Caffè Lena opened in Saratoga Springs, NY in May of 1960. Since then, the coffee house has kept its doors open featuring predominately performances by folk musicians. Often the performers were at the start of their careers. The café has featured now familiar songwriters including Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Ani DiFranco, and Kate and Anna McGarrigle – to name just a few. After the death of the founder, Lena Spencer, in 1989 Caffè Lena was converted to a non-profit institution. 

The Caffè Lena History Project has launched an online searchable database for the complete Caffè Lena collection. The processing of this collection was made possible with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, administered through the Council on Library and Information Resources’ Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives Project. The digitization of the material was made possible through generous funding from the EMC Corporation.

Click to read full text of Caffè Lena History Project’s Searchable Database.

• Library of Congress Inauguration 2009 Audio and Video Project
  
• Concertina History Online Features Virtual Collaboration and Digitization
  
• Preserving Jewish Memory: Family Photos Join Oral History in Centropa Movies
  
• 129th anniversary of Thomas Edison’s Invention of the Phonograph
  

This session was part of The Memory of the World in the Digital Age: Digitization and Preservation conference and aimed to describe the initiatives of the Data at Risk Task Group (DARTG), part of the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA), a body of the International Council for Science.

The goal is to preserve scientific data that is in danger of loss because they are not in modern electronic formats, or have particularly short shelf-life. DARTG is seeking out sources of such data worldwide, knowing that many are irreplaceable for research into the long-term trends that occur in the natural world.

Organizing Data Rescue

The first speaker was Elizabeth Griffin from Canada’s Dominion Astrophysical Observatory. She spoke of two forms of knowledge that we are concerned with here: the memory of the world and the forgettery of the world. (PDF of session slides)

Click to read full text of The CODATA Mission: Preserving Scientific Data for the Future.

• GIS and Geospatial Data Preservation: Research Resources
  
• Blog Action Day 2009: IEDRO and Climate Change
  
• International Environmental Data Rescue Organization: Rescuing At Risk Weather Records Around the World
  
• SAA 2006 Session 103: “X” Marks the Spot: Archiving GIS Databases – Part III
  

In less than six hours, the polls in Maryland will open for the 2012 general election. Here on ‘election eve’ in the United States of America, I wanted to share some records of those who fought to gain the right to vote for all throughout the USA. Some of these you may have seen before – but I did my best to find images, audio, and video that may not have crossed your path. Why do we have these? In most cases it is because an archive kept them.

Of course I couldn’t do this post without including some of the great images out there of suffragists, but I bet you didn’t know that they had Suffrage Straw Rides.

Or perhaps Suffrage Dancers?

Here we see a group from the Suffrage Hike to Albany, NY in 1914.


Click to read full text of Election Eve: Fighting for the Right to Vote.

• Encouraging Participation in the Census
  
• Using WWI Draft Registration Cards for Research: NARA Records Provide Crucial Data
  
• SXSW Panel Proposal – Archival Records Online: Context is King
  
• Library of Congress Inauguration 2009 Audio and Video Project
  

In honor of the Blog Action Day for 2012 and their theme of ‘The Power of We’, I would like to highlight a number of successful crowdsourced projects focused on transcribing, acquisition and tagging of archival materials. Nothing I can think of embodies ‘the power of we’ more clearly than the work being done by many hands from across the Internet.

Transcription

• Old Weather Records

Learn more about why the weather scientists need you.

• From The Page: “FromThePage is free software that allows volunteers to transcribe handwritten documents on-line.” A number of different projects are using this software including: The San Diego Museum of Natural History’s project to transcribe the field notes of herpetologist Laurence M. Klaube and Southwestern University’s project to transcribe the Mexican War Diary of Zenas Matthews.


Click to read full text of Harnessing The Power of We: Transcription, Acquisition and Tagging.

• Archival Transcriptions: for the public, by the public
  
• THATCamp 2008: Crowdsourced Transcription and Collaborative Annotation
  
• The MemoryArchive Affiliate Program: A Wiki Engine for Collecting Memoirs
  
• reCAPTCHA: crowdsourcing transcription comes to life
  

In honor of the 2012 Day of Digtal Archives, I am posting a link to the UNESCO/UBC Vancouver Declaration. This is the product of the recent Memory of the World in the Digital Age conference and they are looking for feedback on this declaration by October 19th, 2012 (see link on the conference page for sending in feedback).

To give you a better sense of the aim of this conference, here are the ‘conference goals’ from the programme:

The safeguard of digital documents is a fundamental issue that touches everyone, yet most people are unaware of the risk of loss or the magnitude of resources needed for long-term protection. This Conference will provide a platform to showcase major initiatives in the area while scaling up awareness of issues in order to find solutions at a global level. Ensuring digital continuity of content requires a range of legal, technological, social, financial, political and other obstacles to be overcome.

Click to read full text of UNESCO/UBC Vancouver Declaration.

• Day of Digital Archives
  
• DMCA Exemption Added That Supports Archivists
  
• Book Review: Digital Preservation
  
• Caring for Special Collections: Exploring the Connecting to Collections Bookshelf
  

CURATEcamp Processing 2012 was held the day after the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) sponsored Digital Preservation annual meeting.

The unconference was framed by this idea:

Processing means different things to an archivist and a software developer. To the former, processing is about taking custody of collections, preserving context, and providing arrangement, description, and accessibility. To the latter, processing is about computer processing and has to do with how one automates a range of tasks through computation.

The first hour or so was dedicated to mingling and suggesting sessions.  Anyone with an idea for a session wrote down a title and short description on a paper and taped it to the wall. These were then reviewed, rearranged on the schedule and combined where appropriate until we had our full final schedule. More than half the sessions on the schedule have links through to notes from the session. There were four session slots, plus a noon lunch slot of lightening talks.

Click to read full text of CURATEcamp Processing 2012.

• Final Count Down to SAA2007
  
• SAA 2007 Session Proposal: Preserving Context and Original Order in a Digital World
  
• Unofficial SAA2007 Chicago Conference Wiki Now Online
  
• SAA Wiki 2008: Create an account and add your voice!
  

The Grateful Dead Archive Online threw open its virtual doors in late June, 2012. This project has gotten a lot of attention from both the archives community and the Grateful Dead community. I got a message from my husband shortly after it went online directing me to the envelope shown above from the fan art section of the site. This was the envelope I helped decorate for our mail order ticket request sent back in January of 1992. The theory was that if you made your envelope beautiful, it was more likely to get pulled out of the pile of orders vying for a limited number of tickets. It worked for us this time – we plan to upload images of the tickets we received from that order (yes, we still have them!).

Click to read full text of Grateful Dead Archive Online: First Impressions.

• Yahoo & Google’s Search for Reusable Images and the Flickr Commons
  
• Freebase Parallax Search Interface: Exploring Olympic Games Facts
  
• SAA 2006 Poster: Communicating Context in Online Collections
  
• Concertina History Online Features Virtual Collaboration and Digitization
  

The official title for this session is “Preservation and Conservation of Captured and Born Digital Materials” and it was divided into three presentations with introduction and question moderation by Jordon Steele, University Archivist at Johns Hopkins University.

Digital Curation, Understanding the lifecycle of born digital items

Isaiah Beard, Digital Data Curator from Rutgers, started out with the question ‘What Is Digital Curation?’. He showed a great Dilbert cartoon on digital media curation and the set of six photos showing all different perspectives on what digital curation really is (a la the ‘what I really do’ meme – here is one for librarians).

“The curation, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets.” — Digital Curation Center.

What does a Digital Curator do?

Aquire digital assets:

• digitized analog sources
• assets that were born digital, no physical analog exists

Certify content integrity:

Click to read full text of MARAC Spring 2012: Preservation of Digital Materials (Session S1).

• Rescuing 5.25″ Floppy Disks from Oblivion
  
• Day of Digital Archives
  
• MARAC Spring 2010: Hurray for Archival Metadata (Session S2)
  
• GIS and Geospatial Data Preservation: Research Resources
  

The quality vs quantity dilemma is high in the minds of those planning major digitization projects. Do you spend your time and energy creating the highest quality images of your archival records? Or do you focus on digitizing the largest quantity you can manage? Choosing one over the other has felt a bit like an exercise in fortune telling to me over the past few months, so I thought I would work through at least a few of the moving parts of this issue here.

The two ends of the spectrum are traditionally described as follows:

• digitize at very high quality to ensure that you need not re-digitize later, create a high quality master copy from which all possible derivatives can be created later
• digitize at the minimum quality required for your current needs, the theory being that this will increase the quantity of digitized records you can digitize

• Rescuing 5.25″ Floppy Disks from Oblivion
  
• Blog Action Day 2009: IEDRO and Climate Change
  
• Digitization Program Site Visit: Archives of American Art
  
• Digitization Program Site Visit: University of Maryland
  

The image of Alexander Calder above shows him in his studio, circa 1950. It is from a folder titled Photographs: Calder at Work, 1927-1956, undated, part of Alexander Calder’s Papers held by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art and available online through the efforts of their digitization project. I love that this image capture him in his creative space – you get to see the happy chaos from which Calder drew his often sleek and sparse sculptures.

Back in October, I had the opportunity to visit with staff of the digitization program for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art along with a group of my colleagues from the World Bank. This is a report on that site visit. It is my hope that these details can help others planning digitization projects – much as it is informing our own internal planning.

Date of Visit: October 18, 2011

Click to read full text of Digitization Program Site Visit: Archives of American Art.

• Digitization Program Site Visit: University of Maryland
  
• Session 305: Extended Archival Description Part I – Archives of American Art
  
• SAA2006 Session 305: Extended Archival Description Part II – ArchivesUM
  
• Susa 2.0: Max Evans’ Finding Aid Prototype