Mark Custer

Last call for proposals for New England Archivists Spring 2024 Meeting! Proposals due on 11/17th.

New feature! ✨ You can now flip images horizontally while transcribing. Use it to read reversed text or to make a cephalopod dance. 🦑

"Dearest Dorothea - Here is the voice of your Cecilia - Can you recognize it? ... Tell me your news and what you are about inside would you?" 💌 Read personal letters between artist Cecelia Beaux and her lifelong partner Dorothea Gilder: s.si.edu/3INc18c #SmithsonianPride

Yale is about to launch a new Linked Data based research and discovery tool across all of our libraries, archives and museums. Stay tuned ... but here's me talking about it for the cameras this morning! #YaleLUX

#Volunpeer Jennie Caughran has transcribed 140K+ #FreedmensBureau records since 2018. 🤩 Last year, she visited @NMAAHC to see some of these documents displayed in the exhibition "Make Good the Promises: Reconstruction and Its Legacies." Read her story: torch.si.edu/2023/04/volunt….

Alma Thomas dedicated herself to painting after retiring from a 38-year career as a public school art teacher in Washington, D.C. She painted this work, “Earth Sermon – Beauty, Love And Peace,” in 1971, in her 80s.

#BeforetheEuro resumes with Spain, which was part of the first group of countries to adopt the Euro in 2002. Before this date, the Spanish currency was the peseta, which lasted for 134 years @ArchivosEst holds the original docs on the new monetary system archivesportaleurope.net/advanced-searc…

The papers of Max Cole are currently being processed. The collection contains photographs, interviews, gallery files, over 300 digital discs, and other records detailing Cole’s 60-year career. 🎨 #SmithsonianWHM #WomensHistoryMonth

Andddddd....we're back! The Transcription Center site — with some new features and improvements — is up and running again. Thank you for all your patience! Learn more about what's changed: transcription.si.edu/articles/were-….

Astronomer Annie Jump Cannon revolutionized our understanding of the universe. In 1901, she developed a classification system for stars based on their temps and spectral types. ✨ #TDIH 1912, Cannon observed a star with "strong metallic lines:" s.si.edu/3ZPxDqH. #WHM

Next up in the #MysteriesOfTheArchivesOfAmericanArt where we identify unknown figures in photographs across the Archives collections: Join us in solving this mystery—scroll for more info! 🕵️‍♂️🔎❔

Want to learn more about using controlled vocabularies for subjects, places, persons, etc. mentioned in / related to your archival documents? Then this webinar series by @archivists_org's Description Section and TS-EAS is for you: bit.ly/3L8ZGgA

@meau_takes I'm giving up on finding it now, but I seem to remember a paper that brought together a variety of pre-AT / pre-PDF templates, and those examples were very similar to the following: sustainableheritagenetwork.org/system/files/a…, archives.nysed.gov/common/archive…, and archives.nysed.gov/common/archive….

@meau_takes I swear that I’ve stumbled across an article before that assembled a sample of paper-based accession template forms for comparison. Have you seen that? That report seemed to me to be an influence on the Archivists’ Toolkit. I’ll try to rediscover it and share a citation next week

Archives oldheads -- I believe that our mental model for documenting accessions is bound to the data model created by Archivists’ Toolkit and ported to ArchivesSpace. But I’m having the hardest time finding AT documentation of why they chose the elements they did. Suggestions?

This team at Smithsonian is amazing, and growing. Feel free to DM me for more info... Director of Data Analytics and Insights Public Announcement: usajobs.gov/job/699532500 Fed Only Announcement: usajobs.gov/job/699532800

Check out the latest @archivists_org Descriptive Notes Blog post "Updates to EAC-CPF 2.0: A Webinar Recap" by EAS section member James Truitt: saadescription.wordpress.com/2023/01/10/upd…

@wikidata I'm just shy of celebrating my fourth #WikidataBirthday. First edit was to update a SNAC identifier. See wikidata.org/w/index.php?ti…. To celebrate, I just read Georgia Douglass Johnson's poem Gossamer, which - perhaps fittingly in relation to wikis - ends with "cob-webs of the dawn"

In what year did you start editing #Wikidata? What was the first thing you were involved in? #WikidataBirthday

Tom Feelings b. #OTD Here: I saw your face: text by @kwamedawes; drawings by Tom Feelings bit.ly/2zfqyc6 Tom Feelings Artwork @YCAL_JWJ bit.ly/2LF8yNU

Happy 125th birthday, Thornton Wilder! Finding aid to the Thornton Wilder Papers: bit.ly/2srRRZR

@melibeus1 @BeineckeLibrary Happy Easter -- and what a collection of Easter Eggs (wikidata.org/wiki/Q330574), indeed! Also, here's a direct link to that photograph, collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/200428… Or, using some of the fun features of IIIF, here's another zoomed-in view of that same feature : collections.library.yale.edu/iiif/2/1019990…