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9 February 2012

The National Archives (UK) Is Developing Tools To Interpret Medieval Documents

The National Archives is supplying digital data from its catalogue to an international partnership of historians, archivists and computer scientists to help make historical documents more accessible.

The Charter Excavator (ChartEx) project will use technologies and data management techniques typically used in the sciences to provide historical researchers with new ways to explore medieval and early modern documents relating to the buying and selling of property in England and Wales.

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7 February 2012

Southington Library, Connecticut, USA, Preserves Old Newspapers

Technology has allowed the Southington Library to digitize its entire newspaper collection. Now people anywhere can view online the black-and-white pages that date back to the 1800s.

More than a year ago, library administrators decided it would be a good idea to put the library's microfilm collection on the Internet. With help from Southington's Friends of the Library, $10,000 was provided for the project.

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The New National Archives of Ireland Website

The National Archives of Ireland have just given their website, nationalarchives.ie, a welcome facelift. The new design is a model of clarity: easier to read, more intuitive to navigate, and with expanded guides to collections, digital resources and genealogy.

However, the real meat and potatoes of any archival website is the online catalogue. Even where entries consist only of record descriptions and titles, rather than actual records, a database catalogue gives users the power to search much more widely and more precisely.

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6 February 2012

French Railroad Hands Over WWII-Era Archives

SNCF, the French national railroad, has handed over digital copies of hits World War II–era archives. The documents were transferred to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Shoah Memorial in Paris, SNCF said Feb. 3 in a statement.

The handover comes a year after SNCF President Guillaume Pepy admitted that the company participated in transferring Jews to Nazi concentration camps. SNCF said in the statement that it is working to adhere to its policy of being transparent about its past.

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30 January 2012

Finding Kuwait's Missing National Archives

Jurist Guest Columnist Douglas Cox of the City University of New York School of Law says that the Kuwaiti national archives, which were taken by Iraqi forces in 1990, have still not been returned and keep the post-Saddam Iraq under a UN Security Council resolution aimed at having the documents returned.

As the final US military convoy left Iraqi territory last month, the US, along with other members of the UN Security Council, criticized Iraq's lack of progress in locating Kuwaiti national archives — the historical records of the nation — that disappeared during Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion.

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27 January 2012

The British Library 19th Century Historical Collection App Wins Prestigious Publishing Innovation Award

At the opening of the Digital Book World Conference in New York City yesterday, the British Library, together with technology partner, BiblioLabs, LLC, was awarded the prestigious Publishing Innovation Award (PIA) for their British Library 19th Century Historical Collection iPad App.

The App, released in August last year to rave reviews from both critics and consumers, offers seamless, cloud-based access to more than 45,000 historical works from the British Library, spanning 21 thematic collections.

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23 January 2012

Gale Outlines First Archives for Nineteenth Century Collections Online

Gale, part of Cengage Learning and a leading publisher of research and reference resources for libraries, schools and businesses, today announced the source libraries, collections and plans for the first four modules of Nineteenth Century Collections Online, its global digitization and publishing program that brings together rare nineteenth-century primary source content. Currently still in development, the modules will be available this spring.

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20 January 2012

University of South Alabama Searching for New Archives Location

The University of South Alabama is looking for a new permanent location for its archives. The archives expanded almost a year ago with the donation of the Doy Leale McCall Collection, which includes 1 million documents valued at $3.1 million.

As a result of the donation, the school gave the USA Archives a new name: The McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The archives already housed about 1 million pieces before the donation was made.

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National Library of Ireland Gets Digital

The Kildare Street library is expanding its online footprint and giving equal weight to archiving material that comes in bits and bytes.

For 135 years, saving paper has been its focus. But with so much of the world’s written content and images increasingly in digital form, the National Library of Ireland has embarked on a major project to digitise its collections and give equal weight to archiving new material that comes in bits and bytes.

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19 January 2012

Behind the Scenes of the British Library Digital Newspaper Project

Online publisher Brightsolid has worked with IBM to digitise four million pages of the British Library's historical newspaper collection for online access as part of a 10-year big data analytics project that could cost Brightsolid millions of pounds.

The online publisher was selected by the British Library in April 2010 to digitise the newspapers and it launched the British Newspaper Archive website in November 2011. Brightsolid is investing the money because it will see a finanancial return from payments for access to the digital content.

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18 January 2012

Stalin Digital Archive Nears Completion

The Yale University Press will likely make the Stalin Digital Archive, which will contain more than 28,000 documents related to former Soviet Union Premier Joseph Stalin, available for purchase by this summer, according to John Donatich, director of the Yale University Press.

The project is the culmination of over 20 years of collaboration between Yale University Press and the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI). David Schiffman, Yale University Press director of digital publishing, said students.

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17 January 2012

Rare World War II Photographs Show American Soldiers' Fight for Survival in Brutal Battle of Saipan

It is the little-known battle that claimed the lives of thousands of Americans during World War II.

But now black-and-white photographs, captured by Life magazine photographer W. Eugene Smith, show the everyday horrors for the U.S. soldiers fighting against Japanese forces on the Mariana Island of Saipan between June 15 and July 9, 1944.

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Martin Luther King Digital Archive Opens to Public

The King Center has published 200,000 personal documents belonging to Martin Luther King Jr, as the US marks the civil rights leader's birthday. The online archive contains personal notes, telegrams to John F Kennedy and a handwritten draft of King's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

US President Barack Obama and his family marked the day volunteering at a library in Washington DC. King's memorial is open to the public for the first holiday since it opened.

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12 January 2012

In Pictures: Carlisle Archive Holds Cumbrian Treasures

Lady Gillford’s House, a Georgian Grade II*-listed building in Carlisle, has been renovated to provide a new archive centre. The £8.2m project includes the building of a modern extension. The new archive replaces the previous centre at Carlisle Castle.

The documents and artefacts will now be kept in large strongroom vaults, in a number of other temperature-controlled rooms and on more than four miles (6.4km) of shelving. Space has been made available to store the current archive, along with a projected 25 years' worth of new material.

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Malaysia National Archives Digitising Historical Materials

The National Archives is in the process of digitising all historical records and materials to make it easier for the public to obtain information, National Archives deputy director-general (research and development) Daresah Ismail said.

The digitisation process, carried out under the National Key Economic Area (NKEA), would also endear the public to an institution responsible for safeguarding the country's history, she said.

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10 January 2012

First Female Professor’s Archive Goes Digital

Laura Bassi, a noted 18th-century Italian scientist, left behind 6,000 pages of intriguing documents that describe her life and work. They now rest in the archives of the principal municipal library in Bologna, Italy, safe but not accessible to the world at large.

That is about to change. Stanford University has teamed up with the Bologna library and the Istituto per i beni culturali della Regione Emilia-Romagna to scan Bassi’s archives and make them easily accessible online later this year.

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Czech National Digital Library Project Under Heavy Fire

Two days after Alena Hanáková took over the reins of the Ministry of Culture from Jiří Besser, she wrote to Tomáš Böhm, director of the National Library, asking him to postpone signing the acceptance protocol of the National Digital Library implementation project.

If Böhm signed the document, the National Library would de facto be approving the digitalization solution designed by Logica. Critics of the system, which has never been tested under similar conditions, are relying on the fact that if the protocol is not accepted there is still hope, albeit small, that the contact with the local firm Logica could be cancelled.

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New Records from 1911 Available at Jersey Archive

A butcher accused of adulterating sausages with acid and the arrests of St Helier prostitutes are just two of the stories featured in newly-released documents from Jersey Archive. On 1 January, 200 new records were made public.

Archivist Linda Romeril said islanders could use the documents to get a clearer picture of Jersey's history, and maybe find out more about their ancestors. Many date from 1911, when George V was crowned, British MPs first received salaries and the Suffragettes stormed Parliament.

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9 January 2012

A Vast Historical Archive at University of Georgia Now Open to the Public

After months of moving, the University of Georgia’s new special collections library building opened to the public last week — even though the new building still looks unfinished inside.

Years in the planning, the new Richard B. Russell Building will usher in a new era for the special collections, an archive of Georgia history that includes Sen. Richard B. Russell’s baseball card collection, a lock of Jefferson Davis’ hair and thousands of rare or one-of-a-kind photographs, books, manuscripts and other items that document the history of Georgia and the South.

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6 January 2012

1911 Medical Conditions: Wife's Long Tongue and Children's Quarrelsome Stubbornness

A man listed his wife's "long tongue" and his children's "quarrelsome stubbornness" as medical conditions in the 1911 census, newly-released records show. The information, which details descriptions of people's ailments as perceived by the head of the household on the night of Sunday April 2 1911, has remained closed under data protection regulations until now.

The entries, given for the most part by people who would have had no medical knowledge, are often amusing, with some of the more unusual health conditions including ''old age'', ''voteless'', ''bald'' and being ''short of cash''.

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