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Heritage & the Web
This unit has four purposes:
The general and partly historical introduction will be covered uniquely in this unit. Contemporary popular web applications will be previewed here and, where appropriate, studied in greater depth in further units ('contemporary culture', 'popular culture and community memory', 'virtual communities', ...). The general philosophy and the research agendas of Museum 2.0 will covered in this unit, with specific initiatives studied, where appropriate, in greater depth in further units ('intelligent heritage', 'museums without walls', ...).
[a lot to go in here ... for a very rough start:]
In this section we'll review the history of, and look at classic examples of, early adotpion of the web by museums--both real and also those that came into being as uniquely web museums--and consider some of the theoretical issues in using the web as a platform.
EXPO
One of the earliest virtual museums, originating in 1993 with an online guide to artifacts from the Vatican Library on display at the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Now archived at Ibiblio.
» http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/
The WebMuseum (a.k.a. the WebLouvre)
One of the earliest examples of a virtual museum, the WebMuseum was founded by Nicolas Pioch in France in 1994, while he was still a student. Formerly known as the WebLouvre, it was forced to change its name when the actual Louvre became aware of its existence. Now archived at Ibiblio.
» http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/
The Museum of Hoaxes
Established in San Diego, California, and on the web in 1997 the Museum of Hoaxes is dedicated to promoting knowledge about hoaxes. An early--and thriving--example of how the web has been used not as mere 'brochureware' to promote a real-world museum but a bona fide museum in its own right.
» http://www.museumofhoaxes.com
:: Libraries and Archives ::
[t.b.c.]
Internet Archive
The biggest and the best general resource for digital archives. "The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public."
» http://www.archive.org
The UK National Archives (and LearningCurve)
» http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk
» http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk
European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO)
"The ECHO initiative aims to create an infrastructure to bring cultural heritage on the Internet, and builds up a network of institutions, research projects and other users which provide content and technology for the common infrastructure, with the aim to enrich the "agora" and to create a future Web of Culture and Science."
» http://echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
Library of Congress
"The Library of Congress is the nation's oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library's mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations."
» http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html
Project Gutenberg
The oldest (1971) and probably still the largest collection of full-text e-books. "Project Gutenberg ... is a volunteer effort to digitize, archive and distribute cultural works, as founder Michael Hart said "To encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks."[2]. Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library.[3] Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-lasting, open formats that can be used on almost any computer. As of February 2009[update], Project Gutenberg claimed over 27,000 items in its collection. Project Gutenberg is affiliated with many projects that are independent organizations which share the same ideals, and have been given permission to use the Project Gutenberg trademark.
Wherever possible, the releases are available in plain text, but other formats are included, such as HTML, PDF and Plucker. Most releases are in the English language, but many non-English works are also available. There are multiple affiliated projects that are providing additional content, including regional and language-specific works. Project Gutenberg is also closely affiliated with Distributed Proofreaders, an internet-based community for proofreading scanned texts."
» http://www.gutenberg.org
The Open Library
"One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty, but achievable, goal. To build it, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a brand new database infrastructure for handling huge amounts of dynamic information, a wiki interface, multi-language support, and people who are willing to contribute their time, effort, and book data.
To date, we have gathered about 30 million records (20 million are available through the site now), and more are on the way. We have built the database infrastructure and the wiki interface, and you can search millions of book records, narrow results by facet, and search across the full text of 1 million scanned books.
Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and is funded in part by a grant from the California State Library. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone! This is an Open project - the software is open, the data is open, the documentation is open, and the site is open.
Now it's your turn! Everyone can participate in this project, whether you're a programmer who wants to build on top of this data, a librarian who wants to add records of digitized books to her local catalog, or a lover of books who wants to make sure his favorites are well represented."
» http://www.openlibrary.org
The Poetry Archive
"The Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded. ...
Using state-of the-art technology, the Poetry Archive restores poetry to its roots. It preserves for future generations uniquely valuable voices which might otherwise be lost. And it will re-energise, enliven and enhance the teaching of poetry at all levels."
» http://www.poetryarchive.org
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings of American and world music
"The Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C., is home to the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections.
The Rinzler Archives is composed of two major collections. The first is the Moses and Frances Asch collection, which consists of the original recordings, business records, correspondence, and photographic material that came to the Smithsonian with the purchase of Folkways Records in 1987. In addition, it contains recordings on the Collector, Paredon, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, and Monitor labels that have been acquired by the Center subsequently.
The Rinzler Archives also houses an extensive collection of recordings documenting ethnic music traditions from around the world, early American country music and bluegrass, blues, and examples of Folk Revival performances on other labels. Listening copies of most of the Folkways catalog are kept in the Archives, and are available to researchers.
The other major archival collection in the Rinzler Archives consists of the written, audio, and visual records of projects and exhibits sponsored by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage: most notably, more than three decades of recordings documeting fieldwork, research and performances related to the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival (formerly known as the Festival of American Folklife), which takes place each summer on the National Mall of the United States in Washington, D.C.
The Archives' holdings are global in perspective, and include such topics as world ethnic performance traditions, historical and spoken word recordings, sounds of science and nature, occupational folklore, and family folklore. The collections are also strong in American, and more specifically Euro-American, African-American, Caribbean, and Native American music and performance traditions. These are living archives, from which recordings and videotapes are regularly issued or reissued for enjoyment and scholarly research."
» http://www.folkways.si.edu
Historical Voices (Michigan State University)
" 'Hearing the actual voices of the past can bring history alive in a way that reading a transcribed text never can,' noted Mark Kornbluh, Director of MATRIX. 'Digital technologies now allow us to recapture the sounds of the past and make them freely available to students, teachers, and all Americans through the World Wide Web.'
Historical Voices (www.historicalvoices.org) is part of the Digital Library Initiative II funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Historical Voices is one of the first fully functional, multi-media, interoperable digital libraries available online. The primary goals of each of these projects will be the development of a rich set of both online exhibits and educational curricula, utilizing audio files as a key component of these resources.
Historical Voices is working to create a federated archives and trans-institutional resources. To this end, Historical Voices is working with several partners to build collections and galaries, including the Chicago Historical Society; Northwestern University; University of Michigan, Flint; Institut Fondamental d‚Afrique Noire (IFAN), Dakar, SN; West African Research Center (WARC), Dakar, SN; University of Capetown, SA; University of the Western Cape, SA; and University of Durban, Westville, SA. Historical Voices is also working with several research partners, including Center for Speech and Language Research, University of Colorado; Northwestern University; Speech Processing Lab, Michigan State University; Speech and Audiology, Michigan Sate University; and the Oral History Association.
Historical Voices is housed at Michigan State University’s MATRIX: the Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences online (matrix.msu.edu). MATRIX is devoted to the application of new technologies in humanities and social science teaching and research. The center engages in fundamental research in the development of digital libraries, creates and maintains online resources, provides training in computing and new teaching technologies, and creates forums for the exchange of ideas and expertise in new teaching technologies."
» http://www.historicalvoices.org
The British Library Archival Sound Recordings
"When complete, The British Library's Archival Sound Recordings website will provide UK Higher and Further Education staff and students free access to approximately 32,000 recordings. Currently there are over 12,000 fully searchable recordings located on the website with a further 20,000 to follow by the end of the project in March 2009." Categories include: UK accents and dialects; arts, literature and performance; classical music; environment (British wildlife); jazz and popular music; oral history; sound recording history; ethnographic wax cylinders; and world and traditional music.
» http://sounds.bl.uk
The Open Music Archive
"The Open Music Archive is situated within the current discourse surrounding notions of authorship, ownership and distribution, reanimated by a porting of Free/Libre and Open Source software models to wider creative contexts. The Open Music Archive concerns itself with the public domain and creative works which are not owned by any one individual and are held in common by society as a whole.
Under copyright law, a music recording has two automatically assigned property rights: A musical composition has a property right and a recording has a separate and independent property right. These property rights are limited by term. In the UK, the term of copyright in a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work is limited to the life of the author plus 70 years, while the term of copyright in a sound recording is limited to 50 years from the date of recording. The archive attempts to gather recordings and information about recordings whose proprietary interests have expired and make them accessible to a wider public.
Artists Ben White & Eileen Simpson have initiated this project following a series of projects which involved researching and gathering music which has fallen out of copyright. Much of this music, although legally in the public domain, is tied to physical media (for example gramophone records) and locked away in archives or private collections which are not widely accessible. The Open Music Archive aims to digitise as much of this music as possible in order to free it from the constraints of a physical collection.
The project aims to share the existing resource and to build a larger archive in open collaboration with others. The archive aims to distribute this music freely, form a site of exchange of knowledge and material, and be a vehicle for future collaborations and distributed projects."
» http://www.openmusicarchive.org
Taisce Cheol Dúchais Éireann (Irish Traditional Music Archive)
"The Irish Traditional Music Archive – Taisce Cheol Dúchais Éireann – is a national reference archive and resource centre for the traditional song, instrumental music and dance of Ireland. It is a public not-for-profit facility which is open, free of charge, to anyone with an interest in the contemporary and historical artforms of Irish traditional music. The Archive promotes public education in Irish traditional music through its own activities and through partnerships with others.
Established in 1987, the Archive is the first body to be exclusively concerned with the making of a comprehensive multi-media collection of materials – sound recordings, books and serials, sheet music and ballad sheets, photographs, videos and DVDs, etc. – for the appreciation and study of Irish traditional music.
The Archive now holds the largest such collection in existence, with coverage of the island of Ireland, of areas of Irish settlement abroad (especially in Britain, North America and Australia), and of non-Irish performers of Irish traditional music. A representative collection of the traditional music of other countries is also being made."
» http://www.itma.ie
The Music of James Scott Skinner
» http://www.abdn.ac.uk/scottskinner/index.shtml
The Archive of Popular American Music
A well-structured annotated and searchable database of sheet music with resizable high-quality scans of cover images. Allows users to create their own 'virtual collection'.
"The UCLA Music Library's Archive of Popular American Music is a research collection covering the history of popular music in the United States from 1790 to the present. The collection, fully accessible at the item level through the UCLA Library Orion2 catalog, is one of the largest in the country, numbering almost 450,000 pieces of sheet music, anthologies, and arrangements for band and orchestra. The collection also includes 62,500 recordings on disc, tape, and cylinder.
Particular strengths within UCLA Music Library's twentieth-century holdings include music for the theater, motion pictures, radio and television, as well as general popular music, country, rhythm and blues, and rock songs.
The Digital Archive of Popular American Music is an initiative designed to provide access to digital versions of the sheet music, and performances of the songs now in the public domain."
» http://digital.library.ucla.edu/apam/
Mutopia
"The Mutopia Project offers sheet music editions of classical music for free download. These are based on editions in the public domain, and include works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Handel, Mozart, and many others." Also includes quite a lot of folk, gospel, and jazz.
» http://www.mutopiaproject.org
The Lannan Foundation Audio Archives
"The archives contain audio files from the popular Readings & Conversations series, other public Lannan events from the past 16 years, as well as selections from the award-winning literary radio program “Bookworm” with Michael Silverblatt.
Lannan has always made audio recordings of and often videotaped its public program events. These events may belong to any of the Lannan program areas: Art, Cultural Freedom, Indigenous Communities, Literary, Readings and Conversations, or Residency. The archive is an ever-growing collection of unique material as we add in recordings from each public event we host."
An excellent collection of audio 'readings and conversations' with speakers such as Salman Rushdie, Robert Fisk, John Pilger, Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, and Tariq Ali.
» http://www.lannan.org/lf/audio/lannan-archives/
[t.b.c.]
Repositories delivering media-rich content to the user
NewsPlayer
"Newsplayer is a web and mobile based service providing newsreel footage spanning the last 100 years. Having acquired a license of material from the libraries of ITN, Reuters, Paramount, Gaumont, British Empire News, Visnews and French Pathe, Newsplayer allows it’s users to browse and search it’s on-line digital archives featuring video news footage from 1896 to the present day and stream any of the 14,000 video clips on request."
» http://www.newsplayer.com
ITNSource
"ITN Source is the gateway to over one million hours of iconic footage and creative moving imagery captured over three centuries. From news to drama, celebrity, comedy, music, wildlife, natural history and film, to an inspirational stock footage section and growing at a rate of over 20 hours of digitised content a day, ITN Source is the most diverse commercial archive in the world. ITN Source represents the footage libraries of Reuters (including historic newsreel collections), ITN, Channel 4, ITV Productions, British Pathe, Fox News and Fox Movietone, Channel 9 News, UTV, Setanta Sports News and other specialist collections."
» http://www.itnsource.com
BritishPathe
"British Pathe are one of the oldest media companies in the world. Their roots lie in 1890s Paris where their founder, Charles Pathe, pioneered the development of the moving image. They were established in London in 1902, and by 1910 were producing their famous bi-weekly newsreel the Pathe Gazette. After the First World War they started producing various Cinemagazines as well. By 1930 they were producing the Gazette, the Pathetone Weekly, the Pathe Pictorial and Eve's Film Review, covering entertainment, culture and womens' issues. By the time Pathe finally stopped producing the cinema newsreel in 1970 they had accumulated 3500 hours of filmed history amounting to over 90,000 individual items. Over the last 30 years this material has been used extensively around the world in television programmes, home videos, advertisments, corporate productions and, most recently, in web publishing. Through the generosity of the Lottery Funded New Opportunities Fund it was possible to build this web site, and to encode the library for digital distribution."
» http://www.britishpathe.com
Vanderbilt Television News Archive
"The Vanderbilt Television News Archive is the world's most extensive and complete archive of television news. We have been recording, preserving and providing access to television news broadcasts of the national networks since August 5, 1968."
» http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu
Lost Films
Rather than an archive of films themselves, this is--as its title suggests--a repository of documents relating to lost films. "Document types uploaded include surviving production records, such as scripts and set designs, as well as posters and other distribution materials, press items, censorship documents and music manuscripts. Also uploaded are numerous photographic stills and even in some cases digitised film clips." Uses CollectiveAccess.
"LOST FILMS is a new internet portal aimed at collecting and documenting film titles, which are believed or have been declared 'lost'. The ARCHIVE currently contains over 3500 entries, a number of which are extensively illustrated with surviving documents contributed by archives and individuals worldwide. The IDENTIFY section contains images and short video clips of around 50 unknown or unidentified films, which face the danger of also becoming lost if not identified by members. The aim of LOST FILMS is not to produce a definitive list of lost films but to provide a platform where members can frequently--and freely--exchange, add and update information."
» https://www.lost-films.eu
European Film Gateway
Still under development at the time of writing (7th March 2009).
"To date, an ever-growing amount of digitised collections including moving images and cinema related material is widely dispersed across Europe. Domain specific research across the various repositories, institutions and countries is still lacking.
Initiated by ACE (Association des Cinémathèques Européennes) and the EDL Foundation, the EFG project will develop a portal providing direct access to about 790,000 digital objects including films, photos, posters, drawings, sound material and text documents. Content will be provided mostly by film archives and cinémathèques, which are partners in the project. The collections to be made accessible have been selected to serve as a sample representing the actual digitised content held in the film institutions. The project started in September 2008 and will run for three years.
The European Film Gateway portal will be linked to the Europeana portal, which is creating the European digital library, museum and archive, providing integrated access to digital treasures from museums, archives, audio-visual archives and libraries of Europe. By making its archival content available through the common interface of Europeana, EFG will contribute to fulfilling one of the major promises of an integrated digital environment: enabling users to search and retrieve different media via a single access point.
While developing the EFG portal service, the project will address a number of key issues for access to digital content, namely, technical and semantic interoperability, digitisation best practices, metadata standards as well as best practices for rights' clearance and IPR management of cinematographic works."
» http://www.europeanfilmgateway.eu
Icons--a portrait of England
"Some people argue there is no such thing as a shared English culture. They say all those invasions by the Normans and Romans simply left us with a ‘hotch potch’ of other people’s cultures. Paradoxically, this melting pot is what makes England unique. And today’s multicultural communities make this mix even more vibrant and interesting. ICONS is a rich resource of material about our lives and cultural heritage. Teachers use it to stimulate classroom learning. Inspiring content continually sparks visits to arts venues and events."
» http://www.icons.org.uk
6 Billion Others
"6 Billion Others tries to draw a portrait of contemporary mankind by asking questions about universal values. What is happiness? What can we learn from life's difficulties? What is the meaning of life?" A fascinating concept: a compendium of short video interviews with people around the world speaking on such themes as happiness, tears, childhood dreams, God, love, fears, nature, dreams, first memory, money, freedom, anger, the meaning of life. Although there is no commentary nor interpretation, the interviews by themselves reveal "others" as very much like ourselves.
» http://6billionothers.org
Paul F. Marty and Michael B. Twidale, 'Lost in gallery space: A conceptual framework for analyzing the usability flaws of museum Web sites'
» http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_9/marty/
Mashed Museum
A resource "for anyone interested in ways in which museums can begin to consume, share and "mash" content on the web, using approaches like REST, RSS, OAI or OpenSearch". See also its accompanying Google group.
» http://www.mashedmuseum.org.uk
» http://groups.google.com/group/mashedmuseum
- first as a general and partly historical introduction to, and critical review of, the ways in which the WWW has been used to support culture and heritage work since the early 1990s; this will include a review of some contemporary archives;
- secondly, and with reference to some of the sites reviewed in [1], as an exploration and discussion of design and usability issues for museum web sites;
- thirdly, as an overview of mostly end-user oriented contemporary web applications (genealogical and family history archives, personal and community histories, etc); and finally
- as a more technology-focused introduction to "Museum 2.0"--the innovative application of cutting edge Web 2.0 technologies in the museums and heritage sector.
The general and partly historical introduction will be covered uniquely in this unit. Contemporary popular web applications will be previewed here and, where appropriate, studied in greater depth in further units ('contemporary culture', 'popular culture and community memory', 'virtual communities', ...). The general philosophy and the research agendas of Museum 2.0 will covered in this unit, with specific initiatives studied, where appropriate, in greater depth in further units ('intelligent heritage', 'museums without walls', ...).
[a lot to go in here ... for a very rough start:]
Contents
Heritage & the Web: a history- the WebMuseum (formerly the WebLouvre)
- Libraries and archives
- genealogy and family history
:: Heritage & the Web: a history ::
In this section we'll review the history of, and look at classic examples of, early adotpion of the web by museums--both real and also those that came into being as uniquely web museums--and consider some of the theoretical issues in using the web as a platform.
EXPO
One of the earliest virtual museums, originating in 1993 with an online guide to artifacts from the Vatican Library on display at the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Now archived at Ibiblio.
» http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/
The WebMuseum (a.k.a. the WebLouvre)
One of the earliest examples of a virtual museum, the WebMuseum was founded by Nicolas Pioch in France in 1994, while he was still a student. Formerly known as the WebLouvre, it was forced to change its name when the actual Louvre became aware of its existence. Now archived at Ibiblio.
» http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/
The Museum of Hoaxes
Established in San Diego, California, and on the web in 1997 the Museum of Hoaxes is dedicated to promoting knowledge about hoaxes. An early--and thriving--example of how the web has been used not as mere 'brochureware' to promote a real-world museum but a bona fide museum in its own right.
» http://www.museumofhoaxes.com
:: Libraries and Archives ::
[t.b.c.]
General
Internet Archive
The biggest and the best general resource for digital archives. "The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public."
» http://www.archive.org
The UK National Archives (and LearningCurve)
» http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk
» http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk
European Cultural Heritage Online (ECHO)
"The ECHO initiative aims to create an infrastructure to bring cultural heritage on the Internet, and builds up a network of institutions, research projects and other users which provide content and technology for the common infrastructure, with the aim to enrich the "agora" and to create a future Web of Culture and Science."
» http://echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
Library of Congress
"The Library of Congress is the nation's oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in its collections. The Library's mission is to make its resources available and useful to the Congress and the American people and to sustain and preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations."
» http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html
Books and literature
Project GutenbergThe oldest (1971) and probably still the largest collection of full-text e-books. "Project Gutenberg ... is a volunteer effort to digitize, archive and distribute cultural works, as founder Michael Hart said "To encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks."[2]. Founded in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, it is the oldest digital library.[3] Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-lasting, open formats that can be used on almost any computer. As of February 2009[update], Project Gutenberg claimed over 27,000 items in its collection. Project Gutenberg is affiliated with many projects that are independent organizations which share the same ideals, and have been given permission to use the Project Gutenberg trademark.
Wherever possible, the releases are available in plain text, but other formats are included, such as HTML, PDF and Plucker. Most releases are in the English language, but many non-English works are also available. There are multiple affiliated projects that are providing additional content, including regional and language-specific works. Project Gutenberg is also closely affiliated with Distributed Proofreaders, an internet-based community for proofreading scanned texts."
» http://www.gutenberg.org
The Open Library"One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty, but achievable, goal. To build it, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a brand new database infrastructure for handling huge amounts of dynamic information, a wiki interface, multi-language support, and people who are willing to contribute their time, effort, and book data.
To date, we have gathered about 30 million records (20 million are available through the site now), and more are on the way. We have built the database infrastructure and the wiki interface, and you can search millions of book records, narrow results by facet, and search across the full text of 1 million scanned books.
Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and is funded in part by a grant from the California State Library. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone! This is an Open project - the software is open, the data is open, the documentation is open, and the site is open.
Now it's your turn! Everyone can participate in this project, whether you're a programmer who wants to build on top of this data, a librarian who wants to add records of digitized books to her local catalog, or a lover of books who wants to make sure his favorites are well represented."
» http://www.openlibrary.org
The Poetry Archive"The Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded. ...
Using state-of the-art technology, the Poetry Archive restores poetry to its roots. It preserves for future generations uniquely valuable voices which might otherwise be lost. And it will re-energise, enliven and enhance the teaching of poetry at all levels."
» http://www.poetryarchive.org
Audio and music archives
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings of American and world music"The Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C., is home to the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections.
The Rinzler Archives is composed of two major collections. The first is the Moses and Frances Asch collection, which consists of the original recordings, business records, correspondence, and photographic material that came to the Smithsonian with the purchase of Folkways Records in 1987. In addition, it contains recordings on the Collector, Paredon, Cook, Dyer-Bennet, Fast Folk, and Monitor labels that have been acquired by the Center subsequently.
The Rinzler Archives also houses an extensive collection of recordings documenting ethnic music traditions from around the world, early American country music and bluegrass, blues, and examples of Folk Revival performances on other labels. Listening copies of most of the Folkways catalog are kept in the Archives, and are available to researchers.
The other major archival collection in the Rinzler Archives consists of the written, audio, and visual records of projects and exhibits sponsored by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage: most notably, more than three decades of recordings documeting fieldwork, research and performances related to the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival (formerly known as the Festival of American Folklife), which takes place each summer on the National Mall of the United States in Washington, D.C.
The Archives' holdings are global in perspective, and include such topics as world ethnic performance traditions, historical and spoken word recordings, sounds of science and nature, occupational folklore, and family folklore. The collections are also strong in American, and more specifically Euro-American, African-American, Caribbean, and Native American music and performance traditions. These are living archives, from which recordings and videotapes are regularly issued or reissued for enjoyment and scholarly research."
» http://www.folkways.si.edu
Historical Voices (Michigan State University)" 'Hearing the actual voices of the past can bring history alive in a way that reading a transcribed text never can,' noted Mark Kornbluh, Director of MATRIX. 'Digital technologies now allow us to recapture the sounds of the past and make them freely available to students, teachers, and all Americans through the World Wide Web.'
Historical Voices (www.historicalvoices.org) is part of the Digital Library Initiative II funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Historical Voices is one of the first fully functional, multi-media, interoperable digital libraries available online. The primary goals of each of these projects will be the development of a rich set of both online exhibits and educational curricula, utilizing audio files as a key component of these resources.
Historical Voices is working to create a federated archives and trans-institutional resources. To this end, Historical Voices is working with several partners to build collections and galaries, including the Chicago Historical Society; Northwestern University; University of Michigan, Flint; Institut Fondamental d‚Afrique Noire (IFAN), Dakar, SN; West African Research Center (WARC), Dakar, SN; University of Capetown, SA; University of the Western Cape, SA; and University of Durban, Westville, SA. Historical Voices is also working with several research partners, including Center for Speech and Language Research, University of Colorado; Northwestern University; Speech Processing Lab, Michigan State University; Speech and Audiology, Michigan Sate University; and the Oral History Association.
Historical Voices is housed at Michigan State University’s MATRIX: the Center for Humane Arts, Letters and Social Sciences online (matrix.msu.edu). MATRIX is devoted to the application of new technologies in humanities and social science teaching and research. The center engages in fundamental research in the development of digital libraries, creates and maintains online resources, provides training in computing and new teaching technologies, and creates forums for the exchange of ideas and expertise in new teaching technologies."
» http://www.historicalvoices.org
The British Library Archival Sound Recordings
"When complete, The British Library's Archival Sound Recordings website will provide UK Higher and Further Education staff and students free access to approximately 32,000 recordings. Currently there are over 12,000 fully searchable recordings located on the website with a further 20,000 to follow by the end of the project in March 2009." Categories include: UK accents and dialects; arts, literature and performance; classical music; environment (British wildlife); jazz and popular music; oral history; sound recording history; ethnographic wax cylinders; and world and traditional music.
» http://sounds.bl.uk
The Open Music Archive"The Open Music Archive is situated within the current discourse surrounding notions of authorship, ownership and distribution, reanimated by a porting of Free/Libre and Open Source software models to wider creative contexts. The Open Music Archive concerns itself with the public domain and creative works which are not owned by any one individual and are held in common by society as a whole.
Under copyright law, a music recording has two automatically assigned property rights: A musical composition has a property right and a recording has a separate and independent property right. These property rights are limited by term. In the UK, the term of copyright in a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work is limited to the life of the author plus 70 years, while the term of copyright in a sound recording is limited to 50 years from the date of recording. The archive attempts to gather recordings and information about recordings whose proprietary interests have expired and make them accessible to a wider public.
Artists Ben White & Eileen Simpson have initiated this project following a series of projects which involved researching and gathering music which has fallen out of copyright. Much of this music, although legally in the public domain, is tied to physical media (for example gramophone records) and locked away in archives or private collections which are not widely accessible. The Open Music Archive aims to digitise as much of this music as possible in order to free it from the constraints of a physical collection.
The project aims to share the existing resource and to build a larger archive in open collaboration with others. The archive aims to distribute this music freely, form a site of exchange of knowledge and material, and be a vehicle for future collaborations and distributed projects."
» http://www.openmusicarchive.org
Taisce Cheol Dúchais Éireann (Irish Traditional Music Archive)"The Irish Traditional Music Archive – Taisce Cheol Dúchais Éireann – is a national reference archive and resource centre for the traditional song, instrumental music and dance of Ireland. It is a public not-for-profit facility which is open, free of charge, to anyone with an interest in the contemporary and historical artforms of Irish traditional music. The Archive promotes public education in Irish traditional music through its own activities and through partnerships with others.
Established in 1987, the Archive is the first body to be exclusively concerned with the making of a comprehensive multi-media collection of materials – sound recordings, books and serials, sheet music and ballad sheets, photographs, videos and DVDs, etc. – for the appreciation and study of Irish traditional music.
The Archive now holds the largest such collection in existence, with coverage of the island of Ireland, of areas of Irish settlement abroad (especially in Britain, North America and Australia), and of non-Irish performers of Irish traditional music. A representative collection of the traditional music of other countries is also being made."
» http://www.itma.ie
The Music of James Scott Skinner
» http://www.abdn.ac.uk/scottskinner/index.shtml
The Archive of Popular American Music
A well-structured annotated and searchable database of sheet music with resizable high-quality scans of cover images. Allows users to create their own 'virtual collection'.
"The UCLA Music Library's Archive of Popular American Music is a research collection covering the history of popular music in the United States from 1790 to the present. The collection, fully accessible at the item level through the UCLA Library Orion2 catalog, is one of the largest in the country, numbering almost 450,000 pieces of sheet music, anthologies, and arrangements for band and orchestra. The collection also includes 62,500 recordings on disc, tape, and cylinder.
Particular strengths within UCLA Music Library's twentieth-century holdings include music for the theater, motion pictures, radio and television, as well as general popular music, country, rhythm and blues, and rock songs.
The Digital Archive of Popular American Music is an initiative designed to provide access to digital versions of the sheet music, and performances of the songs now in the public domain."
» http://digital.library.ucla.edu/apam/
Mutopia
"The Mutopia Project offers sheet music editions of classical music for free download. These are based on editions in the public domain, and include works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Handel, Mozart, and many others." Also includes quite a lot of folk, gospel, and jazz.
» http://www.mutopiaproject.org
The Lannan Foundation Audio Archives
"The archives contain audio files from the popular Readings & Conversations series, other public Lannan events from the past 16 years, as well as selections from the award-winning literary radio program “Bookworm” with Michael Silverblatt.
Lannan has always made audio recordings of and often videotaped its public program events. These events may belong to any of the Lannan program areas: Art, Cultural Freedom, Indigenous Communities, Literary, Readings and Conversations, or Residency. The archive is an ever-growing collection of unique material as we add in recordings from each public event we host."
An excellent collection of audio 'readings and conversations' with speakers such as Salman Rushdie, Robert Fisk, John Pilger, Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, and Tariq Ali.
» http://www.lannan.org/lf/audio/lannan-archives/
[t.b.c.]
Video archives of public history and public records
Repositories delivering media-rich content to the user
NewsPlayer"Newsplayer is a web and mobile based service providing newsreel footage spanning the last 100 years. Having acquired a license of material from the libraries of ITN, Reuters, Paramount, Gaumont, British Empire News, Visnews and French Pathe, Newsplayer allows it’s users to browse and search it’s on-line digital archives featuring video news footage from 1896 to the present day and stream any of the 14,000 video clips on request."
» http://www.newsplayer.com
ITNSource"ITN Source is the gateway to over one million hours of iconic footage and creative moving imagery captured over three centuries. From news to drama, celebrity, comedy, music, wildlife, natural history and film, to an inspirational stock footage section and growing at a rate of over 20 hours of digitised content a day, ITN Source is the most diverse commercial archive in the world. ITN Source represents the footage libraries of Reuters (including historic newsreel collections), ITN, Channel 4, ITV Productions, British Pathe, Fox News and Fox Movietone, Channel 9 News, UTV, Setanta Sports News and other specialist collections."
» http://www.itnsource.com
BritishPathe"British Pathe are one of the oldest media companies in the world. Their roots lie in 1890s Paris where their founder, Charles Pathe, pioneered the development of the moving image. They were established in London in 1902, and by 1910 were producing their famous bi-weekly newsreel the Pathe Gazette. After the First World War they started producing various Cinemagazines as well. By 1930 they were producing the Gazette, the Pathetone Weekly, the Pathe Pictorial and Eve's Film Review, covering entertainment, culture and womens' issues. By the time Pathe finally stopped producing the cinema newsreel in 1970 they had accumulated 3500 hours of filmed history amounting to over 90,000 individual items. Over the last 30 years this material has been used extensively around the world in television programmes, home videos, advertisments, corporate productions and, most recently, in web publishing. Through the generosity of the Lottery Funded New Opportunities Fund it was possible to build this web site, and to encode the library for digital distribution."
» http://www.britishpathe.com
Vanderbilt Television News Archive
"The Vanderbilt Television News Archive is the world's most extensive and complete archive of television news. We have been recording, preserving and providing access to television news broadcasts of the national networks since August 5, 1968."
» http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu
Lost Films
Rather than an archive of films themselves, this is--as its title suggests--a repository of documents relating to lost films. "Document types uploaded include surviving production records, such as scripts and set designs, as well as posters and other distribution materials, press items, censorship documents and music manuscripts. Also uploaded are numerous photographic stills and even in some cases digitised film clips." Uses CollectiveAccess.
"LOST FILMS is a new internet portal aimed at collecting and documenting film titles, which are believed or have been declared 'lost'. The ARCHIVE currently contains over 3500 entries, a number of which are extensively illustrated with surviving documents contributed by archives and individuals worldwide. The IDENTIFY section contains images and short video clips of around 50 unknown or unidentified films, which face the danger of also becoming lost if not identified by members. The aim of LOST FILMS is not to produce a definitive list of lost films but to provide a platform where members can frequently--and freely--exchange, add and update information."
» https://www.lost-films.eu
European Film GatewayStill under development at the time of writing (7th March 2009).
"To date, an ever-growing amount of digitised collections including moving images and cinema related material is widely dispersed across Europe. Domain specific research across the various repositories, institutions and countries is still lacking.
Initiated by ACE (Association des Cinémathèques Européennes) and the EDL Foundation, the EFG project will develop a portal providing direct access to about 790,000 digital objects including films, photos, posters, drawings, sound material and text documents. Content will be provided mostly by film archives and cinémathèques, which are partners in the project. The collections to be made accessible have been selected to serve as a sample representing the actual digitised content held in the film institutions. The project started in September 2008 and will run for three years.
The European Film Gateway portal will be linked to the Europeana portal, which is creating the European digital library, museum and archive, providing integrated access to digital treasures from museums, archives, audio-visual archives and libraries of Europe. By making its archival content available through the common interface of Europeana, EFG will contribute to fulfilling one of the major promises of an integrated digital environment: enabling users to search and retrieve different media via a single access point.
While developing the EFG portal service, the project will address a number of key issues for access to digital content, namely, technical and semantic interoperability, digitisation best practices, metadata standards as well as best practices for rights' clearance and IPR management of cinematographic works."
» http://www.europeanfilmgateway.eu
:: Museums on the web: contemporary examples, innovative exhibitions, and models of good practice ::
Icons--a portrait of England"Some people argue there is no such thing as a shared English culture. They say all those invasions by the Normans and Romans simply left us with a ‘hotch potch’ of other people’s cultures. Paradoxically, this melting pot is what makes England unique. And today’s multicultural communities make this mix even more vibrant and interesting. ICONS is a rich resource of material about our lives and cultural heritage. Teachers use it to stimulate classroom learning. Inspiring content continually sparks visits to arts venues and events."
» http://www.icons.org.uk
6 Billion Others"6 Billion Others tries to draw a portrait of contemporary mankind by asking questions about universal values. What is happiness? What can we learn from life's difficulties? What is the meaning of life?" A fascinating concept: a compendium of short video interviews with people around the world speaking on such themes as happiness, tears, childhood dreams, God, love, fears, nature, dreams, first memory, money, freedom, anger, the meaning of life. Although there is no commentary nor interpretation, the interviews by themselves reveal "others" as very much like ourselves.
» http://6billionothers.org
:: Museums on the web: Design issues ::
Paul F. Marty and Michael B. Twidale, 'Lost in gallery space: A conceptual framework for analyzing the usability flaws of museum Web sites'
» http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_9/marty/
:: End-user oriented web applications ::
'Online e-heritage media' at the time of writing turns out to be a bit of a 'catch-all' for any resource that doesn't quite fit neatly elsewhere in this document. As an exercise in conceptual sorting, I can identify at least the following five kinds of resource:- rich genealogical and family history archives
- family history research sites that support the above (e.g. the UK National Archives, Ellis Island, Ancestry.com, RootsWeb, MyHeritage)
- collections of personal and community (oral) histories (e.g. MovingHere, TimeWitnesses, 'What did you do in the war, Grandma?', the Wartime Memories Project)
- (personal) 'digital scrapbooks'. ((This is analogous to my more narrowly focused 2001 concept of the 'e-folio', an access-anywhere 'personal learning portfolio' documenting and integrating one's ongoing learning. This is documented on another of my sites.)) For a couple of years I've been thinking about online (and, to a degree, offline) "people's museums" and "personal museums" as interactive and densely interconnected heterarchical repositories of personal and family memories that collectively capture. In late 2006, I started my own 'personal museum' project ("My Life is My Museum") as a pilot node. In a rather chaotic fashion, personal blogs as online diaries serve this purpose, with 'blogrolls' connecting the individual to others through simple formal (rather than semantic) links. But clearly blogs per se are effectively no more than simple personal content management systems and have no inherent model that suits them specifically to e-heritage. Hybrid blog-photo-video-whatever personal sites such as MySpace and Vox, and communities-focused media collections such as OurMedia (see also below) show potential as models; but again there is nothing in the stated aims of the site or in the information architecture that orients them explicitly in the direction of 'community memory'. At the time of writing (17 April 2007) I've found no good examples of 'digital scrapbooks'.
- niche sites offering audio-visual media for specific communities and interest groups (e.g. Clioaudio podcasts for History, Classics and Archaeology)
- Show Me
"... cool stuff from the UK's museums and galleries". A learning site for schoolchildren, with links to numerous interactive games for history, science and technology, life sciences and the natural world, and art and design.
» http://www.show.me.uk/topic/topic.html
- Clioaudio Podcasts
Podcasts of ... "News and features about History, Classics and Archaeology. All the past from prehistory to the space age."
» http://clioaudio.com - OurMedia
I mentioned this above. The site highlights links to "a digital collection of over 6,000 cylinder recordings from the late 19th and early 20th centuries", "an archive of folk tunes covering the blues, country and other styles of music", a collection of animated short films, including several animation classics, spanning 65 years of animation at the National Film Board of Canada, "public domain senate and house footage under a free-document license", and much more. The greater the pity, then, that there is no explicit community (memory) model that integrates these resources in a meaningful manner.
» http://www.ourmedia.org/learning-center/open
:: Museum 2.0 ::
Mashed Museum
A resource "for anyone interested in ways in which museums can begin to consume, share and "mash" content on the web, using approaches like REST, RSS, OAI or OpenSearch". See also its accompanying Google group.
» http://www.mashedmuseum.org.uk
» http://groups.google.com/group/mashedmuseum
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