Library of Congress: Library of Congress Releases Newly Digitized Colonial-era African Postcards. “The Library of Congress has announced the initial release of over 1,300 newly digitized postcards from the Africana Historic Postcard Collection, which depicts life under French, Italian, German, Belgian and British colonial rule in sub-Saharan Africa from the 1890s until the end of the 1930s.
Princeton University Library: Sidney Lapidus ’59 gift to Princeton University Library opens digital access to collection of rare Revolution-era books and publications. “The collection includes more than 2,700 original books, atlases, pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines relating to human and political rights, liberty, and independence around the time of the American Revolution. Lapidus also made a financial gift that enabled the PUL team to digitize the collection, making it keyword-searchable and openly available to the world.”
San Francisco Chronicle: 50 years of powerful Bay Area posters collected by Oakland library go online. “Before the internet age, artists, community leaders and organizations in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood would drop off posters at the library that highlighted educational classes for the community, protests and cultural events in the Bay Area. Over the past 50 years, the librarians at the then-called Latin American branch – the first branch in the U.S. dedicated to the Spanish-speaking community – archived and have since collected more than 250 posters, a majority of them stored in boxes. This year the library unveiled a digital version of the collection on its website.”
11 Alive: Students work to preserve Atlanta’s Krog Street Tunnel. “— Wedged between Wylie Street and Dekalb Avenue, the Krog Street Tunnel stands. More than 100 years old, the tunnel is a permanent passage between Inman Park and Cabbagetown. But as Curt Jackson knows, what’s inside the tunnel is ever changing…. That’s why the PhD student spends every Saturday at the tunnel, camera in hand along with a team of Georgia State University students.”
Digital Library of Georgia: New collection features over 50 years of digitized African American funeral programs from Evans County, Georgia, and are now available freely online.. “Selected by statewide cultural heritage stakeholders and funded by the DLG’s competitive digitization grant program, over 3,000 pages of digitized African American funeral programs from Evans County, Georgia, and other Southeastern towns and cities are now freely available in the Digital Library of Georgia.”
Boing Boing: See vintage punk flyers and ephemera on the “Art Punk Kill” instagram. “If you’re in need of some more neat stuff on your instagram feed, you can see vintage punk flyers and ephemera on the ‘Art Punk Kill’ page. I love looking through all of the ink drawings in this giant archive. It always inspires me to draw something in my sketchbook.”
New York Times: A Panorama of Design. “Coming to the rescue of leaflets, typefaces and ticket stubs is the People’s Graphic Design Archive, a crowdsourced database that recently went live after eight years of development. The digital archive, which currently contains about 5,000 items, allows anyone, anywhere in the world, to upload — and thereby keep — any piece of ephemera.”
Creative Boom: Anthony Burrill launches his graphic ephemera archive to inspire the design community. “Anthony Burrill has launched an online archive this week featuring the graphic ephemera that inspires his process and work, making them available for anyone to download. Full of inspiring print, graphic design, typography and other pieces, it’s a treasure trove for any discerning designer.”
Ford Authority: Ford Heritage Vault Proves Incredibly Popular As Traffic Overloads Site. “…the response to this new site was so overwhelming that many had difficult accessing it as the Ford Heritage Vault has garnered a large amount of traffic, to the point where it’s been down quite a bit over that same time span, as Ford archivist Ted Ryan explained to the Detroit Free Press.”
Video Games Chronicle: An archivist has made every English-language SNES manual available online . “The user, who goes by the name Peebs online, has spent the last eight years playing through every SNES game on Twitch. However, while playing they noted that there wasn’t a resource online that provided a full archive of SNES game manuals. After a number of years, Peebs has now completed their own archive and made it available online for anyone to access.”
San Francisco Chronicle: Lost landmarks of the Bay Area. “In a city that has gone to war against sugary sodas, residents still took the 2020 loss of a Coca-Cola billboard hard, like someone was tearing down one of the Painted Ladies. When the Cliff House sign was removed — the art deco sign, not the actual Cliff House — hundreds arrived to mourn. So we’re building a virtual museum, tracking the most prominent lost landmarks of the last 50 years (including, sadly, more than a few that came down during the pandemic).”
Motor1: Ford Ends Print, Digital New Vehicle Brochures Starting July 1. “New vehicle brochures have been a staple in the auto industry for decades, but that long tradition could be coming to an end at Ford starting July 1. The automaker is reportedly ending the creation of brochures in both print and digital format, leaving Ford’s official website as the only source for current vehicle information.”
Smithsonian Magazine: Archiving the January 6 Insurrection for History. “Religion, curators point out, played a role in the insurrection. The [National Museum of American History], which recently announced the formation of its Center for the Understanding of Religion in American History, is collaborating with the University of Alabama’s Department of Religious Studies. A new website, ‘Uncivil Religion: January 6, 2021,’ features essays from scholars and archived digital materials from the insurrection. The site will catalog tweets, videos and FBI files to document how religious beliefs played a role in the attack.”
New York Times: He stalks delirious, unfinished New York as it rises. “British artist Nick Relph likes to wander New York under cover of night, loitering in the vicinity of the city’s ubiquitous construction fences, doing a thing that seems at first glance — especially if you are a police offer — immediately identifiable. He holds a dark object in his hand. He swipes it rhythmically up and down the wooden fencing and its building poster, a motion common to generations of graffitists and guerrilla wheat-paste-poster artists. Except that in place of a spray can or glue roller, his instrument is a lightweight VuPoint Magic Wand digital scanner, a cheap device about the size of an electric toothbrush, often used to digitize book pages and legal documents. And so instead of leaving art on the streets, Relph is slowly extracting it.”
Savannah Now: Savannah archives: Historic postcards of Savannah now online. “A new collection of Savannah-area postcards donated by the city’s deltiologist (a fancy word for postcard collector), Alderman Nick Palumbo, is now open to the public for research. This new addition to the Palumbo collection of Savannah-area materials includes over 600 postcards that show Savannah’s streets, squares, buildings, neighborhoods, historical events, and much more (some images never before seen by Municipal Archives’ staff)!”
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