In celebration of the Society for Medieval Archaeology's 50th anniversary the first fifty volumes of Medieval Archaeology have been made available in digital form.

http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/library/med_arch/index.cfm

1 (1957)- 50 (2006)

It's free!

http://www.archivesnext.com/?p=83

Excerpt:

When I wrote my first posts about the archival blogosphere (or lack thereof) and did an inventory of archival blogs, I made a decision to leave out blogs that primarily featured highlights from an institution’s collections or discussion about day to day processing work. I chose to focus on blogs that discussed more theoretical issues or current issues, and those are also the blogs I feature in my blogroll.

But more and more institutions are starting blogs about their collections and day to day work, so let’s take a look at them (sorry, only those in English):

• A View to Hugh - Processing the Hugh Morton Photographs and Films
• Alone in the Archives - Thoughts from a “lone arranger” at a small college (Hobart and William Smith)
• Ball State University Archives & Special Collections
• Beinecke Library: African American Studies
• Beinecke Library: Poetry
• Charles Babbage Institute News and Information - from an archives and research center at the University of Minnesota, dedicated to preserving the history of information technology and promoting and conducting research in the field
• Connecticut Historical Society Library
• F&M Archives & Special Collection - from Franklin and Marshall College
• Guided by History - from the Wells Fargo corporate archives
• Haverford College Special Collections: New & Noteworthy
• Historical Notes from OHSU - from the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) Historical Collections & Archives
• Hyde Collection Catablog - from the cataloger of The Donald and Mary Hyde Collection of Samuel Johnson is a comprehensive collection of the works of Samuel Johnson, his associates and contemporaries, and the literary world of 18th century London.
• Lawrence of Arabia & the Light Horse - from the Australian War Memorial, describes work on the forthcoming exhibition Lawrence of Arabia and the Light Horse: the road to Damascus
• M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives Blog - at the University at Albany Libraries
• MIT Archives + MIT History
• Mudd Manuscript Library Blog - from the Princeton University Archives and Public Policy Papers Collection
• National Anthropological Archives / Human Studies Film Archives - part of the Smithsonian Institution
• NCSU Special Collections Research Center
• Northern Illinois University Rare Books & Special Collections
• PACSCL Consortial Survey Initiative - news from the PACSCL survey to assess backlogged archival collections in 22 Philadelphia area institutions
• PACSCLblog - news from the 33 members of the The Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL)
• Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities - another project from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
• Sandusky History - A blog dedicated to the discussion of topics relating to the history of Sandusky and Erie County, Ohio; inspired by the collections of the Sandusky Library Archives Research Center and Follett House Museum. A service of the Sandusky Library Archives Research Center.
• SJSU Special Collections & Archives - from San Jose State University
• Special Collections at the University of Maryland
• Special Collections LSU - from Louisiana State University Special Collections
• The Johnson Library Archives & Special Collections - from the archives and special collections of the Southern Polytechnic State University’s Lawrence V. Johnson library
• UGA Libraries News & Events » Special Collection - from the University of Georgia
• University of Houston Special Collections
• University of Minnesota Academic Health Center Archives Project
• University of Wyoming American Heritage Center Events Calendar
• What’s Cool @ Hoole (University of Alabama)

[...]

Three catalogues of the Archivo Histórico de la Universidad de Sevilla can be searched electronically. The start 1518, 1567, 1587.

General information on this can be found at http://fondoantiguo.blogspot.com/2007/11/catlogos-del-archivo-histrico-de-la.html .

Descriptions of the tree catalogues can be accessed via http://virtualbus.us.es/ahus/index.php .

The search interface is at http://virtualbus.us.es/ahus/formulario.php

Thanks to HCK at
http://www.phil-hum-ren.uni-muenchen.de/W4RF/YaBB.pl?num=1196414863

Update:
100+ digizited documents of the archive at
http://fondosdigitales.us.es/books/search/list_books_by_group?oid=8

http://everybodyslibraries.com/

www.upenn.edu Photo of John Mark Ockerbloom, creator of the legendary Online Books Page.

http://www.sciencetext.com/copyright-abuse.html

Most of the issues surrounding copyright are related to what bloggers and webmasters can and cannot reproduce on their own sites, but, open access aside, what about corporate copyright abuse. In this guest blog post Peter Lewis of the Open University in England gives us his opinion of copyright abuse in the commercial world.

I first came across the problem of copyright abuse by numerous commercial image databanks, in 2004. At the time, I was writing my book on the Tay Bridge disaster (Tempus 2004). My reanalysis of the disaster - a kind of cold case investigation - involved systematic examination of the many high quality photos taken for the Official Inquiry of 1880. We asked Dundee City Library and St Andrews University Library to make high resolution scans, which my university paid for in the usual way. When I produced my book, however, St Andrews protested that I had wrongly used their images, despite the fact the images dated from 1879 and earlier and were clearly out-of-copyright. They eventually backed down but they, and many others, seem to think that if they posses an old image, they possess the copyright forever.

This doctrine was once used by some university libraries and is known as perpetual copyright. It was abolished in the Victorian period, but seems to have re-appeared! Worse still, modern image companies such as Getty and the UK’s Science Museum/NRM possess public domain images which they have scanned
from original periodicals such as the Illustrated London News, and claim new copyright in those images. I protested to the Science Museum about their policy, and was told that "it was too difficult to remove the copyright watermark for one or two images"!

Another example occurred more recently when we were designing new covers for one of our teaching blocks. It was a book about intellectual property, and the designer had used an old image from a US
Patent which he had found in a commercial image library. They wanted to charge £600 (about $1200). I pointed out to the designer that the image was in the public domain and could be downloaded for free from the US Patent Office website, and so we saved the money. Many designers and others are apparently totally unaware of this scam, and will happily pay large sums for public domain images when they can be obtained for free. One irony in this case was that the quality of the US Patent Office image was much better than that offered commercially.

I think this issue is very important for anyone researching historical events, or indeed, carrying out any other work where they may be open to copyright abuse.

- Guest blog post by Peter Lewis. Lewis is interested in product and process failures in engineering and has researched and written widely on the subject. He is Chair of ‘Design and Manufacture in Polymers’ and Chair of ‘Forensic Engineering’ at the Open University, England. He is actively reanalysing other historic disasters and accidents, using his cold case approach to engineering failures. His book on the Shipton rail accident (near Oxford, England) will be published by Tempus in February 2008, and he is currently looking at the Staplehurst crash of 1865 in which author Charles Dickens was involved.

For advice on finding copyright free images for use in your blog or website, check out David Bradley’s article on credit and copyright on Sciencebase. Lewis points out that Wikipeda has a growing archive of pictures and photos in the public domain, and you personally only need scan in an original to be able to use it. Copyright abuse has even been tried with patents and other intellectual property. Patents, of course, are all in the public domain. And it is worth knowing that all US Government material (text, photos etc) are automatically free of copyright thanks to the US Constitution.

In additional correspondence Lewis told me that copyright can be abused by any commercial interest, especially against smaller enterprises such as authors and users. Indeed, there have been many examples of large companies trying to abuse the system. Examples which come to mind include car manufacturer British Leyland, which tried to gain copyright on its car exhaust systems to prevent cheap exhaust pipes being made for their vehicles. Similarly, to manufacturer Lego tried to apply copyright law to their famous plastic bricks. Both companies were defeated in English law through the 1988 Act of Parliament.

Via OA News

http://www.repository.naturalis.nl/

Naturalis, the National Museum for Natural History, has now its own repository with Open Access full texts of staff publications.

Stop Destroying Ancient Bindings
by J. A. Szirmai
Beelaertslaan 16, 6861 AV Oosterbeek, Netherlands

Reprinted with permission from Gazette du Livre Médievale, No. 13, Fall 1988, pp. 7-9 (editorial offices at CNRS-CEMAT, 156, avenue Parmentier, F-75010 Paris, France).

It was 50 years ago that the first detailed observations on technical aspects of the bindings of Carolingian manuscripts from the Reichenau monastery were made. Gerhard Kattermann of the Badische Landesbibliothek Karlsruhe, where the manuscripts are kept, showed his findings to a young local bookbinder, Adolf Heinz, who carefully studied the bindings and provided a technical description (Archiv f. Buchbinderei, 1938, p. 33-38). Kattermann's report (ibid., 1939, p. 17-20, 31-32) proved that not all of the Reichenau manuscripts had been newly bound in the course of the extensive rebinding operation in 1457 by the monks Pfuser and Plant. Out of the 163 manuscripts 21 kept their original binding which lasted for another 500 years, even if showing some signs of wear and tear (the latter facilitating the observations of the internal structure otherwise hidden). The studies of Heinz and Kattermann deserve credit for drawing attention for the first time to the technique of the simple, undecorated Carolingian binding, and thus arousing the interest of other investigators, like, among others, Van Regemorter, Pollard and Vezin.

The studies of Heinz and Kattermann did not entirely exhaust the subject, as often happens with the works of pioneers. The technical description of Heinz was based on the study of two bindings only (Aug. cxi and ccxxxiii), whereas Kattermann' s article contains several intriguing photographs without giving full explanation of all details. Intriguing, because they seem to have bearing on the earliest use of sewing support and its relation to the ancient kettle-stitch sewing. The desire to clarify some of these issues prompted a visit to the Badische Landesbibliothek Karlsruhe, in July 1988, with the aim of reinvestigating the material of Heinz and Kattermann, supposedly still available.

Disappointment is a feeble expression to qualify the confrontation: out of the 21 bindings listed by Kattermann, only two (Aug. clxxi and clxxxvii) are still in their pristine original state. The others have been more or less crudely "restored" between 1967 and 1978, two of then even completely rebound (in one case the cover has been saved and is kept separately; the cover of the other one has disappeared)--all this without any detailed record. Among the irreplaceable losses are two bindings studied by Heinz (Aug. cxi: rebound, cover lost; ccxxxii: thoroughly restored). They share the fate of a few hundred original bindings of manuscripts and incunabula of the Badische Landesbibliothek, the only possessions of that Library that escaped destruction by the 1942 fire, and it is tragic that they have been more or less destroyed after that disaster, but now purposely, by misguided hands. Nevermore will we have the chance to verify, for example, the course of sewing thread or details of the attachment of the boards of the Reichenau bindings, to determine the nature of the sewing thread or the variations in the construction of the tab-headband: the evidence is lost forever. It is like suddenly standing over the tomb of a dear friend, whom one was hoping to reach still alive.

Read the rest of the article:
http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byorg/abbey/an/an13/an13-5/an13-513.html

Millions of historical documents seized by US occupation forces from Iraqi archives remain held in the United States by the CIA and the Pentagon and must, under international law, be returned to Iraq, Dr. Saad Eskander, the director of the Iraqi National Library and Archive in Baghdad, told an audience at Columbia University in New York City on November 12.

Read more at
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/11/18/18462009.php

ala.org

https://listserv.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/wa-iub.exe?A2=ind0711&L=SHARP-L&T=0&O=D&P=7475

One of the directors of the Royal Library, The Hague - Netherlands, Hans Jansen by name so that posterity may know him, has made known in an interview that the Royal Library - that is our National Library - is planning to scan about 150.000 - 200.000 books en have them OCR'd in the process.

A great project but in this case with a snag that in my modest opinion will put Jansens name on a par with other great destroyers like the infamous sultan who burned the Alexandrian Library to warm his baths. To scan this books on the cheap they will be cut up so that the leaves may be dropped into a sheet-feeding scanner.

Of course: "the copies to be sacrified will be selected carefully" - something mentioned in the aftermath of a little outcry by scholars and the public and in fact I do not believe that people with the outlook of a mid-fifthies Kolchosfarmer will endorse any carefull selection, but apart from that:

What I would like to know from the Sharp-scholars: how do the books look that have been scanned by Google? Have they been cut up too? Or do they use a non-destructive process?

I have taken a good look at the robots that are used in Germany to process the 16th century books. Is this an expensive way of working?
I believe that there must be methods to scan and OCR on the cheap (we are not talking about the results here since most times you get what you pay for) that are non destructive and any information on them would be more than welcome. Off or onlist.

An interesting onlist discussion would be: how do bookhistorians and librarians feel about this kind of actions of National Libraries?

Paul Dijstelberge