too many topics,

    too little time.

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Brent and I have “Chapter 11: The April 16 Archive: Collecting and Preserving Memories of the Virginia Tech Tragedy” in the above book.

Blacklight is an open source OPAC (online public access catalog). That means libraries (or anyone else) can use it to allow people to search and browse their collections online. Blacklight uses Solr to index and search, and it has a highly configurable Ruby on Rails front-end. Currently, Blacklight can index, search, and provide faceted browsing for MaRC records and several kinds of XML documents, including TEI, EAD, and GDMS.

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blacklight looks cool and highly extensible, hopefully i’ll find some time to play with it soon. i like it’s theme… expose your hidden data.

Archivalia: Usage of Creative Commons by cultural heritage organisations:
Usage of Creative Commons by cultural heritage organisations
http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/studies/cc2007

Snapshot and case studies of current usage of Creative Commons (and other open content) licences by cultural heritage organisations in the UK
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this is a worthwhile study, i wonder if there is funding to do a comparable study in the u.s.

Report: The future of scholarly communication: building the infastructure for cyberscholarship:
The future of scholarly communication: building the infastructure for cyberscholarship link

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From craigbellamy.net

How to pay for a free press, by André Schiffrin:
How to pay for a free press

In a media world with one eye on the bottom line and the other on the official line, it’s getting harder to publish or broadcast anything that doesn’t promise huge sales and attendant profits, and that doesn’t say or show what is approved. But it’s still possible

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perhaps it is time to start a universal trust to support the free press?

Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century:
Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century

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so archivists are sharing.

International Memory of the World Conference:
“Communities and memories: a global perspective” is the theme of the Conference to take place in Australia next year.

In association with the Australian Memory of the World Committee and under the auspices of the Australian National Commission for UNESCO, the National Library of Australia will organize the Third International Memory of the World Conference from 19 to 22 February 2008 in Canberra, Australia.

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This looks like it could be something cool.

Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation:
Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation is an online survey from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science. The study team is interested in hearing from all bloggers on their perceptions on digital preservation in relation to their own blogging activities, as well as the blogosphere in general

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this is an interesting project…

Memory of the World:
UNESCO’s Memory of the World program aims at preservation and dissemination of valuable archive holdings and library collections worldwide.
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great idea…

AlterNet: Myth of the Universal Digital Library:
Sorry, but we can’t digitize everything. Here’s why …

A lot of Web geeks believe that one day everything ever created by humans will be available online. Call it the myth of the universal library. Here’s how the myth goes: Because there is unlimited real estate in cyberspace and because media can be digitized, we can fill cyberspace with all human knowledge and give everyone access to it. Without further ado, I present to you three arguments for eliminating the myth of the universal library.

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It is true, we can’t… do it… but then… that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do something.

Linux.com | Linux to help the Library of Congress save American history:
The Library of Congress, where thousands of rare public domain documents relating to America’s history are stored and slowly decaying, is about to begin an ambitious project to digitize these fragile documents using Linux-based systems and publish the results online in multiple formats.

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The sloan foundation has funded this development. It uses scribe, which is a bookscanning system.

Museum Professionals and the Relevance of LIS Expertise:
Marty, Paul F. (2007) Museum Professionals and the Relevance of LIS Expertise.

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Paul Marty, who I met while interviewing at FSU, is cranking out some great papers in museums, museum informatics, and museum professionals in relation to library/information professionals

Peter Suber, Open Access News
:
Is China blocking OA to Chinese Marxist texts?

Noam Cohen, Who’s Attacking an Online Marxist Archive? China Is Suspected of Trying to Block Access to Texts, New York Times, February 5, 2007. Excerpt: …According to the Marxist Internet Archive, an online community that produces and organizes an ever-growing [open access] Marxist library…computer attacks primarily from China are jeopardizing its ability to provide Marxist texts, perhaps forcing the library to stop providing material in Chinese.

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The NYT covered the Marxist Archive of which the CDDC is now one of the main hosting providers. We have not had as much problems with Chinese, but that is probably because of the excellent infrastructure that Virginia Tech provides.

Modern Archival Literature: A Brief Annotated Bibliography:

Largest archive of free culture to be built in the Netherlands:
From the Netherlands, the “Images for the Future” project is building a large-scale conservation and digitization project to make available 285,000 hours of film, television, and radio recordings, as well as more than 2.9 million photos from the Netherlands’ film and television archives. A basic collection drawn from the archive will be made available on the Internet either under CC licenses, or in some cases, in the public domain. The Government of the Netherlands, a long time supporter of the local Dutch CC project, will invest a total of 173 million Euros over a seven-year period. Their aim is to spur innovative applications with new media, while providing valuable services to the public.
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this will be great… free content is the backbone of innovation and production.