Musings on archives, museums and libraries...

California Historical Resources Information System

rayqueen — Sun, 01 May 2011 21:58:59 +0000

Something I never knew existed. There’s a California Historical Resources Information System, which is a database of the records on California’s historic resources maintained by the Office of Historic Preservation (OHP). The OHP is based in Sacramento and is part of the California State Parks system.

So if you want to find out more about historic properties in California, you have a place to start.

Vatican Library

rayqueen — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 22:49:31 +0000

: A shot from inside the Vatican Library from 60 Minutes.

60 Minutes did a piece on the Vatican Library and its contents a few weeks ago. Much more fantastic than Dan Brown’s descriptions.

This is just a phenomenal archive. Art and texts dating back thousands of years. It’s like dozens of Sistine Chapels and Louvres rolled into one building and it’s a place very few will ever get to see.

Oakland Regional Family History Center

rayqueen — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 20:18:14 +0000

Though I am not a genealogist, a few weeks ago, I went to a presentation at the Oakland Regional Family History Center (ORFHC), which is a branch of the main Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Family History Library in Salt Lake City. The presentation was given by Margery H. Bell, the Director of the ORFHC.

The Family History Library boasts 4,500 Family History Centers worldwide. Though it is private, access of use of their libraries is free. Another cool thing about them is that they are promoting free online access to the U.S. Census indexes, with the Family Search Indexing Project. As they get the census pages digitized, volunteers help get them indexed. Anyone can participate.

The topic Marge Bell spoke on was websites for free family history searching, helpful to those who may not want to or are able to subscribe to Ancestry.com. Amongst these websites are:

US GenWeb, which has a genealogy home page for every state and county. This information has been compiled and added by volunteers but depending on the location and how much has been entered, you might find cemetery records, obituaries, and probate indexes.
A new search engine for FamilySearch.org, at http://beta.familysearch.org. This search engine culls through census documents. Again, this has been indexed by volunteers and not all documents have been digitized.
Google Books, which has some genealogy books digitized and one can enter a family name and get hits on references to them in those books.

NASA and the Internet Archive launch collection on Flickr

rayqueen — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 22:21:45 +0000

When I did a tour of the Internet Archive during grad school back in 2008, they were telling us how they had just received a large collection from NASA that they were going to evaluate and digitize.

Well, they have completed this work and it is now available on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nasacommons.

There are photos of the site where the Johnson Space Center in Houston began.

Getty Images now offers photos from the Hulton Archive

rayqueen — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:16:24 +0000

Getty Images is an online image licensing service. They have recently added photo images from the Hulton Archive. The Hulton Archive is a massive collection of photographs, many going back to the early years of photography. The bulk of the collection is from the former British magazine, Picture Post, which was much like Life magazine. Hulton was a publisher who amassed the collection over years of acquisitions of the archives of folding publications and photography companies. They also have photographs from the Time & Life Pictures collection as well as the New York Daily News, to this spans the U.S. as well.

Too bad the collection cannot be accessed or browsed online.

San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive

rayqueen — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 18:50:45 +0000

I had the wonderful opportunity last week to see a wonderful presentation called, “Developing Access to Moving Image Collections,” given by Alex Cherian, archivist at the San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive. This was put in motion by the Special Libraries Association, San Francisco Chapter, and hosted by Taylor & Associates and The Wall Street Journal.

Cherian showed many clips, most of which are accessible from their website, of Bay Area Television news from the 1940s through the 1970s. He even showed one interview of Dianne Feinstein, when she was running for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. See it here.

The clip Cherian presented of James Baldwin, from “Take This Hammer,” where Baldwin tells a group of black youths, “There will be a Negro president of this country but it will not be the country that we are sitting in now,” which sends chills down the spine of viewers. The documentary was a series of interviews of Baldwin on San Francisco in 1964 and how clean cut and racially harmonious San Francisco appears on the surface but how different it was in reality.

There’s footage of Mohammed Ali, Janice Joplin, Willie Brown, Robert Kennedy, Marlon Brando, and much more. Go and visit soon but expect to waste a lot of time because you will get lost watching old film clips and documentaries

The San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive is a collection maintained by the Leonard Library at San Francisco State University. It is part of the Special Collections & Archives section of the library.

New England Journal of Medicine puts archive online

rayqueen — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 20:21:58 +0000

The New England Journal of Medicine has completely refurbished their website to make it and their information more accessible and interactive for doctors around the globe. What is truly fantastic is that they have scanned and made accessible their entire publication, dating back to 1812, when the journal was started.

You still have to subscribe to get complete articles but you can browse the issues back to 1812 via the index. Medical personnel can research the approach to diseases over time but researchers can also have a view of medical history at their finger tips.

For more information, read the article at Reuters, “The New England Journal of Medicine Redefines the Traditional Publication with Launch of New Website.”

Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

rayqueen — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 21:14:27 +0000

Until I learned of Harvey Pekar‘s passing on July 12th, I had never known the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum existed. I also never knew the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art existed, which was the archive and creation of a man named Bill Blackbeard.

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum began in 1977 with the Milton Caniff Collection, Caniff was a cartoonist in the early 20th Century who created a myriad of characters and comic strips, not just one. In the early days, several different artists would work on one comic strip or take it over, if another artist left a newspaper.

Recent donors to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum have been Charles Schultz’s widow and the family of Bill Keane.

Lafayette Historical Society

rayqueen — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 18:07:45 +0000

Tucked away downstairs in the new Lafayette Library and Learning Center building, off Mount Diablo Blvd., in Lafayette, California. The Lafayette Library and Learning Center is part of the Contra Costa County Library system and apparently, the Lafayette Historical Society is not related. There are no links to it from the Lafayette Library website.

The Historical Society has been in existence since 1973, yet hasn’t had a permanent home until the fall of 2009. This archive has some terrific photos donated by long time residents of Lafayette, once a ranching town, at the turn of the century. La Fayette was an early spelling of the town’s name.

The Historical Society’s new home is sparse with a few exhibits. It will be fun to return in year or so, after they’ve settled in and have filled out their new space.

American Institute of Architects Library: Gone gone gone to the Library of Congress

rayqueen — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:12:59 +0000

I learned yesterday from the Archivist of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), Nancy Hadley, that their library had been closed, boxed up and was set to be transferred to the Library of Congress, as part of their Prints & Photographs Division.

This is terribly ironic, since the AIA has an award for the design of libraries but they don’t have one of their own.

Hadley has been manager of the Archives and Records for the AIA since 2003. She has a great page on researching old buildings and other architectural history. She points out the guide from the San Francisco Public Library and mentions the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, which is owned by ProQuest. Locally, U.C. Berkeley’s Environmental Design Library has a subscription.