First bulk upload to Wikimedia Commons a success thanks to emerging public historians

On November 23, 2020, the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections contributed several digitized historical maps to Wikimedia Commons, an online repository of free images and other media. With these scans later embedded into Wikipedia articles, the maps are now viewed nearly 2.4 million times per year.
Students enrolled in visiting professor and course director Gilberto [...]

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York archivists host virtual class visit for international development students

Originally published in yFile: York University’s News.
The York University Libraries’ Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections (CTASC) hosted its first-ever virtual class visit on May 27 with Professor Miguel Gonzalez’s SOSC 3800 Development Studies Research Methods course, part of the International Development Studies program in the Department of Social Science.
For the past several years, Gonzalez [...]

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Recently described acquisitions

The following archival records have recently been processed, described, and are now available for researcher access!

The Abbott Ferguson Productions Ltd. fonds documents the creative and business aspects of several radio and television shows, predominantly the Royal Canadian Air Farce comedy troupe which aired on CBC from 1973 to 2019.
The records of Professor Stephen Lyon Endicott [...]

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Crowdsourcing the transcription of digitized archival records

Increasingly, researchers who use primary source materials hope their research can be done remotely through the use of digitized copies of archival records.  However, simply providing access to these digital surrogates is not always enough to optimize their utility for research. Though optical character recognition (OCR) technologies, under ideal circumstances, can do fairly well to [...]

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