http://bibliofile.commons.yale.edu/files/2011/08/RareBooks12.pdf

"Photo+Design (a division of Yale University ITS / Academic Technologies), has created a free introductory guide to handling rare books and other works on paper in libraries’ special collections. Your friendly YWGBH co-organizer, Bryn, wrote the text, which was vetted by Yale conservators and curators."

http://bibliofile.commons.yale.edu/2011/08/02/training-manual-rare-book-photography/

British Geological Survey, Homepage

"When Viktor Mayer-Schönberger's stepfather died, he left a collection of 16,000 heavy glass photographic slides, his visual record of decades travelling the world. His stepson had to decide what to do with them. "I had two rules in working out whether to keep a slide. One, if there was anybody in it I knew or might know. Two, if it was beautiful. Know how many I kept? 53."
His stepfather also kept a diary of his travels. Mayer-Schönberger doesn't expect to publish it any time soon. "The entries were so dull! What was the temperature, if the butter was good."

But maybe there was a point in his stepdad recording butter quality at some otherwise forgotten breakfast. In his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Mayer-Schönberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at the University of Oxford's Internet Institute, writes: "Time is quite simply a very difficult dimension of human memory for humans to master."

Mayer-Schönberger says: "My stepfather's diary was probably incredibly meaningful for him because when he read some banal detail about butter, maybe that triggered the memory of the place for him. He externalised what was important for him, so he would have the cues he needed to remember something later."

In Delete, Mayer-Schönberger traces the history of such external memories – cave paintings, scrolls, photographic slides, diaries – and their importance to the flourishing of human knowledge. "Since the early days of humankind," he writes, "we have tried to remember, to preserve our knowledge, to hold on to our memories and we have devised numerous devices and mechanisms to aid us. Yet through millennia, forgetting has remained just a bit easier and cheaper than remembering."
No longer. Because of the digital revolution, he argues, it is easier to keep everything – the drunken email you sent your boss, the photo you put on Facebook in which you're doing something non-CV-enhancing to an inflatable cow – rather than go through the palaver of deciding what to consign to oblivion.

That's because so many of our external memories – digital pictures, emails – are now hardly as heavy as Mayer-Schönberger's stepfather's glass slides, but lighter than bees' wings. The overabundance of cheap storage on hard disks means that it is no longer economical to even decide whether to remember or forget. "Forgetting – the three seconds it takes to choose – has become too expensive for people to use," he writes. If Mayer-Schönberger's stepdad had taken digital photographs, his stepson wouldn't have had to bother thinking about which to delete.

But isn't it great that digital memories correct fallible human ones? "Many of my critics say that forgetting is a weakness of the human mind that we should be happy to get rid of. I agree we benefit from digital memories, but not if that means we lose the capacity to forget because that capacity is valuable."

The dream of overcoming human memory's fallibility was expressed by HG Wells when, in the 1930s, he wrote of a "world brain" through which "the whole human memory can be . . . made accessible to every individual". Today, perhaps we have that world brain, and it is called Google. Mayer-Schönberger sounds an Orwellian note about this: "Quite literally, Google knows more about us than we can remember ourselves."

His point is that a comprehensive memory is as much a curse as a boon. He cites the case of a 41-year-old Californian woman called AJ who, since she was 11, has remembered the events of her every day in agonising detail – what she had for breakfast three decades ago, what happened in each episode of every TV show she watched. That inability to forget, Mayer-Schönberger argues, limits one's decision-making ability and ability to form close links with people who remember less. "The effect may be stronger when caused by more comprehensive and easily accessible external digital memory. Too perfect a recall, even when it is benignly intended to aid our decision-making, may prompt us to become caught up in our memories, unable to leave our past behind."

And not being able to leave our past behind makes humans, he argues, more unforgiving in the digital age than ever before. In 2006, Vancouver-based psychotherapist Andrew Feldmar was crossing the Canada-US border to pick up a friend from Seattle airport – something he'd done many times before. This time, though, the border guard searched online and found that in 2001 Feldmar had written in an academic journal that he had taken LSD in the 1960s. As a result, Feldmar was barred entry to the US. "This case shows that because of digital technology, society's ability to forget has become suspended, replaced by perfect memory."

In the 19th century, Jeremy Bentham envisaged a prison called a panopticon in which guards could watch prisoners without them knowing whether they were being watched. In the 20th century, Michel Foucault argued that the model of the panopticon was used more abstractly to exercise control over society. In the 21st century, Mayer-Schönberger argues that the panopticon now extends across time and cyberspace, making us act as if we are watched even if we are not. He worries that this "perfect memory" will make us self-censor. "That's becoming standard. In the US most colleges have a mandatory class on how to clean up your Facebook account."

But isn't it good that digital technology encourages us to modify our behaviour? "Not necessarily. If you increase utility of storage, you risk collateral damage. In my home country of Austria, the DNA database keeps samples of everybody who left traces at a crime scene. It even means there are two classes of people – suspects and non-suspects and the class of suspects includes those who have been mugged or raped who have their DNA samples on the database."

Mayer-Schönberger took part in a radio phone-in recently. One caller related how her children's classmates found her image on a website publishing mugshots of convicts. "In the US, there are companies who buy up mugshots of prisoners and put them online – unless you pay $500 to take them down." Surely that's inimical to the spirit of the law whereby convictions become spent and offenders are rehabilitated? "It is inimical, but that's not a question that troubles their business model."

Suddenly this woman was punished again for an offence she had committed more than a decade ago and for which she had spent time in prison. Friends and neighbours treated her as a criminal, even though a day before they had entrusted their children to her care. Mayer-Schönberger writes in the new edition of Delete: "Digital memory, in reminding us of who she was more than 10 years ago, denied her the chance to evolve and change." This story, he argues, typifies how digital memory denies us the capacity to forgive.

Once lost, it's difficult to reconstruct. Germany's lawmakers tried prohibiting HR departments from Googling job applicants – thereby compelling institutional forgetting. "It was impossible to operationalise. They couldn't stop HR department workers Googling at home, for instance."

Mayer-Schönberger believes his book struck a chord. "Nine out of 10 Americans want the right to force websites and advertising companies to delete all stored information about them. And for US digital natives [those born after the introduction of digital technology] the figure is 84%."

Why is there such a concern? "People feel vulnerable online and don't trust organisations to protect their personal information. Google was clumsy in dealing with complaints about StreetView. Think of Facebook: it's in their DNA to keep information because they can monetise it."

He's intrigued by what Facebook does to human identity. "In the analogue era, it was relatively simple to keep your lives separate. If my main leisure pursuits were being in the golf club and in an S&M circle, it was essential that no one at the former knew about the latter. Facebook, by not allowing you to have two accounts, problematises that separation. The response is that individuals employ strategies to hack the system – almost all my colleagues have two Facebook accounts, to keep different parts of their lives boxed in."

What can be done to reverse the demise of forgetting? "I suggest we reset the balance and make forgetting just a tiny bit easier than remembering – just enough to flip the default back to where it has been for millennia, from remembering for ever to forgetting over time." He argues that digital storage devices (cameras, mobiles, computers) should automatically delete information that has reached its expiration date.

How? He suggests that users, when saving a document they have created, would have to select an expiration date in addition to the document's name and location on their hard disk. "Expiration dates are about asking humans to reflect – if only for a few moments – about how long the information they want to store may remain valuable."

This chimes with Harvard cyberlaw expert Jonathan Zittrain's idea that we should have a right to declare reputation bankruptcy – ie to have certain aspects of one's digital past erased from the digital memory. Such a right might have helped the woman caller to Mayer-Schönberger's phone-in.

Mayer-Schönberger envisages that each digital camera could have a built-in process to select expiration dates for a photo. Before taking a picture the camera would send out "picture requests" to what he calls "permission devices" (about the size of a key fob that, perhaps, might dangle from our necks) that respond to the request with the owner's preferred expiration date. That date could range from zero to three years to 100 years from now (an option reserved for really memorable pictures).

He concedes expiration dates are no overall solution to the problem, but what he likes about them is that they make us think about the value of forgetting and, also, that they involve negotiation rather than simply imposing a technical solution to a technical problem. There are alternatives, such as turning your back on the digital age. "I don't like digital abstinence. I want us to embrace participation in digital culture and global networks. Just not at any cost."

He argues that digital memory intrudes into our most intimate relationships. "Think of my old love letters. I hope they were destroyed or they're rotting in some attic. There's an implicit ethical agreement that they won't be used against me or published." In the digital age, such implicit ethical agreements are rendered obsolete. So much of our past is so readily retrievable in the digital age that we can't help but stumble across things we'd do better to forget. In Delete, he imagines a sad little story of two friends meeting after not seeing each other for years. John and Jane arrange to go for coffee at an old haunt to reminisce. But Jane can't quite remember the name of the cafe. So she has a brainwave – she'll check through her old emails to John. As she looks for the cafe address, she stumbles across an exchange with him that poisons her attitude to him. Instead of forgiving and forgetting, she is overwhelmed with old resentment and, quite possibly, won't turn up for that coffee.

Our digital footprints, that's to say, can trip us up later on – unless we self-censor assiduously. Given that, what information is Viktor Mayer-Schönberger prepared to disclose to me about himself – given it will be Googlable for the forseeable? He tells me he was born in a small Austrian alpine resort called Zell am See 45 years ago. Little Viktor started computer programming when he was 12, invented a new computer language aged 14, and before he was out of his teens had won awards at the International Physics Olympics and the Austrian Young Programmers Contest. Aged 18 he started a data security company called Ikarus Software.

He sold Ikarus at 26, amassed degrees from Salzburg, Cambridge, Harvard and the LSE. He worked for his father's tax law practice, then spent 10 years on the faculty of Harvard's John F Kennedy school of government. Last October, he took up his Oxford appointment. He has John Lennon glasses, and sounds – thanks to all those Stateside years – like Steve Buscemi. He has a wife and one child and hopes that this information will never be used against him. But, given how little we know about the future, who knows if that will happen?

When we finish this interview the professor did not activate a permission device to change preset expiration dates for the online version of this article, which was kind of him. In future, journalism may well not be like that.

"One thing that's pleased me since I've been working in this area is some online services have implemented expiration dates for information." Among them was drop.io, which offered private file sharing with expiration dates – and was bought up by Facebook last year. Google also now has a facility to set dates after which a web page will no longer be included in its search results displayed to users. He is heartened too by the tendency to encourage digital users to set privacy settings. "When Apple launched iCloud , it allowed you to sync privacy setting across devices – that's incredibly nifty."

Mayer-Schönberger is now researching what he calls "institutions of remembering". "We set up institutions of memory to help us remember important things – such as the Holocaust, for example. But with Google and Flickr and other sites offering seemingly comprehensive memory, we might be prompted to devalue these established institutions of memory. They risk being drowned out by stuff online. My fear is that the digital age, while benefiting us enormously, impoverishes us too.""
Stuart Jeffries, Guardian, 30.6.2011

"Anne Aghion is raising funds through Kickstarter for Iriba Center For Multimedia Heritage, a Documentary project in Kigali, Rwanda that will gather films, photographs and audio recordings dating from the start of colonial rule in East Africa to the present day to keep the country's history alive and accessible for all Rwandans.

To help fund this project, see http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1021275587/iriba-center-in-rwanda-a-media...

IRIBA CENTER is the extension of more than a decade of work by multiple award-winning filmmaker (and Sundance Institute grantee) Anne Aghion.

Since 1994, all Rwandans share genocide as their central legacy. As they search for a path to long-lasting recovery and peace, discovering—or re-discovering—their common history and cultural identity is essential to moving forward and to consolidating peaceful coexistence. Our goal is to give free and open access to that history in picture and sound.

IRIBA CENTER FOR MULTIMEDIA HERITAGE, whose name means "the source," will gather films, photographs and audio recordings dating from the start of colonial rule in East Africa, more than a century ago, to the present day. On site—in a building the French Embassy in Kigali has already pledged to us—we will offer individual screening stations, and create class and group programs. Just as important, we also plan to send mobile cinema programs out into the rural communities where most Rwandans—and the most disenfranchised Rwandans—live.

Audiovisual materials are an important part of any country's historical and cultural legacy. But in Rwanda, where many do not read or write, less than a generation after the most efficient genocide of the twentieth century, these resources will play a critical role for future generations to learn about their past as they build towards a common future free of strife.

To begin with, we will solicit materials from international institutions such as the Tervuren Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium or the Institut national de l'audiovisuel in France. We will also search out materials held by private individuals and institutions in Rwanda and the Great Lakes Region of Africa.

In addition, IRIBA CENTER will be the Rwandan home for a unique archive of 350 hours of video footage accumulated over the ten years Anne filmed in Rwanda, covering the reintegration of perpetrators and survivors in a single community, and the three years of local genocide trials held there. Recognized by scholars internationally as the only such long-term documentation of a post-genocide community, this footage will become part of Rwanda's historical legacy.

The response to our plans for IRIBA CENTER has been tremendous:

• The French Embassy in Kigali has allocated a building for us—this is raw space that will need refurbishing, but it is large, airy and centrally located;

• Bophana has agreed to grant us a free license to their proprietary data management software, with guidance and support in our initial year;

• Several major international donors have already expressed an interest in contributing to our effort.

So why are we turning to you on Kickstarter? In order to qualify for these resources, we have months of work to do. The $40,000 we hope to raise will help cover costs such as legal, administrative and specialist consulting fees as well as other development expenses and the ability to devote all of our energy and resources to getting the project off the ground.

We are aiming for IRIBA CENTER to open its doors in 2012. To do so, we will need to begin hiring and training core staff as early as our official announcement.

But Kickstarter is an all or nothing funding platform, so if we don't reach our fixed goal by August 21, 2011, we'll lose all of your contributions (which will revert to you)! So, please join us! Help us make IRIBA CENTER a reality by participating what you can and spreading the word far and wide!

Bio: Anne Aghion's work as a filmmaker has brought her to Rwanda for over a decade. Her GACACA FILMS, a series of three one-hours and the feature film MY NEIGHBOR MY KILLER have earned her numerous honors, among them an Emmy Award, UNESCO Fellini Prize, a Nestor Almendros Award for Courage in Filmmaking from the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Two of the shorter films were shown on television networks including Sundance Channel, Arte and more than half a dozen networks around the world. MY NEIGHBOR MY KILLER was one of the rare documentaries shown in Official Selection at the Cannes Film Festival. The films have screened for tens of thousands of Rwandans to date. http://www.gacacafilms.com/"

"Public offices should have plans to prepare for and manage the effects of natural disasters on their records and information, says NZ Chief Archivist Greg Goulding in his latest report on the state of government recordkeeping.

"Archives New Zealand is committed to assisting in the rescue and recovery of public records in Canterbury," Mr Goulding said.

"The Canterbury earthquakes in 2010 and 2011 have shown the impact that natural disasters can have on New Zealand. Although natural disasters have significant and visible effects, disasters can occur in many forms. Information from Archives New Zealand's annual government recordkeeping survey indicates that many public offices are not as prepared as they should be to manage the effects of disasters on their records and information.

“Appropriate disaster recovery/business continuity planning for records and information management can assist in both prevention and response."

The Chief Archivist's Report on the State of Government Recordkeeping 2010 also makes recommendations to ensure information is well managed during times of changes within the public sector.

"In this world of constant change it is more important than ever for public sector agencies to develop good information management frameworks to ensure continuity of government services and continued accountability of government," Mr Goulding says.

As public offices increase the delivery of online services there are opportunities to ensure that information management is integrated into system design. Ensuring systems can create and maintain reliable business information and records supports efficient business practice and helps enable the delivery of better, smarter public services.

The report also reflects on the five years since the passing of the NZ Public Records Act 2005. During this time significant progress has been made in public sector recordkeeping practices.

Archives New Zealand has identified three enablers of good information management in which public offices have made notable improvement:
* 93 per cent of public offices state they now have, or are working towards implementing a formal recordkeeping programme
* Many more offices are also working towards systems to support compliance within the Act; demonstrating there is an increased realisation within public offices of the benefits of full and accurate recordkeeping
* Public offices must be authorised by the Chief Archivist to dispose of their records. Disposal covers a range of activities including destruction or transfer to Archives New Zealand. In 2010 close to half of all public offices have gained disposal authorisation from the Chief Archivist for their core business records.

Implementation of disposal authorities is identified as a major area for improvement. Regular and routine disposal of public records is a key way to improve business efficiency. Only managing information for as long as it is required to be kept reduces storage costs and saves unnecessary time managing records that are no longer required.

Mr Goulding says many historic records of value to New Zealand are held in public offices throughout the country. Transferring them to Archives New Zealand eases the burden on public offices to care for these records and lets them focus on their core business.

The report is available on Archives New Zealand's website: http://archives.govt.nz/chief-archivists-annual-report-state-government-recordkeeping-2010"
Link

"Eating with Uncle Sam: Recipes and Historical Bites from the National Archives features over 150 historical and modern-day recipes from the collection at the National Archives, including a wide selection of regional favorites from each of the Presidential libraries. With a message from Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero and an introduction by America’s 2011 Outstanding Chef of the Year and Chief Culinary Advisor to the National Archives Experience’s “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” exhibition José Andrés, Eating with Uncle Sam explores America’s rich history of food."
Link

In the 19th century, more than 20,000 people emigrated from the region Emsland / Grafschaft (county) Bentheim, situated in the Northwestern part of Germany, to the United States of America.
In the beginning, a close contact between the “Old” and the “New World” was established, mostly by writing letters. Over the years and decades, the relationship broke more and more.

The website http://www.german-immigrants.com would like to revive this connection and will provide data and tools to enable interested people on both sides of the “salt-water curtain” doing research and taking up contact again or for the first time.

A free-of-charge database with records on currently more than 15,000 German immigrants is the centerpiece of this website.

http://zine.openrightsgroup.org/hargreaves/orphan-works:-the-cultural-heritage-perspective

Excerpt: "A study which has just been conducted by the European Commission funded ARROW project, has reviewed 10 journal titles published each decade between 1890 and 2010. The findings reveal that 31% of all these titles are orphan works. "