A worthy endeavour

Off The Beaten Path: Archeologists work to preserve artifacts in Kentucky’s forests

Interesting series on the loss of literature and history as collections crumble or are sold for scrap in India

In India, History Literally Rots Away
Repairing the Damage at India’s National Archives
India’s Archives: How Did Things Get This Bad?
The Parsis, Once India’s Curators, Now Shrug as History Rots
...all by Dinyar Patel, a historian and Harvard doctoral candidate who is also Parsi.

If you care anything at all about preserving history, documents, and literature, some of this will break your heart. But some people are trying to change things, although it sounds like the problem is so large, the bureaucracy so great, that it's a bit like tilting at windmills. But if even a tenth of what out there gets preserved through greater awareness, that's a step in the right direction.

I admire the goal, not to mention it's a possible place for weeded library books

In a Flood Tide of Digital Data, an Ark Full of Books

“We want to collect one copy of every book,” said Brewster Kahle, who has spent $3 million to buy and operate this repository situated just north of San Francisco. “You can never tell what is going to paint the portrait of a culture.”

As society embraces all forms of digital entertainment, this latter-day Noah is looking the other way. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur who made his fortune selling a data-mining company to Amazon.com in 1999, Mr. Kahle founded and runs the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization devoted to preserving Web pages — 150 billion so far — and making texts more widely available.

But even though he started his archiving in the digital realm, he now wants to save physical texts, too.

Thanks to Gerry McKiernan for the link.

Preserve. Remember. Never Let It Happen Again.

'Ravages of time' leave Auschwitz decaying: Global campaign seeks to raise $165 million to create 'perpetual fund' to allow repairs

The red brick barracks that housed starving inmates are sinking into ruin. Time has warped victims' leather shoes into strange shapes. Hair sheared to make cloth is slowly turning to dust.

Auschwitz is crumbling — the world's most powerful and important testament to Nazi Germany's crimes falling victim to age and mass tourism. Now guardians of the memorial site are waging an urgent effort to save what they can before it is too late.

There is no other place on this earth where the chilling crimes of the Nazis and their 'Final Solution' to the 'Jewish Problem' can be seen so plainly. Auschwitz is forever burned into the memories of those who endured it. For many Jews, it is a place where family members died and were buried or cremated, and while not holy, should be respected as a place of the dead. But even more so, for the rest of us, it is a reminder that we can never let this happen again, that the massive wholesale and orderly efficiency with which so many people were murdered is still a form of butchery. It is a bastion against those who would deny its existence, and that of the Holocaust itself. It is an opportunity to teach new generations of the horror that can come when ordinary people do extraordinarily evil (and to be fair, in some cases heroic things). It should not be allowed to crumble to dust, but rather be preserved for the present, and for the future, with the hope that this will never happen again.

Says museum director Piotr Cywinski:

"There are no more remains of Treblinka, Kulmhof, Sobibor and Belzec," Cywinski said, referring to extermination camps that the Nazis destroyed in an effort to hide their crimes. "Let us not allow the biggest of these death camps — and the only one that is still recognizable — to fall into decay due to the ravages of time and our indifference."

Interested in digital preservation?

REGISTRATION OPEN!

PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY:
Sustaining Digital Collections
DECEMBER 9-10, 2008
InterContinental Chicago Hotel
Chicago, Illinois

PRESENTED BY the Northeast Document Conservation Center
CO-SPONSORED BY Society of American Archivists, American Library Association, and Center for Research Libraries

TAUGHT BY A FACULTY OF NATIONAL EXPERTS, this two-day conference on digital longevity provides information about the latest developments in digital preservation to help you with the life-cycle management of your institution's collections.

CONFERENCE COST: $425
GROUP CONFERENCE REGISTRATION DISCOUNT RATE: Register 3 or more individuals from the same institution at the same time for $340 each.
INTERCONTINENTAL CHICAGO HOTEL RATE: $175 / NIGHT

FOR COMPLETE CONFERENCE INFORMATION AND ONLINE REGISTRATION:
http://www.nedcc.org

FOR WEB STORIES AND SAMPLE COMMENTS from past participants of Persistence of Memory: http://www.nedcc.org/about/archives.php

WOULD YOU LIKE TO RECEIVE current information about NEDCC's programs?
Join NEDCC's E-mail Announcement List:
http://www.nedcc.org/contact/signup.php

Partial funding for this conference is provided by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

The NEDCC is one of the world leaders in library and archive conservation/preservation. One of my teachers in school, George Cunha (a truly remarkable man who had been a chemist, a sailor, a conservator, and then a teacher), was a founder of NEDCC and had been director. It's not a conference I can go to, but I thought some of you might be interested, especially if you can get your institution to foot the bill. Thanks to Julie Martin from MEDLIB-L for passing this along.

Anticipation

News Flash From the Cover of Esquire: Paper Magazines Can Be High Tech, Too details the magazine Esquire's plans to celebrate 75 years of publishing with an electronic cover complete with E Ink, the substance that allows Amazon's Kindle to work without a backlight.

Only real drawback? The magazine cover will lose its battery power in about 90 days. So how do you preserve a dynamic magazine cover?

Thanks to Bibliofuture from LISNews for the head's up.

After more than a year, a Lexington library resource re-opens

In February 2007 a burst water pipe in the special collections area of the Lexington Public Library shut down the Kentucky Room, where needed renovation and expansion was made posible by donations. In his blog, Bluegrass and Beyond, Tom Eblen talks about the crown jewel of the collection, a near-perfect run of the oldest newspaper in Kentucky.

Kentucky Room is back in service: 2007 water damage leads to improved space (link good for seven days)

Last night

my internet was acting up and so during the time I would normally blog, I reset and unplugged modems and routers until it was working, then headed to bed without writing. Sorry about that, but I'd worked two jobs and taped a lot of a little hot utility room with no air conditioning for several hours and I just felt drained. Today's the priming. Now that I've meticulously taped, I'm thinking the priming and painting won't be as bad. But, hey, I could be wrong.

I think I have a new addition to my painting clothes. Monday I went to Danville and before I left I checked the car's oil and transmission fluid and prepaid for some gas. I needed transmission fluid. Now, my hood doesn't stay up on its own anymore; the hydraulics are shot. It's a twelve-year-old car with 252,000 miles on it, so as long as other things don't break down, I can live with it. Well, I was juggling the hood, the funnel (you need a long one for transmission fluid), and the fluid, and I wound up dumping the fluid down my blouse--my favourite one at that. I was so discombulated that I almost drove away without pumping my gas. But I got some of the fluid into the car, pumped the gas, went home (I was only a block or two away), changed, and headed to Danville.

I missed my cousins by about 15 minutes; they headed towards Mammoth Cave and other attractions to see on the way back South. My uncles were roofing a shed for my grandmother most of the day, so I saw them intermittently, then had a little visit when they were through. My mom and John came for awhile, but she'd had a 16-hour shift the night before and was exhausted. She went back home to go to bed after awhile (but I did get my car insurance cards from her; yay--my copies have been expired since February, even though I've had insurance, I just haven't had the proof with me). But I had a great visit with my Aunt Sharon Sue (I have two Aunt Sharons--my uncle married one, so the middle name is necessary; besides, we're in the South--that's what she's always been called. This is my mother's sister. She and her husband are paraprofessionals in a public library, so we can commisurate.) And of course I got to visit quite a bit with my grandmother. All in all it was a good visit. The weather was beautiful and the traffic light, at least on the way there. There were a couple of accidents and even a detour but it wasn't too bad.

After that I came back to Lexington, taped for a couple of hours, and then I did notes. This is my first experience using the recording I made to get down everything; I'm listening to it off the flash drive on the computer through Windows Media Player since I can start and stop it easily. On the recorder, unless you set index marks, it just goes back to the beginning or forward to the end, and that's over 6 hours of recording to go through. This way I can skip any extraneous stuff like dollmaking or the latest movies and concentrate on the content from the game.

Yesterday I worked at the hospital and met with a Basch representative, who did an impressive presentation. If she can get a better deal, especially in terms of service fees, I may go with her company as a serials vendor. I like their claims system, check-in module, and how easily it is to access electronic journals in a central online location. I haven't had that with our current jobber. Then I went to the store for about 3 hours and helped train a new girl. Then it was time for taping. I didn't get to do notes last night; I felt like I'd had all the life sucked out from me and only an episode of 'Will & Grace' restored me a tad.

By the way, something happened on Friday that I forgot to mention here, although I put it on Twitter. I went to the clinic to check on room for some Spanish books and found a tub of ice condensing on top of some of the board books during a party. Needless to say, I was upset, and although I didn't demand the culprit's tongue, I did point out to several people that this was no place for liquids. About four were damaged, but not severely. I forget other people are clueless about books, but my God, you expect some common sense, especially as all of the people in the clinic presumably have degrees. Agh.

Okay, off to work before I'm late.

A nice bit on conservationism at the British Library

via The Beached Librarian, which I in turn found whilst perusing BlogShares

A busy weekend, as usual

I pretty much do the same thing each weekend--I work 10 hours or so on Saturday, then prepare for the game on Sunday, then play the game, then put the notes from the game into the computer. But it's been a productive weekend, one which has been helped by making up for my sleep deficit over the week and banking a little more for the days coming up. Monday between the two jobs I'll work 14 hours; Tuesday will be 13. Wednesday I'll be off from both but only because I need to go to court. I don't know about Thursday and Friday yet. We have a new guy training at the gas station. Hopefully he'll work out and I'll be able to go back to my normal hours, although I have to admit, the pay's been nice lately. I don't know, though. One of the girls sent him back with a list to get cartons of cigarettes and he came out with single packs that he'd taken from various cartons--then put the cartons back so there was no telling where the packs came from. That was a pretty colossal error, and he was terribly embarrassed. Hopefully he'll do better, though.

I just wanted to touch base before I went to sleep for a couple of hours till a friend calls me for a ride home from work. Tomorrow will be such a long day I don't know if I'll get a chance to post. So, I'll give you a link now:

Triage to save rare books

I don't know how long it will stay active. Basically a pipe burst down at Lexington Public Library (the main branch) and did a number on some biographies (which could be pitched), but more importantly, the Kentucky Room, which has rare items. So the library closed and the various staff worked to save the damaged books and papers. It was on the front page of the Herald-Leader the other day. I thought that was nice, especially as the main coverage we as librarians have been getting in the paper lately has to do with the 'scrotum' fiasco. I did blog about that, didn't I? I think so.

Anything else? Oh, yes, this--so appropriate, really:

I am Azathoth! Known as the "Blind Idiot God", the center of all cycles known as Azathoth is the great void itself, infinite creation and inescapable oblivion made one. The Great God is without ego, as it has been embodied in a seperate consciousness as Azathoth has cast off the curse of self-awareness. Surrounded by the host of flautist servitors, piping the songs of the unknowable, Azathoth is not to be known by his aspirants. That is the purpose of another God...

Which Great Old One are you?

It was the minions thing. I want flautist minions. Although I rather thought I might wind up as Nyarlothotep or Yog Sothoth (the latter of which turned out to not be a choice, disappointingly). Oh, and be sure to check out http://www.yog-sothoth.com/ for news about the Call of Cthulhu gaming system, if you're interested. Anyway, enjoy the quiz. 'Night!