A Sydney librarian recently discovered a misfiled lost gem in the stacks: Virginia Woolf’s own copy of her first novel, with handwritten notes for revision. An expert explores what they tell us.
Card readers were used to confirm permanent voter cards during the 2019 Presidential elections in Nigeria.
Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images
Museums’ collections are a priceless resource for scientists, but they’re not easy to access. Digitizing specimens – like the 700 bat skulls the author studied – is a way to let everyone in.
With a lot not on display, museums may not even know all that’s in their vast holdings.
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
A tiny percentage of museums’ natural history holdings are on display. Very little of these vast archives is digitized and available online. But museums are working to change that.
Metropoles like Shanghai have survived and thrived in large part because of their massive populations. But what happens when people start to become a liability rather than an asset?
Reuters/Aly Song
Research shows that technology disrupts economies of scale, turning megacities’ huge populations from strength to liability. To survive, megacities, like companies, must adapt.
John Z'graggen’s tapes from Madang.
Nick Thieberger
There are hundreds of different languages spoken in the Pacific region that could be lost. So it’s important to safeguard what recordings we have in a digital archive available to all.
Off to the great video library in the sky…
Shutterstock
In the mid-1980s as a further education lecturer I was mocked by some more traditional colleagues for using “lantern slides”, their term for the then newfangled technology of the overhead projector, or…
Are libraries destined to be archaeological sites of the pre-digital age?
Chris Devers
Today we eagerly embrace new technology for fear of being left behind. A toddler with an iPad in hand is a welcome sign of a child learning to succeed in a digital world. Remainders of the pre-digital…