April was a good start on spring! We had students in our secondary space to get hands-on with the Minitel collection, continued to host lots of students in the lab itself, and continued to work through our backlock of accessioning. Newly accessioned items include: a variety of early-gen FitBits, a preview of the upcoming Shift Happens by Marcin Wichary, an excellent little illustrated book titled Computers at Work and some HitClips (remember those?)
In the ongoing pursuit of further radio skills, libi & Lori have started to learn Morse code. To that end, the lab now houses 2 Morserino-32 Morse code devices, one of which has been assembled so far. They’ll allow for a variety of learning modes and for more experiments with our HAM licenses. More detailed info on them at www.morserino.info - they’re pretty great little gadgets.
Lori and libi also attended & presented at the Radio Preservation Task Force Conference at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. Lori gave a talk and mini workshop, “Media Archaeology: Preservation, Maintenance, and Repair,” and libi presented on MAL’s collections access techniques and strategies in a panel titled “Discovering and Describing New Collections”.
Last bit of business, a reminder! We have an open call for proposals for residencies. The full text of the call can be found at tinyurl.com/MALresidency and the application form can be found at tinyurl.com/MALapp2023. If you’ve got questions, or want to run an idea by us, please reach out!
We’ll leave you with this great quote from Laurie Anderson, in the piece Four Talks at the Hirshorn: “IF YOU THINK TECHNOLOGY WILL SOLVE YOUR PROBLEMS YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND TECHNOLOGY - AND YOU DONT UNDERSTAND YOUR PROBLEMS”
Cheers, friend, til next month!