Library launches crowd-sourced transcription project to make 12,000 pieces of abolitionist correspondence searchable.
History buffs get excited whenever a state or local agency announces the digitization of a huge collection of newspapers, birth and death records, and other archives. We all want the Holy Grail: convenient online access from home that lets us drill down and find information from genealogy records to crime reports.
A lot of us can recall stories and tales told to us by our grandparents when we were young. Many of us hung on to these oral histories and have retold them plenty of times to our children in the hopes that they, too, will keep the tradition going. But what would happen if these oral histories were lost? Future generations would never know about their family’s history. Such was almost the case for the Navajo Nation.
Want to see some large antique globes, but don’t want to put on pants and trek to Portland, Maine? The Osher Map Library has you covered with its new digitization project. Globes were once incredibly common for use in mapping and exploring the world, but now it can be hard to get up close and personal with these delicate items. Luckily for map- and history-lovers, the Osher Map Library is working hard to get its collection of nearly three hundred vintage globes online and available for viewing at all hours of the day.
Humans are recorders. We’ve been recording things for centuries. We drew everyday life on the insides of caves. We documented the number of livestock we owned. Today, we’ve evolved to journal every aspect of our existence, from the clothes we wear to the food we eat. We are what we eat, and as early as the 1st Century, we were recording what we consumed. For twenty-five years, it was Barbara Ketcham Wheaton’s job to curate the cookbook collection at the Schlesinger Library at Cambridge, Massachusetts’ Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. For twice that amount of time, she has been feverishly creating a database of all the recipes, ingredients, and cookbooks recorded in Europe and America.
Digital preservation is a solution to the “archivist’s dilemma”—how do you provide access without worrying about loss?
From smaller library initiatives to the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America’s digital newspaper project, digital preservation provides access to information through an accessible, retrievable and searchable database.
Over the past few years, a lot of our information has gone into ‘the cloud.’ The appeal is clear—the ability to access data (files, spreadsheets, schedules, etc.) from anywhere. Drop and drag a file from your desk top and retrieve it from any device you use. The convenience is undeniable. But is convenience overshadowing reason?
Scanner manuals can often befuddle users with too much information. For non-expert users there are just a few basic things you need to know in order to get the best possible results from your scanner.