An end of the week roundup:
You might want to read Dan Cohen’s views on “Is Google Good for History?“, prepared for his panel (of the same name) at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, on January 7, 2010, in San Diego. In places he broadens his observations about changes in scholarship caused by the availability of Google Books to include digitized archival collections as well, so it should give us food for thought. (UPDATE: Also see a Summary of the panel from “Inside Higher Ed”.)
Two more great uses of Twitter by archives–@ukwarcabinet , sponsored by The National Archives (UK) allows you to “watch WWII unfold day by day through original Cabinet Papers from 1940 held at The National Archives” and @JFK_1960, sponsored by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, is “on the campaign trail with John F. Kennedy — 50 years later. Experience the day-to-day workings of JFK’s road to the White House.”
Looking for a job? I’ve been asked to make sure people know about the position as Repository Librarian for the the Carolina Digital Repository (CDR), the University’s institutional and digital preservation repository. If you have the right qualifications–and you might, take a look at what they’re asking for–this should be a interesting opportunity. Note that although the review of applications has begun, “Applications will be accepted until the position is filled.”
The response to the group read of Archives Power has been very impressive–about seventy people have introduced themselves so far from all over the world. I’m a little intimidated about trying to lead this discussion, but I’m sure this group won’t have any trouble coming up with their own observations. Even if you’re not reading the book, feel free to check in the conversation now and then.
And I think you can still come up with more “Reasons to be Thankful for Archives (and Archivists).” I don’t see any movie references. I love the serious ones, but the librarians list had some funny ones as well. If you don’t watch it, I’ll start calling y’all “librarians.”
Advocacy, Archival profession, History & related professions, Twitter | Kate T. | 
January 8, 2010 7:41 am 
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By Marco, January 12, 2010 @ 11:52 am
Most interesting to me seems to read the view Dan Cohen has on Google docs… I think he will say something like “I see that students are making more references to books now. I think this is caused by the ease of accessibility nowadays. Before technologies like Google docs, students where too lazy to go to the library but now they can just look in the books from out their chair while playing some game or watching a movie.” In my opinion Google docs is really helpful. Nevertheless, they are also violating all the rules that have to do with copyright! Isn’t it unbelievable that they can just do this.
By Bart Klein, January 12, 2010 @ 12:56 pm
The uses that The National Archives (UK) now made for twitter seem really nice to me. It is a form of archiving historical data, in a modern internet solution. I think that because the new generation grows up with internet uses like twitter, it is good to have such important historical data reachable like this. So that this new generation can reach the information in a way they now learn, instead of the older archives.