Images, transcriptions and comments by F. de Lasala S.J.

http://www.unigre.urbe.it/pubblicazioni/lasala/WEB/HOME_E.HTM

[via VL Geschichte News]

http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/link.html

This page offers an excellent link collection for historical prices and wages in the net covering the entire world.

http://www.scc.rutgers.edu/memdb/GeneralPages/TopLevel/databaseList.asp

MEMDB contains five large data sets, three pertaining to currency exchanges and two pertaining to prices: 1.Currency Exchanges (Metz) contains monetary data from Rainer Metz, Geld, Währung und Preisentwicklung: der Niederrheinraum im europäischen Vergleich, 1350-1800 (Frankfurt am Main, 1990). 2.Currency Exchanges (Mueller) contains monetary data supporting material presented in Reinhold C. Mueller, The Venetian Money Market: Banks, Panics, and the Public Debt, 1200-1500 (Baltimore, 1997). 3.Currency Exchanges (Spufford) contains all currency exchange quotations compiled by Peter Spufford and published in his Handbook of Medieval Exchange (London, 1986). 4.Prices (Metz) contains grain prices supplied by Rainer Metz and compiled for the printed edition of Dietrich Ebeling and Franz Irsigler, Getreideumsatz, Getreide- und Brotpreise in Köln, 1368-1797 (Köln, 1976). 5.Prices (Posthumus) contains prices drawn from primary sources and published in Nicholaas Wilhelmus Posthumus, Nederlandsche Prijsgeschiedenis (Leiden, 1943).

Elsas, Moritz John: Umriss einer Geschichte der Preise und Löhne in Deutschland. Vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts, Bd 1.2., Leiden: Sijthoff 1936-1949, IX, 808, IV, 649, VII, 138 S. (195 Mb)
The classical work (online citations) has been digitized at
http://www.digitalis.uni-koeln.de/digitaletexte.html

Many of the presentations from the conference, Trusted Digital Repositories for Cultural Digital Heritage (Rome, November 17-19, 2003) are now online, and it appears that the others will be coming soon. (Open Access News)

http://www.erpanet.org/www/products/Rome/rome.htm

For our audience most interesting is the following PDF file:

Andrew Wilson: Access across time: how the National Archives of Australia preserves digital records

Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists
by Fred R. Byers

(10/03, 48 pp.) $15
ISBN 1-932326-04-9

This report describes in nontechnical language the various types of CDs and DVDs now in use, how they are made, and how they work. It then distills current industry knowledge about disc longevity, conditions that affect life expectancy, and how to care for optical media. The guide is amply illustrated and includes a glossary and bibliography.

The guide's author, Fred R. Byers, is a technical staff member in the Convergent Information Systems Division of the Information Technology Laboratory at NIST.

The guide was written for use by librarians and archivists; however, it will be equally useful to any business or individual wishing to safeguard CD or DVD collections.

The complete text can be downloaded for free as PDF at
http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub121abst.html

Via Ten Thousand Year Blog

The Library of Congress is pleased to announce the release of the online collection The Atlantic World: America and the Netherlands, available at the Library’s Global Gateway Web site: http://international.loc.gov/intldl/awkbhtml/awkbhome.html.

Developed by the Library of Congress in cooperation with the National Library of the Netherlands, this is the first stage of an ongoing project, The Atlantic World: America and the Netherlands, being produced under a cooperative agreement signed by the two institutions earlier this year. The companion site of the National Library of the Netherlands, The Memory of the Netherlands, is located at: http://www.geheugenvannederland.nl.

The Atlantic World is available in both English and Dutch, and is intended for use in schools and libraries and by the general public in both countries and around the world. It includes more than 70 items totaling some 11,737 images from the collections of the Library of Congress, the National Library of the Netherlands, and six other Dutch institutions that are cooperating with the National Library on the project: the Netherlands National Archives, the Municipal Archives of Amsterdam, the Plantage Library of the University of Amsterdam, and the National Maritime Museum. Among the items digitized for the project are a letter describing the purchase of Manhattan from the Native Americans in 1626, an etching of the Mohawk Sychnecta, early land grants and patents from Dutch settlers, seventeenth- century maps, and an early description of the Dutch colony on the eve of its transfer to the British.

Via Ten Thousand Year Blog
http://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress/

Call for Papers

"The Golden Triangle: History, Archives, and Records Management"
Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
September 29-October 1, 2004

Panel and paper proposals are now being solicited for the Semi-Annual
Meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference, to be held in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on September 29-October 1, 2004. Founded in 1972,
MARAC is a volunteer, regional consortium of individuals who live and work
in the individual states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland,
Delaware, Virginia, and West Virginia, and the District of Columbia.

Read more in H-MUSEUM

An excellent link collection:
http://www.amherst.edu/%7Eedstarr/judlibs.html

Homepage of the Heidelberg "Zentralarchiv" (German version)
http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/institute/sonst/aj/index.html

Peter Honigmann's article "Die Akten des Galuts" on the history of Jewish archives and the inventarisation of Jewish sources in Germany is online:
http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/institute/sonst/aj/B6/galut.htm

More Jewish resources (too small list):
http://www.stub.uni-frankfurt.de/webmania/ljud.htm

One must add "Compact Memory" - digitization of historic Jewish Journals in Germany including the "Mitteilungen des Gesamtarchivs der deutschen Juden" (1909/26):
http://www.compactmemory.rwth-aachen.de/cm2/html/

Online texts related to Jewish History
http://jewishhistory.huji.ac.il/links/texts.htm

Databases for academic Jewish studies
http://jewishstudies.virtualave.net/Other_Internet_Resources/Databases/index.shtml

RAMBI - Index of articles on Jewish studies
http://jnul.huji.ac.il/rambi/

On October 21, the Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) officially launched its online catalogue. SCAN has been gathering, negotiating, and digitizing for four years, and has been online at least since February of this year when I blogged a note about it. Quoting Magnus Magnusson at the launch ceremony: "SCAN, the new Scottish Archive Network, has resolved all my worries about the Internet, restored my faith in human ingenuity and revolutionised my life as a researcher. SCAN is the Web in blazing Technicolor action, fully quality-controlled, fully peer-reviewed, and fully free of numbskull keyboard-bangers."

Peter Suber in his Open Access News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

* Collections of the Month: Astronomy has been in the news in recent weeks
with one of the most powerful solar flares in years, and a campaign for
'dark skies'. The Archives Hub includes descriptions for the papers of
leading astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians, and for the records of
instrument makers and observatories:
http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/nov03.shtml
* Latest additions: New descriptions from the Royal Agricultural College,
Cirencester. Additional descriptions from the Universities of Dundee,
Exeter, Leeds, and Warwick, and the University of Wales Aberystwyth. The
Archives Hub's 15,000th description is for the National Viewers' and
Listeners' Association Collection at the University of Essex:
http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/news/index.html
* The Tavistock Institute has published its 'Summative Evaluation of the
Archives Hub': http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/news/index.html


Source: ARCHIVES

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide access.

We, the undersigned, feel obliged to address the challenges of the Internet as an emerging functional medium for distributing knowledge. Obviously, these developments will be able to significantly modify the nature of scientific publishing as well as the existing system of quality assurance.

In accordance with the spirit of the Declaration of the Budapest Open Acess Initiative, the ECHO Charter and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, we have drafted the Berlin Declaration to promote the Internet as a functional instrument for a global scientific knowledge base and human reflection and to specify measures which research policy makers, research institutions, funding agencies, libraries, archives and museums need to consider.

Goals

Our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the information is not made widely and readily available to society. New possibilities of knowledge dissemination not only through the classical form but also and increasingly through the open access paradigm via the Internet have to be supported. We define open access as a comprehensive source of human knowledge and cultural heritage that has been approved by the scientific community.

In order to realize the vision of a global and accessible representation of knowledge, the future Web has to be sustainable, interactive, and transparent. Content and software tools must be openly accessible and compatible.

Definition of an Open Access Contribution

Establishing open access as a worthwhile procedure ideally requires the active commitment of each and every individual producer of scientific knowledge and holder of cultural heritage. Open access contributions include original scientific research results, raw data and metadata, source materials, digital representations of pictorial and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia material.

Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:

1. The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving.


See also a few German comments at
http://jurix.jura.uni-sb.de/pipermail/urecht/Week-of-Mon-20031020/001622.html

Full-text
http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html