were covered before for their 4+ decades of absurdist, satirical, dry, improvisational sketch comedy. Vic and Sade's radio program was also covered. Jack Benny's Christmas Show, previously. Collections of Golden Era Radio Internet Archive has a whole section devoted to Old Time Radio, and it's still growing. Currently, you can listen to over 125 episodes of The New Adventure of Sherlock Holmes (not to be confused with the other radio dramatizations), The Adventures of Superman, including his real-life fight against the KKK, as heard in "Clan of the Fiery Cross." On the lighter side, there's a growing list of recordings from The Les Paul Show and a couple clips from the Grand Ole Opry. With the ever-growing collection, Internet Archive dwarfs other collections, but some other sites focus on areas overlooked (or maybe just buried) at Archive.org. Old Time Radio (OTR) - Radio Days: A Radio History (previously) is an ever-growing collection, including Radio News, Mystery, Private Eyes, Comedy, SciFi, and more. Old Time Radio Fans (Fans plural) has the usual assortment of programs, plus a selection of old radio commercials. Jezner.com - Old Time Radio is a blog focused on OTR, with background and commentary on the episodes posted every few days. Old Time Radio Fan is limited to the weekly line-up, where they're online for 7 days, then try your luck with The Random Hopper. Modern radio dramas Decoder Ring Theatre (previously) is home to two original series (The Red Panda Adventures and Black Jack Justice), as well as the grab-bag of anthology stories that is Showcase. Darker Projects (warning: auto-starting audio) (previously) has three original projects, along with Star Trek and Doctor Who interpretations. ZBS Foundation produces shows for purchase, but their podcasts are free of charge (previously). ZBS Foundation was discussed previously-er as a set of links to current radio drama. Though all the links died, Archive.org remembers Seeing Ear Theater and Virtually American. Sci-Fi's Seeing Ear Theater is also on CD in 3 volumes. Not included in those volumes: Neil Gaiman's Snow Glass Apples.

Save vs. Obscurity

Scattercat — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 10:08:25 -0800

The Play-Generated Map and Document Archive: finally providing a place to put all those odd doodles, detailed maps, and character sketches that come out of your weekly gaming sessions. Complete with artistic interpretations of characters named "Stedfast," meticulously organized campaign notes, and anonymous stains, the archive takes the approach that gaming ephemera is a kind of folk art, and thus seeks to preserve it while some of it is still available in its original form. The site is almost completely user-generated, with materials scanned in and organized by donor. Click the "random image" link a few times, get nostalgic, and then come share gaming stories.

Gimme That Old Time Derivation

DU — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:37:41 -0800

The Cornell Historical Math Monographs archive has a great many famous papers, including works by De Morgan, Hamilton, Descartes (warning: French) and of course Lewis Carroll. Found while searching for this interesting paper.

Shuttle launch aborts.

loquacious — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:53:54 -0800

Space Shuttle launch aborts. Approximately six minutes of on-pad post-ignition pre-liftoff aborts in a single YouTube link.

Excellent fiddlesticks for the insolent rascal, and other ways to while the days

filthy light thief — Fri, 29 May 2009 13:32:57 -0800

As a belated tribute (of sorts) to Victoria Day, may you find interest in a variety of Victorina era literature, short and long. In the short category, there is Chit-Chat of Humor, Wit, and Anecdote (Edited by Pierce Pungent; New York: Stringer & Townsend (1857), who has written quite a bit of such work) [via mefi projects], and Conundrums New and Old (Collected by John Ray Frederick; J. Drake & Company Publishers Chicago, 1902) [via mefi projects] This publishing house also published The Art of Characturing, copyright 1941. If you prefer your antiquated humor with a twist, take a gander at bizarro version of Conundrums New and Old [via mefi projects]. In the category of longer works, behold the The Lost Novels of Victorian New Zealand [via an older mefi projects]. The lost novels is a free online archive of New Zealand and Pacific Islands texts and heritage materials, provided by the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre, which is part of the Victoria University of Wellington. The content of the online archive ranges from novels written or set in New Zealand to shorter fiction that appeared in local pamphlets and newspaper supplements, and covers a broad range of topics. The long list of archive projects are available under various licenses, and where the original text is out of copyright it is our policy to provide the digitised version under a New Zealand Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License (CC BY-CA).

Joyful Noise

Miko — Sun, 24 May 2009 05:55:03 -0800

Pilgrim Productions Presents: Voices Across America, an archive of gospel music in a variety of genres, submitted for free play and download by church groups and folk and traditional groups across the country and beyond. Style, age, and quality vary greatly, but fans of noncommercial music will enjoy hunting for the gems of blues, Cajun, bluegrass, choral, shapenote, country, vintage, and mountain gospel and more.

The Sinister End-of-the-World Homerun

Miko — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:50:03 -0800

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved" .... and mad enough to play fantasy baseball. In the new book Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats, a NY Public Library archivist considers documents revealing the author's detailed obsession with the imaginary exploits of players like Pictorial Review Jackson and teams like the "Pontiacs, Nashes, and cellar-dwelling LaSalles" in his finely grained, fictional Summer League.

Harder Better Faster Further.

loquacious — Sun, 10 May 2009 18:07:38 -0800

Daft Punk revealed in bootleg video at the 1996 Even Further festival. Though it's impossible to see what gear-manipulating is going on, this is an excellent example of a "live PA" of electronic dance music as opposed to DJing.

Scan, Edit, Copy, Paste, Appropriate and Steal This Book

filthy light thief — Thu, 07 May 2009 07:45:03 -0800

In June of 2004, fifty-eight friends and acquaintances joined in a collaborative labor project that lasted for eight days. They were instrumental in organizing the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, CA. One month from today will be the little library's fifth anniversary celebration. The library project/ public art project/ art installation/ archive/ part information center is an appropriation-friendly collection of books, periodicals, zines, and print ephemera. The library isn't organized by the Dewy Decimal system, but sorted by Megan Prelinger into four constant threads: landscape and geography; media and representation; historical consciousness; and political narratives from beyond the mainstream. The library is the less-known work of Rick Prelinger, and his wife, Megan. Rick is most commonly known for his video collection, which is the primary source of ephemera films on archive.org. (All things Prelinger previously)

That's no Moon. Or a McDonald's. WTF?

loquacious — Fri, 01 May 2009 11:54:31 -0800

At the mostly abandoned Moffett Field in an abandoned McDonald's, digital archeologists attempt to restore, recover and archive abandoned high resolution imagery and data from previous manned Moon missions, using an abandoned Ampex 2" tape drive found in a chicken coop - the last working machine in the world, restored by the last man alive capable of rebuilding the heads. This is likely only part of their weird story.

Government Comix--more exciting than it sounds...

Tesseractive — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 11:23:31 -0800

After two years of work of collecting, scanning, and tagging, the Government Comics Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln library has gone live. This digital collection features "comic books affiliated with state and federal U.S. government agencies, as well as the UN and the EU (and a couple from Canada and one from Ghana)" and includes comics and art by Will Eisner, Scott Adams, Hank Ketcham ("Dennis the Menace Takes a Poke at Poison"), and more. Found via the University of Florida Comix Scholars listserv, which is unfortunately not archived and searchable at this time.

PhilSci Archive

aniola — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:15:07 -0800

The PhilSci Archive is an electronic archive for preprints in the philosophy of science. The goal of the Archive is to promote communication in the field by the rapid dissemination of new work.

How to Love Golden Age Comics

carsonb — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 20:24:20 -0800

How to Kick a Person in the Teeth | How to Contemplate the Back of Your Pate | How to Eat Beans Without Soiling Your Jeans | How to Get Your Beard Sheared | How to Sharpen Your Wits | How to Block a BackSlapper's Sock | How to Grope for Bathtub Soap | How to Eat Crackers in Bed | How to See TV | How to Keep a Cool Conk | How to Double Your Bubble Gum Bubble | How (Not) to Reel on a Banana Peel | How to Tweak a Beak | How to Fall on Your Face | How to Laugh at a Bum Joke
...and many more hilarious how-tos from Basil Wolverton's Culture Corner. All the Culture Corner strips are also available together as a PDF or Comic Book Archive (.cbz). For lots more classic comic strip goodness check out the Golden Age Comics archive, an amazing collection of public domain comics freely available for download.

The Visual Telling of Stories

carsonb — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 10:53:36 -0800

The Visual Telling of Stories
A lyrical encyclopedia of visual propositions;
a visually orientated taxonomy of the ways in which pictures are used to tell stories. And we, spectators always, everywhere Looking at, never out of, everything ! It fills us. We arrange it. It decays. We rearrange it, and decay ourselves. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, the eighth elegy, 1922

Gramophone Archives

Gyan — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 08:55:54 -0800

The Gramophone Archive is a (free) searchable database containing every issue of Gramophone from April 1923 to the latest issue.

Free Sound Archive

leotrotsky — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:49:55 -0800

Your alarm goes off, you get up to attend to your morning ritual, have a coffee, take a shower, head off to work, get on to Metafilter, and there you discover the wonders of the Free Sound Project! (previously)

I can't forget that I'm bereft of all the pleasant sights they see

cashman — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:41:10 -0800

British Library warns of 'black hole' in history if websites and digital files are not preserved. "Historians of the future, citizens of the future, will find a black hole in the knowledge base of the 21st century." In addition to dead file formats and lost information from government websites, Lynne Brindley also points to the habits of individuals. "I call it personal digital disorder. Think of those thousands of digital photographs that lie hidden on our computers. Few store them, so those who come after us will not be able to look at them."

The Travel Film Archive

chunking express — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 11:09:39 -0800

Enjoy the Travel Film Archive on YouTube. They have tons of videos from the 1900s through to the 1970s. For example, you can learn about that wonderful island South of India, Ceylon.

For Ourselves and Our Posterity

Miko — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 07:54:38 -0800

Inauguration 2009 Sermons and Orations Project The Library of Congress invites you to submit digital audio or video recordings of speeches made between January 16 and january 25, 2009 on the occasion of Barack Obama's inauguration. The speeches will be archived in a collection for future scholarship, much like the Day of Infamyand other collections capturing signifcant American moments.

UCLA's Phonetics Lab Archive

cog_nate — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 09:25:55 -0800

"For over half a century, the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory has collected recordings of hundreds of languages from around the world, providing source materials for phonetic and phonological research, of value to scholars, speakers of the languages, and language learners alike. The materials on this site comprise audio recordings illustrating phonetic structures from over 200 languages with phonetic transcriptions, plus scans of original field notes where relevant." (Description from website.) Many more recordings -- indexed by language, sound, and geographic location -- are available here.

The Archive of American Television

not_on_display — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:32:49 -0800

The Archive of American Television "produces extensive video oral history interviews with television legends of all professions and makes them available online. To date, the Archive has completed over 2000 hours of videotaped conversations with over 570 Actors, Producers, Writers, Newscasters, Executives, Directors, Craftspersons, and more. ... The interviews are conducted by reviewing the subject's life and career chronologically. They discuss their childhood, early influences, how their career began, and thoroughly cover their television careers, ending with their thoughts on the industry and legacy."*

We will remember

Abiezer — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:11:37 -0800

The Great War Archive goes live today (November 11), the 90th anniversary of the Armistice. Launched by the University of Oxford in March 2008, the initiative invited members of the general public to submit digital photographs, audio, film, documents, and stories that originated from the Great War. Although the dealine for submissions is past, photos can still be added to the project's Flickr group.