May
07
2015
May 7th, 2015 by Michael Sauers

Scholars at the University of California, Berkeley have pieced together a collection of dispatches written by Mark Twain when the author was a young newsman in San Francisco.

In the letters, the man who would write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, likened the city’s police chief to a dog chasing its tail and accused city government of rascality. Some of the letters carried his flair for embellishment and may not be entirely true.

“This is a very special period in his life, when he’s out here in San Francisco,” said Bob Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project on the Berkeley campus.

“He’s utterly free, he’s not encumbered by a marriage or much of anything else, and he can speak his mind and does speak his mind. These things are wonderful to read, the ones that survived.”

Twain was likely 29 years old when he started filing near-daily columns for the Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada, in 1865. He wrote a 2,000-word story, or “letter,” six days a week for a salary of $100 a month, Hirst said.

Many of the letters were in back issues lost to fires, but Twain scholars picked through archives of other Western U.S. newspapers for copies. They have found about 110 columns written in 1865 and 1866.

Source: http://www.usnews.com/news/entertainment/articles/2015/05/04/berkeleys-mark-twain-project-reveals-cache-of-new-writing

Posted in Books Tagged with: ,

Feb
06
2015
February 6th, 2015 by Michael Sauers

The Rescued Film Project discovers and processes 31 rolls of film shot by an American WWII soldier over 70 years ago.

Filmed By: Tucker Debevec
Audio Engineer: Eric Bower
Original Music: Mark Doubleday
Second Camera: Eric Bower
Edited by: Levi Bettwieser

Posted in Photos Tagged with: , ,

Jan
30
2015
January 30th, 2015 by Michael Sauers

The Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play has launched a Tumblr page to highlight their collection. Check them out @ http://libraryandarchivesofplay.tumblr.com/

Posted in Libraries Tagged with: , , ,

Jan
16
2015
January 16th, 2015 by Michael Sauers

The Wire takes a tour of the British Library’s Sound Archive, deep below its London residences on the Euston Road, to talk about sound conservation and take a tour of its collections with some of its key sound curators.

“The 20th century was about audiovisual material, our memory of the 20th century is heavily audiovisual, but our sense of the 21st century is going to be a different kind of audiovisual… archiving is not going to be so much about what we can bring in, but about what to exclude,” says Will Prentice, British Library Audio Engineer and Conservation Specialist.

Nathan Budzinski interviews Popular Music Curator Andy Linehan, Audio Engineer, Conservation specialist Will Prentice, and Wildlife Sounds Curator Cheryl Tipp.

Posted in Libraries, video Tagged with: , ,

Jan
14
2015
January 14th, 2015 by Michael Sauers

TolkienAs part of its vast collection of literary and historic treasures (the Magna Carta, Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook), the British Library owns some six million sound recordings, including significant theater productions, famous voices (like J.R.R. Tolkien’s), and field recordings of extinct animals. Some of them date back to the earliest and most fragile days of recording technology.

Now, as the Telegraph reports, the library is launching an urgent campaign to digitize and preserve its collection.

Read the full post @ IO9.

Posted in Audio, Libraries Tagged with: ,

Oct
29
2014
October 29th, 2014 by Michael Sauers

Havelin CollectionThe University of Iowa Libraries has announced a major digitization initiative, in partnership with the UI Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development. 10,000 science fiction fanzines will be digitized from the James L. “Rusty” Hevelin Collection, representing the entire history of science fiction as a popular genre and providing the content for a database that documents the development of science fiction fandom…

The fanzine portion of the Hevelin Collection, numbering approximately 10,000 fanzines, will be digitized in its entirety.

“Nothing on this scale has been attempted with fanzines before, and we are thrilled to be able to finally address the concern we have been hearing for years from fans and scholars, to find a way to enable them to discover exactly what these pieces contain,” says Greg Prickman, head of special collections.

Once digitized, the fanzines will be incorporated into the UI Libraries’ DIY History interface, where a select number of interested fans (up to 30) will be provided with secure access to transcribe, annotate, and index the contents of the fanzines. This group will be modeled on an Amateur Press Association (APA) structure, a fanzine distribution system developed in the early days of the medium that required contributions of content from members in order to qualify for, and maintain, membership in the organization. The transcription will enable the UI Libraries to construct a full-text searchable fanzine resource, with links to authors, editors, and topics, while protecting privacy and copyright by limiting access to the full set of page images.

To learn more about the project and to follow its progress, visit here.

Read the full article @ now.uiowa.edu.

Posted in ebooks, Libraries Tagged with: , ,

Oct
28
2014
October 28th, 2014 by Michael Sauers

memento_chrome_extension

Memento wants to make it as straightforward to access the Web of the past as it is to access the current Web.

If you know the URI of a Web resource, the technical framework proposed by Memento allows you to see a version of that resource as it existed at some date in the past, by entering that URI in your browser like you always do and by specifying the desired date in a browser plug-in. Or you can actually browse the Web of the past by selecting a date and clicking away. Whatever you land upon will be versions of Web resources as they were around the selected date. Obviously, this will only work if previous versions are available somewhere on the Web. But if they are, and if they are on servers that support the Memento framework, you will get to them. 

Posted in Tech Tagged with: ,

Oct
20
2014
October 20th, 2014 by Michael Sauers

Do it for herThe National Library of Medicine is pleased to announce that it is now a participating institution of the Commons on Flickr.

The Commons on Flickr was launched in 2008 as a pilot project in partnership with the Library of Congress in order to increase access to publicly-held photography collections and to invite the general public to provide information about the collections. The National Library of Medicine now joins a distinguished, international group of nearly one hundred cultural institutions in providing greater access to its collection and inviting public use of and engagement with these images held in the public trust through The Commons on Flickr.

Images from the historical collections of the History of Medicine Division, including public health posters, book illustrations, photographs, fine art work, and ephemera, have always been available through the Images from the History of Medicine database, which includes over 70,000 images illustrating the social and historical aspects of medicine dated from the 15th to the 21st century. Now, people can also access them through the Commons on Flickr via a photostream where visitors can contribute information about the images by adding comments and tags. By adding a new way to see our collections through Flickr we hope to learn more details about our collections, create dialog about our holdings, and share knowledge with the public. Our collection of images on Flickr will continue to grow so we hope visitors will check back frequently for new content.

Source: NLM

Posted in Libraries Tagged with: ,

Sep
16
2014
September 16th, 2014 by Michael Sauers

Partisan ReviewFounded in 1934 , Partisan Review magazine was one of the most significant cultural literary journals in the U.S. Throughout its 69-year history (with a brief interregnum in November 1936 to Nov. 1937), Partisan Review editors and contributors have viewed critically both liberal and conservative agendas. Apart from an early connection to the Communist Party, it has eschewed party affiliation.

In addition to art and book reviews, Partisan Review contributors wrote on the cultural and political subjects of the day, ranging from psychology and political theories to feature columns from intellectuals who reported on World War II and the Holocaust, the reintegration of Europe, September 11 and the global rise of terrorism, among other topics. For almost seven decades, the magazine published firsthand accounts of American and European arts and culture, and the political scene of various countries.

Partisan Review is valued for its legendary editors, William Phillips, Philip Rahv (two of its founding editors), and Edith Kurzweil. They provided a forum to publish creative essays, commentary, book reviews, and book excerpts by such writers as Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Marge Piercy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roger Shattuck, Susan Sontag, William Styron, Lionel Trilling, and Robert Penn Warren. The entire list of editors and writers is a virtual who’s-who of the cultural and literary world.

Find it @ the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.

Posted in ebooks Tagged with:

Sep
09
2014
September 9th, 2014 by Michael Sauers

The Eaton CollectionA few weeks ago it looked like the Eaton Science Fiction and Fantasy collection at UC Riverside might get shut down. Well, they’ve received a life-saving gift:

The gift comes from the estate of Jay Kay Klein, who worked in advertising for General Electric and Carrier and had a passion for photography and science fiction. Klein began taking photos of science fiction writers and fans at conventions in the 1940s and kept at it for much of his life. He died in 2012 at 80.

By then he already had donated his $1.4 million photo collection to UCR, largely because of the relationship he had established with Melissa Conway, the library’s special collections director.

Read the full article @ Riverside County’s Press Enterprise.

Posted in Libraries Tagged with: ,

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