Vancouver Archives, UK Web crawling, Preserving Virtual Worlds, Yamasaki Associates records

Just a few things that have flown over the transom as of late:

• The City of Vancouver Archives is soon going to have a fully functioning digital archive that makes use of the open source Archivematica digital archiving system. It's also actively reaching out to the open source/hacker community, which it sees as an emerging user group for its datasets and other electronic records. This is pretty cool -- to the best of my knowledge, no one in the American archival community is really seeking to find out how the coding community wants to make use of archival data. (If I'm overlooking someone, please let me know!)

• The online UK edition of Wired recently posted a great article outlining the copyright and other legal challenges that the British Library faces as it attempts to capture and preserve the nation's Web presence -- a daunting challenge in and of itself. (h/t: Resource Shelf)

• The Atlantic recently highlighted (online and in print) the fascinating work being done by the Preserving Virtual Worlds project, which seeks to preserve video games and virtual environments such as Second Life. It's really heartening to see this project, which is funded by the Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program, get this sort of media attention.
  

• This (probably) doesn't have much to do with electronic records, but I really want to commend my colleagues at the Archives of Michigan for taking quick, decisive action to save the records of the now-defunct architectural firm of Yamasaki Associates. The firm was founded by Minoru Yamasaki, who designed, among many other important buildings, the World Trade Center complex in New York City and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's National Personnel Records Center (Military Personnel Records) in St. Louis, Missouri, which suffered a devastating fire in 1973. Kudos Michigan State Archivist Dave Harvey and all of the Michigan state government personnel and Society of Architectural Historians administrators who helped to save the firm's records. They were given less than a day to do so, and they rose to the challenge spectacularly well.