David Mattison has some critical comments on the new Nicholas Cage movie.

http://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress/index.php?p=854

The ACLU of Northern California filed an amici curiae brief on behalf of librarians and archivists urging the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse a lower court's decision allowing the government to preclude public access to the original writings of Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynski, who pled guilty to the "Unabomber" crimes, plans to donate his journals to the University of Michigan. The University, which has agreed to receive them, houses a special collection of materials on radical social and political movements, known as the Joseph Labadie Collection.

The Freedom to Read Foundation, founded by the American Library Association, and the Society of American Archivists, appearing as friends of the court, contend "that the original documents should be preserved and made accessible to scholars, researchers, and the general public, and that the First Amendment precludes irrational and arbitrary government action that could needlessly result in the destruction or deterioration of the papers and denial of public access."

Read more at
http://www.aclunc.org/pressrel/041020-speech.html

http://www.ica.org/biblio.php?pdocid=171

The Records of NGOs, Memory... To Be Shared. A Practical Guide in 60 Questions

download: pdf 506.9 kb

This manual is a practical guide, which draws the attention of officials, staff and volunteers of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to the value of their records and offers advice on their management and preservation. Some of these records are of crucial importance for the history of both the organizations themselves and the societies concerned.

author(s): Armelle Le Goff

subject(s): Basic Readings on Archives, Records & Knowledge Management, International Cooperation and Development

language: English

publication: 2004

ISBN/ISSN: 2-9521932-2-3

Also available in French.

Modifying the INSPIRE Directive, an unsigned document, dated October 18, 2004, arguing that Europe's INSPIRE (INfrastructure for SPatial InfoRmation in Europe) should recommend open access to publicly-funded spatial data.

Source:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

The unsigned document is from Jo Walsh see
http://egip.jrc.it/200410/1118.html

See also:

http://www.vterrain.org/freedata.ca/why-free.html

http://frot.org/devlog/0009_inspire.html

http://space.frot.org/docs/tcm_eurospatial.html

Directive 2003/98/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 November 2003 on the re-use of public sector information

http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/375135/ (German)
http://jurix.jura.uni-sb.de/pipermail/urecht/Week-of-Mon-20040202/001496.html (German)

http://www.digitalarchives.wa.gov/

The Washington State Digital Archives is the nation's first archives dedicated specifically to the preservation of electronic records from both State and Local agencies that have permanent legal, fiscal or historical value.

ENDANGERED ARCHIVES PROGRAMME

Coming in October 2004

In pursuit of their general aim to support fundamental research into
important issues in the humanities and social sciences, the Trustees of the
Lisbet Rausing Charitable Fund have decided to sponsor a Programme focusing
on the preservation and copying of important but vulnerable archives
throughout the world.

The Programme is administered by the British Library and applications will
be considered by an International Panel of historians and archivists.

The Programme will achieve its objectives principally by making a number of
grants to individual researchers to locate relevant collections, wherever
possible to arrange their transfer to a suitable local archival home, and to
deliver copies into the international research domain via the British
Library. Pilot projects may also be funded. Grants will be made each year
and will vary in amount, but a guideline maximum of GBP 50,000 for a full
project, and GBP 10,000 for a pilot project, is envisaged.

It will also make available - to overseas archivists and librarians only -
bursaries for professional attachments at the British Library to foster
better archival standards in cataloguing, preservation, etc., and thereby to
assist the process of safeguarding other such collections locally in the
future.

The aim is to safeguard archival material relating to societies usually at
an early stage of development, i.e. its normal focus will be on the period
of a society's history before 'modernisation' or 'industrialisation' had
generated institutional and record-keeping structures for the systematic
preservation of historical records, very broadly defined. The relevant time
period will therefore mostly vary according to the society with which we
deal.

The Programme will be completely open as to theme and regional interest,
although it will normally, but not invariably, be concerned with non-western
societies.

For the purposes of the Programme, archives will be interpreted widely to
embrace not only rare printed sources (books, serials, newspapers, ephemera,
etc.) and manuscripts in any language, but also visual materials (drawings,
paintings, prints, posters, photographs, etc.), audio or video recordings,
digital data, and even other objects and artefacts - but normally only where
they are found in association with a documentary archive. In all cases, the
validity of archival materials for inclusion in the Programme will be
assessed by their relevance as source materials for the pre-industrial stage
of a society's history.

The Fund does not offer grants to support the 'normal' activities of an
archive, although the Programme may offer support for such items as costs
directly related to the acceptance of relocated material.

Further information about the timetable, criteria, eligibility and
procedures will be announced on the Programme's website at
http://www.bl.uk/endangeredarchives in October.

Preliminary enquiries or expressions of interest may be addressed now to
eap@bl.uk.

Sophie Arp
PA to Graham Shaw
Head, Asia Pacific & Africa Collections
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London
NW1 2DB

Source: H-MUSEUM

http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/oct04.shtml

Collections of the Month, October 2004.

"The Florence State Archive has printed 2,000 facsimile copies of the XIV century manuscript detailing the charges and sentence against Dante - the author of the Divine Comedy - and will give them to universities and libraries.

The copies closely match the original - down to the original binding - but with the addition of explanatory notes.

From the BBC [...]"
Source: http://www.cronaca.com/archives/002801.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/3687282.stm

Sorry, why will archives not receive copies? And why put the Italian archivists the document not online?

See (in Italian):
http://www.archiviodistato.firenze.it/manife/chiodo.html