Otto Kelland’s Model Dories and the Digital Archives Initiative

Otto Kelland was a truly unique individual in Newfoundland. During his long life he had several careers from being a prison superintendant to being an instructor at Marine Institute. During his life Kelland made hundreds of wooden boat models. They are beautifuly hand-crafted and represented the type of watercraft used by fishermen in Newfoundland. The collection of boat models made by Otto Kelland and owned by Marine Institute made an ideal object to be digitalized. In particular the collection of dories was an ideal group to be digitized. They were housed in one cabinet and accompanied by hand-written documents describing each model. The Digital Archives Initiative (DAI) is a “gateway to the learning and research-based cultural resources held by Memorial University of Newfoundland and partnering organizations.” The DAI hosts a variety of collections which together reinforce the importance, past and present, of Newfoundland and Labrador's history and culture. I will give an oral presentation of the project followed by a demonstration of the Otto Kelland Dories exhibit on the Digital Archives Initiative (DAI) at Memorial University of Newfoundland. I will be happy to answer questions following my presentation.

As disfunções sexuais femininas no periódico Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Após o sucesso de vendas do Viagra, medicamento indicado para o tratamento da disfunção erétil, lançado em 1998, houve uma rápida proliferação de artigos, livros e encontros sobre as disfunções sexuais femininas. Desde 2000, um intenso debate sobre o envolvimento da indústria farmacêutica na produção biomédica sobre as disfunções sexuais femininas e a concomitante busca por um medicamento similar ao Viagra destinado às mulheres tem envolvido profissionais de diferentes disciplinas. Esta dissertação teve como objetivo investigar os discursos científicos sobre as disfunções sexuais femininas, através do exame dos artigos publicados no periódico Archives of Sexual Behavior, desde sua fundação, em 1971, até 2007. O periódico foi escolhido por sua legitimidade neste campo de saberes, por abranger um amplo período (36 anos) e seu caráter multidisciplinar. Pretendeu-se investigar quando, como e por quais grupos profissionais as disfunções sexuais femininas foram descritas e abordadas no periódico. No caso das chamadas disfunções sexuais, as descrições científicas, que vêm aumentando significativamente nos últimos anos, dão origem a prescrições de terapias, medicamentos, intervenções cirúrgicas, programas de educação sexual e políticas públicas. Ou seja, subjacente a esse discurso, que afirma ser empírico e imparcial, estão processos que se encontram muito além dos limites de um laboratório ou das atividades de um pesquisador. Buscou-se, assim, pensar a produção científica como produto de articulações e negociações que se desenrolam em esferas diversas, envolvendo processos culturais, sociais, econômicos e também cognitivos ou científicos, em contraposição às concepções que caracterizam a ciência como um projeto que apenas revela verdades. Para tanto, foi apresentado o contexto do surgimento de uma ciência da sexualidade, no decorrer do século XIX e, em seguida, o contexto no qual emergiram os discursos sobre as disfunções sexuais femininas, o que propiciou sua emergência naquele dado momento, o modo como foram definidas e por quem, como se articularam a processos sociais, econômicos e culturais e que transformações sofreram ao longo dos anos.

Catalogue of EAFFRO scientific archives

Besides the formal publications held in the library (books, annual reports. Journals and reprints) a considerable quantity of unpublished Information on subjects relevant to freshwater fisheries in East Africa is held on various departmental files, etc.in Jinja. This material is extremely valuable: firstly because it is usually of immediate reference to current research work at EAFFRO, and secondly because it usually exists only as original material: no other copies are available elsewhere.

Transcription of multi-genre media archives using out-of-domain data

We describe our work on developing a speech recognition system for multi-genre media archives. The high diversity of the data makes this a challenging recognition task, which may benefit from systems trained on a combination of in-domain and out-of-domain data. Working with tandem HMMs, we present Multi-level Adaptive Networks (MLAN), a novel technique for incorporating information from out-of-domain posterior features using deep neural networks. We show that it provides a substantial reduction in WER over other systems, with relative WER reductions of 15% over a PLP baseline, 9% over in-domain tandem features and 8% over the best out-of-domain tandem features. © 2012 IEEE.

When the library is located in prime real estate: a case study on the loss of space from the Duke University Medical Center Library and Archives.

The Duke University Medical Center Library and Archives is located in the heart of the Duke Medicine campus, surrounded by Duke Hospital, ambulatory clinics, and numerous research facilities. Its location is considered prime real estate, given its adjacency to patient care, research, and educational activities. In 2005, the Duke University Library Space Planning Committee had recommended creating a learning center in the library that would support a variety of educational activities. However, the health system needed to convert the library's top floor into office space to make way for expansion of the hospital and cancer center. The library had only five months to plan the storage and consolidation of its journal and book collections, while working with the facilities design office and architect on the replacement of key user spaces on the top floor. Library staff worked together to develop plans for storing, weeding, and consolidating the collections and provided input into renovation plans for users spaces on its mezzanine level. The library lost 15,238 square feet (29%) of its net assignable square footage and a total of 16,897 (30%) gross square feet. This included 50% of the total space allotted to collections and over 15% of user spaces. The top-floor space now houses offices for Duke Medicine oncology faculty and staff. By storing a large portion of its collection off-site, the library was able to remove more stacks on the remaining stack level and convert them to user spaces, a long-term goal for the library. Additional space on the mezzanine level had to be converted to replace lost study and conference room spaces. While this project did not match the recommended space plans for the library, it underscored the need for the library to think creatively about the future of its facility and to work toward a more cohesive master plan.

Catalogue of the Archives of the Marine Biological Association. Occasional Publication of the Marine Biological Association 5

A 64-page catalogue of material in the MBA Archive Collection containing details of documents, records, and personal papers relating to the history and development of the Marine Biological Association.

Testing the timing of radiocarbon-dated events between proxy archives

For interpreting past changes on a regional or global scale, the timings of proxy-inferred events are usually aligned with data from other locations. However, too often chronological uncertainties are ignored in proxy diagrams and multisite comparisons, making it possible for researchers to fall into the trap of sucking separate events into one illusionary event (or vice versa). Here we largely solve this "suck in and smear syndrome" for radiocarbon (14C) dated sequences. In a Bayesian framework, millions of plausible age-models are constructed to quantify the chronological uncertainties within and between proxy archives. We test the technique on replicated high-resolution 14C-dated peat cores deposited during the "Little Ice Age" (c. AD 1400-1900), a period characterized by abrupt climate changes and severe 14C calibration problems. Owing to internal variability in proxy data and uncertainties in age-models, these (and possibly many more) archives are not consistent in recording decadal climate change. Through explicit statistical tests of palaeoenvironmental hypotheses, we can move forward to systematic interpretations of proxy data. However, chronological uncertainties of non-annually resolved palaeoclimate records are too large for answering decadal timescale questions.

A Study of the Development of the Ability of the Archives Department of the Hudson's Bay Company to Carry Out Document Repairs

The objective of this thesis was to determine whether the establishment and operation of an archives services by the Hudson's Bay Company had an effect on the company's ability to carry out document repairs. Data collection methods included reviews of published material, archival records of the Hudson's Bay Company, and semi-structured interviews. The study found that the Hudson's Bay Company's commitment to operating a modern archives service in accordance with accepted archive administration practices had a substantial effect on its ability to carry out document repairs. The principled approach to repair, as practiced by the Public Record Office, was a major influence. A review of secondary sources placed this development squarely within the context of archival developments in 20th century England. Overall, the thesis findings add to the growing conversation about conservation history in England, in particular, archive conservation history as it occurred outside of the Public Record Office in the 20th century, by discussing how some methods of repair that were devised, adopted and extended by the Public Record Office in the 19th and 20th centuries were adopted and applied in the 20th century by a well-established business corporation.

Out of tune: the dangers of aligning proxy archives

Tuning is a widespread technique to combine, date and interpret multiple fossil proxy archives through aligning supposedly synchronous events between the archives. The approach will be reviewed by discussing a number of literature examples, ranging from peat and tephra layers to orbital tuning and d¹⁸O series from marine and ice deposits. Potential problems will be highlighted such as the dangers of circular reasoning and unrecognised chronological uncertainties, and some solutions suggested. Fossil proxy research could become enhanced if tuning were approached in a more quantitative, reliable and objective way, and especially if individual proxy archives were non-tuned and kept on independent time-scales.