Bad news from Denmark. According to an official press release, the Danish government has changed its position and now endorses the European Commission’s proposal to extend the term of protection for sound recordings. Since Denmark was part of a fragile blocking minority in the European Council, there is a danger now that the EU Presidency (Hungary) will try to push through the proposal within a matter of weeks.

Read more at
https://kluwercopyrightblog.com/2011/04/06/o-no-not-again-term-extension/

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The Mundus Gateway is a web-based guide to more than four hundred collections of overseas missionary materials held in the United Kingdom.

https://www.mundus.ac.uk/

Via
https://www.archives-records-artefacts.com/2011/04/religious-collections-at-university-of.html

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"The Ibaraki Shinbun (Newspaper of Ibaraki) on 20th March and the Asahi Shimbun (Newspaper of Asahi) on 23rd March published the articles which integrated the information about how cultural properties from the whole prefecture had been damaged. Many nationally designated structures such as Kodokan, Rokkakudo, the main structure of Kashimajingu Shrine, and the structures in Makabe a traditional architectural preservation district, have suffered from the quake and Tsunami. The considerable number of prefecturally and municipally designated properties were also damaged, so that each Board of Education which has jurisdiction over cultural properties are treating these designated materials. In addition, museums and archives are also tied up in rescuing their own properties. According to the reconstructing process after the Hanshin Earthquake and other natural disasters, as for the urgent rescue of the non-designated historical materials, there is no choice but for the researchers who live in each affected area to have to cooperate in facing these problems.

As for my personal activity, at the beginning I searched around the communities in Kasama City near my house by bicycle for gathering accurate information about the present condition of historical materials. There were many cracks on the road, and the damage which occurred in the old city area stood out from the other places in the city. The subsidence on the road was obvious here and there, and an innumerable number of roof tiles which had fallen from decrepit houses were scattered from place to place, although there were no houses destroyed completely. Some specific examples of damaged structures are as follows; The Torii gate of Inarisha which is the auxiliary shrine in Kashima-Inari Shrine had collapsed. The old sake brewer “Matsumidori” ‘s sake-brewery was destroyed. The Torii gate of Oobuchi-Tenjinsha Shrine has fallen down, its front shrine was slanted, and its stone walls were loosened. Those research activities for confirming the present condition might already have been done by each researcher in Ibaraki Prefecture, so it will be necessary to integrate all their information.

Therefore, I tried to gather them by using phone and internet, simultaneously I sought the way how we could do our best under such a difficult situation.

Because there was no evidence to suggest activity from any Ibaraki area, the Study Group for Medieval History in Ibaraki University whose members consist of postgraduate students and alma-mater of my research seminar decided to be the conduit through which information about rescuing non-designated properties in the devastated area would be sent. We of course recognised that we were not proper members who could tackle those problems only by referring to our expertise of medieval periods, as almost all of the damaged material belonged to modern times. We rewrote the appeal which had already published by the Network for Historical Materials, and asked property owners to preserve historical documents and artefacts. At present, we are trying to send our appeal to the stricken area through the prefectural and each municipal Boards of Education and researchers living in the Ibaraki area. Tetsuya Shirai, Associate Professor in Tsukuba University, whose area of expertise is archives gave us his cooperation from the start, he will lead us in rescuing historical materials hereafter. Moreover, we have already gotten some positive responses from the disaster-stricken communities.

On the other hand, for example, Ibaraki universities are also elaborating on the plan for researching the East Japan Earthquake, and an inter-departmental project team incorporating various research fields has already been set up. However, it will be necessary for this team to try to do their activities whilst widely cooperate with associations which are working in the devastated area now.

In Ibaraki Prefecture, because we have not yet had any institutions which have assembled the researchers who have interests in regional history across the eras or fields, this situation was an obstacle in integrating and sending information. From now on, it will be necessary to cooperate with the researchers in adjacent prefectures for rescuing historical materials in the Tohoku area. Although we cannot change this situation immediately, we still strongly feel that it will be necessary to establish the network which brings them up to one institution. "
Link: https://rekishishiryonet.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/the-breaking-news-of-the-present-condition-of-ibaraki-prefecture-1/

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https://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/03/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-march-31.html

Excerpt:

"The most amazing growth story of the first quarter of 2011 is that of Mendeley, jumping half a million articles downloadable for free, from 300,000 to 800,000, growth of 171% in just one quarter!! Since Mendeley is a DIY tool for researchers, this amazing growth illustrates that there is a considerable appetite for self-archiving, once the researcher has a service that appeals to them."

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https://scripto.org/

Via
https://infodocket.com/2011/03/30/spotlight-on-scripto-open-source-crowdsourcing-for-libraries-and-archives/

(T)

https://www.dippam.ac.uk/

Parliament, People and Migration, a virtual library of the history of modern Ireland was today launched at Queen’s University Belfast. The new virtual resource brings together the story of migration throughout Irish history into one place, a searchable online database. The online resource has three searchable databases: Enhanced British Parliamentary Paper on Ireland, The Irish Emigration Database and Voices of Migration and Return.

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This was the title of a _NY Times_ op-ed piece by Robert Darnton in this morning's paper: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/opinion/24darnton.html?_r=1&ref=opinion . From the article:

"Nonetheless, we should not abandon Google’s dream of making all the
books in the world available to everyone. Instead, we should build a
digital public library, which would provide these digital copies
free of charge to readers. Yes, many problems — legal, financial,
technological, political — stand in the way. All can be solved...

A coalition of foundations could come up with the money (estimates
of digitizing one page vary enormously, from 10 cents to $10 or
more), and a coalition of research libraries could supply the books.
The library would respect copyright, of course, and it probably
would exclude works that are now in print unless their authors
wanted to make them available. It would include orphan books,
assuming that Congress passed legislation to free them for
non-commercial use in a genuinely public library. "

" ..... Report about Present Activities

This is Arata Hirakawa, from the Miyagi Network for Preserving Historical Materials.

Already one week has passed since the Northern Japan Earthquake. I cannot find any words to express my shock and sadness at the extent of the damage and there are still some friends whose whereabouts and safety I am uncertain of. Our present situation and undergoing activities are as follows :

1. We have contacted officers who have a duty in the Government Agency For Cultural Affairs. According to them, the Government Agency has started to discuss how to deal with the disaster of the quake by cooperating with universities, institutions, and the Japan Society of Archive Institutions, in the same manner as when the Hanshin Earthquake occurred.

2. With regard to the great earthquakes and Tsunami of the past, the well-known examples are the Jogan(*1) Earthquake in 869 recorded in one of national historical chronicles “Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku (*2)” and the Keicho(*3) EarthQuake in 1611.

The secretariat staff of the Miyagi Network for Preserving Historical Materials have also been participating in the Disaster Prevention Science Research Core Group, therefore we had prepared researching about those past disasters from both scientific and historical perspectives with the cooperation of this group. As far as we learned from the records and geological surveys, it was already clear that the great tsunami flooded 3-4km inland along the Pacific coast in Miyagi prefecture. So we had been planning to carry out more specific research and to draw up a more accurate hazard map as a disaster prevention measure.

However, we were struck by an actual Tsunami earlier than we had anticipated. Although Tsunami researchers had already pointed out the possibility that a great Tsunami on the same scale as that of the Jogan and Keicho Earthquakes would likely hit our coast, we couldn’t prevent the enormous damage because the residential areas were widely spread out along the coastline. Despite the fact that cities had to compromise between disaster prevention and residential development, the experiences of the past Tsunamis did not bring about the desired effects in terms of disaster prevention. How can we reconstruct our community in a way which completely ensures against such destruction brought about by a tremendous Tsunami only once every 400 years or so?

3. Now we cannot get enough petrol to visit each disaster-stricken community, it prevents us from researching the present conditions as to how they suffering from the earthquake. For this reason, we could grasp only a little information from some institutions and families of distinction located near Sendai City. In addition, we are preparing for surveying the extent of the damage over a wide area, and establishing the system which will coordinate with museums and municipal offices for the cultural affairs of Sendai City and Miyagi Prefecture along with the Governmental Agency for cultural affairs.

4. The Centre for Northeast Asian Studies’ building at Tohoku University where our office is located has been seriously damaged and is off-limits. So we now moved to Lecture Room A on the same campus (Kawauchi campus).

*1: Jogan(貞観) A Japanese era dating from AD859 to 887.

*2: Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku (日本三代実録) A Japanese national history chronicled by the Imperial Court. Spanning three Emperors’ reigns from AD858 to 887, recording not only national affairs, but also the annual ritual programs and governmental documents as they were.

*3: Keicho(慶長) A Japanese era dating from AD1596 to 1615."
Link: rekishishiryonet, 22.3.2011

https://hangingtogether.org/?p=900

This supports one of the working group’s recommendations: Go ahead! Invite user contributions without worrying about spam or abuse.

https://scripto.org/?p=81&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=emncheck

We are pleased to announce the alpha implementation of Scripto with CHNM’s Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 project. Beginning today, interested volunteers can register to begin transcribing any of the materials in this groundbreaking digital archive.

With major funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities and the National Archives’ National Historical Publications and Records Commission, CHNM is pioneering a new phase in digital documentary editing, by allowing users to transcribe historical documents and contribute them to a digital archive of correspondence, speeches, accounting logs, and other documents from early American history.

Building on the models of other crowdsourcing projects like Wikipedia and Flickr Commons, PWD will benefit from the various enthusiastic communities of volunteer transcribers. Volunteers—who may include historians doing scholarly research, students and teachings, genealogists, and other interested members of the general public—will have the opportunity to transcribe any of the over 45,000 documents in the digital archive. In doing so, they will make that text available to the search engine, improving the ability of users to locate the materials they need. Additionally, as users select documents to transcribe the editors at the PWD project will gain significant insights into the areas of the collection that are of most interest to the wider user community.