Fletcher Durant
@fletcherdurant.bsky.social
Preservation : Conservation : Academic Libraries : Archives : Stuff
Update: all issues of the Book Historical journal De Gulden Passer = The Golden Compass from 1923 up until 2015 are now available in Open Access on DBNL: www.dbnl.org/titels/tijds.... Later years will follow as the wall moves (and scanning infrastructure permits).
One of the great things about returning to a childhood home is basking in the water pressure from unregulated showerheads.
This photograph shows why all archives are wary of silverfish, which thrive in damp conditions: most of the image has been devoured, leaving only the linked arms of this - presumably - bride and groom. #EYAErased
There was a period in the 90s/00s when people would get paid $100,000 to be "futurists" and say shit like "CD-ROMs are the new town square" in Wired magazine. Current-day tech grifters must have FOMO for this era
Museum of Twitter@museum-of-twitter.bsky.social · 2w ago
No one says if this 1580 text *was* actually checked out, despite being available
Chromolithograph from ‘Reports on Observations of the Total Eclipse of the Sun, August 7, 1869, conducted under the direction of Commodore B. F. Sands, U.S. N., Washington, 1870. #Solareclipse #naturalhistory #naturalhistoryillustration #scientificillustration #chromolithograph
Fun news on the digital media archiving front. "Nine PBS" is KETC Channel 9, a PBS member TV station in St. Louis, Missouri. 50 TB of storage would be enough to hold high-res digital captures of about 2,000 half-hour television shows. Never leave the only copy of your data with someone else.
PBS broadcaster loses access to 50TB of data comprising 70 years of TV history after contracted cloud storage vendor goes defunct — public TV channel sues Iron Mountain data center, which hosts archiv...
This wouldn't have been an issue if the organization bought a $1,000 NAS and populated it with a few hard drives.
tomshardware.com
When climate adaptation runs up against “heritage”.
French state heritage architects block roof-insulation projects over height restrictions
Sarking, which involves slightly raising zinc roofs to insulate them, is authorized under Paris's bioclimatic local urban plan but often faces resistance from guardians of the city's landscape.
lemonde.fr
While I love a good posting, this is a grim one for a museum. The case is completely empty.
"The Morgan Library & Museum obtained $2.5m from the Lilly Endowment to digitize about 300 religious manuscripts from the Middle Ages & Renaissance. Called The Morgan Illuminated, the program should lead in 2029 to a free portal giving access to the volumes in their entirety, nearly 120,000 pages"
Just a french cat@justafrenchcat.bsky.social · last mo.
Restoration work on the gilded “Arts of War” and “Arts of Peace” statues near the Lincoln Memorial is nearing completion. The restoration work, ordered by President Trump, is expected to cost more than $5 million, according to the Associated Press and other reports.
The Times writes about BookOps, the logistical hub managing book distribution btw the NY and Bklyn public libraries. Its director, Sal, is retiring today, after decades of service. (I wrote about BookOps and Sal back in 2015: urbanomnibus.net/2015/06/midd...)
Waiting for a Library Book? This Man Makes Sure You Get It. (Gift Article)
For 20 years, a retired Police Department captain has overseen the shipping of books to library branches. Tens of thousands of books are sorted each day.
nytimes.com
And keep in mind that librarians have been yelling about this for literal decades.
Lise M. Dyckman@lisedyckman.bsky.social · last mo.This is a huge issue for scholarship, not just for library collections. We can’t keep ebooks, etexts, ejournals, only rent them. Which means: - paying over & over again to achess the same titles, & - no guarantees of finding the same works later; they can be yanked at any time.
Luke McKernan looking at three lost digital resources making a strong case for a true registry of endangered and lost digital archives (not simply a high-level symbol of endangerment) lukemckernan.com/2026/06/28/l... #digipres #DigitalPreservation #Archives #GLAM #LegalDeposit #Registry
Lost resources
To lose one database is a misfortune; to lose four feels like a conspiracy. Recently three online databases and one audiovisual digital archive with underlying database, on each of which I worked f…
lukemckernan.com
This is a very serious problem for libraries, archives, and knowledge-keepers of all kinds. If you don’t control access to your collections, *you do not have collections.* If we do not have permanent access to records, stories, & sources of knowledge then our histories and memories are not our own.
Shannon Mattern@shannonmattern.bsky.social · last mo."In 2022, Wiley removed over 1,300 ebooks from academic library collections; [they said] perpetual access is not an option for subscribed content. In 2025, Clarivate,... announced they would stop offering libraries perpetual access licenses for ebooks and primary-source digital collections."
Would anyone like to try making some iron gall ink? If so, this book on miniature painting has a recipe for you!
NBD, just hanging out with the Cathach, @rialibrary.bsky.social MS 12 R 33 dating to 560-600 AD and the oldest extant Irish manuscript of the Latin Psalter 🤩📜
i think it was larry g that said big windows in a client's house are a dealer's greatest enemy. museum architects heard that as a challenge.
very funny logic here. it's "disrespectful" to cover the huge windows the architect built for a museum full of light-sensitive objects? have we not learned from harvard and rothko, from lacma and govan, from every light-based fuck up in the past 100 years of art. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/a...
Jury duty and a good book. Citizenship in action.
The Walters Art Museum seeks a new James A. Murnaghan Curator of Renaissance and Baroque Art, who will oversee a collection of over 3,000 works of European art from the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The deadline for applications is 31 August: www.codart.nl/careers/job-...
James A. Murnaghan Curator of Renaissance and Baroque Art - CODART
The Walters Art Museum is among America’s most distinctive museums, forging connections between people and art from cultures around the world and spanning seven millennia. Located in Baltimore’s Mount...
codart.nl
Aruba’s digital heritage collection holds nearly 180,000 items for a community of just 110,000 people. 📚 In A LANGUAGE WORTH SAVING, Peter Scholing shares how Coleccion Aruba is preserving Papiamento & cultural knowledge carried through language. 🎧 futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/van... 🧵
Around eight million books were destroyed in Kharkiv yesterday. Many Ukrainians are responding by buying books from the affected publishers and from KnyhoLand, the bookstore chain that also used the warehouse. I bought these today.
If the AI companies are buying books, disbinding them, scanning them, adding them to their corpora, and then disposing of the paper pages and covers, are they destroying the books? Are the books the paper that words are printed on, or are they the words themselves, which transfer to a database?
‘More than just objects’: Australian booksellers raise alarm over ‘horrific’ destruction of rare titles to feed AI
Secondhand booksellers believe they may have been caught up in the AI supply chain that sees old books scanned then destroyed
theguardian.com
The Phillies fans invaded Camden Yards. And the wife of the Phillies fan in front of us must have given out $40 to all the children around her in apology for her husband’s inability to stop cursing. My kids came home with $10. 🤷♂️
10 Nov. Discover @dlocaribbean.bsky.social, the world’s largest open access repository focused on the Caribbean & known for its partner collections, historical maps and newspaper collections. With @chancyms.bsky.social & @evehayes123.bsky.social www.history.ac.uk/news-events/... @ilcs.bsky.social
An Introduction to the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC)
CLACS & IHR Research Training
history.ac.uk
"Exclusively for UChicago on-campus housing residents, students can borrow original artworks for their dorm rooms—for free—all school year long." artsmidwest.org/stories/art-...
Dalí in Dorms: Midwest Museum Loans Art to College Students
Art isn’t always meant for white gallery walls behind rope. Sometimes, it lives amid loft beds and term papers—if even just for a moment.
artsmidwest.org
