English Corner
"Perhaps you all have read about the following story that happened in Guatemala. During the 36-year civil war that ended in 1996, thousands and thousands of people had been executed, and made to disappear by the national secret police. For years, human rights advocates had tried to nail down those people who are responsible for all these atrocities, but they couldn’t do anything because of the absence of concrete evidence. And in 2005, by accident, a huge amount of police records and archives testifying to those crimes were discovered in a run-down factory that had actually been used as a storeroom for ammunition for the secret police. And because of this discovery, they were able to make some arrests and even had some perpetrators brought to court, some of whom actually went to jail.
This is the power of archives. Without archives, much of human rights work cannot happen. When we are talking about archives, we mean those records that were created by an organization, or even by an individual, as a result of official business. The important thing is that records created in such a way have to be kept and man- aged professionally, as evidence of the business activities concerned. As such, records are “evidence” of the whole business process; they are the basis for accountability.
Archivists usually make a distinction between “records” and “archives.” Records refer to those which are still in active use by an organization. But when records have completed their administrative function, and if they have been appraised by an archivist to possess historical value, they will then be sent to the organization’s archives for permanent retention. So, there are “records” and there are “archives.”
In Hong Kong, there is no archives law! ...."
Link
Wolf Thomas - am Dienstag, 7. Februar 2012, 21:03 - Rubrik: English Corner
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Nupepa Type Scripting Project from R3IMAGE on Vimeo.
R3 had the wonderful opportunity to work on this project to create this call for support in completing a searchable archive for thousands of pages of Hawaiian newspapers.Wolf Thomas - am Samstag, 4. Februar 2012, 09:13 - Rubrik: English Corner
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From: Catherine Eagleton
To: MONEY-MUSEUMS@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Dear all,
Many of you will already have heard the sad news about budget cuts and job losses at the Geldmuseum Utrecht, in the Netherlands. This museum has had financial difficulties since its creation in 2004 from a merger of the Royal Coin Cabinet, the Dutch Mint Museum, and the collection of the Dutch Central Bank, most recently in 2008 resulting in 6 collections management staff losing their jobs. Now, despite the efforts of all who work there, and the new director (who was faced with this problem as soon as she arrived in 2009), the financial challenges remain.
The result of this is that a reorganization and refocusing of the museum is in progress. The main activity of the museum will now be financial education, and while there is still an internationally-important collection there, it will now be looked after by just two curators, who will focus mostly on doing exhibitions. The collections- and research-related activity will be dramatically scaled back, meaning that nine of our colleagues in the Collections and Research Department at Geldmuseum Urecht will lose their jobs, and while there are plans to keep the library open for limited hours each week, this will be run by volunteers.
I’m sorry to have to bring this sad news to you all – my thoughts are with our colleagues in Utrecht.
Catherine Eagleton
Dr. Catherine Eagleton
The British Museum
Curator of Modern Money
Great Russel Street
WC 1B 3 DG London
To: MONEY-MUSEUMS@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Dear all,
Many of you will already have heard the sad news about budget cuts and job losses at the Geldmuseum Utrecht, in the Netherlands. This museum has had financial difficulties since its creation in 2004 from a merger of the Royal Coin Cabinet, the Dutch Mint Museum, and the collection of the Dutch Central Bank, most recently in 2008 resulting in 6 collections management staff losing their jobs. Now, despite the efforts of all who work there, and the new director (who was faced with this problem as soon as she arrived in 2009), the financial challenges remain.
The result of this is that a reorganization and refocusing of the museum is in progress. The main activity of the museum will now be financial education, and while there is still an internationally-important collection there, it will now be looked after by just two curators, who will focus mostly on doing exhibitions. The collections- and research-related activity will be dramatically scaled back, meaning that nine of our colleagues in the Collections and Research Department at Geldmuseum Urecht will lose their jobs, and while there are plans to keep the library open for limited hours each week, this will be run by volunteers.
I’m sorry to have to bring this sad news to you all – my thoughts are with our colleagues in Utrecht.
Catherine Eagleton
Dr. Catherine Eagleton
The British Museum
Curator of Modern Money
Great Russel Street
WC 1B 3 DG London
KlausGraf - am Donnerstag, 2. Februar 2012, 17:35 - Rubrik: English Corner
"Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazi German regime promoted racial health policies that sought to eliminate all sources of biological corruption to its dominant “Aryan” race. Among the groups persecuted as threats to the national health were Germany’s homosexual men. Believing them to be carriers of a “degeneracy” that weakened society and hindered population growth, the Nazi state arrested and incarcerated in prisons and concentration camps tens of thousands of German men as a means of terrorizing them into social conformity.
Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933–1945 examines the Nazi regime’s attempt to eradicate homosexuality, which left thousands dead and shattered the lives of many more."
Link
Wolf Thomas - am Sonntag, 29. Januar 2012, 18:00 - Rubrik: English Corner
"Abstract: Shortly after the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, Kanan Makiya, a long time Iraqi dissident and professor of Middle East studies at Brandeis University, uncovered a major trove of documents belonging to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and his security forces. The documents proved highly important in reflecting the inner workings of the Baath Party system in his final years in power. Soon after the discovery of the documents, the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF), a private Washington, D.C.–based group founded by Makiya, took custody of the records, later depositing them with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University to provide a safe haven for them. The deal ignited immediate international controversy and charges of pillage from some Iraqi officials, archival organizations, scholars, and others who also demanded their immediate return to the Iraq National Library and Archive in Baghdad. On the surface, these charges of theft and plunder appear plausible enough, but on examination, a different and complicated narrative emerges in light of the conventions of war, U.S. law, and the Iraqi penal code, as well as the chain of events surrounding their taking and removal by nonstate actors in the Iraqi theatre of war and occupation."
Full Text: International Journal of Cultural Property (2011), p. 309 ff (PDF)
Full Text: International Journal of Cultural Property (2011), p. 309 ff (PDF)
Wolf Thomas - am Sonntag, 29. Januar 2012, 17:54 - Rubrik: English Corner
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" .... Jurist Douglas Cox of the City University of New York School of Law says that the Kuwaiti national archives, which were taken by Iraqi forces in 1990, have still not been returned and keep the post-Saddam Iraq under a UN Security Council resolution aimed at having the documents returned..."
Douglas Cox, Finding Kuwait's Missing National Archives, JURIST - Forum, Jan. 23, 2012, http://jurist.org/forum/2012/01/douglas-cox-kuwait-archives.php.
For more: http://www.docexblog.com/2012/01/more-on-finding-kuwaits-missing.html
Douglas Cox, Finding Kuwait's Missing National Archives, JURIST - Forum, Jan. 23, 2012, http://jurist.org/forum/2012/01/douglas-cox-kuwait-archives.php.
For more: http://www.docexblog.com/2012/01/more-on-finding-kuwaits-missing.html
Wolf Thomas - am Sonntag, 29. Januar 2012, 17:46 - Rubrik: English Corner
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/01/2012121132641226409.html
Excerpt:
Appealing to the tastes of package tourists and neglecting the interest of ordinary Egyptians, the Antiquities Council has long scorned what cannot be displayed in expensive vitrines and hastily photographed. Egypt's post-"Islamic" - and particularly its 19th and 20th century - culture has therefore been ignored, if not actively denigrated, by the Council.
Most recently, the furore over the alleged smuggling and sale of Naguib Mahfouz's archives has made more visible than ever the state's failure to safeguard its "modern" heritage. Although Sotheby's would eventually call the auction off, the patriotic Egyptian public was infuriated. It provoked the country's preeminent newspapers to ask how the manuscripts of Egypt's Nobel Laureate could be sold in the chambers of a foreign auction house, and why the state had not intervened to protect them. And yet, the Mahfouz sale further prompts the more important question: where and with whom should the private papers of public personalities be deposited?
For example, at his death earlier this month, Egypt's celebrated novelist Ibrahim Aslan left behind a number of unpublished manuscripts. How could his heirs, should they so wish, make this material accessible to an interested public?
In theory, the answer is easy - either the National Archives of Egypt or the adjacent "Dar al-Kutub". But in practice, the logic by which both institutions operate makes this issue a lot more complicated than it first appears to be.
Essentially, the current National Archive is descended from a series of disparate document repositories cobbled together in the 1920s. This new centralised archive was designed to provide the infrastructure behind professional history writing, which aimed to forge a monolithic national (and more importantly monarchical) identity for the country. During this state-building period, documents that did not promote a certain view of Egyptian history, and the reigning monarchy of the time, were either discarded or destroyed.
True to its etymological origins, the National Archive of Egypt continues to be held within the state's coercive grip. State security plays arbiter. Despite the efforts of Egypt's preeminent historian, Khaled Fahmy, it continues to viciously restrict access to the documents to all but a privileged few: These tend to be professional historians whose research is perceived as non-subversive to the state and its narratives, which are overwhelmingly nationalist.
Excerpt:
Appealing to the tastes of package tourists and neglecting the interest of ordinary Egyptians, the Antiquities Council has long scorned what cannot be displayed in expensive vitrines and hastily photographed. Egypt's post-"Islamic" - and particularly its 19th and 20th century - culture has therefore been ignored, if not actively denigrated, by the Council.
Most recently, the furore over the alleged smuggling and sale of Naguib Mahfouz's archives has made more visible than ever the state's failure to safeguard its "modern" heritage. Although Sotheby's would eventually call the auction off, the patriotic Egyptian public was infuriated. It provoked the country's preeminent newspapers to ask how the manuscripts of Egypt's Nobel Laureate could be sold in the chambers of a foreign auction house, and why the state had not intervened to protect them. And yet, the Mahfouz sale further prompts the more important question: where and with whom should the private papers of public personalities be deposited?
For example, at his death earlier this month, Egypt's celebrated novelist Ibrahim Aslan left behind a number of unpublished manuscripts. How could his heirs, should they so wish, make this material accessible to an interested public?
In theory, the answer is easy - either the National Archives of Egypt or the adjacent "Dar al-Kutub". But in practice, the logic by which both institutions operate makes this issue a lot more complicated than it first appears to be.
Essentially, the current National Archive is descended from a series of disparate document repositories cobbled together in the 1920s. This new centralised archive was designed to provide the infrastructure behind professional history writing, which aimed to forge a monolithic national (and more importantly monarchical) identity for the country. During this state-building period, documents that did not promote a certain view of Egyptian history, and the reigning monarchy of the time, were either discarded or destroyed.
True to its etymological origins, the National Archive of Egypt continues to be held within the state's coercive grip. State security plays arbiter. Despite the efforts of Egypt's preeminent historian, Khaled Fahmy, it continues to viciously restrict access to the documents to all but a privileged few: These tend to be professional historians whose research is perceived as non-subversive to the state and its narratives, which are overwhelmingly nationalist.
KlausGraf - am Donnerstag, 26. Januar 2012, 13:03 - Rubrik: English Corner
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For the Record - Library & Archives Canada from Jeff Lively on Vimeo.
"Worked as the Creative Director to produce an awareness piece intended for the general public to explain what LAC does & why basically.A combination of motion graphics & live action video. I shot the original footage using the Canon 5D DSLR and the Kessler Phillip Bloom Slider.
Written & produced by Hyperactive Productions for Library & Archives Canada. "
Wolf Thomas - am Donnerstag, 19. Januar 2012, 19:11 - Rubrik: English Corner
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KlausGraf - am Montag, 9. Januar 2012, 22:31 - Rubrik: English Corner
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http://www.connectedhistories.org/
"Connected Histories brings together a range of digital resources related to early modern and nineteenth century Britain with a single federated search that allows sophisticated searching of names, places and dates, as well as the ability to save, connect and share resources within a personal workspace."
"Connected Histories brings together a range of digital resources related to early modern and nineteenth century Britain with a single federated search that allows sophisticated searching of names, places and dates, as well as the ability to save, connect and share resources within a personal workspace."
KlausGraf - am Mittwoch, 4. Januar 2012, 15:13 - Rubrik: English Corner
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