Newsletters, libraries, archives, genealogy, and everything nice
This week I'll tell you about a 243-page e-book reprinting my old newsletters, pop culture reviews of libraries & archives, family history narratives, and other news items which pique your interest!
Hello everyone! I hope you had a productive week, even with everything that is happening right now. A couple days ago, I published an e-book on the Internet Archive which compiles all newsletters from April 2019 to December 2020, so that’s exciting! I learned a lot in putting it together and how to make this newsletter better going forward. I also published posts on each of my respective blogs. One continued my series about romance in library settings, while another talked about archives in Carmen Sandiego. The latter post is connected to a review of family history themes in the last season of Carmen Sandiego which were not part of the main plot, but still important. I further published a post examining the unusual story of one of my ancestors, Alaska Packard Davidson, the first female FBI agent, a suffragist, one-time factory owner, and sister of the two men who created the Packard car company. Just as important was a post about one of my ancestors from Transylvania (no vampires here!), Michael Hermann, titled “Michael Hermann was from Hungary…but where in Hungary?”
Let me continue onward with some discussion of archives. The National Security Archive noted how Biden is making the White House visitor logs available, as opposed to what the former administration has done, and about a secret agreement between the Netherlands and the U.S. to keep nukes in the Netherlands beginning in 1960. Apart from that, the Virginia Gazette had a story about a woman digitizing Virginia Gazette articles from 1893 to 1925, creating a unique, and free, resource. Additionally, the National Archives Museum had an online exhibition about George Washington's First Inaugural Address, Margot Note wrote about archival values and an archival CMS, while Jillian Lohndorf and Sylvie Rollason-Cass talked about collection development with COVID-19 content, and the Society of California Archivists published their newsletter, talking about photographs of farmworkers in the Central Valley of California, digitization of tapes from a local music festival, a new archival collections database, an archives in Sonoma County coming close to being destroyed by a recent fire, the lack of unionization among Californian archivists, and other news items. At the same time, historian Sophie White mentioned how archives helped her with her research about enslaved people and Black history in general, while historian Daryl Williams, editor of the Journal on Slavery and Data Preservation, said that “continental Africans and people of the Diaspora” have their fullness “denied them by the archives of the transatlantic trade.”
With that, let me talk about libraries. I Love Libraries had articles about supporting diverse books and creative ways that libraries have adapted in the COVID era. Hack Library School, for their part, noted the value of librarianship, lessons learned from an online semester of library school, and how to develop professional relationships with LIS faculty and students. CripLib had a discussion about the intersections of fatphobia and disability, the Cleveland Public Library announced that it was beginning a free words on wheels program, and Serena Troshynski of the NYPL wrote about the unknown history of Hart Island. Finally, the Library of Congress had blogs about additions to their Chronicling America resource, George Washington’s 1789 Oath of Office, Lincoln’s 1865 inauguration speech, and upcoming opportunities to connect with the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division.
There are a number of other articles that get honorable mention this week. This starts with those about genealogy, specifically about researching the lost state of Franklin and finding Irish ancestors. Just as fascinating was a story in Defector about the person who took a picture of a famous World Cup shot has been forgotten due to another photographer claiming credit for it and profiting off it and the strange world of copyright law. In contrast to my post last week from Larry M. Elkin, was the perspective of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit which is backed by Google, which grumbled about “forums for speech or speakers…taken offline altogether” and declared that “we can anticipate an escalating political battle between political factions and nation states to seize control” of parts of the “global digital infrastructure,” going forward. Honestly, that battle that the EFF speaks about was inevitable even before the riot on January 6. What happened since then only reinforced the existing ability of social media companies to control spaces they have created. In sum, there’s no need to stand up for the speech of bigots, racists, or the like, because they supposedly have a “right” to say awful things, especially on social media platforms. It just isn’t worth your time to stand for their right to speak. Moving on, Smithsonian had articles about inventing the alphabet, the rise and fall of America’s lesbian bars, and archaeologists unearthing an Egyptian Queen’s tomb and 13-Foot ‘Book of the Dead’ scroll. ProPublica had an article about how Amazon’s self-publishing arm is a haven for White supremacists, one person outlined an oral history of Wikipedia, and the Los Angeles Times noted how streamers are struggling to overcome the “churn” where users get a subscription for a film or something else, then cancel their subscription, with the company trying to come up with ways to make users stay on their respective platforms.
With that, I bring my newsletter to a close and readers, I hope that all have a good week going forward.
- Burkely