A bookworm librarian, archival records, and more!
This week's newsletter will focus on libraries, archives, genealogy, and review an anime about a bookworm librarian
Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great week and Labor Day. This week’s newsletter will focus on similar topics to last week, mainly about libraries, archives, genealogy, and more. Without further ado, let me begin this newsletter, with the above image being of a disorganized library in Ascendance of a Bookworm. It’s never good when you find a library like that! It is a travesty, to say the least.
There were numerous library-related stories this past week. Hack Library School had posts about succeeding in life, flexibility, building your “professional library,” and choosing the process for your career which suits you best. Before going any further, I’d like to mention my post which looks at an anime titled Ascendance of a Bookworm, literally translated as “Ascendence of a Bookworm: I'll Stop at Nothing to Become a Librarian.” The post focuses on Myne, the bookworm librarian (and the show’s protagonist), and library classification, along with a bunch of wonderful short clips. It is a series I would recommend you watch since it will be some time before the next season airs. Apart from this, either this week or next week I’ll publish a post on Read or Die, and my review of the goth/witchy librarian in Hilda will be coming later this month too. At the same time, I read some articles this past week about student employment in academic libraries, the theft of books at the Carnegie library, how libraries are helping with mail-in voting, and a review of a book about libraries that have been lost over time. The Library of Congress had some wonderful blogposts too, whether about municipal codes, a cartographer who was a pirate, the struggle for suffrage after the passage of the 19th Amendment, flashpoints of U.S. history, and an interview with Robert Brammer of the Law Library of Congress, to name a few.
With that, I’d like to talk about some posts and news about the archives field. Archives Aware! had an interview with Annette La Rue and Adam Jeffrey, both archivists from tattoo museums while David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, talks about the digitization of archival records and honoring the staff of NARA’s National Personnel Records Center (NPRC). There were also some posts about previously released (and pre-processed) FBI files, honoring Black women within archives, the differences between internships and fellowships, and the accomplishments of the SAA in the past year as Nancy Beaumont told an annual membership meeting in early August. I’d like to point to my reprinted post about the erasure of records, digitization, and 1990s Hollywood films. Currently, I am watching The Mystic Archives of Dantalian in hopes of finding archival themes in the anime. Since “archives” is in the name of the anime, I thought it was worth a shot to watch it in hopes of archives being a major part of the anime itself. As always, suggestions for future animations or popular culture which focus on archives are welcome.
Finally, there are some posts about genealogy and other topics which deserve to be mentioned. When it comes to genealogy, the prolific Jeannette Holland Austin penned a number of posts about records of “Loyalists” (people sympathetic to the British Crown) who traveled to East Florida from 1774 to 1785 and on Ulster Scots who immigrated to America. In this same vein, I’d like to highlight my blogpost where I attempted to apply family history concepts to animation, looking at a number of individuals of some of my favorite shows, the companies that make those shows, where those shows are shown, and so on. It’s pretty fascinating! If all goes well, I’ll publish a post about Zaphod’s cousin in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy this week or next week. I am excited about the upcoming third season of Carmen Sandiego, where Carmen, an international master thief, will likely go on a quest to learn more about her past. I’ll definitely write about that! There were also posts about how The Matrix was a trans allegory, which has been guessed in the past but it now confirmed, the Decentering Whiteness in Design History Resources document/guide, and test results for how long COVID can be found on library materials. That’s all.
I hope you all have a great week to come.
- Burkely