Civil War Widows' Pensions Digitization Project

The National Archives preserves 1.28 million Civil War Widows' Pension applications within its holdings. Currently, a team of more than sixty volunteers are working hard at sorting, preparing, and scanning the files for digital access (they recently just passed number 100,000). The files provide a wealth of information for history and genealogy researchers. The link below is a wonderful video explaining the project:

http://youtu.be/rWV9ObQUDRc

Facebook Timeline

Facebook is not without controversy, and it's new Timeline feature is no exception (What is Facebook Timeline?).  But, as an archivist, I'm intrigued by its possibilities.

From digital camera pictures to status updates and tweets, we produce a stream of digital content almost daily.  Facebook Timeline will offer users the opportunity to give that content context and place it in a dynamic, searchable, chronology - much like a scrapbook of analog photographs, letters, and clippings.  This is one of the first large scale attempts at creating such a repository for users.

I look forward to seeing it in practice!