National Archives Having Network Diffifculties

A recent article from Information Week reported that the National Archives and Records Administration needs to purchase new networking equipment but can't because of its bidding process. The situation has gotten so bad that Office of General Counsel lost e-mail access for a whole day. Click on the link for the full story.

Personal Archives

Salon.com posted an interesting piece on Friday concerning the need for personal archives. The article advocates the creation of some kind of way to automatically archive the digital content (such as blog posts) that we create. It raises some interesting issues about how the material we create on the internet will be preserved, if it will be at all, and if it should be. Click on the link above to access the article.

Geocities Becomes Torrent File

As most of you are probably aware, Yahoo! closed there pioneering Geocities service last year. Despite the fact that they did not archive the sites it hosted a small chunk of it has been saved. The article was originally posted on the archives and archivists listserv.

Also, today is election day. For those of you reading this I would like to remind you to vote if you have done so already. Voting it the duty of every citizen. While it may not seem obvious, your vote does count.

Founding Fathers Going Digital

The Washington Post has an interesting article. It seems that the University of Virginia Press is going to be putting the papers of some of the Founding Fathers online. The project is expected to be public by 2012 and completed by the following year. Click the above link for the full article.

Upcoming Conferences

The following conferences are coming up in the next several weeks:

• MARAC Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference, November 11th-13th. It will be held in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and the theme is "the politics of archives".

• Association of Moving Image Archivists and the International Association of Sound
  and Audiovisual Archives will come together for the first time in a joint
  conference. November 2-6, 2010 in Philadelphia, PA

• New England Archivists Meeting November 5-6, 2010 at Keene State College
  the theme is "Looking Inward/Looking Outward: Changing Roles and Expectations
  in Archival Settings"

Also note that election day is in 2 weeks. Mark this date on your calender. Remember that your vote is important, no matter how dismal the year may seem.

Archivist in the News

The following article was posted on the Archives and Archivists listserv that is maintained by the SAA. It's an article about a man from Hopewell Junction who tried to sell what turned out to be a stolen Texas Supreme Court document. The situation was resolved when the director of operations for the New York State archives certified that the document was real and brought it back to Texas. Here is the link: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/casey/7237177.html.

New Assistant Web Master

I would like to take the time to introduce myself. My name is Michael and I am the new assistant web master for SCSAA. What that means is that I will be contributing to this blog on a regular basis. The plan is for that to happen every Sunday. This is my first semester at Albany and I am currently enrolled in the dual History/Information Science program. As you may have gathered I am in the archives track. That will be all for my first post. I look forward to contributing further to this blog.