News

NY State Archives' Name & Website Changed

It used to be "New York State Archives and Records Administration," but the bit about records administration has been dropped, although presumably the Archives will go on administering records as it has in the past. The new web address is http://www.archives.nysed.gov/. The address and telephone remain the same: Cultural Education Center, Albany, NY 12230 (518-474-6926).

The Met Gets a State-Of-The-Art Paper & Photo Lab

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has a million works of art on paper and related substrates, including ancient Egyptian papyrus, Old Master and contemporary drawings and prints, old and new photographs, Southeast Asian paintings, Islamic miniatures, and medieval illuminations on parchment. A new 8,000-square-foot conservation laboratory has been planned for the last five years, and is scheduled to open in January 2001. It will be called the "Sherman Fairchild Center for Works on Paper and Photograph Conservation," to honor the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, Inc., which provided a major grant to make it possible.

The area dedicated to photography is partially funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and is designed to support teaching and research functions.

Majorie Shelley is Sherman Fairchild Conservator in Charge, and Nora Kennedy is Sherman Fairchild Conservator of Photographs. The New center staff consists of nine conservators and two installers; work is also done by interns, visiting conservators, Mellon Fellows, and pre-program volunteers.

NISO Standards are Now Free on the Web

All National Information Standards Organization (NISO) standards and technical reports are now available for free in downloadable pdf files from the NISO website (http://www.niso.org/), according to an announcement in Information Standards Quarterly for October 2000, on p. 10. Customers can choose to download the pdf file or purchase a hard copy by going to the NISO website and clicking on the NISO Press icon. This downloads it to your desktop.

NISO's chair, Don Muccino, says, "NISO is making its standards freely available to support the widest possible dissemination of its publications. Free distribution and easy access to our standards support implementation." This new NISO service is made possible by NISO's voting members and the libraries supporting the NISO Standards Forum.

This means that two preservation standards which were at press in October may be on the Web even now: Z39.77-2001, "Preservation Product Information," and Z39.79-2001, "Environmental Conditions for the Exhibition of Library Materials."

Apply for the Carolyn Horton Fund Award

This award, administered by the Foundation of the AIC (FAIC) is offered annually to support continuing education or training for professional book and paper conservators. One must be a member of AIC's Book and Paper Group in order to qualify. The amount of the award varies with need. Deadline: February 1, 2001. Write to Carolyn Horton Fund, FAIC, 1717 K St. NW, Ste. 200, Washington, DC 20006.

Digitization Projects Funded By NEH

The National Endowment for the Humanities recently announced $5 million in grants for five information-technology projects providing high-tech solutions to humanities research problems:

A digital music library (Indiana University, Bloomington)

A cuneiform digital library (UCLA)

A classical Chinese digital database (University of Hawaii, Manoa)

A search index program for digitized collections of handwritten manuscripts (UMass, Amherst)

Creation of standards and procedures for online encyclopedias (Stanford).

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