Libraries, digital skills, fiction, archives, Black genealogy, and more
This week's newsletter includes stories about libraries and archives, along with my friend's new fiction with a non-binary archivist, the importance of roots work, and many other relevant stories
Hello everyone! I hope you all are having a good week. Not many updates this week to report, apart from a post I wrote about more beautiful libraries in animated series, another about popular culture and the duties of archivists and a new discussion by the SNAP section of the SAA about the value of digital skills when it comes to the archival field. Also, my quest to find out how many states have indexing with FamilySearch in their prisons continues, and my friend published a new fictional work which, again, features archives. My favorite line is when one of the protagonists says, when his assistant introduces the archivist (who is non-binary by the way): “I know who they are. I don’t need an introduction. I know who the archivist is in this city, goddamnit…go away, shoo.” The archivist has a significant role in the first half of the story, part of my friend’s continued efforts to improve representation of archives in popular culture, something I salute them for.
There are several articles this week when it comes to archives. My fellow colleagues at the NSA wrote about Gorbachev’s diplomatic efforts to try and stop the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the anniversary of George Kennan’s Long Telegram, and climate change negotiations by the Clinton Administration. At the same time, the NSA joined other groups to urge the Biden Administration to take “specific, meaningful steps to strengthen the Freedom of Information Act and reduce government secrecy.” Other than this, Margot Note, who I’ve mentioned in this newsletter before, wrote about visual literacy, historic preservation and image management while Maarja Krusten talked about preservation of presidential records in our current time, and digital records. The Board of the Society of Mississippi Archivists released a statement opposing the members of Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH)’s Board of Trustees being nominated by the board and confirmed by the Mississippi State Senate. They said this is important to oppose because Mississippi has a difficult and complex history, still struggling with “issues of civil rights and racial justice,” it needs to not be “unencumbered by political interests.” There are articles about wonderful Black History collections, a community archives project of the Norfolk Record Office, some people reflecting on COVID-19 web collecting by the NIH, a presentation at Archive/Counter Archive 2020 Symposium, and the intersection of natural history and archives. Of note are posts about documenting the 1960s in digital collections and Emily Stohl of Book Riot writing about archives, archivists, and dealing with a reactionary presidency.
That brings me to libraries. The Library of Congress has posts about Afro-Latinos, Fannie Lou Hamer, Finnish War Trials, and Matthew Whitaker (a blind jazz pianist). NYPL highlighted Black women in history, Hack Library School had a post asking how to serve today’s young adults in libraries, and I Love Libraries noted a number of LGBTQIA books recommended by librarians. Furthermore, Newsweek argued, as a number of people in the library field have said as well, that libraries are an essential service so librarians should get the vaccine, something which I definitely agree with. There was a story, which some may describe as scary, about a Michigan library being closed down because of venomous spiders, CBC noting that libraries in British Columbia are removing late fees, a librarian in the UK saying they had to use “guerrilla tactics” to preserve their underfunded library, and Ed Tech magazine talking about how school librarians, like many of us, have adjusted to remote learning.
The above video was originally shared by Black Pro Gen, a Black genealogy group on Twitter.
With that, let me move to one of my favorite topics, genealogy. Nicka Smith, a Black genealogist, talked about major news on Ancestry, with the digitization of U.S. Freedmen’s Bureau Records for all U.S. States, the Danish West Indies Record Collection, the Reindexed U.S. Probate Collection, and launching a “Questions and Ancestors: Black Family History” video content series, where Smith will be interviewed. Another Black genealogist, Shannon Christmas wrote about how so-called “slave schedules” largely “identify enslavers, not the enslaved” as Black people are only identified, literally, by tick marks! It’s hard to say what tick mark identifies what person, as no names are listed. He specifically criticized the popular genealogy show Finding Your Roots for misusing the schedules to reinforce the “already pervasive falsehood that tracing African American families remains a Sisyphean task of Herculean magnitude,” noting that a number of “easy-to-access, but too often overlooked digital resources and archival records contain far more detail about African American lives – free and enslaved alike” than these schedules. Later posts on his blog focused on finding ancestors by using X-DNA, Genetic Genealogy, tracing free people of color before 1870, and researching enslaved ancestors. Other blogs focused on events at RootsTech and making genea-goals.
That brings me to the final part of this newsletter. The School Library Journal had a post about Cat in the Hat removed from reading programs because of racism by Dr. Seuss (and replaced with more diverse books). Other articles were about a NLRB ruling which potentially limits which adjuncts can form unions, California Democrats wanting to strike the term illegal ‘alien’ from state law, which makes sense, requests by Reuters journalists about mortality in U.S. jails, the burning of the U.S. capital by the British in the so-called “War of 1812,” and the elusive life of Martha Washington. I really enjoyed illustrations on The Nib about Biden’s milquetoast student debt plan, how the GOP used the “free market” to screw over Texans (from the always great Tom Tomorrow), the spread of even more COVID-19 mutations, and a debate between two luminaries in the Black freedom struggle in the U.S.: Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and the less-known Robert F. Williams.
That’s all I have for this week. Hope you all have a productive week ahead.
- Burkely