Colonial North American Project at Harvard University

Harvard University has embarked on a remarkable multi-year project to digitize and make freely available all 17th and 18th century archival records and publications from all its campus repositories relating to life in colonial North America. This ambitious enterprise is called the Colonial North Amercian Project at Harvard University.

In addition to the collection itself, there are also a series of thematic essays which provide deeper insight into the contents of this digital library and archives.

It appears that the public interface is powered by the Omeka open source software.

BitCurator Consortium launches website

The BitCurator Consortium (BCC) has launched its website at http://bitcuratorconsortium.org/. The website contains numerous information resources about the BitCurator Consortium, digital forensics, and more.

The BCC is an independent, community-led membership association that supports the curation of born-digital materials by libraries, archives, and museums. Members of the BitCurator user community founded BCC in 2014 to enhance, promote, and explore this growing area of professional activity.

The BitCurator environment is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that includes open source and public domain digital forensics tools, as well as unique reporting mechanisms and user interfaces, designed to assist libraries, archives, and museums with the curation of born-digital materials. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the BitCurator project has developed, packaged, and documented open-source forensics and data analysis tools to create forensic disk images, analyze files and file systems, extract file system metadata, identify and redact sensitive information, and identify and remove duplicate files.

The BCC operates as an affiliated community of the Educopia Institute, a nonprofit organization that advances cultural, scientific, and scholarly institutions by catalyzing networks and collaborative communities to facilitate collective impact.

Source: edited from ARCAN-L, "Announcement: New BitCurator Consortium Website!", 020150903

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.

Leading in the Digital World: Opportunities for Canada’s Memory Institutions report

The Council of Canadian Academics has released its report Leading in the Digital World: Opportunities for Canada's Memory Institutions. The report was assembled by an Expert Panel on Memory Institutions and the Digital Revolution haired by Dr. Doug Owram.

The Getty opens its public domain art to all

The Getty launched its Open Content Program on August 12, 02013 to make digital versions of its public domain artwork available to all. They went above and beyond, as have some other cultural organizations, by providing "high-resolution, reproduction-quality images with embedded metadata, some over 100 megabytes in size."

I applaud The Getty's decision and hope that many more cultural institutions will follow their example. In British Columbia, the City of Vancouver Archives has a comparable policy to the Getty. I would love to see my former employer, the Royal British Columbia Museum, step onto the open access/open content stage. Perhaps this will happen once the BC Archives, which has been part of the RBCM for a decade, converts its database systems for public access via the new content management system, work on which has been underway for at least five years. Amazingly, the existing BC Archives search system is nearly 20 years old, possibly a world record when it comes to public access Web-based databases.

I've always felt it was wrong for cultural institutions to charge money for the use or licensing of public domain content they were preserving since most if not all these organizations also held full rights to other content or could find other ways to generate revenue.

 For some further information about The Getty's decision, see President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust Jame Cuno's article "Open Content, An Idea Whose Time Has Come" in The Getty Iris.

The Burgess Shale, a new Web site from the Royal Ontario Museum

The Royal Ontario Museum developed a Virtual Museum of Canada Web site around The Burgess Shale, a UNESCO World Hertiage Site, which is located entirely in BC in Yoho National Park. The ROM has done fieldwork at the Burgess Shale. None of the Burgess Shale fossils appear to be on display anywhere in BC, so it's great to have this opportunity for a virtual visit. The guy with the sledgehammer kind of worries me though.

NMC (New Media Consortium) Horizon Report 2011 Museum Edition released

The NMC (New Media Consortium) Horizon Report 2011 Museum Edition was released at the Museum Computer Network Conference in November 02011 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. In order to download the report as a PDF file you'll need to create a free account.

National Portal To Historic Collections from American Heritage and AASLH

Started in 2007, American Heritage and the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) currently sponsor the National Portal To Historic Collections. According to the About page,

"... the National Portal is a massive, multiyear project to provide information on 4,000 historical sites, including easily searchable online access to digital images and descriptions of millions of artifacts housed in the collections of American museums, historical societies, National Parks, and other institutions across the country.
The objects being added to this national “clearinghouse” include documents, photographs, paintings and artifacts, and run the gamut from military artifacts to artworks to the tools and mementos of everyday life."

Gigapixel art, the Google Art Project

The Google Art Project was started by Google employee Amit Sood. Launched on February 1, 02011 at London's Tate Britain gallery, the Art Project contains content from 17 major galleries and collections around the world and allow a virtual visitor to explore these museums and one art art using "gigapixel" technology. The virtual tours use the same technology as the Street View you experience through Google Maps.

WebWise 2011 Conference, Baltimore, MD, USA, March 9 to 11, 02011

The WebWise 2011 conference is coming to Baltimore, Maryland, USA and runs between March 9 and 11, 02011. This annual conference is sponsored by the United States government funding agency the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The theme of this year's conference is "Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) in Education, Learning, and Research". This is one of the few conferences in its category for which no fee is required; pre-registration to reserve a spot at the conference, however, is necessary.

Update for April 16, 02011: Archived Webcasts from the pre-conference and conference sessions are available at http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/webwise/110309/.

Royal BC Museum launches new collections database

The Royal BC Museum has launched its new collections database. As of October 12, 2010, you can access new databases for Ethnology, Archaeology and Modern History. Databases that utilize existing search engines and have yet to be transitioned to the new system are the natural history collections and the BC Archives.

National Digital Forum 02010 Conference, Wellington, New Zealand, October 02010

The National Digital Forum is holding its 9th annual conference on the theme of "Linking data, linking people" The NDF 02010 Conference is being held in Wellington, New Zealand, at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa on October 18 and 19, 02010. According to an announcement on the DIGLIB mailing list (02010 09 02), the early registration deadline has been extended to September 17, 02010.

The NDF "is a coalition of museums, archives, art galleries, libraries and government departments working together to enhance electronic access to New Zealand’s culture and heritage."

Digital Content Quarterly Issue 3 (Summer 02010) from the UK JISC Strategic Content Alliance

The UK's JISC Strategic Content Alliance published its Summer 02010 Issue 3 of the Digital Content Quarterly in both interactive and non-interactive PDF versions. This is a superb publication which I highly recommend. Details and download links are found on the Strategic Content Alliance Blog.

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."

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

Let's get visual with metadata standards

Jenn Riley, Indiana University, has a free, terrific PDF poster called Seeing Standards: A Visualization of the Metadata Universe, supplemented with a metadata standard glossary, also available as a free PDF in poster or brochure formats.

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

Version 1.0.9 beta of ICA-AtoM released

May 17, 02010 marks the release date of version 1.0.9 beta of ICA-AtoM with a significant raft of improvements and new features.

Royal British Columbia Museum official blog soft launch

In case you had not yet heard, the blogosphere is abuzz about the Royal BC Museum Blog hosted by Google's Blogger service. The first post by Tim Willis was on March 10, 02010 and the most recent by archivist Ann ten Cate, all about a bathroom fetish, was on May 12, 02010. The RBCM is also on Facebook and YouTube.

Pass It On through National Preservation Week, May 9–15, 02010

Too bad this is not an International Preservation Week, but the slogan of the first National Preservation Week organized by the American Library Association is Pass It On. Events are scheduled for the week of May 9 through 15, 0210. Lots of great tools for setting up something like this in communities outside the United States.