From Star Trek to the Vatican
Family history, records, digitization, and digital preservation
Hello wonderful subscribers!
It brings a smile to my face that the number of subscribers is on the rise! I published a short article recently on one of my family history blogs, focusing on the geographical concentration of those with the Packard surname, predictably in Suffolk County, aligning with existing family history. There’s also a host of articles I’ve read this week that I’d like to share with all of you. They are as follows:
Samantha Cross, an archivist of POP Archives, reviews the archival themes within the Star Trek series, determining the role of archives within the “final frontier” of the series itself. Connecting archival themes with pop culture, as I’ve done in the past as well, is an effective way to promote the archival profession by tying it to something that other people know
EvaAnne Johnson writes about how to protect your digital archive of family history documents. Pretty interesting since those of us researching our family histories do most, if not all, of our research online.
The International Tracing Service renamed themselves the “Arolsen Archives, International Center on Nazi Persecution” and have an online database of 13 million documents of over 2 million victims of Nazi persecution. Not only is this great for historians, but also for genealogists as well!
An article about self-publishing your own genealogy, especially important for those who want to share their genealogy findings outside those that use their family trees on whatever site they use.
An interesting conversation with Wendy Hagenmaier, the Digital Collections Archivist at Georgia Tech, another interview by the SAA’s group on electronic records, helping those who are new to the field, like myself, get a feel of what archivists do in the workplace.
Margot Note is at it again, writing about changing definitions in digital preservation. While this article was written back in December 2018, she re-shared it on LinkedIn on May 20.
The story about how one collector of Bob Dylan memorabilia, Mitch Blank, turned his obsession into a professional role as an associate archivist at the Bob Dylan Center, which will open in 2021, blurring the line between collector and preserver, along with much more.
The fight over the estate of late Mexican architect Luis Barragán and its archives has come to the silver screen
U.S. Navy to create a social media archive of 350 billion records to look at “big data” and analyze trends. The ethical issues of this should be more than obvious
Hundreds of Italian high schoolers using A.I. to digitize Vatican records and make them available outside the walls of the Vatican itself
- Burkely