View from the Hill

"Oh these, these are only incidental"

The British Library have realised that they have a new collection.  They have about 300,00 rarely seen images from the early days of photography.  Apparently the collection is "incidental".  About 250 of the images will feature in a new exhibition, focusing on the social aspect of photography. 

Looks quite interesting, for an "incidental" collection.

- Katharine Liu

An Archiving Answer?

I noticed this article on the BBC website recently about a new and reliable way to back up and archive digital material.  A team of researchers in Japan are confident that they have come up with a breakthrough piece of archiving technology which will still be readable well into the next Millennium.  Basically they are semiconductor memory chips made from silicon.

Now that is future proofing for you.

- Katharine Liu

Lost list discovered in Australia

What treasures await librarians when sorting through boxes in dusty old vaults? Dr Olwen Pryke at the State Library of New South Wales in Australia discovered a carbon typset copy of Oskar Schindler's list. The German industrialist saved Jews from the Nazi death camps during World War II by forcing them into labour.  The newly discovered list was amongst papers acquired from the author of the book Schindler's Ark, Thomas Keneally, and is one of very few surviving copies of the original list, compiled by Schindler in an effort to persuade the Nazis to save his Jewish workers. One copy is housed in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem, but the whereabouts of the original list is unknown. It is thought that Schindler wrote several lists. This particular copy of the list came into Keneally's possession after a chance encounter with survivor Leonard Pfefferberg, worker number 173 on the list.

It must have been incredible to find such an important historical document. "The original list was hurriedly typed on 18 April 1945 in the closing days of WWII, and it saved 801 men from the gas chambers," said Dr Pryke. "It's an incredibly moving piece of history."

When disaster strikes...

A story on the BBC website on Friday caught my eye - National Library hit by flooding. For the second time in two years, the National Library of Scotland has been flooded after a pipe burst. Thankfully there appears to be only minor damage and I'm sure this is in no small part due to the efforts of the fire crews and library staff.

I got to thinking about other libraries affected by disasters.

Reading February's edition of the Society of Archivists' journal ARC magazine, I learnt about the efforts to rebuild the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA) after it was ransacked and looted in 2003. Dr Saad Eskander, Director of the INLA explained that 95% of the rare book collection had been lost. Since then the building has been restored, morale has been raised amongst staff and over 900 people per month now use the reading rooms. Dr Eskander is described in the article as inspiring and has reminded us of "the importance of archives and libraries in underpinning a free and fair society" and he was recently awarded Fellowship of CILIP.

Has your library been hampered by disasters, natural or man-made?

TED Archive

This may be old news to a lot of you but I was recently pointed in the direction of TED.  TED stands for Technology, Entertainment & Design and they are a series of talks by a series of "facinating thinkers and doers".  Over 200 of previos talks have been archived and are available to view online.  One that may be of particualr interest is a talk by Brewster Kahle, who has some very interesting things to say about archiving the web.

Check it out. 

Love in the archives

Yes, I admit it. I'm the "colleague" to whom Fiona referred in her blog post about snow day and the comment I made about the boat journey being romantic.

By the same token, I didn't feel I could let February 14th go by without a mention. And thanks to Assistant Archivist Dr Katrina Legg and her archives colleagues at Swansea University we have a 100-year old love letter to mark the day. The letter was written by William Weightman and features a code akin to text message writing. For example, the letter “W” followed by a picture of a hen is used to stand for “when” and “H” followed by “8” for “hate”. University Archivist Elisabeth Bennett discovered the letter in a society meeting book and had much fun trying to decipher the code.

Another literary love tome, the book "Love Letters of Great Men", which featured in the recent "Sex and the City" film has enjoyed great commercial success in the bookshops. I wonder if it features highly in library borrowing statistics this month. Maybe I'm just too much of a romantic at heart...

The Serving Soldier

Having recently worked with Kings College to help kick start their “Serving Soldier” project which will be featuring a blog, we thought we’d link them up and introduce such an interesting project:

The joint initiative between KCL and JISC will digitize and make available a significant number of archives that have previously been held in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives. It will bring to light little known material and essentially  “provide a body of material of contemporary relevance to researchers, students and today’s serving soldiers.”

The blog will feature some interesting discoveries along the way and with a staggering 22,000 images of original visual and archival documents to sift through it will be well worth a look.

Library offers hints for Credit Crunch Christmas Lunch

I varied my usual Google news search on the word "library" by adding in "Christmas", just to be topical!

Having been wowed by Delia and her £28 Christmas lunch for 4 I was intrigued to see a much earlier version of the Credit Crunch lunch offered up by Cambridge University Library's Darwin Correspondence Project. "Mrs Charles Darwins' Recipe Book" is a new publication of a very old book, housed in Scientific Manuscripts at Cambridge, and it tells us how to broil mushrooms and make turnip cresselly (any suggestions?!) but also teaches us to be frugal and make our own snacks like cheese straws and ginger biscuits. Good skills for all. The original book is used by researchers and proceeds from the new publication will be going towards funding more research into Charles Darwin's letters.

What other credit-crunch-beating tips or Christmas hints can be found in your libraries?

A limbo of libraries

Two subjects that are very important to me joined forces yet again today - no, not shoes and champagne, but Photography and Libraries. I logged on to Flickr to see what people have been saying about my photos (they liked them, you'll be pleased to know!) and was presented with a Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation about libraries and an intriguing link. I followed it. It introduced me to the New York Public Library and a fascinating array of photographs. The Library is hoping that anyone and everyone will be help to tag the photos and that this will provoke activity and debate in this area of Flickr - The Commons. I've mentioned this initiative before and had hoped to see some more UK libraries joining in. Our NZ contingent here will be pleased to see The National Library of New Zealand is part of the Flickr Family.

Have you joined the Flickr Family yet?

Personal Collection? No - Archive? Yes

Anyone feel like pitching in to buy an archive? As not only a music lover, but an analogue music lover at heart, this story really saddens me. Paul Mawhinney owns the world's largest personal record collection, amassing some 3 million records over the course of his life, but due to his ailing heath and economical issues, he is being forced to sell.  The collection has been valued at over $50 million, yet the asking price is a mere $3 million. Bargain.

Considering a Library of Congress study concluded 87% of the music in the collection is not available on the internet, is there not from a historical point of view, a burden for this collection to be bought and preserved by a body that has the resources to keep it in the condition it deserves?