Archives Issues

From The Punch:

Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, is teaming up with a number of academics in the culture sector to halt the transfer of the archives of Ulli and Georgina Beier from Osogbo, Osun State, to the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library, Abeokuta, Ogun State.

The process of securing the transfer of the cultural museum, Soyinka contended, was “devious, fraudulent, manipulative and a grand deception”[…]

From The New Times: Rwandas First Daily:

THE East African Law Society (EALS) together with the Open University of Tanzania have organized a two-day consultative workshop to discuss the future of the archives of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) ahead of winding up of the tribunal set for 2010.

The meeting scheduled for August 16-17 in Arusha will bring together experts, legislators from EALS, archivists and curators who will be lobbying for and eliciting positive responses towards ensuring the retention of ICTR Archives for posterity here in East Africa.

From LibraryJournal:

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) recently awarded $255,040 to the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Information to study the collection and preservation of massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, which often involve interactive role-playing.

LJ checked in with Assistant Professor Megan Winget about her history with gaming, the goal and scope of her project, games as they relate to art, and which institutions she feels are best suited to collecting and preserving videogame materials[…]

Maarja Krusten posted a note to the Archives&Archivists listserv alerting us that the FAS has posted on its website a pdf of the hearing record from the February 22, 2007 hearing on the Presidential Libraries donation disclosure process. The record includes the actual transcript of the questions to and answers of Assistant Archivist for Presidential Libraries Sharon Fawcett.

From The Tehran Times:

Iran launched its first world manuscripts data bank during a ceremony held on Monday at the venue of Iran National Library and Archives (INLA)…

Following his address, [project executive Naser] Golbaz talked more about the project. He said that at present, the bank has collected data on more than 280,000 manuscripts from around the world, adding, “Iran maintains a collection of manuscripts that contains the largest number among the countries of the world. Iran has also made the most strenuous efforts in collecting the manuscripts.”

From fcw.com:

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has joined the Library of Congress in the ongoing development of an online library that will make historical and cultural documents from around the word available online.

The World Digital Library project is a partnership of libraries, universities and associations worldwide that are working to provide access, free of charge and in multilingual format, to primary documents considered important by different cultures. […]

Activist Archivists - from Mississippi’s wlbt.com:

The Mississippi Department of Archives and History is petitioning the Department of Transportation to drop a controversial plan to expand U.S. Highway 61.

I caught this post , “Meeting with the nation’s archivists,” on the Ancestry.com blog.  Its author, Al Viera, discusses partnerships, attendance at the recent NAGARA conference, and support for PAHR.

[At the conference] Ancestry.com also announced that we would be awarding $1.5 million in digitization services grants through State Archives in the first quarter of 2009. We handed out Grant Packets to nearly 70 interested parties and there was palpable excitement over the announcement.

A reader’s comment to this post, written from a genealogist’s perspective, highlights some different issues as well.  Acknowledging that Ancestry.com should listen to the concerns of state and local archivists, the commenter also writes that “the concerns of experienced genealogists do not always, however, mesh with some archivists’ view of how best to conduct digitization projects.”

On the History News Network site, Maarja Kursten writes:

As for the National Archives, it is vulnerable to being trapped between two cultures. One is the Presidential, which, as David Gergen pointed out in 2000, has become increasingly dependent on spin. The other is scholarly, which is dependent on facts. As long as statutes fail to recognize the gap between the cultures, the Archives will be left alone to work through the many challenges that surround its difficult but important mission.

From Andrew Adam Newman’s story in The New York Times:

“I bet you would be hard pressed to find a household in the U.S. that doesn’t have at least a couple cassette tapes hanging around,” said Shawn DuBravac, an economist with the Consumer Electronics Association. Even if publishers of music and audio books stopped using cassettes entirely, people would still shop for tape players because of “the huge libraries of legacy content consumers have kept,” he said.

As long as people keep mix tapes from a high-school sweetheart up in the attic, Mr. DuBravac said, there will still be the urge to hear them. “People have a tremendous amount of installed content and an innate curiosity when coming across a box of tapes to say, ‘Hey, what’s on these?’ ” he said.

p.s. I haven’t personally digitized my high school mix tapes (yet).