Tag Archives: digital archives

News: Education & Technology, Librarianship

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Education & Technology

Xbox One News: Xbox One’s DRM policy reversal: an oral history | Engadget and Xbox One won’t play 3D Blu-rays — for now | CNET

Intel Has Acquired Kno, Will Push Further Into The Education Content Market With Interactive Textbooks | TechCrunch
We had a tip about, and have now confirmed, Intel’s latest acquisition: Kno, the education startup that started life as a hardware business and later pivoted into software – specifically via apps that let students read interactive versions of digitized textbooks.

Librarianship

digital collections – if you build them will anyone visit | Frederick Zarndt

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News: Education & Technology, Librarianship

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Education & Technology

Web inventor Berners-Lee sounds alarm on mass spying | CNET
Sir Tim Berners-Lee says the activities of the NSA and its UK counterpart, the GCHQ, could warp his baby, making the Internet vulnerable to attack and depriving humanity of a “safe space” for problem solving.

The Amazingly Unlikely Story of How Minecraft Was Born | WIRED
Excerpt from new book.

Librarianship

Mom Complains About Library’s Porn Policy | NBC Chicago
A suburban mother is demanding the Orland Park Public Library ban pornography on its computers. More scandal: Library book overdue in Texas? Go directly to jail | Teleread

Creature Feature: The Original Frankenstein Text Is Now Readable Online | Gizmodo

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In the pantheon of classic horror, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ranks as one of the first, and most memorable, monster tales ever told. And while it’s easy enough to pick up a new copy of the spine-tingling 1818 narrative from pretty much any bookstore, it’s now possible to pore over the original, hand-penned manuscript online.

New York Public Library teamed up with the University of Maryland’s Institute for Technology in the Humanities to digitize Shelley’s two surviving notebooks containing most of the work—complete with edits by Percy Bysshe Shelley, her poet husband. Making this almost 200-year-old text click-accessible for a modern audience is only the first step for the Shelley-Godwin Archive, which hopes to digitize the entire oeuvre of the ultra-writerly family of Percy, Mary, and her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

There’s a pretty extensive how-to on the best ways to navigate the site, which fittingly launched this All Hallows Eve and is currently in beta mode. Have a look around at what genius looked like in the most truly terrifying time of them all: pre-word processing. [New York Times ArtsBeat]

Frankenstein
Image: Shelley, M. (1817). “Frankenstein—Draft Notebook B,”
in The Shelley-Godwin Archive, c. 57, fol. 29v.

via Creature Feature: The Original Frankenstein Text Is Now Readable Online | Gizmodo.

Russian volunteers put the complete works of Tolstoy online | MobyLives | Melville House

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Read the article: Russian volunteers put the complete works of Tolstoy online | MobyLives.

Quoteable: “This tremendous response is apposite for Tolstoy: not only of course is he one of the most beloved of the Russian greats, but he believed in the extraordinary possibilities of collective effort.”

Digitized books are available for download on the Tolstoy website. The website is in Russian for now, with an English version still under construction.

British Film Institute to launch streaming video service on October 9th | Engadget

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The British Film Institute promised that it would put 10,000 movies online as part of the Film Forever initiative, and it’s now making good on its word — if slowly. The Institute will launch the first phase of its BFI Player streaming service on October 9th with a library of more than 1,000 videos, including movies, behind-the-scenes clips and archival footage. About 60 percent of the content will be free, with the rest available as pay-per-view. As for those remaining 9,000 videos? The BFI expects those to appear in the months ahead, and it’s launching BFI Player’s second phase in early 2014.

via British Film Institute to launch streaming video service on October 9th | Engadget.

Archival Technologies Presentation | Cliff Landis

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An Online Project Collects The Stories Behind Favorite Heirlooms | Co.Design

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Genie lamps, ancient tomes, swords in stones: Classic tales reveal that certain objects possess magical powers, absorbed through generations of inheritance. With today’s relentless pressure to just buy more and more, it’s easy to forget the power of our own belongings. We’re all hoarders on some level. But most of us have at least one heirloom with a rich history, an item that seems more alive than the rest.

British photographer Joakim Blockstrom wants to hear these particular stories and to document your favorite heirlooms. Blockstrom founded The Heirloom Project, an online bank of images of passed-down objects along with their histories. The intent is to start a discussion about the meaning of inheritance and its relationship to our identities and what we value.

An Online Project Collects The Stories Behind Favorite Heirlooms | Co.Design | business + design

See the full post: An Online Project Collects The Stories Behind Favorite Heirlooms | Co.Design | business + design.

World’s largest Aboriginal exhibition goes online | Australian Geographic

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THE WORLD’S LARGEST AND most representative collection of Aboriginal artefacts will soon be accessible at the click of a mouse.

The South Australian Museum has undertaken a significant project to digitally photograph and database every object in its Aboriginal Material Culture collection, which is recognised as the world’s largest and most comprehensive.

Aboriginal Artifact

via World’s largest Aboriginal exhibition goes online | Australian Geographic.

Related: Australia’s Oldest Culture Enters the Digital Age – One Image at a Time | South Australian Museum

Digitize Your Large-Format Film At A Fraction Of The Price With This DIY Scanner ⚙ Co.Labs

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With a bit of elbow grease and a DSLR, a few large-format-film-buff hackers have built a rig to scan in photos at a much higher resolution than your average desktop scanner.

The DIY DSLR lightbox has been around for a few years, but only for traditional 35mm film, the dominant format for film and still photography. This new model is specifically for large-format film, from the popular 4″x5″ format (which is 16 times the size of a 35mm frame–and thus has 16 times the resolution) up to 8″x10″, after which it reaches “ultra large” format resolution.

via Digitize Your Large-Format Film At A Fraction Of The Price With This DIY Scanner ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community.