Libraries, archives, genealogy, the blogosphere, and news of the world
This week's newsletter notes three new blogs I created to review popular culture in the library, genealogy, and archives fields, along with other news from the past week
Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great week. This week’s newsletter will focus on various subjects. Before moving onto the rest of my newsletter, I’d like to tell you all about my new blogs. I’m talking about my three new WordPress blogs: Libraries in Popular Culture, Genealogy in Popular Culture, and Wading Through The Cultural Stacks (about archives/archivists). On each of these blogs, I’m planning to post reviews of libraries, genealogy/family history, and archives respectfully. Originally, I had written about those topics on my History Hermann WordPress blog, but it made sense to have dedicated blogs to those areas instead. With that, let me begin this newsletter.
I’d like to focus on the library field first. Book Riot had an interesting article about the “little free libraries” and their new role in our COVID-era times, while Hack Library School had a number of introspective articles. In some, writers questioned the point of their MLIS, while others noted the importance of the summer break, remote work in the library field, learning new knowledge, and why being a “generalist” can be vital. Similarly the statement from the Summersville Public Library about a jerk who “deliberately removed their mask and coughed throughout the library,” resulting in the library having to close down and only offer curbside service! So, people, please wear your mask. It’s not that hard to make a mask if you don’t want to buy one.
That brings me to the archival field. Sure, there was a review of Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 on the Review Portal of The American Archivist, looking at the archival themes in the book, but I more fascinated with the storytelling workshop and was the interview with Kristen Sosinski, Archivist in the Prints & Photographs Division at the Library of Congress, on one of the LOC blogs. In that interview she described what she does and what an archivist does, generally:
An archivist organizes, describes, preserves and makes unique materials accessible to the public. In the Prints & Photographs Division, archivists are tasked with processing large collections. Generally speaking archives work in our division involves: surveying the collection; meeting with reference librarians and curators to hear about their challenges using the collection in its current unprocessed state; and developing a team-based plan that mitigates these challenges and creates an efficient workflow. Once the plan is approved, the archivist processes the collection and is responsible for creating the necessary tools such as a database to capture metadata, training team members, and conducting quality review to ensure accurate work. The end result is often an online finding aid or records accessible through the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog…I am currently developing plans to process the photographic archive of the American Red Cross…Obviously, we cannot take the collections home with us to work on them, so physical processing paused. That said, our job is more than just physically arranging and housing collection items…With creative thinking a great deal can be accomplished even though we aren’t able to physically have our hands in the collections.
There are a number of articles that get an honorable mention. Jeannette Holland Austin posted about the “genealogy clock,” and imagining the hard times your ancestors went through while researching, finding South Carolina Marriages, and Kentucky ancestors, while some scholars wrote about Fake News, Artificial Intelligence, and Censorship in Educational Research. I also enjoyed reading the “Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences,” the role of algorithms, and the new executive director of Maryland Humanities. Best of luck to them. In terms of the Internet Archive, which is really a library (specifically a digital library) rather than an archive, there were posts from them about the essential nature of digital librarians, distance learning, and the role of their library collections. Apart from this, there was a post about Internet Archive data and an article in Vox noting that the lawsuit against the Internet Archive over their Emergency Library will not be as dire as some think, even if they lose the case, which is a possibility.
I hope you all have a great week to come.
- Burkely