East London Lives 2012 - a Living Archive Launches
Today sees the launch of the East London Lives 2012, a digital archive project which aims to document some aspects of change in the lives of East Londoners towards the hosting of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
The archive hosts content from research projects based at the University of East London and other contextualising material about London and specifically the five East London boroughs and the bid promises that were made about the impact of the Olympics.
Importantly the archive also contains a wealth of community generated content, including oral histories, image, video and interviews.
Below is a short video created by the project which gives an excellent feel for what the archive has done, and why it is such an essential resource going into the future:
Life-cycle of a Digital Object Workshop
Following University College London’s very successful conference on 3D Colour Laser Scanning in March 2008 we are planning a 2-day workshop exploring the life-cycle of a digital object.
The workshop is funded by JISC through the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (AHeSSC).
Who is invited?
The workshop is aimed at anyone interested in user engagement with 3D objects. It will help researchers and professionals better understand how to use 3D objects and related digital data records. It will be particularly relevant for conservators, curators and educators wanting to use 3D or 2D records of museum artefacts and for Arts and Humanities researchers interested in this field.
What will be covered?
3rd September.
The first day will offer opportunities for small group guided tours of relevant UCL facilities. Delegates will have the opportunity to discuss practical applications of the technologies with existing users:
Arius3D colour laser scanner
CAVE Virtual Environment
UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC): a centre of excellence in human-computer interaction Slade School of Fine Art: use of a hand held scanner in art classes Digital Petrie Exhibition (in the making) Digital Manufacturing centre, Bartlett School of Architecture The day concludes with a wine reception.
4th September
The second day will feature talks and presentations on a range of topics, including 3D colour laser scanning and standards, 3D objects in virtual environments, 3D colour printing, the life cycle of an object and digital repatriation. More information is available here.
The workshop is FREE to attend but numbers are restricted to 50. Register now to confirm your place. Booking closes on 15 August 2009.
To book your place, please complete the booking form.
Making the Case for Digitisation
The philosopher, linguist and novelist Umberto Eco described libraries as a form of repository, or bank, which served to secure the written word and the treasures of the text.
The essential nature of the library, even today, is therefore one of contradiction: where the traditional processes of cataloguing and classification act to hide and ‘lose’ books as much as they reveal and allow access to books.
Such a view seems appropriate in the week that the British Library seems to have ‘mislaid’ 9,000 books.
A recent article in the Guardian highlighted that visitors to the British Library discovered
Renaissance treatises on theology and alchemy, a medieval text on astronomy, first editions of 19th- and 20th-century novels, and a luxury edition of Mein Kampf produced in 1939 to celebrate Hitler’s 50th birthday
were all apparently missing.
And I suspect that this is a situation that almost all libraries, special collections and archives can sympathise with.
What is interesting about this case is that the digitisation of such precious texts represents an opportunity to not only preserve these texts and the knowledge they contain, but also to open up access for everyone who might be interested in these works.
While there are often financial, infrastructural and ideological barriers to digitising such material, it is hard to imagine a better illustration of why digitisation is such an important part of an institutions practices.
Using Flickr for digital resources
The East London Theatre Archive is creating an invaluable database of performing arts resources, from playbills and programmes to press cuttings and photographs. It will consist of around 15,000 digital objects, taken from East London theatres.
As an extra part of their work, they have commissioned photography of some of the theatres themselves, such as Wilton Hall, the Theatre Royal or the wonderfully named Half Moon theatre.
The team have decided to put these photos up on Flickr as an extra dissemination channel. A dedicated website is currently being built, but the team wanted to test what usage was like using a publicly available platform. Usage is currently being monitored, and the team will report back as their project progresses.