http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/09/life-magazine-now-available-on-google.html

http://www.kittredgecollection.org/

John Kittredge was well known as a generous and supportive member of the numismatic community, both in Worcester, Massachusetts and in New England. Much of his collection concentrates on Crowns and Talers from the 15th century onward. He also has a collection of U.S. coins, New England Numismatic Association (NENA) medals, tokens and other items. All told he had over 7,200 coins and other items that are now in the collection.
Upon his death, John’s collection went to the Kittredge Numismatic Foundation. The mission of the Foundation is to preserve John’s collection, to promote numismatics in the New England region, and to generally provide an educational and research source for the greatest community possible.
Because of the scope and nature of John’s collection, and the endowment of the Foundation, there is an exciting prospect to achieve John’s goals, although one that does not lend itself to the traditional museum setting. It was decided, therefore, to create a “virtual museum” for the coins and medals.
With the help of Ethan Gruber (whose expertise and assistance is gratefully acknowledged) this site has been created to be an ongoing resource for the professional researcher, the serious numismatist and the casual collector of coins and medals. We have used open source software in creating this site, so that others may freely use and modify this application for their own purposes, and also help us continually improve the ease of access and quality of the information.

Some of the database entries have images.

http://www.kittredgecollection.org/display/ead/d1e98386

#numismatik

Shadrack Katuu, Department of Information Sciences, University of South Africa, skatuu@gmail.com, wrote this article in Information Development, Vol. 25, No. 2, 133-145 (2009).

Abstract:
"While education and training of archives and records professionals within Sub Saharan Africa has a history of about five decades, elsewhere professional development has a history lasting several centuries. In Europe, archivists have been in existence since the 17th century while in North America, while the history is just about one century old, within that time a lot of innovation has been evident. This article provides a summary of developments in the two continents, drawing lessons that could be useful in reinvigorating discussion within the African continent."

Source: http://idv.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/25/2/133

http://illicit-cultural-property.blogspot.com/2009/09/deaccessioning-in-uk.html

The Southampton City Council has decided to sell parts of its permanent collection, including Rodin's Crouching Woman, pictured here, and Alfred Munnings' After the Race.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1470211

Navigating the Deaccessioning Crisis

Derek Fincham
Loyola University New Orleans College of Law

September 8, 2009

Indiana Law Review, Forthcoming

Abstract:
A deaccession crisis confronts the American Museum community. Deaccession of art occurs when a museum decides to sell or dispose of a work of art. The crisis stems not from the practice itself - though there are indications deaccession will occur with increasing regularity. Rather the curious mixture of trust and estates law, state law, tax policy, nonprofit governance, professional guidelines, and doctrines governing deaccession all combine to form a body of rules which lack clarity and often conflict. These general and ephemeral standards preclude reasoned appraisal of whether any given sale may benefit the public. More care should be taken when crafting the rules governing our collective cultural heritage.

This article attempts to define the public interest in works of art, and provide a framework to guide in the deaccession of works of art to ensure those sales do in fact serve the public interest. The decision to sell works of art should be taken with care; but the current rules lead to a number of pernicious consequences. They have caused the loss of works from the public trust, the closure of museums and unnecessary legal battles.

Current guidelines require that deaccession proceeds be used only to purchase more art; however this rule appears to be a product of one high-profile scandal involving New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. To assist donors, museum directors and state Attorney Generals, this article proposes three changes. First, the unnecessary restriction on deaccession proceeds should be eliminated. Second, when an important work of art is deaccessioned, other museums should be given an opportunity to purchase a work - to keep it in the public trust or its region - in much the same way the United Kingdom and other nations regulate the export of works of art. Finally, when any museum is considering a deaccession, it must provide reasons for the sale and publicize the decision to allow for public comment.

http://www.thepublicdomain.org/2009/09/08/we-must-stop-google-books-because-it-will-work/ (James Boyle)

There are good reasons to worry about the Google Book Search Settlement, as I explained at length here. But of all of the reasons to oppose it, this utterly surreal statement is my favourite.

European officials fear that if the Google project goes ahead in the US, a yawning transatlantic gap will open up in education and research.

“Oh my God! The Americans are about to create a private workaround of the enormous mess that we regulators have made of national copyright policy! They will fix the unholy legal screwups that leave most of the books of 20th century culture unavailable, yet still under copyright! They will gain access to their cultural heritage — giving them a huge competitive advantage in education. This MUST BE STOPPED!! No one can be allowed to fix this for any other country because then we would be left alone stewing in our own intellectual property stupidity! We must forbid their progress in order to protect our ignorance.”

http://bristol.ac.uk/news/2009/6515.html

Evidence of a previously unknown voyage to North America in 1499, led by a Bristol explorer, is to be published this week in the academic journal Historical Research.

The article by Dr Evan Jones, a historian at Bristol University, suggests that a Bristol merchant, William Weston, undertook a voyage to the ‘New Found Land’ just two years after the first voyage of Venetian explorer John Cabot who sailed from Bristol to ‘discover’ North America in 1497. [...]

Although the publication of this research is entirely new, Dr Jones is keen to stress that the letter itself was found thirty years ago, miscataloged among a bundle of Chancery files in what is now The National Archives. The archivist who found the letter, Miss Margaret Condon, passed on the information to the eminent discovery historian, Professor David Beers Quinn in 1981. He, however, failed to publish the information because he wanted to wait for another historian, Dr Alwyn Ruddock, to publish her research on the Cabot voyages first. This, however, never happened, leaving the letter unpublished at the time of Quinn’s death in 2002.

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/09/library-scholarship-not-widely-oa.html

Doug Way, The Open Access Availability of Library and Information Science Literature, College & Research Libraries, preprint, August 27, 2009. Abstract:

To examine the open access availability of Library and Information Science (LIS) research, a study was conducted using Google Scholar to search for articles from was 20 top LIS journals. The study examined whether Google Scholar was able to find any links to full text, if open access versions of the articles were available and where these articles were being hosted. The results showed the archiving of articles is not a regular practice in the field, articles are not being deposited in institutional or subject repositories at a high rate and the overall the percentage of available open access articles in LIS was similar to the findings in previous studies. In addition, the study found that Google Scholar is an effective tool for finding known LIS articles.

From the article:

... Of the 922 articles examined, OA versions were found for 253 articles. ...

[...]

If professionals in LIS are unwilling to archive their works in repositories, it should not be surprising that repositories face difficulties in recruiting content. ...

More in German:
http://archiv.twoday.net/search?q=open+access+heuch