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

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.

The Shopsowitz Formula: silica and cellulose = evolutionary colors

According to a newspaper article on November 26, 02010, University of British Columbia research chemist and chemistry doctoral candidate Kevin E. Shopsowitz accidentally discovered a formula for creating a color formula that adapts to changing light conditions. He accidentally spilled a solution he was working on. The newspaper article forecasts paint that adapts to changing light conditions and inexpensive sensors. The journal Nature published a paper on this major Canadian discovery.

Tweet to the beat from Aviary online music creation software

In late June 02010 Aviary, a company that offers a free suite on online creation and editing tools, introduced an unusual one called Music Creator. They provide you with the virtual instruments and sound to create your beats and you take it from there. Pretty cool! But the app is still in Alpha mode.

Help solve some national problems in the USA at Challenge.gov

According to an ITI Weekly News Digest story, Challenge.gov is "a new online site and digital platform to help mobilize American ingenuity to solve some of our nation’s most pressing challenges. Challenge.gov is an online site where entrepreneurs, innovators, and citizen solvers can compete for prestige and prizes by providing novel solutions to tough national problems, large and small."

Source: "Challenge.gov Prize Platform Invites Citizens to Solve Nation’s Challenges", Weekly News Digest, September 9, 02010 via White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

What Is the Big Idea? asks The Chronicle of Higher Education

For its 10th anniversary issue, The Chronicle of Higher Education solicited a series of short essays from scholars and illustrators, asking them to define a single "idea of the coming decade, and why?" You can read their provocative, compelling and exciting thoughts in "What's the Big Idea?".

The Boston Typewriter Orchestra and Dead Media Ensemble

I read about the Boston Typewriter Orchestra on a mailing list. Intriguing sounds. I wonder if we will also see a Dead Media Ensemble that works with the likes of wire recorders, lantern slide projectors, Betamax video players and maybe a 3.5 inch diskette or two to store their works.

Anthologize that WordPress blog, just not your WordPress.com one

Form follows feed promises Anthologize, a new open source blog publishing tool that according to its About page

is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.

Please note that Anthologize cannot be installed on blogs hosted at WordPress.com.

Anthologize is a project of One Week | One Tool a project of the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Et tu Snarkus

I read about "the rise of the ridicule" or "online snark culture" in a newspaper article by Melissa Martin of the Winnipeg Free Press on July 25, 2010. What was it comedian Rodney Dangerfield said, "Can't get no respect." The article is essentially a paen of praise for April Winchell's Regretsy.com. She mocks "the most hiedeous or head-scratching items on the handmade online marketplace, Etsy." Get it? Etsy + Regrets = Regretsy. Winchell, the article recounts, "was something of a connoisseur of really crappy art." So now she's laughing all the way to the bank with no regretsies. Did I mention she's also published a book titled Regretsy: Where DIY Meets WTF.

My Information Today Newsbreak published on Google Buzz

Update for 02010 03 17:

Bad, bad, bad Google chastens FTC Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour according to PC World as cited by Matt McGee in Search Engine Land.

Original post of 02010 02 22:

My short article on Google Buzz was published today as one of the Information Today Newsbreaks titled "Google Gets Stung by Its Own Buzz."

Google Buzz was launched by Google on February 9, 2010 and immediately generated a hornet's nest of buzzing, angered Gmail customers backed by a dark cloud of consumer privacy protection organizations. Who can resist these metaphors and puns? I was asked to write up the controversy surrounding Google Buzz for an Information Today Newsbreak that should appear on Monday, February 22, 2010. I completed and submitted it on time. This is my second Newsbreak in seven years almost to the day that I've written on Google, the first back in 2003 was on its purchase of Pyra Labs, the creators of Blogger and Blogspot.com. The title of that piece also had the word buzz in it: "Blooglelicious—the Buzz about Google Buying Pyra Labs."

My Newsbreak article on 12sprints (now known as StreamWork) is now online at InformationToday.com

Update for April 26, 02010: SAP has branded its beta 12sprints product as StreamWork. If you had an account on the beta version, it is still accessible through the basic, free version of StreamWork at https://streamwork.com/.

My Newsbreak article on SAP AG's 12sprints collaborative decision-making Web application is now online at InformationToday.com.

Evernote.com integration with SAP 12sprints

Update for April 26, 2010: SAP has branded its beta 12sprints product as StreamWork. If you had an account on the beta version, it is still accessible through the basic, free version of StreamWork at https://streamwork.com/.

I discovered during my beta testing of SAP's 12sprints that Evernote.com's Web-based document storage service is integrated with 12sprints. According to the earliest news release from 2006 on the Evernote Corporation's site, the company "is a provider of note management, digital ink and handwriting recognition software and technologies for the PC, mobile and wireless markets." The About Us page provides this information:

Our goal at Evernote is to give everyone the ability to easily capture any moment, idea, inspiration, or experience whenever they want using whichever device or platform they find most convenient, and then to make all of that information easy to find.

And we’ve done just that. From creating text and ink notes, to snapshots of whiteboards and wine labels, to clips of webpages, Evernote users can capture anything from their real and digital lives and find it all anytime.

Ritescript is the division of the company that markets Evernote's "handwriting recognition and digital ink software and technologies." (http://www.evernote.com/about/corp/)

Digital ink software, another fascinating challenge for recordkeeping and archiving.

Apple iPad meets Star Trek

I swear I saw the new Apple iPad lurking in the background of the most recent Star Trek film. Apple's own advertising even displays the film being viewed on the iPad. Certainly the concept and design of a thin, large-screen computer tablet has been a prop in some science fiction films and TV shows (not that I can name one off the top of my head), so I hope the iPad does well. The pricing is certainly interesting.

I'd be happy to have one sent to me for review.

Reality Check for Your Muses: Creativity and Business Innovation Resources

My latest article for Searcher magazine, "Reality Check for Your Muses: Creativity and Business Innovation Resources," was published in the November/December 02008 issue (vol. 16, no. 10). It's not available online for free, so you'll have to either purchase it through Information Today or access it through one of the full-text commercial databases.

[caption id="attachment_2747" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Searcher magazine cover, November/December 2008"][/caption]