The Women in Science website is a new digital media archive that uses KORA, MATRIX’s digital repository application, to deliver text access to the written works of several women scientists, including the works of the marquise Du Châtelet, and biographies written by leading historians of science.

The website is available through the participation and support of the MSU Department of History, the MSU Lyman Briggs College, and the MSU Libraries.

To visit the Women in Science website, visit http://womeninscience.history.msu.edu/

To learn about KORA, visit http://www2.matrix.msu.edu/kora/

On July 17, Lisa Schmidt, electronic records archivist at MATRIX, attended “Managing the Digital University Desktop,” a Society of American Archivists (SAA) workshop held at the Kellogg Hotel & Conference Center on the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing. Duke University archivist Timothy D. Pyatt led the workshop, which focused on research results and subsequently developed electronic records training tools from the joint University of North Carolina-Duke University Managing the Digital University Desktop (MDUD) project. Practical strategies on training university employees how to manage e-mail and other electronic records were discussed, as well as general issues related to the management of active electronic records. Staff from the MSU Archives and other departments across campus attended, along with archivists and librarians from Wayne State University, Hope College, and the University of Illinois. This workshop was part of a series presented by the Michigan State University Archives and Historical Collections in honor of its 40th anniversary.

At the second digital curation curriculum symposium of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina (April 1-3), Lisa M. Schmidt, MATRIX’s electronic records archivist, will be presenting the poster “Preserving Electronic Mailing Lists: The H-Net Archive.” DigCCurr 2009: Digital Curation Practice, Promise and Prospects is part of the Preserving Access to Our Digital Future: Building an International Digital Curation Curriculum (DigCCurr) project. DigCCurr is a three-year (2006-2009), Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded collaboration between SILS and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The symposium includes presentations on approaches to developing a graduate-level digital curation curricular framework as well as recent research in the field of digital preservation.

View poster (ppt)
View poster abstract (doc)

The John Snow Archive and Research Companion has been updated from its original XHTML format to use KORA. Our content manager, Peter Vinten-Johansen, can now ingest and deliver digital texts, images, and their corresponding metadata through KORA. All items within Snow’s Works, Snow’s Contemporaries, Interpretive Studies, and the Bibliography section are displayed from KORA and searchable through the online Document Search.

To read more about John Snow, visit http://matrix.msu.edu/~johnsnow

To learn about KORA, visit http://www2.matrix.msu.edu/kora/

The article “Preserving the H-Net Academic Electronic Mail Lists” by MATRIX’s Electronic Records Archivist Lisa M. Schmidt has been published online as a Society of American Archivists Campus Case Study. To view this article visit http://www.archivists.org/publications/epubs/CampusCaseStudies/casestudies/Case11-Schmidt.pdf.

This article is part of a MATRIX project with H-Net to preserve and improve access to H-Net’s specialized electronic mailing list archives. More information on this project can be found at http://www.h-net.org/archive/.

To view other articles published by MATRIX staff, visit our Publications and Presentations page.

MATRIX and the MSU African Studies Center have launched the redesigned and expanded African Activist Archive website. The more than 1300 photographs, posters, historical documents, political buttons, T-shirts, and streaming audio and video are a strong beginning at documenting the U.S. movement supporting freedom and justice in Africa, especially Southern Africa. The project is preserving records and memories of activism on Africa during the past 50 years and welcomes people with materials and personal remembrances to add them to the online archive.

KORA 1.0.0 has been released. This full version release includes bug fixes from the KORA 1.0.0-beta release and additional features, including fixity checking and enhanced documentation.

You can obtain KORA 1.0.0 from sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=212072

MATRIX and African Studies Center at Michigan State University hosted a ribbon cutting Friday May 2, 2008 at the Kellogg Hotel & Conference Center in honor of their recently launched websites Overcoming Apartheid and Community Video Education Trust.

Among the guests was MSU Trustee, Melanie Foster, who spoke on MSU’s dual missions of African studies and digital humanities. Trustee Foster described the work as “…interdisciplinary research, scholarship, and outreach at its best.”

Yusef Omar, previous South African Consul General in Chicago, spoke of the importance or recording memories and teaching about the struggle against apartheid. Omar is interviewed on the Overcoming Apartheid website.

Both websites contribute to MATRIX and African Studies Center engagement of preserving and providing access to materials about the struggle for freedom and democracy in Africa. Please browse these sites at http://overcomingapartheid.msu.edu and http://cvet.org.za

Please visit http://www.overcomingapartheid.msu.edu/promo.php to view the Overcoming Apartheid promotional video.

Included in photo (from left to right; click on photo to enlarge): Jeffrey Riedinger, Dean of MSU’s International Studies and Programs; Satish Udpa, Dean of MSU’s College of Engineering; Melanie Foster, MSU Trustee; Yusef Omar, former South African Counsul General in Chicago, IL; Mark Kornbluh, MATRIX Director; and David Wiley, MSU’s African Studies Center Director

MATRIX received the Excellence Award in Interdisciplinary Scholarship from the Michigan State University Chapter of The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi at their annual initiation ceremony and banquet held at the Kellogg Center on Saturday April 19, 2008. The award was for MATRIX’s contribution to a variety of disciplines including research in digital archiving with projects that have a significant societal impact. Please see the Overcoming Apartheid and American Black Journal for examples of this work.

Since 1927, the MSU Chapter of The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi has been working to promote the pursuit of excellence in all fields of higher education. For more information, please visit their website at http://pkp.msu.edu/

Included in photo (from left to right): Wayne Dyksen, MATRIX Associate Director; Burton A. Bargerstock, The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi President; Mark Kornbluh, MATRIX Director