From Heritage Portal: An open-access visual archive of architecture and sculpture Gothic Past is an open-access visual archive of Irish medieval architecture and sculpture that showcases thousands of photographs and drawings of medieval Irish architecture and sculpture. The site was launched by the Provost of Trinity College Dublin, Dr Patrick Prendergast, on February 15, 2012. Since then the site has had thousands of hits and page views by web users worldwide. http://www.gothicpast.com is a rich source of visual material for the general public and researchers of Irish architecture and heritage tourism. The visual content of the site includes...

via HeritagePortal.eu It is now possible to zoom into the intricate, breathtaking details of one of the most important works of art in the world, thanks to a newly completed website focused on the Ghent Altarpiece. A stunning and highly complex painting composed of separate oak panels, The Mystic Lamb of 1432 by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, known as the Ghent Altarpiece, recently underwent much-needed emergency conservation within the Villa Chapel in St. Bavo Cathedral in Ghent. As part of this work, the altarpiece was removed from its glass enclosure and temporarily dismantled—a rare event which also made it possible to...

From the University of Chicago Library News: Digitized copies of a small selection of the Library’s 19th-century ethnographic maps and 19th-century European transportation maps are now available online. These newly digitized maps form a portion of the roughly 400 maps that are available via the Library’s Map Collection web page. [Clip] Most of these maps show the distribution of particular ethnic groups or languages, while a few show the geography of other aspects of culture. The majority concentrate either on parts of the colonial world in which the ethnic distribution was only coming to be known by Western scholars—or else on one of...

Last year we mentioned the physical book archive Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, has started, stockpiling physical books in cargo containers in warehouses against a time when they might be needed in the future. Now the New York Times has noticed, covering it with an article discussing the rationale behind it, the process of archiving the books, and what use they might see in the future. Part of it is that Kahle wants to keep the books available in case technology should improve and they need to be scanned again. But he also wants to make sure...

An article made available by Simon Fraser University in British Columbia provides a firsthand report by SFU alumnus Kyle Jackson about a trip he took to India as part of an Endangered Archives Programme (EAP) pilot project. Here’s a small portion of the article: I was in Mizoram as a part of a four-member pilot-project under the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP), a global rescue mission for the world’s most endangered historical documents. Administered by the UK’s British Library and funded by Arcadia, EAP researchers have in the past seven years fanned out across the globe, armed with little more than high-resolution digital cameras and...

The video was recorded during the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Fall 2011 Membership Meeting. Title: “Preservation Status of e-Resources: A Potential Crisis in Electronic Journal Preservation” Direct to Video (59 minutes) Direct to Slides (.ppt) Presenters: Oya Y. Rieger Associate University Librarian Digital Scholarship Services Cornell University Robert Wolven Associate University Librarian Bibliographic Services and Collection Development Columbia University E-journals have replaced the majority of titles formerly produced in paper format. Academic libraries are increasingly dependent on commercially produced, born-digital content that is purchased or licensed. The purpose of this presentation is to share the findings of a 2CUL study that assesses the role of LOCKSS and PORTICO in preserving each institution’s...

From the press release: 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. Nineteenth Century Collections Online is an ongoing publishing program with content and partner libraries being added continuously. The British Library, The National Archives (United States), The National...

From the Asheville Citizen-Times: America’s most beloved national park site, the Blue Ridge Parkway, was built for scenic driving. But thanks to nearly three years of devoted digitizing by UNC Chapel Hill Library staff and graduate students, it is now open for driving back in time. The just-launched “Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina,” created through a collaborative project based at UNC’s library puts everyone in the driver’s seat of the parkway’s 77-year history. [Clip] The site allows users to explore parkway history chronologically, geographically or by dozens of topics, from access roads to wildlife. The “GeoBrowser” feature is one...

From ResearchBuzz: CyArk, the World Monuments Fund, and the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office have gotten together with University of Redlands associate professor Dr. Wesley Bernardini to launch the Hopi Petroglyph Sites Digital Preservation Project Website. (Say that three times fast.) This site contains multimedia, a virtual tour, and educational plans related to Tutuveni, which means newspaper rock in Hopi. Tutuveni contains 5,000 petroglyphs of Hopi clan symbols in its 150 sandstone boulders. You can access the site at http://archive.cyark.org/hopi-petroglyph-sites-intro. The site starts off with a slideshow but you can access a menu of available content on the main page. The multimedia page contains drawings,...

From the Wall St. Journal (Subs Only) or Free via Google Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue, has turned Vogue’s glossy pages into a digital database and is opening it to the public for a hefty fee. Voilà: the Vogue Archive. Kept under a cloak of secrecy for two years as the publisher scanned a truckload of paper into digital bytes, the archive was expected to be unveiled online Wednesday evening. The result is a pop-culture data mine covering 120 years of American desires and aspirations. More than 425,000 images, 300,000 ads, and 100,000 articles, dating back to 1892, have been fully indexed and are...

From the National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek): In 2009, the European project KEEP started (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable). KEEP is doing research and development into technical and legal possibilities and challenges to give long-term access to digital information using emulation. Within this project and beyond, the National Library of the Netherlands has invested significant time and money in developing new software to help achieve this goal. On 26 and 27 October 2011, the KEEP project presented its intermediate results in a workshop dedicated to professionals in the field of preservation and data management. [Clip] The KEEP project ends in February 2012. At...

From the University of Michigan News Service: Scholarly gems are often found by sifting through dusty archives in foreign lands thousands of miles away. But sometimes they’re discovered just by doing some office cleaning on campus. That’s what happened recently at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. Staffers who were tidying up a storage room found a stunning collection of rare propaganda papercut images from the Cultural Revolution—a period of massive political upheaval in China that began in 1966 and lasted about a decade. One papercut shows the late Chinese leader Mao Zedong and his hand-picked successor, Lin...