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Stop the closing of the Russian State Historical Archives!

THE LARGEST HISTORICAL ARCHIVES
IN RUSSIA AND EUROPE
IS UNDER THE THREAT OF DESTRUCTION
ACCORDING TO THE DECISION OF THE OFFICIALS!

The Russian State Historical Archives in St.Petersburg is under threat of closing, eviction and destruction due to the decision of the officials, planning to use all its buildings for accommodation of the offices and a hotel complex.

On December 17th, 2002 the Chairman of the Government of Russia Mikhail Kasianov signed a bylaw according to which all the buildings occupied by the Russian State Historical Archive were confiscated and were consigned to the Administration of the President of Russia Vladimir Putin.

The administration of the Archives was proposed to close the archives and to release the buildings. Before the new building will be constructed the collections were proposed to warehouse somewhere. This means that the Archives will be closed in summer 2003 for 15-30 years!

There were several articles in Russian papers, magazines, TV interviews against closing the Archives. But till now there is no document stopping this awfull governmental decision.

WE ASK FOR HELP OF THE EUROPEAN AND WORLD COMMUNITY,
UNESCO, THE SCIENTISTS AND POLITICIANS
TO AFFECT THE RUSSIAN AUTHORITIES AND INDUCE THEM
TO ABANDON THE ATTEMPT OF CONFISCATION OF THE BUILDINGS
OF THE ARCHIVES AND CLOSING IT!

http://rgia.narod.ru/maineng.htm

Read a little more in German here

Short information on the archives in English:
http://feefhs.org/blitz/blitzfa.html
http://rgia.narod.ru/archiveng.htm (with pictures)

Stolen documents in Milan’s State Archives

While preparing an exhibition last summer, museums in New York and Amsterdam contacted Milan’s State Archives to request the loan of an architectural drawing of the Teatro alla Scala. This was no ordinary blueprint: the plan, about one meter square
and with some areas highlighted in red and yellow, is an autograph by Giuseppe Piermarini, the house’s original architect, who may have traced it between 1776 and 1778.

When the document was discovered missing in August, a special task force of Italy’s
carabinieri (military police) called the Nucleo tutela patrimonio culturale launched an
operation code-named “Teatro alla Scala.” A small flood of collectibles had recently
been appearing on Milan’s antiquarian market, and the goal was to find the source of
the treasures and to trace from there the whereabouts of the Piermarini drawing.

The results of the investigation, announced earlier this month, were startling.
Thousands of pieces were found to have disappeared: parchments from the 11th
century; papal bulls; official decrees bearing the signatures of Emperor Charles V,
Empress Maria Theresa and Napoleon; autograph manuscripts by such Italian literary
giants as Alessandro Manzoni and Gabriele D’Annunzio — a substantial slice of eight
centuries of European history, as seen through documents from one of the continent’s
wealthiest metropolitan centers from the Middle Ages onward. Some 3,000 items from
the State Archives and smaller depositories have been recovered, while 1,000 more
are still reported missing, probably smuggled into private collections in Italy or abroad.
(The plan of La Scala was discovered in a private home.)

Since the investigation and gathering of evidence are ongoing, public prosecutor Maria
Letizia Mannella is withholding the names of the three main suspects, who are
described as a professore (a civil servant employed by the provincial government of
Milan in the field of cultural heritage and an esteemed scholar), the principal of a
technical high school at San Donato Milanese (a neighboring township) and an
antiquarian running a shop in downtown Milan. The trio have been charged not with
actual theft, but rather with receiving stolen goods, which may hint at the involvement
of a larger criminal organization.

From andante.com

Read more in Italian (December 2003):
http://www2.unicatt.it/unicatt/seed/mag_gestion_cattnews.vedi_notizia?id_cattnewsT=2634

Lithuanian Parchments

A UNESCO grant has enabled the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences to digitize about 10% of its collection of 1,400 parchments and provide open access to the digital images. The 121 parchments in the project include royal privileges, papal bulls, international agreements, genealogical data, and related historical information from 1187 to 1500.

Via http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

Some documents are in German, some in Latin.

The Iraqi Jewish Archive Preservation Report

|“Rare, historic and modern books, documents and parchment scrolls pertaining to the Iraqi Jewish community were found in the flooded basement of the Iraqi Intelligence (Mukhabahrat) headquarters in Baghdad in early May 2003. Upon removal from the basement, the wet materials (known as the Iraqi Jewish Archive) were packed into sacks and transported to a nearby location where they were partially dried. Dr. Harold Rhode, expert in Middle Eastern and Islamic Affairs, Department of Net Assessment, Office of the Secretary of Defense, provided a general review and initial sorting of the contents during the retrieval process, after which the materials were placed in 27 metal trunks. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) arranged for the materials to be frozen, which served to stabilize the condition and eliminate further mold growth.

At the request of the Coalition Provisional Authority, conservators from the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) traveled to Baghdad June 20-23 to assess the condition of the materials and develop recommendations for their preservation. The following report outlines the preservation action plan and funding requirements for preserving this important collection…”

The full illustrated report is at:
http://www-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/IRAQ/mela/IraqiJewishArchiveReport.htm

This document is published on the website of the Middle East Librarians Association Committee on Iraqi Libraries with the kind permission of the authors and The National Archives & Records Administration.

A news report on these documents also appeared in The Art Newspaper, Monday 12 January 2004
http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=11494

Please feel free to re-post this announcement wherever there may be interest.

Chuck Jones
IraqCrisis Moderator
https://listhost.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/iraqcrisis
cejo@midway.uchicago.edu

Long-term Archiving

Harry Goldstein, The Infinite Archive, IEEE Spectrum Online, January 1, 2004. A short piece highlighting “key projects” in the long-term preservation of digital content, including DSpace, the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), and the Internet Archive.

From Open Access News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

Mormon church’ Proxy Baptism

Belleville News Democrat 12/11/03
Religion Today
MARK THIESSEN
Associated Press
SALT LAKE CITY – The Mormon practice of posthumously
baptizing non-Mormons, which has angered Jews and others in
the past, is now creating tensions with another religion –
the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is funding
the preservation
– at 10 cents a sheet – of thousands of names of dead
Russian Orthodox
Church members.
The church flatly rejects allegations that it is buying the
names of dead
souls, and insists the effort in Russia is aimed only at
providing an archive
of genealogical data for the public good. However, critics
contend the
church is using the names for its oft-criticized ritual
called proxy baptism, a
practice they say is rife with ethical and moral
problems.

Read more:
http://www.belleville.com/mld/newsdemocrat/7468326.htm

Links:
Mormon church: http://www.lds.org
Mormon church’ genealogy site: http://www.familysearch.org

Via RAIN via ARCHIVES Listserv

Call for papers for 2005 American Historical Association Conference

The theme for next year is Archives and Artifacts and some of you may be interested in presenting. Information can be found at
http://www.theaha.org/annual/2005/CFP2005.htm . The proposal deadline is 2/15/04.

It would be really nice to see some archivists talking about archives to
historians instead of just having historians talk about archives.

Danna Bell-Russel
in a posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List

RSS Feed for the “English Corner” of ARCHIVALIA

Please feel free to inform your collegues who cannot read German that they can now subscribe ARCHIVALIA via the own RSS feed of the “English Corner”:

?cat=14&feed=rss2

RSS Feeds are available also for the other (German) topics of this colloborative weblog.

Please think about CONTRIBUTING to ARCHIVALIA (only registration at http://twoday.net is needed)!

An Unquiet History …

I dream of seeing a one volume, general discussion of archives written for the general public in the chain and independent bookstores. Every once and a while we come close, but with Martha Cooley’s novel, The Archivist, we find the wrong portrayal and with a dust cover with a stack of books we get more confused; with Miles Harvey’s The Island of Lost Maps, the sense of archives is a bit lost in the musings about collecting and thievery; and in Nicholson Baker’s Double Fold, archivists are invisible and there are too many conspiracies anyway. Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), with an attractive picture of library stacks, may be a good prototype for the kind of volume archivists need.

http://hopper.sis.pitt.edu/drcox/Battles.htm

These are the first words of a review of Battles’ new book (see also htp://log.netbib.de) by Richard J. Cox (Main page).

Archives! Please sign the Berlin Declaration!

The signatory page of the Berlin Declaration has added this statement:
Governments, universities, research institutions, funding agencies, foundations, libraries, museums, archives, learned societies and professional associations who share the vision expressed in the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities are therefore invited to join the signatories that have already signed the Declaration.

Please contact:
Prof. Dr. Peter Gruss
President of the Max Planck Society
Hofgartenstraβe 8
D-80539 Munich
Germany
e-mail: praesident@gv.mpg.de

Via Open Access News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

More on Open Access in this Weblog in the (German) category
http://archiv.twoday.net/topics/Open+Access

Disability Database for Museums, Archives and Libraries

Providing online access to a database of 200 trainers, auditors and consultants specialising in disability issues is the
latest step towards reducing access barriers in museums, archives and libraries by Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries. The database designed and built by Resource in partnership with the nine Regional Agencies, is the first online service of its kind for the cultural sector.

The database is rich in information to help museums, archives and libraries to find support and advice on all disability issues […]

The disability database is available on the Resource website at:
http://www.resource.gov.uk/action/learnacc/00access_03.asp

Via http://www.h-museum.net

Historical Prices and Wages

http://www.iisg.nl/hpw/link.html

This page offers an excellent link collection for historical prices and wages in the net covering the entire world.

http://www.scc.rutgers.edu/memdb/GeneralPages/TopLevel/databaseList.asp

MEMDB contains five large data sets, three pertaining to currency exchanges and two pertaining to prices: 1.Currency Exchanges (Metz) contains monetary data from Rainer Metz, Geld, Währung und Preisentwicklung: der Niederrheinraum im europäischen Vergleich, 1350-1800 (Frankfurt am Main, 1990). 2.Currency Exchanges (Mueller) contains monetary data supporting material presented in Reinhold C. Mueller, The Venetian Money Market: Banks, Panics, and the Public Debt, 1200-1500 (Baltimore, 1997). 3.Currency Exchanges (Spufford) contains all currency exchange quotations compiled by Peter Spufford and published in his Handbook of Medieval Exchange (London, 1986). 4.Prices (Metz) contains grain prices supplied by Rainer Metz and compiled for the printed edition of Dietrich Ebeling and Franz Irsigler, Getreideumsatz, Getreide- und Brotpreise in Köln, 1368-1797 (Köln, 1976). 5.Prices (Posthumus) contains prices drawn from primary sources and published in Nicholaas Wilhelmus Posthumus, Nederlandsche Prijsgeschiedenis (Leiden, 1943).

Elsas, Moritz John: Umriss einer Geschichte der Preise und Löhne in Deutschland. Vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts, Bd 1.2., Leiden: Sijthoff 1936-1949, IX, 808, IV, 649, VII, 138 S. (195 Mb)
The classical work (online citations) has been digitized at
http://www.digitalis.uni-koeln.de/digitaletexte.html

Trusted Digital Repositories

Many of the presentations from the conference, Trusted Digital Repositories for Cultural Digital Heritage (Rome, November 17-19, 2003) are now online, and it appears that the others will be coming soon. (Open Access News)

http://www.erpanet.org/www/products/Rome/rome.htm

For our audience most interesting is the following PDF file:

Andrew Wilson: Access across time: how the National Archives of Australia preserves digital records

Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs

Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists
by Fred R. Byers

(10/03, 48 pp.) $15
ISBN 1-932326-04-9

This report describes in nontechnical language the various types of CDs and DVDs now in use, how they are made, and how they work. It then distills current industry knowledge about disc longevity, conditions that affect life expectancy, and how to care for optical media. The guide is amply illustrated and includes a glossary and bibliography.

The guide’s author, Fred R. Byers, is a technical staff member in the Convergent Information Systems Division of the Information Technology Laboratory at NIST.

The guide was written for use by librarians and archivists; however, it will be equally useful to any business or individual wishing to safeguard CD or DVD collections.

The complete text can be downloaded for free as PDF at
http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub121abst.html

Via Ten Thousand Year Blog

America and the Netherlands

The Library of Congress is pleased to announce the release of the online collection The Atlantic World: America and the Netherlands, available at the Library’s Global Gateway Web site: http://international.loc.gov/intldl/awkbhtml/awkbhome.html.

Developed by the Library of Congress in cooperation with the National Library of the Netherlands, this is the first stage of an ongoing project, The Atlantic World: America and the Netherlands, being produced under a cooperative agreement signed by the two institutions earlier this year. The companion site of the National Library of the Netherlands, The Memory of the Netherlands, is located at: http://www.geheugenvannederland.nl.

The Atlantic World is available in both English and Dutch, and is intended for use in schools and libraries and by the general public in both countries and around the world. It includes more than 70 items totaling some 11,737 images from the collections of the Library of Congress, the National Library of the Netherlands, and six other Dutch institutions that are cooperating with the National Library on the project: the Netherlands National Archives, the Municipal Archives of Amsterdam, the Plantage Library of the University of Amsterdam, and the National Maritime Museum. Among the items digitized for the project are a letter describing the purchase of Manhattan from the Native Americans in 1626, an etching of the Mohawk Sychnecta, early land grants and patents from Dutch settlers, seventeenth- century maps, and an early description of the Dutch colony on the eve of its transfer to the British.

Via Ten Thousand Year Blog
http://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress

The Golden Triangle

Call for Papers

“The Golden Triangle: History, Archives, and Records Management”
Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
September 29-October 1, 2004

Panel and paper proposals are now being solicited for the Semi-Annual
Meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference, to be held in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on September 29-October 1, 2004. Founded in 1972,
MARAC is a volunteer, regional consortium of individuals who live and work
in the individual states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland,
Delaware, Virginia, and West Virginia, and the District of Columbia.

Read more in H-MUSEUM

Judaica Libraries and Archives on the Web

An excellent link collection:
http://www.amherst.edu/%7Eedstarr/judlibs.html

Homepage of the Heidelberg “Zentralarchiv” (German version)
http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/institute/sonst/aj/index.html

Peter Honigmann’s article “Die Akten des Galuts” on the history of Jewish archives and the inventarisation of Jewish sources in Germany is online:
http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/institute/sonst/aj/B6/galut.htm

More Jewish resources (too small list):
http://www.stub.uni-frankfurt.de/webmania/ljud.htm

One must add “Compact Memory” – digitization of historic Jewish Journals in Germany including the “Mitteilungen des Gesamtarchivs der deutschen Juden” (1909/26):
http://www.compactmemory.rwth-aachen.de/cm2/html

Online texts related to Jewish History
http://jewishhistory.huji.ac.il/links/texts.htm

Databases for academic Jewish studies
http://jewishstudies.virtualave.net/Other_Internet_Resources/Databases/index.shtml

RAMBI – Index of articles on Jewish studies
http://jnul.huji.ac.il/rambi

Scottish Archive Network launches its catalogue

On October 21, the Scottish Archive Network (SCAN) officially launched its online catalogue. SCAN has been gathering, negotiating, and digitizing for four years, and has been online at least since February of this year when I blogged a note about it. Quoting Magnus Magnusson at the launch ceremony: “SCAN, the new Scottish Archive Network, has resolved all my worries about the Internet, restored my faith in human ingenuity and revolutionised my life as a researcher. SCAN is the Web in blazing Technicolor action, fully quality-controlled, fully peer-reviewed, and fully free of numbskull keyboard-bangers.”

Peter Suber in his Open Access News
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

UK Archives Hub: November Update

* Collections of the Month: Astronomy has been in the news in recent weeks
with one of the most powerful solar flares in years, and a campaign for
‘dark skies’. The Archives Hub includes descriptions for the papers of
leading astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians, and for the records of
instrument makers and observatories:
http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/nov03.shtml
* Latest additions: New descriptions from the Royal Agricultural College,
Cirencester. Additional descriptions from the Universities of Dundee,
Exeter, Leeds, and Warwick, and the University of Wales Aberystwyth. The
Archives Hub’s 15,000th description is for the National Viewers’ and
Listeners’ Association Collection at the University of Essex:
http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/news/index.html
* The Tavistock Institute has published its ‘Summative Evaluation of the
Archives Hub’: http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/news/index.html

Source: ARCHIVES

Berlin Declaration on Open Access

Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

The Internet has fundamentally changed the practical and economic realities of distributing scientific knowledge and cultural heritage. For the first time ever, the Internet now offers the chance to constitute a global and interactive representation of human knowledge, including cultural heritage and the guarantee of worldwide access.

We, the undersigned, feel obliged to address the challenges of the Internet as an emerging functional medium for distributing knowledge. Obviously, these developments will be able to significantly modify the nature of scientific publishing as well as the existing system of quality assurance.

In accordance with the spirit of the Declaration of the Budapest Open Acess Initiative, the ECHO Charter and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, we have drafted the Berlin Declaration to promote the Internet as a functional instrument for a global scientific knowledge base and human reflection and to specify measures which research policy makers, research institutions, funding agencies, libraries, archives and museums need to consider.

Goals

Our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the information is not made widely and readily available to society. New possibilities of knowledge dissemination not only through the classical form but also and increasingly through the open access paradigm via the Internet have to be supported. We define open access as a comprehensive source of human knowledge and cultural heritage that has been approved by the scientific community.

In order to realize the vision of a global and accessible representation of knowledge, the future Web has to be sustainable, interactive, and transparent. Content and software tools must be openly accessible and compatible.

Definition of an Open Access Contribution

Establishing open access as a worthwhile procedure ideally requires the active commitment of each and every individual producer of scientific knowledge and holder of cultural heritage. Open access contributions include original scientific research results, raw data and metadata, source materials, digital representations of pictorial and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia material.

Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:

1. The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving.

See also a few German comments at
http://jurix.jura.uni-sb.de/pipermail/urecht/Week-of-Mon-20031020/001622.html

Full-text
http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html

Australia: The historian as archival collector

Don Boadle: The historian as archival collector: an Australian local study, in: AARL 34:1 (March 2003)

Online:
http://alia.org.au/publishing/aarl/34.1/full.text/boadle.html

Abstract: Neither archivists nor historians have shown much interest in trying to establish a link between the kinds of writing an historian does and the kind of archival records he or she acquires and preserves. This paper presents an Australian study, focussing on the writing of the local historian Keith Swan (1916-1996) and the collections he created for the Wagga Wagga and District Historical Society and for Charles Sturt University.

Archives and popular culture

Call for Papers

Libraries, Archives, Museums and Popular Culture Area
Joint conference with Popular Culture Association and American Culture
Association
San Antonio Marriott Rivercenter, San Antonio TX 78205
April 7-10, 2004

The Libraries, Archives, Museums and Popular Culture area solicits paper
proposals from librarians, graduate students, library school faculty,
collectors, writers, and other aficionados (yes! including people who use
libraries, archives, and museums, and other information settings!) of
popular culture and information settings of all types!

Also welcome are proposals for slide shows, video presentations, workshop
formats, and panels organized around common themes.

Among previous presentations were a culture study of a small public library,
a report on a one city/one book program, an overview of collection
development for feminist spirituality, and considerations of librarians as
presented in cartoons and movies.

Suggested topics:
– discussion of intellectual freedom issues related to popular culture
resources, including the USA PATRIOT Act
– profiles of popular culture collections
– knowledge management issues
– book clubs and reading groups
– reports of research studies of popular culture & libraries, archives, or
museums
– marketing popular culture materials to library, archives, or museum users
– collection building and popular culture resources
– organization and description of popular culture resources
– new media formats and popular culture in libraries, archives, or museums

For more details, visit the Association’s web site at
http://www.swtexaspca.org

Send a 200-word abstract to the Area Co-Chairs by November 15, 2003.

Also include your complete mailing address, school or other affiliation,
e-mail address, telephone number, and fax number.

Rhonda Harris Taylor
School of Library and Information Studies
401 West Brooks, Room 120
University of Oklahoma
Norman, OK 73019-6032
PHONE (405) 325-3921
FAX (405) 325-7648
e-mail: rtaylor@ou.edu

Janet Brennan Croft
Head of Access Services
Bizzell Library NW104
University of Oklahoma
Norman, OK 73019-6030
PHONE (405) 325-1918
FAX (405) 325-7618
e-mail: jbcroft@ou.edu

Source: H-MUSEUM http://www.h-museum.net

Special collections and the Web

http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_10/normore

Studying special collections and the Web: An anlaysis of practice by Lorraine Normore

Many digital library collections are the virtual analogs of special collections in libraries, museums, historical societies and archives today. A field study of people responsible for collection maintenance across a variety of institutions was carried out. It aimed at improving our understanding of issues involved in collection description and access. A second study examined the current state of Web access to materials from the previously studied special collections. Data concerning the availability of online finding aids, externally accessible databases for collection content, digitized images and Web exhibits are presented.