The University of California, San Diego Libraries and the New York University Libraries, working together with the Five Colleges Libraries, have been awarded a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support development and implementation of the Archivists' Toolkit. A website for the project is located at: http://euterpe.bobst.nyu.edu/toolkit/ .

The Toolkit will be a suite of open source software tools for processing and managing archival information. Its objective is to decrease the time and cost associated with archival processing and to promote the standardization of archival information. Early implementation of the Toolkit will focus on small to medium-sized repositories for which resources and staffing are comparatively limited.

The Archivists' Toolkit will address and integrate a broad range of archival functions; it will provide a single, consistent, and reliable tool for managing collection processing, accessioning, description, resource location, and provenance registration. In addition, the Toolkit will provide the archivist with a variety of outputs, including EAD (Encoded Archival Description) encoded finding aids and METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard) records. Automating such outputs will considerably lessen the cost now expended on producing them.

Currently, there is nothing akin to a library management system tailored to the needs of archival repositories, nor is it feasible for many archives to keep up to date with today's evolving and complex metadata standards. This is especially true for smaller repositories which, while small, nevertheless hold important collections that may be relatively invisible to the research community. The Toolkit will empower archives, small and large, by providing them with the tools for more easily establishing their presence on the Web and for sharing information on their holdings with other repositories and union catalogs.

To ensure the development of a truly comprehensive software tool, the Archivists' Toolkit will be developed with the input of seventeen archival repositories that represent a broad range of workflows, sizes, materials, staffing, and resources. The repositories participating in the project are: in New York City - The American Museum of Natural History, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Carnegie Hall Archive, The Center for Jewish History, Manhattan College, and NYU's Fales Library & Special Collections, University Archives, and Tamiment Library & Wagner Labor Archive; in western Massachusetts - Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, Hampshire College Archives, Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections, Smith College Archives, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, and University of Massachusetts Amherst, Special Collections and Archives; in southern California - UCSD's Mandeville Special Collections Library and Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archives

The $847,000 awarded by the Mellon Foundation will support the first two-year phase of the project. Project management will be based in the UCSD Libraries. Software development will take place at NYU, in collaboration with a design team comprising staff from the UCSD, NYU, and Five Colleges Libraries. In addition, a project oversight committee and an advisory board have been established to ensure standards compliance and superior design, and to foster widespread adoption of the Toolkit. Members of the advisory board include: Robin Chandler (California Digital Library), Michael Fox (Minnesota Historical Society), Lee Mandell (Harvard University), Guenter Waibel (Research Libraries Group), and Beth Yakel (University of Michigan).



Institutional Partners:

UCSD Libraries
The UCSD Libraries (http://libraries.ucsd.edu//), the project's lead institution, have emerged in their short history as leaders in library technology and the development of digital library collections and services. The Libraries have an extensive information technology staff that has acquired substantial experience in designing library databases. The UCSD Libraries, with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, have been designing a prototype Union Catalog for Art Images (UCAI), a project aimed at developing national-level cataloging practices and efficiencies for image collections. One of only eighteen NSF National Science Digital Library awardees in 2002, the UCSD Libraries worked in close collaboration with the San Diego Supercomputer Center and Scripps Institution of Oceanography to develop the SIO Explorer, a portal to SIO expedition discoveries (http://nsdl.sdsc.edu/). Working with the same partners, plus the San Diego Historical Society, the Libraries also have developed a related digital library, California Explores the Ocean (http://ceo.ucsd.edu/).



New York University Libraries

New York University Libraries (http://library.nyu.edu) has established itself as one of the leaders in digital library technology. As a partner in the Digital Library Federation, NYU Libraries has taken a lead role in the creation of the METS metadata standard. Its special collections have played an active role in the implementation of EAD standards for primary source materials. NYU has been named as a Sun Center of Excellence for Digital Libraries and was a finalist in the 2003 Computer World Honors program. The NYU Digital Library Team also has significant experience in partnering with other institutions to advance both the creation of scholarly resources and the development of digital library technologies. The Libraries recently completed a project to explore web archiving with the Center for Research Libraries, and are continuing to collaborate with other institutions in the development of tools and methods. They are also collaborating with New World Records to create the Database of Recorded American Music, a large database of sound recordings, and deliver it to academic institutions; and in that context they are partnering with Dartmouth and Indiana Universities in enabling shibboleth authorization over Internet2 connections to the database.



Five Colleges, Inc.

Five Colleges, Inc. (http://www.fivecolleges.edu/) is a consortium comprising Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst-all located in western Massachusetts. The Five College Libraries have been in the forefront of promoting collaboration among the schools for more than three decades, even before the consortium was established. The Libraries' cooperative activities include a joint online catalog, shared borrowing privileges, complementary collection development and management, and the Five College Library Depository, a high-density storage facility for the lesser-used materials from the libraries. The archivists of the Five Colleges also share a long cooperative history, most recently working together in joint digitization and EAD encoding projects. Together, the archives and special collections repositories of the Five Colleges provide a conveniently located, rich opportunity for testing the ability of an Archivists Toolkit to accommodate a range of institutional processing practices and staffing patterns.

Source: EXLIBRIS list

Most librarians and archivists have not yet identified blogs as online resources particularly meriting collection and preservation. This is hardly surprising. Web archiving activities in general are still in their infancy, and most of the attention is being paid to Web publications that have characteristics in common with more traditional published material, i.e., ISBNs, ISSNs, regular publishing cycles, and an emphasis on academics, writes Richard Entlich (Cornell) in the RLG DigiNews.

Worth for preservation is e.g. David Mattison's well known weblog
http://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress/
featured in the same issue of DigiNews.

http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0408a&L=archives&T=0&F=&S=&P=3492

Excerpt:

1.The records box long distance jump 5 - 10 maybe 15 records boxes in a
single leap.
--As long as you are wearing sensible shoes...

2.The records box long distance carry. Fully packed records boxes, 40lbs,
how many boxes can you carry?
--One will do, thanks. Any more and you can just bury me in the cold, cold
ground.

See also
http://listserv.muohio.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0408a&L=archives&T=0&F=&S=&P=2801
and more stuff there.

The Swedish government is refusing to allow full access to archives containing records of the country's involvement with World War II war criminals, a Swedish historical researcher contends.

Read more in the Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1092539014600

Re: http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/287857/

I have received today the following mail.

Guidance Note 3- Copyright in Public Records (GN3)

The waiver set out in GN3 does not cover re-use of photographs or images of
documents held at the National Archives. To re-use this material you would
require a licence/permission from the National Archives. Contact details are
as follows:

Mr Tim Padfield
Copyright Officer
The National Archives
Kew
Richmond
Surrey TW9 4DU

Tel +44 (0)20 8392 5381
Fax +44 (0)20 8392 5286
E-mail <mailto:tim.padfield@nationalarchives.gov.uk>
tim.padfield@nationalarchives.gov.uk

Copyright in Unpublished Material

The term of copyright protection in Crown copyright works depends to a large
extent on whether/when the work has been commercially published. The
following is a summary of the position in respect of literary works:

if a work is published commercially within 75 years from the end of the
calendar year in which the work was made, it has a life of 50 years from the
end of the year in which it was first published. Section 163(3)(b) of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 applies.
If the work is not published within 75 years from the year in which the
material was made it would have a copyright life of either:

125 years from the end of the year in which the work was made (Section
163(3)(a)); or
50 years from the end of the calendar in which the new copyright provisions
came into force (1 August 1989). This is under Schedule 1, Section 41(3) of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

whichever is the later.

I have provided a link to Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 -
http://www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1988/Ukpga_19880048_en_1.htm
http://www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1988/Ukpga_19880048_en_1.htm
http://www.hmso.gov.ukl

I hope this helps.

Yours sincerely

Margaret Ferre

Her Majesty's Stationery Office
St Clements House
2-16 Colegate
Norwich
NR3 1BQ

T: 01603 723010
F: 01603 723000

Her Majesty's Stationery Office - delivers access and reuse of
government information through innovative e-services. Visit HMSOnline at
http://www.hmso.gov.uk

A little debate in the LibraryLawBlog
http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2004/07/the_public_doma.html#more

Quote from Peter Hirtle's statement:
In short, while many libraries may have in the pre-Bridgeman past claimed copyright in digital scans, and while many might still wish to be able to do so, I believe that most libraries and archives are moving away from copyright claims and instead asserting contractual claims based on their physical ownership of an image. Whether this is a good thing or not is something that I tried to address in the essay I cited at the beginning of this too-long message.

The cited essay is available at:
http://hdl.handle.net/1813/52

http://www.lineages.co.uk/

English, Scottish and Irish Genealogy News and Articles

A weblog updated frequently.

http://www.jenkins-ip.com/patlaw/cdpa1.htm#s163
Copyright ... Act 1988
Duration: 125 years after creation (for unpublished works)

Crown Copyright in public records
"Unpublished public records and those open for public inspection are reproducible freely under waiver of copyright. This guidance explains how this works in practice"
http://www.hmso.gov.uk/copyright/guidance/gn_03.htm

Copyright Policy of The National Archives:

"The Crown copyright protected material (other than the Royal Arms and departmental or agency logos) may be reproduced free of charge in any format or medium provided it is reproduced accurately and not used in a misleading context. The exception to this rule is for material downloaded from our DocumentsOnline service (see below). Where any of the Crown copyright items on this site are being republished or copied to others, the source of the material must be identified and the copyright status acknowledged.
Images on this site may not be reproduced without payment of a fee to the image library."
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/legal/copyright.htm

See also:
http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/conf/dac/en/sterling/sterling.html

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk

The National Archives in the UK has re-launched its website, and now incorporates content from the former Public Record Office and the Historical Manuscripts Commission websites. (Library Blog)

http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/bibliography/index.htm

AN ANALYTIC BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ON-LINE NEO-LATIN TEXTS

DANA F. SUTTON
Professor of Classics
The University of California, Irvine

The enormous profusion of literary texts posted on the World Wide Web will no doubt strike future historians as remarkable and important. But this profusion brings with it an urgent need for many specialized on-line bibliographies. The present one is an analytic bibliography of Latin texts written during the Renaissance and later that are freely available to the general public on the Web (texts posted in access-restricted sites, and Web sites offering electronic texts and digitized photographic reproductions for sale are not included). Only original sites on which texts are posted are listed here, and not mirror sites.

This page was first posted January 1, 1999 and most recently revised on July 26, 2004 . The reader may be interested to know that it currently contains 11,240 records. I urge all those are able to suggest additions or corrections to this bibliography, as well as those who post new texts on the Web, to inform me by e-mail, so that this bibliography can be kept accurate and up to date. I take this opportunity to express my gratitude to all the individuals who have supplied me with corrections and new information