Libraries, fiction, genealogy, archivists in popular culture, history, and so on
This week, I'll be writing about archives, libraries, genealogy, and history, along with a focus on my friend's new fictional work, a slave trading ancestor, and many other topics.
Hello everyone! I hope your week is going well. In the past week, I published a post about wonderful scenes of libraries in animation and webcomics. My friend wrote a fictional work that has a huge focus on a lot of family history and genealogy, especially at the beginning, before it gets moving onto the rest of the story. I’m really excited that their work is moving forward!
Speaking of genealogy, I published a post today which looks at one of my ancestors from Rhode Island who participated in the transatlantic slave trade, as a slave trader, even though his action was wholly illegal. Already, the post has been praised by fellow genealogists on Twitter for having “great information” (Carolynn ni Lochlainn) and providing “incredible detail and research” (Beth Wylie). Wylie also said that the post made their day since she writes and researches so little these days, and hoped that “more white people were familiar with their own histories & comfortable discussing their ancestors roles in the oppression of other groups,” saying it would help a lot in “our current National issues.” I’ll agree with that. You can see my responses to Lochliann and Wylie on my Twitter account. With that, let me begin my newsletter.
In the world of archives, Colleen Theisen, a MLIS program lecturer who was formerly a Special Collections librarian, mentioned a film named The Last Letter From Your Lover which is based around a journalist stumbling “across love letters dating back to the 1960s while doing research in the newspaper’s archives.” She is helped by an archivist, with a love story which, of course, “begins to unfold between the journalist and the endearing archivist the more letters they read together,” according to Forbes. So, that’s cool, even if it is replete with stereotypes (which it undoubtedly is). It reminds me a bit of Somewhere in Time, where Christopher Reeve reads about a mysterious woman he meets and he tries to travel back in time to 1912, using old records to help him in this endeavor. Anyway, Samantha “Sam” Cross, who I have mentioned in this newsletter time and again, reviewed archives within a video game, The Hollow Knight. She noted a part where a player takes on the role of an archivist, even though the archives are in name only. She talked about the value of an archivist “represented by a jellyfish type creature” as they represent “something unknowable and alien, which makes them the perfect conduits for knowledge keepers” in the game itself.
Other than this, there were stories about a NARA grant funding digitization of Pittsburgh records, NARA’s virtual programs in their Virtual Programs Newsletter, and the SAA’s 2021 Nominating Committee asking for help in identifying potential candidates for the Vice President/President-Elect (2022-2024), Council Member (2022-2025), and Nominating Committee (2023) positions. Additionally, the story about how a music library on Spotify will disappear if Spotify itself dies, was interesting and terrifying at the same time. Otherwise, the Web Archiving section of the SAA outlined lessons from pandemic web archiving, Gina Kim Perry, an archives specialist at NARA in D.C., noted the importance of the ratified Indian Treaties Digitization Project, as did Dong Eun Kim, an exhibits conservator. I also liked reading about a new exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum which shows the power of records, and the Los Angeles Archivists Collective describing the true cost of archival acquisitions. The College & University Archives section of the SAA announced the results from recent elections, and the New Zealand Micrographic Services outlined why digitization is important, although they don’t focus much on the costs of such digitization.
That brings me to libraries. There was a lot of news from the Library of Congress this week. Some posts focused on the role of online interns, preserving special books, and a return to in-person reference services. Others included interviews with two interns who worked on transcribing the Herencia: Centuries of Spanish Legal Documents collection for the Law Library of Congress: Nina Perdomo and Gabby Farina. In related library news, 600,000 books being culled from the National Library of New Zealand’s collection will be digitized by a not-for-profit digital library, the Internet Archive. While the article says IA “saved” these books, the fact is that they were being culled for a simple reason: they were overseas publications generally published between 1965 and 1969 and “rarely accessed.” That seems like a more justified reason than any in weeding the books, as that these publications will be removed to “make room for more New Zealand, Māori and Pasifika content.” Libraries are not storehouses of information that need to keep everything they ingest, unlike archives, which have stricter records retention measures, with many of the records kept permanently. Nothing in a library is required to be there permanently.
Just as valuable were articles about the Indianapolis Public Library leadership accused of racism, a post by Laura Solomon reminding librarians to not pretend they are patrons of a library website, and a post from April Hathcock. In the latter case, Hathcock noted that sociopolitical context is important to recognize as it affects us all, saying that there is no such thing as library neutrality because we “live in a system of oppression,” which is not accidental, going “beyond individual motivations and good intentions,” and says that some folks fail to “realize the broader contextual implications of what they’re asking for, saying, doing.” She concludes by saying we should all “do the world a favor and take a step back to observe the context around us…be mindful of how that context rests on the lives of others” and do our work from such a “place of mindfulness.” That is something I can agree with completely.
With that, we move onto genealogy. China’s Genebox was said to be a “breakthrough” in DNA testing at home, while others pointed to investigative genetic genealogy being used to solve a double murder and, in the case of Olive Tree Genealogy, focused on finding naturalization papers for an ancestor. Judy G. Russell of The Legal Genealogist, had a post about the switchover from pounds and pence to dollars and cents, with pounds used as currency by some well into the 19th century, since the U.S. “didn’t have anything remotely resembling a national banking system that could push the general economy into the new currency system.” Midwest Computer Genealogists had a post about two Missouri pioneers and SFGate pointed out that Ancestry.com had begun subleasing its 9 million square foot space in San Francisco.
There is some news in the world of history. Perspectives and History reviewed history lessons that can come from Judas and the Black Messiah, and told the story of Buck Colbert Franklin and the Tulsa Massacre. In addition, Smithsonian magazine examined what archaeology can tell us about the ancient history of eating kosher and a trove of Viking-age treasures making their public debut. Alison J. Miller, Asian Art History Assistant Professor, examined, in Nursing Clio, medicine and modern girls in 1930s Japanese painting, while articles in the Journal of the American Revolution focused on two topics: George Washington’s Culper Spy Ring and Caroline Howe celebrating the Glory of the First of June, 1794. Furthermore, Jacques Gagné wrote in Genealogy Ensemble about the tragic cholera epidemic of 1832 in lower Canada.
That brings me to other articles which don’t fit into the existing categories of this newsletter. The Washington Post reported on the terrifying, but at all surprising, use of private spy software sold by an Israeli firm found on cellphones worldwide, while Smithsonian magazine, for their part, argued that the controversy over a Black actress playing Anne Boleyn is unnecessary and harmful, KPBS reported on the unveiling of a Say Your Names memorial by the San Diego African American Museum of Fine Art, and the World Health Organization certified China as malaria-free earlier this month.
The Nib had a number of wonderful illustrations. They were on various subjects. This included, for instance, how anti-vaxxers shame autistic kids, post-quarantine edition of awkward hugs, the wackiness of those who believe in the lies peddled by the former president, unvaccinated Americans being the ones who worry the least about the Delta variant, and Israel declaring that Ben & Jerry’s will suffer “severe consequences” over boycott of occupied Palestine, even though the company has “conducted business in Israel with a licensee partner since 1987.”
The official statement is more weaselly than you would think: Ben & Jerry’s ice cream won’t be sold in occupied Palestine after the end of this year, but they will STILL “stay in Israel through a different arrangement.” So, I guess this is a victory, but a hollow one at best. Other illustrations focused on efforts to ensure conservative power, how nothing is returning to normal, Republicans being divided on how much to push vaccines, and the problematic statistic that almost a quarter of LAPD officers fail to promptly activate body cameras in incidents where they use force! This is only a sampling of the probably 30-40 illustrations they send out each week, which cover a gamut of topics.
That’s all for this week. Until next time!
- Burkely