Robert Goldwater Library blog

You've read the article, now see the pictures

In a nice display of publishing synergy,  Museum Anthropology (the blog) has just reproduced color images to accompany an article recently published in Museum Anthropology (the journal), Crests on Cotton: “Souvenir” T-shirts and the Materiality of Remembrance among the Kwakwaka’wakw of British Columbia by Aaron Glass (vol. 31, no. 1 (spring 2008), p. 1-16).

Note to our readers: You can access the article online (via Anthrosource) or consult our print copy (A C854).

While in this instance the blog is meant to supplement the print and online journal, the journal will no doubt benefit from visits by blog readers wanting to know more behind the images appearing in the blog post.

Malian manuscripts digitized

Excerpted and reblogged from the New York Times, published May 20, 2008:

Project Digitizes Works from the Golden Age of Timbuktu
by John Noble Wilford

< A legal opinion on the rules for buying and selling goods. (Credit: Savama-DCI)

From Timbuktu to here, to reverse the expression, the written words of the legendary African oasis are being delivered by electronic caravan. A lode of books and manuscripts, some only recently rescued from decay, is being digitized for the Internet and distributed to scholars worldwide ...

Now, the first five of the rare manuscripts from private libraries have been digitized and made available online (www.aluka.org) to scholars and students. At least 300 are expected to be available online by the end of the year.

Read full article

Tips on web tools for anthropology

Rex at Savage Minds has re-posted a very helpful (if unattributed) blog post with suggestions on "how to use commonly available and completely free tools on the Internet in order to keep up to date with the latest literature in anthropology." He offers to updated it regularly if there is sufficient interest from the readership.

The focus of the original post is Pacific Islands research, and the choices may reflect that. Here's what's covered:

• Table of Contents Alerting
• Get an email account
• Subscribe to American Anthropologist and other American Anthropological Society journals
• Subscribe to the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
• Subscribe to new book alerts at University of California Press
• Sign up to your other favorite publishers

Even if you already do all this, you might want to skip down to the "Final Thoughts" entry, where the unintended consequences of Total Information Awareness are addressed.

Four Maya sites featured on new web site

Originally spotted on ARLiSNAP:

An visually exciting and comprehensive web site on four Maya archaeological sites has just been posted by Charles Rhyne, professor emeritus of art history, and his colleagues at Reed College. [Kudos to Prof. Rhyne, who was my academic advisor at Reed.]

Architecture, Restoration and Imaging of the Maya Cities of Uxmal, Kabah, Sayil and Labná "includes over 1000 photographs ... taken on site, with descriptive captions, including architectural and sculptural details, paint remains, and interior spaces, not previously published. In addition, there are over 250 19th century drawings, prints and photographs and another 300 by early 20th century scholars, many previously unpublished, showing the appearance of these four cities before the extensive restoration campaigns of the twentieth century." While the site was produced by Reed College primarily for the use of its faculty and students, the site will certainly be of interest to a wider audience of specialists and non-specialists alike.

Of particular note to the library research-minded are the extensive scans culled from published works including Waldeck's Voyage pittoresque et archéologique dan la province d'Yucatan (1838), the several works by Stephens and Catherwood from the 1840s, as well as Charnay's Cités et Ruines Américaines (1862-63) and Anciennes  Villes du Nouveau Monde (1885), photographs by Le Plongeon, and Seler's monograph on the ruins at Uxmal.

An extensive bibliography is included, sorted into four separate pdf files by subject, author, title and date.

Web 2.0: Ross Day and Erika Hauser Podcast

< March 28, 2008, Ross Day and Erika Hauser (Goldwater Library) in the newly installed Oceanic wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

via Sarah Falls @ ARLIS/NA at Altitude (The official blog of the ARLIS/NA 36th annual conference in Denver, Colorado May 1-5, 2008). This podcast runs best with iTunes. It can also be streamed from Ourmedia.

Interview 1: Ross Day and Erika Hauser
Sarah Falls

On March 28, 2008, I sat down with Ross Day and Erika Hauser of the Goldwater Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We discussed their outreach efforts with web 2.0 technologies through such sites as Flickr, Wikipedia and with blogging.

To listen to the interview, click here (mp3 format)  Interview #1

Sites to visit for the Goldwater Library:

Library blog: http://goldwaterlibrary.typepad.com/

Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/people/goldwaterlibrary/

Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Goldwater_Library

Library wiki: http://goldwaterlibrary.wikidot.com/er-introduction

You can also click on the top bar of the audio player below:

Nineteenth-century views of Mexico City

Reblogged in part from BibliOdyssey, 3/30/2008:

Mexico and Environs ['Mexico y sus Alrededores']

The album of chromolithographs, 'México y sus Alrededores' (Mexico and Environs), is online at NYPL. [A copy of the original is held by the Thomas J. Watson Library here at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.] The principal lithographer/artist for the project was Casimiro Castro, one of Mexico's foremost landscape artists in the nineteenth century. The forty illustrations were originally published in 1855-1856 [available at Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes (click 'leer'), which includes the text]. The version at NYPL was published in 1869.

Speaking of NYPL, check out the newly designed Digital Gallery, announced as a 'soft launch' last week.

Blog now offers access to e-journal content

The library scientists here at goldwaterlibrary.org are constantly experimenting with new ways to make our library's contents more accessible. Here's one we hope will catch on with our readers.

Starting today a new feature appears in the blog's sidebar. Four links appear under the heading Online Journal Contents. Each covers a different segment of the library's collection scope. Click on a link and you will get a constantly updating list of articles from academic journals that are available electronically.

The ten most recent articles appear on the first page. Click "Read More ..." at the bottom of the page and a new page will appear. As you continue through the pages successively older articles will appear.

For now this list is limited to those titles published electronically for which the Museum has a subscription and that have RSS feeds. As new RSS feeds become available those titles will be added to the mix.

If you already aggregate feeds into a feed reader like Google Reader or Bloglines, you can use these four feeds to add links to individual journals, or feeds from these four links themselves. (For the time being this seems to work best in Google Reader, but we're working on a solution to that.)

Access to the full-text version
Citations and abstracts for each article should be available to everyone. However access to the full-text of the articles is limited.

Those reading the blog from within the Metropolitan Museum or by proxy from another computer should have access to the full text. (Please let us know if it isn't.) Likewise those accessing the blog from an institution (college or university or museum, for instance) that also subscribes to a specific journal, everything should be accessible. Of course, your institution's subscriptions may vary; all the titles may not be available.

Every experiment needs its guinea pigs. Please let us know (goldwater.library (at) metmuseum.org) what your experience is with these journal feeds: what works and particularly what doesn't work. In the meantime we'll continue to tinker with it to make it better.

Met Museum joins ArtShare on Facebook

This month The Metropolitan Museum of Art added its first art objects to the popular ArtShare application on Facebook.

ArtShare was developed last November at Brooklyn Museum. The application allows Facebook members to select art objects from participating museums and have them appear on their Facebook Profile page. Each time the profile is loaded a different work displays at random from the selections. Each entry (sample at right) features an image and accompanying catalog information.

Recently the Met joined with four other museums -- Indianapolis Museum of Art, Powerhouse Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Walters Art Museum -- to offer Facebook highlights from their respective collections. At this writing twenty-six MMA objects are available. (One each appears from Africa, the Pacific, and Precolumbian America.)

An additional feature allows Facebook members to upload their own art work and share it with other Facebook members.

• Read ArtShare on Facebook: A Progress Report (posted on the Brooklyn Museum blog Feb. 11, 2008)

Aboriginal archive's new DRM: Cultural Solution?

via BBC News,  Tuesday, 29 January 2008 (thanks Nicole!):

Aboriginal archive offers new DRM

A new method of digital rights management (DRM) which relies on a user's profile has been pioneered by Aboriginal Australians.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive has been developed by a community based in Australia's Northern Territory.

It asks every person who logs in for their name, age, sex and standing within their community.

This information then restricts what they can search for in the archive, offering a new take on DRM

Dr Kimberly Christian, who helped to develop the archive, told BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme that the need to create these profiles came from community traditions over what can and cannot be seen.

"It grew out of the Warumungu community people themselves, who were really interested in repatriating a lot of images and things that had been taken from the community," she said.

"You find this a lot in indigenous communities, not just in Australia but around the world... this really big push in these communities to get this information back and let people start looking at it and narrating it themselves."     Where to look

Dr Christian, who is an assistant professor based at Washington State University, stumbled across the idea of the archive by chance after meeting a group of missionaries who had digitally archived photos of the Warumungu community since the 1930s.

After loading them onto her laptop, she took them back to Tennant Creek and set up a slideshow - where she noticed that people turned away when certain images came up on screen.

For example, men cannot view women's rituals, and people from one community cannot view material from another without first seeking permission. Meanwhile images of the deceased cannot be viewed by their families.
   

Offline website

"The way people were looking at the photos was embedded in the social system that already existed in the community," she said.

"People would come in and out of the area of the screen to look when they could look."

This threw up issues surrounding how the material could be archived, as it was not only about preserving the information into a database in a traditional sense, but also how people would access it depending on their gender, their relationship to other people and where they were situated.

Dr Christen and her team of software developers came up with what is described as "a website that's not online", containing photos, digital video clips, audio files, digital reproductions of cultural artefacts and documents.

The system has also been designed with a "two-click mantra" in mind, making the content easy to access for those with low computer literacy skills.

Images are arranged in their own categories, with content tagged with restrictions.

The project believes it has established a cultural solution as well as an opportunity for Aboriginals to collate much of what was once lost. The hope of the project's designers is that as culture and traditions change, history can be rewritten and changed by people themselves.

Photosharing on a grand scale: LC & flickr

Reblogged from Read Write Web (thanks, Joy!):

Library of Congress teams with flickr
Written by Josh Catone / January 16, 2008 10:26 AM

The Library of Congress and photosharing site Flickr today announced a partnership that will put photos from the LoC's collection online in a social environment and users to interact with them. The Library is home to more than 14 million photographs and other visual materials, and to start they've selected about 1500 works each from two of their collections that are known to exist in the public domain. The images come from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information and The George Grantham Bain Collection, for which no known copyright exists. The collections will be housed on the LoC's Flickr page.

As part of the pilot program with the Library of Congress, Flickr has launched a new tagging initiative called The Commons. The Commons encourages people to help describe the historical photos being added to Flickr by institutions like the Library of Congress by tagging them or commenting on them.

"From the Library’s perspective, this pilot project is a statement about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better acquire information, knowledge and -- most importantly -- wisdom," said Matt Raymond, the LoC's blogger-in-chief. "One of our goals, frankly, is to learn as much as we can about that power simply through the process of making constructive use of it."

The photos, which are already available on the Library's photo and prints page (along with over 1 million others), may not be on Flickr permanently. The length of the pilot program will be determined by the amount of interest and activity shown by Flickr users, according to the LoC.

According to George Oates, at Flickr, the pilot program with the Library has two main goals, "firstly, to increase exposure to the amazing content currently held in the public collections of civic institutions around the world, and secondly, to facilitate the collection of general knowledge about these collections, with the hope that this information can feed back into the catalogues, making them richer and easier to search."

Flickr also said today that the site now houses over 20 million tags which help to power the search function of the site.