Posted in archive, faculty academy, umwfa08 on May 12th, 2008
If history is told by the winner, then the archive is the supporting evidence for that story.
An archive, as defined by
Wikipedia, refers to…
…a collection of historical records, and also refers to the location in which these records are kept.[1]
Archives are made up of records (AKA primary source documents) which have been accumulated over the course of an individual or organization’s lifetime. For example, the archives of an individual may contain letters, papers, photographs, computer files, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries or any other kind of documentary materials created or collected by the individual–regardless of media or format. The archives of an organization (such as a corporation or government), on the other hand, tend to contain different types of records, such as administrative files, business records, memos, official correspondence, meeting minutes, and so on.
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Posted in archive, faculty academy, umwfa08 on May 8th, 2008
What's a digital archive? Well, conceptually it's not that much different from what was defined above, just be prepared to re-imagine how we will preserve, share, and find all those “letters, papers, photographs, computer files, scrapbooks, financial records, diaries or any other kind of documentary materials created or collected by the individual.”
The Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization dedicated to maintaining an on-line library and archive of Web and multimedia resources. Located at the Presidio in San Francisco, California, this archive includes “snapshots of the World Wide Web” (archived copies of pages, taken at various points in time), software, movies, books, and audio recordings. To ensure the stability and endurance of the archive, IA is mirrored at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, the only library in the world with a mirror.[1] The IA makes the collections available at no cost to researchers, historians, and scholars. It is a member of the American Library Association and is officially recognized by the State of California as a library.[2]
The Wayback Machine
The Wayback Machine is a digital time capsule created by the Internet Archive. It is maintained with content from Alexa Internet. This service allows users to see archived versions of web pages across time—what the Archive calls a “three dimensional index.”
Snapshots become available 6 to 12 months after they are archived. The frequency of snapshots is variable, so not all updates to tracked web sites are recorded, and intervals of several weeks sometimes occur.
As of 2006 the Wayback Machine contained almost 2 petabytes of data and was growing at a rate of 20 terabytes per month, a two-thirds increase over the 12 terabytes/month growth rate reported in 2003. Its growth rate eclipses the amount of text contained in the world’s largest libraries, including the Library of Congress. The data is stored on Petabox rack systems manufactured by Capricorn Technologies.[3]
The Internet Archive Blog
The Internet Archive’s Collections Team started this blog to highlight new collections and interesting items from the Movies, Audio, and Education collections.
As a sidenote: the Internet Archive is using a WordPress.com blog to get their message out, not depending on their insanely robust infrastructure to host a small application like WordPress --why would that be?
Tags: , archive.org, internet archive blog, the internet archive, wayback machine
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Posted in Uncategorized on May 8th, 2008
Features Films on the Internet Archive
he list includes some amazing films like Akira Kurosawa’s multi-perspective masterpiece Rashomon; D.O.A. -the classic Film Noir starring Edmund O’Brien; Fritz Lang’s German masterpiece M and his Hollywood Noir Scarlet Street; Charlie Chaplin’s first full-length feature The Kid; the depression era classic My Man Godfrey; classic exploitation films from the 1930s like Sex Madness and Reefer Madness; the unedited version of They Call Me Trinity -a Spaghetti Western starring Terence Hill and Bud Spencer; what many believe to be the first narrative film The Great Train Robbery; and the list goes on and on…
Delicious/jgroom/iearchivemovies
An idea I had a while back centers around a public domain film course. The logic is to organize several of these movies into a hands-on curriculum wherein students can have structured space to both analyze the history of film along the lines of genre, film form, stylistics, etc. as well as incorporating a lab element wherein they get their hands dirty by re-editing, re-mixing, and mashing up selected films as a way of using this unbelievable archive to give students a more immediate relationship to the art, craft, and beauty of film making. (Read more
here.)
Rick Prelinger blogged last year about the Industrial and Sponsored Film Course being offered at NYU during the Fall 2007 semester. Most of the films on the syllabus were freely available on the Internet Archive.
The Prelinger Archive Mashups
What happens when you make close to 2,000 ephemeral public domain films freely available on the Web? People make art and more films are born!
Here’s a sample of films created with Prelinger Archives footage and uploaded to the Internet Archive. However, Rick Prelinger suspects thousands more are uploaded on other video sites. If you have a video you created using footage from the Prelinger Archives, please let us know so we can include it here. (Link to Prelinger Mashups Archive.)
Tags: , feature films, internet archive, mashups, prelinger archive
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Posted in Uncategorized on May 7th, 2008
UbuWeb is a constantly expanding archive that has a fascinating mission statement, that border on being aggressively subversive 
UbuWeb has no need for money, funding or backers. Our web space is provided by an alliance of interests sympathetic to our vision. Donors with an excess of bandwidth contribute to our cause. All labour and editorial work is voluntary; no money changes hands. Totally independent from institutional support, UbuWeb is free from academic bureaucracy and its attendant infighting, which often results in compromised solutions; we have no one to please but ourselves.
UbuWeb posts much of its content without permission; we rip out-of-print LPs into sound files; we scan as many old books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space to fill. It is in this way that the site has grown to encompass hundreds of artists, hundreds of gigabytes of sound files, books, texts and videos.
Some examples of resources on UbuWeb:
Delicious/jgroom/ubuweb
Tags: ubuweb
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Posted in archive, faculty academy, umwfa08 on May 5th, 2008
So given the definition of an archive as an “records which have been accumulated over the course of an individual or organization’s lifetime,” then the obvious question is where is your personal archive? For example, where is the record of your work here at UMW over the last X years?
Some examples of personal publishing archives (or e-portfolios):
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Posted in archive, faculty academy, umwfa08 on Apr 8th, 2008
Textual Archive
Image Archive
Video Archive
Website Archive
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