Archives, libraries, writing, and more

A whole gamut of articles this week, focusing on various fields of study

Hello everyone! I hope you are all having a great week and have a wonderful holiday break this week.

Note: Hack Library School has since gone dormant, with the last posts on there sometime between May-June 2023.

There are a number of interesting articles relating to the archives and libraries fields which I found this past week. Three articles on the SAA Electronic Records Section’s blog recapping a forum for BitCurator (a data recovery software), email archiving, and the relevant panels of the Digital Library Foundation Forum. There was also an article in Dance Magazine, of all places, about how dancers are doing more to research their roles as archives become more accessible. Sometimes you’d never guess who your users will be!

I also found a post on the Smithsonian Libraries’ blog, Unbound, about cotton gloves, very enlightening. They note that rare historical objects should NOT be handled with white gloves because hands in the gloves “lack the tactility and manual dexterity of bare [and dry] hands” while causing page fragments to be lifted, are not clean, and cause hands to sweat.

They further note how handling paper with bare hands does not cause chemical damage, with advice on book handling through centuries urging “clean hands rather than the use of gloves,” starting how the idea of white-gloved librarians may only be “about 20 years old, and stem[ming]…from canny vendors and archival supply catalogs praising their virtues.” Even so, there are exceptions, especially when it comes to photographic material, “books with lots of metal components” or books that have toxic elements like arsenic. They end by remarking that “next time you see a character in a TV show donning white gloves to page through a rare book, feel free to tut at your screen. The librarians of Smithsonian Libraries Special Collections will be right there with you.”

Finally I’d like to mention two posts on Hack Library School, one about librarians that are needed in the field and the other about more ethnic caucuses in the American Library Association, specifically for indigenous and Black peoples.

With that, my newsletter has come to a close.

I hope everyone has a great rest of their week.

- Burkely