Indigenous land "cessions," archives, and libraries
This week's newsletter will focus on archives and libraries, a new digital database focused on Indigenous lands, and much more.
Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great week. This week’s newsletter will focus on archives, libraries, and more. The opening image comes from the new tool by NARA and the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, which expands access to treaties between the U.S. and indigenous nations. The tool is called the IDA (Indigenous Digital Archives) Treaties Explorer and shows “cessions” or those areas indigenous nations agreed to cede to the U.S. It doesn’t include much of the Eastern Seaboard, Kentucky or West Virginia but treaties for those areas can be searched for by title or indigenous name. Related to that, here’s a map showing areas where indigenous nations (also called “tribes”), cultures, and languages are located across the United States put together in 1991 to give some more context. Oh, and this month is “National Family History Month,” but the idea came from a reactionary former U.S. Senator, Orrin Hatch, which is often overlooked by genealogists who promote it.
Anyway, without further ado, let me get on with the rest of this newsletter, beginning with archives. There was another article, continuing from the one last week, on the blog of the SAA Electronic Records Section, about estimating energy use for digital preservation. I’d recommend, additionally, the recent edition of Archival Outlook, the blogpost about gifs created by NARA, and another about the history of Victorian hairwork … and a hair album of all things. I further enjoyed reading the academic article in the Journal of Western Archives about the closure of the Seattle Archives, which is much better than what I wrote back in February. Also of note is my post on the Wading Through The Cultural Stacks blog which focuses on a number of archives and archivists in popular culture and the fact that there may be some great upcoming posts on the blog of the Acquisitions & Appraisal Section of the Society of American Archivists in November. If that is your area of expertise, send them a submission!
That brings me to libraries. Hack Library School had posts about learning from technology mishaps, the historic Maryland newspapers project, and a call for peer review of an LIS textbook. The Library of Congress had wonderful articles about the Korab collection, the soundtrack of WWII, Black cowboys, and an interview with the librarian-in-residence at the Law Library of Congress, Louis Myers. There is, furthermore, a post where an academic librarian talks about open access, another about preserving artifacts of the MET’s Thomas J. Watson Library and the story of a former library employee who stole over $1.3 million in printer toner over about a two year period! Just awful to have people who work at libraries steal materials. I think I mentioned in my last newsletter, but in December the second season of Hilda will be beginning on Netflix and I’m super excited because “The Librarian” will be coming back! From the new opening of season 2 and the stuff I’ve seen on Twitter, I’m excited to see the next season and write about this again for I Love Libraries.
I have a few honorable mentions for this newsletter. This includes a rare folio of one of Shakespeare’s works going on auction for over $10 million, a story in The New Yorker reviewing Mike Mandel’s selfies from the Seventies, and another about how COVID-19 is forcing college libraries to quarantine textbooks, which has hurt low-income students. There were posts of note about villains of the Revolutionary War, picture books of Indigenous people, honoring Indigenous voices in books for young people, publishers extending permissions for read alouds, and an updated Fold3 including a purportedly improved “Browse” feature. Finally, there is a story about how Facebook changed its algorithms to punish the progressive media outlet, Mother Jones, while advantaging right-wing (and toxic) outlets like Breitbart and Fox News. Its deeply disturbing to say the least, with these tech companies having so much power over what we see every day, especially since many of us often use social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, to name three of the biggest.
I hope you all have a wonderful week to come.
- Burkely