This is huge, or potentially so. Yahoo! has launched what they are calling an "electronic anthropology project"—a digital time capsule of images, stories, video, audio, and artwork, all submitted by Yahoo! users. As of this posting, the project has collected more than 4000 objects from nearly 3000 people in just over a day. When the capsule closes on November 8th, the collection will be transfered for long term preservation with the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings project. Until then you can explore it through a very cool Flash interface. By any measure this a very welcome expansion of the practice of online collecting ... even if Yahoo!'s claim that "this is the first time that digital data will be gathered and preserved for historical purposes" is patently and outrageously false.
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