AMIA Newsbriefs

Tahrir Cinema displays revolutionary power of archives

From its onset, the 25 January revolution has been marked by obsessive documentation. With a multitude of multimedia material came a marked effort to collect and preserve records of the ongoing struggle for change,
from state institutions like the National Archives to the newly formed activist media collective, Mosireen.
Read the story here: http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/node/479077

UIC Plans Internet Portal to 14 Chicago Institutions' Archives

The University of Illinois at Chicago Library is leading a project to plan a portal to the historical collections of 14 museums, universities and libraries that make up the Chicago Collections Consortium.

Read the press release here.

Capture and Save Twitter Activities in a Corporate Digital Vault

Thanks to this new Twitter connector, corporate tweets can be searched in a hierarchical manner, retrieved and archived. The tweets can be dynamically archived in the corporate archiving system and therefore be indexed for Search, Early Case Assessment or eDiscovery, For example, all tweets of company employees can now be saved and monitored easily, which is vital to control effectively corporate communication.

Read the press release here.

Arkivum launches hosted content archive

Arkivum will introduce its data archiving service to the broadcast and entertainment market at IBC2011. The Arkivum system is built on research undertaken at the University of Southampton IT Innovation Center. The British university has been hosting several projects in the A/V sector including Avatar-m, a project researching the planning and management of large-scale, sustainable and integrated digital archives. The project was a collaboration of academics, a major broadcaster and storage vendors.

More from Broadcast Engineering here.

Stalin, Frozen Noses in Bolshoi Archives

The discoveries have been made during the digitalization of the Bolshoi’s music archives, which are some of the oldest and most extensive in the world and include rare treasures such as a 15th-century Italian songbook score containing handwritten words in Latin.

Read more in The Moscow Times.

Only US copy of Magna Carta treated at US Archives

A painstaking conservation effort to remove old patches and repair weak spots in a 714-year-old copy of the Magna Carta has revealed that the full text of that English declaration of human rights remains intact even though some words are faded and illegible to the eye, the National Archives said Tuesday.

More about the Magna Carta here.

Activist charged with hacking JSTOR

According to the indictment, Swartz hacked into the MIT network so he could mass download millions of documents from an archive operated by the nonprofit group JSTOR. When computer security tried to block his access, he allegedly broke into a basement closet of an MIT building to hard-wire his computer to the network.

Read more here.

Iconic 'Gone With the Wind' Dress Faded Forever

Efforts to preserve and restore several iconic dresses from the Oscar-winning Civil War movie "Gone With the Wind" have uncovered what might be painful for die-hard fans: Some of them simply can't be made to look like they did on screen.

Read it in the New York Times here.

Silent film shows procession at famous Kerala temple

While discovery of huge treasures from vaults of the famed Padmanabhaswamy temple in Kerala's capital has revived interest in history and culture of Travancore, a silent film made in 1933 focussing on a turbulent phase in the princely state's history has been taken out of the box where it has been lying unseen for decades.

Read more here ...

National Archives hires 'Wikipedian in residence'

Without the National Archives' new "Wikipedian in residence," the only way anyone would be able to see Ansel Adams' collection of 220 photos would be to visit the archives in person.

But now, thanks to a new partnership between the archives and Wikipedia, the entire collection can easily be viewed on Wikimedia Commons, part of an effort to make information housed at the nation's repository more easily accessible.

Read more here:  http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2011/07/19/2107876/national-archives-hires-wikipedian.html