Family history, pop culture reviews, libraries, archives, and everything nice
This week's newsletter will focus on some recent pop culture reviews I did, libraries, archives, and much more!
Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great week. This week’s newsletter will focus on libraries, archives, and much more. Happy belated Indigenous Peoples Day!
I’d like to note, first, let me highlight a few posts I published last week. Firstly, I reviewed the recent, and short, season of Carmen Sandiego, where one of the major sub-plots was her searching for her mom, only having the name “Vera Cruz” to go off, but not even knowing her mom’s real name! I hope that is expanded in the next season, whenever that is added on Netflix. I also put together a post noting the progress I’ve made in reviewing libraries up to this point, far ahead on my goal to watch and catalog 200 episodes in anime and animation which focus on libraries. I am excited for the next season of Hilda to come in December. I promise that I’ll write another article about The Librarian, a popular secondary character in the show, yet again!
That brings me to articles about archives and libraries. The Library of Congress had a number of great posts this week. Some were about Broadway, maps, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Hispanic heritage. Others were about sovereignty and preserving films. The same can be said about Hack Library School. There were episodes about the online MLIS experience, being a student leader, working through grad school, and the issue with broadly tagging books with “diversity.” I also enjoyed reading about librarians creating digital book displays for students and virtual libraries. When it comes to archives, the SAA’s Electronic Records section had a fascinating post about estimating energy use for digital preservation and summary of another part of the SAA’s 2020 conference. I also assembled tweets which focused on the ArchivesOnTheJob hashtag,
Some stories get an honorable mention in this newsletter. For one, the controversy over YouTubers colorizing historical videos with AI even when historians (and curators) are telling them to stop, and Google giving data to police based on search keywords are both chilling. On a more positive note, I loved seeing the news of gay men reclaiming the proud boys hashtag, reading the “Passenger Pigeon Manifesto” which is a call to public galleries, libraries, archives, museums, and their funders to liberate cultural heritage which has been digitized already, and the new website of the Maryland Center for History and Culture (formerly the Maryland Historical Society). In the latter case, I found, again, a link to the letter I wrote back on March 30, and another about uncertain times from COVID, to name two specific ones.
With that all being said, I hope you all have a wonderful week to come.
- Burkely