Archive for 'SAA' Category
Welcome to SAA
“What I did last Summer: The 2005 Hurricanes’ Impact on Archives, Libraries, and Museums”
Moldy Book
Originally uploaded by D-.
This session featured Ann Wakefield of the New Orleans Notarial Archives, Lee Hampton of the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, and Hank Holmes of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The trio described their experiences dealing with the aftermath of last year’s devastating Hurricanes (especially Katrina).
Wakefield described difficulties returning [...]
Original Aladdin Lunchbox Art
Original Aladdin Lunchbox Art
Originally uploaded by D-.
As part of the SAA 2006 reception at the National Museum of American History, the museum’s archives showed off some of its treasures. One of the coolest: these original paintings of the art destined to go on school lunchboxes manufactured by Aladdin Industries. (Note the Beatles design in the [...]
Possibilities and Problems of Digital History and Digital Collections
As a history student, I found this to be an utterly fascinating session. It was led by Roy Rosenzweig and Dan Cohen, both of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. The two presenters are co-authors of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on [...]
Designing an Open-Source and Standards-Compliant Descriptive Tool for Lone Arrangers
Despite all the verbiage in the name, this was one of the best sessions I attended at the SAA conference, because it focused so clearly on a real need in the profession and offered a tangible and practical solution. The session centered on Archon a brand new software project that has just been released [...]
Archivists in the Movies
Archivists in the Movies
Originally uploaded by D-.
Leith Johnson, co-curator of the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives, rounded out Thursday at SAA with a lighthearted look at how archives and archivists have been portrayed in film. There were audible gasps throughout the room whenever a character would do something that was not strictly archivally correct. Like, say, [...]
2400 pages per hour? No sweat!
Book Scanner
Originally uploaded by D-.
This BookScan system was being demonstrated by Kirtas Technologies. I had never seen one of these in action before. It’s quite hypnotic — a robot basically pages through the book while two SLR digital cameras capture high resolution images of two pages at a time. The device uses a weak vacuum [...]
Secrecy vs Access: Government Information in the George W Bush Era
Probably the most spirited session of the day was the standing-room-only panel on government secrecy, chaired by Tom Connors and featuring Rick Blum, Ira Chinoy, and Tom Blanton.
Blanton is with the National Security Archive, a repository at George Washington University that gathers and disseminates declassified materials. He is a thoughtful and passionate critic [...]
Making Technology Work: DSpace and its implementations
DSpace
Originally uploaded by D-.
After spending lunch at a roundtable targeted at Student members of SAA, I headed over to the International Ballroom for a session on DSpace, an open-source digital repository system written in Java. The system is now in use at a large number of institutions nationwide (and even worldwide.)
Two of the panelists were [...]
Yizkor books, Weblogs and Ethnic Cleansing: Grassroots Documentation and New Technologies
This morning, I attended a session entitled “Yizkor books, Weblogs and Ethnic Cleansing: Grassroots Documentation and New Technologies,” presented by Rosemary Horowitz of Appalachian State University and Andràs Riedlmayer of Harvard University. The session was moderated by Stephen Naron,
The session focused on “Yuzkor books” and other ways in which communities decimated by genocide and massive [...]
