Lisa Grimm wrote in her blog about the flood dammage at the derby museum in Louisville.
Link:
http://amovablearchives.blogspot.com/2009/08/louisville-floods-racing-history.html

"Library and Archives Canada has begun construction on a new storage facility for Canada's film heritage.
The $17-million project in west Ottawa will include a building to store 5,000 movies made using nitrate-based film and 600,000 photo negatives dating back to 1912.
The federal government awarded the construction contract for the 12,700-square-foot facility to Ottawa-based Laurin Group last week. A design by Ottawa-based Schoeler & Heaton Architects Inc. was approved in 2005.
All of the historic and archival works from 1890 to 1950 are on nitrate-based film, including one of Canada's earliest dramas, Back to God's Country.
Canada has been at risk of losing this history because the current storage building is inadequate....
The new building will have 22 individual "vaults" measuring about 1.8 metres across by 4.2 metres deep. ....
The building is expected to be ready in a year. The current site, built in the 1940s on the Rockcliffe Air Base, is being turned over to the Canada Lands Corp. for future redevelopment."
Link:
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2009/08/04/film-preservation.html

Adrian Chen answers: " .... With a computer. In a typical reconstruction process, technicians feed all the available shreds into a scanner. An automated software program then assigns a unique ID to each piece and analyzes a number of characteristics, including size, color, indentation, and font. Using a matching algorithm, the software then identifies potential neighboring shreds, displaying them onscreen for an operator to confirm.
Not all shredded documents can be put back together. The possibility and ease of reconstruction depends on the size of the shreds—the smaller and more numerous the pieces, the harder it is to reconstruct a document. Strip shredders cut paper into long strips 1/8- to 5/16-inch wide and are the most popular option because of their speed and low cost—but they're also the easiest to reassemble since they produce a relatively small number of large fragments. Cross-cut shredders, which slice paper into many tiny, confettilike pieces, are significantly more secure (and expensive), while shredders that pulverize paper into dust cost thousands of dollars but are essentially reconstruction-proof. (To secure top-secret information, the Department of Defense requires that the majority of shredded particles "not exceed 5 square millimeters.") When using a strip-shredder, the slicing direction also has implications for reconstruction. Horizontal cuts may leave entire lines of text intact. Vertical shredding, which ensures that sentences are broken up, is more secure.
Before advances in scanning and computer technology, documents had to be reconstructed by hand. Assuming all the pieces are in one place, reassembling a shredded document is a bit like solving a jigsaw puzzle; the reconstructionist must painstakingly sift through the shreds, looking for matches. During the 1979 Iranian Revolution, students and militants who took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran turned to local carpet weavers to reassemble classified CIA documents they found that had been shredded. These pages were later published in a set of about 60 volumes called Documents From the U.S. Espionage Den. And in 2002, former FBI agent William Daly took about an hour to reassemble a shredded page from the dictionary on Good Morning America."
Link: http://www.slate.com/id/2223844/

" .... Three years ago, David Wills, a mutual friend and fellow member of Brooks’s Club in St James’s, London, organised a lunch there to introduce me to the man responsible for establishing the Sayer Archive. It was, Wills told me, one of the world’s largest collections of second world war-related original documentation in private hands, with more than 100,000 items in all. Furthermore, said Wills, no historian had ever been allowed access. I admit that my first instinct was the ignoble one of hoping that none would be, at least until I had published my book.
We got on well and, a few days later, I entered the vast library attached to Sayer’s house in Berkshire and immediately felt awed and very excited. There were shelves upon shelves of letters, memos, reports, diaries, maps, photos and telegraphic correspondence, as well as more than 20,000 books relating to the second world war. I have since returned many times and have never failed to feel a sense of wonderment at what Sayer has achieved over a lifetime of collecting......
The origins of the current Sayer Archive go back more than 30 years. In 1974, Sayer had become fascinated by a mystery described in The Guinness Book of Records as the “world’s greatest robbery”. Just before the end of the war, the Nazi Reichsbank’s gold and foreign currency reserves had been sent out of Berlin to the safer climes of Bavaria. Large sections of this treasure remained unaccounted for, even 30 years after the war had ended.
In all, millions of dollars worth of missing gold and currency had been smuggled out of Bavaria by an informal consortium of serving US officers, black marketeers, former German army and SS officers. Sayer decided to follow the trail of one lot of gold and currency, missing since 1945, and requested official assistance from the US authorities in locating it. The US Department of State eventually agreed to launch an investigation, lasting 14 years, which culminated in Sayer becoming the only private citizen to have been responsible for the recovery of any misappropriated Nazi gold. In 1984, nearly 10 years after he began his investigation, he co-wrote with Douglas Botting a bestseller entitled Nazi Gold, about the Reichsbank thefts. The day he was photographed in the Bank of England vaults holding two ingots of the missing gold that he had tracked down – complete with swastikas engraved on them – remains one of the proudest of his life.
Researching this story in British, German and American archives, Sayer became increasingly fascinated by second world war documents, and he decided to try to collect the original signatures of people who had played an important role in the war. In January 1976 he bought a signed photograph of Mussolini for £75 from an autograph dealer, and began to look through auction catalogues. “There was quite a lot of second world war material around at the time,” he recalls, “but interest had not yet focused on it, so it was fairly easy to acquire. This was particularly true in the US where batches of unresearched letters and photos were invariably grouped together in fairly large collections and sold as one lot, usually without any serious effort having been made to identify the signatories.”
In the early 1980s Sayer met Sir Kenneth Strong, who had been General Eisenhower’s chief of intelligence during the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944 and the Battle of the Bulge in the French Ardennes in December 1944. Strong owned some of the 20th century’s most evocative historical documentation. In 1945 he had taken part in the negotiations to end the war in Europe, talking to Hitler’s successor, Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz. During 48 hours of tense negotiations between Eisenhower’s HQ in Rheims and Doenitz’s HQ in Flensburg on May 6 and 7 1945 there had been an exchange of messages transmitted in code by radio. Strong had kept the original written documents used in these transmissions, and sold them to Sayer, but it was many months before Sayer became aware of just how important some of them were, for they open a new page in history.
Doenitz’s most senior emissary to the Rheims surrender negotiations was Colonel-General Alfred Jodl (later hanged at Nuremberg). The Germans were playing for time as they wanted to bring as many Germans as possible home through American and British lines before the Russians sealed this path. In order to create a delay, Jodl told Strong he was only empowered to begin the discussions for a capitulation and did not have authority to terminate them. This meant a delay while messages were sent between Rheims and Flensburg, on the assumption that a surrender could not be signed until Doenitz agreed.
In reality, Jodl was actually carrying a second letter which gave him full authority to conclude the surrender himself. One letter is now in the Permanently Valuable Records Depository of the United States Archive, but the other is held by the Sayer Archive. Had Jodl been searched when he arrived at the Allied HQ from Flensburg there would have been no need for further discussions with Doenitz – and nearly 1.6m more Germans may have found themselves in captivity in Russia for at least 10 years.
From time to time Sayer has come across various pieces of paper which initially meant very little to him, such as a number of tiny coloured drawings, usually of cherubs, which he later discovered were drawn by Hitler and handed out as souvenirs to intimates. (The Sayer Archive contains 60 letters and photographs signed by the Führer, from 1920 to just before his death in the Berlin bunker in April 1945.)
Another innocuous-looking note proved to be a document so important that it actually changed the course of the 20th century. On August 2 1934 Hitler assumed his new position as supreme commander of the German Armed Forces, or Wehrmacht. Some weeks earlier he had destroyed the potential challenge from one of his own paramilitary organisations – the SA, or Brownshirts – by executing their senior commanders during The Night of the Long Knives. The executions were carried out by the Führer’s smaller unit, the SS, but he needed to ensure that the German army did not interfere with his plans, as it was the only body capable of ousting him or, alternatively, sustaining him in power. To this end, he had made a secret agreement with the head of the army, General Werner von Blomberg, in April 1934, by which the army would support Hitler in his taking the presidency of Germany once the incumbent Paul von Hindenburg died (which he duly did, on August 2).
A week later, on August 9, Blomberg sent a note just one sentence long, saying, somewhat menacingly: “My leader, I would like to remind you of your statement to the Wehrmacht. Blomberg.” The general had, in standing by as Hitler crushed the Brownshirts and then took the presidency, effectively allowed him to become dictator of Germany. Now he wanted his reward. It was not long in coming. On August 20 Hitler issued a public proclamation which accorded the German army the sole power to bear arms on behalf of Germany. Blomberg’s note, such a key document, is not to be found among the Bundesarchiv material in Berlin but in the Sayer Archive.
As the collection grew, so did Sayer’s expertise. When the Hitler Diaries fiasco – in which the Sunday Times published extracts from Hitler’s supposed personal journals, which turned out to be forged – blew up in 1983 he demonstrated how the diaries were forged.
In 1988, Sayer tracked down the SS war criminal General Wilhelm Mohnke, who had been responsible for killing a group of British soldiers in retreat to Dunkirk in 1940 and for two other massacres in 1944. The Mohnke case developed into an international “cause célèbre”. The West German authorities grudgingly initiated an investigation which lasted several years before concluding in 1994 there was insufficient evidence to bring Mohnke to trial. He died in a nursing home in Germany in 2001.
One of the star documents in the Sayer Archive is the last letter Hitler wrote apart from his last will and political testament. On April 23 1945, Field Marshal Ferdinand Schoerner sent a radio message to Hitler exhorting him to leave Berlin as the Russians approached, and carry on the war from southern Germany. Hitler wrote out his response, which was radioed to Schoerner. Asking him to push his group northwards, he wrote “every effort must be made to win the struggle for Berlin”.
With the forces available to him, Schoerner was unable to break through the tightening Russian encirclement but was nonetheless promoted to commander-in-chief of the Wehrmacht on April 29, the day before Hitler committed suicide. In this last letter Hitler stated: “I shall remain in Berlin, so as to take part, in honourable fashion, in the decisive battle for Germany, and to set a good example to all the rest.” Instead he shot himself.
Sayer passed his collection over to his children in the mid-1990s and now acts as the archive’s honorary curator. He continues to look for nuggets of history within it. He is also a consultant to auction house International Autograph Auctions.
To those historians who despair at the thought of ever trying to find anything “new” about the second world war, I offer the thought that there might – perhaps – be other Ian Sayer out there, men whose quiet expertise and dedication can, even seven decades on, shed new light on the story of the greatest cataclysm ever to engulf mankind. "
Link:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b6759648-7d60-11de-b8ee-00144feabdc0.html

http://action4archives.com/category/action4archives

Welcome to the Action 4 Archives. We are a group of historians, academics, independent researchers, archive sector professionals and regular users of archives that are concerned about the challenges facing archives in the UK.

This website was created to raise awareness and co-ordinate a response to planned voluntary cuts to the budget of The National Archives (TNA), which we believe will disproportionately affect public service and damage the core function of the institution.

We encourage you to look through the site to learn more about this project. In particular, we would like to alert you to available funding opportunities for archival doctoral students and the upcoming Archival Education and Research Institutes planned for 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012. The four fellowships and four annual institutes comprise the two major portions of this project. Bringing together this range of strengths in archival education will demonstrate the breadth of modern archival research and practice, and will create cross-fertilizations that can only enhance Archival Science's overall position as an important player in the information fields. We seek participation from and interaction with faculty and students across the United States and worldwide.
Building the Future of Archival Education and Research represents a collaborative effort amongst eight colleges and universities to educate and train future archival faculty. Part of this effort will be four Archival Education and Research Institutes (AERI) held at three universities throughout the United States which are envisioned as strengthening education and research as well as supporting the development of cohorts and mentorship networks. The institutes are open to all faculty and archival doctoral students. Additionally, four doctoral students will receive full fellowships to one of the eight participating colleges or universities.
Our goal is to stimulate the growth of a new generation of academics in archival education who are both versed in contemporary issues and knowledgeable of the work being conducted by colleagues.
This project is funded by a four-year grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services - Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program (Link).
Link:
http://aeri.gseis.ucla.edu/index.htm

"Archives are the foundation of historical research. Without access to primary material—be it documents, photographs, financial statements, engineering or test reports—historians lack the building blocks necessary to write the chronicles that inform our understanding of the past and illuminate the future. To their credit, America’s automakers have gone to great lengths and expense to preserve and protect the historical documents which chronicle and define their existence. Until recently. As Chrysler and GM plunged into bankruptcy, they turned their back on their own heritage and destroyed a priceless part of our collective past."

http://shrinkster.com/17yo
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/editorial-chrysler-destroys-its-historical-archives-gm-to-follow/

"Instead of a week in the sun, Gloucestershire archivist Karen Cooke is taking time off for an international mission to save more than 1,000 years of history.
The Cologne City Archive building in Germany collapsed in March and buried more than 1,000 year's of historic documents in the rubble.
Karen, who works for Gloucestershire Archives, is spending her holiday time to help the salvage effort.
She said: "Archives are the collective memory of a community. The Cologne archive is one of the oldest and most important in Northern Europe."
Cllr Antonia Noble, Gloucestershire County Council's cabinet member with responsibility for archives, said: “It’s great to think that someone from Gloucestershire will be involved in an international effort to rescue treasures that have been collected for more than a millennium."
Link

Ms. Myrna Castro, new Minister of Culture in Honduras, supported by
Micheletti and seemingly well-known as defender of physical burning of
books, has just dismissed Ms. Natalie Roque and Ms. Rebeca Becerra,
heads of National Archives and Book, respectively, and well-known
democrats. Some of the first measures adopted by the new Minister
involve destruction of records and press releases on Micheletti’s
past, as well as prohibition of publication and access to public
records, cancellation of literacy campaigns, closing of the Center for
Historical Research, which has become literally barracks, etc.

Condemnations/Rejections will be welcomed.

From a message to the Archives list by
Alejandro Delgado Gómez
Archivero/Archivist
Servicio de Archivo y Bibliotecas del Ayuntamiento de Cartagena
Archivo Municipal
Parque de Artillería, s/n. 30201-Cartagena (Spain)

See also:
http://hondurascoup2009.blogspot.com/2009/07/to-investigate-and-disseminate-history.html

http://tinyurl.com/kqn26o (Spanish news)

UPDATE
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5885495/

http://archieven.blogspot.com/2009/07/worldcat-digital-collection-gateway.html

(Press release without comment.)