Happy Year of the Dog / 狗 年 旺 旺 !

The Year of the Dog is now underway, the new lunar year having begun on February 16, 2018. The image above is a woodcut from Edward Topsell's bestiary entitled The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents . . . , which was published in London in 1658. A digitized copy of this text is available online via the Internet Archive. For a modern take on the life of canines, check out artist Laurie Anderson's contemplative film, Heart of a Dog (2015).

The Future of Martin Luther King, Jr. Park

The Carrboro Community Garden and the Growing Healthy Kids Garden, subjects of the new Common Curator documentary, Growing It Here, Growing It Now, are both located at the site of the future Martin Luther King, Jr. Park in Carrboro, North Carolina. The Carrboro Board of Aldermen will be discussing the development of the park during its upcoming meeting, which is scheduled for 7:30pm, October 4, 2011. The agenda is available online (see item D(3)), including the park's agenda item abstract and the 2004 Master Plan. The meeting is public and supporters of the community gardens are invited to attend.

Meanwhile, Growing It Here, Growing It Now, continues to be aired on local public access television. In addition to Channels 4 (Carrboro) and 8 (Chapel Hill), the film is also now being shown on Channel 18 (Durham); the schedules for the coming week are listed below:

Channels 4 (Carrboro) and 8 (Chapel Hill)

Mon., Oct. 3 – 5 pm
Tues., Oct. 4 – 8:30 am
Wed., Oct. 5 – 2 pm
Thurs., Oct. 6 – 2 pm + 9 pm
Fri., Oct. 7 – 6:30 pm
Sat., Oct 8 – 2 pm
Sun., Oct. 9 – 12 noon + 10:30 pm

Channel 18 (Durham)

Mon., Oct. 3 – 11 am
Wed., Oct. 5 – 8 am
Fri., Oct. 7 – 6 pm
Sat., Oct. 8 – 3:30 pm

Daily and weekly schedules for all programming are accessible at The Peoples Channel.

The documentary was directed and produced by Daniel Smith; for a description, check out the announcement in a previous Common Curator post. The film is available on DVD for $10 postpaid, and can be ordered by emailing the Common Curator.

The Internet Archive Builds a Physical Archive

As a complement to its online digital library, the Internet Archive is developing "a physical archive for the long term preservation of one copy of every book, record, and movie" that it can acquire, with a goal of obtaining ten million items. Founded in 1996, the Internet Archive's digital collections encompass millions of items, including texts, moving images, audio, software, and archived web pages. But as its founder Brewster Kahle noted in a recent blog post: "Books are being thrown away, or sometimes packed away, as digitized versions become more available. This is an important time to plan carefully for there is much at stake." He observed further that: "A library that would prefer to not be named was found to be thinning their collections and throwing out books based on what had been digitized by Google. While we understand the need to manage physical holdings, we believe this should be done thoughtfully and well."

In development since January 2009, the Internet Archive's first physical storage facility will be launched this month in Richmond, California (the image above depicts modified shipping containers that are utilized as environmentally controlled storage units). Further information on this initiative can be found in Kahle's blog post.

On a related note, the North Carolina History of Health Digital Collection is available online via the Internet Archive (The Common Curator was the principal investigator and project director for this grant-funded digitization project).

The Digital Public Library of America Announces "Beta Sprint"

The Steering Committee of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has announced a Beta Sprint to solicit ideas, recommendations, models, and so forth to inform the development of a large-scale digital library. The DPLA planning initiative is the outgrowth of a meeting in October 2010 at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where representatives from numerous constituencies convened to discuss the creation of a national digital library. John Palfrey, chair of the DPLA Steering Committee, has stated:

As the DPLA planning initiative moves forward, we are optimistic that the DPLA community and public can help us think about what a DPLA might look like, in practical – and perhaps unexpected – ways, as platform, architecture, interface, and beyond. We hope geeks and librarians, especially, will join forces to develop beta submissions in support of this initiative.

Statements of Interest for the Beta Sprint are due by June 15, 2011, with final submissions due September 1, 2011. The DPLA Secretariat is located at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and further information on the DPLA can be found on the Berkman Center web site. The DPLA also maintains a planning initiative wiki and a listserv for public discussion.

125th Anniversary of the Haymarket Affair

Aside from being the Society of American Archivist's MayDay: Saving Our Archives, May 1st is also International Workers' Day, and this year it commemorates the 125th anniversary of the Haymarket Affair in Chicago. The eight-hour workday was a central demand of the Chicago labor movement in the 1860s, and a week-long, city-wide strike began on May 1, 1867. The strike collapsed, but the issue remained, with the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions in 1884 calling for workers to take direct action and begin observing the eight-hour day on May 1, 1886.

Numerous meetings, parades, and gatherings took place leading up to a strike on May 1, 1886. On May 3, two strikers were killed by police, which led to a protest meeting being called by anarchists at West Randolph Street Haymarket. The following day more violence ensued, when police moved to disperse another meeting and a bomb exploded. Many of the these events have been documented in the Haymarket Affair Digital Collection created by the Chicago History Museum. In addition to contextual essays, the collection provides access to trial documents, published materials, manuscripts, artifacts, broadsides, photographs and prints, and wood engravings depicting the events of Haymarket as recorded in the press.

The labor movement has long been fraught with controversy, and the eight-hour workday was not achieved until the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was passed as part of the New Deal. The image above (Wikimedia Commons) depicts the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument, which was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1997. Erected in 1887 in Forest Park, Illinois, the inscription reads: "The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you are throttling today."

Long Live Free-Form Radio! Long Live WFMU!

Appreciate free-form radio? Then consider supporting independent station WFMU during its annual fundraising Marathon that runs February 28 through March 13, 2011. WFMU first hit the airwaves on April 24, 1958 at the now-defunct Upsala College and has never looked back. Currently based in Jersey City, New Jersey, WFMU broadcasts at 91.1 Mhz and via a second signal at 90.1 Mhz in Mount Hope, New York. WFMU has also long been an Internet pioneer, streaming its programming 24/7 in multiple formats, including iPhone and Android. Past shows are archived at the station's website, which also features WFMU's entertaining and content-rich blog.

What is free-form radio you might ask? WFMU describes itself as follows:

WFMU's programming ranges from flat-out uncategorizable strangeness to rock and roll, experimental music, 78 RPM Records, jazz, psychedelia, hip-hop, electronica, hand-cranked wax cylinders, punk rock, gospel, exotica, R&B, radio improvisation, cooking instructions, classic radio airchecks, found sound, dopey call-in shows, interviews with obscure radio personalities and notable science-world luminaries, spoken word collages, Andrew Lloyd Webber soundtracks in languages other than English as well as country and western music.

And because WFMU is 100% listener-supported, with zero corporate, government, or other underwriting, WFMU DJs have for years maintained complete autonomy and control over their own programming, which is indeed extraordinarily eclectic. Check out the current WFMU audio smorgasbord, and see for yourself!

Note: The poster shown above was designed by Dave Cunningham for the 2002 Marathon. The premiums for this year's marathon can be viewed here.

The Triangle Research Libraries Network Joins the HathiTrust

The Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN), a longstanding consortium of Duke University, the University of North Carolina, North Carolina State University, and North Carolina Central University, has just joined the HathiTrust, a large-scale, collaborative digital repository of some of the leading research libraries in the U.S.

The mission of the HathiTrust is "to contribute to the common good by collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge." The repository has the following stated goals:

:: To build a reliable and increasingly comprehensive digital archive of library materials converted from print that is co-owned and managed by a number of academic institutions.
:: To dramatically improve access to these materials in ways that, first and foremost, meet the needs of the co-owning institutions.
:: To help preserve these important human records by creating reliable and accessible electronic representations.
:: To stimulate redoubled efforts to coordinate shared storage strategies among libraries, thus reducing long-term capital and operating costs of libraries associated with the storage and care of print collections.
:: To create and sustain this “public good” in a way that mitigates the problem of free-riders.
:: To create a technical framework that is simultaneously responsive to members through the centralized creation of functionality and sufficiently open to the creation of tools and services not created by the central organization.

More information on the HathiTrust is available on the site's FAQ. The digital repository can be explored via catalog, full-text, and collection-level searches.

The Common Curator Launches

The Common Curator has recently superseded the Carolina Curator blog, which was previously cited by OnlineUniversities.com as one of the "100 Best Curator and Museum Blogs." After approximately 220 postings on a wide variety of topics since its inception in December 2008, all the content of the Carolina Curator (click the Carolina Curator label) has been incorporated into the Common Curator blog, which will continue in much the same--if broader--vein to document developments in the history of the health sciences, digital libraries, archives, museums, and special collections, as well as tend other issues of import, such as freedom of information, open access, preservation and conservation, public policy, human rights, etc.

All readers of the Carolina Curator are encouraged to follow the Common Curator by visiting this website, or by subscribing to its RSS feed with Google Reader, Bloglines, or your favorite RSS reader. In addition to the new blog, the Common Curator also has a presence on other social media, including Delicious, Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter.

So, whether a longtime follower of the Carolina Curator or just discovering the new blog, thanks for your collective interest and comments--hope to continue hearing from you here at the Common Curator!

New Consortium for History of Medicine Finding Aids

The History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) is pleased to announce the release of its prototype History of Medicine Finding Aids Consortium, a search-and-discovery tool for archival resources in the health sciences that are described by finding aids and held by various institutions throughout the United States.

The new resource crawls existing Web content managed by partner institutions, provides keyword search functionality, and provides results organized by holding institution. Links point to the holding institution's Web sites. Formats indexed consist of HTML, PDF and Encoded Archival Description XML. The project does not include content held in bibliographic utilities or other database-type information. Crawls are conducted monthly to ensure information is current and to capture new content as it is released.

Current Consortium partners are:

-- NLM History of Medicine Division, Archives and Modern Manuscripts Program
-- Columbia University Health Center Library Archives and Special Collections
-- Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
-- University of California-San Francisco Library Archives and Special Collections
-- University of Virginia Health Sciences Library Historical Collections
-- Virginia Commonwealth University Tompkins-McCaw Library Special Collections and Archives

NLM's History of Medicine Division invites libraries, archives and museums which include in their collections archival materials related to the history of medicine and health sciences to join.

For more information about the project or requests to join the Consortium, please contact John P. Rees, Archivist and Digital Resources Manager, NLM, at reesj@nlm.nih.gov, or visit the Consortium's web site.

An Odyssey of Knowledge: A New Online Exhibition from the National Library of Medicine

"An Odyssey of Knowledge: Medieval Manuscripts and Early Printed Books from the National Library of Medicine," is a new online exhibition at the National Library of Medicine by visiting curator Dr. Alain Touwaide of the Smithsonian Institution. As described on the exhibition web site:

Medicine in the Old World arose from many components: the classical Greek tradition, its Christian re-elaboration, the contributions of the Arabic World, and the unique medieval synthesis of them all. By examining significant pages and illuminations from manuscripts and early printed books of the National Library of Medicine, one can see how these cultures contributed to the creation of medical knowledge in Europe.

The exhibition is organized by the following sections: Greek Medicine and Science in the Early Middle Ages; The Arabic Contribution; A Crossroad of Knowledge: Southern Italy; The Spread of Translation; From Translation To Teaching; Diffusion; The Return of Greek; and The Many Uses of Books and Texts.

The collections of the National Library of Medicine include 90 Western manuscripts written before 1601. Many of the Library's manuscripts are recorded in Dorothy M. Schullian and Francis E. Sommer, A Catalogue of Incunabula and Manuscripts in the Army Medical Library (1950), and Seymour De Ricci and W.J. Wilson, Census of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts in the United States and Canada (1935–1940), with a supplement by C.U. Faye and W.H. Bond in 1962.

Note: The image above depicts an illuminated manuscript initial with two physicians in conversation (Paris, 13th century); it is from the National Library of Medicine's Manuscript E 78, folio 35 recto.

Guide to the History of Medicine and the Health Sciences

A guide to selected resources in the history of medicine and the health sciences is available at the Special Collections web site at UNC Health Sciences Library; a PDF version is also available for download. While not a comprehensive compendium, the guide contains links to scores of useful tools and research materials at UNC and at other institutions around the United States and abroad. Organized by section, it covers the following areas of interest:

— Professional & Scholarly Associations
— Libraries
— Online & Print Catalogs
— Classification Schemes & Catalog Searching
— Digital Collections
— Online Exhibitions
— Aggregator Sites
— Listservs & Blogs
— Bookdealers, Antiquarians & Auction Houses
— Dissertations
— Oral Histories
— Museums
— Archives & Manuscripts
— UNC Special Collections
— UNC Online Resources & Guides
— Online Journals
— Selected Books & References
— Digitization
— Preservation & Conservation
— Book Collecting
— Information Management
— Funding & Opportunities

A guide to researching Public Health at UNC is available online as well.

HSL Special Collections and Social Media

:: Special Collections at UNC Health Sciences Library

— Special Collections Website
— About Special Collections
— Exhibitions
— Digital Collections
— Historical Collections
— Archival Collections
— Oral History
— Donor Collections
— Highlights
— Guide to Research Resources
— Search Library Catalogs
— UNC Health Affairs History
— Friends of HSL

:: The Carolina Curator

— The Carolina Curator Blog
— The Carolina Curator on Delicious
— The Carolina Curator on Facebook
— The Carolina Curator on Flickr
— The Carolina Curator on Twitter

:: The Bullitt Club

— Bullitt History of Medicine Club
— Bullitt Lectures on iTunes [navigate to School of Medicine] [direct link]

:: Mobile

— Mobile Options for UNC
— Mobile for UNC Libraries
— Mobile for National Library of Medicine





Note: The image above was created using the image utility at Wordle.

UNC Health Sciences Library Awarded Digitization Grant

Special Collections at UNC Health Sciences Library has recently been awarded $42,675 for year two of a three-year NC ECHO digitization grant project for the creation of the North Carolina History of Health Digital Collection. Funded by the State Library of North Carolina through the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), the 2010-11 awards were announced June 10, 2010 and totalled $4.9 million for statewide library projects; the complete list of awards, including others at UNC, is available at the LSTA web site.

Work on the North Carolina History of Health Digital Collection commenced with a pilot project over two years ago, and through year one of the grant project (FY 09-10), over 130,000 pages of core journals and books in medicine, public health, dentistry, pharmacy, and nursing from 1849 to the present have been digitized. The digital collection will eventually grow to over 800 volumes and approximately 300,000 pages. This material thoroughly documents the development of health care and the health professions within North Carolina and is thus a significant part of the state’s cultural heritage and history.

While digitized content is also being made available via the Internet Archive, the project is actively developing an integrated web site that will provide consolidated online access and advanced searching functionalities. The digital collection will moreover provide historical context for the resources in the various health disciplines and K-12 educational materials for selected content. A glimpse of public health images from the digital collection is available via Flickr.

Daniel Smith, Special Collections Librarian at UNC Health Sciences Library, is the principal investigator and project manager, and has directed each phase of the grant. Partners in the project include the Carolina Digital Library and Archive, the UNC Library, and Learn NC.

Note: The image above is from the Health Bulletin (1927), v. 42, n. 2, p. 1, published by the North Carolina State Board of Health.

Five Centuries of North Carolina Maps Now Online

More than 3,200 historic maps of North Carolina are now available online as part of the digital North Carolina Maps project, set to be completed June 30, 2010

Visitors to the North Carolina Maps site can see the results of a three-year collaborative project to identify and scan nearly every original map of the state published from 1584 to 1923. The collection also contains maps of every North Carolina county and maps published by the state through the year 2000.

The North Carolina Collection in the Wilson Special Collections Library collaborated to produce the new site with the North Carolina State Archives and the Outer Banks History Center in Manteo. The UNC Library and the State Archives scanned the maps, and the Library hosts and administers the site.

Read more . . . .

Resources for Oil Spill Disasters and Health

As part of its Disaster Information Management Research Center, the National Library of Medicine provides access to disaster management information resources, projects, and programs. One of its newest additions is a set of disaster preparedness and response resources related to crude oil spills and health. This site features sections for current awareness; occupational hazards; dispersants; food contamination; government agencies; wildlife protection; social media; as well as resources from the National Library of Medicine and in foreign languages.

The Internet Archive Book Drive

The Internet Archive has been scanning books for some years now, and we're always looking for more. In addition to 1,000,000+ eBooks available to anyone available through Open Library, we've announced the release of modern books for the print-disabled community in a special format called DAISY. It's a brand new collection--one of the largest available online. For too long, print-disabled people have been denied access to the full breadth of contemporary books, and we'd like to assist in tipping that balance back to where it should be, universal access for all readers.

Please help us by donating books to be scanned or with financial support for the scanning process. Based on existing foundation funding, we are sponsoring the scanning of the first 10,000 books that are donated in this Book Drive. We're looking for wonderful and important books for this first 10,000 and even more books and money to keep it going. We will make these digital books as available to the world as we can, including the print-disabled, and will preserve the physical book for the long term.

How Does The Book Drive Work?
You can simply send up to 100 books or drop them off in person at our headquarters:

Internet Archive Book Drive
300 Funston Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94118

If you'd like to make a donation of more than 100 books, wow! That would be wonderful, but please give us a call on +1 415-561-6767 to arrange shipping and handling.

Read more . . . .

Physicians' Lives in the Shenandoah Valley

The National Library of Medicine's Archives and Modern Manuscripts Program (AMMP) in the History of Medicine Division is pleased to announce the launch of a new digital texts site, Physicians' Lives in the Shenandoah Valley, a collection of 828 letters dating between 1786-1907. It is drawn from the Henkel Family Letters collection covering more than a century of life in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.

The Henkel family settled in New Market, Virginia in 1790. Generations of fathers and sons studied medicine. Over the course of their careers, these physicians ministered to their community, tended to their countrymen on the battlefield, and testified in the nation's courts of law. The letters of the Henkel family richly document the daily life of men in medicine in the nineteenth century and reveal the challenges of the profession as well as the rewards and responsibilities. Their writings colorfully represent the range of events in everyday life, from the minute details of local issues to the national crisis of the Civil War. The missives convey the concerns and characters of the authors, vividly illustrating the writers' personalities, and their experiences as physicians.

The site contains the complete collection of transcribed letters alongside images of the originals. Curators normalized the majority of place names, general subject terms, and MeSH terms (Medical Subject Headings) to aid searching and browsing. The original spellings are enhanced by pop-up window links that display the normalized phrase. All spellings and verbiage are those of the original writers; no editorial interventions were made, although some layouts differ to enhance readability.

North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center is a new, statewide digitization and digital publishing program housed in the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill. The Center operates in conjunction with the State Library of North Carolina's NC ECHO (North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online) project. It is supported by the State Library of North Carolina with funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act.

There are several projects currently available at the Center's website:

:: North Carolina College and University Yearbooks. Images and full-text searching are available for student yearbooks from several schools, including Appalachian State, Elon, Elizabeth City State, East Carolina, Meredith College, Louisburg College, UNC-Greensboro, and UNC-Chapel Hill. There will be many more schools added soon.

:: Images of North Carolina. This collection features images of original materials from a variety of institutions, including the Orange County Historical Museum, the Sallie Mae Ligon Museum and Archives at the Masonic Home for Children in Oxford, and UNC-Chapel Hill.

:: Durham Urban Renewal Records. Records from the Durham County Library documenting the urban redevelopment of Durham in the 1960s and 1970s.

:: Digital Davie. Historic photographs from the Davie County Public Library documenting people and places in Davie County.

:: Wilson County's Greatest Generation: The Memories of the World War II Veterans of Wilson County, N.C. This collection was compiled by the Wilson County Historical Society and consists of photographs, documents, and personal recollections of many of the men and women from Wilson County who served in World War II.

Visit often, as new materials are being added to all of these projects on a regular basis. We will also continue to develop new projects, and look forward to working with more libraries, archives, and museums around the state to share their resources online.

Please feel free to contact Nicholas Graham, Program Coordinator, with any questions (ngraham@unc.edu or 919-962-4836).

The Internet Tidal Wave -- Then and Now

"The Internet Tidal Wave" was the subject of a memorandum delivered to Microsoft executives and other staff by Bill Gates fifteen years ago today, on May 26, 1995. The memo is supplied in its entirety on Wired Magazine's This Day in Tech, and is remarkable both for its prescience and for its observations that from today's vantage seem almost quaint, such as the following:

Most important is that the Internet has bootstrapped itself as a place to publish content. It has enough users that it is benefiting from the positive feedback loop of the more users it gets, the more content it gets, and the more content it gets, the more users it gets. I encourage everyone on the executive staff and their direct reports to use the Internet.

The memo was made available as a trial exhibit in a District Court filing for the antitrust case, United States v. Microsoft.

First National VIVO Conference: Enabling National Networking of Scientists

Enabling National Networking of Scientists
August 12-13, 2010
New York Hall of Science

The first annual National VIVO Conference, Enabling National Networking of Scientists, will bring together scientists, developers, publishers, funding agencies, research officers, students and those supporting the development of team science. This two day conference will begin with workshops and tutorials for those new to VIVO, those implementing VIVO at their institutions, and those wishing to develop applications using VIVO. Invited speakers will present regarding the Semantic Web, Linked Open Data and the role of VIVO in support of team science. Panelists will discuss adoption and implementation findings. Feedback sessions will engage participants in requirements gathering and brainstorming regarding future network services. Presenters will discuss mapping, social networking, crowd sourcing, support for societies and other national network applications. Learn more at the conference web site.

VIVO is an open source, open ontology, research discovery platform for hosting information about scientists, their interests, activities, and accomplishments. VIVO supports open development and integration of science through simple, standard semantic web technologies. Learn more at the VIVO web site. VIVO is funded by the National Institutes of Health, U24 RR029822.