http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/536641/2263809

One of New Zealand's oldest schools is selling rare New Zealand books and artwork dating back to the 18th century to help fund repairs for their ageing buildings.

The collection includes first editions of Captain Cook's voyages and books signed by former student, Noble Prize winning scientist, Ernest Rutherford.

Nelson College, with a history of a 152 years, says its buildings are more than 70 years old. Yet the college says it gets the same yearly maintenance funding as schools a quarter of its age.

"We have substantially more infrastructure costs than your average aluminium-jointed modern building school," says headmaster Gary O'Shea.

So the college is now selling pieces of New Zealand history - its rare books and art works worth hundreds of thousands of dollars - to help cover costs.

"After an awful lot of soul searching by members of the trust, it was decided that we would be better served if we were able to add the funds from the sale of these items into an endowment fund," says Ian Lash from the Nelson College Trust Foundation.

Keeping the fragile items would mean finding even more money for a museum-quality storage facility and the college felt it had little choice but to auction them off.

"From my point of view, and I've done this for nearly 25 years now, it's the most exciting collection of books I've ever had to sell," says Dunbar Sloane auctioneer Anthony Gallagher.

[...]

The rare books and artwork will go under the hammer later this week.

See also:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/nelsonmail/4752260a6510.html

Many of the books had been sitting at the Isel Park museum storage unit for more than 30 years, Mr Lash said.
"The time had come to really think about how relevant they were to the college."
Seven of the artworks depict a Nelson subject or are related to Nelson's history, including two rare R P Malcolm paintings of Nelson College's original wooden building and college house, valued at between $4000 and $10,000.
Dunbar Sloane head of art Helena Walker said the two watercolour paintings, her favourites, were of stunning quality.
It was unusual for a trust to sell so many pieces, and with works of New Zealand historical nature highly desirable, interest from the Nelson community was high, she said. She hoped the paintings would be retained by the community.
Former Nelson art teacher Brian Strong, a Nelson College old boy who taught art in the region for 30 years, said he understood why a school would sell part of a collection if it was finding it hard to make ends meet financially.
He said the John Gully works were interesting because of his link with the school as a past teacher.
"It's a shame they have got to go, but that's what collectors do eventually. If the income is for the needs of development, I can understand them putting the works on the market."

College book collection snapped up at auction
Nelson Mail, New Zealand - 6 Nov 2008
An auction of 180 historic books belonging to Nelson College has raised $60000 for the school, with all but two books sold on Thursday. ...
Via Google News (article not available)

Book Auction Catalog, PDF (no provenances given)

It's very short-sighted to sell heritage items belonging to the own institution's history ...



Image: http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/miscpics/0/0/3/doc/mp003051.shtml

From the Archives-List:

Since there has been discussion of this matter, I want to be perfectly clear that Princeton University Archivist, Dan Linke, and I argued strenuously to a number of senior university administrators that closing the Michelle Obama thesis would be a mistake and contrary to archival ethics and Princeton policy, both because it had been open, used and copied prior to the closure, because a resolution of the university faculty in the 1970s said that all materials in the university library open to one researcher must be open to all, and that in fact this would not be in the best interest of the Obama campaign. Nonetheless, the thesis was briefly closed at the request of the Obama campaign. Apparently it didn't take long for the Obama campaign to realize that fact because it soon reversed course and released the thesis to a member of the press who posted it to the Internet, but not bothering to inform the University which in my view was left looking foolish for having closed it however briefly. These of course represent my person view and not those of Princeton University.

Ben Primer
Associate University Librarian for
Rare Books and Special Collections
1 Washington Road
Princeton, NJ 08544
609-258-3242
609-258-2324-Fax
primer@princeton.edu
http://www.princeton.edu/rbsc

Guy Pessach, (Networked) Memory Institutions: Social Remembering, Privatization and its Discontents, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, April 2, 2008. The published edition has no abstract, but here's the abstract from the self-archived edition:

Memory institutions are social entities that select, document, contextualize, preserve, index and thus canonize elements of humanity's culture, historical narratives, individual and collective memories. Archives, museums and libraries are paradigmatic examples for traditional memory institutions. Content-sharing platforms, social networks, peer-to-peer file-sharing infrastructures, digital images agencies, online music stores and search engines' utilities represent emerging novel entities with a de-facto derivative function as networked memory institutions. This article includes an in-depth inquiry regarding the manners in which digitization and networked communication technologies implicate on the identity, structure and attributes of society's memory institutions. More specifically, I focus on privatization processes that networked memory institutions are increasingly undergoing. My basic hypothesis is that the transformation from tangible/analogue preservation to digitized cultural retrieval tends to result in intense privatization of society's memory institutions - both traditional and novel ones. Among other aspects, I examine the fundamental role of copyright law in facilitating and supporting these dynamics of privatization.

The article then analyzes the consequences of privatizing memory institutions in the light of their unique social functions in a democratic culture. Commercialization and unequal participation are two elements that characterize privatized memory institutions and that may conflict with a democratic vision of social remembering. Privatized memory institutions also avoid institutional separation between the social function of cultural production and the social function of cultural preservation. The resulted outcome is that groups and sectors with dominant positions in contemporary media are able to reproduce, leverage and manipulate their social dominance from one generation to another. The power to remember, as well as the power to forget, is thus gradually being concentrated in clusters of commercial enterprises with very particular interests, beliefs, ideologies and preferences.

I conclude with several reform proposals for deprivatizing networked memory institutions. As general matter of policy, reduced copyright protection is also likely to result in an equilibrium that strengthens the capacities of public-oriented memory institutions while reducing the incentives - and therefore the dominance - of commercial intermediaries entering this field. More specifically, I focus on two distinct types of reforms. One type of reform proposals focuses on ex-ante copyright privileges for networked memory institutions. The second type of reforms introduces my novel proposal to impose ex-post obligations on networked memory institutions. I argue that deprivatization of memory institutions requires also regulation that takes into account and moderates imbalanced proprietary regimes of networked memory institutions. Based on this argument, I offer a complementary set of reciprocal share-alike obligations that come on top of the general ex-ante privileges that memory institutions should benefit from.

Source: Open Access News

An aggregation of feeds of records and archives management journals is available here:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pekkahenttonen/rimjournals

At the moment it contains the latest issues of Records Management Journal, Archival Science, Journal of Archival Organization, Archivaria, and The American Archivist.

http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/



Please ignore the Copyfraud when the artist is longer than 70 years dead.

http://www.newyorkheritage.org

NewYorkHeritage.org brings together freely accessible digital collections from libraries, museums and archives from all over the state.

The software is OCLC's Content-DM.

http://www.educause.edu/thetowerandthecloud/133998?time=1225318118

The book is available online for free.

Ten years ago today, a private American collector purchased the Archimedes
Palimpsest. Since that time he has guided and funded the project to
conserve, image, and study the manuscript. After ten years of work,
involving the expertise and goodwill of an extraordinary number of people
working around the world, the Archimedes Palimpsest Project has released its
data. It is a historic dataset, revealing new texts from the ancient world.
It is an integrated product, weaving registered images in many wavebands of
light with XML transcriptions of the Archimedes and Hyperides texts that are
spatially mapped to those images. It has pushed boundaries for the imaging
of documents, and relied almost exclusively on current international
standards. We hope that this dataset will be a persistent digital resource
for the decades to come. We also hope it will be helpful as an example for
others who are conducting similar work. It published under a Creative
Commons 3.0 attribution license, to ensure ease of access and the potential
for widespread use. A complete facsimile of the revealed palimpsested texts
is available on Googlebooks as ³The Archimedes Palimpsest². It is hoped
that this is the first of many uses to which the data will be put.

For information on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, please visit:
http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org

For the dataset, please visit:
http://www.archimedespalimpsest.net

We have set up a discussion forum on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project. Any
member can invite anybody else to join. If you want to become a member,
please email:

wnoel@thewalters.org

I would be grateful if you would circulate this to your friends and
colleagues.

Thank you very much
Will Noel
The Walters Art Museum
October 29th, 2008.

http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2008/10/ancestrys-grant.html

Peter Hirtle is commenting the Ancestry digitization "grant" for state archives.