Celebration, aftermath of victory, libraries, archives, and much more
This week I'll be covering various topics, touching on the election results, libraries, archives, and more!
Hello everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful week, especially with the presidential election news and the resounding defeat of toxicity, racism, and the awfulness that has festered in the last four years. As such, even if we don’t agree with Biden and Harris, celebrations totally make sense! It reminds me of the message in the opening to the recently concluded She-Ra, or this haunting cover: being brave and fighting against “shadows” and “evil,” in whatever form that takes. Of course the election results are not a “happily ever after” that Steven Universe (voiced by Zach Callison) sang about, rather there is no such thing as a “happily ever after,” as there is always “more work to do,” in Steven’s words at the end of the franchise’s one and only musical film. Perhaps we can also take lessons from the limited epilogue series, Steven Universe Future, which dealt with the aftermath of victory, something rarely covered in animation. Anyway, this week’s newsletter will focus on libraries, archives, and more.
When it comes to libraries, there were some interesting articles this week. Hack Library School writers focuses on life choices, election day, and programming lessons. At the same time, American Libraries, the magazine of the ALA, had an article about trauma that those in the library workforce have from traumatic events, indirect results of those events, and hearing “patrons speak out about their traumas and even by helping them find the resources they need to realign their lives,” leading librarians to “perform emotional labor while communicating with them.” While the news about vandalism at libraries in an attempt at voter intimidation is worrisome, there was some positivity. For one, the bookculling project at the NZ national library, which I mentioned in my September 30 newsletter, has been paused for the time being, and librarians are innovating in an attempt to take on new responsibilities in COVID times. Also, I may write another review for my Libraries in Popular Culture site next week. If so, I’ll tell you about it here, without a doubt! I can happily report that I have currently watched 85 episodes with libraries or librarians in anime, and 66 in Western animation. If you see any libraries or librarians in any of the popular culture media you consume that you’d like to share, please let me know. I’d appreciate that.
It’s worth talking about archives a bit as well. The Nelson Mandela Foundation had a post titled “Liberating the archive,” noting that three recent books have benefited from “engagement with the Foundation and its archival resources.” I was glad to hear about the 100,000 items digitized by the Sheffield City Archives in the UK and efforts to strengthen the push for indigenous data control in part because of COVID control. Also, Mustafa Saif wrote on the South Asian American Asian Control about the diverse range of experiences of queer and trans South Asian people which are archived in the Archive of Queer Brown Feelings. Apart from this, I have a post which I hope to publish in the next week titled something like “Missing records, love, and mystery!” which focuses on records in a Bloom Into You episode.
There are some articles I’d like to note as honorable mentions. First, the New York Times talked about book publishers trying to diversify with their new hires, Dhanya Addanki wrote about interviewing Dalit people and how they felt unsafe “in largely South Asian spaces” and Anne Ifran writing about “long history of Palestinian refugees deploying petitions as part of their political activism.” Of note is a new online bookshop called Bookshop.org which is an alternative to Amazon and for indie publishers, which I may try to use, Jeannette Austin writing about poor houses and genealogy, and the RIAA, not surprisingly, abusing DMCA so they can take down youtube-dl, “a popular free software tool for downloading videos from YouTube and other user-uploaded video platforms,” which will potentially stop “many thousands of users, and other programs and services, that rely on it.” Finally, there is the story of the Kansas city curator, Keth Davis, who built the collection of Nelson Atkins photographs, resigning in protest because of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art’s announced that it was cutting its budget by 25 percent and laying off 36 staffers to “cope with financial challenges due to the coronavirus pandemic.” Some considered the departure of Davis and others as hurting the reputation of the museum itself.
That’s all for now. I hope you all have a wonderful week to come.
- Burkely