http://digipal.eu/

"As its homepage states, DigiPal (Digital Resource and Database of Palaeography, Manuscripts and Diplomatic) focuses on the handwriting of English manuscripts, particularly those produced between AD 1000 and 1100, during the reigns of Æthelred, Cnut and William the Conqueror."

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/05/have-you-used-digipal-yet.html

"The output from one of South Africa's largest digitisation projects to date was made available to the public and researchers at an official hand-over of the African National Congress digital archive to President Zuma.

The handover was made by Mr Nolo Letele, Executive Chairman of MultiChoice South Africa Group who sponsored the project to the African National Congress at an event held at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg. For the first time in their 100-year history, the ANC Archives are accessible to the public. A selection of the archives are now available on on a public site and application can be make to gain full access to a research site that presents all the digitised material. "

http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/23/92777.html

http://ancarchives.org.za/

"Since November 2011, e-codices has been offering an OAI-interface, through which metadata for all manuscripts provided by e-codices are released for free use. This offer is not subject to any copyright and is always up to date. Since its introduction, three portals have already made use of the interface and have harvested metadata about all our manuscripts (the „Plateforme Isidore,“ a project of Adonis of the CNRS; the Czech National Library’s „manuscriptorium“; and „e-lib.ch“ of the ETH-Library in Zurich). This year, two more portals have been added. The data transfer to „Gallica“ was especially successful and professional. The transfer took place without previous arrangements. On March 6, e-codices registered its first visitor via Gallica. Since then, the number of visitors has continually grown, and the number of visitors to e-codices has increased by more than 3%. "

http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/newsletter/archive/issue-10.htm

At the moment, the virtual library contains 981 manuscripts from 42 different libraries.

Numbers of harvested items from e-codices.ch (links provided in the newsletter)

Gallica 949
http://gallica.bnf.fr/Search?p=1&lang=FR&adva=1&adv=1&t_typedoc=manuscrits&reset=true&p=1&f_provenance=ecodice

Isidore 940
http://rechercheisidore.fr/search?q=e-codices&source_taxo=25673335

TEL 891
http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/tel4/search?query=e-codices&link-level=DIGITAL_OBJECT

manuscriptorium link doesn't work (as expected)

Jeremy York wrote me this some minutes ago.

http://www.hathitrust.org/ has a new interface.

"10,720,385 total volumes
5,614,463 book titles
278,213 serial titles
3,752,134,750 pages
481 terabytes
127 miles
8,710 tons
3,363,612 volumes(~31% of total) in the public domain"

The percentage of the PD world-wide volumes is 64,4 % of all PD-volumes (including the PD-US works). [Corrected.]

The 2009 Cologne Archives collapse was a disaster for historians.

"[I]n 2009, after an architectural competition, a decision on a new
archive building was made. It was planned to accommodate not only the
archive institution itself but also the Kunst- und Museumsbibliothek,
a renowned art and museum library, and the Rheinische Bildarchiv, a
collection of photographs on the history of art, architecture, culture
and photography in Cologne. The plan was to build the “safest and
state-of-the-art city archive in Europe“ by 2017. After the decision
of the city council, a detailed concept was worked out and approved.
In the light of the city's financial crisis, in 2013 the local
political discussion moved towards re-thinking the decision and even
to a planning moratorium. Protests of the local supporting groups as
well as national archive organizations followed."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Archive_of_the_City_of_Cologne

Please join the friends of the Archives and German archivists by
signing a petition against the planning stop:

https://www.openpetition.de/petition/online/fuer-die-aufhebung-des-planungsstopps-fuer-den-neubau-des-historischen-archivs-der-stadt-koeln
(nearly 1000 supporters until now)

Please choose "Sprache auswählen" at the right for an English version.

Thank you for signing and forwarding!

Dr Klaus Graf, RWTH Aachen archivist
http://archivalia.tumblr.com/tagged/archives
https://plus.google.com/109080670989349548459/posts/gSFpkEjCdyu

(Archives-L)

"Newly-discovered food recipes from a 12th century Durham Priory manuscript have been found to predate the earliest known ones by 150 years. The recipes are to be recreated at a Durham University event later in the month.

The Latin manuscript mainly consists of recipes for medical ointments and cures and was compiled and written at Durham Cathedral’s priory around 1140. The work was recently re-examined and found to contain the food recipes, which experts believe are amongst the oldest in the western medieval culinary tradition, preceding the previously known examples from circa 1290. The manuscript is now held at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University."

http://www.dur.ac.uk/news/newsitem/?itemno=17380

Simon Teuscher's article, in: Archival Science, 10(3), 2010, :211-229, is Open Access online (unfortunately in the author's version) at

http://dx.doi.org/10.5167/uzh-42133

"Using late medieval examples from Switzerland, this paper argues that the emergence of formally organized archives around 1500 was part of an important shift in how documents could be deployed. However, this shift was not away from an oral and toward a literate culture, as argued in some earlier studies, but rather away from seeing documents as testimony that reminded a community about past authoritative actors, and toward relating the texts of documents to other texts, that is, to contexts. "

On Teuscher's work see also:

http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/38749205/

"Internet Archive will be accepting 52 people for week long tumblr residencies. We are looking for creators, hackers, educators, curators, tumblr kids and anyone else looking to play with some code and content."

http://blog.archive.org/2013/04/08/open-call-for-tumblr-collaborators/

http://internetarchive.tumblr.com

"The Kissinger Cables are part of today's launch of the WikiLeaks Public Library of US Diplomacy (PlusD), which holds the world's largest searchable collection of United States confidential, or formerly confidential, diplomatic communications. As of its launch on April 8, 2013 it holds 2 million records comprising approximately 1 billion words."

https://search.wikileaks.org/plusd/pressrelease/

Via
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Oeffentliche-Bibliothek-der-US-Diplomatie-Wikileaks-startet-Projekt-K-wie-Kissinger-1836823.html

By Jennifer K. Nelson:

http://archivalia.tumblr.com/post/47115225569/german-paleography-resources-compiled-list