Librarians, archivists, family historians, and everything nice

This week's newsletter focuses, as always, on the library and archives fields, while also bringing in some articles about genealogy and my friend's fictional work. Enjoy!

Hello everyone! I hope you are all having a great week. I’d like to highlight some stories about archives and libraries this week.

Let me start with libraries. Hack Library School had some interesting articles once again. In one of these pieces, a writer reflected on their first MLIS semester. I also enjoyed reading about the duties of a librarian from Lit Hub or an article in Book Riot outlining how to become a librarian. There was also a fascinating story in Time about librarians sent undercover as part of the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications (IDC) to neutral cities in Europe during World War II to gather intelligence in 1942 and 1943. It is reprinted from a new book by Kathy Peiss titled Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe. Apart from that and the story about the material (music, books, movies, etc) entering the public domain this year, the American Library Association (ALA) reported how the U.S. Senate confirmed Kansas City Public Library CEO and ALA member Crosby Kemper III as Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which is the primary source of federal support for the nation’s libraries and museums. Another press release from the ALA noted how the organization would persist in its campaign for Macmillan to lift their e-book embargo.

That brings me to stories in the realms of genealogy and archives. I think it’s worth noting the genealogists who highlighted the digitization grants this year, the upcoming genealogy conferences in the months to follow, an older post about how to request vital records in Paris online, or Margot Note pointing out how anyone can “learn methods to save their personal or family history.” That brings me to three other posts by Note, one talking about levels of archival arrangement, another about determining your archival project budget, and a final one about how technology has affected archival activities. The post by the NARA blog, The Unwritten Record, about the fact that indexes of aerial photography of the U.S. is being digitized and the Winter 2020 newsletter of Solo, the quarterly newsletter, which focuses on when disasters (man-made or natural) cause damage to cultural heritage institutions are both worth a read. That brings me to pages 6 and 15 of Archival Outlook, a publication of the Society of American Archivists, focusing on Archive of Our Own, an organization which tries to archive fan fictions. They note how the organization has recently won the Hugo Awards for its work and the relevance of the organization to archival practice.

With that being said, I might as well also mention a part from my friend’s recently published fictional work, which includes one character noting that only non-active records are transferred to the archives. My friend said they wanted to put more of a mention of libraries in that story, but it wouldn’t have flowed right if they had tried to add it. So, they kept it as is.

That’s all for this week. I hope everyone has a great rest of their week.

- Burkely