Archives, confidential files, libraries under stress, history, genealogy, and beyond
In this newsletter, I'll share the latest articles on archives, libraries, history, genealogy, LGBTQ topics, animation, and recent events hinting at how White some professional organizations are
There has been a lot of news since my last newsletter, so let’s get to it. Most recently, I had a review of an animated series, Kim Possible, on The Geekiary, and I may have more reviews on other series in the week to come. With that, let me move onto the rest of this “too long for email” newsletter.
Archives were in the news again. Some tweeted about confidentiality of an employer listed on Archives Gig and criticized the accessioning of a grenade. Otherwise, my colleagues at NSA updated their collections, in the Cyber Vault, with more “security classified articles, puzzles, interviews, and how-to guides” from the other NSA which were requested through a mandatory declassification request. David Ferriero of NARA wrote about the agency’s GIPHY channel, which is popular with younger people. Archives AWARE! interviewed Camri Kohler who talked about her job as the Archivist for PBS Utah. Previous interviews on the same site, which I think are worth noting are those interviewing archivists working for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (Joel Thoreson), the American Foundation for the Blind (Helen Selsdon), and finding users as well as donors when doing archives outreach.
There were additional news items about Black History Month projects from the SNAP section, digitization of Black newspapers, the Black Film Archive which was founded by Maya Cade in 2021, preserving vintage pressed flowers, introducing a new column by Dorothy Berry titled “Archives Unbound” which will offer an “inside look at the work of the digital archivist,” and the messy re-opening of a library archives in Ithaca College Library without an archivist since the college eliminated the archivist position in June 2021. Shame on Ithaca for eliminating that position. It will just lead to hardship for those working at the library. Others pointed to the acquisition of a Peter More archive by Northwestern University, performing arts in the Library of Congress Coronavirus Web Archive, residency modules put together by Project STAND on privacy and digital archiving, and Uproot having five library and archives workers within Latine heritage/Latin American culture discuss problems with the conception of Latinidad, “anti-Blackness, and white privilege within Latine communities, US imperialism and Indigenous erasure.” There were additional articles on restricted access in archives and unlocking digital archives.
There were older, and still relevant, articles and posts. Some were about collective access and Dublin Core while others were about an archives-related gift for a person’s wife (who is an archivist), and solutions for spread-out collections. There were scattered posts on NARA blogs about the early use of emoijs, Philadelphia as the first capital of the U.S., historical roads and buildings in Maryland, Virginia, and D.C., and the Tulsa Race Massacre. Articles beyond this focused on archival returns, information knowledge and open access to information, U.S. naval history at the Smithsonian, critically examining the role of records and archives in supporting the agency of the forcibly displaced, critical feminism in archives, critical archiving and recordkeeping research and practice in the continuum, and the always relevant “Wages for Intern Work: Denormalizing Unpaid Positions in Archives and Libraries.” Further articles in the International Journal of Digital Curation were about assessing metadata and curation quality, the red queen in the repository, and archivists managing research data, to name a few.
I thought this video from the Arizona Archives Alliance on confidential files and sensitive information is worthwhile to mention here:
With that, I move onto libraries. Some tweeted about problems even with BIPOC-led libraries when it comes to diversity and the faultiness of library neutrality. Additional librarians tweeted about a faulty NY Times column on supposed “woke librarians” and how it shows the falseness of “neutrality” (and how that “neutrality” is really all about power), DEI going beyond race and ethnicity and about dismantling oppressive systems, the problems with “demonstrations” of library software, criticism of ALA policy as caring more about intellectual freedom than human freedom or human aspirations and the impossibility of library neutrality, and calling for ALA guidance on the terrible executive order in Texas which calls on Family and Protective Services to investigate all trans children in Texas, and issues with volunteer-led “libraries,” deconstructing vocational awe and believing in DEIA, a past LIS chat about mental health (see here for more), and unreasonable expectation that some librarians in smaller or even medium-sized libraries are supposed to be expert marketers.
Additional tweets were about the need for critical tech literacy, no clear answers as to why Holocaust denial books were on Hoopla, gay conversion therapy texts on Hoopla, the power of data cartels (information and data companies), the problem with library vendors, the fact that collection development decisions are not censorship, libraries struggling with the fact that big e-collections are not controlled by them but by others, and anti-abortion texts on Hoopla. There were a rash of other tweets from librarians, like those who joined the ALA just to vote for Emily Drabinski, critical cataloging, living wages and regular salary for librarians, asking if LIS instructors talk about compassion fatigue, burnout, emotional labor, and other topics, and joking about a possible series on Jocasta Nu.
The Library of Congress (LOC) interviewed a foreign law intern named Friederike Loebbert, Taylor Healey-Brooks, the Librarian-in-Residence in the Latin American, Caribbean and European Division who is co-authoring a resource guide that “explores Haiti’s contributions to liberation movements in the U.S. and across Latin America,” and the new collections management chief, Cathy Martyniak. Other posts focused on legal inspiration in literature and art, visualizing DC’s municipal infrastructure from 1890 to 2022, the White House scientist and the ancient Jewish book, 100 years of women’s suffrage in Sweden, researching newsmaker photos, carving the marble vessels of the ancient Americans, and picturing the Moon.
Articles on other topics included military legal resources, introducing Wong’s new action figure, Amazon closing its physical bookstores, an “age-appropriate” school library bill passing the Tennessee State Senate, Oklahoma reviewing school library books and claiming they might violate obscenity laws, Afghanistan’s libraries going into blackout, the owners of Little Queer Library targeted by specific people, digital surveillance in libraries, demanding accountability for Hoopla and Overdrive having fascist materials on their platforms, the supposedly “remarkable” history of public libraries, cooperation between an oft-library vendor, Lexis Nexis, and I.C.E., expanded lending of digitized books in specific California libraries, libraries increasing their “circulating collections of non-traditional library material,” libraries as a space that “people can gather for free and access a plethora of socialized resources” but are under attack, and secret and mysterious libraries around the world.
Articles other than this noted a D.C. school librarian creating a sanctuary for students, a survey showing that only 27% of Texans trust politicians’ judgment of school books, Scientific American noted that reading on paper has “unique advantages” over reading by using e-readers and tablets, a website which once outlined “bibliomysteries,” i.e. those mysteries which “have settings, plots, or substantial characters in them related to the world of books, writers, archives, and libraries,” defining the word library, thoughts on library themes in Twilight Zone and Star Trek, imagining a world without libraries, why libraries should be down with controlled digital lending, fear of government surveillance influencing our behavior, pushing for AAPI representation in kid’s books, and five trends in 21st century libraries. Additional articles were on how libraries can be a sanctuary, metadata directions, questioning the Dewey Decimal System, and websites of two organizations, first one named the Progressive Librarians Guild and the other named Little Black Library. Then there’s Michele T. Fenton’s Little Known Black Librarians Facts blog. Some posts to highlight this week focus on three notable figures on librarianship (Daphne Rowena Douglas, Kenneth Everard Niven Ingram, and Dorothy G. Williams Collings), and Dr. Charles D. Churchwell, the second Black person to earn a Ph.D. in library science from the University of Illinois in 1966.
There was an assortment of library articles. Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies articles were about excavating racism in the library stacks, digital historiography and critical librarianship, autoethnographic research into identity, culture, and academic librarianship, equity of access to information through the lens of neoliberal responsiblization, a course syllabus about information work and the anthropocene, and considerations for libraries in the anthropocene. The International Journal of Digital Curation provided librarians’ perspectives on digital preservation challenges in Nigerian libraries, and re-engineering libraries for the data decade.
When it comes to history, there are various articles, especially in Smithsonian magazine. This includes stories on the cartoons of a Black artist, Charles Alston, and their role in World War II, an ornate 5,000 year old stone drum uncovered, how many revolutionary war cannons ended up in the Savannah River, the colorful history of cats in the White House, hundreds of Iron Age coins uncovered in London, the ‘protest’ olympics known as the People’s Olympiad that never came to be, the Sierra Club grappling with the racism of John Muir, and the missions to the Moon that never left the drawing board like a space station on the moon. Additional stories in the magazine were on the tragic life of Hansken, ‘Rembrandt’s Elephant’, the haunting inner passage to enslaved peoples, where Black and Indigenous history come together (in Minnesota), and how Gloria Richardson’s look of righteous indignation became a symbol of no retreat.
The Journal of American Revolution, on the other hand, had articles on George Washington’s final retreat, Rev. George Whitefield’s influence on colonial chaplains, Black drummers in a Redcoat regiment, a demographic view of the Georgia continental line and militia from 1775 to 1783, and power, liberty, and constitutionalism during the American Revolution.
Further history articles focused on women’s suffrage in sheet music, the cartography of language, Belgium taking steps towards restitution of African artifacts, two of Nigeria’s Benin bronzes returned home to a traditional place, the Baltimore Sun looking to make amends for promoting policies with oppressed Black Marylanders, a database which provides digital access to materials “documenting the roles and experiences of Black Women in the Women’s Suffrage Movement and, more broadly, women’s rights, voting rights, and civic activism between the 1850s and 1960,” and research confirming that Australia’s forests currently carry far more “flammable fuel than before British invasion,” with rejection of the “approach of Indigenous Australians who’ve developed sophisticated relationships with fire over tens of thousands of years.” Others examined Black social gospel, radical politics, and internationalism, the technology of the U.S.S. Monitor and its impact on naval warfare, Black women and American freedom in Revolutionary America, the causes and consequences of electoral violence with evidence from England and Wales, 1832–1914 (which includes an interactive map), how immigrant newcomers to Atlanta have enriched the city, the story of the 1891 explosion at Sparrows Point, the known dead and wounded in the Tulsa Race Riot as listed on pages 34 to 44 of the Teaching Black History Conference document from July 2021 (which I learned about from LinkedIn), and reliving injustice from the U.S. concentration camps for Japanese people during World War II.
There’s a lot of genealogy-related news for this newsletter. Some wrote about a genealogy group helping Black people fill in the past, while others noted census records, asking how genealogists are writing their own memories, how to research historical Irish church records, uncovering ancestral claims to nobility in the Spanish kingdom, and a peek at family trees, records, and registers. Beyond this, some noted the historic Woodland Cemetery, the 1950 U.S. federal census, being kind to young genealogists, how generational wealthy passes through the generations, researching at the National Archives of Ireland, Irish ancestors named Anne and Nan, examining the Irish census in 1911, 1901, and earlier, how to research your ancestors in a location you can’t visit, the voice of every ancestor mattering, the companies with the largest genealogy databases, Irish immigration via New York ports from 1820 - 1955 (which included my ancestor, John Mills), and the pitfalls of amateur genealogy. There were also articles in the Genealogy journal about using critical family history to deconstruct specific surnames, illegitimacy, genealogies and the Old Poor Law in Somerset from 1762–1834, faith, fatherhood, and masculinity in one man’s letters to his son during the First World War and flipping our scripts about undocumented immigration.
This week, I’d like to focus on, in terms of LGBTQ articles. This includes The Geekiary providing nine well-written queer content recommendations on the eve of its 9-year anniversary. Others wrote about queer webtoon comics to start reading, specifically these seven: Always Human, Mage & Demon Queen, High Class Homos, Novae, Castle Swimmer, Small World, and Life Outside the Circle), polyamorist couples, the release date of The Executioner and Her Way of Life, based on a yuri light novel series of the same name, on April 2, Seven Seas licensing Cats and Sugar Bowls yuri manga, the difference between being aromantic and asexual, and the most romantic boy’s love ships in anime. Additional articles notes the difference between monogamy and polyamory, the LGBTQ storyline in Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated, queer romance novels, thirteen queer Black romances, ranking of all the Adventure Time couples (BMO & Lorraine, Tree Trunks & Mr. Pig, Joshua and Margaret, Finn & Flame Princess, Jake & Lady Rainicorn, BMO & Bubble, Finn & Huntress Wizard, Finn & Roselinen, Betty Grof & Simon Petrikov, Princess Bubblegum & Marceline, the Vampire Queen), and the release a yuri visual novel on Valentine’s Day.
There were several articles about animation and anime. Some were on Sailor Moon, Kim Possible (how Shego is a feminist icon), the Indian anime community, praise of the first (and second) episode of The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder, and cool anime from 2021. While I didn’t agree with their listing of Otherside Picnic, which had a weird pro-U.S. military plot in later episodes, I really did enjoy Kageki Shoujo!! and The Aquatope on White Sand, and will have to check out I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level and The Night Beyond the Tricornered Window. Related are pages about the Kapamahu short which focuses on “the healing power of four mysterious stones on Waikiki Beach in Hawaii” which is now a book, the fact that animation matters, violence in animation, and anime superheroes, to name a few. The biggest news in terms of animation, in the past week, was the completion of the Crunchyroll-Funimation merger, meaning that all the content from Funimation will be moved to Crunchyroll, beginning with the over 100 series moving from one streaming platform to another.
There are some relevant Smithsonian magazine articles worth mentioning. They focus on the re-opening of a century-old bridge in the Florida Keys as a tropical high line, whether birds have a language (they do, obviously), the possibility that some neurons in your brain respond to singing but not other music, California about to test its first solar canals, warming temperatures turning Antarctica green, climate change researchers wanting to pull carbon dioxide from the ocean and turn it into rock, scientists uncovering black holes in the Milky Way Galaxy, and West African scientists on the forefront of a malaria vaccine. Others focused on collecting environmental time capsules, a study suggesting that the wild ancestors of cannabis likely came from China, resources toward understanding systemic racism in America, a warmer climate causing male dragonflies to lose their patchy wings, and sparking excitement about STEM through exposure and career pathways.
There are other topics which should be mentioned in this newsletter. For one, there is the current conflict in Ukraine, shared across social media. One post by Alia ElKattan, a NYU PhD student, had a point: people are chattering about Ukraine, but when it comes to Israeli attacks on Palestine, these people are silent, claiming that those who bring it up aren’t being “professional” and are engaging in “politics.” This is true when it comes to professional organizations as well, putting aside the organizations in Ukraine, like the Ukrainian Library Association. The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), CILIP: The library and information association (in the UK), Society of American Archivists (SAA), the International Council on Archives (ICA), European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations (EBLIDA), Federation of European Publishers (FEP), International Association for the Humanities (MAG), International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), International Publishers Association (IPA), PEN America, and Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL), to name a few, all had statements on Ukraine, pledging their solidarity.
The IFLA, along with the ICA, the International Council of Museums, ICOMOS, and Co‐ordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations, the first four who are part of Blue Shield International, released statements in 2009, 2006 and 2003 on destruction of cultural property but took a “both sides are bad” approach, unlike the more declarative statements on Ukraine which pin all the blame on Russia, with the assumption that the Western countries shoulder none of the blame for what is happening. This is despite the fact that the U.S. is on record as reassuring the Russians in the 1990s that NATO expansion would be slow, and continued U.S. push for NATO’s enlargement into the late 1990s, while even Yeltsin opposed such expansion at the time and was worried about expansion.
Blue Shield International released similar statements on Afghanistan (in 2003), Iraq (in 2003, 2014, 2015), Yemen (in 2015), which again took an “all sides are bad” approach, or the IFLA’s statement on Afghanistan in 2021 (similar to CLIP’s statement at the same time). This is reinforced that even though the U.S. was military occupying Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003, and has been militarily involved in both countries until 2021, and likely is involved covertly and through private mercenaries, along with backing/leading the Saudi war in Yemen, the U.S. was not even mentioned in any of these statements. That says a lot about Blue Shield International and where its biases lie. They make stronger statements when it comes to Ukrainians but when it comes to people of color elsewhere in the world, they are more wishy-washy. It didn’t even condemn Israel for its occupation of Palestine since 2009, and even then, it did so in a weak way which blamed both sides for the violence. ICOMOS did the same in their 2021 statement about Israel’s war in occupied Palestine, on Yemen in 2015 and about Iraq the same year. And PEN America put out a statement last year criticizing Israel for striking a building with AP and Al-Jazeera offices, but had no other statements other than those applying to very specific individuals.
The CILIP is not better, with no statements on Palestine, Yemen, or Iraq, and only issued a statement on Afghanistan in 2021 which didn’t even mention the U.S. The same was the case for the SAA, which recently released yet another statement, declaring the organization’s “solidarity with our Ukrainian and Russian archival colleagues” as part of a statement which sounds more like it was written by the U.S. State Department or the White House Press Secretary than a professional archives organization. The SAA has not released any statements on the Off the Record blog about Palestine, Yemen, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Although the SAA had a statement in 2003 on Iraqi Archives which didn’t mention the U.S., and had no statements on Palestine, Yemen, and Afghanistan, a joint statement by the SAA and Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) in 2008 expressed concern “about the whereabouts, current custody, and ultimate fate of records captured or otherwise obtained by the United States of America.” So, its a mixed bag, with no statements from EBLIDA, FEP, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), which reposted the MAG statement, or IPA, on Palestine, Yemen, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
The ALA put out a statement in support of Ukraine too, a “both sides are bad” statement on Israeli war in Gaza in 2009 which was said to be “amended to the point of uselessness” by the ALA’s Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT), a group founded in 1969 by a group of concerned librarians who denounced library neutrality as an excuse to “avoid confronting social justice” as Haruko Yamauchi points out in his chapter on urban information specialists and interpreters in Radical Librarianship & Justice: History, Practice & Praxis. Additionally, resolutions in support of Palestinian rights activists which SRRT proposed in 2020 and 2019 were rejected by the ALA Council, as was a 2021 statement on damage and destruction of schools and cultural institutions in Gaza and damage to Israeli schools. A 2002 statement on destruction of Palestinian libraries, archives, and other cultural resources was watered down. This is all according to the Resolutions Archive put together by the ALA’s SRRT. I’ve mentioned this archive before, saying last August that it “gives the impression that the ALA, and especially its council, has taken very conservative and reactionary positions, starting in the mid-1980s, but the amount of rejections after 2000 are higher than in any other period.” What I am noting in this newsletter reinforces those statements completely and fully.
As of yet, the ALA has not released any statements on Yemen, Iraq, or Afghanistan, only releasing some assorted articles (like those here, here, here and here) in American Libraries, and passed a 2008 resolution on the confiscation of Iraqi documents from the Iraq National Library and Archives and a resolution on the connection between the Iraq War and libraries in 2005. On the other hand, the ALA rejected a 2009 resolution on libraries and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, a 2007 resolution to advocate ending the funding for the Iraq War, a 2003 resolution on Iraq Crisis, and referred a resolution calling on the U.S. government to drop all charges against Julian Assange. The ALA Council previously defeated resolutions on CIA Recruitment at ALA Meetings (in 2019), Socially Responsible Investments for the ALA Endowment Fund (in 2018), support for Edward Snowden (in 2014), divestment of holdings in Fossil Fuel Companies (in 2013), access to information and Wikileaks (in 2012), Wikileaks (in 2011), National Health Care (in 2010), impeachment of President George W. Bush (in 2007), War in Afghanistan (in 2002), Secret Tribunals (in 2002), ALA and the Gates Library Foundation (in 1995), Israeli censorship (in 1993), Guidelines for Librarians Interacting with South Africa (in 1990), Literacy, Literature, and Libraries in Nicaragua (in 1986), military withdrawal from Central America (in 1984), Right of Chicago Public Library to Unionize (in 1982), use of private or corporate Funds to maintain services (in 1976), protest of the Failure of Illinois to Ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (in 1975), call for impeachment of President Nixon (in 1974), funding and support for childcare (in 1974), avoidance of sexist terminology (in 1974), Vietnam War (in 1970), and 18-Year-Old Vote (in 1970) as noted by the aforementioned archive, which covers resolutions from 1970 to present. While the SRRT had more success in passing progressive resolutions in the earlier years, as time went on, fewer resolutions proposed were accepted by the council.
This disparity in statements among the organizations I have mentioned have racial dynamics. It makes clear that these organizations care more about White people than people of color, whether they intend that or not, which should be no surprise, as many of these organizations are probably White majority. Just an educated guess here. After all, only ICOMOS, ICOM, ICA, and IFLA put out a statement about the ongoing bloody Tigray war in Ethiopia, but PEN America, CILIP, SCONUL, SAA (and nothing on Off the Record), EBLIDA, FEP, MAG, ACLS, or IPA have released no statements, to date, on the conflict. Although there are likely statements on Myanmar, I would not surprised to see a lack of statements on conflicts in Colombia, Oromo (Ethiopia), Somalia, Nigeria, Ituri (Democratic Republic of Congo), Maghreb, Darfur, Kivu, South Sudan, Mali, Central African Republic, Cabo Delgado, and many other ongoing conflicts listed on the Wikipedia page “List of ongoing armed conflicts” which lists 59 ongoing armed conflicts going on the world right now. You won’t see anything about those conflicts on the nightly news unless there is a military coup, an American is kidnapped, or something else happens which makes the reporters giddy. What this also tells you is that institutions like NARA are not “neutral.” If they are openly displaying the Ukrainian flag outside the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, in “solidarity with the people of Ukraine,” in NARA’s words, then they are taking a political position. They can deny it, but they would never fly a Palestinian flag there, claiming that doing so would be a “political act.”
Just as some have denounced the double standard of reporting by the Western media on Ukraine, the same applies to these professional organizations, who seem to care more about when White people are under threat than armed conflicts that are affecting Brown and Black people. This analysis shows that these organizations are not “tools for liberation” and are reinforcing “oppressive ideologies, structures, and tactics.” These are the same things that Archivists Against is standing against, although they are focusing more on archives than professional organizations. They want to use “archival records to learn past strategies and get inspiration to enact the structural change we need now…[and] interrupting cycles of oppression because of and not despite our professional ethical commitments and identities” and believing that archivists “can use archives, archival labor, and archival theory for human liberation.” I know it is not a direct connection between the statements by these organizations and actions by archives, but there is at least some connection, however tenuous.
There were other assorted articles about fandom racism, Biden’s pick to the Supreme Court in WordinBlack and a LOC blog, argument that student loan debt is a U.S. military recruitment tool from The Debt Collective (see here and here), the disappearance of the Maldives, the unfortunate use of DuckDuckGo by conspiracy theorists (I used it before it was “cool” apparently), space pirates, sounds of bugs in that 60 Minutes special on the dumbly named “Havana Syndrome” which intelligence personnel are complaining about and blaming Russia/Cuba/whoever for it, Mexican activists who told the story of Moctezuma’s headdress from an indigenous perspective, and whether we are ignoring other causes of disasters. It was also interesting to read about a playwright who challenges cliches about disabilities through writing, how COVID has changed museum digital projects forever, Black cowboys, three Southern organizations making their communities safer and more sustainable without prisons, and the insistence on teaching Classical Arabic over modern dialects hindering linguistic and literary development.
Then there are illustrations in The Nib. They focused on orcas, anti-immigrant arguments, climate change, superheroes, cryptocurrency and beyond, and Starbucks union-busting tactics. Others were about rent relief, the landmark Griswold v. Connecticut case, which states that contraception for married couples can’t be banned, is under threat, the faulty idea of everything being digital, the Tuskegee experiment, cargo ship with luxury cars sinking in the Atlantic, democratic regression, Women’s History Month, performative action, and tax breakers.
That’s all for this newsletter. Until next time!
- Burkely