Libraries' Surprising Special Collections. [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole on Mar 3, 2009 - 44 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

For decades, the LDS church microfilmed old records of genealogical interest and stashed them in the Granite Mountain Record Vault for safekeeping. Copies could be ordered and viewed at local Family History Centers. Now, through massive digitization and volunteer indexing efforts, those records are starting to come online. [more inside]
posted by Knappster on Jul 27, 2008 - 38 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. [more inside]
posted by richards1052 on Oct 22, 2007 - 9 comments

The National Endowment for the Arts and the Library of Congress are putting 30 million newspaper pages online. The National Digital Newspaper Program "will create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922." The goal is to have it done in 20 years; the LOC has a sample up now: The Stars and Stripes from 1918-1919.
posted by me3dia on Nov 17, 2004 - 17 comments

Ben Kacyras is the inventor of the portable Cyrax 3D scanning camera traditionally used by surveyors for quickly creating "surgical exact" 3D models of large structures. Ben has set a goal to scan every World Heritage Site on Earth and make it available online so that if anything were to happen to a site, an exact replica could be re-built. Example Cyrax pictures. More 3D Camera links and other World Heritage Digitization efforts.
posted by stbalbach on Mar 8, 2004 - 5 comments

Digital Collections at the Ewell Sale Stewart Library: including A Delight for the Eye and the Mind, 'books on molluscs and their shells'; The Remarkable Nature of Edward Lear (Natural History illustrations by the famous 'nonsense poet'); Nature's Great Masterpiece: The Elephant; Foul and Loathsome Creatures (‘Illustrated Herpetological Books’); and Drawn from the Deep (‘The Fish in Science, Art and the Imagination’).
posted by misteraitch on Jun 26, 2003 - 2 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