Solomon Lartey spent the first five months of the Trump administration working in the Old Executive Office Building, standing over a desk with scraps of paper spread out in front of him.
Lartey, who earned an annual salary of $65,969 as a records management analyst, was a career government official with close to 30 years under his belt. But he had never seen anything like this in any previous administration he had worked for. He had never had to tape the president’s papers back together again.
Armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape, Lartey and his colleagues would sift through large piles of shredded paper and put them back together, he said, “like a jigsaw puzzle.” Sometimes the papers would just be split down the middle, but other times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti.
Listen to audio-recorded readings of former Consultants in Poetry Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Frost; Nobel Laureates Mario Vargas Llosa and Czeslaw Milosz, and renowned writers such as Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, and Kurt Vonnegut read from their work at the Library of Congress.
The Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature at the Library of Congress dates back to 1943, when Allen Tate was Consultant in Poetry. It contains nearly two thousand recordings—of poets and prose writers participating in literary events at the Library’s Capitol Hill campus as well as sessions at the Library’s Recording Laboratory.
Most of these recordings are captured on magnetic tape reels, and only accessible at the Library itself. In digitizing the archive and presenting it online, the Library hopes to greatly broaden its use and value. The material featured on this online presentation represents a sample of this collection. The site will continue to provide additional items from this archive on a monthly basis over the next several years.
Find the collection @ http://www.loc.gov/collections/archive-of-recorded-poetry-and-literature
The Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery contain some of the most important holdings of Asian art in the world. In addition, the Freer Gallery boasts exemplary examples of late nineteenth-century works by James McNeill Whistler and his American contemporaries. The Sackler Gallery is host to contemporary art from Asia as well as international loan exhibitions. Together, both Galleries form the national museums of Asian art at the Smithsonian and are dedicated to the acquisition, care, study, and exhibition of works in their collections.
Image: Boy Viewing Mount Fuji, 1839,Katsushika Hokusai, (Japanese, 1760-1849)
Now the M-DISC™ comes in a 25GB Blu-ray! With all of the longevity benefits of our original DVD, the Blu-ray gives you over five times the storage capacity on one disc.
As technology rapidly advances, we’re living longer, doing more, creating more memories and recording more data. Every scrapbooker, business owner, photographer, every person fears losing the legacy they have spent their lifetime creating. M-DISC™ eliminates that fear. Once written, your documents, medical records, photos, videos and data will last up to 1,000 years. “Just M-Disc™ and Forget It!”
M-DISC™ is the only data storage solution to withstand rigorous testing by the U.S. Department of Defense. Even today’s leading archival optical discs weren’t up to the challenge. M-DISC™ is resistant to extreme conditions of light, temperature, humidity and more. M-DISC™ cannot be overwritten, erased or corrupted by natural processes. Best of all, it’s compatible with any DVD drive, so you can access your data anywhere, anytime.
The New York Times archives are full of advertisements that give glimpses into daily life and cultural history. Help us digitize our historic ads by answering simple questions. You’ll be creating a unique resource for historians, advertisers and the public — and leaving your mark on history.
The Invisible Photograph: Part 1 (Underground)
A safe haven for thousands of images happens to be hundreds of feet underground in a repurposed limestone mine.
The Invisible Photograph: Part II (Trapped)
In Part 2 of The Invisible Photograph, see how a team of computer scientists, archivists, artists, and curators teamed up to unearth Andy Warhol’s lost digital works.
For the archivist, it means that the paper they once collected – manuscripts for novels, notepads, UN speeches and what have you – no longer exist, or never came into existence. What paper material that arrives for archiving now is more ephemeral: thank-you notes, ticket stubs, dinner-table seating plans and cocktail-napkin sketches. Manuscripts now exist almost entirely electronically, and there’s apparently not that much interest in a laser printout of a book in its early stages, or even in the final drafts where a back and forth with an editor is evident. Archivists want the first draft only, and they want it written by hand, the thinking being that with handwriting you have a true neurological record of a book’s pregnancy and birth.
Somehow I’ve been bookmarking a whole bunch of articles about new digital archives lately that I’ve decided to just dump them all into a single post.
The Discordian Archives HistoriaDiscordia.com is dedicated to documenting the origins and history of the Discordian Society and as a vehicle to provide updates and information on forthcoming book projects related to the Discordian Archives.
And what are the Discordian Archives? Geez, I thought you would never ask.
The Discordian Archives are, of course, Greg Hill’s archives, who—along with Kerry Thornley—co-founded Discordianism in the late 1950s. Not only was Greg one incredibly gifted individual, but he meticulously saved damn near every project he ever worked on. And that was a good thing
Franklin
On December 4, 2013, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library launched FRANKLIN. What is FRANKLIN you ask? FRANKLIN is a virtual research room and digital repository that provides free and open access to the digitized collections of the Roosevelt Library – to everyone, anywhere in the world. Whether you are a lover of history, a student working on a school project, or an experienced scholar and author, FRANKLIN opens a door to some of the most significant and in-demand historical materials our Library has to offer. Now you can search by keyword, browse through photograph galleries and document lists, and for the first time open whole folders of archival documents online – a level of discovery that till now was only possible in-person.
The Pulp Magazines Project The Pulp Magazines Project is an open-access digital archive dedicated to the study and preservation of one of the twentieth century’s most influential literary & artistic forms: the all-fiction pulpwood magazine. The Project also provides information on the history of this important but long neglected medium, along with biographies of pulp authors, artists, and their publishers.
Warren Publishing Archive
Warren Publishing was an American magazine company founded by James Warren, who published his first magazines in 1957 and continued in the business for decades. Magazines published by Warren include After Hours, Creepy, Eerie, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Help!, and Vampirella. Initially based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the company relocated by 1965 to New York City, New York.Begun by James Warren, Warren Publishing’s initial publications were the horror-fantasy-science fiction movie magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland and Monster World, both edited by Forrest J Ackerman. Warren soon published Spacemen magazine and in 1960 Help! magazine, with the first employee of the magazine being Gloria Steinem. After first introducing what he called “Monster Comics” in Monster World, Warren expanded in 1964 with horror-comics stories in the sister magazines Creepy and Eerie — black-and-white publications in a standard magazine format, rather that comic-book size, and selling for 35 cents as opposed to the standard comic-book price of 12 cents. Such a format, Warren explained, averted the restrictions of the Comics Code Authority, the comic-book industry’s self-censorship body: The Comics Code saved the industry from turmoil, but at the same time, it had a cleansing kind of effect on comics, making them ‘clean, proper and family-oriented’. […] We would overcome this by saying to the Code Authority, the industry, the printers, and the distributors: ‘We are not a comic book; we are a magazine. Creepy is magazine-sized and will be sold on magazine racks, not comic book racks’. Creepy’s manifesto was brief and direct: First, it was to be a magazine format, 8½” × 11″, going to an older audience not subject to the Code Authority.” By publishing graphic stories in a magazine format to which the Code did not apply, Warren paved the way for such later graphic-story magazines as the American version of Heavy Metal; Marvel Comics’ Epic Illustrated; Psycho and other “horror-mood” series from Skywald Publications; and Warren’s own line of magazines.
