From archives to libraries, the ALA to chain codes, history to assorted topics
This week, as always, various articles about libraries, archives, genealogy, and history, will be discussed, as will related news
Hello everyone! I hope you had a good week. Earlier this week, I reviewed one of my favorite series, writing about a vampire librarian who weeds her books, to pare them down, keeping some she likes and others she doesn’t want to read anymore. This upcoming Tuesday, my review of one of the worst librarians in existence, Francis Clara Censordoll, who literally dips “objectionable” books in kerosene, will be published on my Libraries in Popular Culture blog, so look forward to that. I enjoyed reading a post by Jennifer Snoek-Brown where she talks about cruise ship libraries and librarians. With that, let me move forward with this newsletter.
Let me start with archives. NARA commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre (also known as Black Wall Street massacre or Tulsa race riot) while the National Archives of Australia warned, in late April, that historical recordings, films and images could soon be lost, unless their budget is increased. Shannon Morreira wrote about the fire at the Jagger Library on the University of Cape Town campus, noting that burning of any part of the library is terrible “because you lose voices from the past which may carry alternative histories,” and notes that archives matter to decolonizing higher education because “histories they afford us to embrace.” Morreira outlined three lessons from the fire. For one, digitization is “hugely valuable, and should be well-funded” (even if it could take hundreds of years as was said about the Seattle National Archives before its proposed closure). Secondly, climate change is putting everything at risk, including libraries. Thirdly, that losing university archives is devastating even though they are not the “only places where knowledge is made or stored.” On a related note is the relaunch of Artbase, an Archive of Born-Digital Art and the value of polaroids, described by the Arquives in Canada, as a “particularly fascinating type of archival evidence because a Polaroid is entirely of the moment and singular,” in a collection about a place known as the “Pussy Palace.”
I liked reading about a sound heritage project in Northern Island and a review of a book by Geoffrey Yeo titled Record-Making and Record-Keeping in Early Societies which “investigates the beginnings of human recording practices and provides a survey of early record-making and record-keeping in societies across the world,” including non-written and written records in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, China and the Americas, drawing on recent scholarship. It sounds like an important book which could help when it comes to fictional works, even more than Ernst Posner’s Archives in the Ancient World, which only covered Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. That brings me to a recent post titled “Why Your Organization Needs an Archives” by Margot Note. She makes some good points about the value of archives. She notes that archives have a purpose to make, and preserve records of enduring value to an organization, with archives themselves as “direct by-products of an organization’s functions,” calling archival programs a worthwhile investment, and says that well-organized archival programs allow you to “identify, save, and retrieve the information you need while safely removing the material you do not.” The post wasn’t what I thought it would be, as the organizations she is talking about are presumably corporations, but could still be helpful. I say that even though I’m not on board with the business-speak terms like “return on investment.”
That brings me to libraries. Some articles noted a camel bringing books to homeschooling children in Pakistan, digital humanities initiatives in U.S. art libraries, OER textbooks, and adding fair use images to people’s Wikipedia pages as noted by a librarian. There are a number of blogs from the Library of Congress, about various topics, specifically on library acquisitions, three different dance practices, federal courts, an 18th century Buddhist carving, and women’s suffrage in Switzerland.
Beyond that, I liked reading Alex Brown’s analysis of the ALA’s State of America’s Libraries report, beginning with this tweet, criticizing vocational awe vibes, notes that libraries are not “the cure for governmental ineptitude and negligence,” and pointed to the problem of the “lack of broadband on tribal lands and rural areas.” She asked whether “the challenges on programs and meeting rooms” is accurate, saying it could include those who “pushed back against libraries hosting transphobic speakers…[or] getting a slavery reenactment cancelled,” says that librarians should “push back against harmful, offensive books,” criticized the ALA for praising “libraries that remained open during COVID,” noting that changes to e-book lending terms from big publishers “were short lived,” says libraries should be ashamed for turning off their wi-fi when they were closed, and adding that libraries should not get thanks for “extending wifi to their parking lots or buying chromebooks and hotspots” as this is the “least possible effort.” She criticized the “Advocacy in Action” section, with nothing about #ProtectLibraryWorkers or #CloseTheLibraries (advocacy on Twitter), not creative virtual programming, criticizing short-term digital library cards, saying it does not make librarians heroes when registering undocumented people for library cards, noticed how the ALA did not “include ways in which school and academic libraries have struggled to provide learning services during the pandemic (and before),” and noted that the ALA is “praising itself for putting out an empty BLM statement…[which] did not advocate for dealing with institutional racism within libraries.”
She adds that how inequities in collection development came about, through institutional racism, questions if the library profession “worked to address internal inequities in 2020,” says that there was “no mention of Asian Americans or Latinx, Indigenous, or immigrant POC people” in the report, and concludes that the report “seems like a lot of money was spent on something that probably could’ve been a bunch of blot [sic] posts…No follow-through, analysis, or self-reflection. No strategies for moving forward,” arguing that it “feels like ALA built itself a pedestal then hauled itself up there and then wrote a “report” about it.” Her tweet thread speaks for itself. I didn’t summarize ever part here, while noting some of the bigger points. I’d recommend reading the whole thread to get her full perspective. It gave me pause in that I should be more critical of the ALA and its pronouncements.
There is a lot of genealogy-related news to share from the past week. You might be scratching your head and wondering how an animated series, like Star Wars: The Bad Batch and its use of “chain codes,” relates to genealogy. It is pretty simple, actually. As the CBR reviewer writes, “…perhaps we can think of a chain code as a cross between a police database and Ancestry.com.” This is because these chain codes contain “biographical information that goes beyond birth date and home address” and it continued to be used by the New Republic. It was described as an “unique identification marker.” Some interesting posts noted that many Americans are descended from Germans, while noting the history of Black cemeteries, and organizing your family history. I liked reading about a book that “presaged and helped spur the effort to stop the practice of patenting unmodified genes,” the Caribbean Genealogy Library, the Mayo parish just before the famine, genealogy tips to research logs, and Irish emigration, not only to U.S. and Canada.
There were various articles about history I read this past week. This included posts about Georgia voting restrictions, clothing scrapbook, National Park Service unveiling new Underground Railroad sites, history of the National Archives building in D.C., the 1722 murder which spurred Indigenous pleas for justice, refugee history, and mapping survivor testimonies from the Holocaust. Smithsonian magazine explained possible changes to Stone Mountain Park, 19th-century America’s partisan warfare, how Indigenous peoples in British Columbia tended ‘Forest Gardens,’ the history of Blackface (it is older than you might think), and asking whether Shakespeare based his masterpieces on works by an “obscure Elizabethan playwright.”
That brings me to the last section of this newsletter on assorted topics. One writer argued that writers should know about search engine optimization (SEO), social media, copyright, and the publishing industry. Others talked about metadata, deciphering the mysteries of migratory birds, tutorial in creating 18th century coastlines for fantasy maps, the ransom attack on the Colonial Pipeline, Republicans grumbling about critical race theory and announcing bills to restrict it, and legislation and book bans targeting teaching about social justice and racism in schools. As always, The Nib had insightful and hilarious illustrations. This included topics such as a search and seizure in Rudy Giuliani’s apartment, Instagram “accidentally” blocking posts about the Aqsa Mosque while allowing Qanon to remain, changes women have endured over the years, panic buying of gasoline, using Peanuts characters to lampoon those who participated in the Capitol riot, and how Mickey Mouse has a racist origin story and argues that the mouse is a minstrel in and of itself. My favorite, however, was one by Kasia Babis about a meat-eating man who blabs on about meat, the vegan man leaves, and the meat-eater declares that vegans are “weird.” The point is the meat-eater has the problem, not the vegan, obviously.
That’s all for this week. Until next week! Hope you all have a productive week ahead.
- Burkely