Libraries, archives, and all the rest
This week's newsletter will primarily focus on library and archives news, with a little genealogy and family history thrown in there, too! Enjoy!
Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great week. While I could have sent this out on Friday or Saturday of last week, I decided to send it today instead since I thankfully have a nice break from work this week. As such, the next newsletter will likely be sent either next Friday (9/4) or Saturday (9/5). Anyway, onward with the newsletter!
I’ll start with the library field and posts on my Libraries in Popular Culture blog. Since my last newsletter on August 15, I’ve written about the “curmudgeon” librarian in a Western animation, Futurama’s joke about libraries, and a fight in the library between various characters. All the posts I’ve published since the 15th are interesting, but those three are my favorites. Oh, and I put together a post which outlines when I’ll post on the blog in the future, probably either weekly or biweekly, like my other blogs. In other library news, I thought the article about the complicated business of keeping books clean during COVID was pretty fascinating, as was the posts on the Library of Congress (LOC) blog about a business librarian’s perspective of the census, and evidence from “invisible worlds” in Salem. Also of note is the Hack Library School post giving tips for online discussion boards which is important when more and more of education, whether in higher educational institutions or elsewhere is going online. The same could be said about the story about the University of Oregon library covering up racist murals, the LOC acquiring foreign-language materials about COVID’s affects, and a commentary about textbooks in library collections.
That brings me to the archives field and my Wading Through The Archival Stacks blog. When it comes to the blog, I published a post which focuses on the special collections depicted in one of my favorite animated series, Cleopatra in Space, building off the post I made on ilovelibraries recently, reviewing libraries in that series and another series, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. Later this week I’ll have a post which reprints a post I made back in 2019 about records and 1990s films, but the following week I’ll have some new content. So, look forward to that! Otherwise, I liked reading about how the Library of Congress program to crowdsourcing the transcription of Lincoln’s letters has come to an end, a recap of the 2020 SAA conference, and an interview with the digital assets librarian at the Morton Arboretum. Most exciting of all is the Presidential Library Explorer, which shows how many records NARA has digitized when it comes to presidential materials. It’s pretty small right now, but on the bright side, it’s good that NARA is being transparent.
There are several articles which get a special mention as I continue to think about a possible post for Genealogy in Popular Culture, where I haven’t published anything since August 12. As such, suggestions for that blog would be appreciated. Moving on, I thought the article about the importance of student groups and chapters to a MLIS grad school experience was interesting, as was the posts about how colonists created the necessities they needed and the exciting events of the past. I further thought that the articles about why the rise of audiobooks is worth celebrating and the post about Hingham sailors in the Civil War (by the Hingham Archives) are worthwhile as well.
With that all being said, I hope you all have a great weekend and week to come.
- Burkely