Found History

Prep School Library Drops Books in Favor of Kindles — Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts (not far from where I grew up) is in the process of deaccessioning the books in its library in favor of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader. According to USA Today (hat tip @BryanAlexander), instead of checking out books, from now on [...]

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Big Copyright’s History of Anti-Innovation — Ars Technica has an interesting account of the movie studios, music companies, and other large content owners’ historical antipathy to new content delivery mechanisms. Some of the new technologies on the list: the player piano, the television, the .mp3 player, and the digital video recorder. What the $%@! is [...]

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The Material Culture of Mad Men — Via Steve Lubar, an intriguing interview with the prop master of Mad Men, a hit television drama set in early 1960s New York and acclaimed for its realism and attention to historical detail. Enough Wave, Improve Google Docs — Google Wave may be all the rage among the [...]

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Open Access to AHA Directory Until End of October — The American Historical Association’s (AHA) Directory of History Departments and Organizations is now online and available to all until October 31, 2009. After the trial period, the full directory will be available to members and institutional subscribers. A limited version will remain available to the [...]

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Yesterday I received a letter from Google addressed to Robert T. Gunther at Found History. As founder of the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford, where I did my doctoral work, and a major figure in my dissertation, I am very honored to welcome Dr. Gunther to the Found History staff. Despite having [...]

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The Great Museum WC — Maybe not the most important room in the museum, but among the most essential: Okay, you have GOT to check out that bathroom.

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Here’s a list of three questions one might overhear in a peer review panel for digital humanities funding, each of which can kill a project in its tracks: Haven’t X, Y, and Z already done this? We shouldn’t be supporting duplication of effort. Are all of the stakeholders on board? (Hat tip to @patrickgmj for [...]

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Dan Brown Gets Smithsonian History Right and Wrong in "The Lost Symbol" — Smithsonian Magazine’s Around the Mall blog has a nice “fact or fiction” run down of claims made about the Institution by Dan Brown in his latest thriller, The Lost Symbol, which is set in Washington, DC. Curator Now Online — Via @NancyProctor [...]

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BBC and Neil Gaiman Launch Collaborative Storytelling Experiment on Twitter — This week the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) teamed up with Neil Gaiman (author of Neverwhere and other latter day science fiction and fantasy classics) and thousands of Twitter followers to draft what will become an original audiobook. Gaiman tweeted the first line yesterday and [...]

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ArchivesNext on Modes of Social Media Interaction — Kate Theimer at ArchivesNext has an excellent post detailing four approaches archives and other cultural heritage institutions can take in inviting users to interact with their collections via social media. The four interactive modes or “places” are described according to their relative openness and the kinds of [...]

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