Categories
History

Archives need to get digitally with it?

flat tablet pc

Interesting piece in the Guardian about the affordability of research:

It is the age of the digital historian. Technology gives researchers the means of carrying out their work more effectively and quickly, and archivists need to respond positively to these changes. Without encouraging researchers to use and disseminate their material, archive buildings risk becoming populated only by those with the incomes to be able to indulge in research – and we will all be poorer for it.

Full article.

Categories
Digital

Digital Archives

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pshab/5771179476/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pshab/5771179476/

Digital content has been around for 20+ years, and is now formally being collected.

All British print publications have been held by the libraries since 1662. But from today, says Lucie Burgess, the library’s head of content strategy, this has been extended “to capture the digital universe as well”.

The 4.8 million websites using the .uk domain will all be collected and made accessible from January 2014, though certain material will be available earlier. Other British websites with .org and .com domain names should follow soon after.

Read full article… what further ramifications does this mean for a society in which we say that our past is all recorded? As a historian I’m thinking, even if it all is, we’re going to be selective in what we search for/access, and how it’s categorised will change access…

Categories
History

BUNAC Archives: Anyone find a home?

imagesBUNAC – I nearly looked to go with them for my first overseas experiences…

“Ultimately, if we cannot find a home for this material, it will finish up going through the shredder and being recycled. I think that would be a tragedy, but I cannot see an alternative,” David Heathcote, former Bunac national committee member, told Times Higher Education.

“The material traces the changes in attitude among young people to the US from the time of the Vietnam War to the present day. There must surely be a PhD thesis in the material, at least.

Read full article.

Categories
Academic Digital

Twitter is Archived….

“Have you ever sent out a “tweet” on the popular Twitter social media service?  Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress.

That’s right.  Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.”

“Just a few examples of important tweets in the past few years include the first-ever tweet from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (http://twitter.com/jack/status/20), President Obama’s tweet about winning the 2008 election (http://twitter.com/barackobama/status/992176676), and a set of two tweets from a photojournalist who was arrested in Egypt and then freed because of a series of events set into motion by his use of Twitter (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/786571964) and (http://twitter.com/jamesbuck/status/787167620).”

Read full story.

I thought this was a good comment:

  1. Joshua Rogers April 16, 2010 at 1:05 amMost of the negative comments on here seem to be quite odd. It’s as though most people believe that removing a tweet actually removes all record of its existence. Google archives twitter, different websites aggregate tweets, tweets get retweeted or sent to cell phones. Once it’s out, it’s out.

    There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Showing anger at the Library of Congress for archiving tweets also shows a lack of understanding about how the internet works. Anyone requiring a warning that words can’t be unsaid should probably not be using such a service (or the internet as a whole.) When you distribute information (such as a tweet) you lose the ability to control it any further.

    Additionally, it might be worth mentioning that people probably shouldn’t tweet things that they don’t want others to see. I’d hoped that was obvious though.

Categories
History

Haiti’s Declaration of Independence found in the British National Archives

DUKE (US)— The only known printed copy of Haiti’s Declaration of Independence has been found in the British National Archives by a graduate student from Duke University.

While researching the early independence of Haiti in February, Julia Gaffield found the document, an eight-page pamphlet dated Jan. 1, 1804, in the British National Archives in London.

It is only the second declaration of its kind in the world, the first being the U.S. Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson and others.

Gaffield, who is researching early 19th century Haiti for her doctoral dissertation in history, says the document had been overlooked in the British archives, even as researchers spent decades searching for it in Haiti.

“I wasn’t specifically looking for it, but I had an eye out for it because I knew it was missing,” Gaffield says. “We figured there was an original somewhere, but didn’t know if it still existed.”