ResearchBuzz

All work and no play makes Jack one sad rhino. When you get tired browsing through academic digital archives, check out the new Marvel Comic Vault, available at http://www.marvel.com/digitalcomics/ .

Make no bones — this is a pay site. You can pay either $4.99 a month for a year of access (that’s if you pay for a year at a time) or $9.99 a month, billed monthly. There is a sampler of 250 comics available for free, with over 2,500 comics available in the archive and about 20 titles being added every week. (The way the press release describes it, I do not get the impression that Marvel is going to try to make this an absolutely complete archive.

Oh dear, I haven’t read comics in a long time, and I don’t want to search for something obvious like Captain America. Oh, I know — how about Captain Marvel?

No, not THAT Captain Marvel. The female, African-American Captain Marvel who I think was a police officer named Monica? Wikipedia informs me that I am thinking of Monica Rambeau. I did a search for Monica Rambeau and got only four results, with what appears to be for other characters named Monica. There is a place where you can browse by character/artist names, but it appears to be available for subscribers only. A search for Jonah brought about 15 results, mostly (as you’d expect) for Spider-Man comics.

The viewer appears to be Flash-based, allowing you to page through the comics. Even if you’re not a subscriber, it looks like the first two or three pages are available. This is pretty comfortable except sometimes it takes a few minutes for the page to load (I guess the vault is rather busy at the moment.)

I’m sure I’m a bit too old — okay, dammit, way too old — for the demographic that’s being aimed for. Browsing the free samples did find some amusing offerings, like a Love Romances comic from 1960. (Who can resist the line, “Come here, you beautiful little ninny”?). If I were the demographic, however, I think I would agitate for an advanced search that allowed you to do more complex date/title/character searching and a faster load for the comics viewer…

One of the real joys of doing ResearchBuzz is learning about other people’s passion for stuff that I have never really thought about. Did I ever consider that some people love old wallpaper? Nope. Could I have imagined that there’s an online database containing information about over 4000 samples of old wallpaper? No way. But there is, and beyond that there’s a great resource that links together many old wallpapering resources.

The historic database is available at http://www.spnea.org/wallpaper/catalog/search.htm. You can leave all the search options (including year, country of origin, paper type, finish, pattern name, etc.) blank and you’ll get a list of all the samples. I did a search for handmade embossed wallpaper and got 25 results. Results are shown in a table which includes the sample’s accession number, year span (start and end), exact year (if available, and I didn’t see any that were available) and a thumbnail of the paper.

Click on the thumbnail or the accession number for more details including sample size, motif, design elements, notes, use, and provenance. Not all notes are available for all samples. Larger pictures of samples are available, but most of them were disappointing to me; too small and too dark. Just enough to show me that some of those handmade Japanese samples from the 19th century are amazing looking, but not enough detail to see how amazing.

While we’re standing around talking about historical wallpaper, let me also mention a great Web site devoted to the subject, http://www.historicwallpapering.com . This site has a huge link list of companies which sell reproductions of historic wallpaper as well as links to articles on preservation, collections of historic wallpaper, and other related topics.

I’m looking forward to the city of Toronto’s database…

Arizona State University and NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston have teamed up to make high-res scans of original Apollo flight films available online. The new archive’s available at http://apollo.sese.asu.edu .

There is a minimum amount of content available on the Web site at the moment — the project has just started and will take about three years to complete. About 36,000 images in total will be scanned, including about 600 35mm frames and about 4,600 panoramic camera frames.

You can see a preview of how the pictures are going to be scanned at http://apollo.sese.asu.edu/METRIC_PREVIEW/index.html . Each frame has a Web page, with several different sizes of images to download (I saw one original scan that was over a gig.) The frames have extensive details about where and when they were taken as well.

This is just the beginning for this archive, but one to keep an eye on.