Indiana Modernist residence Miller House and Garden Now has an online archive. “The robust digital collection contains 17,699 downloadable images, including architectural drawings, material samples, photographs and administrative documents related to the history of the property. The archive spans more than 50 years, from the initial planning and construction of the house to later renovations and interior design projects.”
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has released an online database of consumer complaints against banks and financial institutions. “The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday went live with an updated online database that includes more than 7,700 narratives from homeowners, loan recipients and others who provided first-hand narratives detailing their frustrations.” I took a quick look at the narratives and most of the ones I looked at were against really aggressive debt collection companies. You can get an RSS feed of the narratives database as it’s updated. Also available is a spreadsheet view of the consumer complaint data – company, zip code, issue and sub-issue, date complaint received, etc.
Under development: a digital archive for brass bands in Ireland. “A Queen’s academic is appealing for Ulster families to search their attics and family photo collections to share prized photos of their ancestors performing in brass bands. Professor Michael Alcorn, head of the School of Creative Arts at Queen’s, is hoping to retrieve artefacts, instruments, uniforms or anything connected with brass bands in Ireland between 1850 and 1970.”
Companies House, which is a UK government agency dealing with the licensing of companies, has launched a new Web site in beta along with an API. “It said the service has made 170 million company records available free of charge, including information on financial accounts, directors and secretaries, and that users will be able to find real time updates. Although all of the information was previously in the public domain, Companies House levied a charge for access.”
32 years of the LGBT publication Dallas Voice are now available online. “University of North Texas digitized and put online 32 years of Dallas Voice from Volume 1, Issue 1 as part of its North Texas LGBT history archives. UNT also has been working on the project in conjunction with The Dallas Way and Resource Center, which donated its Phil Johnson Archives. Thousands of pages of Dallas Voice articles and ads are searchable.” Also, the archive is a lot, lot more readable than the screen shots in the blog post make it out to be.
NASA images have been aggregated into one big collection. “The NASA Images collection, built and unveiled last week by Luna Imaging, combines over 70 NASA Image galleries into a single, searchable source. These includes familiar collections such as NASA’s Image of the Day Gallery and the Jet Propulsion Image Gallery, but also plenty of obscure treasures. In total, the collection contains over 100 thousand photographs that range from historic documentation of the Apollo moon missions to the latest shots of distant quasars by the Hubble Space Telescope.”
A professor and a hashtag has turned into a crowdsourced list of readings on the Charleston shootings. “The professor [Chad Williams] reached out to the historians Kidada E. Williams (no relation), a professor at Wayne State University; Keisha N. Blaine, an incoming professor at the University of Iowa; and Christopher Cameron, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who is the founder of the African American Intellectual History Society. The four scholars solicited suggestions on Twitter under the hashtag #CharlestonSyllabus, and the project quickly took off.” Note that the list at http://aaihs.org/resources/charlestonsyllabus/ is no longer accepting suggestions, but contributors are asked to continue to use the #CharlestonSyllabus hashtag; a TheCharlestonSyllabus.com Web site is under development.
Akron, Ohio has a new online photo archive. And unlike many photo archives I cover, this one is recent. “An online treasure trove of photographs of Akron is now available — for free use by anyone — thanks to local photographer Shane Wynn and two nonprofits who work to give the city a boost. Wynn spent more than 40 hours last year taking the shots, capturing more than 1,400 images of the city, including wide-angle photos taken from the tops of parking decks and a ladder.”
Scottish explorer David Livingstone now has an online archive. “The site, Livingstone Online, http://www.livingstoneonline.org, is the digital home for the documents chronicling the life and work of Livingstone, a missionary, physician and abolitionist best known for his travels in Africa in the mid-19th century…. More than 7,500 original images of Livingstone’s writings can be found on the site and the archive is expected to expand to more than 12,000 images by 2016. The archive also includes drawings and illustrations depicting Livingstone’s work and findings.”
Quartz has launched a new home for the charts which appear on its site. “Atlas gives each of our charts its own home, along with a set of tools for interacting with them: You can now download the data behind our charts, embed our charts elsewhere on the web, grab an image of our charts, and of course share our charts on social media. They will look great regardless of whether you’re using a big screen or mobile device.”
Under development: a digital archive of British Comic Fanzines. “For several months now, British comics fan David Hathaway-Price had been gathering and scanning every British comics fanzine that he’s been able to buy or had loaned to him. His aim is to create a Fanzine archive / repository, celebrating all of the brilliant work that was produced in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s in British comic zines such as BEM, Comic Media News and many other fondly-remembered titles.”
Huh. Reddit now has a music player. “It works by offering you an extensive list of subreddits on the left-hand side. Clicking on a link adds it to your playlist and gives you the most recently recommended songs as YouTube clips that run in the player.”
The Digital Library of Georgia has released a new collection of Savannah photographs. “The City of Savannah, Research Library and Municipal Archives has recently made a new collection available through its online Digital Image Catalog: Public Information Office–Photographs, 1948-2000. This collection contains digitized photographs, slides, negatives, and manuscript material maintained by the city of Savannah’s Public Information Office, and document city-sponsored services, programs, and significant city events. There are also photographs of politicians and employees of city bureaus.” It’s a small collection – just over 150 photographs – but I’m including it here just because of how much in encompasses. The 1996 Olympics Torch Run, a movie set (Glory, 1989), stained glass, a funeral, dancing police officers – this set of images is all over the place.
The Archivo Histórico General del Estado de Sinaloa has joined the Flickr Commons. “Founded in 1999, the Archivo Histórico de Sinaloa hosts one of the largest digital libraries in Mexico. Its staff is working to digitize the entire collection of images with the goal of making it available to anyone interested. They want to help spread the history of the state of Sinaloa and put its documents to good use, whether for academic or personal purposes.”
Now available: a database of LGBTQ movies from Canada. I don’t have a complete count of database entries but it looks like several hundred. “The goal of the Queer Media Database Canada-Québec Project is to establish and maintain a dynamic and interactive online catalogue of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) Canadian film, video and digital works, their makers, and related institutions.”
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