Archives in video games, Black leaders at the helm of the Smithsonian, librarians in sci-fi and fantasy, and vestiges of racism within the U.S.
Happy Saturday! This week I'll be covering the some of the most relevant archives, library, genealogy, and history news, in a newsletter deemed "too long for email"
Hello everyone! I hope you are all having a good week. On Tuesday I published a post noting titles of series I have found with libraries in them in September, which I have added to my Libraries in Popular Culture blog, and on Friday I published a post recommending one of my favorite animated series, RWBY. Hope you are all excited for next week’s post on the same blog about Doctor Strange and the Black sorcerer librarian. The following week will be a post on Cletus Bookworm in an episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle who ends up siding with the censors who take away the protagonists at gunpoint from the library, so that was a lot of fun, but also terrifying, to write. With that, I’ll move to other parts of my newsletter.
In the world of archives, there’s a lot of news. My co-workers at NSA noted that declassified documents were key to a judgment against Colombian paramilitary, while archivists on Twitter talked about subject such as accountable archives, no such thing as “sanctity of the archives” when people are physically endangered, the fact that archivists will geek out about something the researcher found “really interesting,” that people forget records management at their peril, and Sam Cross teasing a follow-up to a recent article noting how it is impossible for three people to “archive hundreds of projects” in a short period of time because you can’t keep track of “how much space” is being used on the server. That post reviews archives in the video game, Kentucky: Route Zero, set in the 1970s, noting that archives figures into the story, first with mention of folk music archivists, whose work got attention of power company executives, with the archivists in a position “above” the miners. Cross notes that people and documents are “products of their time and experiences,” making determining what is said to be the truth “a much more daunting task.” I found it interesting that the Bureau of Reclaimed Spaces occupies a former cathedral with the congregation “moved to an off-site storage facility,” with the archives not in a basement, but the characters still have to go through a bureaucratic nightmare. Even so, as she notes, there are no archivists to be found and the files they are looking for are at another old storage unit, and they find a use for the archival materials after all.
Apart from my hope that frannypak’s proposal for a “limited run podcast that will be fun/funny about archives in SF/F settings (movies, TV, books, video games),” with her search for a co-host, something in which she is probably got many eager archivist applicants, pans out, there is some other archives-related news. The Smithsonian recently named Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty as the new Director of Smithsonian Libraries and Archives. She will be responsible for “nearly 3 million library volumes and over 44,000 cubic feet of archival materials chronicling the history of the Smithsonian…[and] will oversee 137 employees…22 library branches and reading rooms located in Washington, D.C., New York City, Maryland, Virginia and the Republic of Panama.” She previously worked as an associate university librarian at Cornell University, faculty member of UCLA California Rare Book School, director of collections and services at New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, executive director of University of Chicago’s Black Metropolis Research Consortium. Having a Black woman at the helm of the Smithsonian is wonderful and hopefully it means that structural inequities, structural racism, and the like are addressed, especially since she is described as having “a rich background…across diverse subject matters.” In related news, David Ferriero of NARA continued his series offering respect and recognition to Indigenous peoples previously living on lands that federal facilities such as the Federal Records Center in Pittsfield, the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas, two locations in Chicago (National Archives at Chicago and Chicago Federal Records Center in Southwest Chicago), and the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
I loved hearing about the task ahead to create a searchable and publicly-accessible database for Afro-American Newspapers, which will include “an estimated 3 million photos, thousands of letters, business records, original audio recordings, advertisements and even reporters’ notebooks,” with several years of newspaper archives already digitized and available using ProQuest, and The AFRO American Newspapers working with Google to present an “extensive collection of digitally archived issues spanning over 100 years of history.” The latter includes the Baltimore Afro-American from January 1943 to December 2003 on Google News Archive. Speaking of digitization, the first African Americana Collection, part of UC San Diego Library’s Special Collections and Archives, will hopefully be done by the end of this year, new digital archives of historic Arlington newspapers from 1935 to 1978 ae available online, Karamu House’s treasure trove of archives will be preserved and “made available for public view at CWRU library,” the Library of Congress (LOC)’s September 11, 2001 Web Archive continues onward today, and HarperCollins acquired “world publishing rights” to the archives of Martin Luther King, Jr.
I liked the reading the post on The American Archivist Reviews Portal by Elizabeth Kobert on archives as source of creative inspiration in Hacks, with one character trying to digitize the old performances of a female comedian, although she does so in the basement, with the “association of archival work with lonely drudgery,” which are clear stereotypes. Kobert also notes that this work is non-professional, which is unfortunate. While there are so many other posts I could expand on here, whether Maarija Krusten’s post on the Obama Presidential Library, Courtney Chartier, the new SAA president, noting about Grace and Futurism, the #askanarchivist day which is coming on October 13, and the existing SAA mentoring program. However, instead of expanding on those posts or mentioning any others, I’m moving the other links to next week’s newsletter, and I’ll decide if to integrate them into that newsletter or not.
Then we get to libraries. There were some interesting comments on Twitter about how in school settings, “library spending is faculty spending…[and] student spending,” the outline of what is being called “The Radical Hood Library,” organized by Black writings and not by using the Dewey Decimal System, and asking why someone would put another person’s life at risk by “calling the cops for overdue library fines.” American Libraries had articles on digital repositories heading to the cloud and a short profile on video librarian and researcher Sheva Moore, a Black woman who works at Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., who even provided historical footage for the film Hidden Figures. On the other hand, Hack Library School had posts on the value of citation managers, balancing responsibilities, and tips for serving patrons with mental health illnesses or issues.
LOC, for their part, had posts on a variety of subjects, like always. Some posts of note focused on documenting the concerts of Jessye Norman, while others reflected on the UN’s guiding principles on human rights and business, and a crowdsourcing campaign to transcribe “early copyright title pages.” There were also posts on an embroidered map of England and Wales, Japan encouraging (unsuccessfully) Western investment in Manchuria when they had control of it in the 1930s, and the copyright office urging drag queens to copyright their acts.
In other library news, I was glad to read the reel librarian titles added in October 2021 to Jennifer Snoek-Brown’s Reel Librarians, Tor.com celebrating librarians in fantasy and science fiction, and I Love Libraries outlining five reasons to live school libraries and librarians. In terms of Tor.com’s post, I have heard of, and know, of Wan Shi Tong in Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, Barbara Gordon (Batgirl/Oracle) in Batman, Rupert Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the “grey lady” in Ghostbusters, Mike Hanlon in IT, Wong in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Evelyn Carnahan in The Mummy, the Rex Libris comic, Jocasta Nu in Star Wars (she is really an archivist, not a librarian), Conan the Librarian, Romney Wordsworth in the The Twilight Zone episode “An Obsolete Man,” and Night Vale Public Librarians in Welcome to Night Vale. I haven’t heard of the librarians like Death in Kristen Cashore’s Bitterblue, The Librarian in Terry Pratchett’s The Discworld Series, CAL in a few Doctor Who episodes, A-Through-L in Catherynne M. Valente’s Fairyland series, and The Librarian/The Town’s Librarian in Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World. The same goes for Isaac Vainio in Jim C. Hines’ Libriomancer, Zelda Schiff in The Magicians, Lirael in Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series, Lucien in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman Comic Series, The Library Daemon in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and Mr. Atoz in Star Trek: The Original Series. There’s always more librarians to write about and review. Its a never-ending quest!
Some articles of note, in terms of libraries, focused on stories such as hundreds of students, parents and residents in York County, Pennsylania, protesting limits on books “told from the perspective of gay, Black and Latino children,” a statement on using controlled digital lending as a mechanism for interlibrary loan, a peek inside the new library of Waseda University, known as Waseda International House of Literature, in Tokyo, and an article about LIS grassroots movements and patron concerns around policing and public libraries. Others noted that some public librarians were harassed over enforcement of a vaccine mandate, the re-opening of the San Francisco Library, the moral obligation for interlibrary lending, and a framework for measuring relevancy in discovery environments. On a totally different, but relevant subject due to the ongoing pandemic, I am reminded of the discussion on /r/asklibrarians back in March 2019, asking if books are carriers for virus, bacteria, and disease, and the answer is no, apart from not wanting transmit bedbugs from one person borrowing the book to another. So, librarians, please remember this, and get rid of those unnecessary and wasteful book quarantines.
There were a lot of posts about genealogy I came across this week. I loved reading the interviews with Harley Sears and Natalie Pithers in The Hidden Branch. Pithers started her genealogy research in the 1990s and notes that historical context is “absolutely vital” while Sears said that the present is “an exciting time for genealogy.” Other than this, of note is an interview with journalist and genealogist Janice Hamilton, a paper which examines the “origins of the funeral piping tradition in Gaelic Scotland and its evolution in North American society,” a Black woman, Gwen McArthur Holland, discovering her history through genealogy, and Olive Tree Genealogy with an article on finding a British Home Child from 1869 to 1939. Some genealogists wrote about their ancestors, like one who gave up a career as a lawyer, or those who were blind. The Washington Times Herald outlined six steps to start researching your genealogy, CBS Chicago tells the story of the discovery of a lost film roll providing family history, and Nancy E. Loe notes a book about tips on searching using Ancestry’s website. On the other hand, Donna Moughty had a post on her site, Irish Family Roots, about her trip to Ireland, and IrelandXO talked about old Irish names for Girls and their aliases. The ones of most interest to me is this one: Márgrég (Original Gaelic); Latinized: Margarita; Anglicized: Margaret; Nicknames: Maggie, Molly, Minnie, Maighréad, Greta. That may help me in my search for Marget. It might help a lot.
Other posts of note include ones about genealogist Tim Pinnick searching for descendants of racial terrorism, learning about your Irish heritage (if you have any), and why the Mormons include sex parents and couples on FamilySearch even as the LDS STILL opposes same-sex marriage and does not recognize anything but “traditional, male-female unions for solemnization.” Some, like Nathan Kitchen of Affirmation, an advocacy and support group for LGBTQ Mormons, their friends, and family, criticized this rightly as “a necessary evolution for FamilySearch to survive and thrive in the family history marketplace” with those who add their same sex married children to FamilySearch, but then the Mormon Church withdraws their memberships. That is disturbing to say the least.
That brings us to history. Lonnie Bunch III explained what it takes to lead the Smithsonian Institution, as the first historian to hold the role of Secretary, saying “the past is too complex to lionize or excoriate” his predecessors, and saying their “great strength is our willingness to engage fully with our past, build on our achievements and evolve to meet the lofty goals we have always set for ourselves.” Other articles in Smithsonian magazine focused on a “slave badge” found in the ground near South Carolina’s College of Charleston, a farmer stumbling upon an Egyptian carving which is over 2,000 years old, the impact of the Santa Fe railroad, new research of an impact crater in Ukraine blows away previous estimates of its age, a 146,000 year old skull from a Chinese well donated by a farmer to the Hebei GEO University museum in 2018 (but had been kept by the farmer and family since it was discovered underneath a railroad bridge over the Songhua River in the 1930s), with debate about it among paleoanthropologists, and a new book by historian Tiya Miles, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, tracing “the lives of three Black women through an embroidered family heirloom known as ‘Ashley’s sack’”. The last article was perhaps the most interesting of the lot.
The Journal of the American Revolution had fascinating articles as well. Some were about the intellectual origin of the U.S. Constitution, while others were on the Brooklyn Line of Forts in 1776, the connection of Thomas Jefferson and Montesquieu, and the story of the Revolutionary War coming to the Thompson-Neely homestead in New Jersey. More relevant than those, Niels Boender talked about uncovering the brutality of British actions during the so-called “Kenya Emergency”/Mau Mau Uprising beginning in 1952 and noted that the location of these files at the National Archives in the UK “perpetuates another colonial injustice,” saying that Kenyans need to tell their own stories, adding that “archive repatriation should also be considered” because the “files were removed to edit the history of Britain’s rule in Kenya [and] this history should be restored.” On other, but related topics to the subject of history, LOC recently published Serial Set Volumes from the 69th Congress on law.gov and historian Walter L. Buenger reflected on the challenge of teaching remotely, saying he missed the human contact with his students.
There are several articles which don’t fit neatly into categories of this newsletter, like archives, libraries, genealogy, and history. For instance, the Smithsonian had articles on the vibrant world of Muslim fashion, a multi-billion-dollar business and market which some don’t believe exists, as part of a now-ended exhibit, birds collected over two centuries ago helping scientists today, visions of the ocean in 2030 posed by the United Nations for its Decade of Ocean Science, and a study suggesting that Venus may still be geologically active. I loved reading about the melodramatic nature of Dear Brother, a 1990s yuri/girls love anime which I’m slowly watching. Here and now I’d like to pledge solidarity with the potential IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees) strike of 60,000 crew members, which was approved by a near-unanimous vote of employees, over 98% in favor.
Just as relevant is April Hathcock’s post about “Columbus Day,” otherwise known as Indigenous Peoples Day, which Italian-Americans claim is their “heritage” despite the fact that Italy did not exist as a nation when Columbus was alive and that he spent most of his life in Spain. She noted protests by “native folks and allies against the settler colonization and genocide that Christopher Columbus represents.” She also argued that all the “racist legacy of the racist people who built this racist country” should all be torn down, whether its George Washington, Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, or Thomas Jefferson, stating that unless every vestige of the U.S.’s “racist, white supremacist history” is torn down, then the country will “never attain the equality and equity we…talk so glibly about.” She concludes by saying we “need to confront our history and our present, and then…tear it down.” That is something I can agree with. What “tearing down” means will need to be decided.
Before ending this newsletter, I’ll say that I agree with the call by ND Stevenson, a non-binary transmasculine writer, producer, and cartoonist, who uses any personal pronouns, is bigender, and bipolar. He argued in his first newsletter on this site, titled “I’m Fine I’m Fine Just Understand,” that Substack should “deplatform TERFs who have built their brands on harassment.” His wife, Molly Ostertag, also has a newsletter on here, focused on making a graphic novel, titled “In the Telling.” He added, in an interview with Polygon, that he is on the platform to increase trans presence on this site, is outspoken about “vile TERF rhetoric on Substack,” saying he would like to see “those incredibly toxic voices removed and barred from the platform,” and hopes he can offset that. Ultimately he wants to increase visibility of trans people on Substack while “calling for the removal of the incredibly hateful, incredibly dangerous anti-trans voices” on Substack itself. Related to his comments, I have thought, myself, about leaving Substack and moving to another platform, but at the present time I am staying here. If that changes and I find a better platform, I will let you all know before the change is made.
Finally, there are illustrations in The Nib on various subjects. This includes Black people commiserating over White people saying their voices “aren’t black,” a joke comic about the awfulness of NFTs, cliffs that the U.S. is approaching, the “gender reveal” party of particles which collide and cause the destruction of the universe, workers asking for high wages from their bosses, records that 900 Secret Service agents got COVID, and the life of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a scientist behind “the world’s first LGBTQ+ rights organization.” Other illustrations focused on topics such as critical race theory, drug use, Facebook defending itself, keeping secrets online, and seven habits of “highly effective monsters.”
That’s all for this week. I may publish at a different time next week, and if I do, then please be prepared for that. Just letting you all know in advance. Have a good weekend everyone and hope you all have a great Indigenous Peoples Day on Monday!
- Burkely