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6 votes
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The Museum of Science and Industry abruptly closed for a day last week to allow it to move “military artifacts from archival storage”
26 votes -
How to make a time capsule
5 votes -
I ported thousands of apps to Windows 95
23 votes -
Marvin Gaye: Never-before heard music resurfaces in Belgium
10 votes -
A university librarian asks: How do we rescue the past?
14 votes -
A new archive of modern American political history
2 votes -
Surprising detail in New York bank records helped a historian bust a longstanding myth about Irish immigrants
15 votes -
I found Frank Herbert’s Dune script. It’s hard to imagine a weirder film version of Dune than the one David Lynch released in 1984, but Frank Herbert found a way. Dune: Part Two is better.
32 votes -
Millions of research papers at risk of disappearing from the Internet: An analysis of DOIs suggests that digital preservation is not keeping up with burgeoning scholarly knowledge
26 votes -
Packages seized by the Royal Navy from a Faroese cargo ship bound for Denmark during the Napoleonic Wars opened – previously hidden away in the National Archives
9 votes -
Google’s retiring of Internet archiving tool draws ire of China researchers
18 votes -
An archive of Wikipedia from Thursday, December 20, 2001
18 votes -
The ambitious plan to open up a treasure trove of Black history
8 votes -
The Hobbes OS/2 Archive logs off permanently in April
8 votes -
History in ink: Preserving the world’s largest cartoon and comic collection
8 votes -
archive.org went down today
21 votes -
This library has most books ever published in the UK
10 votes -
Doug Lenat's source code for AM and possibly EURISKO w/Traveller found in public archives
13 votes -
Public archive of over 600 type specimens from Germany
21 votes -
Feared lost now rediscovered - documentary about life in Brazilian Amazon from 1918 that has been hailed as a classic emerges from depths of Czech archive
17 votes -
India’s early electronic music from the ’70s is finally being released
14 votes -
Getty Images to debut its own AI image generator which will be trained on Getty’s own data
16 votes -
Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications has grown to more than 90,000 resources related to amateur radio, shortwave listening, amateur television, and related topics
29 votes -
‘The love for music is still there’: saving the sounds of Afghanistan one cassette at a time
10 votes -
The pirate preservationists - a long history
20 votes -
Lunar Codex: Digitised works of 30,000 artists to be archived on moon
15 votes -
Thousands of Yiddish pulp fiction stories finally seeing the light of day
15 votes -
How a pair of unreleased John Coltrane tapes surfaced at New York Public Library
21 votes -
Advice on cataloging antique historic photos
Hey all! (If this is the wrong place for this, please feel free to reassign) During the winter months I can't get out to do much photography, but I love darkroom printing. Last winter I started...
Hey all!
(If this is the wrong place for this, please feel free to reassign)
During the winter months I can't get out to do much photography, but I love darkroom printing. Last winter I started buying antique photo negatives on ebay to have something to print.
It's been amazing! Many are from the 20's, 30's and 40's, with one set (of glass plates) having been manufactured pre-20th century!
I don't know how many I have, but it must be somewhere around 300-500 negatives. Currently they are stored in their original envelopes from the labs that developed them nearly 90 years ago, but that's not a good long term option. I love history, and I want to do this right, but I feel a bit overwhelmed with the volume.
Data I'd like to keep track of:
- The name of the person on the envelope the negative came from
- The date on the envelope
- The approximate date taken (if known)
- Ideally the specific envelope it came from
I'm going to try and store these in a binder of some sort, though that presents it's own challenges since it won't be possible to find sheets with sleeves that are the right size for the negatives. But that's a problem for me to solve haha. I've never had to index/catalog physical media before, so I'm pretty clueless on where to start.
More than anything it's really important to me to preserve this history in a safe way. For many of the people these pictures may be the only trace on earth that they ever existed, and I want to respect that.
9 votes -
The coolest library on Earth: At the University of Copenhagen, researchers store ice cores that hold the keys to Earth’s climate past and future
15 votes -
Permanent archival formats. Do they exist?
Recently, I've been thinking pretty hard about how to archive data. Optical media is out, due to my (possibly irrational?) fear of disc rot. HDDs just break with extended use, SSDs have been known...
Recently, I've been thinking pretty hard about how to archive data. Optical media is out, due to my (possibly irrational?) fear of disc rot. HDDs just break with extended use, SSDs have been known to die with either overuse or just existing for an extended period of time. What's left?
I have heard of tape (of some kind) being used for backup in some bigger operations, but with my experieces with VHS, and to a lesser extent, cassettes, they seem to be very susceptible to mould.
Any suggestions?
30 votes -
Specimens are deteriorating at the Florida State Collection of Arthropods; this neglect could interfere with research
https://undark.org/2023/07/05/neglect-of-a-museums-collection-could-cause-scientific-setbacks/ IN A DUSTY ROOM in central Florida, countless millipedes, centipedes, and other creepy-crawlies sit...
https://undark.org/2023/07/05/neglect-of-a-museums-collection-could-cause-scientific-setbacks/
IN A DUSTY ROOM in central Florida, countless millipedes, centipedes, and other creepy-crawlies sit in specimen jars, rotting. The invertebrates are part of the Florida State Collection of Arthropods in Gainesville, which totals more than 12 million insects and other arthropod specimens, and are used by expert curators to identify pest species that threaten Florida’s native and agricultural plants.
However, not all specimens at the facility are treated equally, according to two people who have seen the collection firsthand. They say non-insect samples, like shrimp and millipedes, that are stored in ethanol have been neglected to the point of being irreversibly damaged or lost completely.
When it comes to how the FSCA stacks up with other collections she’s worked in, Ann Dunn, a former curatorial assistant, is blunt: “This is the worst I’ve ever seen.”
Experts say the loss of such specimens — even uncharismatic ones such as centipedes — is a setback for science. Particularly invaluable are holotypes, which are the example specimens that determine the description for an entire species. In fact, the variety of holotypes a collection has is often more important than its size, since those specimens are actively used for research, said Ainsley Seago, an associate curator of invertebrate zoology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.
A paper published in March 2023 highlighted the importance of museum specimens more generally, for addressing urgent issues like climate change and wildlife conservation, with 73 of the world’s largest natural history museums estimating their total collections to exceed 1.1 billion specimens. “This global collection,” the authors write, “is the physical basis for our understanding of the natural world and our place in it.”
9 votes -
Louis Armstrong's dazzling archive has a new home — his
6 votes -
We're back at the Royal Astronomical Society to look at some awesome antique moon globes
9 votes -
Neglect of a museum’s collection could cause scientific setbacks at Florida State
12 votes -
Where to find digitalized illustrations from the past such as these?
5 votes -
All of Vincent van Gogh's 1515 paintings and drawings
19 votes -
The advent of sunglasses
9 votes -
News Music Search Archive
3 votes -
r/DataHoarder project to archive reddit before the API changes (link to request a copy of your personal data in comments)
21 votes -
The Digital Transportation Archive
7 votes -
DLARC Radio Library surpasses 75,000 items of ham radio, shortwave history
2 votes -
Here’s all the rocks we hauled back from the Moon
5 votes -
How they saved the holes in Swiss cheese
6 votes -
Why game archivists are dreading this month’s 3DS/Wii U eShop shutdown
10 votes -
How codebreakers decrypted a trove of long-lost letters written by Mary, Queen of Scots
7 votes -
Anna's Archive: Humanity’s written heritage, preserved forever
9 votes -
Lost and found: Codebreakers decipher 50+ letters of Mary, Queen of Scots
7 votes -
Every few months, when the wind's blowing in the right direction, a bottle of air is taken from Kennaook / Cape Grim, at the northern tip of Tasmania, and saved for science. Here's how and why.
6 votes