" It can't be easy to acknowledge to the public and your employees that morale at your agency has hit the skids. But David S. Ferriero, the U.S. Archivist, did just that after the National Archives tied with the Department of Housing and Urban Development last week as the lowest-ranked large federal agencies in a survey of federal employees' views about their jobs.

Ferriero released a lengthy press release -- something more commonly used for self-congratulation -- on the heels of the closely watched "Best Places to Work" rankings by the Partnership for Public Service.

He said that he encouraged the Archives' 3,200 employees across the country to respond to the survey, and 82 percent did -- the highest participation rate in the government.

Ferriero, who arrived nine months ago, said in an interview that one of the biggest problems with morale is a sense that employees do not have a clearly defined career path, and many feel stuck.

"I want all of our employees, regardless of where in the agency they work, to feel valued and have pride in this agency," Ferriero wrote in his release. "We are on the path to change."

He said that he has been on a listening tour of 21 Archives offices across the country. Last week, he sent all employees a follow-up survey that solicited suggestions on how to improve the agency's work environment. "Within the first day, we had received 342 responses," he wrote. And he said that he has set up a task force in the agency to sort through the ideas and implement them. ....."
Washington Post, 8.9.2010

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/agatha_christie/

via
http://www.webuser.co.uk/news/top-stories/498989/bbc-opens-agatha-christie-web-archive

http://labs.nationalarchives.gov.uk/wordpress/index.php/2010/03/uk-history-photo-finder

This tool allows you to search and view digitised historical photographs of the UK and Ireland. Starting with the Dixon-Scott collection, which holds more than 14,000 photographs taken in the 1920s-1940s, we will be adding new photographic resources in time. You can search by location and view images for free.

" * To better understand a society, its people, and their activities
* To provide primary information about society's activities to help citizenry and scholars recognize and evaluate these events for themselves, so that they may discern truth and reality from fiction and biases
* To support an accurate and diverse documentary record of human existence and human action
* To foster a sense of community and to strengthen civic pride based on a shared and documented history
* To provide support for understanding the community and how communities form the building blocks of state, national, and global societies
* To evaluate the role a community played in historical events on a state, national, or international scale
* To ensure administrative continuity as organizations and businesses function and evolve
* To ensure a smooth-running society governed with order and efficiency
* To hold public officials accountable with organized public records that can be viewed by citizenry
* To help ensure freedom
* To hold liable those who stifle mores, repress societies, and otherwise degrade human rights
* To secure property rights and provide evidence of ownership
* To provide evidence against those who break laws
* To make materials available for review for assistance with planning, allowing us to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and to focus on the successful ideas of others that have been committed to record
* To promote efficiency in records management programs by distinguishing materials with long-term evidential, informational, and historical value
* To promote the study of a town or organization to researchers
* To market a community and promote tourism using a deep knowledge about the community's history and strengths
* To recognize and support the links among all institutions and individuals that create and collect documents in society
* To evaluate society and distinguish trends from more permanent traits of diversified culture
* To support the provenance and documentation of collections of objects
* To support the management of secondary-source collections such as those found in a library
* To support and supplement public education and lifelong learning
* To serve as illustrative works for educational, cultural, and other diversified programming
* To preserve cherished memories of family, friends, and community
* To define one's own identity and have some reassurance of one's continued memory through personal documentation

More reasons to value archives:
To preserve symbolic value through a document's embodiment of a particular idea (for example, the Declaration of Independence symbolizing the USA and freedom to Americans)
Can you think of more reasons to value archives? Write to us at melissa@mannon.org "
Link

The HyperCities project and website, developed by UCLA, USC and CUNY takes a spatial approach to history and uses the Google Earth platform to collate the layers of history of a particular place. Information about people, buildings or institutions can be tied to a particular geographic location and cross referenced by time so that you can see the evolution of urban spaces. These objects, organized by both a geographic and a temporal marker, can take the form of almost any kind of media including photographs, oral histories, historic maps, 3D reconstructions of buildings.
The precursor to HyperCities was a project created by Todd Presner of UCLA, “Hypermedia Berlin,” which consisted of a manually geo-referenced historic maps of Berlin creating a web-based environment for students to investigate the layers of Berlin’s history. The Hypercities project is an expansion of this idea, both in terms of the geographic coverage and in terms of participation. In a similar way to Wikipedia, the new platform allows anyone to contribute content and even gives the creator of an object the option to allow others to edit their contributions. Objects and collections can also be closed to outside editing and the owner also has the option to make their collection or parts of it invisible to the public. Collections can be imported and nested within other collections, allowing users to combine data in an almost infinite variety of ways, often bringing forms of media into contact with each other that are usually separated.

Hypercities currently contains significant content for Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Rome, Lima, Ollantaytambo, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Tehran, Saigon, Toyko, Shanghai, Seoul and the founders hope that this will continue to expand. A recent project showcasing the capabilities of HyperCities is one created by Xarene Eskandar on the protests around the 2009 Iranian elections containing more than a thousand objects documenting the location of the protests and their repression as they unfolding using Youtube videos, twitter feeds and Flicker photos. See here for a Youtube video showcasing this collection. HyperCities can also form the platform for class projects as Todd Presner has used it for his class at UCLA, “Berlin: Modern Metropolis.” See here for a YouTube video on this collection. Because anyone can contribute a collection, HyperCities is certainly not limited to the academy and provides a forum for a community to assemble and display their own history.

Further Reading:

Janice Reiff, “Two Ideas, Two Cities, Two Projects: A Digital Urban World.” Perspectives on History. May 2009. American Historical Association. 15 June 2009.

Link to Blog-Entry

"WASHINGTON (July 20, 2010)—The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced $897,000 in grants for five international digital humanities projects, in partnership with the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), which contributed approximately $772,000.

The NEH/DFG Enriching Digital Collections Grants support collaborations between U.S. and German scholars to develop digitization projects that will benefit research in the humanities. Each project was sponsored jointly by an American and a German institution, whose activities will be funded by NEH and DFG respectively.

“Technology is rapidly changing the landscape for humanities research,” says Brett Bobley, director of NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities. “Our partnership with the DFG has inspired scholars, librarians, and archivists in both Germany and the United States to work together on these groundbreaking projects that combine new technology with leading-edge scholarship.”

Among the grants awarded is one that will allow scholars and the public to search records of artwork sold during wartime Germany. This collaboration between The Getty Research Institute, the Heidelberg University Library, and the Art Library, and National Museums in Berlin to digitize German auction catalogs from 1930-1945 will provide an indispensable source for provenance research in establishing the origins of artistic and cultural assets that were taken from their legal owners during the Nazi regime and make those records freely accessible to the general public.

A grant to combine the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) and Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library’s digital holdings in Classical Studies will create one of the most comprehensive online collections of Greco-Roman materials available for public and scholarly use. And an award to the University of Virginia and the University of Paderborn’s cooperative Music Encoding Initiative will allow scholars to share and study vast collections of music manuscripts through the development of an open-source digital encoding standard for music notation.

One award will allow researchers from Cologne University and Maharishi University of Management to work together in establishing an international digital Sanskrit library. Another will support collaboration between Princeton University and the Freie University in Berlin to digitize 236 Arabic manuscripts on Islamic theology and law that will shed new light on the political, intellectual, and literary history of Islamic civilization, but have till now lain largely neglected and inaccessible in private libraries in Yemen.

“The NEH/DFG cooperation has proved to be a fruitful framework for encouraging ambitious cooperative projects in the digital humanities,” says Christoph Kümmel, program officer within DFG’s Scientific Library Services and Information Services division. “These grants will make it possible to develop encoding standards, digitize large collections of text and materials, and integrate valuable existing databases from both sides of the ocean. It has been very satisfying to see digital collections being improved and enriched in such an innovative way.”

NEH and DFG are also announcing the deadline for the next Enriching Digital Collections grant competition, which will be November 16, 2010. For information on how to apply, please see the Office of Digital Humanities’ webpage.

NEH/DFG Enriching Digital Collections Grants were awarded to the following projects:

* Getty Research Institute – Los Angeles, California
German Sales 1930-1945: Art Works, Art Markets, and Cultural Policy
Thomas Gaehtgens, Project Director
Outright: $174,120
To support: An international collaboration between The Getty Research Institute, the Heidelberg University Library and the Art Library, National Museums in Berlin to create an open, searchable database of German art auction catalogues from 1930-1945.
* Maharishi University of Management Research Institute – Maharishi Vedic City, Iowa
Sanskrit Lexical Sources: Digital Synthesis and Revision
Peter Scharf, Project Director
Outright: $177,872
To support: An international partnership between the Sanskrit Library (Maharishi University of Management) and the Cologne Digital Sanskrit Lexicon (CDSL) project (Institute of Indology and Tamil Studies, Cologne University) to establish a digital Sanskrit lexical reference work.
* Tufts University – Medford, Massachusetts
The Hellespont Project: Integrating Arachne and Perseus
Gregory Crane, Project Director
Outright: $174,828
To support: An international collaboration between Tufts University and the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) to join together the digital holdings of Tufts’ Perseus Digital Library and the DAI’s Arachne into the largest collection of Greco-Roman materials online.
* Princeton University – Princeton, New Jersey
The Yemen Manuscript Digitization Initiative
David Magier, Project Director
Outright: $209,056
To support: An international collaboration between Princeton University and the Freie University, Berlin, to preserve three private libraries and create an online resource for their dissemination; the project team will digitize 236 Arabic manuscripts in the fields of Islamic theology and law.
* University of Virginia – Charlottesville, Virginia
Digital Music Notation Data Model and Prototype Delivery System
Erin Mayhood, Project Director
Outright: $161,175
To support: An international collaboration between the University of Virginia and the University of Paderborn to develop the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) demonstration project in order to establish an open source, non-proprietary academic encoding standard for music notation."
Link

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1634126

From the abstract:

"Originally advanced by publishing industry lobbying groups, the
prevailing account of mass book-digitization projects is that
they will devastate authors and publishers, just as Napster and
its heirs have supposedly devastated musicians and music labels.
Using the impact of GBS on the revenues and operating incomes of
U.S. publishers believing themselves to be the most-affected by
it, this Article finds no evidence of a negative impact upon
them. To the contrary, it provides some evidence of a positive
impact, and proposes further empirical research to identify the
mechanisms of digitization's economic impact."