There are about 59,000 cards in archival boxes from the Red Cross’s WW2 enquiry service. While their language is impersonal, the golden rule was to provide solace to soldiers’ families, and fast.
A slave fortress in Cape Coast, Ghana.
AP Photo/Clement N'Taye
An online database explores the nearly 36,000 slave voyages that occurred between 1514 and 1866.
Penny Gulliver wrote to Germaine Greer several times over two decades.
University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer Archive, 2014.0042.00350, Correspondence with Penny Gulliver
Fifty years of correspondence is stored at the Germaine Greer archive. It ranges across topics as diverse as US politics, grassroots feminism, gardening and Queen Victoria’s underpants.
Both sea ice and government data are disappearing.
U.S. Geological Survey, flickr
Morgan Currie, University of California, Los Angeles and Britt S. Paris, University of California, Los Angeles
Activists today are racing to save climate records from the Trump administration. Secret archives were a powerful way to fight hostile political climates throughout history – from the Nazis to the Islamic State.
This will be part of your permanent record.
Lucas Jackson/Reuters
Knowledge is power. If you own it, you can control those without it. Since so much knowledge about Africa doesn’t sit on the continent, it’s apparent that Africa lacks power in this regard.
Gillian Armstrong’s 1971 student film The Roof Needs Mowing featured a bathtub full of baked beans.
VCA Film & Television School
In less than a decade, most people won’t be able to play a VHS tape anymore. Let’s farewell the humble tape, and celebrate the archives finding their way to digitisation and YouTube.
Hex code from the Blaster worm reveals the potential motivations of the worm’s creator.
Ward Moerman
How can archivists properly preserve computer programs often written specifically to destroy data?
Eastman Johnson’s ‘A Ride for Liberty’ (ca. 1862) depicts a family of slaves galloping for the safety of the North in the early morning light.
Brooklyn Museum
With Freedom on the Move, historians hope to reveal patterns of escape and capture, while giving anyone the chance to learn about the individual heroism of runaway slaves.
In the 1950s, Woody Guthrie lived in one of Fred Trump’s buildings. In newly discovered, never before published writings, Guthrie bitterly rails against the developer’s color line.
The State Library of Victoria has received the greatest single bequest of rare books in its history, coupled with an endowment for the collection’s preservation. No wonder book scholars are smiling.
We don’t send as many letters these days but, as historians know, there’s nothing quite as resilient.
Ben/Flickr
Australians might now prefer to send emails over private letters but let’s not overlook the letter’s unique, tactile role, particularly in its most intimate expressions.
Kilometres of these now fit in a few cubic inches of digital storage.
merlin1487
From the Domesday Book to modern government papers, the National Archives’ collection of more than 11m historical government and public records is one of the world’s largest. It includes paper and parchment…
Traditionally, audio-visual archives have emphasised preservation and put access second.
Thomas Christensen
It goes without saying these are difficult times for the country’s museums and archives. In recent months, the National Library, War Memorial, Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, and others, have all flagged…
Some films were made to be projected – which is why we need our archives to make copies in their original formats available to scholars and fans.
girl/afraid
Last month a major restructure at the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) in Canberra was announced, including a tranche of job cuts and the closure of the Arc cinema. Many in the film community were…
Germaine Greer’s acquired work is enough to fill 150 filing drawers.
AAP Image/Dean Lewins
Earlier this week, as you may have read, the University of Melbourne announced it had acquired the archives of a former student, feminist scholar and writer Germaine Greer. The total cost of the archive…