A symbiotic relationship between artists and archives exists in the Canadian province of Manitoba, where for the sixth year the Association of Manitoba Archives awarded artists for using archives in their works and making the the local arts scene richer. Will the Manitoba Awards see a seventh year? It depends. After Library and Archives Canada recently cut both the National Archival Development Program and the Canadian Council on Archives, the fate of archives and archival programs all over Canada looks gloomy, and so do the ripple effects. But if efforts to restore the NADP and CCA work, then not only will hundreds of libraries and archives stay open and employ people, creative people like the 13 Manitoba Awards recipients will be able to continue to advance society by drawing inspiration from archives and applying history to their work.

On May 28 a national march will take place in Ottowa to protest the eliminations. It echoes a similar event in 1935 calling out government mismanagement during the Great Depression. Anyone in a position to attend the Archivists’ On to Ottowa Trek, should.

This week we have discussed “catablogs” and what we like about this Web 2.0 feature that some archives and special collections use to describe their collections and prime them for online discovery. Their structure is a landing page with a post for each collection description behind it, and these posts can be searched using a search box, tags, and categories. Some incorporate RSS subscription feeds. If I were a genealogist or other archives and special collections researcher who trolls the Internet every day for new material or resources, I would find this useful because new posts will get sent to me instead.

What inspired us was a recording of a May 10 presentation at the Metropolitan New York Library Council about how the Brooklyn Historical Society created a catablog using WordPress blogging software because it was a simple and inexpensive solution to repackaging collection descriptions and legacy finding aids for the Internet. It was a transition project that recruited interns and volunteers for help and eventually gained grant funding for further development. Because of how accessible their catablog is for people online used to looking at blogs and other post-Web 2.0 interfaces – and for staff learning to manage it – catablogging is a fine model for archival practice. Reference inquiries at Brooklyn Historical Society spiked in numbers as well as overall interest in and usage of the historical society’s collections. That’s what marks success in the archival industry and I love these happy endings even more when a simple and inexpensive solution prevailed.

The Archives 2.0 wiki has a page about catablogs with links to some. UMarmot at University of Massachusetts – Amherst is another well-known successful catablog.

A federal judge in New York will decide whether the heirs of the man who invented the Pepsi drink formula have the right under First Amendment law to publicly disclose original documents he kept which detail the invention. When the children of Richard Ritchie found the original documents in 2008 in a bank vault and a family member told a PepsiCo historian about them, PepsiCo wanted them. Even though PepsiCo has copies of the papers, it states in case files that their disclosure would be considered a trade secret violation.

Scottish archivists in Edinburgh are trying to learn who photographed 178 images depicting life in India a century ago during the British Raj – British rule in the Indian subcontinent – that were recently found in a shoebox at the national collections. With plans to catalog the images and make them publicly available, archivists hope photography enthusiasts and members of the public and can provide more information about them.
This wasn’t the first news this week of recent discoveries of boxes of photographs. An archivist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge found a box of more than 400 photographs stored on rolls of detailed aerial images of the city and LSU campus. Photographer and filmmaker Fonville Winans shot the series in 1947 and were found about six months ago when staff went through a large collection of his work.

Oxford American magazine named Christopher Sims, a photographer and instructor at Duke University who was a photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., as one of the top new southern artists.

A rare book from 1743, “Dissertation Upon Parties” by Henry St. John Lord Bolingbroke, was donated by a local planter and diplomat in the 1700s to the College of Charleston and will be returned to the college after it was found in the Charleston Library Society. It had been housed there until space for it at the college opened but the Civil War and other events caused the book and other materials to be unaccounted for because of the number of times the library moved. Other items archivists found with the book include letters written by Alexander Hamilton and a letter written by John Marshall, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a South Carolina plantation owner who helped draft the Constitution.

A feature article about the New York Times morgue explores if web technology can be a permanent home for, and capture the essence of, 160 years worth of print materials clipped and stored in the archives repository, where space preservation is a growing concern.

This summer, records of immigrants from Asian countries in the last 100 years will be available to the public at the San Francisco Federal Records Center, which is the National Archives facility in San Bruno, Calif.

In historic Washington County, Tenn., the solution to a pressing issue of where to store records and archival materials was literally found behind bars. An East Tennessee State University archivist is overseeing a project in Jonesborough to convert an old jail adjacent to the county courthouse into storage for county records dating back more than 230 years. When renovation of two floors of the jail for the Washington County Archive Annex is complete, materials that right now fill four trailers will be moved in and some of them will be digitized. Where an inmate processing center was will be a space for researchers, and a kitchen and storage work spaces throughout are also part of the plan.

A retired archivist from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., who in the 1970s worked with a man who donated about 10,000 master copies of radio recordings he collected, faces prison time for stealing at least 3,000 of those recordings and selling some of them online.

Librarians, scholars, and archivists representing several Virginia institutions including Old Dominion University and Virginia Commonwealth University formed the DOVE (Desegregation of Virginia Education) project and are traveling around the state collecting materials and recording oral histories from the segregation era about Virginia’s civil rights struggles.

A report with documents seized by soldiers from Osama Bin Laden’s raided Abottabad compound and released to the Combating Terrorism Center in West Point, NY., was posted online.

Queens Library’s archives, located in the system’s central library in Jamaica, NY, celebrated its centennial on April 25 with local preservationists and others.

Democratic strategist Garry South, whose work has influenced major California political races for decades, donated his archive to University of California Los Angeles and will become UCLA Library’s Garry South Collection of Political Research.

The Folger Shakespeare Library, where Shakespearean actress Lynn Redgrave once served on the Board of Governors, acquired Redgrave’s archive of materials about her and her family of actors and actresses.

New York City municipal archivists put 870,000 images of New York City into an online database that launched April 24. The various types of black and white and color photographs date from 1853 to the 2000s, but most come from the 1980s.

Volunteers are digitizing Nebraska’s 75,790 homestead records at the National Archives, which is finishing the third year of digitizing, indexing, and putting online all 821,890 homestead certificates – generated by the Homestead Act of 1862 – from 30 states. Nebraska’s were selected as the first to be processed and are expected to be completed in about a year.

Diaries at Duke University, written by British and American women who traveled in the 1800s and 1900s throughout the United States and the world. Finding aids for the collections at Duke containing diaries can also be found in ArchiveGrid by using “diary” as a search term, and narrowing the search by location to Duke.