Archives Issues

From The Tide, Nigeria:

The Federal Government plans to organise a national workshop on modalities for the establishment of archival institutions by the state governments.

Mr Adedoyin Lafinhan, Director, National Archives of Nigeria, told The Tide’s source recently in Abuja that the workshop would discuss “the need to safeguard our cultural heritage nationwide, through proper archival records”.

The director said 74 archivists, representing two slots from each state and the FCT, were expected to participate at the two-day event in Abuja from July 17-18.[…]

From the official press release:

Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein announced today the launch of a major initiative which lays the foundation for preserving electronic and all other records generated by the government and providing public access to them. The Initial Operating Capability of the National Archives Electronic Records Archives (ERA) is the beginning of far-reaching changes in the management of U.S. government records.

From Pocket-lint news and reviews, via Peter Kurilecz’s RAIN posting to the A&A listserv:

Delkin Devices is now shipping Archival Gold Blu-ray recordable media, the first archival BD-R disc guaranteed to preserve data safely for over 200 years.

From Warsaw Business Journal, via Peter Kurilecz’s RAIN posting to the A&A listserv:

The publication of the controversial book on former president Lech Wałęsa’s alleged co-operation with communist secret services has triggered a fast-growing debate on access to archives of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN)[…]

From SFGate, via Peter Kurilecz’s RAIN posting to the A&A listserv:

The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley has begun receiving the papers of Rep. Tom Lantos, a San Mateo Democrat who died of esophageal cancer on Feb. 11 at age 80.

The human rights crusader was the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress.[…]

From the AP, via Peter Kurilecz’s RAIN posting to the A&A listserv:

The government took the unusual position Monday as leading historical groups press for the release of grand jury transcripts in the criminal investigation of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Following their 1951 espionage trial for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, the husband and wife were executed in 1953.

Among those seeking release of the material in the Rosenberg and Brothman/Moskowitz cases are the National Security Archive based at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., the American Historical Association, the American Society for Legal History, the Organization of American Historians and the Society of American Archivists.[…]

From Seattlepi.com, via Peter Kurilecz’s RAIN posting to the A&A listserv:

Saad Eskander, director of the Iraq National Library and Archives has called for the immediate return of the archive to Iraq. The Society of American Archivists and the Association of Canadian Archivists have also come out in support of the return of the archive to Iraq.

Here is the letter Eskander wrote to the Hoover Institution regarding this fiasco[…]

From BBC News, via Peter Kurilecz’s RAIN posting to the A&A listserv:

Scotland’s first women’s archive, including family planning leaflets, suffragette photos and one of the first known lesbian novels, is to be set up.

A £410,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund will help fund the scheme.[…]

From Slate.com:

I got bad news from the FBI a few months ago. A file I’d requested under the Freedom of Information Act wasn’t going to be available. Ever.

And not for one of the reasons I already knew to expect—that the material was classified, that the file concerned a living person, or that no file existed to begin with. Judging by the FBI’s final response letter, there might have been a file on my subject, a long-deceased Mississippi lawyer name John R. Poole. But if there was, it got shredded. […]

Trudy Huskamp Peterson is interviewed!

From chronicle.com:

An academic librarian last week published the second version of his Google Book Search Bibliography, a list of citations for articles about “the legal, library, and social issues” associated with the search engine. […]