National Cinema Center of Armenia and... Constitutional Court

As a big film fan, I am all excited with the launch of “promising” cinema related online projects. And it was with the excitement that I started exploring the website for the National Cinema Center of Armenia.

Boy, I was in for a surprise.

Have a look at this screenshot and remember which website you are looking at. Spotted anything bizarre or unusual for the occasion? I thought so too.

Why on earth under the Links section are links... to the president’s, parliament’s, government’s and constitutional court’s (!) websites is beyond me.

I understand that the website is still ‘under construction’. But would not you expect to see cinema and art related links when you enter the National Cinema Center of Armenia? You would not necessarily search for the Constitutional Court of Armenia there, would you?

Interestingly, they were in such a hurry to put those websites in, that they forgot the most relevant one - Ministry of Culture’s. Oh my...

Searching "Armenia" in Google's newspaper archives

Last September, Google announced its plans to digitalise the content of newspapers and make their archives accessible and searchable. One year on, Google blog posts about "quadrupling the number of articles included in News Archive Search". Astonishingly, they now include for example a searchable content of "complete June 2, 1753 edition of the Halifax Gazette, one of the oldest newspapers we've digitized to date."

I tried searching "Armenia" using News Archive Search. This search returns archives of selected newspapers back to 1 January 1750 ("Memoirs of the house of Brunswick"). I find this amazing, having a huge potential for research or everyday use, even if for curiosity and fun. And this is only the beginning...

For now, it mainly includes a content from such publications as the New York Times etc. I hope, in time we'll see an archived accessible and searchable content of Armenian publications there too.

Burnt archives

The building of Ministry of Justice in Armenia has been burnt down this morning. It may be pure accident - fire, nothing more, but with all those burnt archives and documents there are only rhetorical questions to ask...

*source of photo: A1+