Archives
The record that was never meant to be published. Registries, national archives, the disaster of a burned or bombed archive, digitisation programmes, provenance and repatriation, and how you find one document among forty million.
Part of Books
38 moments in this segment.
- - Hours of Charles the Noble, King of Navarre (1361-1425). Bound Volume in the Cleveland Museum of Art (Medieval Art). France, Paris. Digitised image of the artefact itself; dated to the object, c. 1404.
- - Hours of Charles the Noble, King of Navarre (1361-1425): fol. 11r, November. Bound Volume in the Cleveland Museum of Art (Medieval Art). France, Paris. Digitised image of the artefact itself; dated to the object, c. 1405.
- - Hours of Queen Isabella the Catholic, Queen of Spain. Bound Volume in the Cleveland Museum of Art (Medieval Art). Flanders, Bruges and Ghent. Digitised image of the artefact itself; dated to the object, c. 1500.
- - Campfire Girls' Outing - title page. Title page of "Campfire Girls' Outing; or, Ethel Hollister's Second Summer in Camp." ( https://archive.org/details/CampFireGirlsOuting )
- - Paper, 1940s. Archive film of British paper manufacture in the 1940s, from raw fibre through the machine.
- - Sylvia Beach on meeting James Joyce. Archival footage of Beach describing her first encounter with Joyce in Paris.
- - Oak galls and iron(II) sulfate - California State Archives. Iron gall ink, made from oak galls and iron sulphate, the standard European writing ink for over a thousand years; it eventually eats through the page. Modern photograph.
- - Old Library, History Reading Room, 1964. Fry Library. Photograph taken during the making of a BBC documentary. IMAGELIBRARY/138 Persistent URL: http://archives.lse.ac.uk/dserve.exe?dsqServer=lib-4.lse.ac.uk&dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqCmd=Show.tcl&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqPos=0&dsqSearch=(RefNo='IMAGELIBRARY/138') Modern photograph of the subject as it appears today.
- - Saad Eskander on running a library in a war. American Libraries interview with the director of the Iraq National Library and Archives on operating through bombings, staff killings and reconstruction.
- - Scanning the brain to predict reading difficulty. Associated Press report on imaging research predicting which dyslexic children go on to compensate.
- - Digital legal deposit begins. British Library on the 2013 regulations extending legal deposit to digital publications.
- - Robert Darnton on digitising and democratising. The book historian and former Harvard librarian on mass digitisation, Google Books, and who ends up controlling access to the written record.
- - The Iraqi Jewish Archive, recovered from a flooded basement. US National Archives conservators on the waterlogged Hebrew books and documents found in Baghdad in 2003 and the freeze-drying and treatment that followed.
- - Richard Ovenden on opening up the Vatican's texts. Bodleian's Librarian on what a mass digitisation partnership with the Vatican Library changes for scholarship.
- - The British Library's support for Iraq. British Library chief executive on the partnership helping the Iraq National Library and Archive rebuild its collections.
- - The British Library digitises its collection. An AP report on the British Library's digitisation programme and how items are scanned.
- - The British Library Qatar Foundation partnership. An overview of the digitisation partnership that put Arabic scientific manuscripts and Gulf archives online.
- - Legal deposit for librarians. A professional webinar on handling legal deposit enquiries and obligations.
- - How the Internet Archive works. The Internet Archive's own introduction to its collections, tens of millions of items and billions of archived web pages, and how to navigate them.
- - UNOG Archives Reading Room-07. Nations Unies, Genève, salle de lecture, archives de la Société des Nations. « Index cards of correspondence ».
- - Rebuilding Ireland's destroyed Record Treasury. The Virtual Record Treasury reconstructs in 3D the Public Record Office of Ireland and the archives destroyed in the 1922 Four Courts fire, gathering surviving copies from collections worldwide.
- - Data preservation in Mine 3, Svalbard. The Arctic World Archive's own film from inside the permafrost facility.
- - Collecting Aotearoa's published heritage. National Library of New Zealand on building its collection through legal deposit.
- - Rebuilding the Iraq National Library. CGTN interview with Saad Eskander, who returned to Baghdad in 2003 to salvage the national library and archives after the looting and fires.
- - Hachette v. Internet Archive, point by point. Detailed walkthrough of the publishers' lawsuit over controlled digital lending and what the 2023 decision means for libraries lending digitised books.
- - A free digital library in court. ABC7 on the legal battle between publishers and the Internet Archive's Open Library.
- - Rewriting Kenya's colonial libraries. Al Jazeera documentary on Book Bunk, restoring Nairobi's oldest public libraries, built for colonial readers, and rebuilding their collections for the city that uses them now.
- - What legal deposit is and what it collects. Singapore's National Library explains its statutory duty to collect the nation's published output.
- - Write yourself into history with legal deposit. National Library of Australia on how a published book enters the national collection by law.
- - 700,000 items moved out of the Old Library. Trinity library staff mark the completion of the decant, 350,000 volumes among over 700,000 items relocated before conservation work began.
- - Why publishers sued the Internet Archive. TechCrunch on the Hachette case and the defeat of controlled digital lending.
- - Could an Arctic vault save our data?. BBC reporter visits the Svalbard archive and asks what happens when the technology that holds our records becomes unreadable.
- - The Penguin archive at 90. A first look at the Penguin Books archive, marking ninety years from 1935 to 2025.
- - Can the Internet Archive save our digital history?. BBC News goes behind the scenes at the Internet Archive as it fights lawsuits and preserves the web.
- - Four digital rights for memory institutions. The Internet Archive argues for the rights libraries and archives need to preserve digital heritage.
- - Inside the Arctic World Archive. Conference session on the vault in a Svalbard coal mine storing data on film for institutions worldwide, designed to survive without power or maintenance for centuries.
- - Panizzi Lectures 2025: insects and colonial archives. British Library lecture on postcolonial book history and the material fate of colonial archives.
- - The Internet Archive in peril. A 2026 account of how AI crawling and litigation are threatening the Internet Archive.
