Tag: cool catalogs

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The World Digital Library shows off artifacts from around the world

UNESCO’s World Digital Library launches today. It’s a site where you can view artifacts from every UNESCO member country, or, in the words of the WDL, it “makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.”

Screenshot of the World Digital Library homepage
Screenshot of the World Digital Library homepage

Right now, there’s a bit of a mismatch between the lofty mission statement and the actual site — there are only 1,170 artifacts as of now. But it’s growing, so it will be interesting to watch the site develop.

The layout is cool. It’s actually a pretty simple idea to lay artifacts out on a map of the globe, but it changes my experience of the artifacts. It makes me think about the objects each country chooses as repositories of its history, and about what values and expectations went into making these decisions. Plus, it’s so easy to use that everyone from elementary school students to grownups could benefit from it.

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Blogging the Beinecke

Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities is a blog featuring amazing finds from Yale’s phenomenal Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. I like the lesbian pulp novels, the Revolutionary War-era lottery tickets, and the WPA textbooks from the 1940s. The blog is maintained by Tim Young (curator of the Modern Books and Manuscripts collection) and Nancy Kuhl (curator of poetry for the Yale Collection of American Literature).

Riding a moon bat to Saturn (obviously), from Voyage dans la Lune, a 1900 book about lunar travel in the Beineckes collection.
Riding a moon bat to Saturn (obviously), from Voyage dans la Lune, a 1900 book about lunar travel in the Beinecke's collection.

I think a blog is a great way of showcasing a collection, since it portions out awesome finds in manageable chunks. I often feel overwhelmed by the number of digital collections out there, and a blog helps me to process things at a reasonable pace.

Also awesome: the Beinecke produces podcasts about its events and exhibitions. To be honest, I’m not likely to listen to a podcast of an event (although maybe others are?), because an event is an event — designed for the people who are there in person, and not necessarily suited for recording. I’d really like to see them spotlight individual items in the collection, the way they do in the blog, and explore them from a bunch of different angles.

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Wax cylinder recordings

Photograph by Scott Dierdorf.
Photograph by Scott Dierdorf.

(Via MetaFilter.) Syracuse University has started digitizing its Belfer collection of cylinder recordings. So far it has 293 online, but they’re hoping to get 6,000 recordings digitized by the end of the year. You can search the recordings by keyword or browse them by subject (e.g., “Elks (Fraternal Order)” and “Foot’s resolution, 1829”), and you can download the recordings as MP3s or WAV files.

My favorite, hands down, is the 1910 anti-daylight savings song “We Don’t Want More Daylight.” My one tiny criticism is that I wish there was a straightforward list of all the recordings.

Also see U.C. Santa Barbara’s Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project. (To their great credit, the two institutions are comparing notes to ensure they don’t duplicate their online offerings.)