The digital library JSTOR has announced its new
Register & Read program, under which users unaffiliated with an institution can access "approximately 1,200 journals from more than 700 publishers, a subset of the content in JSTOR. This includes content from the first volume and issue published for these journals through a recent year (generally 3-5 years ago)."
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posted by jedicus
on Jan 14, 2013 -
58 comments
"Although best-known for its restoration of feature films, UCLA Film & Television Archive has been preserving animated films for more than three decades, with over one hundred titles to its credit. The short subjects, trailers, and promotional films presented here provide a representative sampling of that work. They have been preserved from best-surviving and sole-surviving 35mm nitrate and 16mm prints, showcasing many forms of animation spanning the entire silent film era."
The UCLA Preserved Silent Animation project, one of over 80
collections made available through the UCLA Digital Library Program.
posted by cog_nate
on Aug 30, 2012 -
4 comments
For more than two years, scholars and imaging scientists have been using advanced scanning techniques to recover the mostly illegible contents of an 1871 field diary kept by the British explorer David Livingstone in Africa. Low on paper and ink, the explorer had resorted to writing on newspaper sheets, with ink made from berries, and over time the original document had become almost impossible to read. Now the team has unveiled an online “multispectral critical edition” with images, transcriptions, and relevant notes, making Livingstone’s first-person account accessible again. They’ve also created a “Livingstone Spectral Images Archive” to give anyone who wants it direct access to the images, transcriptions, and metadata the project has created, no strings attached. Almost everything in both the edition and the archive comes with a Creative Commons license that allows the contents to be reused with attribution. [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole
on Jun 3, 2012 -
11 comments
The U.S. National Archives today released the returns from the
1940 national census, providing an invaluable resource to historians and genealogists. At the moment, you'll need to know the particular address you want to see--the records are not yet searchable by name. A companion project seeks to fix that by
enlisting your help in a crowdsourced project to index the census data. However, if you're looking for a New York address,
you can use this clever site from the New York Public Library to look someone up in the 1940 phone book. (FYI, the site seems to be running a bit sluggishly under first-day load, so you may need to be patient.)
posted by Horace Rumpole
on Apr 2, 2012 -
31 comments
For much of the time since their discovery in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls were the jealously guarded treasure of a select group of scholars. Now, thanks to a partnership between Google and the Israel Museum,
five scrolls have been digitized and made available online.
posted by Horace Rumpole
on Sep 26, 2011 -
25 comments
The Koran of Kansuh al-Ghuri is a 500 year old manuscript written on six foot square sheets of a silken, vellum-like fabric which is polished with smooth stones so that ink sits on the surface rather than being absorbed. It is considered "one of the finest, most
lavishly illuminated and calligraphically significant Qur’an manuscripts from the late
Mamluk period". Too fragile to be displayed, it is also missing two leaves that were discovered in Dublin's Chester Beatty Library in the 1970s. So a unified digitized edition is being prepared that will be freely available on the Internet for researchers. The process is being blogged
here.
posted by Joe Beese
on Jan 24, 2011 -
14 comments
Docs Teach, a new website from the
National Archives, offers teachers access to more than 3,000 digitized documents from NARA's collections, along with classroom activities using them. It's the latest in a series of efforts under the recently appointed Archivist of the United States
David Ferriero to enhance the agency's presence on the web.
(via) [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole
on Sep 28, 2010 -
5 comments
Circuits are flipping on in the
nation's attic. A couple of weeks ago,
31 "digerati" -- like
Clay Shirky,
Chris Anderson, and
George Oates --
dropped in to the Smithsonian Institution for the invitation-only conference
"Smithsonian 2.0: A Gathering to Re-imagine the Smithsonian in the Digital Age".
Dan Cohen of the
Center for History and New Media provides
a great summary (and continues to pose provocative questions) on his own blog. Those whose invitations were somehow lost in the mail can play fly-on-the-wall by
watching the keynotes, paging through the
Flickr pool of envymaking glimpses of their behind-the-scenes lab and collections tours, reading the
blog (where Bruce Wyman of the Denver Art Museum lays out
a succinct road map for museums using social media), and poking around in the SI's
website gallery. Want to cheer on the USA's favorite 163-year-old
"Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge" without taking the trip to DC? Thanks to their recent efforts, you can now follow the SI on
Twitter, listen to its
podcasts, watch its
YouTube channel, visit the
Latino Virtual Museum in Second Life, or use the
FaceBook gifts page to send your best friends their very own pair of Dorothy's
ruby slippers,
Hope diamond,
Negro Leagues baseball, or
coelocanth.
posted by Miko
on Feb 27, 2009 -
13 comments
Fire destroyed the office of the War Department and all its files in 1800, and for decades historians believed that the collection, and the window it provided into the workings of the early federal government, was lost forever. Thanks to a decade-long effort to retrieve copies of the files scattered in archives across the country, the collection has been reconstituted and is offered here as a
fully-searchable digital database.
posted by Knappster
on Jan 13, 2009 -
10 comments
The Open Content Alliance poses a threat to Google and Microsoft's competing library digitization projects. OCA was founded by the
Internet Archive, whose main claim to fame is the Wayback Machine, designed to archive the internet's web history. OCA's mission is to open the nation's library collections to universal web search by digitizing books and making them as widely accessible as possible.
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posted by richards1052
on Oct 22, 2007 -
9 comments
Apparently, the digitization of all words ever spoken by human beings would take up 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Or, 5
exabytes. How long will it be before
my laptop has that much space?
posted by sandor
on Feb 23, 2000 -
3 comments
