Archival ethics, libraries, White supremacy, genealogy, history, and beyond!
In this week's newsletter, I'll share some articles I've written this week, along with news about archives, libraries, genealogy, history, and more.
Hello everyone! I hope you are all having a good week. I’ve been relatively prolific recently, first writing about a fictional librarian, then reviewing the animated series Arcane, which has become a smash hit, and writing a review of another one of my favorite webcomics, Bring Me Love. In the latter case, the artist herself praised my piece saying she “couldn’t be more thankful” for the “super kind words” I wrote about her story! Then, last Thursday, I attempted to answer the question, “Is Jocasta Nu in "Star Wars" an archivist or...a librarian?” as there has been some confusion on this issue from time to time, among archivists and librarians. And today my review of an episode of The Freak Brothers, another animated series, was published! With that, let me move on to the rest of this newsletter deemed “too long for email” yet again.
There is some news in the archives world I’d like to share this week. My colleagues at NSA wrote about NATO Expansion and the Budapest blow up of 1994, citing State Department documents obtained in a FOIA lawsuit, while others reviewed the declassified State Department Review of the so-called “Havana Syndrome.” Apart from these articles from my work colleagues, I enjoyed reading the interview with Terry Baxter, archivist for the Multnomah County Records Management and Archives Program and the incoming Vice President/President-Elect for the Society of American Archivists, on Archives AWARE!, and hearing that Ricky Punzalan, who taught a class on archival appraisal I took in grad school, is running for President-Elect/Vice-President of the SAA! He said that “archives and archivists have the capacity to make a difference in the lives, memories, and histories of the communities they serve.” I can’t agree more! Other archivists noted discussions about representation of archives in fiction, saying that people should take care of themselves first especially if they are contingent workers, and that appraisal, description, and access ARE political, despite some saying otherwise.
There was more in the world of archives than what has been previously mentioned. The SAA’s Archival History section recapped a virtual annual meeting which “featured two presentations focused on pandemics and the response of the archival community” and there was another post connecting readers to archival materials from the Library of Congress (LOC) Music Division’s Jonathan Larson Papers. There was also posts about Alexandra Chassanoff and Colin Post winning the Preservation Publication Award, and Delaware archivists discussing National Treasure. On /r/Archivists, there were posts on storage and labeling, creating disc ISOs, and framing a vintage poster. Just as relevant today as it was in July 2019, is Rachael Woody’s post on Myspace and the precarity of user content on social media platforms. I also came across, two posts by the Concerned Archivists Alliance in 2020 about the destruction of ICE records and arguing that the alteration of Getty’s Women’s March images is unethical. In the latter case, after reading what they had to say, I went back to some of my old Twitter moments from the time. Reading through them, I don’t really agree with what I wrote about the incident at the time, believing the issue had been “blown out of proportion” and “not a big issue” to quote my January 22 newsletter (I said the same in a January 29 newsletter). While some responses went too far, like those calling for Ferriero to resign and people to be fired over the blurring of the Getty image, it is clear that this record bluring is an important issue, especially in terms of archival ethics.
That brings me to libraries. Trevor Owens had a new article about a jobs strategy for libraries, while American Libraries, the ALA’s flagship magazine, had articles about intellectual freedom, censorship, sharing library catalogs, strategies for cultivating younger library advocates, the challenge of virtual story times, equity at intersection of service as argued by Patricia "Patty" M. Wong, the ALA president, and Tracie D. Hall, executive director of ALA, advocating for a strategy to “ensure ALA is in the best possible position to help library workers and the libraries and institutions.” On the other hand, LOC posts focused on Black people in the Civil War era, photographs of Japanese-Americans imprisoned in World War II, efforts to preserve the watercolors of Diego Rivera, cuneiform tablets, autumn color chemistry, an ongoing photo mystery, the unique seafaring charts of the Marshall Islands, and meeting the Fall 2021 Herencia interns: Silvia Lopez, Alèxia Devin, Celine Huang, Anna Weese-Grubb, Johannah Ball, Francesca Marquez, Cameron Hub, and Katherine DeFonzo.
On a totally different subject, I am reminded me of the time that the CIA tried to recruit at the ALA convention and people fought back and the ad released in May of this year as part of a recruitment campaign with an unnamed gay librarian claiming to be surprised at how “inclusive” the CIA is. Other than this, I loved hearing about the Baltimore librarian putting in place book nooks. As always there is a still-relevant post by April Hathcock reviewing James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, connecting it to how she is struggling with White people “for the right to live my life, equitably, fairly, without their censure or policing or gaze.” She added that nice White people do the most damage, the ones who don’t think they are causing harm, not ceding any “power or privilege” in treating Black people. She also said that “nothing can ever change” until White people are “willing to accept the cost,” saying that “there’s a price to be paid for the undoing of their privilege, for the dismantling of…[White] supremacy.”
Then there are stories about genealogy. Genealogy journal had articles about retracing African trade routes from Marseille, France, unsettling settler family’s history in Aotearoa New Zealand, and re-unlearning and re-learning discourses of healing in a tribally placed doctoral cohort. The Hidden Branch interviewed Carly Bagley, who calls herself a “public historian and an aspirational cool, millennial, genealogist, older-sister-type.” Stacy Hawkes of Dividing Ridge Genealogy had posts about the art of handwriting and the value of memories. Deseret noted that FamilySearch wants a free and all virtual RootsTech in 2022. Others noted that Aussies are being encouraged to opt into the census time capsule, why to add trees to DNA, and why occupations are important to genealogists. These are only some of the many articles.
There are important stories when it comes to history worth noting in this newsletter. LOC shared images from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information (FSA/OWI) collection, China’s colossal encyclopedia, and had other posts on the burial urns of Santa Maria and the royal geographer Nicolas de Ferthe. Others wrote about public health and venereal disease in Hot Springs, Arkansas, before the Tuskegee Study, the relationship among “radical socialism, Islamic balanced reform and Tatar national identity in early twentieth-century Russia,” and the education of African children in “countries that were colonized by Britain.” Apart from this were articles about topics such as Lafayette’s plan to invade Ireland, North Carolina’s response to the battles of Lexington and Concord, the postwar struggles of one female veteran of World War I, the importance of Caribbean history, and Sarah Tate’s resistance interconnected with consumerism and curation of her own items.
Smithsonian magazine had articles on many topics. Some were on mercury poisoning in the copper age, how an amateur geologist created her own cabinet of curiosities, archaeologists finding a lost 4,500 year old Egyptian sun temple, and how the ancient Romans went to the bathroom. Other articles were about the influence of the automobile, artifacts from Chinese transcontinental railroad workers found in Utah, why dragons dominated the landscape of medieval monsters, a 3,500 Babylonian tablet perhaps the earliest known ghost image, and research which highlights Smithsonian’s “successful repatriation of Sitting Bull’s leggings and lock of hair to his direct descendants.” I also liked reading about how historians decide who is the “worst” President, the long history of the espresso machine, and how women were encouraged in the 1960s to “seek employment in computing by appealing to traditional domestic roles,” not taking into account women had been in the field since the 1940s, but were shut out of upper management as men remained as managers.
That brings me to the last part of this newsletter. Some articles talked about astrophysicists detecting a black hole gobbling up a neutron star, recommendations of what to watch after finishing The Aquatope on the White Sand, with Bartender, Sweetness and Lightning, Princess Jellyfish, Ristorante Paradiso, and Barakamon listed as possible anime shows to watch. Google News Initiative announced a “LGBTQ+ language and media literacy program” but did not include the words pansexual, bisexual, and Two-Spirit. Later this was updated to add “bisexual,” “pansexual,” but not Two-Spirit while offensive words remained.
There were also articles arguing that a non-binary Cowboy Bebop character is wronged in the live-action version, anti-racist moderation, how video games can change the world for domestic violence survivors, the quest to shoot an arrow farther than anyone has before, reviewing how John Steinbeck portrays oppression, and a positive review of the current animated series, Arcane. Others talked about racism among White people, art installations made out of car wreckage serving as “high-impact designated driver reminders,” how driving to save time slows everyone down, how COVID changed science, volatile organic compounds, the environmental damage of a Bitcoin power planet, using the descriptor “disabled people” rather than anything else, and research showing that labor unions help lower the risk of poverty. Hathcock, who has been mentioned earlier in this newsletter, had two posts, one about spiritual solitude and urging information professionals to have a “responsibility to bring a critical lens to every instance of our work,” not erasing “difficult or oppressive histories from the materials we collect and preserve” and adding that “there is no neutrality in that kind of whitewashing of history, only more oppression.”
The Nib had wonderful illustrations as always. There were about capitalism, drug use, selfish billionaires, parentism over the ages, Africa pointing its finger at Western countries to quit oil and gas first, career aptitude, some intellectuals accepting some fascist imagery, and people mocking what others wear. Others had illustrations about astronauts which will be wearing diapers because there are no toilets on Elon Musk’s SpaceX capsule, tangling of a secular government with religious ideas, virtual reality, lock down in Australia, comic drawing, anger management, delivery drivers, parenting, and the GOP fighting vaccine mandates and then blaming Biden for the rise in COVID cases.
That’s all for this week! Hope you all have a good week ahead!