Blooming into archives, libraries, and genealogical merriment
This week I'll be talking about archives and libraries, as I always do, along with articles about genealogy, U.S. history, data mining, and more!
Hello everyone! I hope you all had good weeks, despite everything that is going on. This week’s newsletter will focus on various archives, library, and genealogy topics. Enjoy the above video when it comes to archives dealing with COVID-19.
Without further ado, let me begin with archives. I start with a post I published yesterday about missing records, love, and mystery in an episode of one of my favorite anime, Bloom Into You. It was fun to write about it because there were many more archival/archives themes than I would have thought! I enjoyed writing about a basement library in Little Witch Academia just as much. There were various articles apart from this, which I enjoyed reading this past week. This includes posts about digital innovation at the National Archives, the role of the latter in the Electoral College, the Stasi Archive showing the way for recordkeeping of abuse, and 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment which gave women the right to vote. Similarly, others wrote about major challenges for audiovisual archives as full digitization moves forward and there was even a petition about access to historical records for veterans, families of veterans, and researchers, which I recommend you sign. Finally, I was glad to see David Ferriero of NARA say that the agency is examining and addressing racism, with a new task force on racism to “address racial inequality in both our customer-facing operations and internally within our workplaces.” However, will NARA address, as the Alabama Archives has done, which I noted in late September, white supremacy within archival materials, through new appraisal, description, access, use, education, and professional life, as outlined in Gracen Bilmyer’s poster, with White perspectives dominant in those collections.
That brings us to libraries. Hack Library School had posts giving a retrospective of the year, learning from academic librarians, getting out of a funk, and a perspective from international library students on remote work from the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, I’ll happily report here that libraries did well at the polls, Polish manuscripts held by the Library of Congress, updates to congress.gov, and some libraries being more special than others, which refers to what the ALA calls “special libraries.” Additionally, librarians and booksellers named their top books for 2020 and great books of Ireland returning home. If I’m lucky, I’ll also post something about libraries on my Libraries in Popular Culture blog. In other news, the Internet Archive announced that it is adding fact checking labels (and context) to links within the Wayback Machine. While this seems to be a positive, I worry that it could end up distorting representations of some content, as it is based on opinions from those who declare themselves fact checkers, and not letting people decide about the sources themselves.
There are several other honorable mentions of posts, especially when it comes to genealogy first and foremost. Yesterday I posted about my ancestors Joseph and Anne in Tipperary County, Ireland, and a new record I found, so that was exciting as I love to hear more about my Irish roots, which are currently shrouded a bit in mystery. Jeannette Austin wrote about a set of records that detailed the vessels which transported wives to Virginia, while others wrote about auction treasures and amplifying Detroit River narratives. I was fascinated to learn about the new, and unsurprising evidence that Alexander Hamilton was a slaveowner and the associated paper that Jessie Serfilipp, Historical Interpreter at the Schuyler Mansion, wrote about the topic. It’s a definite must read! It’s just as important as the articles I found about the interconnection of White terrorism and voter suppression, the social implications of data mining, and the role of data mining in the pandemic.
That’s all for this week. With that, I hope you all have a productive week to come.
- Burkely