Archives in popular culture, archival storage, and the library world
In this week's newsletter, I summarize my recent review of popular depictions of archives, and talk about news in the archives and library fields. Hope you enjoy!
Hello everyone! I hope you are all having a great week. This is Burkely and his fledgling newsletter coming back at ya! I know it’s not midway through the week, as its Thursday, but that still counts.
This week I’d like to begin with a post I just published reviewing three depictions of archives in popular culture. The first two of these are from Hollywood films and the last one brings in an animated show where characters travel to an archives. As you would expect, the portrayals are not really that positive. Two of them peddle into stereotypes about archivists as people who are classy and wear Chanel suits (although some are, of course, but others are not), or are dusty places below the ground. Only one is more neutral but that is only because the archives is not shown in the story, with only an archival record used.
Speaking of archives, there are some great news this week. David Ferriero notes how NARA now has a place to store congressional records on the third floor of the Government Publishing Office’s (GPO) Building A in Washington, D.C. This is because the Washington National Records Center (WNRC)’s available storage space in Archives I was essentially full. Now, there are 50,000 cubic feet of unclassified records storage space now available, with NARA with “ample space for the anticipated growth of House and Senate records,” preserving these records for future use. Apart from that, Archives Aware! interviewed the director of the Walt Disney Archives while two NARA blogs reviewed color transparencies which document the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, the U.S. Army’s first African-American paratrooper unit, and a repost of a 2017 post about Japanese internment and “righting a wrong.”
That brings me to articles in the library world. Hack Library School had articles about vocational awe and its connection to academic service and another that recommended that librarians need to stop saying they aren’t qualified for their jobs. Additionally, other websites talked about the continuing battle between publishers and libraries over e-books, and how librarians keep for-profit scientific journals from squeezing their budgets. NPR even had an interesting article, attempting to answer the question of who should decide what books are allowed in prison.
That’s all for this week! Hope everyone has a great rest of their week.
- Burkely