Anime News Network: Toho Archive Accepts Unclaimed Film Masters After Tokyo Laboratory Shuts Down. “Tokyo Laboratory (Tokyo Genzōsho, or Togen) announced on Thursday that the TOHO Archive will now take over the management of all of Tokyo Laboratory’s remaining unclaimed film masters, instead of the masters being destroyed. Tokyo Laboratory shut down on Thursday after 68 years of operation.”
National Library of Australia: Making history with Trove. “Australia’s much loved digital library Trove is inviting community-led, volunteer-run and rural and regional collecting organisations across Australia to make their significant digital collections and data available and findable in Trove. Following the budget announcement in April 2023, the National Library of Australia has announced that these organisations will not be asked to pay to showcase their digital content in Trove.”
The Guardian: ‘Cultural vandalism’: row as Kew Gardens and Natural History Museum plan to move collections out of London. “London’s ageing buildings, crumbling storage space, and soaring land prices mean a move beyond the M25 is the only realistic way to protect the capital’s swelling backroom collections of scientific and cultural treasures while improving researchers’ access to them, say senior museum staff. The total price-tag for the venture could top half a billion pounds. But this vast rehousing project has not been universally welcomed.”
The Guardian: Preserving our digital content is vital. But paying $38,000 for the privilege is not. “Storing online data in perpetuity is not just about photos and texts but thoughts and ideas. Platforms such as WordPress are starting to act, but it must be at a realistic price.”
The Guardian: ‘No one else is saving it’: the fight to protect a historic music collection. “The ARChive of Contemporary Music, which houses more than 90m songs and is supported by names such as Martin Scorsese, is in need of a new home.”
The Guardian: Cheese-rolling, straw bears and weird rituals galore: one man’s mission to record all of British folklore. “Fans of British folklore are championing a campaign to safeguard a unique archive cataloguing traditions from Britain and Ireland. The collection – of more than 20,000 books, 4,000 tape cassettes and 3,500 hours of reel-to-reel audio – has been amassed by one man. David ‘Doc’ Rowe is a 79-year-old folklorist who has travelled the UK since the 1960s, visiting calendar customs such as the Straw Bear Festival, the Krampus Run or the Hunting of the Earl of Rone.”
Gothamist: Beloved NYC design store seeks new home for its extensive archive. “[KIOSK] was a place where you could find simple items from around the world, curated and arranged so that customers understood who made the objects and why they mattered. Now, the beloved emporium is looking for a new home for its archive of more than 1,500 objects – with a deadline of Thanksgiving to vacate from its current space.”
New-to-me, from MIT Technology Review: The grassroots push to digitize India’s most precious documents. “The museum building houses the largest reference library for Gandhian philosophy in the state of Karnataka, and over the next year, the large assortment of books—including the collected works of Mahatma Gandhi, a translation of his autobiography, Experiments with Truth, into the Kannada language, and other rare items—will be digitized and their metadata recorded before they join the Servants of Knowledge (SoK) collection on the Internet Archive.”
BBC: Royal Albert Hall archive preserved in £1m project. “The Royal Albert Hall’s archive has been saved from flooding and preserved in a £1m rescue operation. The South Kensington venue’s collection includes a trumpet from the opening ceremony 152 years ago and a programme designed by Pablo Picasso. The archive spans the venue’s history since its inception in the 1850s and consists of tens of thousands of items.”
Leadership (Nigeria): 1,000 Publications, Rare & Vulnerable Resources In NLN Lagos Strong Room Digitised – National Librarian . “Chief Executive Officer (CEO), of the National Library of Nigeria (NLN), Professor Chinwe Anunobi has said about a thousand of the library’s publications, including rare and vulnerable resources in its Lagos branch ‘strong room’ have been digitized. Anunobi disclosed this during a media briefing to mark her second year in office, whilst highlighting the library’s achievements and challenges.”
WTVQ: Appalshop in Whitesburg receives grant to treat, digitize images damaged in flood. “Appalshop Archive, a media, arts and education center in Whitesburg, recently received a grant to treat and digitize images that were damaged in the July 2022 flood. The Save America’s Treasure Grant provides Appalshop with $750,000 to help cover preservation lab costs to salvage hundreds of hours of moving images that document life in Central Appalachia from the 1930s to the present day.”
Dextero: Major anime archive set to “destroy” history after closing. “Tokyo Laboratory is closing its doors after nearly 70 years of working on iconic, historic anime – and original prints of movies and TV shows are set to be ‘destroyed.’… In a statement, the company wrote: ‘Due to the termination of our business at the end of November this year, we will no longer be able to continue storing the original film plates from December onwards, so we are currently working on returning them to our customers.’”
Irish Times: Karlin Lillington: Technology helps piece together archive lost in 1922 Four Courts fire. “This is an absorbing tale of imagination, diligence, chance discoveries and fruitful relationships with other national archives, many in the UK which hold copies of records here, and myriad small partners such as Killruddery, with its 400 years of documents including land records and correspondence.”
Independent: TV archive boss says lost Doctor Who episodes are ‘out there’ – but collectors refuse to share them. “Chris Perry, CEO of the TV archive organisation Kaleidoscope, has now told Radio Times that the lost episodes – featuring William Hartnell as the first Doctor and Patrick Troughton as the second – are known to still exist in some form. However, the collectors in possession of the lost episodes are said to be refusing to share the broadcasts with the world.”
CBC: Some advocates want residential school abuse records re-examined, archived as debate on their future continues. “Geraldine Shingoose was shocked when she opened a report probing what should be done to protect potential unmarked grave sites at former residential schools for Indigenous children. Of the thousands of former students who detailed the abuses they suffered to an adjudicator tasked with determining their eligibility for compensation under the historic Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, only about 30 have sought to have copies of their words archived.”
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