1912 Goad Fire Insurance Plan now available in Vanmap

Vanmap, a geomatics tool from the City of Vancouver, now includes a layer representing Goad’s 1912 Fire Insurance Plan contributed by the City of Vancouver Archives. The fire insurance plan data is also available through the city's Open Data Catalogue. You can read an extensive description by the city archives about the fire insurance plan.

British Columbia Government Information Act begins second reading in Legislative Assembly

Update for March 3, 02015: The second reading of Bill, the Government Information Act, began on March 2, 02015 in the British Columbia Legislative Assembly. The Hansard transcript is here: http://www.leg.bc.ca/hansard/40th4th/20150302pm-House-Blues.htm

In speaking about the bill, opposition member Doug Routley gave a lengthy critique and highlighted the 33,000 boxes of records in government warehouses awaiting transfer to the BC Archives, part of the Royal BC Museum.

 Original post: British Columbia government introduces legislation to create government digital archives

The British Columbia government introduced Bill 5, the Government Information Act, on February 12, 02015. The main purpose of the act is to repeal the 1936 Document Disposal Act. The new act will also establish a "digital archives for government information" and mandate a new position, the chief records officer, who will be "responsible for managing, securing and preserving the digital archives." The digitization of government information will become mandatory under this legislation unless the information is exempt from being digitized. Information in a non-digital form "must be digitized before it is archived."

Although it is open for interpretation and clarification, section 20(2)(e) appears to lay the groundwork for the government to begin paying fees to the Royal BC Museum for archival services. Except in a few very special circumstances, the Royal BC Museum has not taken in government records for over a decade. The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner highlighted this situation in its July 02014 special report A Failure to Archive: Recommendations to Modernize Government Information Management. Could this bill be a response to the OIPCBC's report?

I wonder too whether with this new legislation the door may be opening for the payment of a one-time fee and transfer of thousands of boxes to the "museum archives of government" as the bill styles the Royal BC Museum.

The first reading version of the bill is at
http://www.leg.bc.ca/40th4th/1st_read/gov05-1.htm

A news release offers some additional information: the "digital archives will be open to the public and searchable online" and "The transition to digital information management will begin in the spring of 2015 and is expected to take three years."

The Victoria newspaper Times-Colonist's article about Bill 5 is here.

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)

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

UBC Library digitizes historic BC newspapers

According to this Canadiana.ca update, UBC Library has completed the digitization of 24 historic BC newspapers dating between 1865 and 1924. You can search these through the Canadiana Discovery Portal, a Google-like search engine that currently has its own failings, not the least of which is the ability to isolate a set of records such those valuable newspapers.

As the update states, "There are 8862 issues in total and over 45,000 pages. Here are the names of the newspapers:

Abbotsford Post
Alberni Advocate
Atlin Claim
Bella Coola Courier
Boundary Creek Times
British Columbia Record
Cariboo Sentinel (Barkerville)
Cumberland News
Daily Building Record (Vancouver)
Daily Ledger (Ladysmith)
Grand Forks Sun
Hedley Gazette
Hot Springs News (Ainsworth)
Kootenay Mail (Revelstoke)
Ledge (Greenwood)
Ledge (Nakusp, New Denver, Fernie)
Massett Leader
Miner (Nelson)
Mining Review (Sandon)
Moyie Leader
Nelson Economist
Phoenix Pioneer
Prospector (Fort Steele)
Tribune (Nelson)"

In the Canadiana Discovery Portal Search "Everything" option list, you can change the search option to Titles. There's a catalogue record for the newspaper itself and then individual records for each issue which will take you to UBC's British Columbia Historic Newspapers site. Congratulations UBC on making these invaluable resources freely available.

African Nova Scotian Diaspora: Selected Government Records of Black Settlement, 1791-1839

The Nova Scotia Archives is pleased to present a significant new online resource features unique documents reflecting the struggles and survival of African Nova Scotians, as the world marks the United Nations' International Year for People of African Descent. It contains over 500 digitized and fully searchable government documents relating to early African Nova Scotian immigration and emigration. Many of the documents are rich in the names and reflect the experiences of Black Refugees who came here at the close of the War of 1812.

You can visit the exhibit at: http://gov.ns.ca/nsarm/virtual/diaspora/


Source: ARCAN-L mailing list, 02011 09 23

University of Chicago Library launches new digitization initiative

According to an announcement on the Archives & Archivists mailing list (02010 11 11),

The University of Chicago Library's Special Collections Research Center has a launched an initiative for the digitization of archives and manuscript collections. The digital images are being made available via the online finding aid for each collection. This will recreate for the online user the experience of a researcher encountering the original materials in the SCRC Reading Room, with documents displayed as they are housed in each folder, and with description of the contents in the form of folder headings.

Individual, high-resolution images of each page will be permanently preserved in the Library's digital repository, and can be made available for publication or other research needs. Due to provisions of copyright laws, digitization efforts are currently focused on materials in the public domain, or those for which the University of Chicago holds copyright.

 Among the new content to be available are Soviet and Middle Eastern poster collections, records around the trial of Jefferson Davis for treason, and plantation life records before and after the Civil War.

For links to the content currently online, see this November 11, 02010 entry from the SCRC blog.

Footnote.com now part of Ancestry.com

Having grown its database of digitized historical documents over the past four years and based on a successful use-pay model that offered some parts of its database for free, Footnote.com announced on October 21, 02010 that it's been acquired by Ancestry.com as of that date. According to the announcement, "The plan is to continue to run Footnote.com the way we have always run Footnote.com — continuing to do what we believe is best for our customers, our business and our brand." I wonder though how long that will last under Ancestry.com's ownership. The announcement also provided these statistics: "Footnote.com started with only 5 million historical documents and today we have nearly 70 million searchable documents, over 1 million members, nearly 100,000 Footnote Pages, and over half million annotations added."Quite an accomplishment, but let's not forget that some of those records were provided through partnership arrangements with archives such as the National Archives and Records Administration in the United States, who therefore also deserve some credit. I hope that Ancestry.com will honor the agreements that were struck by Footnote.com with organizations such as NARA.

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

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." 

Jane Austen fans rejoice at new, international digital collection of her fiction manuscripts

A three-year joint project of the University of Oxford and King’s College London, Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts is now thrilling her fans worldwide. According to the Web site Introduction,

The focus of the present digital edition is three-fold: the virtual reunification of this significant collection of fiction manuscripts by means of high-quality digital photographic images; the linking of these images to fully encoded and searchable diplomatic transcriptions; and the creation of as complete a record as possible of the conservation history and current physical state of these frail objects. Through virtual reunification, scholars and interested users are provided for the first time with the opportunity to compare the forms and texts of these dispersed manuscripts – their different physical construction, shifts in handwriting and presentation – to examine passages of erasure and revision, to question editorial readings in the transcriptions, and to make their own new discoveries about Austen’s working practices across her writing career.

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities official launch May 02010

The UCL (University College London, England) Centre for Digital Humanities held its internal launch in February 02010 and an official, invitation-only launch will be held on May 20, 02010. The Projects and Links pages contain many excellent resources, including on the former TEI by Example, a collaborative project to develop an online tutorial for learning TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), the gold SGML standard for marking up digitized manuscripts and printed works.

The UCL Centre for Digital Humanities is also on Twitter at http://twitter.com/UCLDH.

European IMPACT (Improving Access to Text) project

According to the front page of the European IMPACT (Improving Access to Text) project, "IMPACT is a project funded by the European Commission. It aims to significantly improve access to historical text and to take away the barriers that stand in the way of the mass digitisation of the European cultural heritage." Essentially, the project is developing a better OCR (optical character recognition) engine and, because no software is as yet better than the human eye and mind, "A full web-based collaborative correction system: this web-based platform, suitable for massive volunteer participation, validates and corrects OCR results. In this way, it enables the general public to help with large scale digitisation efforts." (IMPACT Tools).

19th-century books from the British Library on Kindle for free

So screams the headline of Barbara Quint's Information Today Newsbreak of February 25, 02010. The Microsoft-British Library partnership to digitize 19th century books was completed last year and Microsoft "handed over 25 million pages in 65,000 19th-century books". The British Library then struck a deal with Amazon.com to make these works available for free and as print-on-demand paperbacks through the bookseller's Kindle ebook reader. Quint predicts that "Expect to see the digital collection appear elsewhere as well. The Amazon arrangement is nonexclusive."

If you go to the bottom of the Amazon Kindle page you'll see links to Kindle software for the PC and Mac that allows you read Kindle ebooks on those platforms without owning a Kindle reader.

Questions and opinions from a Canadian music industry icon about Canadian archives

I hope legendary Vancouver rock and roll dj Red Robinson's letter to the Times-Colonist newspaper on February 13, 02010 might provoke more public discussion about relationships and expectations between donors and archives. He wrote in response to my letter of February 10, which I wrote in response to an article from February 6 about his donating his interviews to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. I took issue with this part of the original article:

Robinson would love to have kept it in Canada, but there was no place for it to go.

"There is no repository for my stuff, or Bruce Allen's, or Bryan Adams', or anybody," Robinson said. "It's a disgrace."

So he decided to give to the Rock Hall.

I posted two items about this on my personal blog at http://davidmattison.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/dj-red-robinson-interviews-heading-south-to-rock-roll-hall-of-fame-ohio-usa/ and http://davidmattison.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/red-rock-tapes-could-stay-here/.

Digitization Activities planning document from the U.S. Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative

The U.S. Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative's Still Image Working Group has released a new planning document: Digitization Activities: Project Planning and Management Outline. FADGI was established in 2007 and consists of two working groups: "The Federal Agencies Still Image Digitization Working Group will concentrate its efforts on image content such as books, manuscripts, maps, and photographic prints and negatives. The Federal Agencies Audio-Visual Working Group is focusing its work on sound, video, and motion picture film."