ABC OPEN – State Records’ In Living Memory
The exhibition presents surviving photographs from the Records of the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board, from 1919 to 1966. The old photographs are juxtaposed with contemporary photographs of Elders, families, and communities by renowned Indigenous photographer Mervyn Bishop.
Put simply, it’s an unbelieveably moving exhibition. And it helps to remind us that whilst NAIDOC Week, and Dreambox, are a celebration of Indigenous Australia with an emphasis on family fun, it’s important to remember and acknowledge the layers of complexity in relations between non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australia
Lawrence Hargrave’s Spanish theory for ‘Punto’ Piper via @The Wenty
A BRIEF newspaper clipping was enough to convince Lawrence Hargrave that Australia was discovered by the Spanish long before the arrival of the First Fleet.
Hargrave, best known as a pioneer in aviation, held the controversial view that the vessel Santa Ysabel and its crew landed at Point Piper in 1595.
Read more at the Wentworth Courier
The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.
Crowd-Sourcing the Magnum Archive
Crowd-sourced photo tagging isn’t necessarily the cure for computer-induced procrastination, but it’s a lot more rewarding and a much greater service than some of the ways we spend our time online.
No matter how rich a digital archive may be, photos without tags or keywords have essentially disappeared from public view. Of the 500,000 images that Magnum has posted online, for example, about 200,000 have little or no information attached to them. Important photos — like those by Leonard Freed in this slide show — are difficult to find.Find out more about their program on the New York Times blog.
The author of Girl with a Pearl Earring meets the curator of the V&A Quilts exhibition (via @RachelHollis)
To mark the opening of Quilts: 1700 – 2010, V&A Magazine commissioned the author of Girl with a Pearl Earring and Remarkable Creatures to write a special short story. As it turned out, Tracy was about to embark on some serious quilt research for a forthcoming book about quaker imnmigrants to America. To learn about quilts and their history for both stories, Tracy visited the textile store at Blythe House, home of the V&A reserve collections and its archive where she met Quilts curator Sue Prichard.
This film follows the author as she describes how she uses real historic collections and objects to inform her writing. It focuses particularly on the George 111 quilt, the extraordinary design that inspired the short story Tracy Chevalier wrote for V&A Magazine.
Jane Austen manuscript auctioned for almost £1m
The only remaining privately owned fragment of a Jane Austen novel in the author’s own handwriting has sold at auction in London for nearly £1m, three times its estimate.
The heavily corrected manuscript from The Watsons, written in about 1804, was acquired by the Bodleian library at Oxford for £993,250 at Sotheby’s. The hammer went down to a round of applause, since the lot had been estimated to reach £200,000-£300,000.
Digitisation Dilemma’s (via @FutureProof)
There are substantial benefits to be gained by digitising paper records. As a result, the number of organisations undertaking digitisation has increased dramatically in recent years.
However, if you want to introduce digitisation projects or programs you need to be aware that there are also a variety of risks. Being aware of these risks can help your organisation to built mitigation measures into program/project planning and management.