The good message:

ArchiveGrid (www.archivegrid.org) is a new web site that offers faculty, scholars, librarians, and genealogists unparalleled access to archive records and finding aids to enable you to do the most comprehensive research possible on your subject. Search through nearly a million collection descriptions and get the information you need to arrange a visit or order copies.

Access to ArchiveGrid is free from March 1 through May 31, thanks to a funding grant to support wider use by the academic community and general public.

For more information, including how to link to ArchiveGrid on your Web site, see archivegrid.org/web/jsp/linking.jsp

Visit the website at http://www.archivegrid.org


And now the bad one:

After May 31 it's a subscription service. RLG (Research Libraries Group) should better make such meta-searches available with "Open Access" . With promoting the OAI standard such attempts to make money with things which should be free will fail because OAI Service Providers like OAIster can harvest the archival collections.

Society of American Archivists

Political Pressure and the Archival Record
Edited by Margaret Procter, Michael G. Cook and Caroline Williams.

The 20 essays in this volume resulted from an important international conference held in 2003 at the Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies in the United Kingdom.
The contributors come from a breadth of disciplines (history, archives, the law, social and anthropological sciences) and from a wide-ranging geographical area (Australia, Asia, Europe, Africa and North America).
Topics addressed include use of records as a tool of government; destruction of records as a political act; effects of corruption or ideology on the record; secrecy and accountability; and the nature and use of records resulting from repressive policies.

The book is now listed in the online SAA catalog.
http://www.archivists.org/catalog/

http://www.nytimes.com/
* * * * * * * * * *
The New York Times

February 21, 2006
U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 —
In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.
The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.
But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.

(… … …)

* * * * * * *

see also
The National Security Archive
declassification in reverse
and
SPIEGEL ONLINE English Site
and
The National Archives responds ...

http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/rusbridge/

Excerpt:

Since then, a number of common assertions, or perhaps assumptions, about digital preservation have begun to worry me. No one person has said all these things, but increasingly they seem to be in the background of conversations. I will put these forward as a list of statements, but, in some respects at least, I think they are fallacies:

1. Digital preservation is very expensive [because]
2. File formats become obsolete very rapidly [which means that]
3. Interventions must occur frequently, ensuring that continuing costs remain high.
4. Digital preservation repositories should have very long timescale aspirations,
5. 'Internet-age' expectations are such that the preserved object must be easily and instantly accessible in the format de jour, and
6. the preserved object must be faithful to the original in all respects. [...]

How about this?

1. Digital preservation is comparatively inexpensive, compared to preservation in the print world,
2. File formats become obsolete rather more slowly than we thought
3. Interventions can occur rather infrequently, ensuring that continuing costs remain containable.
4. Digital preservation repositories should have timescale aspirations adjusted to their funding and business case, but should be prepared for their succession,
5. "Internet-age" expectations cannot be met by most digital repositories; and,
6. Only desiccated versions of the preserved object need be easily and instantly accessible in the format de jour, although the original bit-stream and good preservation metadata or documentation should be available for those who wish to invest in extracting extra information or capability.

http://petition.publicgeodata.org/

We the undersigned, ask Members of the European Parliament to reject the current draft of the INSPIRE Directive on European Spatial Data Infrastructure.

*Public Geographic Information is the bedrock of how civil society is managed in the information age.
*Free map data could enable a new generation of location-based technologies with enormous economic and social potential.
*Open access to geodata is the best way to ensure co-operation between Europe's government agencies on environmental and census data, and in other important fields.
*If it is passed, INSPIRE will entrench a policy of charging citizens for information they have already paid to collect, enforced by state copyright over geographic information.

The INSPIRE Directive risks holding back the economic and social potential in maps and location-based technology in Europe by many years.

E-LIS is an open access archive for scientific or technical documents, published or unpublished, on Librarianship, Information Science and Technology, and related areas.

http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00005605/

Die Landesbibliographien aus der Sicht eines Wissenschaftlers

Graf, Klaus (2006) Die Landesbibliographien aus der Sicht eines Wissenschaftlers, in Die Regionalbibliographie im digitalen Zeitalter : Deutschland und seine Nachbarländer/ hrsg. von Ludger Syré und Heidrun Wiesenmüller. - Frankfurt am Main : Klostermann, 2006. - 426 S. - (Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie:Sonderbände), pp. 179-196. Klostermann.

Full text available as:
PDF - Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader or other PDF viewer.
Abstract

[English abstract]

The article reviews the work of the bibliographies which have as topic the German regions and states (Landesbibliographien, Regionalbibliographien) and gives suggestions for the future from a historian's point of view.

[German abstract]

Dieser Artikel nimmt Stellung zu den Desideraten und zukünftigen Möglichkeiten der Landesbibliographien aus der Perspektive eines Wissenschaftlers bzw. Historikers, der sich in besonderem Maße der landes-, orts- und regionalgeschichtlichen Forschung einerseits und der frei zugänglichen Digitalisierung und Erschließung wissenschaftlicher Inhalte andererseits verpflichtet fühlt.

Please note that it is possible to deposit articles on archival issues in E-LIS!

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=2006&post=2006-02-01,7

After conducting hearings on ths issue of "orphan works" (copyrighted
works that are lost to further use because their copyright holders
can no longer be traced), the Copyright Office has just issued
a report on the hearings, and their recommendations. It's at

http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/

I've only had time to read the executive summary and skim through
some of the rest, but the gist seems to be that they recommend changing
US copyright law to allow use of those works by the public under certain
circumstances. Quoting from the report (via my colleague Beth Camden):

"The recommendation has two main components:

* the threshold requirements of a reasonably diligent search for the
copyright owner and attribution to the author and copyright owner
* the limitation of remedies that would be available if the user proves
that he conducted a reasonably diligent search."

Basically, if a user makes a reasonably diligent search for a copyright
holder, and cannot locate one, they could reuse the work, and sanctions
would be minimized if a copyright holder later turns up who wasn't
findable earlier. [...]

http://hangingtogether.org/

HangingTogether is a place where some of the staff at RLG, a membership organization of libraries, archives, and museums, can talk about the intersections we see happening between these three different types of institutions. We travel to our members a lot and go to conferences and wanted to be able to take note of the interesting things we see along the way. Stop in, stay awhile, and hang out.

http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/

The American Museum of Natural History has launched an institutional repository through which it's poviding OA for its past and present scientific publications. The program includes its journal, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, which is now OA up to its most recent issue from 2005, and its monograph series, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, which is now OA up to what seems to be the most recently published volume in 2002. (Open Access News)

Why calling it repository instead website with free content? AMNH uses the repository Open Source software DSpace http://www.dspace.org .