NARA, presidential records, archives, diversity, and beyond
This week's newsletter will focus on the value of archiving (especially of presidential records), the librarian profession, and other relevant news from the past week
Hello everyone! This week has been a relatively productive one for me and I hope it has been for all of you as well. I composed an article about the YouTube animated series called Too Loud, and submitted it to I Love Libraries, a series centered on two siblings with oversized heads (shown above) who work at a local library. I recently got accepted as a writer for the pop culture site, The Geekiary, for which I am composing my first review, and sent in two posts about librarians and archivists of color to Reel Librarians, one of my favorite review blogs, run by Jennifer Snoek-Brown, a librarian in Washington State. Apart from that, I published posts reviewing the value of libraries in various animated series, the “forbidden archives” shown in one of my favorite anime, and a family history blog post which explains the connection between my ancestor, E.P.W. Packard, and Susan B. Anthony.
With that, let me begin! Archives Aware! had a great piece interviewing Rebecca Hankins on the Rich LGTBQ+ Collections Housed in Cushing Memorial Library and Archives at Texas A & M University, while Mother Jones wrote about how a forum run by supporters of the former traitorous U.S. president, scrubbed its archives of posts before the violent break-in at the Capitol. Then, Politico reported on the newly created presidential library for the former traitorous president, run by NARA. There isn’t much there, but it is interesting that his personal Twitter account was NOT archived by NARA, so you have to go places like this to see the tweets. Politico explains that NARA “is working to make such accounts of administration officials, including the former president, “publicly available as soon as possible.”” I think it is a major oversight for them to not archive his personal Twitter account, because there is a lot of historical value in his awful, and bigoted, tweets. Maarja Krusten, a former NARA employee, has noted that “although presidential library often used loosely outside NARA for a library or museum, neither library or museum required by law” and Rachel Vagts, president of the Society of American Archivists, said there is a need now for “better funding for the National Archives, and a better culture of compliance with laws governing record-keeping,” as noted in an op-ed by Philip Kennicott, advocating for no presidential library for the former president. Apart from this, one of my colleagues has said that she hopes that “Trump is funding the digitization of records that will appear on the site – just as Barack Obama did – rather than forcing taxpayers to do so.” I hope that is the case as well, since the library won’t take FOIA requests until 2026. Bob Clark, one of the critics of the Obama Library, has declared that there “will not be a presidential library. The era of those is over,” while others have doubted that a brick-and-mortar building would be created and said that if he does build such a library it will be a “shrine to his ego,” and said that such a library does not need to be created. Other than this story, Margot Note wrote about archival user expectations, the ACOR digital archive which will cover a “range of thirteen countries across the Middle East and North Africa” with over 30,000 images, was announced, and Sarah Barsness, a Digital Collections Archivist at the Minnesota Historical Society, shared a manual for digital archivists. I further enjoyed reading the tribute to Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia, the first Chilean judge to prosecute Pinochet for crimes, a post by archives technician Michael J. Hancock about how the U.S. almost nuked itself in January 1961, the January/February issue of Archival Outlook, and the website of the Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade database, known as Enslaved. Otherwise, I was heartened to hear about the lawsuit from indigenous nations to keep NARA’s Seattle facility from closing, with the Public Buildings Reform Board declaring in October (see page 21 of the public meeting minutes) that “the parcel is included in this group of high-value assets, and so the due diligence work is proceeding,” and The Guardian pointing out in December that the move “could deprive indigenous people in the Pacific north-west of access to critical documents.” I also loved the comment by Sam Cross, the Pop Archives guru, who said, at the end of her review of Wonder Woman 1984, “…instead of watching WW84, go out and support your local archives. If you can, make a donation. If you can't, write a nice letter or let the parent institution know how much you and the community value the archives. It's the truth and the truth is beautiful.” I agree with that wholeheartedly! Finally, I think an article by archivist B. M. Watson in Perspectives of History is relevant in telling people to stop calling things archives when they aren’t archives:
Various disciplinary “archival turns” over the course of the past few decades have resulted in a tendency towards the over-casual use of the word “archive” as a shorthand to refer to, well, just about anything…Others have since pointed out that a flash drive is not an archive, that a website is not an archive, and that the internet is not an archive…nearly every year academic presses or journals publish collections of essays by historians reflecting on “the archive” and the role it plays in the historical field. Most of these essays demonstrate a misunderstanding of what exactly archives are…As many historians currently use the word “archives,” they seem to imply that an archive is the natural state in which primary sources arrange themselves after being discarded or left by their creators. It creates the false impression that there is little to no work that goes into making primary sources available to researchers, and…that archives are even a neutral or unmoderated space…the invocation of “the archive” by historians enacts an ironic historical revisionism that reduces the labor of me and my…colleagues to reading room furniture…So invisible, in fact, that archivists, librarians, and others might not even appear in acknowledgments of the publications based on their collections.
Let me talk about libraries a little bit. Hack Library School had posts about getting a student library job, decentralizing romance in YA literature, and being a rural librarian. At the same time, the Library of Congress had blogs about microwaves, holograph manuscripts, georeferencing, and a 15th century manuscript. Just as fascinating was David Vinjamuri and Joseph Huberty’s article about what a “post-pandemic library” would look like, a post about libraries and the criminal “justice” system, and how to study without library access at university. Similarly, reading about the “bird librarian,” Leah Tsang bringing “bird poisoners to justice as part of her role at Australia’s oldest museum” was an interesting article in Nature. Then there was an post, a couple days ago on Snoek-Brown’s Reel Librarians where she made a commitment to writing about more librarians of color on her blog, which is something I’m trying to do in the coming year as well. It’s definitely worth a read, and she notes that while “there has been an increase in representation onscreen in recent years…there’s no way to sugar-coat the fact that there are still not that many cinematic representations of librarians of color,” even fewer who are major characters, while pointing to several books about the lack of diversity in the librarian profession.
Now, there are a number of articles which get an honorable mention. A3 Genealogy had a post about researching Midwest German ancestors, while Jeannette Austin highlighted genealogy records for Charles City County, Virginia, and finding ancestors buried in old graves and farms. On other topics, the newsletter by William Hogeland, a progressive historian, focusing on the history of stealing an election in the U.S., from Alexander Hamilton to Richard Nixon and beyond, a history of sea shanties, a flood revealing the shape of an English Civil War fort, the Museum of Chinese in America releasing an online portal showing some remaining records over a year after a devastating fire destroyed many of their records, are worthy reads. It does concern me that the museum partnered with a corporation like Google rather than a public or community institution. I would say that is a big mistake on their part. The same can be said about an article about price gouging over student e-books, the need, as one writer put it, to “save books” from those she calls the “book people,” an article guessing that the future (when it comes to animation) will be “family-friendly” and an article, based on a discussion between the Native American Archives Section (NAAS) and the Human Rights Archives Section (HRAS), giving recommendations for decolonizing practices and welcoming indigenous researchers. At long last, Perspectives on History had an article about the role of history courses in general education.
With that, this newsletter comes to a close. Hope you all have a good week.
- Burkely