Happy Fourth of July!
Loosely collected thoughts: Digital Cultural Heritage and User Experience
"You can't back up the Internet." That was from Aaron Straup Cope, and he was talking about digital preservation, but it could have been the subtitle for the whole day last Friday, at the Digital Cultural Heritage and User Experience symposium. You can't back up the internet: it is a forward moving thing, a live performance. This year is Brooklyn Historical Society's 150th anniversary, and it’s a point of pride that we could play a role as a host, stakeholder, and instigator in this symposium. Brooklyn Historical Society is an urban history center in a landmark building. It has made a…
Matthew Lewandowski: Design Drawings and Die-sets
BHS actively collects documents, artworks, and artifacts that support our mission ad collection development goals. In librarian and museum parlance, we call this acquisition and accessioning. Accessioning has its etymological roots in Latin, as a concept in property law (think “accessory”, as in the property added to an estate) but for libraries, archives, and museums, it’s just as useful to think of accessioning as providing access, the act of making something usable by researchers. In the months ahead, we’ll be featuring a few of our recent acquisitions, and pulling back the curtain to give…
Capstones and Cornerstones
It's quiet in the library for a few more minutes. The staff will start to arrive around 9, the first school tour will flow in around 10 am, soon enough the doors will open for researchers, and then at 5, we'll strike the set and prepare for tomorrow's symposium, "Digital Cultural Heritage and User Experience". There are all sorts of reasons to be excited for this event. It's a great lineup of our smartest friends, digging into the way we work now. There will be notes and remarks to follow on the website and live responses all day on Twitter and Facebook. The symposium marks the culmination of…
Progress on Documenting Sandy, from the Director of Library and Archives
The history of Brooklyn contains many stories of resilience and reinvention and Hurricane Sandy adds another chapter to that account. Brooklyn has come out in force to help this recovery and Brooklyn Historical Society is committed to doing its part by making sure there is a thorough and publicly available collection of material that will document the preparations, response, and recovery efforts. Soon after Sandy made landfall, Brooklyn History began using email and social media to collect photographs. Our November Photo of the Week series featured “before and after” photo essays about areas…
Documenting Sandy, From the Director of Library & Archives
I moved back to Brooklyn in April to join the staff of the Brooklyn Historical Society as the Director of Library and Archives. Over the last few months, I have met many people with a stake in Brooklyn and the work that Brooklyn Historical Society does for the borough, supporters who have asked me a lot of insightful questions about our plans for the Othmer Library. In the last few weeks, the question of what we do as a library and archives has taken on an added urgency. One of the essential jobs of libraries, archives, and museums is to help communities remember, and disasters are important…