Archives, libraries, and more
This week's newsletter will focus on archives, libraries, note a new pop culture review I did of libraries in animation, and much more. Enjoy!
Hello everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful week. This week’s newsletter will focus, mainly, on archives and libraries.
There was a lot of news and posts about archives this week. One of those posts focused on the work balance for a person working in a special collections at a university, while another argued that there should be more investments in archives. There were, at the same time, posts about preserving libraries and journals, and that “hair album” I mentioned in last week’s newsletter. On the other hand, NARA blogs focused on how cultural institutions in the U.S. can be visited virtually and talked about cognitive technologies. Most interesting of all, however, was the FOIA request made by Reclaim the Records, asking for billions “of digital images and their associated text metadata, to return online access to American historical documents to the public”! These are the records created under the agreement NARA had with various genealogical entities to digitize some of their holdings. While I’m not sure if Reclaim the Records will be successful, it will be interesting to see how NARA responds and what documents are revealed which will tell us more about this program.
With that, let me move onto libraries. I’d like to first focus on a post I put together two days ago, which highlighted libraries within some recent anime I’ve watched, like Little Witch Academia and Bloom Into You. Both are of a young-adult (YA) variety, although Bloom Into You is a lesbian (yuri) romance, while Little Witch Academia is a story which is a 1000 times better than anything that transphobic J.K. Rowling could come up with in her overrated and stale Harry Potter series. Additionally, I am getting closer to 100 anime episodes with libraries or librarians. Yay! Apart from that, Hack Library School had some interesting posts about library cats, musings of a first time teacher, hope, and friends of the library. When it comes to library cats, I actually wrote about that specifically in a grad school paper, focusing on a cat named Uggles at one of the campuses of the University of Illinois. So, I know a little about that, ha. There were an assortment of other articles I came across when it comes to libraries, whether about e-books, trans and gender diverse voices in the field, more COVID tests of various library materials, and the fight for LGBTQ rights in U.S. librarianship.
Finally, there are several posts that get an honorable mention in this newsletter. I did not know previously and was disturbed to find about Roald Dahl’s anti-Jewish book, The Witches, and a number of articles in Inside Higher Ed. For the latter, there were articles on how racism leads to poor mental health outcomes for Black students, pushes to add ethnic studies to college curricula, and an opinion piece about the divide between those with and without college degrees. There were posts about ancestors who migrated to Alabama and how some teaching approaches, when it comes to digital literacy, can make students susceptible to various individuals and groups.
With that, I hope you all have a productive week to come.
- Burkely