Family history, webcomics, archives, and new library resources
I'll be talking about libraries, archives, and genealogy, as I do every week, along with a bunch of new resources available from the Library of Congress!
Hello everyone! I hope you all had a productive week. On the one hand, I published a post about family secrets, trees, and history in one of my favorite ongoing webcomics, Spellbound. On the other hand, I wrote about archives themes in two other webcomics: 180 Angel (ongoing) and Power Ballad (ended some years ago), and anti-social male librarians in various animated series. I’d recently reorganized a page on my Libraries in Popular Culture blog site, which is being revised all the time. I’m planning to have a similar format on other blog pages, expanding it to my blogs focusing on archives and genealogy as well. I am super excited by my upcoming guest post on Jennifer Snoek-Brown’s Reel Librarians website titled “Non-White librarians in animated series: She-Ra to Yamibou.” Currently, my friend is writing a new fiction work, which will have a scene in a library and may mention archives (or an archivist), so I’ll likely share that with you next week to give that friend some support in this newsletter. With that, let me move onto the rest of my newsletter.
Let me start with archives. My colleagues at NSA wrote about U.S. nuclear armed exercises and the Allende massacre in Mexico. There was some chatter by my colleagues about how someone who was part of the former administration who has ties to the former military junta of Argentina…and even led the FOIA desk at the State Department! On a related records note, I’d like to point to a new bill proposed by Carolyn Maloney, called the Presidential Records Preservation Act, which would “require the president, vice president and White House senior officials to “make and preserve” records that track the president’s official activities,” including putting in place specific measures to preserve and capture electronic records while making them “easily searchable and accessible.” If this passed, it would definitely change how records are viewed and accessed by the general public. I enjoyed listening to a podcast about how archivists can “combat systemic racism in the workplace” and the archives profession, reading Margot Note’s explanation of how a CMS improves and automates archival labor, Rachael Woody’s article on how to prepare your family treasures for the worst, and another about the effects of the current pandemic on “web-archiving efforts at the University of Illinois.” The search for the new director of the SAA is beginning, the spring conference of MARAC (Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference), about “Suffrage Legacies: Civil Rights, Political Activism, and Archives” will be hosted in April, the University of Arizona is digitizing over 6,000 recordings of Indigenous oral history, and researchers are interviewing Black engineers and business people in order to “capture the history of the tech industry.” Black Women Radicals, a Black feminist advocacy organization, highlighted 16 Black feminist archival projects and the NARA blog Pieces of History talked about USS Monitor gun carriages. Others wrote about linked data, regional archives, information technology, and a historic Kentucky kitchen. Also of note, of course, is the newest issue of Archival Outlook for March and April 2021, which I recommend you read.
That brings me to libraries. There were a number of great blogs from the Library of Congress (LOC) about new additions to Chronicling America, the trial of Governor Picton in Trinidad, the U.S. farm bill, GIS data, new entries on the recording registry, historic female trailblazers, Spanish laws, a new LGBTQ resource from the LOC music division, new oversight board of Facebook, Latina women, maps, and manuscripts. Hack Library School talked about the value of books. LOC recently updated their handbook of Latin American studies, the Washington Post talked about the e-book monopoly Amazon has, The Verge added that Amazon is restricting how these e-books are made available to public libraries, and Columbus Underground talked about the importance of OCLC to the library community.
With that, I’d like to briefly touch on genealogy. Apart from some mention in mainstream publications like Comic Book Resources and an opinion piece in Newsweek which mentioned Ancestry.com DNA results showing direct lines to the Dominican Republic, others wrote about various genealogy topics. This included RootsTech Connect, women’s history, genealogy ethics, Black genealogy, Irish genealogy, and coats of arms. Furthermore, some even suggested that Pinterest would be a good tool for genealogists (I guess?) and gave tips for navigating the Irish diaspora.
There are a number of other stories which I’d like to mention. Amazon announced that it will not sell books that “frame sexual identity as mental illness” which should be a no-brainer, California universities and Elsevier made a huge open access deal, MIT Press launched direct open-access monographs, and POGO talked about how agencies misuse the law enforcement exemption in FOIA. The Verge wrote about how scientists scrambled to stop the EPA, during the time of the traitorous president, from wiping out climate data, Doris Morgan Rueda, a doctoral candidate at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, emphasized the importance of accurate historical interpretation, while the American Historical Association opposed an effort to eliminate tenure at an Ohio university (John Carroll University). One writer in the AHA’s Perspectives of History, Varsha Venkatasubramanian, explained the importance of building an online presence as a historian. As always, I enjoyed the illustrations in The Nib, like the ones about collective stress (and the pandemic), the “new boss” (how Biden is still detaining immigrants), and a guide to dealing with police at protests. Last but not least, Smithsonian magazine had articles about the Salem Witch Trial, how women once dominated the beer industry, the first Black physician in America (James McCune Smith), and the woman who helped avert nuclear war: Juanita Moody.
That’s all for this week’s newsletter. I hope you all have a great week ahead, despite the continued rise in bigotry in the country, only amplified in recent days with the attacks on Asian Americans in Georgia. Please be safe out there and work to counter this racist filth in the U.S. the best you can. Thanks.
- Burkely