London’s Heywood Hill curates impressive collections for discerning customers in 60 different countries — and specializes in the obscure. READ MORE: The Tiny London Shop Behind Some of the Very Best Libraries | The New York Times
Tag Archives: collections
Paramount Now #Streaming 175 #Free #Movies #Online | Open Culture #film #historical #cinema
They call the project The Paramount Vault, a digital cinematic storehouse sorted into playlists of Classics, Comedy, Action/Adventure, Drama, Horror, Westerns, Science Fiction, and Thrillers, containing such pictures as Ironweed, Hamlet, Paris When It Sizzles, King Creole, Dark City, Funny About Love, and Margot at the Wedding — all of which, unfortunately, you can only watch in the United States. (BTW, we have a big list of unrestricted films here.) The geographical constraint still holds, at least for now, but the Paramount Vault people have kept at work filling it with movies. READ MORE: Paramount Now Streaming 175 Free Movies Online, Including Westerns, Thrillers & Crime Pictures | Open Culture
Smithsonian #Libraries Receives #Nano #Bible | Smithsonian Libraries #digital #collections #tech
Smithsonian Secretary David J. Skorton recently accepted a Nano Bible from the American Technion Society at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History on Oct. 30. The Nano Bible will be part of the Smithsonian Libraries collection, housed in the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology at the National Museum of American History.
The Nano Bible is the world’s smallest version of the Hebrew Bible, produced by researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. Engraved on a gold-plated silicon chip the size of a sugar grain, the bible’s text consists of more than 1.2 million letters carved with a focused beam of gallium ions. The text engraved on the chip must be magnified 10,000 times to be readable. READ MORE: Smithsonian Libraries Receives Nano Bible | Smithsonian Libraries Unbound
10 Must-Watch #Movies From Paramount’s #Free Internet Vault | Forbes #film #obscure #YouTube #streaming #video #online
It seems that every time the denizens of the Internet have started to get accustomed to the vast sea of options for streaming online video, another huge wave of movies floods the pool of content. Paramount [has] made dozens of titles in their library available to stream in full on the studio’s YouTube channel Paramount Vault.
Admittedly, the entries contained within the vault aren’t the studio’s most high-profile earners; in fact, most of the films that aren’t forgotten gems from decades gone by were released quietly in a small number of theaters or direct to home video. And yet, the cleverness of the Paramount Vault move lies in just how little the studio has to lose. The properties that have been transferred to the YouTube channel were sitting, collecting dust in the studio’s portfolio of acquisitions. This way, the people receive a slew of new movies at no cost whatsoever, and the studio wrings a little advertising revenue out of properties that were once thought dead and done with. READ MORE: 10 Must-Watch Movies From Paramount’s Free Internet Vault | Forbes
How To #Scan 50 Miles of #Historical Documents Into an #Online #Archive | Gizmodo #VeniceTimeMachine #tech #digital #preservation #digitization
Tracking the lightning quick development of modern cities is easy with Google Street View, but the [Venice Time Machine] project aims to provide context for the past 1,000 years of urban evolution in Venice, Italy. The Venice Time Machine will digitize and catalog a staggering amount of historical documents—a combined 50 miles worth of shelves!—then turn the data into an internet archive and adaptable 3D model. READ MORE: How To Scan 50 Miles of Historical Documents Into an Online Archive | Gizmodo
1200 Years of #Women #Composers: A #Free 78-Hour #Music #Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now | Open Culture #historical #classical
The Spotify playlist “1200 Years of Women Composers: From Hildegard To Higdon,” reveals that women started shaping what we now know as classical music far longer ago than most of us realize. (If you don’t have Spotify’s free software, download it here.) The playlist, which contains over 900 pieces and will take you days to listen to, begins in medieval times with the Byzantine abbess, poet, composer, and hymnographer Kassia and ends with female composers from around the world not only living but (especially by the standards of those who write orchestral music) still young, like Misato Mochizuki, Helena Tulve, and Lera Auerbach. This comes arranged by Spotify Classical Playlists, whose site describes how the playlist offers not just an anthology of women composers, but also “a brief history of western classical music…” MORE: 1200 Years of Women Composers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now | Open Culture
Scouring the Web to Make New #Words ‘Lookupable’ | TNYT #search #discovery #language #dictionaries #online #datascience @wordnik
Ms. McKean started a campaign last month on Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site, to unearth one million “missing” English words — words that are not currently found in traditional dictionaries. To locate the underdocumented expressions, she has engaged a pair of data scientists to scrape and analyze language used in online publications. Ms. McKean said she planned to incorporate the found words in Wordnik.com, an online dictionary of which she is a co-founder…Before her analytics project gets underway next month, Ms. McKean is crowdsourcing a list of missing words for possible inclusion in Wordnik.
READ MORE: Scouring the Web to Make New Words ‘Lookupable’ | The New York Times
Calgary Man’s Quest to Develop Abandoned Rolls of Film… | Calgary Sun #photography #photos #images #collections #preservation
Until Azriel Knight developed the film in his darkroom, no one had ever seen these photographs, or hundreds of others like them, dating back decades and showing everything from mundane life to the historically fascinating. “It’s easier than throwing the film away — I come across them by happenstance, by buying old cameras,” said Knight. “In the photos, a lot of the time the people seem really happy, so I figure they would probably like to have them back.” Like a voyeuristic Indiana Jones, Knight is an archeological treasure hunter, sifting through forgotten rolls of film for clues as to who lost them, and when and where they were taken.
Knight’s website, Mysterious Developments (http://mysteriousdev.com), contains 61 documented cases of lost film so far, presented both as still pictures and as narrated video episodes, explaining what’s known so far.
READ MORE: Calgary man’s quest to develop abandoned rolls of film leads to interesting find | Calgary Sun
My Grandfather Built a House of 20,000 #Books From the Ashes of War | The New Republic #collections #libraries #history
Snip: I do not think anyone ever counted the number of books in Chimen’s house, although he made partial efforts over the years to catalog his collection, and various book experts, some flown in from New York and others from London, spent weeks studying it after he died. Looking at the shelves, I estimated that there were probably close to 20,000 volumes in the house at the time of Chimen’s death. My father believed it was more like 15,000. Whatever the exact number of books at Hillway, it was staggering. And what made it more staggering was their quality. Chimen did not simply aim for numbers; he collected books and editions that were extraordinarily hard to find and, by extension, were worth their weight in gold. More important, they were the stuff of rebirth, ways to bring vanished pasts to life. READ MORE: My Grandfather Built a House of 20,000 Books From the Ashes of War | The New Republic
#Stream 58 Hours of #Free #Classical #Music Selected to Help You Study, Work, or Simply Relax | Open Culture #streaming #spotify
Lovers of classical music have a third online option, thanks to an enterprising digital curator who goes by the name of Ulyssestone and who compiled the Spotify playlist above of 58 hours of classical music — from Sibelius to Satie, Bach to Debussy. It’s designed for anyone who wants to study, work, or simply relax. READ MORE: Stream 58 Hours of Free Classical Music Selected to Help You Study, Work, or Simply Relax | Open Culture.
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