Standing up and being counted

I fully support equal civil rights for gay,lesbian,bisexual,and transgendered Americans. Period.

For those of you who haven’t been involved in the various discussions on the Archives &Archivists listserv or on other blogs,this might be a bit of a departure from my usual posts. I’ve been tossing this post around [...]

Crowdsourcing the Smithsonian:There are prizes!

Fifteen museums and cultural institutions (including the Smithsonian American Art Museum) are participating in Wikipedia Loves Art ,a scavenger hunt/content-building contest that looks like a whole lot of fun. Check out the Flickr group and rules here.

Some of the prizes that looked most toothsome to me:

Indianapolis Museum of Art

The photographer with [...]

Shrinking state budgets affecting archives

 A quick roundup of recent articles about the effects of state budgets on archives and preservation.

 Economy hurts effort to preserve the past- The Columbus Dispatch

“Preserving the past is important,but if governments don’t start spending and borrowing less,there won’t be much of a future left for our kids to enjoy,”Sepp said.

[...]

MLK in Memphis:A view from the mountaintop

 

Memphis TV station WHBQ put together a website containing historical video footage from the Memphis sanitation workers strike that brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to their city during a period of demonstrations and unrest. Take a look here:A View From the Mountaintop

I think this is an interesting example of a group [...]

Access isn’t the only thing that’s important

As an archivist (and come to think of it,as a person),outreach is something that I am passionate about. When I hear stories like the one below,my first instinct is:how can I help? How can I make this better?

The story,from NPR:Saving Folk History,One Recording at a Time

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A few digital thoughts,plus one about dancing archivists

 Some thoughts on this sunny Sunday morning:

-Reading this article (“Does Facebook Replace Face Time?”) and thinking about the changing nature of friendships and relationships with regard to digital interaction,I wanted to think a bit more about the impact that digital availability can have from the perspective of archives and users. Certainly in some [...]

Want a Popemobile? A 1904 Oldsmobile Touring Runabout? Step right up to the auction block…

 

One “solution”that I think we’ll be hearing more about as the economic climate gets tougher:attempting to sell parts (or all of) a collection. The General Motors Heritage Collection has announced that they are selling cars from their collection this month,including hundreds of concept and rare vehicles that have been stored [...]

Collection talk in a fragile economic climate

Welcome back from the holiday break!

The roads are icy here this morning,and classes won’t start for another two days,so campus is a fairly quiet place. I’ve found that this is a great time to get work done in my office. Sadly,the campus Starbucks has restricted hours until the students return…so [...]

Ingesting electronic records–the Bush papers

One of the more exasperating things about travel (and particularly holiday travel) is the dearth of time that I seem to have for sitting down and thinking (and then posting) about things that I want to discuss–and I’ve been doing a lot of traveling over the past few months.  Something that I’ve been thinking [...]

What is the line between professional and personal lives?

I think that Russell over at Records Junkie proposed something earlier this week that is probably of interest to some–the idea of creating “identity-based”interest groups through SAA. This could be a place where like-minded archivists meet up with other like-minded archivists around activities that they enjoy. I bet there are probably some folks [...]