With ThinkUp, your social activity is stored in a database that you control, making it easy to search, sort, analyze, publish and display activity from your network. All you need is a web server that can run a PHP application.

"The BBC Domesday Project was a pair of interactive videodiscs made by the BBC in London to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book and published in November 1986. It was one of the major interactive projects of its time, and it was undertaken on a scale not seen since."

"Archives

Kevin Kelly on browsing at the Prelinger Library. "But stacks of paper offer several user experiences that are superior to online browsing."

"Librarianship is a profession steeped in ethics. But now more than ever some of those staunch ethical positions put libraries at odds with evolving user expectations when it comes to privacy and the use of commercial tools and services.

This tension served as the starting point for an online symposium held November 17, which brought together more than 400 librarians for a session on "The Ethics of Innovation: Navigating Privacy, Policy and Service Issues." The event was cosponsored by Library Journal and OCLC, and has been archived for later viewing."

"I often find myself thinking about the epistemological (and ethical) status of the archive. This is a gap in our pedagogy that warrants attention. At the most basic of levels -- how did this material come to be available to me as historian and what are my obligations to these material traces?
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"How does an archivist discover relationships or find information in a sea of millions of digital records? With the proliferation of digital records, the task of an archivist has grown exponentially more complex. This problem is especially acute for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the federal government agency responsible for managing, preserving and ensuring transparency in access to federal government digital records documenting our nation’s history, our democratic processes, and the rights of American citizens. "

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is established in the permafrost in the mountains of Svalbard, is designed to store duplicates of seeds from seed collections around the globe. Many of these collections are in developing countries. If seeds are lost, e.g. as a result of natural disasters, war or simply a lack of resources, the seed collections may be reestablished using seeds from Svalbard.

Around the world, key scientific data are at risk of being lost, either because they are held on fragile or obsolete media or because they may be destroyed by researchers who are unaware of their value. Now a team of scientists is planning to scour museums and research institutes to draw up a global inventory of threatened data. Launched on 29 October, shortly after the biennial conference of the Committee on Data for Science and Technology in Stellenbosch, South Africa, the project aims to publish the inventory online in 2012.

So what appears to us as “too much information” could just be the freedom from necessity. I don’t have to worry about find ing and cut ting and storing fire wood: I don’t even have to man age a coal furnace.  That attention has been freed up for other things. What we see as “too much informa­tion” is probably some thing more like “a surplus of free attention.”

As a historian, I no longer have to spend hours scanning texts to find the smaller sets of information  I need. They pop up quickly when I deal with digitized texts, and the search process is stream lined and auto mated much in the way a gas burner stream lines and auto mates a wood stove.

Award winning SHERPA is investigating issues in the future of scholarly communication. It is developing open-access institutional repositories in universities to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research. SHERPA services and the SHERPA Partnership are both based at the Centre for Research Communications at the University of Nottingham.

In the history of science, the 20th century is unique in terms of the sheer scale, social importance, and intellectual diversity of the scientific enterprise, and the closeness of its relationship to the development and design of technology.  This can create some intimidating historiographical challenges...
The question, though, is whether the local narrative is revealing or reflective. I like to think of the archive as something like a Greek oracle. It always answers no matter what you ask it, and if you get a cryptic answer, you always think it’s an answer to the question you’ve asked. In a sense, the themes highlighted in Berkner’s work are perennial. Any given organizational decision may reflect these themes, without the problems suggested by them necessarily being in the balance.

Leslie Carr
Southampton, Hampshire, United Kingdom
I am an e-researcher in e-Research, a repository manager, the Technical Director for EPrints repository software and the Director of EPrints Services, a repository hosting company that funds software development for EPrints. I am also a Director of the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre at Southampton, where we run MScs and PhDs about the impact of the Web on human society, and vice versa..

The historical documents and archival records at the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) are for the first time being evaluated, arranged, and cataloged in a systematic and comprehensive way. The goals of this project are to establish an archive that is efficiently accessible, and to produce a descriptive catalog that will be useful both as a finding-aid and as a research tool.

Long-term preservation and stewardship of scientific data and research-related information are vitally important to future science and scholarship. Scientific data archives can offer capabilities for managing and preserving disciplinary and interdisciplinary data for research, education, and decision-making activities of future communities of users. Meeting the requirements for a trusted digital repository will help to ensure that today’s collections of scientific data will be available in the future. A continuing self-assessment of a long-term archive for interdisciplinary scientific data is being conducted to identify the additional steps needed for it to become a trustworthy repository. Recommendations include a strategy for collaborative organizational sustainability, a model for submission and workflow to ingest interdisciplinary scientific data into a repository, and a plan for facilitating intra-organizational transfer between repositories.

Dorothea Salo examines how library systems and procedures need to change to accommodate research data.

NAGARA is the only professional association dedicated solely to helping government archivists and records managers. Annual meetings provide an opportunity to meet with colleagues (federal, state and local) and learn from their experiences.

In this scenario — what would the role of the curator be? Instead of doing all the curatorial work themselves, professional museum curators would rather develop guidelines for how the network of distributed curators shall curate and preserve; the professionals would also distribute protocols for registration in a wiki-based central database; and, most importantly, they would spend much time and energy raising discussions among the practitioners of why the scientific, technological, and medical heritage is worth keeping and its role in the creation of cultural identity. In short, the main role of professional museum curators would be to build a distributed curatorial experience.

Archival repositories are increasingly considering mass digitization as a means of meeting user expectations that materials be available online, remotely. Copyright is frequently noted as a significant obstacle to these efforts, but little empirical data exist on the copyright permissions process in archives. This article reports the findings of a study of the copyright permissions process for the Jon Cohen AIDS Research Collection at the University of Michigan. Specifically, the study sought to reveal how much effort is required to seek copyright permissions, what the results of those efforts would be, and whether or not there were traits of documents or copyright holders that were associated with accept or denial status. The study found that significant time is required to contact and negotiate with rights holders and that the biggest obstacle to getting permission is non-response.

My work centers on understanding the complex cultural transformations brought about by the change from an analog archive to one whose substructure is a digital network.

In 2009, DPC with University of London Computer Centre and Portico carried out an extensive analysis for the JISC Digitisation Programme, examining the projects funded through this programme and assessing their plans for access beyond the existence of their project grants. A scaled down version of the report with analysis is published here and a number of case studies have also been produced.

The primary purpose of the Grid Workloads Archive is to provide (anonymized) workload traces from grid environments to researchers and to practitioners alike.

Mark me well, incidentally: it is unreasonable and unsustainable to expect data archivists to build a whole lot of project-specific shiny stuff. You don't want your data archivists spending their precious development cycles doing that! You want your archivists bothering about machine replacement cycles, geographically-dispersed backups, standards, metadata, access rights, file formats, auditing and repair, and all that good work.

As digital technologies are expanding the power and reach of research, they are also raising complex issues. These include complications in ensuring the validity of research data; standards that do not keep pace with the high rate of innovation; restrictions on data sharing that reduce the ability of researchers to verify results and build on previous research; and huge increases in the amount of data being generated, creating severe challenges in preserving that data for long-term use.

Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age examines the consequences of the changes affecting research data with respect to three issues - integrity, accessibility, and stewardship-and finds a need for a new approach to the design and the management of research projects.

This is a web version of Aspen, a multimedia magazine of the arts published by Phyllis Johnson from 1965 to 1971. Each issue came in a customized box filled with booklets, phonograph recordings, posters, postcards — one issue even included a spool of Super-8 movie film. It's all here.

Ensuring the Integrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age examines the consequences of the changes affecting research data with respect to three issues - integrity, accessibility, and stewardship-and finds a need for a new approach to the design and the management of research projects. The report recommends that all researchers receive appropriate training in the management of research data, and calls on researchers to make all research data, methods, and other information underlying results publicly accessible in a timely manner. The book also sees the stewardship of research data as a critical long-term task for the research enterprise and its stakeholders. Individual researchers, research institutions, research sponsors, professional societies, and journals involved in scientific, engineering, and medical research will find this book an essential guide to the principles affecting research data in the digital age.

How online communities are born -- and what happens when they die.

Alma Swan, in a report well worth reading, posits four kinds of data-curation staff: data creators, data managers, data librarians, and data scientists. I'm not sure how far I can go with that. I agree with the skillsets as Swan lays them out; I'm just agog at the idea that any institution or research shop will be able to divvy up these tasks among four whole people!

The eScholarship Editions collection includes almost 2000 books from academic presses on a range of topics, including art, science, history, music, religion, and fiction.

Access to the entire collection of electronic books is open to all University of California faculty, staff, and students, while over 500 of the titles are available to the public. Print versions of many of the electronic books can be purchased directly from the publishers.

When even scholars wanting to do the right thing and hand off their work to a responsible party cannot find anywhere to go, when enabling digital communication and the preservation of its results is an altruistic act in libraries instead of the bedrock of our mission, when worthy digital projects die because we in libraries do not notice and reach out to them, when we ourselves can't see our way clear to sustaining digital materials… we have a serious systemic problem.

A hierarchy of needs for data-curation: acquisition, physical medium, bitrot, format viability, usability, fidelity to original.

There is growing interest in the issues of preservation and re-use of the records of science, in the "digital era". The aim of the PARSE.Insight project, partly financed by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Program, is twofold: to provide an assessment of the current activities, trends and risks in the field of digital preservation of scientific results, from primary data to published articles

The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages.

Welcome to The Collected Wisdom of MagicTalk!

MagicTalk is a wonderful web discussion forum where magicians of all ability levels discuss every aspect of magic, from getting started, to reviews of various books and effects, to being a professional magician.

Given this mechanism, there is a risk that unexpected phenomena, not predicted by any current theory and hence not included in the subset of collisions deemed interesting, will be eliminated by the data filtering process. In this case, and in a paradoxical way, the theories that we construct to amplify our view of physical reality will actually limit what we can know about nature.

Coordinating group work to archive disappearing internet sites.

Argues that museums need to "support the community with reliable, consistent services and supreme awesomeness." The last of which is left as an incredible gaping hole. Is it really so bad for museums to plod along? Isn't that a feature rather than a bug for an institution that has CONSERVATION as one of its major goals to plod along through economic thick and thin?

The problem is that many kinds of objects go through a period in their potential lifespans when they don't "pencil out"—they're not worth keeping or preserving because they're not worth any money.

A central question of this conference is how can repositories – national, regional and local - help academics and all people whose lives are becoming increasingly digital, to secure, preserve and organise their personal digital archives for themselves and for their families.

The Digital Lives Research Project is designed to provide a major pathfinding study of personal digital collections.

links to National Film Board of Canada, Univ Pennsylvania, etc.

PhilPapers is a comprehensive directory of online philosophy articles and books by academic philosophers. We monitor journals in many areas of philosophy, as well as archives and personal pages. We also accept articles directly from users, who can provide links or upload copies.

So, it's quite upsetting to see Google cave on this. The settlement does not establish any sort of precedent on the legality of creating such an index of books, and, if anything pushes things in the other direction, saying that authors and publishers now have the right to determine what innovations there can be when it comes to archiving and indexing works of content.

SDA is a set of programs for the documentation and Web-based analysis of survey data. There are also procedures for creating customized subsets of datasets. This set of programs is developed and maintained by the Computer-assisted Survey Methods Program (CSM) at the University of California, Berkeley.

Welcome to DataDepot, a site that lets you track, analyze, and share trend lines.

Founded in 1982, the Twin Cities Archives Round Table (TCART) includes members from the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area, as well as out-state Minnesota and western Wisconsin. Members include archivists, manuscript curators, librarians, records managers, and historians representing government agencies, county and state historical societies, colleges and universities, religious organizations, private historical organizations, and corporations.