Transylvanian blood-suckers

Apothecary jar, for holding medicinal leeches, slip-cast earthenware, made by S. Maw and Son, London, England, 1860-1870 http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/?irn=182254#ixzz2lGArzAaV
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Non-Commercial

Last week I started work on a collection of objects relating the period of the Australian Gold Rushand one of the objects was a porcelain medical jar made by S. Maws and Sons between 1860 and 1870. It had been used for holding leeches and I thought there may be an interesting connection between these blood-sucking animals and the diggers who often spent long hours panning or ‘wet-digging’ in streams and rivers.

The Eureka Flag; 150 year mystery solved?

While working on a story relating to the Eureka Stockade I came upon some interesting information which may clarify a nearly 150 year old mystery relating to who designed the famous Eureka flag. Some accounts credit a Canadian miner, “Captain” Henry Ross, as being the designer of the flag. Others say the designer is still unknown and that Ross was simply the person who took the design to the three women, Anastasia Withers, Anne Duke and Anastasia Hayes, who sewed up the flag in time for the rally on 29 November 1854.

Stalin, Zoo Kid and ruin a movie: tweekly update

Last weekend I attended a Graphics workshop at the Sydney Opera house and was lucky enough to catch the fireworks for the Naval Fleet Review. Our position at the Opera House bar was a great opportunity to get some photos on my phone.

The Tyrant as Editor an article by Holly Case in the Chronicle of Higher Education offers a great reading of the way Stalin used his blue marker pen Stalin used to execute and imprison thousands from his realtive comfort of his desk.

Zoo Kid - Out getting Ribs

Sydney Observatory 1858 -1926

Sydney Observatory, The Rock, Tyrrell photographic collection, Powerhouse Museum, c1900 

In 1847 the Colonial Government closed the old Parramatta Observatory and put its instruments into storage. The colony seemed to have sufficient scientific supporters for a new observatory in Sydney but initially the idea floundered. One of the reasons was the skepticism of Colonial authorities and George Biddell Airy, President of the Royal Astronomical Society in England, who were less than enthusiastic. This was all the more surprising given the demonstrable need for accurate timekeeping, tidal monitoring and weather prediction in a city so reliant on the sea.

Water From Air Mapping Technology Culture Policy Betty Page

Is this the first billboard to produce potable water from air? This really cool billboard (pictured above) is real, it’s located in Lima, Peru, and it produces around 100 liters of water a day (about 26 gallons) from nothing more than humidity, a basic filtration system and a little gravitational ingenuity. read more of Mark Peckhams post ...

This page on the HASTAC Mapping technology forum has a good set of references and links to current efforts to develop new ways of visualizing physical and textual spaces. Tools such as Neatline, The DM Project, Google Earth, and Walking Through Time and Projects like Map of Early Modern London, MappaMundi, and The Pegasus Data Project among others.

Interview between Nayland and  Rachel Harrison for Bomb Magazine back in 2008    

Article on diffuse and direct light on the Electrical Engineering Portal is a great introduction to display lighting. 

School work inversion - students watch Khan Academy videos at home and work on them with the teacher in the class - one of the nice ideas which came to the up in the book Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy

I had no idea that the band 'Them' had ever recorded anything like this 9 minute slice of psychedelia .

Creative Australia, the Australian Government’s 2013 national cultural policy, is finally launched and you can download a pdf version from their site.

New South Wales State Government has appointed an industry-led taskforce to drive growth in the creative industries sector and bring together fine arts and music, film, animation, new media and design. A Draft Industry Action Plan [PDF] was released on 11 March 2013.

Film/Doco - The Revolutionary Optimists draws us into the world of two 11 year old's with no access to clean drinking water, a girl forced to labour inside a brick kiln, and a teenage dancer on the precipice of choosing child marriage to escape from her abusive family. From these fragile lives, lawyer turned change-agent Amalan Ganguly mines the strength and vision to build a most unlikely revolution. 

Developing a model for Technology-Based Museum School Partnership. In the words of Julie Wilson ... For over a decade the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum has used distance learning technology to allow students in grades K-12 to visit the museum without ever leaving their classroom. These sessions allow students to connect live to a museum educator, and experience the museum’s collections and exhibits through photos, videos and audio clips, while learning about topics such as civil rights history, geometry, and economics. Like many museums, the Hall of Fame has used distance learning as a way to reach audiences that were previously beyond our grasp.

PDNB Gallery in Dallas had an exhibition by legendary pin-up photographer, Bunny Yeager, who photographed Betty Page among others. Amazingly this was her first solo show in a major photography gallery in the United States. The image above is from an old mag I picked up in an auction some years ago.

Great British Innovation - this was a really nicely executed project to allow people to vote for Britain's greatest innovations. It is also a great source of info for anyone interested as well. 

Graphene and Molybdenite Join Forces for a New Flash Memory see more

Shift Happens Conferences in partnership with Arts Council England since 2008.

• to provide inspiring content that we can share with the whole Arts Sector
• to provoke and examine new thinking
• to generate new ideas for collaboration and connection

Stanford University Libraries is partnering with federal agencies to preserve 15,000 software titles in the Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection in the History of Microcomputing held by the Libraries.

Australian Policy online released a report reviewing the pivotal role of assessment in learning and argues for its reconceptualisation by practitioners and policy makers to better support learning. see report DODGE & BURN the official Tumblr blog curated by the Department of Photographs at George Eastman House  Superb news - search across 80,000 digitised British newsreel documents at News on Screen  Spectacular Images from the OMG Microscope that uses a combination of objects and 3D structured illumination microscopy to see object as small as 100 nanometres across - all in 3D.

Detroit Leaders Launch Opportunity Detroit's Placemaking and Retail Vision for City's Urban Core.

Top ten hacking failures in the movies reveal how little they actually know about the field.

Just finished the first week in my new job at Parramatta City Council's Heritage Centre (this is the view from the bridge outside) & this has been my first chance to post links of stuff from my Twitter feed, but so much good stuff this has only taken me to the end of March so I'll try and get another done next week.

Weekly Update 30 years of CDs Magritte

Kicking off with Rumble a great space-rock tune from the Oresund Space Collective 

Loved the sound of this John Cage project posted by Northern Spy records - In 1977, New York composer John Cage received a commission from Rolling Stone to create a work of art inspired by his hometown. Cage presented the publication with a graphic score titled 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs: a Hagstrom map of the city covered in 49 painted triangles, or “waltzes,” each linking three discrete locations in the city, and presumably a nod to the musical form’s 3/3 time signature. Later, he republished the score as a complete list of all 147 street addresses, specifying only that 49 Waltzes was a piece for “performer(s) or listener(s) or record maker(s).

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the storied composer’s birth, and to celebrate, Brooklyn performing arts non-profit Avant Media has unveiled www.49waltzes.com, an interactive, user-driven recreation of Cage’s ode to the city. The website invites visitors to upload photos, SoundCloud streams, videos, and written commentary to all 147 locations, group-composing each waltz in real time as a succession of memories and impressions .. full article from Northern Spy Records


Compact Discs & How They Affected Our Lives - the 30th anniversary of the first compact disc sale was on October 1st 2012. The CD in question, sold in Japan in 1982, was Billy Joel’s “52nd Street.” bitrebels posted this brief over view of the data storage technology that changed the music and the computing industry.

The Unknown Sheet Music Covers of René Magritte by Hrag Vartanian  at Hyperallegeric is an interesting insight into his Art Deco commercial work. Like many other artists, Magritte worked in the graphic arts and during much of the 1920s he worked in a wallpaper factory and also designed posters, advertisements and sheet music covers. See also Swann Galleries in Manhattan for vintage poster auctions.

Brendan Eich reviews the history of JavaScript, then introduces and demonstrates some of the new features coming in ES6. This is from Strange Loop a multi-disciplinary conference that aims to bring together the developers and thinkers building tomorrow's technology in fields such as emerging languages, alternative databases, concurrency, distributed systems, mobile development, and the web.

Google now show useful flight infographic as a search result when you look for your plane flight. From Robert Kosara.

10 Things You Need to Know About Today’s Job Search by JOSHUA WALDMAN - Google Has Replaced the Resume, A Summary is Enough, Social Proof is a Must, Resumes and Cover letters Are Not Read on Paper Anymore, Relationships First, Resume’s Second, Employers Only Care About What They Want, Don’t Mind the Gap, Nouns Are the New Currency. Everyone Has a Personal Brand – Yes, Everyone, Typing isn’t a Skill Anymore.

With the 100 year anniversary of WW1 looming I thought I'd post myself a reminder to look up the Imperial War Museum's series of posts on social aspects of the Great War. Topics include, Football during the First World War, Defence of the Realm Act, David Lloyd George, Daily Routine, Breakthrough, Anna Airy (one of the first women war artists), Armistice, Alliances 1900-1914, Air Raids in the First World War, Air Aces and more ...

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) new citizen science project, JPL Infographics, - Nick Fordes at SciStarter explains how NASA is asking  for the community to become scientist-artists to communicate their latest science. NASA provides a huge library of amazing high-resolution space images, 3-D models, and lists of interesting facts for you to piece together into your own Infographic.






  

Digital Preservation - the Golden Rules

Untitled, painting by Geoff Barker, 1993

“If we try we may fail, if we don’t try we will certainly fail"

British Library, Preservation Advisory Service, 2010

The 'golden rules' of digital preservation? 

Firstly digital preservation is going to be different from organisation to organisation but that doesn't mean everyone is marching to the beat of their own drum. Thankfully there are some basic principles which should inform all projects:

Always create a project plan before starting your project. Not only will this clarify and cost what you are going to do it will leave a record of how the processes used for your digital preservation and this could be invaluable for those that may need to migrate your data at a later date.

Remember digitisation refers to a wider range of objects than just creating an image file of Museum objects and placing them in a folder. While most of the focus up till now has been on photographic prints and negatives digitisation increasingly covers a wide range of museum content including photographs born in digital cameras, documentation and stories related to objects, videos and audio files relating to collections and content created by people in the broader community using 3rd party sites like blogs and flickr.

Collaborate whenever possible - so check to see if someone else has already done work on the same objects and whether you can share or incorporate their data into your records.

Are you ready to do this? The biggest risk to physical collections is human beings. If the collection has been sitting in a cardboard box in the corner of the museum for the last twenty years and is still in pretty good condition perhaps a few more weeks, months, even years may not make too much difference. It's better to be able to do it all, and to do it properly, than to make a half-hearted attempt on a portion of the collection.

Always hold at least two copies of a record. Technical obsolescence of standard formats is not likely to be an immediate threat so it may be possible to retain a copy in the original digital format in which it was created.

Only ever work on a copy of a record to ensure long-term preservation of the original.

If you want to follow up there is plenty more information on Digital Preservation Basics a site I created for a workshop I did last year. This includes checklists, selecting file formats, finding digital objects, selecting sizes and resource links.