The British Library is always up to something interesting; I just discovered their Database of Bookbindings. This is an entire online collection dedicated to the bindings of books held by the British Library, some of which date back to 1500! The collection also includes some items held by the National Library of Netherlands. The collection [...]

Today I spent the day at the Library of Congress and loved it. I was there with my mother and brother and we took one of the guided tours of the building. This tour starts off with a short movie including a number of brief interviews with some of the librarians who highlight many of [...]

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 [...]

In the 1970′s the various Apollo missions took a number of highly detailed photographs of the moon which have been seen only by a handful of scientist. For three decades these photographs have been preserved in a freezer, but now Arizona State is making these images available through the web. The photographs are being scanned [...]

A few days ago the Christian Science Monitor had an interesting article about conservation efforts for bufeos, (also known boto, pink dolphins, or fresh water dolphins). Scientist Fernando Trujillo from the Colombian based Omacha Foundation is behind a five nation project which also includes Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Their research hopes to gather information [...]

Open Library is a new project starting out in San Francisco, CA, but global in scope. It aims at creating a single database for all book ever published! This massive project expects to function in wiki format and hopes to gather help from enthusiast all around the globe, much like Wikipedia has done in recent [...]

IRENE (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, etc.) is a new technological development that will help in the preservation of millions of sound recordings that are currently being lost because of lack of usable equipment to play them on, and because the audio recordings are becoming increasingly frail. IRENE was developed by scientist Carl Haber, and other [...]

Earlier this week UNESCO had a couple of additions to their World Heritage Site list. World Heritage Sites can include natural locations, buildings, monuments, and entire cities, and are believed to be of significant interest for humanity. In 1972, UNESCO created the program, initially know as the Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and [...]

This weekend I was in Philly to see the Tutankhamen exhibit at the Franklin Institute Science Museum. My mom saw this exhibit when it toured the USA back in the 1970s and she still raves about it today, so we met-up and saw the exhibit together. I had read a good amount about the exhibit [...]

Just a couple of weeks after the incidents at Virginia Tech, the university’s Center for Digital Discourse and Culture (CDDC) with help from George Mason University’s Center for History of New Media (CHNM) have created the April 16 Archive, an electronic archive to share and preserve related information in digital format. Their press release announces [...]