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.