Archives, genealogy, libraries, and more

This week's newsletter shares new blogposts, articles about the archives and libraries fields, and other topics. Enjoy!

Hello everyone! I hope you had a great week. This week’s newsletter will focus on a number of topics, whether new blogposts, libraries and archives, and much more.

I would like to first mention some posts on the blogs I mentioned last week. While I could give a lengthy list of all the posts which have mentioned in the last week, let me mention a few from each of the blogs. On the Wading Through The Cultural Stacks blog, my two favorites are posts about the use of archival records in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and the unfortunately stereotypical view of archives in Amphibia. I was glad and pleased to see Samantha “Sam” Cross re-shared the latter post, as I see her almost as the Pop Archives guru, ha. Moving back to the topic at hand, on the Genealogy in Popular Culture blog, the posts about non-traditional family trees in Futurama, Carmen’s journey of self-discovery in Carmen Sandiego, and family history in Amphibia were some of the best. Finally, the Libraries in Popular Culture had posts about the importance of the public library as conveyed in a Futurama episode and the stories of love within libraries as shown in the Truman Show and the second Harold & Kumar film. There are other wonderful posts on Wading Through the Cultural Stacks, Genealogy in Popular Culture, and Libraries in Popular Culture which I didn’t mention here, so feel free to peruse through each of those blogs. Many of the original posts on those blogs were originally on my History Hermann blog but have been edited and revised before being republished on any of the three above mentioned blogs. Anyway, if you have any suggestions about any films, animations, or popular media you’d like me to write about, please let me know.

With that, let me move onto the next part of this newsletter. I would like to start with the library field. While Music Specialist Robert Lipartito of the Library of Congress had a fascinating post about music during times of pestilence, I thought that the post by Brewster Kahle was a bit more interesting. I say that because he distinguishes between bookstores and libraries, noting how they are different. It’s an important primer to counter misconceptions about libraries. Apart from that, there were relevant stories about librarians alarmed by COVID safety in the reopened public libraries in D.C., the value of machine learning libraries and zines made by BIPOC artists.

That brings me to the archives field. There are wonderful articles in the most recent edition of Archival Outlook about how the Cline Library Special Collections and Archives helped a researcher with a timely request related to the COVID-19 pandemic, related to a team of researchers who identified COVID in 1965, and preserving the rock and rock history of Sacramento. Other articles focused on writing inclusive finding aids and description and dealing with increasing mold. I also enjoyed reading about passport applications of free Black people, civil rights tribute to John Lewis and C.T. Vivian (using photos from the Obama Presidential Library collections), and spotlighting the Spanish-American War through photographs. There are some other articles worth noting, like the article in The American Archivist about the historical hazards of finding aids, and the value of archival arrangement.

I would like to close by making small mentions of some other stories which deserve to be noted. The IMLS came out with a study showing that U.S. public libraries were visited over a billion times in 2017! Moving onto other topics, there is a comic called Rex Libris which follows the story of a “tough-as-nails Head Librarian,” named Rex Libris and a library comic strip named Unshelved which follows the story of librarians as they respond to questions and interactions with patrons. The same can be said of the now defunct comic, Shelf Check. I would like to give a special mention to the Mobile Public Library’s blog on anime, Anime @ Mobile Public Library, with posts written by Lynn Rainey, a Young Adult Librarian at the West Regional Branch of the Mobile Public Library, who defines herself as “an otaku for about twenty years from starting the original Sailor Moon on Cartoon Network back in the mid-1990's.” Pretty cool to have a librarian writing about anime, if you ask me!

I hope you all have a great weekend and week to come.

- Burkely