It’s mid-week, with the grand History and Heritage Extravaganza (the 2009 NW Archivist joint conference) looming on the horizon and a lot of archives instruction happening this week! What to do? A blog post full of links to keep you all busy reading!

The World Digital Library will launch on April 21, 2009

The World Digital Library will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research.

The History Engine: Tools for Collaborative Education & Research

The History Engine is an educational tool that gives students the opportunity to learn history by doing the work—researching, writing, and publishing—of a historian. The result is an ever-growing collection of historical articles or “episodes” that paints a wide-ranging portrait of life in the United States throughout its history and that is available to scholars, teachers, and the general public in our online database. Learn more!

Adair Village Blockhouse: witness to the Cold War, Adv07-08, OR: Who can resist this teaser?

Right in the middle of Adair Village squats a massive, rectilinear pile of concrete. Unmarked and nearly windowless, its perimeter guarded by a cyclone fence topped with three strands of barbed wire, the three-story structure known locally as “the Blockhouse” is a weird sort of contradiction? it’s the biggest thing for miles around, but it’s so utterly featureless that it seems to blend into the background, going almost unnoticed by the steady stream of motorists flowing past on Highway 99W. Today it stands cold, dark and silent. But flash back a half-century, and the Blockhouse was a concrete beehive called SAGE, its corridors filled with men and its rooms crammed with electronic surveillance equipment that constantly scanned the skies. The building was a sentinel standing watch against the looming threat of nuclear annihilation… Read more!

OHSU Historical Collections and Archives celebrates National Public Health Week!

It’s that time of year again: magnolias blooming, grass growing, and folks whooping it up for the annual celebration known as National Public Health Week! Check out their resources …