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Archive for the ‘Archives’ Category

Over 2000 recordings by British and Irish Muscians have been digitised and made available online in a project by Kings College, London.

The Musicains of Britain and Ireland 1900-1950 project is allowing listeners and researchers to rediscover leading musicians who were once household names.

Most of the recordings are making their first public appearance since they came out on shellac over 60 years ago and are linked to a range of research resources about the history of recording to help people make the most of the collection.

The discs were selected specifically to highlight world-class British and Irish performers recorded between 1900 and 1950, especially artists neglected by the newly-formed EMI after the merger of the Gramophone Co and Columbia in 1931.

For more information about this project and to listen to some samples,visit the JISC webpages

All the tracks and many more are all available on the CHARM website.

The AHRC funded project Jane Austen’s fiction manuscripts represent the first significant body of holograph evidence surviving for any British novelist.

They represent every stage of her writing career and a variety of physical states: working drafts, fair copies, and handwritten publications for private circulation.

Digitization enables their virtual reunification and will provides scholars with the first opportunity to make simultaneous ocular comparison of their different physical and conceptual states, facilitating intimate and systematic study of Austen’s working practices across her career.

Many of the Austen manuscripts are frail; open and sustained access has long been impossible for conservation and location reasons.

The digital edition will include in the first instance all Jane Austen’s known fiction manuscripts and any ancillary materials held with them.

Visit the project website for more information.

You can now search and download over 155,000 medal cards recording campaign medals awarded to merchant seamen in the First World War. The cards, available in DocumentsOnline, list the recipients of the British War Medal, the Mercantile Marine Medal and the Silver War Badge.

The cards, from Catalogue references BT 351/1/1, BT 351/1/2 and MT 9/1404, record the issue of medals to individual seamen. The Mercantile Marine Medal was given to those who served at sea for six months or more between August 1914 and November 1918, and who served on at least one voyage through a danger zone. Recipients of this medal were automatically entitled to the British War Medal. The Silver War Badge was awarded to merchant seamen no longer fit for service as a result of wounds or sickness received or contracted during the war.

Link to Article

The first of this year’s releases of the John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera has just been announced.

The publication is a series of fourteen specially commissioned essays that respond to a diverse selection of items from the John Johnson Collection.

These concise and illuminating studies – which have been contributed by Rob Banham, Troy Bickham, Robert Colls, Simon Eliot, D. J. Taylor, Michael Twyman and Mariana Warner – are available in the John Johnson Collection alongside digital facsimile images of the items to which they relate.

The complete list of essays is accessible via a link on the John Johnson Collection home page or by clicking the Responses link in the toolbar that appears at the top of every screen in the John Johnson Collection.

Link to Web Site

This toolkit is aimed at both staff within institutions charged with developing repositories and at researchers wanting to find out more about open access and how they can engage with it.

This toolkit is an output of the Institutional Repository Infrastructure for Scotland (IRIScotland) project, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as part of its Digital Repositories Programme

The toolkit is published primarily as a website to allow a variety of interested parties including researchers, managers, technical staff and librarians to access and contextualise appropriate components. The toolkit has also been produced as the IRIScotland repository toolkit, a single linear PDF document enabling distribution in paper format.

Link to Web Site

The inclusion of another 1m pages on the BL Historic Newspapers website takes the total number of pages of 19th Century Newspapers available online to over 3 million22 new titles cover a range of both regional and metropolitan publications including the Cheshire Observer, the Royal Cornwall Gazette, the Isle of Man Times and the Nottinghamshire Guardian

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The Archivists’ Toolkit is a successful open source software package for archivists, originally developed with grant funding. The author, who formerly worked on the project at a participating institution, examines some of the challenges in making an open source project self-sustaining past grant funding. A consulting group hired by the project recommended that — like many successful open source projects — they rely on a collaborative volunteer community of users and developers. However, the project has had limited success fostering such a community. The author offers specific recommendations for the project going forward to gain market share and develop a collaborative user and development community, with more open governance.

by Sibyl Schaefer

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In 2008, the Library of Virginia (LVA) selected the digital asset management system DigiTool to host a centralized collection of digital state government publications. The Virginia state digital repository targets three primary user groups: state agencies, depository libraries and the general public. DigiTool’s ability to create depositor profiles for individual agencies to submit their publications, its integration with the Aleph ILS, and product support by ExLibris were primary factors in its selection. As a smaller institution, however, LVA lacked the internal resources to take full advantage of DigiTool’s full set of features. The process of cataloging a heterogenous collection of state documents also proved to be a challenge within DigiTool. This article takes a retrospective look at what worked, what did not, and what could have been done to improve the experience.

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22 March – The Prime Minister announced today that The National Archives will lead a programme to create an online Digital Domesday book, which will list non-personal and re-usable central government datasets, by autumn this year. The plan formed part of an announcement on Building Britain’s Digital Future.

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