Robert-Goldwater-Library

Digital Library of Scholarly Resources on Africa

The Summer 2007 issue of African Arts includes a 'first word' column on a promising new online scholarly research resource for Africa. This resource first came to the library's attention in early April, when Aluka announced the roll out of its cultural heritage site component.

[A future post will review the resource and give tips on navigation]

Aluka is "an international, collaborative initiative [to build] an online digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa," according to the project's History and Mission page.

Aluka seeks to attract high-quality scholarly content about Africa from institutions and individuals across the globe ... By aggregating these materials online, the Aluka collections link materials that are widely dispersed and difficult to access, opening up new opportunities for research, teaching, and broader public discussion. One of Aluka’s primary objectives is to provide African scholars and students with access to scholarly materials originally from Africa, but now out of their reach.

Aluka is a project of Ithaka, a not-for-profit organization formed “to accelerate the adoption of productive and efficient uses of information technology for the benefit of the worldwide scholarly community.”  Aluka is affiliated with both JSTOR and ARTstor. Work began on Aluka in early 2003.

Aluka's target audience is primarily the "higher education and research community," with most resources selected and pitched to undergraduate students and their instructors. Some resources may have particular application to specialized researchers.

Access to Aluka is open to "any educational, research, cultural, or other not-for-profit organization that joins Aluka by signing a participation agreement." Outside of Africa a fee is involved. During the 'Preview Period' any institution with access to JSTOR (including this one) has free access to Aluka content. (There is no indication how long the Preview period will last.) The Preview period will end December 31, 2007.

In addition to the content areas themselves, additional pages highlight Featured Collections (for instance, the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies) and a running list of Latest Additions. There is also an FAQ Page.

At the moment Aluka presents three constantly expanding 'content areas':

• Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa "consists of more than 180,000 pages of documents and images, including periodicals, nationalist publications, records of colonial government commissions, local newspaper reports, personal papers, correspondence, UN documents, out-of-print and other particularly relevant books, oral testimonies, life histories, and speeches" reflecting the history of the struggle itself: "colonial rule, dispersion of exiles, international intervention, and worldwide networks that supported successive generations of resistance within the region."

• African Plants "comprises scientific data contributed by the African Plants Initiative (API) ... API's long-term goal is to build a comprehensive online research tool aggregating and linking presently scattered scholarly resources about African plants, thereby dramatically improving access for students, scholars, and scientists around the globe."

• African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes "content area links high-quality visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage sites.The digital library includes photographs, 3D models, GIS data, site plans, aerial and satellite photography, images of rock art, excavation reports, manuscripts, traveler's accounts, historical and antiquarian maps, books, articles, and other scholarly research." [N.B.: Until June 30, 2007, downloading of the the datasets for three-dimensional site models, GIS data, and digital video has been disabled.]

It is this last collection which has the potential to provide the most valuable information for our research community. The collection is organized around what Aluka calls a "cultural landscape." As of April 2007 five cultural landscapes had been identified: Kilwa Kisiwani—a medieval city on an off-shore island in Tanzania; Lalibela, Ethiopia—capital of the Zagwe Dynasty and famous for its rock-hewn churches; The Asante Temples at Besease and Patakro, Ghana; Djenné and Timbuktu, Mali, celebrated for mosques in Sudanic style; and a preliminary collection of digitized photographs of African Rock Art. Future landscapes will include the stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe; the stelae field at Axum, Ethiopia; Elmina, Ghana; Lamu archipelago located on Kenya's northern coast; and five rock art shelters and caves in South Africa’s Cederberg Mountains.

Each of these cultural landscape areas "includes a vast range of visual and textual materials ... [including] high-resolution, metrically accurate digital photographs, two-dimensional site plans, three-dimensional models of structures, towns, and landscapes, spatial/geographic information systems (GIS), digital video and panoramas of the sites, and in the future, computer visualizations with walk-through capabilities.

"Related contextual materials ... include, for example, a selection of digitized scholarly articles, monographs, and travelogues from the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, and the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University; some antiquarian maps of Africa from the Afriterra Free Cartographic Library; selections of narratives, drawings, and documents of and by the |xam and !kun people of southern Africa as collected in the 19th century by Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek; and a unique collection of field notes and images from excavations at Kilwa Kisiwani carried out during the 1960s and early 1970s by Neville Chittick, the first Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa."

Museums That Use Flickr

Reblogged from e-artcasting:

Your Photos on Museums: Ile Ife National Museum, Nigeria

You are e-artcasting's most precious value. Thanks to your emails, comments and contributions e-artcasting's mission is increasing its diverse outreach.

One of our most active activities is located at our Flickr group. "E-artcasters" are about to contribute 1,000 wonderful and rare photos on art museums from all over the world, so it is hight time for celebration. Today we start a new section named, "Your Photos on Museums" in which we will rescue on weekly basis a selection of your best contributions at our Flickr pool.

For our Grand Opening, this exquisite image of the Ile Ife National Museum (Nigeria) taken in April 1958 and posted by Rabinal, who also shared with us a fragment of The White traveller in Black Africa, by Colin Wills,

The Creation of the World (Yoruba version). The creation of the world took place at Ife. Orafame. The Supreme Being, the Creator, sent Orishala out from heaven to create the world. The way was long and hot, and Orishala rested in a grove of palms. He was thirsty, and he drank palm wine, and fell asleep, a serious dereliction in one with such a high task. Orafame was disappointed. He called another demigod named Oduwa, and sent him forth to carry out the mission. Oduwa did not pause by the way. He took earth, a hen, and a chameleon. The hen spread out the earth and scraped it into a mound, just as you will see her do today. The chameleon moved over the mound, testing it with his light weight, feeling gently with his little feet. His delicate,tremulous movements which you can see today, are a memory of that great task. From the mound grew the Earth. It was there that Orfame set down the first man and woman, and from there stemmed the Yoruba people. The mound still exists; I will show it to you presently, said my guide. Oduwa, naturally, is worshipped by millions of Yoruba. The chameleon is also sacred, and the hen, though eaten, is regarded with great respect and affection. But the strange thing is that Orishala also has his devotees. One might expect them to be the wine-bibbers of the community. On the contrary, they are the teetotallers. When Orishala awoke and found that somebody else had created the world while he slept, he bitterly lamented his failure, and swore never to touch palm wine again. He never did, and neither do any of his followers. His failing remains an example forever, a warning to men of their own frailties.

Image: Rabinal: Museum at Ife, posted on September 2006.

A Schomburg Renaissance

Ruby Washington/The New York Times

A 1925 sign from the New York Public Library’s Negro division.

via the NY Times:

Harlem’s Cultural Anchor in a Sea of Ideas
By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: May 11, 2007

YOU could almost see the ghosts among the new furniture and modern recessed lighting. It was a few days before the staff at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, at 135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem, finished hanging two exhibitions and stripping the paper off the doors at its bigger, brighter new entrance. Amid the sounds of hammers and drills, they prepared for tomorrow’s public celebration of the center’s two-year, $11 million renovation.

The Schomburg is as much a monument to an idea as it is a building. So those ghosts, workaday and luminous, inhabit a space of many incarnations, tracing its roots back to the 135th Street New York Public Library branch that opened there in 1905. Predominantly Jewish then, Harlem was mostly black by 1924. Over the years, Alex Haley researched “Roots” at the Schomburg; James Baldwin and Gordon Parks both found it a refuge; a young Ossie Davis honed his craft there.

By the time it officially became the Schomburg in 1972, taking its name from Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, the Puerto Rican-born black bibliophile who donated his collection, it was a one-stop connection with the global black experience. Its wonders include a rare recording of a Marcus Garvey speech, documents signed by Toussaint L’Ouverture, a signed first edition of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, daguerreotypes of African-Americans from the 1830s, Benjamin Banneker’s almanacs. Its exhibitions have tracked black migration and displayed the contents of Malcolm X’s pocket when he was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom.

“The center has increasingly become one of the cultural anchors of the greater Harlem community, one of the top three tourist destinations, along with the Apollo and the Studio Museum in Harlem,” said Howard Dodson, the Schomburg director. “The kind of change that’s taking place in Harlem is of political, social and historical interest to the center, and we’ll be here to document it. We are not going anywhere.”

As the Schomburg unveils its facelift, Harlem itself is also undergoing one of its periodic renaissances. There’s new real estate development, new stores and restaurants, new places to imbibe culture. The association with Harlem has been the constant for the Schomburg trove of more than five million items: art, manuscripts, films, photographs. The center has been a place for community meetings and for local politicians, for schoolchildren and eminent researchers like the historian John Hope Franklin.

Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum, is among those who see the renovated Schomburg as an emblem of a Harlem at the top of its game. Hundreds of thousands of tourists pour into Harlem annually to shop in the stores on 125th Street, sit in the pews of the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church or revel in the serendipity of finding new cafes or dowager buildings.

“The Schomburg stands as a bearer of the idea that our history and culture are important,” said Ms. Golden, who is African-American. “The renovation will reinvent the sense of the institution as living, breathing space. All the cultural institutions in Harlem are going through a period of incredible growth, and it’s not just about physical renovation.”

A walk through Harlem makes vivid its embrace of many worlds. There are the tiny African braiding shops, mom-and-pop restaurants with an African or Caribbean flavor, as well as Citarella and Starbucks amid the cacophony of 125th Street, the area’s commercial spine. It is dotted with stores like Old Navy, as well as the Apollo and the Studio Museum. The streets are cleaner and safer than they have been in years. (read on ...)

And take note of the following:

Two exhibitions will be on view through Oct. 28: “Stereotypes vs. Humantypes: Images of Blacks in the 19th and 20th Centuries” and “Black Art: Treasures From the Schomburg.”

The “Stereotypes” exhibition is meant to show the prevalence of caricatured images of blacks for most of the early 19th and early 20 centuries. It uses items like sheet music, posters, advertisements and postcards to show how words like “darktown” and “coon” were casual companions to depictions of blacks with distorted features.

Some of the items are on loan from the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Mich.

“A small amount of this is from the South,” Mr. Dodson noted. “A significant amount of the stereotypical ads come from New York.”

The propaganda is contrasted with real-life black images from that period: couples in their wedding finery, 1920s bathing beauties, formal banquets.

“Black Treasures” is an eclectic display that includes the 1868 marble and bronze “Portrait of Ira Aldridge as Othello,” by Pietro Calvi, as well as the 1969 collage “Black Manhattan,” by Romare Bearden, and dozens of other work by Elizabeth Catlett, Augusta Savage, Jacob Lawrence, Benny Andrews, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Horace Pippin, Faith Ringgold and others.

   

South African Music Digital Archive

via Bring 'n Braai:

African music samples latest donation to the commons
Posted by Daniela on April 11th, 2007 filed in SA Free Culture Tour, Music

Another donation to the South African digital archive, being collected through Bring 'n Braai and the Free Music Project, is one which will be an incredible resource for children who will be using the One Laptop per Child computer. This donation is from ccMixter South Africa, and consists of the samples that were used for the SAfro-Brazil Remix competition.

Rebecca Kahn, ccMixter SA's resident blogger, explained more about the samples:

"The International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University and Anthony Caplan both created samples using traditional instruments such as the mutumba drums and the umrhube mouth bow. The mutumba drums are originallly from Zimbabwe and are used to accompany spiritual ceremonies that include dancing, singing, clapping and playing the mbira thumb piano. The ILAM have used these drums in a sample which you can hear here.

The umrhube mouth bow is a Xhosa mouth-resonated friction bow, and has been used by Anthony Caplan by using whistling techniques of Xhosa origin, as well as tapping the string in the style of similar instruments found around southern Africa, rather than 'bowing' the string as the Xhosa people do. Check out Anthony’s sample, Umrhube Gees here.

The Kundi harp, which has been used in an ILAM sample that you can hear here, is a five-string harp from Central Africa. It is an instrument traditionally played by young men and boys."

As Rebecca said in her blog entry, it is often difficult to find information or audio clips of these instruments on the internet. And if one does find this type of material, it's usually marked with a big 'all rights reserved' sign. So to have these samples made available on the web, as well as under a CC licence, is truly an invaluable resource. Even more so, these samples will now not only be used to stimulate the talent of our South African remixers, but will also be made available to open the minds of children around the world to the sounds of Africa. And who knows when the next Miriam Makeba or Hugh Masekela will be inspired to start making beautiful music?

Museums + folksonomies: bridging the semantic gap

via NYTimes:
One Picture, 1,000 Tags {excerpts}
By PAMELA LiCALZI O’CONNELL
Published: March 28, 2007

[...]

"Museums have recognized that their online collections are not doing the job — we're hiding the content away from nonspecialists," said Jennifer Trant, a partner at Archives and Museum Informatics in Toronto. "We've got to provide access on the same level as visual memory."

Now, after spending millions of dollars and years of effort on their virtual homes — which draw many more visitors than their physical ones — museums are rethinking their online collections. They are experimenting with one of the hottest Web 2.0 trends: tagging, the basis for popular sites like Flickr.com. In social tagging, users of a service provide the tags, or labels, that describe the content (of photos, Web links, art), thus creating a user-generated taxonomy, or folksonomy, as it's called.

Museums plan to encourage the public to annotate their collections by supplying descriptive tags that could exist alongside professional documentation, creating a new shared vocabulary. Van Gogh's "Starry Night," for example, could elicit tags like "stars," "planets," "swirls" or "insanity."

The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, already have prototype tagging applications on their Web sites, and nearly a dozen other museums plan similar projects.

But can the public be trusted to tag art? Will curators let them?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art ran a test in fall 2005 in which volunteers supplied keywords for 30 images of paintings, sculpture and other artwork. The tags were compared with the museum's curatorial catalog, and more than 80 percent of the terms were not in the museum's documentation. Joachim Friess's ornate sculpture "Diana and the Stag," for example, was tagged with the expected "antler," "archery" and "huntress." But it was also tagged "precious" and "luxury."

"The results were staggering," said Susan Chun, general manager for collections information planning at the Met. "There's a huge semantic gap between museums and the public."

Based on this and other research, a group of museums formed the steve.museum tagging project, which recently received a two-year grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The grant work, which began last fall, is based at the Met and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and includes the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. People may tag selected art from these museums on the project Web site; some of the museums plan applications on their own sites as well.

[...] Aside from the prohibitive cost of subject indexing thousands of works, there are other reasons museums want the public to tag art. For one, "art professionals can find it surprisingly difficult to describe the visual elements of a picture," said Ms. Trant, who is managing the grant work. She recalled that during early testing of tagging at the Met, a frustrated curator complained, "Everything I know isn't in the picture." [read on...]

AnthroSource now available

The Goldwater Library is pleased to announce that the AnthroSource online resource is now available to researchers * through the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The database, developed by the American Anthropological Association in partnership with the University of California Press, brings together 100 years of scholarly publication by the AAA, including full text access to 15 current titles and an archive of all AAA journals:

An online portal to full text anthropological resources, AnthroSource offers access to over 45,000 articles in AAA journals, newsletters, bulletins, and monographs; a linked, searchable database containing past, present, and future AAA periodicals;  centralized access to a wealth of other key anthropological resources, including text, sound, and video; and interactive services to foster communities of interest and practice throughout the discipline.

AnthroSource is a fully integrated information resource. Its powerful search engine makes precision research quick and easy. Citations in article PDF files are dynamically linked through CrossRef to other publications, both within and beyond AnthroSource.

* Researchers within the museum as well as museum staff with remote access may connect to  AnthroSource directly through WATSONLINE, The Catalog of the Libraries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; or from a link in any of the applicable online serial records, for example American ethnologist [electronic resource].

   

ARTstor: New Collaborations and more...

NEWS via ARTstor Feb 07 Newsletter (v.8):
Collections: New Collaborations

Pre-Columbian and World Archeology from the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, Harvard University

ARTstor has reached an agreement with the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, through which ARTstor will distribute digital images related to Pre-Columbian archaeology, as well as images  of Pre-Columbian, African, Native North American, and Oceanic objects from the museum's collections. Approximately 55,000 images are from the photographic archives of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW) which document early archaeological excavations throughout Central America. ARTstor will also distribute up to 90,000 digital images of the Peabody Museum's remarkable collections of archaeological artifacts and art objects.

+++

Native American Ledger Drawings

Now available to ARTstor users are approximately 2,000 Plains Indian ledger drawings from the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. Mostly produced in the middle to late decades of the 19th century, these drawings represent an important indigenous artistic tradition of great and increasing interest to art historians and other scholars.

via ARTstor: Upcoming Collaborations

Collaborative Agreement Reached Between the Art and Art History Department of the University of Texas at Austin, and ARTstor: Ferguson/Royce Archive of Pre-Columbian Photography

ARTstor and the Art and Art History Department at The University of Texas at Austin are pleased to announce that they will collaborate to digitize and distribute the Ferguson/Royce Archive. The Ferguson/Royce Archive consists of approximately 5,200 negatives, created by William Ferguson and John Q. Royce and depicting views of Mesoamerican and Southwest United States sites. William Ferguson and John Q. Royce were amateur archaeologists and aviators who devoted themselves to documenting from the air the major Pre-Columbian ruins. Their photography is best known from publications they authored, together or individually. These books include: Maya Ruins in Central America in color: Tikal, Copan, and Quirigua, 1984; Maya ruins of Mexico in color: Palenque, Uxmal, Kabah, Sayil, Xlapak, Labná, Chichén Itzá, Cobá, Tulum, 1977; Anasazi ruins of the Southwest in Color, 1991; The Anasazi of Mesa Verde and the Four Corners, 1996; and Mesoamerica's Ancient Cities: Aerial Views of Pre-Columbian Ruins in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras, 1990.

The Ferguson/Royce Archive represents a photographic portrayal of many of the major Pre-Columbian sites in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. Magnificent aerial views, as well as ground photographs, provide glimpses of these ancient cities rarely seen by most visitors, often capturing vistas that preserve specific moments in the history of the discovery and excavation of these sites.

Dr. Julia Guernsey, who teaches Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican Art at UT Austin and is a frequent user of the Ferguson/Royce Archive, attests to the importance of this collaboration. "The Ferguson/Royce archive is a rich resource for students and scholars, as it provides rare views of sites and monuments, many of which would be impossible to duplicate today. Having the resource available online in a digitized form through ARTstor will be invaluable for both research and teaching." Max Marmor, ARTstor's Director of Collection Development, adds: "Our partnership with the Art and Art History Department at The University of Texas at Austin will significantly advance ARTstor's effort to provide a rich body of images of Pre-Columbian art and archaeology, for use by teachers, students and scholars. This is one of several important ARTstor projects involving the rich collections of The University of Texas at Austin.

Native Peoples

In the latest issue of Native Peoples, vol. XX, no. 2 (March/April 2007): 

Little Windows on the World: Classic Native American Postcards
At the turn of the 20th century, postcards were a huge worldwide fad. Now, these once-transitory cards have become valuable and fascinating collectibles, as we see in this overview of the collection of Erich Erdoes. With cards portraying Ute, Osage, Musquakie, Apache (Geronimo), Kiowa, Maricopa and Hopi people. By Daniel Gibson.

RGL call no. A N2795

Access issues of Native Peoples, 1997 to current, via WATSONLINE.

When Blobgects Are the Object...

reblogged via Material World, February 7, 2007:

Blobgects: an Experiment in the Discursive Museum

"By situating a catalogue, the definitive universal description, into a discursive idiom, the Weblog, we are drawing attention to the fact that this is but one way of narrating these objects. Through the ability of users to tag, comment, and order these accounts in their way, we hope that the provisional and local nature of the catalogue itself will become clear."

The Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology at the University of Cambridge has a new weblog: http://museum.archanth.cam.ac.uk/blobgects/

I grant you that this is not particularly earthshaking, but this Blog is a little different. It is only a little different, and that is the point. Though it is a weblog, the entries are not curatorial statements, nor academic discourses, nor even the contributions from the public -- they are objects. Or, rather, they are the catalogue entries and, eventually, the images of objects.

The goal of Blobgects is simple, What might happen if rather than just being able to search a museum's on-line catalogue, and being forced into the idiom of the catalogue, users could engage with the catalogue as they would a Blog? Engagement that would include all the features of a Blog: commenting, tagging, RSS feeds of individual records or searches, etc. In other words, what might happen if we extended the principles of Social Computing, in one small way, into the privileged world of the museum catalogue? Hence, Blobgects.

I imagine that I do not have to state on this forum that knowledge is embodied, it is situated and requires sets of social relations between people. However, I feel that I do have to state, or restate, that knowledge also requires things. Just like people, things are not outside of knowledge but are part of its embodiment. It is true that you cannot have knowledge with just things, things are not knowledge, but knowledge is not simply conceptual -- I would argue that it is not conceptual at all, but that is another matter. Objects, even digital objects, embody surrogate practices, surrogate social practices. They do this so they can be knowledge objects, or, more accurately, can participate in situated knowledge production and reproduction.

So why Blobgects? [read full article]

A tweak for Museum Anthropology

Jason Baird Jackson (JBJ) of Museum Anthropology (the blog) takes a moment to point out an enhancement in Museum Anthropology (the journal), relating it to the searching capabilities of a critical research tool in our field:

Readers of Museum Anthropology (MUA) 29(2) will note that, with this issue, we began publishing abstracts of articles. Not only does this bring us into line with standard practice for scholarly journals, it was a move aimed at facilitating access to MUA article content via AnthroSource. Internet visitors to AnthroSource who lack individual or library access can gain table of content information and, if they choose, pay-per-view access to individual items. Providing an abstract gives such potential customers at least some knowledge of what they might be buying into.

In-house (i.e. MMA) researchers should have library access (or more accurately, desktop access) shortly. In fact I am remiss in not having it available even now. My apologies, and hang in there! In the meantime we do have print versions of many of the AnthroSource titles. So ask in the library first before you pony up.