The Need for Reed

YouTube – The Need for Reed I – Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The International Dialects Of English Archive

Marry got married  and wished us all a merry Christmas. Anyone from New York will tell you that the three M-words above are all pronounced differently.

Yinz know what I’m talking about?

IDEA – The International Dialects Of English Archive.

…

Maps!

Maps! Maps! Maps!

We love the strangemaps blog, so coming across MAPCO (via the always-excellent Metafilter) really brightened up our Monday.

Rad aerial of Gallipoli inside.

Frida Kahlo Archive Drama

The LATimes‘ Christopher Knight reports on the archive of the “magnetic, self-mythologizing” Frida, little-known and drama enducing.

Nudity? In an ART MUSEUM?

“Public lewdness” at the Met gets us all hot and bothered about nudity in museums. Bodies and art after the jump.

National Geographic Archives Cracked

The New York Times reveals that the National Geographic Society is entertaining the idea of opening up its archive of more than 11 million images to the fine-art market for the first time.

Atlas Obscura

We’d turned off our twitter, ignored our to-blog bookmarks, and generally gotten-the-fuck-outta-dodge when erstwhile SD contributor JC sent us a link to a new project from some old favorites. It’s Atlas Obscura, a wiki-like compendium of the odd by the…

thanks and you’re welcome

A big SD welcome to our newest contributor, Laura, coming at us LIVE from Austin Texas. Her first post, KEEP OFF THE ART, is below. Welcome Laura. We look forward to more Museum reviews and generally droppin’ the Library Science.

rip judith krug

Judith Krug, Librarian Superhero, passed away on Saturday. Per the Times Obit, she fought against banned books since the 1960s, defending the public’s right to read and access “Huckleberry Finn,” “Mein Kampf,” “Little Black Sambo,” “Catcher in the Rye,” and sex manuals. More recently, she fought against restricting children’s access to the internet.

Thank you, Judith Krug. We are sure you will be missed.

chew on this

An enlightening documentation of the archival restoration process of a collection of old paper materials, in this case, the Chew Family Papers, from maps to scraps. Here’s a rundown:

Dry Clean / Surface Clean – Use vulcanized rubber sponge and strip yourself of all emotion!

Humidify and Flatten – Use a Flattening Press, not an old dictionary!

Wash – Make sure the Ink is not water soluble!

Mend – Especially necessary when somebody has CHEWED your paper. OK sorry. Wheatpaste, not just for street artists like Swoon.

retrograde design

Patty is one of our favorite commenters. (Why aren’t you one of our favorite commenters? Maybe because you don’t comment? Please comment!) Weirdly enough we came home the other night to find her in our living room. We don’t normally encourage this from our commenters, but in this case it turns out she’s a friend and a colleague of our museum-employee roommate. So that’s cool. We didn’t even know we knew her (like knew knew her) and we were gonna post her blog anyway, so here it is: Retrograde Design. Keep it up, Patty. We hope you don’t mind if we steal some of your posts to bloat our own contnet. And don’t be a stranger.

oldest photo ever of new york ever

We handled a few prints of ancient NYC photos at a gig once and that was scary/sexy/cool. Makes us wish we could get our hands on this, a daguerrotype which claims to be the oldest known photographic image of NYC. It’s Broadway, can’t you tell?