It might seem as if though everything has been cancelled or postponed, but we’re happy to report Data Horde’s Summary is still up and running!
Most of the activity in the archiving community this week has been focussed on documenting live updates: news reports, scientific research, rumors on social media, government and health organization announcements just to name a few, regarding the ongoing Coronavirus outbreak.
Archive Team is constantly updating their Coronavirus page which keeps track of relevant links, some of which are especially at risk of disappearing due to company policies of shutting down “non-official” information sources https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-amazon-block-nonofficial-coronavirus-apps-from-app-stores/ .
Seeing as a lot of archivers and data-hoarders have a lot of hardware to spare, in some circles a project by the name of Folding@Home has gained a lot of attention. Led by Stanford University’s Pande Lab, the project allows volunteers to “lend” their hardware for preforming protein folding simulations. The goal here is to be able to understand how various diseases, such as the Coronavirus, behave and try to develop therapies.
In other news, the Internet Archive has received further funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) on their Community Webs project. The project aims to provide training and technical infrastructure for public libraries across the US to build “web collections” of their own, often related to the local community of a region. You can read more about it here: https://blog.archive.org/2020/03/10/community-webs-receives-additional-funding-to-further-public-library-local-history-web-collecting/
Stay tuned for next week’s summary, where we’ll hopefully see each other again same time next week at EST 9 AM!
