Archives

Rising over the battered surface of the moon, Earth loomed in a shimmering arc covered in a swirling skin of clouds. The image, taken in 1966 by NASA's robotic probe Lunar Orbiter 1, presented a stunning juxtaposition of planet and moon that no earthling had ever seen before. It was dubbed the Picture of the Century. "The most beautiful thing I'd ever seen," remembered Keith Cowing, who saw it as an 11-year-old and credited it with eventually luring him to work for NASA.

Twelve years after a Silver Lake man died, his pharmacy receipts and medical bills sit in a Los Angeles archive with a hand-written message declaring: "The Cost of AIDS." In a San Francisco library, a massive photo collection capturing the exuberance of gay liberation in the 1970s and its tragic collision with AIDS fills many cartons.

As part of the "William Hearst, Marion Davies and Hollywood" series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Blaine Bartell, senior newsreel preservationist at UCLA Film and Television Archive, will present a series of restored examples from the Hearst Metrotone News Collection at UCLA on Saturday evening. "Hearst was in partnership with the Fox corporation in order to have access to the sound-on-film technology," Bartell said.

Starting today, people looking to track ancestors who emigrated from British ports will be able to search online passenger lists of the ships that carried them to new lands. Released by Britain's National Archives, the passenger manifests give an insight into long-distance trips made by 30 million travelers between 1890 and 1960. Only the first decade will be available to start. The records are available at findmypast.com, a website licensed by the archives.

The Autry National Center has received a $340,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitally catalog 15,000 California Indian objects. The two-year project, to be announced Monday, will deal with ethnographic objects, archeological artifacts and sound recordings collected by the Southwest Museum, which merged with the Autry in 2003. "This grant fits very well with two of our initiatives," NEH Chairman Bruce Cole said on a recent visit to the Autry.

The battle for control of a dead French philosopher's archives took another odd turn last week when UC Irvine officials said they had revived their lawsuit against his widow -- at her request. The school has been wrangling with the heirs of Jacques Derrida, the founder of an influential philosophy called deconstruction, for more than two years. In November, UCI sued Derrida's estate in federal court, a move that infuriated his admirers at the school and beyond.

In 2005, the Getty Research Institute purchased the vast archives of Los Angeles photographer Julius Shulman, noted for his documentation of California's classic Modernist architecture. Now the institute has acquired the archive of one of those celebrated architects, Pierre Koenig (1925-2004), whose sleek glass-and-steel structures are featured in some of Shulman's most famous photos.

Archives of the Parisian art dealer who represented Picasso, Matisse and other early French modernists will be donated to the Museum of Modern Art for scholarly research, the museum announced. The Paul Rosenberg Archives encompass "a unique assemblage of materials" for the study of early 20th century French art and for "documenting the provenance of hundreds of paintings and sculptures," MoMA said in a statement about the Rosenberg family bequest.

The British Broadcasting Corp. plans to gather what it says will be the largest-ever archive of films, photographs and personal accounts from every human group on the planet -- and put it all online. The BBC is calling on universities, anthropologists and social historians to contribute material to its "Dictionary of Man," which it says will provide the most complete picture of humankind ever assembled.

While imprisoned in Dachau in 1938, Herbert Zipper spent 12 mind-numbing hours a day pushing a cart loaded with heavy stones. To buoy his spirits and those of other inmates, the Viennese intellectual composed a militant anti-Nazi anthem and secretly conducted a small orchestra in an unused latrine. Even amid the soul-depleting humiliation and misery of the notorious German concentration camp, he realized that music could bring life-affirming joy.