I grew up listening to Rubén Blades, -by far one of my favorite musicians-, and I just found out that he has agreed to donate his personal papers to the Eda Kuhn Loed Music Library at Harvard! It will take a few years for the complete transition and cataloging of the material, but in the end the collection should include his personal documents (excluding those directly related to his work as Panama’s Minister of Tourism), rare recordings of rehearsals, concerts, films, and books. And given the man’s long and interesting life, I suspect the collection will be fascinating.

Blades was born in 1948 in Panama, and although he is best known as a salsa singer, he is also a songwriter, actor, Latin Jazz musician, lawyer (Harvard Law ’85) and most recently Panama’s Minister for Tourism. Blades even ran for president in Panama in 1994.

This collection will be arriving at Harvard thanks to the efforts of José Massó, presenter for ¡Con Salsa!, and Alison Weinstock, a Blades fan who created maestravida.com.

I think what I like best of Blades is not only that his music is great to dance to, but that so much of it takes a deeper look into Latin America’s reality. One of my favorite song is “El Padre Antonio y su Monaguillo Andres” which tells the story of a Vatican priest who arrives in the developing world wishing to help out, but half way through a sermon, both the priest and the altar boy are killed. No one ever finds the attackers. (The song alludes to the killing of Monsignor Romero in El Salvador.) When performed live Blades comments that in Latin American people get killed, but ideas will not die.

You can read the newsrelease here, and can access Rubén Blades official website here.

Yo me críe escuchando a Rubén Blades – uno de mis cantantes favoritos – y me acabo de enterar que el ha accedido a donar su colección personal a la biblioteca Eda Kuhn Loed Music Library de Harvard! El proceso de transferencia, y catalogación de la colección tomara un par de años, pero al final la colección incluirá sus documentos personales (excluyendo aquellos que están directamente relacionados con su labor como ministro de turismo en Panamá), grabaciones de ensayos, conciertos, películas, y libros. Y dado la larga e interesante carrera del hombre estoy segura de que la colección será fascinante.

Blades nación el Panamá en 1948, y aunque es mejor conocido como cantante de salsa, también es cantautor, actor, músico del genero Latín Jazz, abogado (Harvard Law ’85), y recientemente ejerció como ministro de turismo en Panamá. Blades incluso se lanzó a la presidencia de Panamá en 1994.

Esta colección llega a Harvard gracias al esfuerzo de José Massó, presentador del programa radial ¡Con Salsa!, y Alison Weinstock, una fan de Blades que creo el sitio Web maestravida.com

Lo mejor de Blades no es solo que su música es buenísima para bailar, pero que todo su trabajo mira más a fondo la realidad de Latinoamérica. Una de mis canciones favoritas es “El Padre Antonio y su Monaguillo Andrés” donde narra la historia de un cura del Vaticano que llega el tercer mundo a ayudar, pero en medio de un sermón lo matan junto al monaguillo. Nadie da con los asesinos. (La canción hace alusión a la muerte de Monseñor Romero en El Salvador.) Cuando Blades canta esta canción en vivo siempre incluye en comentario que “En Latinoamérica matan a la gente pero no matan la idea”.

Usted puede leer el comunicado de presa aquí, y puede entrar a la pagina oficial de Rubén Blades aquí.

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Mujer desnuda con espejo, Goya

Spain’s National Library has recently set the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica to highlight some of its most valuable items, including paintings, photographs, maps, and written texts spanning several centuries. The collection can be browsed through its main categories, or can be searched by keywords. The site also connects you to a number of other digital collections related to Spanish history and culture, such as the Biblioteca Cataluña, the Digital Library of the Royal Gardens, the Biblioteca Digital Vasca, the Memorias Digitales de Canarias, and the Colección Digital Complutenseamong many others.

La Biblioteca Nacional de España esta resaltando algunas de sus más valiosas pertenencias, incluyendo pinturas, fotografías, mapas y textos que cubren varios siglos, en la Biblioteca Digital Hispánica. La colección puede ser ojeada atreves de búsquedas por varias categorías ya establecidas, o se pueden conducir búsquedas por medio de palabras claves. El sitio también lo conectada a otra cantidad de colecciones digitales relacionadas con la historia y cultura Española. Estas incluyen la Biblioteca Cataluña, la Biblioteca Digital del Real Jardín Botánico, la Biblioteca Digital Vasca, las Memorias Digitales de Canarias, y la Colección Digital Complutense, entre muchas otras.

You can access the site here.

Puede entrar al sitio aquí.

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Israel’s Antiquities Authority has begun digitizing the Dead Sea Scrolls to make them available to everyone on the web. The project is an effort to preserve the remains of this 2,000 year old document that is currently a series of parchment and papyrus fragments.

The Dead Sea Scrolls contain the earliest know version of the Hebrew Bible, with the exception of the Book of Ester, and it highly sought after by scholars around the globe. But even the most careful treatment and lowest levels of light promote deterioration. These digital copies will help preserve the original documents, while recording inevitable future damage. The Scrolls were photographed in their entirety once before in the 1950s using infrared technology.

It is anticipated that it will take two years to completely digitize the Dead Sea Scrolls, but it will be a while longer before they are fully available on the web.You can read more about this project from an article in the NYT here.

Image info here.

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At ALA I sat in on a great presentation titled Digitizing Indian Country. The first presentation was on Alaska’s Digital Archives. The collection brings together photographs, oral histories, maps, moving images and other files that record the state’s history between 1860 until the early years of statehood. Material was gathered partially through an invitation to the state’s community to share their photographs and other items related to this period in Alaska’s history.

Mientras asistía a la conferencia de ALA vi una presentación buenísima de titulo “Digitizing Indian Country”. La primera presentación fue sobre Alaska’s Digital Archives, una colección que reúne fotografías, historias orales, mapas, imágenes de video, y otros documentos, que juntos hacen record de la historia del estado desde 1860 hasta sus primeros años como estado de EEUU. El material aquí reunido se recogió por medio de un llamado a la comunidad de compartir sus fotos viejas, y otros documentos relacionados con la historia de Alaska durante este periodo de su historia.

Currently the collection is divided into two larger categories; Alaska Native History & Cultures, and Movement to Statehood. Under Alaska Native History & Cultures you will find links to a rich collection of photographs, and moving images organized in categories such as Religion and Church Leadership, Education, Art, Traditional Technology, and Ceremonial Life, among others. The Movement to Statehood collection is divided into categories such as Government, Military, Natural Resources, and Society and Daily Life, among others. You can browse both collections by geographical region, or by time period. Every photograph contains information on provenance, time period, subject headings assigned and holding institution. The site also provides access to a detailed timeline of the state.

Actualmente la colección está dividida entre dos categorías; La historia y cultura indígena de Alaska, y el movimiento para convertirse en estado. Bajo la primera categoría encontrara enlaces a una rica colección de fotografías, e imágenes de video organizadas bajo categorías como religión, iglesia, educación, arte, tecnología tradicional, y ceremonias, entre otras. Bajo la segunda categoría encontrara la colección dividida bajo categorías como gobierno, ejército, recursos naturales, sociedad, y vida diaria, entre otras. También podrá ojear la colección por regio geográfica, o por periodo de tiempo. Cada fotografía contiene información de su proveniencia, periodo de tiempo, y categorías asignadas por la institución. También podrá encontrar acceso a una detallada línea de tiempo que traza la historia del estado.

Image from the Anchorage Museum of Rasmuson Center, Library & Archives.

La imagen usada es del Anchorage Museum of Rasmuson Center, Library & Archives.

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Audio historian David Giovannoni seemed to have found the first human voice recording in a French patent office. The recording is of a human signing “Au Claire de la Lune” and is dated back to 1860, almost two decades earlier than Thomas Edison’s recoding of “Mary had a little lamb.” The clip is only ten seconds long, and the quality is not great, but it is amazing that the recoding exists.

The audio was captured using a phonautograph, a machine invented by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville, which created visual recordings from sound waves. The machine has a needle that recorded sound waves onto paper coated in soot from an oil lamp. Now the sound was extracted at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory by creating digital scans of the original papers and a “virtual stylus”, and then compensated for the fact that the original machine was hand cranked which created a distortion because the turning wasn’t always constant.

You can listen to the actual recording here.

You can read an article about this from the BBC here.

El historiador de audio David Giovannoni parece haber encontrado la primera grabación de voz humana en una oficina de patentes francesa. La grabación es de una persona cantando “Au Claire de la Lune” y se remonta a 1860, casi dos décadas antes de que Thomas Edison hiciera la grabación de “María tenía un pequeño cordero.” La grabación dura sólo diez segundos y la calidad es no muy buena, pero es sorprendente que la grabación existe.

El audio fue capturado utilizando un phonautograph, una máquina inventada por Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville que creó grabaciones visuales de las ondas sonoras. La máquina tiene una aguja que registran las ondas sonoras en papel recubierto de hollín en una lámpara de aceite. Ahora el sonido se extrajo de forma digital en el Laboratorio Nacional Lawrence de Berkeley mediante la creación de imágenes escaneadas de los documentos originales y un “lápiz virtual”, que luego luego compensa por el hecho de que la máquina original era de manivela, cosa que creaba distorsión porque el cambio no siempre se constante.

Puede escuchar la grabación aquí.

Puede leer un artículo de la BBC sobre el tema.

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Back in late February Álvaro Colom (official website), Guatemala’s president announced that he would be opening the country’s military archives to the public. The announcement was made in honor of Guatemala’s Día Nacional de la Dignidad de las Víctimas del Conflicto Armado Interno (National Day for the Dignity of Victims of Internal Armed Conflict). During his speech Colom acknowledge that the country will not be able to heal unless the state assumes responsibility for the violence that was perpetuated against the country’s indigenous population.

The archives should contain information on military activities during the country’s civil which lasted over 30 years, between 1960 and 1996. It is estimated that at the time as many as 2000,000 civilians were killed and about 50,000 were disappeared. The archives should also shed light as to the location of unnamed graves. In 1999 the UN truth commission estimated that about 90% of these deaths could be attributed to the army and state.

The military establishment and former national leaders have not welcomed this announcement, although it is expected that the opening of these archives will go forth since is it mandated by a presidential decree.

You can read more about this from a BBC article here, and from a Voltairenet article here (in Spanish).

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This morning the New York Times had an article about two parallel art exhibits displaying art looted during WWII. The exhibit is a collaboration between France and Israel in aims at reconnecting these pieces with their original owners. Most of the art on display was either outright looted or forcefully “bought” by the Nazi, and so far has gone unclaimed, presumably because the original owners were likely killed in the Holocaust. The collections contain a number of “common” pieces, but also works from renown artist such as Cézanne, Manet, Degas, Chagall, Delacroix, and Monet among others.

Art and other cultural pieces are often looted during times of war and much has been written and discussed on the subject. Actually a couple semesters ago I attended a lecture by Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, a Harvard professor who has written extensively on collections held in Russian archives which previously belong to other nations. Her book, “Trophies of War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II and the International Politics of Restitution” discusses the complexities of restitution and why countries loot other nations’ cultural treasures.

Fortunately there are efforts around the globe to stop this practice. The Lost Art Internet Database is a project from the Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste which is working to reconnect lost cultural property to its original owners. Looted Art is another such initiative, and while many of these efforts circle the Holocaust this is not a phenomenon seen exclusively around WWII, Chile recently returned a number of book taken from the Peruvian National Library about 100 years ago. And it’s not just armies who walk away with cultural property that belongs to others. Some of the largest and best endowed universities and museums around the world have gotten some of their material in such a matter. Egypt has been demanding the return of the Rosetta Stone for years, to name just one example (You can read about this from an article in the BBC). Unfortunately we are still seeing this practice in current times; the National Museum of Iraq was gravely looted during the USA invasion. (You can read about the Iraqi National Museum from an article in the Guardian.)

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The late Stephen J. Gould has bequeathed his entire collection to Stanford University, who intends to digitize much of it and create a “hyperlinked” version of it. An article in the San Jose Mercury News explained that while Gould was never affiliated with Stanford, his home campus (Harvard) was apparently not interested in the project.

Gould taught in the areas of biology, paleontology and the history of science, although his work covers a much, much larger scope of knowledge. He is known for making connections across seemingly unrelated fields of study. His collection, although not inventoried yet, is said to an contain early editions of Darwin’s “Decent of Man”, among many other treasures.

Stanford now faces the challenge of actually creating this hyperlinked version of Gould’s collection. Good luck to them!

Here’s a link to the Unofficial Stephen J. Gould Archive.

Image info here.

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The Boston Public Library (BPL) has joined forces with PublicResource.org and the Internet Archive in order to begin digitizing the library’s large collection of government documents. This project has first envisioned by Mr. Carl Malamud and Mr. Brewster Kahle, the founders of these two collaborating organizations. Mr. Malamud hopes to eventually digitize the entire USA government document collection, which holds around 100 millions pages. The project is expected to take two years, at a cost of $6 million.

This project also hopes to gather a number of other digital collections which are already accessible online, but at a cost. The intent is to buy access to these collections and make their content freely available to everyone. The BPL wants to begin this project by digitizing their holdings relating to the Committee on Un-American Activities hearings from the 1950s, as well as a substantial collection of Congressional Hearings recently donated by Harvard.

In the future the BPL wishes to begins their own digital archive for holdings relating to local Boston and Massachusetts documents.

Here’s to hoping that initiatives such as these continue to prosper, and to make government more accessible and transparent.

You can read more about this from an article in the NYT here.

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I just got back from the Charles Darwin (1809-1882) exhibit, and even though I already knew the basics of his life (My dad is a big admirer of his), I was still very impressed by it.

Darwin was born into a family of privilege in the UK and as a young man his father pushed him to pursue first a career in medicine and then as a clergy man. His father is quoted as having told him, “you care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.” Initially Darwin didn’t try to go against his father’s wishes, but instead found ways of working around them. If he were to become a clergy man in a small rural community he would then have all the time he wanted to explore the countryside and its wonders.

Luckily for us, Darwin did begin to associate with some of the scientists of the time and was eventually invited by one of them on a world tour aboard the Beagle. This voyage was to last two years, but instead lasted more than five, yet it is also the trip that squarely set Darwin on the path of finding an theory to explain the natural diversity that surrounded him. About this trip he wrote, “The Vogayes of the Beagle“.
By 1842 Darwin had a pretty clear theory to explain evolution though natural selection, but it took him almost two decades to make his findings public. Before making his work public, Darwin wanted more time to think about his theory, and to gather more evidence to convince those who he knew would criticize his work. He also wanted to have a more solid reputation in the field and for the general societal climate to change, since he realized his ideas would be attacked by the church. Eventually a letter outlining another man’s version of natural selection finally got him to publish.

On a curious note; According to the exhibit, Darwin didn’t believe in waste, and often gave his children discarded manuscript pages of the “Origin of Species” to draw on. Because of this there are only 28 pages of the original document known to exist.

Today, 150 years after he first published the “Origin of Species” Darwin regularly becomes a topic of controversy. Oddly (sadly) enough, his work continues to be challenged with the same arguments and objections that were used when his work first came out. The exhibit acknowledges this controversy, but did so with only one small display tucked away in a corner.

My only disappointment with the exhibit was that there were very few original documents on display; almost every single one was a facsimile of the original.

“There is a grandeur in this view of life… from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” -Charles Darwin

04.29.07 – Darwin’s writings covered a vast array of subject. You can find practically everything he ever wrote at The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online. Each document has been scanned so you can see the original, but they have also been retyped to allow keyword scanning.

05.16.07 – Tomorrow the University of Cambridge will be releasing digitized versions of approximatley 5,000 letters Darwin wrote over the course of his life. You can find these letters at the Darwin Correspondence Project. The BBC has an article about this today.

1st image, Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of Darwin; 2nd image, Voyages of the Beagle, both available here.

Acabo de llegar de la exhibición sobre Charles Darwin (1809-1882), y aunque ya conocía todos los detalles básicos de su vida (my papá es gran admirados suyo), quede bastante impresionada.

Darwin nació en una familia privilegiada en el Reino Unido, y siendo aun un joven su padre lo empujo, primero hacia una carrera en medicina, y luego hacia el clero. Se a encontrado documentación de que su padre le dijo que a él [Darwin] no le importaba nada mas que dispararle a los perros, atrapar ratas, y que llegaría a ser una desgracia para si mismo y toda su familia. Inicialmente Darwin no trato de ir en contra de los deseos de su padre, mas bien encontró formas de navegar entre ellas. Si tendría que unirse al clero, por lo menos lo haría en una comunidad rural donde tendría bastante tiempo libre para explorar el campo y sus maravillas.

Afortunadamente para nosotros, Darwin eventualmente empezó a asociarse con algunos de los científicos de su era, y eventualmente fue invitado, por uno de ellos, a un viaje alrededor del mundo sobre el Beagle. Este viaje estaba planeado para durar dos años, pero termino durando más de cinco, y resulto siendo el viaje que cambiaria su vida, firmemente encausándolo hacia el desarrollo de la teoría que habría de explicar la diversidad que estaba viendo a su alrededor. Sobre este viaje habría de escribir el libro “The Vogayes of the Beagle.”

Hacia 1842 Darwin ya tenia una teoría bastante desarrollada sobre la evolución por medio de la selección natural, pero le tomaría casi dos décadas publicar sus ideas. Antes de publicar sus ideas, Darwin quería más tiempo para pensar sobre tu teoría, y para recoger más evidencia que convenciera a aquellos que sabía serian sus críticos. También quería tener una reputación más sólida en su campo, y que cambiara un poco el clima social, ya que sabia que sus ideas serian atacadas por la iglesia. Eventualmente lo que lo empujo a publicar fue una carta explicando otra versión de la selección natural, escrita por otra persona.

Como nota curiosa; según la exhibición, Darwin no creía en desperdiciar nada, y usualmente le daba a sus hijos paginas descartadas de sus manuscritos de El Origen de las Especies, para que ellos dibujaran. Es por esto que hoy en día solo se conocen 28 paginas del documento original.

Hoy 150 años después de que publicara el Origen de las Especies, Darwin aun es tema de controversia. Curiosamente (tristemente), su trabajo todavía se critica con los mismos argumentos y objeciones que cuando primero se publicaran. La exhibición admite esta controversia, pero lo hizo solamente en un rincón apartado del resto de la exhibición.

La única decepción que tuve con la exhibición fue la falta de documentos originales; la gran mayoría son facsímiles de los originales.

Hay una grandeza en esta visión de la vida… desde un comienzo tan sencillo, hay sin numero de formas hermosas y maravillosas que continúan evolucionando. – Charles Darwin.

04.29.07 – Los escritos de Darwin cubren un gran número de temas. Usted podrá encontrar casi todo lo que algún día escribió en el sitio The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online. Cada documento ha sido escaneado mostrándolos los originales, pero también han sido pasados a maquina para que podamos hacer búsquedas por palabras.

05.16.07 – Mañana la Universidad de Cambridge hará publicas aproximadamente 5.000 cartas que Darwin escribió a lo largo de su vida, en formato digital. Estas pueden ser vistas en el Darwin Correspondence Project. La BBC tiene un articulo sobre el tema.

La 1a imagen es un retrato de Darwin por Julia Margaret Cameron; la 2a imagen en un mapa de los viajes del Beagle, ambas pueden ser encontradas aquí.

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