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nice work, Jago.

Beautiful!

Cheers!

Wow, this work is so 'dark' compared to the Jago style I have come to recognise.
I know the subject matter dictates, but even so, I would not have known it was by the same hand!
Interesting seeing your 'other' work.

june

its awesome how the picture changes when you see it small or big, it almost seems to be a different work. the colours are perfect!

yay! i am definitely a fan of retaining information, especially if it doesnt rely on space that i have to pay for.

When this came across the listserv I was pretty stunned. I haven’t yet built up the momentum to write up my own blog post, but I did post a response on the listserv.

[…] In all, I find this to be an embarrassment to the profession. How are we to be trusted with retaining the memory of society if we can’t even retain our own? I certainly hope there are some enterprising archivists out there that are willing to step up to the plate to find a way to store this data before it gets thrown out all together. Do we have to prove SAA Council wrong, or go against their wishes just to prove a point? In some ways I hope not, but if we must, we should. This is finally getting some good coverage thanks to librarian.net and Boing Boing posting links to Rick Prelinger’s post. I certainly it gets more since this appears to be such an egregious violation of the profession’s goals and the trust of the SAA members. […]

I’m worried that the mention of legal liability will cause an avalanche of all professional organizations taking this route. I use AUTOCAT and ARLIS-L archives on an almost daily basis. To zap the collective memory, especially of information professionals, is completely nonsensical to me.

I’m very disappointed. It’s ironic that SAA claims its mission is “to serve the educational and informational needs of more than 4,600 individual and institutional members,” yet so cavalierly tosses aside this valuable resource without consulting its membership first. When I was a young archivist, fresh out of grad school, the A&A list was more useful to me than anything that SAA offered. In fact, I’m not sure what SAA does, other than plan a fine annual meeting and occasionally publish a decent journal, to serve my “educational and informational needs” these days. It’s a question I’ll ask myself when I receive that SAA dues bill next year.

While it seems odd that archivists are getting rid of their archives, I think it speaks to their understanding that listserves are for transmitting information, and not for storage, etc.
For information that needs to be preserved for long-term educational use, I don’t think that email is the right medium.

You might want to proofread your headline again…

Thanks for the very informative blog.

thanks for the heads up, I fixed it!

I once was looking for a document that wasn’t available online, and someone at the National Archive found it for me and made me color copies and mailed them to me for free. It was only a few pages–I think I remember them saying they’d need to charge if it were more than 10 or somesuch–but I didn’t pay a cent. I remember them saying that the only way to get a higher-resolution copy would be to actually go there with a hand-scanner. Luckily the color copy was clear enough. Very helpful.

The fee depends on the type of record you’re requesting. I’ve ordered military and land records from the NARA for my genealogy research, and they were definitely not in color or free! It really didn’t matter if they were in color, though, since they were just written documents without any pictures or anything

See this page for fees: http://www.archives.gov/research/order/fees.html

A couple of things:
1) You should also be able to get at these records at “regional facilities across the country” (according to the press release you linked to above).

2) I do not believe that the text has been OCRd.

3) An interesting side effect of the ability of others to add comments to records is the chance that someone else will help you find something you are looking for.

4) I have a full post about this at: http://www.spellboundblog.com/2007/01/17/footnotecom-and-us-national-archives-records/

Finally - I guess maybe I am either too optimistic or too practical, but doesn’t the government have a long history of farming out jobs they don’t have the staff to perform? True - we usually pay cash for this sort of contracting, but what if we looked upon this as more of a ‘barter’ situation. Footnote gets to make money by providing easy access to records that they are digitizing - and NARA gets lots of records digitized without an outlay of money or personpower.

The one point I will give you is that the rights issues need to be made more clear. Footnote.com should not require you to get permission to use a record that is already in the public domain.

It’s interesting to read concerns about Footnote.com, as MPOW is considering a partnership with them. I had a long conversation with some of their reps at ALA Midwinter, and I was favorably impressed in general with both their ethical stance and their software. Viewed purely as a participatory software venture, this is pretty neat stuff (and, sorry Dan, but more appealing to the mass market than Zotero!).

They aren’t doing OCR because the majority of documents they’re working on are handwritten. If there is an existing index, they are using it and adding links to appropriate pages, but they aren’t doing indexing themselves. Instead, their software allows users to “tag” areas of pages, entering in the appropriate text and giving it an attribute such as name, date, place, etc. Given enough editors, this approach would work.

We shouldn’t be comparing this to institutional digitization projects, IMO. It’s much more an alternative to the approach being developed by the FamilySearch folks (LDS). I spoke with them at Midwinter, too, and they’re close to releasing their distributed indexing tool, which will harness the power of their volunteer organization to index documents they and others are digitizing. Their tool, however, will be free. I’m not too optimistic about the ability of Footnote.com and other paid genealogy sites to compete against the LDS once they get organized!