In a press release Wednesday, the Librarian of Congress announced a fantastic new project to digitize selected books from the collection:

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today announced that the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded the Library of Congress a $2 million grant for a program to digitize thousands of public-domain works, with a major focus on at-risk “brittle books” and U.S. history volumes.

The project, “Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress,” will include not only the scanning of volumes, but also the development of suitable page-turner display technology, capability to scan and display foldouts, and a pilot program to capture high-level metadata, such as table of contents, chapters/sections and index …

“ÀúDigitizing American Imprints' will make a major contribution to the collective body of knowledge that is accessible worldwide, further democratizing the information that is a key to functional societies and economies,” Dr. Billington said…

Among the items to be scanned are some of particular interest to Civil War historians including rare regimental histories, memoirs, and diaries as well as selections from the Confederate States of America Collection.

You’ll notice that the LoC will not be charging the public for access to this material, nor was a sell-out “partnership” with a commercial outfit required to obtain the resources to make it possible. This is worth crowing about. Some creative thinking and financing has gone into this effort and it ought to be rewarded.

All hail the Library of Congress and the folks at the Sloan Foundation.

I love Akismet. It’s very good at identifying comment spam and putting it to one side for me to review later. But my needs have been modest: it took more than 8 months for Akismet to trap the first 2,000 spam comments to this blog.

Then some invisible switch was thrown or critical mass reached out there in the dark underworld where these spammers live. In December I began to see between one and three hundred attempts per day, each one eating bandwidth and server resources. I couldn’t keep up, and as they arrived in bursts I saw performance problems.

So I added Bad Behavior to my arsenal. It doesn’t just quarantine spam, it blocks most of it outright – it never hits my server or database. Since I installed Bad Behavior a week ago only 5 spam attempts (out of 1100) got through to Akismet for my attention.

My life is my own again.

This is a picture taken June 6, 1936 in the cemetary at Winchester on decoration day.
I [George Dellinger] am in uniform X. The other one is Daniel Miller, a Confederate vet,
now in his 100th year. I am in my 92nd year (from the back of the photo)

George Dellinger, formerly of Company D, 23rd Virginia Cavalry, sent this photograph to the Hagerstown (Md.) Historical Society in response to a US Antietam Celebration Commission questionnaire. The Commission organized the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of that momentous battle at Sharpsburg, Maryland on 17 September 1937, and had canvassed surviving Civil War veterans for their memories and present circumstances.

This and other photos, along with letters of reply from many of the veterans, are now online at one of two new exhibits created by the folks at the Western Maryland Historical Library. (more…)

This afternoon, thanks to Google’s blogsearch, I came upon something I haven’t seen before: a DIY instant history website.

Wethersfield in the Civil War is apparently brand new from someone at the Wethersfield (Connecticut) Historical Society and looks like a transcription of the work of one Wes Christensen. The site is hosted on Blogger and currently contains 42 posts, almost all dated 14 December. Some are placeholder pages, so perhaps this is just the beginning, but it’s already a complete, if bare-bones, website.

Most of the posts are listings–for each Regiment or Battery–of the men from Wethersfield who served in the War. Some of these include summaries or anecdotes of the unit’s service. Included is a table of contents which links to all the posts.

16th CT at Antietam
from ANBP

Atypical is the lengthy introduction, which makes particular note of the 16th Connecticut Infantry, one of the many green regiments so badly hurt at Antietam on 17 September 1862.

Aspiring digital historians could take a lesson here. Do you want to get a lot of information up on the web in a hurry with the minimum technical investment and no cost? Consider basic free blogging like Blogger or WordPress. Quick and painless.

It would be a good way to get your feet wet, anyway.

In mid-2003 I completely reworked Antietam on the Web, dropping unmanageable static HTML and using a new database to store the contents. To create and deliver that content I built a rudimentary Content Management System (CMS) in PHP. Today I’d download a ready-made CMS and customize it to suit rather than build my own. No need to reinvent that wheel.

In October I volunteered to build a new website with/for an organization engaged in a good cause related to the Civil War. Among other things, their site will be updated by non-web people, so I think an off-the-shelf CMS will be a good foundation for the project.

About a month into development, here’s how it’s going … (more…)