Friday Reads: One Nation Under God by Kevin M. Kruse

Posted in Books, Politics & Law Tagged with: #fridayreads, history, religion

Friday Video: History Channel Presents The Internet

Posted in Internet, video Tagged with: history, internet

New digital archives of interest

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.

Happy browsing!

Posted in ebooks, Libraries Tagged with: archives, history, horror

The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin #fridayreads

Posted in Books Tagged with: #fridayreads, history

Library 2.013 – eBooks & eReaders: Past, Present & Future

Here are the video and my slides from my eBooks & eReaders presentation for the Library 2.013 conference delivered earlier today.

Posted in ebooks, Presentations, Tech Tagged with: #lib2013, ebooks, ereaders, history

American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857 #fridayreads

Posted in Books Tagged with: #fridayreads, history, religion

The History of Television

Posted in Fun Tagged with: entertainment, glove & boot, history, puppets, tv

The Internet: A Warning From History

Posted in Fun, Internet Tagged with: funny, history

The Public Library of US Diplomacy

Wikileaks has added to their Cablegate documents a new collection titled “The Kissinger Cables” and created The Public Library of US Diplomacy Web site. There’s so much here I don’t know where to begin so for now you’ll just have to investigate it yourself.

The Kissinger Cables are part of today’s launch of the WikiLeaks Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD), which holds the world’s largest searchable collection of United States confidential, or formerly confidential, diplomatic communications. As of its launch on April 8, 2013 it holds 2 million records comprising approximately 1 billion words.

WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange stated: “The collection covers US involvements in, and diplomatic or intelligence reporting on, every country on Earth. It is the single most significant body of geopolitical material ever published.”

THE KISSINGER CABLES

“The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.” — Henry A. Kissinger, US Secretary of State, March 10, 1975: http://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/P860114-1573_MC_b.html#efmCS3CUB

The Kissinger Cables comprise more than 1.7 million US diplomatic records for the period 1973 to 1976, including 205,901 records relating to former US Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. Dating from January 1, 1973 to December 31, 1976 they cover a variety of diplomatic traffic including cables, intelligence reports and congressional correspondence. They include more than 1.3 million full diplomatic cables and 320,000 originally classified records. These include more than 227,000 cables classified as “CONFIDENTIAL” and 61,000 cables classified as “SECRET”. Perhaps more importantly, there are more than 12,000 documents with the sensitive handling restriction “NODIS” or ‘no distribution’, and more than 9,000 labelled “Eyes Only”.

At around 700 million words, the Kissinger Cables collection is approximately five times the size of WikiLeaks’ Cablegate. The raw PDF data is more than 380 Gigabytes in size and is the largest WikiLeaks publication to date.

WikiLeaks’ media partners will be reporting throughout the week on their findings. These include significant revelations about US involvements with fascist dictatorships, particularly in Latin America, under Franco’s Spain (including about the Spanish royal family) and in Greece under the regime of the Colonels.

The documents also contain hourly diplomatic reporting on the 1973 war between Israel, Egypt and Syria (the “Yom Kippur war”). While several of these documents have been used by US academic researchers in the past, the Kissinger Cables provides unparalled access to journalists and the general public.

Most of the records were reviewed by the United States Department of State’s systematic 25-year declassification process. At review, the records were assessed and either declassified or kept classified with some or all of the metadata records declassified. Both sets of records were then subject to an additional review by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Once believed to be releasable, they were placed as individual PDFs at the National Archives as part of their Central Foreign Policy Files collection. Despite the review process supposedly assessing documents after 25 years there are no diplomatic records later than 1976. The formal declassification and review process of these extremely valuable historical documents is therefore currently running 12 years late.

The form in which these documents were held at NARA was as 1.7 million individual PDFs. To prepare these documents for integration into the PlusD collection, WikiLeaks obtained and reverse-engineered all 1.7 million PDFs and performed a detailed analysis of individual fields, developed sophisticated technical systems to deal with the complex and voluminous data and corrected a great many errors introduced by NARA, the State Department or its diplomats, for example harmonizing the many different ways in which departments, capitals and people’s names were spelt. All our corrective work is referenced and available from the links in the individual field descriptions on the PlusD text search interface: https://search.wikileaks.org/plusd

Posted in Politics & Law Tagged with: government, history, wikileaks

Libraries Unbound

What started out as an interesting article about the papers of William Henry Seward being digitized at the University of Rochester turns into one about the changing nature of libraries, making it worth the read twice over:

Cornell’s Kenney says that in the wake of the web, the role of libraries on campuses “isn’t as self-evident as it once was. It’s a more complex environment.” 

The key to adapting, for librarians and users alike, is to focus on content rather than format, says Dimmock. “A book, a physical book, is a format. Is it the content that matters? Being a film librarian, I’ve always had to think about those issues. In my back room, I have 16 millimeter. I have laser discs. I have VHS. I have DVD—and now even DVD is dead. They’re just containers. It’s the content.” 

And moving away from that materiality is “a new service model,” she says. “We’ve very much organized around collections, and we have to change the way we think about collections.” As digitization brings greater uniformity to libraries’ collections—publishers sell journals, databases, and other resources in bundles, much like cable companies do channels—rare books and manuscripts take a special place. “I think that the collections that are going to matter the most to libraries are the special collections, because those are the unique things,” says Dimmock. 

While the Internet has made address-hunting trips to the library unnecessary, students’ need for guidance in navigating libraries’ resources is only growing more acute. Students today “have been using technology since they were toddlers,” says Toronto’s Alford, but they don’t necessarily understand how academic information searching works. “There’s extraordinary complexity of information access and discovery.” 

Read the full article @ rochester.edu. (Thanks Dad)

Posted in Libraries Tagged with: history, libraries, rochester