The Gray Audograph disc! I know that dude

Restrictions on a collection should 1) be within the capacity of the archives to grant 2) have a sunset 3) list out who can release them and how before the sunset 4) should only be negotiated by staff not volunteers

Currently pulling images and videos off of CDs and DVDs, 2004-2012, getting about 20% not-legible discs. Rookie numbers we can get those numbers up

We’ve marched through file cabinets, hierarchies, networks, and relational models in History of the Database. Today we’re at NoSQL! miriamposner.com/classes/is29...

Every couple of years the same article comes about about an ambitious information storage mechanism. Like 7 years ago it was etched nickel plates getting shot onto the moon: "the civilizational backup disk". There's no reason to debase ourselves thinking through moronic ideas

Glad to have spent time with clerk of session Stephanie Cox and pastor Alice Ogden Bell of Fifteenth St PC Washington DC, home of Henry Highland Garnet, Robert Pierre Johnson and so many other Black Presbyterian lights

Glad to put my man Gene in the News Service pcusa.org/news-storyte...

Currently playing back a tape from 1956

Message from Snoopy, on Palestinian child's shirt at "Baptist-run school in Jerusalem" digital.history.pcusa.org/islandora/35...

Hah, yes, it drives me crazy that immediately before that sentence it says "Digital search offers disintermediated discovery" and then invokes intermediating algorithms. In a similar vein, there's Hitchcock 2013, "Confronting the Digital" www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Putnam (2018) looks terrible tbh.

This is about right, the apparent sudden viability of HTR is like discovering you have a cool new sword. I don't think it's going to reshape the scholarly landscape tho lol

I don't have my notes in front of me but basically, because he had an American passport he spent a week in Hong Kong and called up all the participants using someone else's phone card

While we are discoursing about "opsec" I'm reminded of David Gelzer, setting up an officially banned ecumenical conference in Taiwan under the noses of the KMT

I'm reading and writing about Taiwan under martial law and the phrase "regime newspapers -- there was no other kind" made me think of the Washington Post

Many are saying this, more and more

Sorry to hear that Princeton Seminary Library chose Summon by Ex Libris for its new library discovery layer. A very gentle way of opposing the genocidal state is not buying its software

I know that dude

Good work here from my colleagues in the PC(USA) mothership pcusa.org/news-storyte...

Prospectus for the UPCUSA Frontier Internship in Mission, 1963, from RG 527 papers of Margaret Flory -- note the hammer and sickle closing in on the space needle-looking minaret and its crescent

Hey, you want to see something disgusting

We are at the APCE Annual Event this week! Come by, say hello, and grab some stickers. 🤩

Oh that is an attractive picture of files 🗃️

Looking an interview with David Gelzer (RIP) where, in 1975 the government of Taiwan castigates the PC of Taiwan for one of its statements, and says "the business of the church is to take care of spiritual things, put your mind inside the building of the church" app.trint.com/public/2514d...

A year later, AHA leadership rolls out the same language about "fiduciary responsibility", like who wrote the script?

I like the young person walking away from the camera, in this 1960s church picnic in Grand Rapids, Mich

Outstanding production work by my main man Randy on this video combining PHS's two oral histories with Eugene Turner, African American Presbyterian bureaucrat pcusa.org/news-storyte...

It's interesting when this happens: Idaho church asks the archives if they have anything on itself, 1984

Rev Boyd and family of Montpelier, Idaho

*hacker voice* I'm in

Surely! when JD was petulantly making vague noises about keeping his archives closed, surely he was remembering Oedipus at Colonus, where the dying man tells Theseus, "Actually no I don't like your disciplinary processes and so I refuse to die here, come on Antigone let's pack it up and move on"

Anybody got the PDF of this,, for me 😇

So one thing bothers me: If the collection had its original folders and order, and it wasn't being reordered / weeded / altered by the researcher, just folders were being numbered, notes being taken, in what sense was it "not catalogued"

agree with this thread and reminds me of a historian I knew who thought archivists were witless bureaucrats because they wouldn’t let him rearrange a processed collection into an order more guided by his particular research query

Hard to say what went on here, but at least it's a story about how archivists are just prissy gatekeepers about things like handwriting and folder labeling, and Readers are the real professionals.

My shop had a hand in supporting the return of a Kiks.ádi object this year, and I got to write about the collecting habits of Sheldon Jackson, and frankly the amateurish practices of East Coast museums in the 20th c pcusa.org/news-storyte...

Going to give a little care to some 100-year old photos. Had been stapled to basic cardboard

My shop had a hand in supporting the return of a Kiks.ádi object this year, and I got to write about the collecting habits of Sheldon Jackson, and frankly the amateurish practices of East Coast museums in the 20th c pcusa.org/news-storyte...

Incoming agricultural missions content alert! Photos from Pakistan, 1990s, including parade float dedicated to corn/maize. Collection of Ann and Richard Rowe

I'm not obsessive over this kind of thing (texts exist for use) but consarnit

In December 1969, after about 8 months of campaigning for reparations from American Protestant churches, James Forman came to the NCCC General Assembly in Detroit. PHS has tapes of the event pcusa.org/news-storyte...

Man I go away for a couple days and whammo 📦 🗃

Yeah, I tried it yesterday on one of the hardest 19th-c hands I know (obscure DC socialite who has a few transcribed letters up on our site, but not a ton). It did shockingly well! Of course, then I tried throwing a handwritten Yiddish letter at it, and it confidently spouted nonsense

Idk that's pretty interesting gemini.google.com/share/11f25c...

The Unification Commission voted Thursday to recommend to the 227th General Assembly (2026) that in-person gatherings of the 228th General Assembly be hosted by el Presbiterio de San Juan in San Juan, Puerto Rico, from June 11-22, 2028. Read more: pcusa.org/news-storyte... #PCUSA

Just in alongside records of Chapel Lane PC Midland MI, receipts from my shop for their 1980 and 1997 deposits of records

Whoa thank you First Presbyterian Church Morgantown for lending space to APBP, so cool

Lord forgive me, I'm about to go back to the old me (read Gerald Ham again)

Anyway, as my constituents do their own long historical unpackings, I keep saying You should feel joy! You can make a contribution to a world of justice and wisdom! Do that