Gallery websites vanish with alarming frequency when dealers call it quits, and so it’s a relief that the New York Gallery History Project exists. Created by Contemporary Art Library and Independent, it aims to preserve online the archives of esteemed commercial spaces, and it started with a legend, Jay Gorney Modern Art. Now it has released eight more, including Real Fine Arts (I miss it dearly), Murray Guy (the loss endures), and Orchard (mostly before my time). I dipped in, then forced myself to stop: It’s addictive.
Archives
Stories about Archives
‘A Unicorn’ in the Archives: Trinity College’s Watkinson Library Makes a Rare Discovery | Trinity College
A page of text from the 15th century with connections to famed printer Johannes Gutenberg—hidden for more than 100 years in an uncatalogued scrapbook in the Watkinson’s archives—may represent one of the earliest generations of European printing.
Mapping the Landscape of Community-Based Archives | Mellon Foundation
Despite the long-standing presence of community-based archives across the United States and its territories, there has been limited national-level data about the field—its characteristics, challenges, and evolving needs. To address this gap, Mellon partnered with Engage R+D and a “Design Circle” of archival practitioners and field experts to conduct a comprehensive landscape study. Drawing on surveys, interviews, and focus groups, the research captures the perspectives and priorities of community-based archives across the country.
Oliver Sacks Archive Heads to the New York Public Library
Oliver Sacks Archive Heads to the New York Public Library
The voluminous papers of the celebrated neurologist include letters, notebooks, drafts and other traces of a man who couldn’t stop writing.
Now, the New York Public Library has acquired Sacks’s personal archive, a trove documenting his intellectual explorations of topics as diverse as “aging, amnesia, color, deafness, dreams, ferns, Freud, hallucinations, neural Darwinism, phantom limbs, photography, pre-Columbian history, swimming and twins,” to cite a partial list that once appeared on his website.
Why a ruling against the Internet Archive threatens the future of America’s libraries
Why a ruling against the Internet Archive threatens the future of America%u2019s librariesThe decision locks libraries into an ecosystem that is not in readers; interests. Congress must act.
This decision harms libraries. It locks them into an e-book ecosystem designed to extract as much money as possible while harvesting (and reselling) reader data en masse. It leaves local communities’ reading habits at the mercy of curatorial decisions made by four dominant publishing companies thousands of miles away. It steers Americans away from one of the few remaining bastions of privacy protection and funnels them into a surveillance ecosystem that, like Big Tech, becomes more dangerous with each passing data breach. And by increasing the price for access to knowledge, it puts up even more barriers between underserved communities and the American dream.
Internet Archive’s court loss leaves higher ed in gray area
Internet Archive Court Loss Leaves Higher Ed in Gray AreaThe nonprofit published thousands of ebooks for free, violating copyright law. What that means for research libraries remains to be seen.
The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending
The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending
The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in a fight to lend out scanned ebooks without the approval of publishers. In a decision on Wednesday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that permitting the Internet Archive’s digital library would “allow for widescale copying that deprives creators of compensation and diminishes the incentive to produce new works.”
Shining a Light on the Digital Dark Age – Without maintenance, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades
Shining a Light on the Digital Dark Age
Without maintenance, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. How might we secure our data so that it survives for generations?
The Internet Archive also takes multi-century preservation energy costs into account: “We own and operate and run all our own data centers,” says Bailey. “That’s partly because we’re an archive and don’t want to be dependent on corporate infrastructure, and partly because we can then run less expensive climate control operations.”
Why the smell of vinegar shut down a Toronto library’s historical newspaper archive
Why the smell of vinegar shut down a Toronto library’s historical newspaper archive
But in the years since, libraries, archives and collectors have discovered “safety film” actually poses a huge threat to film-based archives and collections because it eventually breaks down. An early indication is the smell of vinegar, which comes from acetic acid that the film gives off as it degrades. Eventually, the film shrinks and cracks until the image is lost.
The destructive and contagious chemical decay is aptly called “vinegar syndrome” — and it means the clock is ticking for those trying to preserve history from this era in Toronto, across the country and around the world.
Internet Archive Responds to Recording Industry Lawsuit Targeting Obsolete Media | Internet Archive Blogs
Statement from Brewster Kahle, digital librarian of the Internet Archive:“When people want to listen to music they go to Spotify. When people want to study sound recordings as they were originally created, they go to libraries like the Internet Archive. Both are needed. There shouldn’t be conflict here.”
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