Tag Archives: digital preservation

Crowdsourced Metadata Games: A Primer | Information Space

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The challenge: You have two minutes to educate a Stupid Robot by describing the picture below as precisely as possible. The catch: you can only list one word of any given length from 4-10 letters, and the robot will reject words it already knows. Therefore, you must be accurate, creative, and specific all at once.

An image from the British Library’s collections on http://www.metadatagames.org

If, like me, you found this challenge oddly entertaining, you might enjoy Metadata Games, a set of interactive tagging games designed to help libraries and museums crowdsource useful metadata for their collections.

READ MORE: Crowdsourced Metadata Games: A Primer | Information Space

British Library gives teachers tools to inspire | Books | The Observer

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Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians from British Library Learning on Vimeo.

While Discovering Literature is an important cultural resource that can be enjoyed by all ages, it has been carefully tailored to appeal to GCSE and A-level students. The British Library’s research among teachers showed that original manuscripts, with their edits and revisions, dodgy grammar and messy handwriting, can be a powerful way of engaging pupils. Contextual material can also be a source of inspiration, and the site is packed with items such as letters, diaries, dictionaries, newspapers and illustrations that illuminate the historical, social and political contexts of classic works.

READ MORE: British Library gives teachers tools to inspire | Books | The Observer.

See Also: The British Library Launches New Online Collection of 1,200 Romantic and Victorian Literary Treasures | InfoDocket

Duke’s Legacy: Video Game Source Disc Preservation at the Library of Congress | The Signal: Digital Preservation

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Duke’s Legacy: Video Game Source Disc Preservation at the Library of Congress | The Signal: Digital Preservation

Several months ago, while performing an inventory of recently acquired video games, I happened upon a DVD-R labeled Duke Nukem: Critical Mass PSP. My first assumption was that the disc, like so many others we have received, was a DVD-R of gameplay. However, a line of text on the Copyright database record for the item intrigued me. It reads: Authorship: Entire video game; computer code; artwork; and music. I placed the disc into my computer’s DVD drive to discover that the DVD-R did not contain video, but instead a file directory, including every asset used to make up the game in a wide variety of proprietary formats. Upon further research, I discovered that the Playstation Portable version of Duke Nukem: Critical Mass was never actually released commercially and was in fact a very different beast than the Nintendo DS version of the game which did see release. I realized then that in my computer was the source disc used to author the UMD for an unreleased PlayStation Portable game. I could feel the lump in my throat. I felt as though I had solved the wizard’s riddle and unlocked the secret door.

READ MORE: Duke’s Legacy: Video Game Source Disc Preservation at the Library of Congress | The Signal: Digital Preservation.

Finally, a Digital Library of Bizarre Human Bones From the Middle Ages | Gizmodo

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skull from Chichester

A spinal column with fused vertebrae. The bones of a woman with advanced syphilis. Skeletons deformed by rickets and leprosy. A fascinating online library of deformed bones from the Middle Ages goes live today—and while I didn’t even realize such a thing existed, now I can’t imagine living without it. God bless technology.

The Digit[ised] Diseases website is run by the Royal College of Surgeons in London. It brings together 3D scans of over 1,600 bone specimens taken from patients with debilitating and disfiguring conditions like rickets and leprosy, and makes them free for the public to browse. Bored on a Monday morning? Gawk at this deformed spinal column or marvel at this alien-like skull with an enlarged cranium. In the scientists’ own words, “it does not resemble any known hominid species.” Cool!

Read:  Finally, a Digital Library of Bizarre Human Bones From the Middle Ages | Gizmodo

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.

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

The Smithsonian Just Added a Chunk of Code to Its Permanent Collection | Gizmodo

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Great to see an organization swoop in, so to speak, to preserve a defunct application, then go a step further and open the source code to developers. Hope to see this happen more often.

The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt design museum in New York just acquired the source code to an iPad app called Planetary from its now-defunct developer. Code is officially art now.

Planetary, as you can see in the video above, is basically a fancy music visualizer. The app’s source code was donated to the Cooper-Hewitt, which promptly open-sourced the code in hopes that people will use its visualization methods for other applications. Beyond the original lines of code, the museum has made a commitment to preserving the offshoots of the open-source project, and to nurturing their development. Planetary’s source has also been printed out in machine-readable OCR-A font on archival stock. Apparently, posterity demands a physical paper record that’s a little less fleeting than a digital archive.

See the full story: The Smithsonian Just Added a Chunk of Code to Its Permanent Collection | Gizmodo.

11 Amazing Historical Snapshots From One of the World’s Best Archives | Gizmodo

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The J. Paul Getty Museum is home to troves of fascinating historical artifacts. And last week, the museum [announced] a project to give the public unfettered access to it. The Open Content Program makes 4,600 high-resolution images available for free and for any use whatsoever. 

Moon Crater

Unknown (photographer) , Moon Crater, late 1850s, Salted paper print from a Collodion negative.

See the full story:  11 Amazing Historical Snapshots From One of the World’s Best Archives | Gizmodo.

See also: Open Content, An Idea Whose Time Has Come | James Cuno | The Getty Iris