Happy Blog Action Day 2010! (If you don’t know what Blog Action Day is, check out their website). This year’s issue is water. At first I thought this would be a very difficult topic to connect to libraries and archives. I mean I could go the standard green technology route and talk about informing our patrons about water conservation, etc., but that has been done a lot. (Not that it isn’t important.) Then I thought I could talk about the danger of water damage to archival materials, but I thought that would be quite a downer for a Blog Action Day post. So I decided to instead focus on two archives that deal with water.
The Colorado State University Water Resources Archive is a “joint effort of the University Libraries and the Colorado Water Institute. I thought the layout of the results page from searching the digital objects was very well done. I just wish that non-CSU affiliated users could use the my favorites feature, although there was an amazing list of bookmarking sites linked into the records. Plus, the records had links for EndNote and EndNote Web which is just awesome. I had issues searching the finding aids, but that could just be a fluke. The list of collections is completely usable as are the lovely EAD-encoded finding aids. Definitely one of the more sensibly designed archives’ websites and results lists that I’ve seen on the web.
The Water Resource Center Archives has been at UC Berkeley, but as of today it is suspending services during its move to UC Riverside and CSU San Bernardino. You can check out the blog post detailing the move and timeline here. Also, the On Water blog is just a great resource for “news, research, and current events on all aspects of water resources.” Luckily for us, while the physical archives are moving down to SoCal, the digital resources are still accessible via the UCB site and the Online Archive of California.
And, because, I mean really how else was I going to end this post? Here is an amazing mash-up trailer by Seduff using clips from The Waters of Mars and The End of Time.
Have a fantastic weekend, full of relaxing, reading, helping others, and making sure your water filters are working. The Waki Librarian will be back next week.