To Die For

×xX~ A perfect, hand-painted addition to my office deco. She’s to die for♡. ~Xx×

Bad Girls

Here is my new coffee mug!! Stac brought me this back from Cali when she hit Universal Studios. It has Harley and Poison! I love it!!!

Lips on Harley

Gotta love putting your lips on Harley Quinn eh!? These two drinking glasses are the newest additions to my DC collectibles. They are black with a contemporary rendering of the Gotham City Siren. Love these things!

Internet Archive offers 900 classic arcade games for browser-based play | Ars Technica

I heard about this a while back.
This is awesome!
~~~F

infophile

As part of its continuing mission to catalog and preserve our shared digital history, the Internet Archive has published a collection of more than 900 classic arcade games, playable directly in a Web browser via a Javascript emulator.

The Internet Arcade collects a wide selection of titles, both well-known and obscure, ranging from “bronze age” black-and-white classics like 1976s Sprint 2 up through the dawn of the early 90s fighting game boom in Street Fighter II. In the middle are a few historical oddities, such as foreign Donkey Kong bootleg Crazy Kong and the hacked “Pauline Edition” of Donkey Kong that was created by a doting father just last year.

READ MORE: Internet Archive offers 900 classic arcade games for browser-based play | Ars Technica.

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Diplomatics and Its Use in Archives Today

Great read!
~~~F

saa@cua

Guest blog by Rachel James

According to the Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, diplomatics is “the study of the creation, form, and transmission of records, and their relationship to the facts represented in them and to their creator, in order to identify, evaluate, and communicate their nature and authenticity.”[i] Diplomatics as a study enables archivists to confirm authenticity of archival records, and in turn helps the records to be viewed as reliable sources for users. Luciana Duranti points as that some of the characteristics that are studied include “…the presence of different hands or types of writing in the same document, the correspondence between paragraphs and conceptual sections of the text, type of punctuation, abbreviations, initialisms, ink, erasures, corrections, etc.[ii]

Figure 1. Dom Jean Mabillon (Archives de France)

Dom Jean Mabillon, a French Benedictine monk, wrote De re diplomatica, consequently creating the study of diplomatics…

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It Won’t Happen To Me: Disasters

Great post School Archivist!
~~~F

The School Archivist

Did you know that September is National Preparedness Month?

Mold and water damage to a book.

You think that disasters are probably going to happen to other institutions, and not your own. You hear about the flooding a storage area from an overhead pipe or water breaking through a wall. There is news about a catastrophic fire in an older county courthouse. Someone mentioned rumors of squirrels eating some of the older records in an attic storage area. The question is not IF a disaster will strike your collections, but WHEN. So your job as an archivist it to pre-empt the possible disasters and create a disaster plan. Remember that your very first concern when disaster strikes is that everyone is okay and the scene is safe. After determining that to be the case, then concentrate your efforts on your collections.

There are precautions you can use as an archivist…

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DC is Marrrrrvel~ous

Oooooo…Oooooo….my fav…Arkham’s~ Solomon Grundy and my new She Hulk (flexed) pin!! Love AstroZombies!!

Turning a Roomful of Straw into Gold, or What Archivists Do

This is a great “in a nutshell” look into the archival profession. I do love being an archivist. I think that playing a part in the preservation of history is very special!
~~~~Felicia

Virginia Museum of History & Culture's Blog

When I tell people what I do for a living—I’m an archivist—they inevitably reply something like, “Oh, you are an architect,” or, “Archeology sounds so interesting!” Once I even had someone ask me what I studied in order to become an “anarchist.” At these times I fall back on the old standbys, such as “I read old mail” or “I catalog manuscripts sort of the way librarians catalog books (or would, if they had to write the book first!).” Well, in many ways I’m part architect, part archaeologist, and even part anarchist. Processing an archival collection requires digging into the material, designing and building an organizational structure, and thinking “outside the box” of current historical trends to highlight the collection’s strengths and potential uses.

Currently, the VHS is almost half-way through an NHPRC-funded processing project to deal with our backlog of business records. (By the way, NHPRC stands for National…

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What an Archivist Does, According to Pinterest

Since October is the month to celebrate archives, I wanted to share this awesome post from another archivist. Pinterest tends to be used sort of mindlessly, but this page is very cool and has some interesting things on it. Enjoy and take the time to appreciate the records managers and archivists who play a part in preserving history. 🙂

~~~Felicia (an archivist)

The Information Professional

What an Archivist Does, According to Pinterest

I don’t know if any of these pictures or captions can quite describe what an archivist does, but it’s a start.

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Exploring the Digital Shoebox

Awesome post… Much ❤ for NDSA! ~~~Felicia

Digitizing My History

«~• 2004 letter from the Center for Home Movies in Los Angeles, California •~»

I finally took the time to have several Super 8mm reels of home movies professionally digitized. This is a family history project that has been weighing heavily on my mind because I knew I needed to do something to preserve the precious footage.

The reels were shot by my mom and dad in the 1970s and 1980s. I was so happy when they were given to me by my dad with a dual 8mm projector. I think my mom still has the camera used to shoot the footage. I have seen some of the movies. They are so amazing. There is nothing like seeing images of my family from so long ago. Much of the digitized footage will be imagery I have never seen before, which is extremely exciting!

In 2004, three reels of the home movies belonging to my family were preserved as part of the Home Movie DVD Project. The films were shipped to the Academy Film Archive for digitization and copies are now part of the Center for Home Movies in Los Angeles, California. That is actually the footage I have seen.

A while back I digitized a little clip of me and the twins (my brother and sister). We were apparently pretending to be cowgirls and a cowboy. Our trio was parading around in hats, stick horses, and boots. My sis was doin’ a little cowgirl stomp. It was really cute! I put that one up on the My Voyage Through Time YouTube portal.

Last week I bought a 16GB thumb drive to ship to Albuquerque. I mailed the drive today. The digitized films will live on that for a while and I will make other copies to preserve. The excitement is killing me. I can’t wait to see what’s on there!? I only wish they had sound. Once I receive the footage back, the next step will be to give everyone in my family a copy. I’m sure my new family history project will be appreciated by all!

Finding My Game Face

…Game Face… Team USA~ Women’s Heptathlon~ Photograph by Tony Duffy

This week I’m going to have to dig deep to get back on track. My trip to the bay was very educational and was fuel for my mind, but I did fall off my game plan in the gym.

Tomorrow will be my first day back in the real gym for almost two weeks. There was a small gym I was able to hit it in a couple of times last week, still that was a far cry from my usual routine! I need to find my game face again!!

There is one exhibition I could kick myself for not tracking down while I was in Washington, DC. The Smithsonian Institution’s Arts and Industries Building on the National Mall displays some amazing images of women.

Why didn’t I make time to go look for “Game Face?” This exhibit and book poses the question~ “what does a female athlete look like?” The answer is~ they look *awesome! Just imagine them game facing it in a 2,500 square foot exhibition! Nice…

Maybe I can find the book? Well….. after I find my game face again! This may be one of my most favorite sites ever.
Check out Game Face for yourself.

“The exhibition at The Smithsonian shows female athletes doing what they do well: everything. Women and girls featured embody a fierceness that is quickly becoming acceptable to an American audience once unreceptive to, even disgusted by females on the field.”
–The Dallas Morning News

Dream Job: Implementing Open Source Preservation Solutions for Digital Collections

This totally rocks! Today the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign published a news release courtsey of Dell titled “New Preservation Archive.” The release says “working with Dell, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has created a new digital archive for its university system that simplifies how it manages digital assets, including rare books and faculty intellectual property output such as research documents, papers and lectures — content typically produced in multiple digital formats. The new archive reduces storage costs and streamlines the management, retention and protection of scholarly works through a solution based on the Dell DX Object Storage Platform and DuraSpace Open Source Fedora Commons Repository Software. Critical for the university was the ability to meet today’s needs and to scale efficiently over time as digital content evolves and grows.” This is awesome! Universities are taking advantage of open solutions, but they have people who know how to build and manage the systems. DuraSpace also rocks! I worked with DSpace when I built small scale, virtual digital repositories from the ground up in my UofA program. I really need to work toward that Doctoral Program. The full news release is below.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dell and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Create Preservation Archive with Open Source Fedora Repository Software

Date : 9/27/2012~~ Round Rock, Texas

~~~One of the largest public university libraries in the country uses open source software on Dell DX Object Storage Platform to manage and protect digital assets.

~~~University lowers storage total cost of ownership with scalability to support archive growth.

Working with Dell, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has created a new digital archive for its university system that simplifies how it manages digital assets, including rare books and faculty intellectual property output such as research documents, papers and lectures — content typically produced in multiple digital formats. The new archive reduces storage costs and streamlines the management, retention and protection of scholarly works through a solution based on the Dell DX Object Storage Platform and DuraSpace Open Source Fedora Commons Repository Software. Critical for the university was the ability to meet today’s needs and to scale efficiently over time as digital content evolves and grows.

Explosive data growth and large data sets make it more difficult for libraries, museums and government organizations to efficiently preserve and protect documents, multimedia content and digital assets for future generations. As one of the largest public university libraries in the world, the Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign manages the intellectual property and digital content created by faculty, administrators and students — from one-of-a-kind, fragile books that can create 600 to 800 image objects once digitized, to retiring professors’ collections of work over a 20- to 25-year tenure.

After considering its digital archive and retention goals, the University of Illinois customized a version of Fedora Repository Software and combined it with the Dell DX Object Storage Platform. The platform automatically replicates an archive master and a working master of each file to simplify data backup, storing one copy on the University’s main library cluster and a second copy in its engineering library. In the future, a third copy will be archived in the cloud to further simplify data access and sharing across the University system. The Dell DX Platform also produces metadata to manage the archive, identifying files that need to be transitioned from older to newer digital formats for future generations. And the DX Object Storage Platform’s plug and play framework lets archivists add additional retention capacity to the digital archive as it is needed, simply and efficiently.

Quotes

John Mullen, Vice President, Education and State & Local Government, Dell
“With the transition from stacks and the Dewey Decimal system to bytes, clusters and metadata, academic libraries need a digital archiving strategy that addresses their immediate and future needs. The University of Illinois’ innovative and open approach to this challenge is a practical model for any university.”

Thomas Habing, Research Programmer, Research and Development, University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign Library
“This opportunity provides us with extra resources to further the development of the Library’s digital preservation archive. It also allows us to continue to utilize Open Source Fedora Commons Repository Software while at the same time employing a commercially-supported object storage platform with many digital preservation features, such as replication and validation, which we will not need to implement ourselves. Plus, we can share all of our development efforts back to the open source community which helps everyone, including Dell.”

Michele Kimpton, CEO of DuraSpace
“The Open Source Fedora repository platform is used by more than 400 institutions around the globe. We believe commercial implementations, such as Dell, provide our users with the best of both worlds — hardware and services from a large-scale commercial vendor integrated with open source software, Fedora Repository. The total package provides users with greater transparency and durability in the long run.”

About University of Illinois
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has long been ranked among the nation’s most distinguished teaching and research institutions. Its diverse, world-class programs reflect the mission of a land-grant university. The largest public university in Illinois, the Urbana campus was chartered by the state in 1867 as the Illinois Industrial University and opened its doors to students in 1868. Its library is ranked highly nationally and globally, and its collections and services are used heavily by students, faculty, and scholars. For more information, please visit http://www.library.illinois.edu.

About DuraSpace
DuraSpace is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. DuraSpace software and services are used worldwide as solutions for open access, institutional repositories, digital libraries, digital archives, data curation, virtual research environments and more. The organization’s open-source technology portfolio includes DSpace open access repository application and the Fedora open repository platform. DuraSpace is the home of DuraCloud, a cloud-based software service that leverages existing cloud infrastructure to enable durability and access to digital content. For more information, visit http://www.duraspace.org.

About Dell
Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services that give them the power to do more. For more information, visit http://www.dell.com.

LEGO Obsession

Every so often my son Daryn puts on his collection manager hat. Since he was a tiny guy he often concentrated on collecting various things. Over the years he has had a: ball collection; a Bakugan collection; a marble collection; a costume collection; a Beyblade collection; a car collection; a Transformers collection; a sword collection; a dinosaur collection, a coin collection; a super hero collection; a video game collection; and a movie collection. I am not talking about a casual collection, I mean lil dude becomes obsessive about collecting.

Daryn watching Ninjago with his LEGO Collection
September 2012

At the moment his obsession in collecting is devoted to his LEGO collection. He has liked LEGOs just as many other children since he was knee-high to a grass hopper, but now that he is more mature he can actually “build.” I think he gets his love of collections from me, and the love of building from his dad and my dad. He likes to build the pre-created sets, but he is also now an expert at inventing his very own designs. Sometimes I sit amazed as he rattles off all the things his new piece can do. Daryn will tell me how it has sophisticated weaponry, maybe deadly lasers and then he places it on his shelf. His latest build was some sort of jet plane his grandma got for him on Friday.

Daryn at the LEGO Store in Disneyland
August 2012

Today I promised him I would tell the world about his collection. He prepared those items he really wanted to display and was rather worried I couldn’t fit all of it into my picture using my “tiny little camera.” Haha! For his display he included: Ninjago (his current favorite), Sponge Bob and Patrick, Joker, Two-Face, a Joker Army, Iron Man, Spider-Man, Batman, Robin, Power Rangers, Wonder Woman, Poison Ivy (my favorite), Thor, Loki, Hawkeye, Hulk, Magneto (my favorite), Captain America (my favorite), Superman, Wolverine, R2-D2, C-3PO, and Luke Skywalker. He was watching a Ninjago DVD while he prepared his display. I have come to realize that the collection makes him feel good. He likes being able to look at something he has built on his own (though sometimes he still needs a little help). It really makes him feel like he has accomplished something. I did read many articles when he was a toddler on the development of “fine motor skills.” I think he has that skill down packed LoL! 🙂

LEGOs from Daryn’s Collection
September 2012