Royal BC Museum launches crowd-sourcing transcription project

From the announcement circulated to mailing lists such as ARCAN-L:

Today, to celebrate National Volunteer Week, the Royal BC Museum launched Transcribe (transcribe.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca), a crowd-sourcing website that invites the public to transcribe valuable historical records from our archival collection.

Day of Digital Archives, October 6, 02011

From the announcement on various mailing lists (2011 09 06) posted by Gretchen Gueguen, Digital Archivist, Digital Curation Services, University of Virginia Library:

The Day of Digital Archives is an initiative to raise awareness of digital archives among both users and managers. On this day, archivists, digital humanists, programmers, or anyone else creating, using, or managing digital archives are asked to devote some of their social media output (i.e. tweets, blog posts, youtube videos, etc.) to describing their work with digital archives. By collectively documenting what we do, we will be answering questions like: What are digital archives? Who uses them? How are they created and managed? Why are they important? This year’s Day of Digital Archives will be held on October 6 and entries will be gathered at the Day of Digital Archives blog.

What is meant by “digital archives” well, primarily archives, repositories, content management systems and other initiatives that collect or manage born-digital material. These initiatives don’t have to primarily collect born-digital materials…in fact they are more likely to only have some born-digital content as part of their mandate. Or, maybe they don’t really have a “mandate” at all…maybe someone will contribute their thoughts about managing their own personal digital content or social media presence. The thread ties the participants together is that they collect, manage, preserve, develop, use, think about or otherwise love born-digital content.

Do you create, manage, or use digital archives? Would you like to participate? Well then, drop me a line at gretchen[.]gueguen[@]gmail[.]com with your contact info and I’ll keep you up to date!

SepiaTown, sharing historic photographs the Web 2.0 way

SepiaTown.com is a new Web site that allows individuals and institutions to share historic photographs the Web 2.0 way, via a Google Maps mashup. According to the site, "The objective of SepiaTown is to map a virtual past by collecting and mapping a vast collection of historical and vintage photographs, prints, film, audio and other media." SepiaTown, Inc. is based in Sunnyside, New York. PCMag.com named SepiaTown one of its Top 100 Web Sites of 2010 in the Undiscovered: Info category.

RockMelt Web browser invite on its way

Information Today's NewsBreaks features an article by Jill O'Neill titled "Hallmarks of the New RockMelt Browser—Efficiency and Integration" (November 22, 02010). Turns out you can receive an invite if you connect to the RockMelt Inc. Web site through your Facebook account. When I made the connection, I got a response saying "Your spot is reserved. We'll email your invite in the next few days." The developers of RockMelt are Tim Howe and Eric Vishria. RockMelt is based on Google's open source Chromium framework that Google also used to create its Google Chrome browser.

OpenFile, a new Canadian development in citizen journalism

OpenFile is a Canadian development in the field of citizen journalism. Basically, you register for a free account, which entitles you to submit story ideas which are then assigned to a reporter. OpenFile is also recruiting reporters. Once the story goes live other OpenFile members can add information and multimedia content to it. As of November 14, 02010, the site is in beta.

I encountered a reference to OpenFile on an archives mailing list that pointed to this story by Patrick Cain "Remembering Toronto's fallen from World War II".

Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research exhibition at the British Library

The British Library wants your opinion to count as part of its Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research exhibition. The exhibition runs between October 12, 02010 and July 16, 02011. Parts of it are online, including a selection of current Web sites that offer access to various free databases or new ways to organize research and connect to other researchers such as Mendeley. A selection of social networking and collaborative research tools are available. If you want to tweet about the exhibition, the hashtag is #blgk

Forvo, a collaborative online pronunciation guide

I was looking for a site that provided an online pronunciation guide to a wide variety of languages. I found it in Forvo. As of October 7, 02010, the site contains "791,131 words 724,689 pronunciations 258 languages." By registering for a free account you can put your own linguistic talents to use.

Site your Points of Interest at Sextant.org

A new wiki called Sextant.org devoted to telling stories about historical points of interest has emerged. Here's what its About page says:

Sextant.org is a website dedicated to allowing anyone to learn about the history of any place on earth. The site's content is written by its users and can also be edited by its users. Anyone is encouraged to add to any of the existing pages or create a new page about a location not yet covered by Sextant.org. Sextant.org's goal is to eventually be able to offer users information about almost every historically significant place one earth, explaining what happened there, when, why, who was involved, and what were the consequences. Access to such information about millions of locations all over the world will allow one to appreciate how, not only does the past surround him/her, but that it is intimately connected to the present.

New issue of open access journal LIBER Quarterly (Vol. 20, No. 1, 02010)

A new issue of the open access journal LIBER Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 1 (02010) is available. LIBER is the acronym for the Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche or Association of European Research Libraries. This issue includes an article titled "User Collaboration for Improving Access to Historical Texts" by Clemens Neudecker and Asaf Tzadok in which they discuss the work of the 02008-02012 IMPACT (Improving Access to Text) project, one of whose goals is "to develop tools that help improve OCR results for historical printed texts, specifically those works published before the industrial production of books from the middle of the 19th century. ... The IMPACT project will specifically develop a tool that supports collaborative correction and validation of OCR results and a tool to allow user involvement in building historical dictionaries which can be used to validate word recognition." 

Archival Missives blog from the Ontario Jewish Archives

The Ontario Jewish Archives has launched its blog Archival Missives, also on the Blogspot platform.

Google Wave crashes on boulders of public apathy

Google announced on August 4, 02010 that it will no longer be developing Google Wave as a standalone product. As I said on my personal, the Wave has crashed on the boulders of public apathy. This must be disturbing news to Novell whose Pulse product is to include Wave support and happy news to SAP whose StreamWork was seen as a competitor to Wave. For more breaking news about Google Wave check out these Google News search results.

Nomenclature 3.0 Community available

Nomenclature 3.0 Community – Now Available!, so proclaims the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) News. According to the August 2, 02010 story, "Nomenclature 3.0, a product of the American Association for State and Local History, is a classification system for cataloguing man-made objects that is heavily used by Canadian museums with humanities collections.  The Nomenclature 3.0 Community is moderated by the members of the Nomenclature Committee, including Heather Dunn from CHIN, who are available to answer questions and review term submissions."

I was just following orders: Canadian Department of National Defense computers used to edit Wikipedia

Here's a sad but true CBC News article about Department of National Defense computers being used to edit a Wikipedia entry about about "the [F-35] Joint Strike Fighter jet and the Conservative government's decision to spend as much as $18 billion on the aircraft. Those edits included the removal of information critical of the government's plan to buy the jets and the addition of insulting comments aimed at Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff." No doubt the culprit's defense will be, "I was just following orders."

Google Apps for Government

According to this ITI Newslink item (July 29, 02010), Google has announced its Google Apps for Government, "the first suite of cloud computing messaging and collaboration applications to receive Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification and accreditation from the U.S. General Services Administration." I wonder if that includes digital archiving/preservation measures and how that functionality will be enabled through cloud computing? Digital archiving/preservation is not one of the features that Google is promoting for this service. At $50 per user per year, you get what you pay for.

ACRL/IRIG Visual Literacy Standards blog

Quoting from the announcement on IMAGELIB (02010 07 15):

The ACRL/IRIG Visual Literacy Standards Task Force is working on Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education. We have started a blog as a forum for discussion about visual literacy, and as a communication tool to provide information about the standards development process and progress. Please visit the blog here: http://acrlvislitstandards.wordpress.com/.

We would like to encourage broad community engagement in the Visual Literacy Standards development process, and invite you to participate in the blog discussions. Please feel welcome to comment on the blog, and invite others to do so as well. We appreciate all input.

According to a post on the blog on 02010 07 15, "We are defining visual literacy in the context of an interdisciplinary, information-literacy-based, higher education environment."

Takeaways and Q&A from “Social is the Next Search” Gigya Webinar, 02010 03 04

Takeaways and Q&A from “Social is the Next Search” Webinar, March 4, 02010

Looks like some useful tips here for anyone interested in how to apply social search concepts to their online business.

United States National Archives launches OurArchives, follows revolutionary trend set by mother country England

In a bold move that follows the revolutionary trend of old mother country England, the United States National Archives officially launched on July 8, 02010, 234 years and four days after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, a public wiki for researchers called Our Archives. According to the About Our Archives page,

Users can contribute to the Our Archives wiki in numerous ways. You can:

* Create new pages and edit pre-existing pages about historical subjects and records held by the National Archives
* Expand upon a description in our online catalog
* Publish your transcription of a document
* Add information to build upon other resources
* Use it as a workbook to store useful information discovered during your archival research
* Collaborate with other users working on similar subjects or to work together on research projects

The wiki is hosted by Wikispaces (the paid, private label version).

The United Kingdom's YourArchives wiki, launched in April 2007, is at http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk and is powered by MediaWiki, the software made famous by Wikipedia.

If you get it, share it, but why are there no sharing tools on the Social Media Club site?

The Social Media Club was founded in 2006 in San Francisco, California, USA, and there are now chapters around the world. The Social Media Club's tag line is "If you get it, share it." Well, I get it, but I'll be darned if I can figure out why the Social Media Club Web site has not a one social media sharing tool in sight.

Historypin to see the past through Google Maps

In partnership with Google, We Are What We Do, a social action movement based in London, England, created Historypin:

a digital time machine that provides a new way for the world to see and share history.

The site allows users to share images from their personal photo albums, as well as the stories behind them. To date, pictures have been provided from various national archives, as well as diverse contributors including Selfridges, Marks & Spencer, the Royal Albert Hall and Arsenal FC.

Developed in partnership with Google, the site finds a unique use for Google Maps and Street View, meaning pictures can be dated as well as geo-tagged and then 'pinned' into place on top of modern Street View photography.

The result is a fascinating snapshot of the changing face of local streets and well known landmarks and provides a new perspective on historic moments.

The site has ambitions to become the World's largest user-generated archive of historic images and stories, providing easy access to digitised history stretching from the invention of the camera to yesterday.

Source: An historic launch for We Are What We Do and Google, June 7, 02010 and thanks to Peter Kurilecz for his notice on a photohistory mailing list, June 5, 02010

Share Your Treasures with Canada!

From the announcement on the CHIN Web site about its new initiative, Canada's Got Treasures!:

The Virtual Museum of Canada (VMC) at the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) launches a new interactive online space, Canada’s Got Treasures! Using YouTube and Flickr, the website invites museums, heritage institutions and people from across the country to upload their photos and videos of objects, artworks, buildings, people or locations that are culturally significant to Canadians. Once uploaded, they will be featured on the Canada’s Got Treasures! VMC website for Canadians to experience and enjoy.

Canada’s Got Treasures! provides an excellent opportunity to showcase and promote the collections of your institution online. Visit http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/treasures and click on the “Upload Your Treasures” button and follow the simple steps.

Each week from May to November 2010, new treasures from our national museums and institutions will be revealed, with an accompanying related quiz to test your knowledge of Canadian history and heritage. These significant holdings, as well as submissions from heritage institutions and Canadians, will also be tracked on an interactive map.

We look forward to seeing your treasures online!

For assistance uploading your photos or videos, or for additional information, please do not hesitate to contact us at:

The Virtual Museum of Canada Team
1.800.520.2446 (Toll Free)
vmc@virtualmuseum.ca
http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/treasures