MetaFilter posts tagged with archives

Louis Armstrong's Collages

Joe Beese — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:28:35 -0800

When not pressing the valves on his trumpet or the record button on his tape recorder, Armstrong’s fingers found other arts with which to occupy themselves. One of them was collage, which became a visual outlet for his improvisational genius. ... These little stories, illuminating and entertaining syntheses of Armstrong’s passions, now reside in the Louis Armstrong Archives at Queens College in Flushing, New York. The collages are collected in Satchmo: The Wonderful World and Art of Louis Armstrong. You could look at them while listening to Armstrong's cover version of Pharaoh Sanders and eating his recipe for red beans and rice.

October is American Archives Month!

marxchivist — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:37:50 -0800

October is American Archives Month. From Alabama [pdf] to Wyoming, New England to the Rocky Mountains and points in between, archival repositories across the United States will celebrate by offering workshops, open houses, and behind the scenes tours. Pretty complete list here. If one these repositories is near you, things like this are a good chance to go see some of the unique things they have. Local and state archives usually aren't set up for browsing, this is a good time to do it. Scroll to the bottom of this page for some archives humor.

I've got a box full of letters, think you might like to read

Horace Rumpole — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:08:30 -0800

Letters of Note reproduces and transcribes letters from the famous, the infamous, and the not-so-famous.

Archive Team

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

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

When this you see, think of me.

Miko — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:25:46 -0800

Olive Lambert's Autograph Book

Will observing the history of physics change it?

Horace Rumpole — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 15:44:49 -0800

The Niels Bohr Library & Archives has completed a project to transcribe its collection of more than 500 oral histories of physics, including a few audio snippets of the interviews. And, if you'd like to put a face with that voice, check out the Emilio Segrè Visual Archives. [via] A few highlights: Luis Alvarez Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar Freeman Dyson George Gamow Werner Heisenberg Steven Weinberg

Shopped, or Not?

netbros — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:58:51 -0800

Real or Fake? From the Life Magazine photographic archives.

A tool for 20th-century Australian History

mattoxic — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 04:36:37 -0800

Even after some deliberation it is difficult to find reasons to support the appointment of women Trade Commissioners. The Virtual Reading Room of the National Archives of Australia is a mine of information about Australia, its relationships and past attitudes.

Technocolor Tarheels

Horace Rumpole — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:15:59 -0800

A View To Hugh. After Hugh Morton's death in 2006, the widow of North Carolina's most prolific photographer donated his entire collection, half a million transparencies, photographs, and negatives, to the North Carolina Collection at UNC. The "A View to Hugh" blog details the work of the team of archivists who are organizing and digitizing the collection. The blog highlights Morton's gorgeous photography, of course (even if he had a few tricks up his sleeve), but perhaps the most interesting part of the blog is its use of crowdsourcing to identify the subjects of photos.

Spirits playground

Horace Rumpole — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 08:54:03 -0800

The Brakhage Scrapbooks. Jane Wodening, then Jane Brakhage, assembled three remarkable scrapbooks in the early 1960s, when she was the wife and muse of experimental film maker Stan Brakhage [previously 1, 2] ... Wodening created the scrapbooks from literal “scraps” of their family life, Brakhage’s creative process, and the artistic communities of which they were a part. Pages are covered with the widest array of verbal and visual materials including but not limited to letters, manuscripts, photographs, original art, clippings, pamphlets, filmstrips, and flyers. See selected high-res scans here, and listen to a podcast about the scrapbooks by Yale University lecturer Richard Deming here. (mp3 link)

Bantoro = Henry Ford

Miko — Wed, 27 May 2009 10:25:07 -0800

Museum archivist, exploring Henry Ford's office records, stumbles into the interesting world of commercial telegraphic code.

Photography, Video, and Visual Journalism

netbros — Fri, 22 May 2009 17:29:29 -0800

Lens is the new photojournalism blog of The New York Times, presenting visual and multimedia reporting — photographs, videos and slide shows. A showcase for Times photographers, it will draw on The Times' own pictorial archive, numbering in the millions of images and going back to the early 20th century. Features in their first week include: Essay: Slow Photography in an Instantaneous Age, about what it means to shoot on large-format film in the digital age; Showcase: A Prom Divided, a multimedia feature about a segregated prom in 2009 south-central Georgia.

Online archaeology and anthropology film from Penn

Rumple — Sun, 03 May 2009 13:28:19 -0800

The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology has put 675 reels of archival 16 mm film online via the Internet Archive. Most of the film is unedited, and stems either from Museum research, or was donated by interested amateurs. Much of it is silent, reflecting the technology of the day. One highlight are the four surviving reels of the long-running TV show 'What in the World" (look for the episode starring Vincent Price), but the archive is full of other hidden gems, such as the 1950s archaeological expedition to Tikal, a 1940 film "A 1000 Mile Road Trip Across America", and Glimpses of Life Among the Catawba and Cherokee Indians of the Carolinas (1927). The films are downloadable in various formats, including MPEG2, Ogg Video, and 512Kb MPEG4. Happy browsing! via.

Cologne City Archive Disaster

stbalbach — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 06:37:37 -0800

Cologne City Archive is a six-story building containing 26 kilometers of shelves, 65,000+ documents dating from 922 AD, 104,000 maps, 50,000 posters, 500,000 photographs and 780 estates and collections, including Irmgard Keun, Hans Mayer and Jacques Offenbach. Considered a state of the art institution when built in 1971 and copied around the world, the building simply collapsed on Tuesday, destroying most everything. [1],[2](via)

When the building was constructed, a small nuclear-bomb proof chamber was included in the cellar to protect the most precious pieces. But in recent years, the chamber has been used only to store cleaning material.

Treasures unburied

Horace Rumpole — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:42:30 -0800

Libraries' Surprising Special Collections. Since Smithsonian apparently doesn't quite get how the internet works, I've rounded up the web pages for these collections: Griswold Chess Collection, Cleveland Public Library. Fore-edge paintings, Boston Public Library (my favorite) Arabic Papyrus, Parchment, and Paper, University of Utah. (Try the "browse" drop-down menu.) Tober Forgery Collection, University of Delaware. Nurse Romance Novel Covers, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. (Awesome!) Arents Collection on Tobacco, New York Public Library. (Click on "Collection contents, then "Tobacco, its History and Associations") Severson Collection of WWI Avaiation, Saint Paul Public Library. (Nothing here, unfortunately.) Judaica Sound Archive, Florida Atlantic University.

Virginia Quarterly Review opens Archives!

Bizurke — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:58:52 -0800

The Virginia Quarterly Review — "A National Journal of Literature and Discussion" — just made public every article, essay, book review etc. published in its pages between 1975 and 2003. Search the archives here or check out this blog post for some greatest hits.

JournalSpace: R.I.P.

GatorDavid — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 18:13:46 -0800

JournalSpace: R.I.P. [Sub-Titled: When is the last time you tested your backups?]

Christmas at the BFI

Rumple — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 19:13:01 -0800

Christmas in the London Blitz, 1940; Making Christmas Crackers, 1910; Santa Claus, 1898; Christmas is coming, 1951: short films from the British Film Institute's wonderful Youtube Channel (including excellent playlists), which you can also explore through Google Earth using the kmz file found here.

Short films made with images from the Hulton Archive

Kattullus — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:44:53 -0800

Photograph of Jesus is a short film by Laurie Hill illustrating the strange requests photography archivists at the vast Hulton Archive sometimes get, such as for photographs of Jesus, the Yeti, Jack the Ripper, Neil Armstrong with 11 other people on the moon and the like. This film won Getty Images' Short and Sweet Film Challenge. The three other shortlisted films were Big Red Button's gambling tale Perrington Stud, Jasmin Jodry's science fiction fantasy Star Games and Ian Mackinnon's sports story Long Jump.

Is this 18.5 minutes of tape anything important?

Horace Rumpole — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 10:01:39 -0800

It's been a busy week for presidential libraries. The Nixon Library released 200 hours of tape (excerpts) and 90,000 pages of documents (excerpts) that detail his obsessive attempts to destroy his political enemies. The LBJ library released MP3s of dozens of phone calls, including one where he accuses Nixon of treason for stalling Vietnamese peace talks in advance of the 1968 election. Finally, the Reagan Library released 750,000 pages of documents (NYT, reg. req.) to researchers. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Europeana

stbalbach — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:36:15 -0800

Europeana is the new EU digital library. It gives multilingual access to two million digitized books and other items of cultural and historical significance held in over 1,000 institutions in the 27 EU states. There will be 10 million by 2010. Soon after its launch the website froze, its servers overwhelmed by over "10 million hits an hour".

Hey Look! The Harvey Kurtzman Archives!

Alvy Ampersand — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:34:36 -0800

"Almost all American satire today follows a formula that Harvey Kurtzman thought up." - Richard Corliss [Via Tom Spurgeon's TCR]

It's nice to share. Cheney sued over not releasing VP documents to the public.

rokabiri — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 13:39:38 -0800

The Society of American Archivists, American Historical Association, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington are suing Vice President Dick Cheney for not transferring the vast majority of his records to the National Archives and Record Administration for eventual release to the public. Cheney argues that he does not need to make his records public since he is not part of the executive branch but rather a 'barnacle on the legislative branch'. CREW's chief counsel, Anne Wiseman, cites the Presidential Records Act in the case against him.

Digital Vaults

netbros — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:46:06 -0800

This is a collection of the National Archives stored in the Digital Vaults. You can browse through hundreds of photographs, documents, and film clips and discover the connection between some of the National Archives' most treasured records. With the Pathways tool you can see the unique and surprising connections between events and people and test your knowledge of history. As you travel through the site and collect documents, images and films, you can then merge the objects to create your own poster or movie from your collection.

the tail wagging the dog

sergeant sandwich — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 03:08:00 -0800

webofdeception.com is a bizarre, timecubesque linkdump maintained and updated by private investigator and domain squatter Joseph Culligan. In addition to sleazy dirt-digging on various celebrities and politicians, Culligan also includes a huge resource list of links to databases and public-record searches. My favorite part was the document archive; highlights of the weird crap he's found include:

Letter from Elvis to Nixon, asking to meet with the President and be appointed a federal agent

White House internal reaction to Elvis' request

Immigration papers of the Sound of Music family

First draft of Roosevelt's "date which will live in infamy" speech

Letter from young RFK to his brother

Enjoy!