This paper discusses the idea of “progressive bibliography,” or proceeding from minimal to fuller descriptions, as an intellectually valid and pragmatically essential methodology. It examines some already existing approaches and discusses a few of the challenges and further areas of research. While the idea of positive accumulation of knowledge is old, computerized tools and modern information theories enables us to streamline this process to the benefit of patrons and scholars, and so managers of these collections have new tools to tackle ever-increasing backlogs of underprocessed materials.

The authors argue that finding aids present only singular perspectives of the collections they describe and fail to represent the impact of archivists' work on records and subsequentreinterpretations of collections by archivists and researchers. The authors place these criticisms within the burgeoning postmodern discourse in archival studies and make two concrete suggestions for finding aids that would allow practicing archivists to acknowledge the inherent subjectivity of archival work and to incorporate multiple perspectives into the description of records.

Archivists and librarians contribute to discovery when they discard illusions of neutrality and express their excitement for the materials and their opinions about their significance.

This essay—part of a series of OCLC Research projects to mobilize unique materials synthesizes evidence of what descriptive information people say they need for research.

...we can see the outlines for how we might curate oral history that offers a richer perspective on sound. These points of agreement might include some of the following: a) recognition that oral history is fundamentally an aural experience and not just a text; b) oral history should be evaluated for meaning at a clip or segment level, not just at the level of the 60-minute or 90-minute interview; c) clips and segments should be connectable across interview or even collection; d) our metadata schemes, as well as our work in representing oral history to public audiences, have to account such rich metadata schemes; e) collecting oral history is one thing, making it open and accessible is another goal that the oral history community should embrace; f) efforts at linked open data have to account for segment and clip-level metadata; g) and, it is vital that we involve communities in processing and connecting to oral history.

Over the last 20 years, humanities and archival scholars have theorized the ways in which archives imbue records with meaning. However, archival scholars have not sufficiently examined how users understand the meaning of the records they find. Building on the premise that how users come to make meaning from records is greatly in need of examination, this paper reports on a pilot study of four book history students and their processes of archival meaning-making. We focus in particular on behaviors of an interpretive rather than forensic nature. This article includes a discussion of the theoretical concepts and scholarly literature that shaped our goals for this paper. It then discusses the methodology and our interpretations of the research findings, before turning to a discussion of the findings’ implications and directions for future work.

Need advice on the care of books, photos, videos, and other media in your collections? The following web pages answer many questions about the care, handling and storage for specific media.

Email archives silently record our actions and thoughts over the years, forming a passively acquired and detailed life-log that contains rich material for reminiscing on our lives. However, exploratory browsing of archives containing thousands of messages is tedious without effective ways to guide the user towards interesting events and messages. We present MUSE (Memories USing Email), a system that combines data mining techniques and an interactive interface to help users browse a long-term email archive. MUSE analyzes the contents of the archive and generates a set of cues that help to spark users' memories: communication activity with inferred social groups, a summary of recurring named entities, occurrence of sentimental words, and image attachments. These cues serve as salient entry points into a browsing interface that enables faceted navigation and rapid skimming of email messages. In our user studies, we found that users generally enjoyed browsing their archives with MUSE, and extracted a range of benefits, from summarizing work progress to renewing friendships and making serendipitous discoveries.

Every lawsuit is a potential drama: a story of conflict, often with victims and villains, leading to justice done or denied. Yet a great deal, if not all, that we learn about the most noteworthy of lawsuits — the truly great cases — comes from reading the opinion of an appellate court, written by a judge who never saw the parties of the case, who worked at a time and a place far removed from the events that gave rise to litigation. We focus on “the facts of the case,” as described in a judge’s opinion, and then we describe the way the court applied the law to such facts as doctrine, hardly pausing to note the irony of this ex cathedra image, smacking of infallibility. Rarely do we admit that the official factual account contained in an appellate opinion may have only the most tenuous relationship to the events that actually led the parties to court. The complex stories — turning on small facts, seemingly trivial circumstances, and inter-contingent events — fade away as the “case” takes on a life of its own as it leaves the court of appeals.

Developments in legal scholarship pose a challenge to our continued near-exclusive reliance on a court’s version of the “facts.” The last 20 years have seen a trend toward increased emphasis on “stories” as a feature of legal teaching and scholarship.

Speaker Deck is the best way to share presentations online. Simply upload your slides as a PDF, and we’ll turn them into a beautiful online experience. View them on SpeakerDeck.com, or share them on any website with an embed code.

Linked Data is Storytelling 101 for computers. It doesn’t have the full richness, complexity and nuance that we invest in our narratives, but it does at least help computers to fit all the bits together in meaningful ways. And if we talk nice to them, then they can apply their newly-acquired interpretative skills to the things that they’re already good at — like searching, aggregating, or generating the sorts of big pictures that enable us to explore the contexts of our stories.

Archivematica is a comprehensive digital preservation system. Archivematica uses a micro-services design pattern to provide an integrated suite of free and open-source tools that allows users to process digital objects from ingest to access in compliance with the ISO-OAIS functional model.

The Southern Historical Collection (SHC) has developed a large-scale digitization program that is designed to provide online access to entire manuscript collections or to substantial portions of collections. The collections listed below were digitized in whole or in part under this program. Clicking on a collection name will take you to the collection's finding aid (a descriptive guide to the collection's contents).

Creative and compelling theoretical formulations of the archive have emerged from a host of disciplines in the last decade. Derrida and Foucault, as well as many other humanists and social scientists, have initiated a broadly interdisciplinary conversation about the nature of the archive. This literature suggests a confluence of interests among scholars, archivists, and librarians that is fueled by a shared preoccupation with the function and fate of the historical and scholarly record. The following essay provides an exploration and overview of this archival discourse.

Help your students think through primary source documents for contextual understanding and to glean information to make informed judgments.

Decapod is a project focused on building a low-cost digitization solution that will allow for rare materials, materials held in collections without large budgets, and other scholarly content to be digitized into a high-quality PDF format. This project will work to incorporate the hardware and software necessary to accomplish this goal.

National Leadership Grants support projects that have the potential to elevate museum, archival, and library practice within the context of national strategic initiatives. The Institute seeks to advance the ability of museums, archives, and libraries to preserve culture, heritage, and knowledge, contribute to building technology infrastructures and information technology services, and provide 21st century knowledge and skills to current and future generations in support of a world-class workforce.

Successful proposals will have national impact and generate results—new tools, research, models, services, practices, or alliances—that can be widely adapted or replicated to extend the benefit of federal investment and that increase community access and participation.

BigSheets is an extension of the mashup paradigm that:
1. Integrates gigabytes, terabytes, or petabytes of unstructured data from web-based repositories
2. Collects a wide range of unstructured web data stemming from user-defined seed URLs
3. Extracts and Enriches that data using the unstructured information management architecture you choose (LanguageWare,OpenCalais, etc.)
4. Lets you Explore and Visualize this data in specific, user defined contexts. (such as ManyEyes)

Since we're on the topic of tea-partying, tax-hating Americans, how about a little historical context involving a favorite industry here at HSS:And the zoom:What does any of the content in this ad have to do with selling insurance, you ask? Well, you, that's a pretty complicated question. But I think the best, most accurate answer is: nothing. There are far more nefarious forces at work here than a sales pitch, folks, and I dare you to be surprised. The private insurance industry in the United States has been pulling the same shit it's pulling now for half a century: calculated deployment of one of the most powerful lobbies in the nation towards the end goal of total corporate deregulation, and equally calculated efforts to sway popular opinion against federal governmental spending (aka, the competition). To summarize the argument I'm making here in clear terms: The private insurance industry in the United States has, and has had for some time now, a very serious stake in public debates over taxation, governmental spending, and federal regulation. Insurance may be a particularly powerful and, to some history bloggers, interesting industry, but it's not the only one playing the field. I would like to encourage readers to look beyond the "cultural" arguments (many of which are dead on) that are being offered to explain the recent rise in fear of federal power. Are there particular industries or interests that profit from this fear? What efforts have they made to galvanize it? Why have they done so, and how?These are some of the questions I'd like to see more people asking.

Lesson One: As you sort through archival records, keep your eyes open. When you see the words "top secret" on a document, make a copy."Top Secret" marketing firm meeting minutes from the 1980sDocument Analysis: It's not that we need any more proof that the American insurance industry avoids regulation by using dirty methods like buying off mayors and hiring marketing firms to manipulate public opinion. It is fun, though, to hold that proof in your hands - and then put it on the internet.

This specification adds mechanisms to the Atom Syndication Format

This specification defines three types of syndicated Web feeds that

Addresses the basics of copyright law and the exclusive rights of the copyright owner, the major exemptions used by cultural heritage institutions, and stresses the importance of “risk assessment” when conducting any digitization project.

Short URL auto-discovery is a simple way to link a long URL with a short URL. The following code should be placed in the <head> section of the HTML page: <link rel="shorturl" href="http://short.com/1234" />

An archive of colour gradients for cartography, technical illustration and design.

Its goal was to develop a theoretical understanding of the records generated by experiential, interactive and dynamic systems, of their process of creation, and of their present and potential use in the artistic, scientific and governmental sectors.

British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries includes the immediate experiences of approximately 500 women, as revealed in over 100,000 pages of diaries and letters.

In the First Person is a free, high quality, professionally published, in-depth index of close to 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world.

Intends to be a dynamic digital library which will understand user queries in the context of a specific discipline, look for content in a domain alien to that discipline and return the results presented in a way useful and comprehensive to the user.

Unless and until some deal can be worked out for digital rights to images, the focus of the digital library is limited to text—just as we enter the golden age of visual narration.

Mailing lists for people with a geneaological interest in Northern Ireland.

Mailing lists for people with a geneaological interest in Ireland.

Cohen sees the potential for partnerships between the lone professional historian and crowds of helpers, particularly as the quantity of historical material increases.

A fully searchable online edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing accounts of over 100,000 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.

An easy to use data access system was developed that meets UNSD’s vision of providing an integrated information resource with current, relevant and reliable statistics free of charge to the global community.

Home of the History of Hip-Hop series.

Digitised pictures of interest to Celticists, PDF files of rare material, selected publications by staff members, Celtic Noticeboard, and tables of contents for select Celtic journals.

Omeka is a simple and flexible system for organizations, cultural institutions, and individuals to manage and publish items, collections, and exhibits on the web.

To the extent it or other search engines limit access to parts of their index, their public-spirited defenses of their archiving and indexing projects are suspect.

Instead of pointing directly to the location of an Internet resource, a PURL points to an intermediate resolution service.

QVIZ will research and create a framework for visualizing and querying archival resources by a time-space interface based on maps and emergent knowledge structures.

The Archive collects and preserves business plans and related planning documents from the Birth of the Dot Com Era so that future generations will be able to learn from this remarkable episode in the history of technology and entrepreneurship.

Many archives and web sites are being asked to remove images of violence that could be shocking or used to support the insurgents in Iraq. Are removals from public view censorship, or a responsible way to limit the effectiveness of propaganda?

NNDB is an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead.

We at iArchives are pioneering the movement from paper to digital. Our powerful, patented technology can convert your data to high quality, searchable, readable PDF files quickly and easily.

At Footnote.com you will find millions of images of original source documents, many of which have never been available online before.

I-School professor whose research includes event gazetteers, narrative structures, and news archives.

The objective of the workshop is to bring together researchers from the Semantic Web field and cultural heritage professionals to discuss the digitalization, annotation, archiving, and retrieval of our cultural heritage in all its forms.

DSpace is an open source digital repository software system for research institutions.

It The BBC is well placed to try and weave the explosion of personal content into a comprehensive narrative that mixes the best of the BBC's archived output with the best of the collective memory and 'citizen history' that they can tap into.

"I had to teach myself genealogy," he said. "Not because I liked genealogy, but because it's how you find things that have been lost."

The clips convey information that the searcher may not have known to look for—often simply through the layout and typeface, which an engine such as Nexis doesn’t preserve.

The Newseum — a 250,000-square-foot museum of news — will offer visitors an experience that blends five centuries of news history with up-to-the-second technology and hands-on exhibits.

Our museum collection displays thoughtfully arranged artifacts of New York City’s rich history, which entice viewers to learn more about the five boroughs.

Editorial cartoon art from the New York Times archives.

The Cartoon Research Library’s primary mission is to develop a comprehensive research collection documenting American printed cartoon art, to organize the materials, and to provide access to these resources.

Engage with production. We can only preserve the living, and the best time and place to preserve is when the connections exist and work and demonstrate the utility of their social value.

The British Cartoon Archive has a library, archive, gallery, and is a registered museum dedicated to the history of British cartooning over the last two hundred years.

This project aims to create an archive of user contributed clip art that can be freely used. All graphics submitted to the project should be placed into the Public Domain

The purpose of this wiki page is to keep track of the Open Clip Art Library's progress of acquiring, converting and archiving the huge source of Public Domain artwork that is available on the internet.

More than 150,000 digitized items — including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts.

Sensors (particularly cameras) can be used directly to access the real world. This will provide much more flexible access than a photo or digitized version would.

I like to think of the blogosphere as a vast, earth-engirdling digestive track, breaking down the news of the day into ever finer particles of meaning (and ever more concentrated toxins).

Can we say it was a mistake? For it was a mistake.

Using the latest laser-scanning technology, CyArk collects the most accurate 3D models of World Heritage Sites and stores them safely in a publicly accessible archive.

Boasts direct integrated access to the Beatport Online Music Store, allowing you to browse their extensive catalogue, pre-listen and buy hot new tracks and download them directly into your library.

The goal of lifelogging: to record and archive all information in one’s life.

It was the so-called ephemera of earlier eras that caused the greatest concern, as these were precisely the materials that would disappear most quickly, and leave holes in the cultural record of their time.

Using Library of Congress Authorities, you can browse and view authority headings for Subject, Name, Title and Name/Title combinations; and download authority records in MARC format for use in a local library system.

[Database] interfaces are modeled on existing genres and media, including the museum because of its archiving and classifying functions...

In today’s technology-rich society this human memory is now supplemented by increasing amounts of personal digital information; emails, photographs, Internet telephone calls, even GPS locations and television viewing logs.

Addressing the archive as an abstract concept, a concrete object, and a practice, we would like to consider theoretical explorations as well as projects focusing on libraries, museums, collections, collectors...

Design and evaluation of digital record-keeping, archival, museum and other evidence-based information systems; metadata for recordkeeping, preservation, and cultural information.

Assistant Professor at the School of Information at UNC Chapel Hill. My major focus is the management and preservation of digital materials.

The washingtonpost.com political team has collected and categorized dozens of political ads according to a wide array of criteria, such as the ad's music, issues mentioned, ad characters, and common visual cues and cliches.

UbuWeb is pleased to present dozens of avant-garde films & videos for your viewing pleasure.

The objective of this project is the development of a set of e-culture demonstrators providing multimedia access to distributed collections of cultural heritage objects.

Composing, nurturing, collecting, maintaining, and making associations within information; the environments and related tools in which these activities take place; and the theory behind these activities and environments.

Research interests include automatic content analysis and annotation of still images, videos and sound for content-driven multimedia archiving and retrieval.

An estimated 100,000 people have squirreled away 9/11 materials. They range from video and document collections to flags, badges, roadside shrines, electronic archives of trade center blogs and even compilations of conspiracy theory materials.