An interesting video from the people at Planets about the British Library project to digitise their 19th Century newpaper collection. "The film is the first of four Planets case studies showing how national libraries and archives in Europe are using Planets tools to preserve large and valuable digital collections."
The video is also available on the Digital Preservation Europe youtube channel.
On 24th March, the National Archives joined the Flickr Commons group. There's a post about it on the Flickr blog but really just go and check out their photostream as they've got some great stuff including Jane Austen's will from 1817!!!
The Vatican has put some of its documents covering a 142 year period online here. The documents can be viewed with a very good zooming system and include lots of interesting things like the proceedings of the trial against Galileo Galilei and background information about the particular document here is the Galileo trial info.
Their site has other cool features like a virtual tour of their rooms.
From ArchivesNext, the Archivist of the United States has a blog. Trying to work out if collector in chief or keeper of the records of Scotland is a cooler title. I think the 'keeper' has it as that's his real job title and I can't find anything that say that the 'collector' is official.
In an attempt to give this blog some love, I'm going to start sharing some of the cool archive related blogs that I've got bookmarked each week.
This week its Letters of Note, a lovely blog that provides images of original letters along with their transcripts for those letters that the editor Shaun Usher believes deserves a wider audience. More information about the blog and the idea behind it is available here and here.
So if you're an archivist with a letter, telegram, note or postcard that you'd like to share get in touch as the site welcomes submissions.
Interesting article from the Guardian here about the History of Advertising Trust's project to create a Ghostsign Archive. This aims to collect image to create "a permanent photographic record of advertising painted directly onto brickwork within the UK."
There seems to have already been in existence a Ghostsigns project that set up a Flickr group called ghostsigns to collect images. This group has nearly 4,000 images at the moment and 415 members which is pretty impressive.
More information about the whole thing is available from their blog and on their website.
Its got me thinking about the ghostsigns I pass every day.
A video by the Rauch Brothers who have animated the story of 86-year-old World War II veteran Joseph Robertson who fought at the Battle of the Bulge. Over 60 years later, he still can't forget one soldier he killed there.
Germans in the Woods from Rauch Brothers on Vimeo.
This story was captured as part of the Story Corps project. Story Corps is an organisation working in the United States that aims "to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening." It is one of the largest oral history project with over 50,000 people sharing their stories since 2003.
I've been thinking about making use of some elements of the various oral history techniques in my work to capture at least some of the knowledge our staff and volunteers have about collections and the shipbuilding and engineering industries in Scotland. As a result I've been reading a lot about oral history projects and techniques.
The Story Corps approach appealed to me and I thought I would include it here as I think it has several web 2.0 elements to it. They encourage collaboration with others (for more information about the collaboration between Rauch Brothers and Story Corps see here), their make hundreds of the recordings available on their website to listen to and also have podcasts.
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