Good morning IRENE, new hope for early audio formats

The new IRENE Audio Preservation service at the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) is the culmination of a decade of research and development at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the US Library of Congress.

The IRENE technology uses a non-contact approach, which eliminates the possibility of damage caused by mechanical contact of a stylus on fragile media.  The process creates ultra-high resolution images of the audio groove structures in either 2D or 3D, and the resulting image files are then processed through software that translates them into an audio file.

NEDCC CURRENTLY WORKS WITH THE FOLLOWING FORMATS:
Wax cylinders, lacquer discs ("acetate" discs), aluminum transcription discs, shellac discs, tin foils, and other rare formats (e.g., Dictabelt, Voice-O-Graph, etc.), and can handle rare, fragile, or damaged media.

LEARN MORE:
About the NEDCC IRENE Service:
https://www.nedcc.org/audio-preservation/about

About the History of the of the IRENE IMLS Grant Project at NEDCC:
https://www.nedcc.org/audio-preservation/history

QUESTIONS about NEDCC's IRENE Audio Preservation Service?
Contact:  Mason Vander Lugt, mlugt@nedcc.orgmlugt@nedcc.org
>
  NORTHEAST DOCUMENT CONSERVATION CENTER
Andover, MA  USA -  nedcc.org
JOIN THE NEDCC E-List for Updates on new IRENE projects and other preservation news you can use:
https://www.nedcc.org/contact/sign-up-for-news

 

Source: ARCAN-L mailing list, 020141120

Saskatchewan Historic Newspapers Online launched

The Saskatchewan Historic Newspapers Online collection has been created in collaboration between the Saskatchewan Archives and Sask History Online (SHO). The project when completed will see the digitization of newspapers from all across Saskatchewan from 1878 through to the mid 1960s. The first stage of the project that you see here focuses upon Saskatchewan newspapers published during the Great War period, from January 1914 through to the end of hostilities in 1918. This initial stage will ultimately include the equivalent of approximately 400 reels of microfilm from nearly 100 communities, making up over 200,000 pages of newsprint. The collection includes newspapers from communities across the province which were published in English, French, German, and Ukrainian.

Source: Saskatchewan Historic Newspapers Online (SHNO)

Royal Society of Canada expert panel on future of archives and libraries releases its report

The Royal Society of Canada’s Expert Panel on The Future Now: Canada’s Libraries, Archives, and Public Memory is now available at: https://rsc-src.ca/en/expert-panels/rsc-reports/future-now-canadas-libraries-archives-and-public-memory

A free copy of the full report is downloadable at the  bottom of the page.

Source: ARCAN-L mailing list, 020141113

Internet Archive Book Images via Flickr

Flickr is hosting nearly 3 million images extracted from digitized books at the Internet Archive through programming developed by an academic researcher. The Internet Archive Book Images is an amazing resource and it's all in the public domain.

Source: "Millions of historical images posted to Flickr" by Leo Kelion, BBC News: Technology, http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28976849

Information and Privacy Commissioner for BC releases special report, "A Failure to Archive"

Elizabeth Denham, the Information and Privacy Commissioner for BC, released a special report on July 22, 2014 titled "A Failure to Archive: Recommendations to Modernize Government Records Management". The report deals with three issues:

1. the decade-old backlog of 30,000+ boxes of records awaiting transfer from government to the BC Archives, which is part of the Royal BC Museum, a Crown corporation. The RBCM established a fee of $454 for the transfer of a box, so government offices decided to warehouse the records which was less expensive. 
2. "the lack of a practical method for archiving government’s electronic records", especially on the part of the BC Archives, which "does not have the capability to accept or archive those records. This challenge has been addressed in other jurisdictions, but B.C. [the province] has yet to make any significant progress in managing the archiving of electronic records."
3. modernization of the legislative framework for records management.

You can download the PDF report at https://www.oipc.bc.ca/special-reports/ and a press release is available for downloading at https://www.oipc.bc.ca/news-releases/