MarkS

Here's our latest pyramid scheme.

picture of Madison, Minnesota

picture of Madison, Minnesota

picture of Madison, Minnesota

picture of Madison, Minnesota

Madison, Minnesota
Pop: 1,400

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison,_Minnesota

Images: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=130985472
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CSU Colorado Mesonet recognized by American Association of State Climatologists for over thirty years of service - Walter Scott, Jr. College of Engineering The Colorado Agricultural and Meteorological Network, known as CoAgMET, was recognized with the American Association of State Climatologists 30 Year Mesonet Award for contributing more than 30 years o...

CoAgMET---the Colorado Agricultural Meteorological network, aka Colorado's Mesonet---was recently recognized for over 30 years of data collection. Read more about the award and the network in this story from CSU Source. Here's to 30 more years of valuable weather and climate information! #cowx

www.latimes.com/entertainmen...

Access to open data at the National Library of France using ARK variants An early adopter of ARKs, the BnF has developed practices for displaying persistent linked open data (LOD) using ARK suffixes for object variants.

New case study on the French National Library's use of archival resource keys for data discovery.

arks.org/news/2025-07...

Celebration at the rainbow: Pride Heritage District to be recognized Years of research went into making the case for a Pride Cultural Heritage District in San Antonio, set to be celebrated Friday, June 20.

sanantonioreport.org/a-celebratio...

www.infodocket.com/2025/06/17/r...

Short answer is yes.

Archivists Aren’t Ready for the ‘Very Online’ Era The challenge: how to catalog and derive meaning from so much digital clutter

"Ardam was confronting a different, somewhat sensitive question about navigating a person’s digital history. When Sontag donated her laptop to the archive, did she realize how much she was giving away?" on archiving digital ephemera and culture -- www.theatlantic.com/culture/arch...

The Documentary - America: The human plasma factory - BBC Sounds Kathleen McLaughlin investigates the multibillion-dollar global plasma industry

I have a new radio documentary out this week on the BBC World Service, you can hear it here www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Imagining Elon Musk drooling at the prospect of feeding the entire Library of Congress into his plagiarism machine.

To Sell Prized Paintings, a University Proclaims They’re Not ‘Conservative’ Valparaiso University is arguing it should never have acquired two paintings, including a Georgia O’Keeffe, in the 1960s. It hopes to sell them to pay for dorm renovations.

From 2024. Quite an interesting "deaccessioning" case. www.nytimes.com/2024/07/19/a...

So pleased to see these go live - new workflows for digital preservation: one on emails and one (a bit more conceptual) on line of business systems: www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archives-sec...

These should help you get your brain around steps and options in these format-specific headaches.

PlayStation’s extraordinary effort to preserve its game-making history 1000+ PS5 builds, plus files from past PlayStation eras, back to Arc the Lad in 1994

NEW: A tiny team at PlayStation has preserved 650 terabytes (and counting) of PlayStation Studios' game-making history

- Release and pre-release builds of games, documentation, art, team photos, you name it.
- A GDC talk about it ended with a terrific revelation

www.gamefile.news/p/playstatio...

You can watch the Trump administration play DEI whac-a-mole with employee policies and public websites on GitHub, which is automatically cataloguing all of the changes the 18F agency is frantically making to its internal and external webpages […]

Fabulous book, highly recommend.

after days of grifters and con men at CES we stumbled upon the booth for VLC. they were all dressed as wizards and told us, "we have nothing to sell, we just decided to show up". i told them I'd been using their software to pirate media for 15 years and they said "keep doing that"

Recruiting for Cultural Competency: A Content Analysis of Archives Job Postings 

I'm thrilled to announce that the new issue of The American Archivist contains a brand new article by Helen Wong Smith, Dawn Schmitz, Cyndi Shein, and Lisa Schmitz: Recruiting for Cultural Competency: A Content…

Applications now open for @atbw.bsky.social’s Web Archiving School. We’re recruiting fellows, instructors, and teaching assistants. Everyone is paid. Apply by January 31st, 2025. www.archivingtheblackweb.org/warc-school/

Sun setting no moon
Ice fishing opener starts
After beer is bought

Congratulations Ian!

Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory is released _today_.

You can buy a copy, or, you can read it FOR FREE via Project MUSE. Please spread the news to your colleagues, your friends, your syllabus makers.

muse.jhu.edu/book/123276

Lord of the ringtones: Nokia celebrates pop-culture status by opening design archive The mobile phones we loved then lost will go on show in Finland and online to reveal history of bestselling brand

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

This is the way.

Toxicity of the Commons: Curating Open-Source Pre-Training Data Open-source large language models are becoming increasingly available and popular among researchers and practitioners. While significant progress has been made on open-weight models, open training dat...

As a historian who focuses on historical texts and has done a lot of work with offensive historical texts in particular, this paper on a process to 'detoxify' historical texts so they can be used to train LLMs for contemporary applications was very interesting! +

arxiv.org/abs/2410.22587

My next book, Averting the Digital Dark Age: How Archivists, Librarians, and Technologists Built the Web a Memory comes out in just a few weeks (December 10th!) with @hopkinspress.bsky.social. It'll be open access.

Can't wait to share it all with you.

www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

We’re heading into dark times. This is how to be your own light in the Age of Trump Having studied authoritarian states for over a decade, I would never exaggerate the severity of the threat we now face. But an American kleptocracy is exactly where president-elect Trump and his backe...

thecorrespondent.com/5696/were-he...

Read this from @sarahkendzior.bsky.social while you still can.