Key takeaways:
In four years, the Modern Endangered Archives Program has published content from 11 collections, featuring more than 12,000 objects from 11 countries.
The program has preserved audio recordings, political ephemera, photography, newspapers and financial ledgers.
The preserved collections are publicly accessible and digitally preserved, while the physical materials remain in their origin countries.
“For two decades the Jewish Museum in Prague, or JMP, has undertaken a global search for lost publications from the city’s Jewish Community Library, which was looted and shuttered by Nazi occupiers during World War II. With the recent emphasis on digitization of collections by academic libraries, including UCLA’s, the museum’s work has become a lot easier and more fruitful. The JMP’s efforts to repatriate these stolen items have increased in intensity as anyone capable of using an online search tool can access these vast online repositories.
UCLA Library is one of the earliest and largest contributors to one such repository, the HathiTrust — a collaborative of academic research libraries that have thus far digitized 17 million volumes and made them full-text-searchable….”
“A project more than 40 years in the making, the Archive of Healing is one of the largest databases of medicinal folklore from around the world. UCLA Professor David Shorter has launched an interactive, searchable website featuring hundreds of thousands of entries that span more than 200 years, and draws from seven continents, six university archives, 3,200 published sources, and both first and second-hand information from folkloric field notes.
The entries address a broad range of health-related topics including everything from midwifery and menopause to common colds and flus. The site aims to preserve Indigenous knowledge about healing practices, while preventing that data from being exploited for profit….”
“Published by the UCLA Music Library in eScholarship, the Contemporary Music Score Collection includes the digital, open access scores from the Contemporary Score Edition series, the first open access edition of new music published by a library, and scores from the Kaleidoscope 2020 Call for Scores, an open access collaboration with the UCLA Music Library. For more information about how to use or search the collection, see the Contemporary Music Score Collection Guide. …”
“The UCLA Library is excited to announce the OpenUCLA Affordable Course Materials Initiative Award Call for Applications.
Two OpenUCLA ACMI awards, in the amount of $5,000 each, will be awarded to the successful proposals that result in the development and release of an Open Educational Resource (OER), to be made available on eScholarship. Applications will be reviewed in the order they are received, and may involve a preliminary interview before a decision is rendered. …”
“With the technical and financial capacity of any currently existing single institution failing to answer the needs for a platform efficiently archiving the web, a team of American researchers have come up with an innovative solution, submitted to the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and published in the open-access journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO). They propose a lightweight, open-source collaborative collection development platform, called Cobweb, to support the creation of comprehensive web archives by coordinating the independent activities of the web archiving community. Through sharing the responsibility with various institutions, the aggregator service is to provide a large amount of continuously updated content at greater speed with less effort. In their proposal, the authors from the California Digital Library, the UCLA Library, and Harvard Library, give an example with the fast-developing news event of the Arab Spring, observed to unfold online simultaneously via news reports, videos, blogs, and social media …”