NYT's transphobic "archival sanctity" defense, common archives and library cliches, Indigenous land acknowledgements, special libraries, and beyond
This week I'll be writing about the latest archives, library, genealogy, and history news, including articles about digitization and a few posts by April Hathcock
Hello everyone! I hope you are all having a good week. This week, I had a discussion on Twitter with archivists about the recent episode of What If…? which featured an archives, stereotypically of course, it became a topic of a back-and-forth dialogue between me and a number of other archivists. Without anything else to add in this introduction, let me move onto the rest of my newsletter, which again has been labeled as “too long for email,” meaning it will be clipped in your inboxes.
There was a lot of chatter about archives this week. Jay Moschella, a curator and cataloger of rare books at the Boston Public Library, noted that when archives and libraries “run smoothly” and appear to be “simple,” it means that there has been “countless hours/days/weeks/years of labor” behind the scenes. In response, some said that administrators and users should understand this, while others stated that the organization is the “result of invisible, underpaid labor, mostly by women,” and that before 1960, the professions of teacher, nurse, and librarian were “most readily available to women” and as such were underpaid then, and are underpaid now. In other unrelated Twitter posts, some archivists noted that they arrange and describe personal fonds and called out the New York Times for resisting the removal of dead names of trans journalists, and having their correct/chosen names used instead, citing the so-called “sanctity of the archives” as a justification. In response to this NYT position, some implied that the paper was hypocritical as changes have been made in other instances, said that NYT does not, due to this policy, care about the safety of their employees, and argued that NYT does not know what they are talking about. Comments beyond this stated that NYT is using the “cultural record” to excuse transphobia, said that changing the names of trans journalists to remove their dead names is “morally right,” described the notion of archival purity is “complete horseshit,” noted that the sanctity of archives doesn’t exist, and asserted that people’s safety is more important than the archive.
On a totally different subject, on September 30, there was a discussion about common archives (and library) cliches, hosted by the SNAP Section. In that discussion I said that libraries are bustling, not dying, noted the hilarity of Indiana Jones being considered an archivist by some, asserted that archival cliches cause more confusion than anything else, and challenged said cliches. Apart from my comments, Alexia Puravida pointed out that archival collections become accessible due to “intervention or mediation involved between collections, archivists, and researchers,” that materials are expensive, that archivists are understaffed and devalued, and that nothing about archives is neutral. Others pointed out that libraries are much more than just books (as is often portrayed in animation), that librarians and archivists do more than track down books but do tasks like coding, that archival work is necessary, pointed to the faultiness of archival cliches, and stated that, without a doubt, library work requires constant interaction. Some pointed to, as I have on various blogs, that the library stereotype is still strong, as it is for archives, noted the cliche that archivists/librarians are “all introverted and socially awkward people,” and Rebecca Goldman provided helpful flowchart comics on archivists, internships, and more. There were additional comments, but these are some of the most pertinent posts worth noting.
There were several archives-related posts unconnected to the previously summarized Twitter posts. This included David Ferriero noting that the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, in Dallas, is on the ancestral lands of the Wichita, Caddo, Comanche, Cherokee, Kickapoo, and Tawakoni peoples, while the Nixon Presidential Library, in Yorba Linda, California, is on the “ancestral lands of the Hotuuknga Tribe…a branch of the Tongva Nation,” and that the National Archives in New York City is situated on the “ancestral lands of the Munsee Lenape peoples.” Other than these acknowledgements of past occupancy of various lands by Indigenous peoples, NARA recently noted the digitization of Civil War maps from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a tool to measure the digitization of collections donated to NARA. While a higher percentage of donated records have been digitized than those in record groups, for government records, according to the tool, a larger number of government records have been digitized. 143,040,642 scans of government records are online, according to the Record Group Explorer, as compared to 829,815 scans of donated records, as of September 2021. On a non-NARA related note, I loved reading the recent interview with Zakiya Collier, the Schomburg’s new Digital Archivist, who curates and maintains digital collections which are focused on a different topics relating to Black life and culture, using the tool Archive-It to archive web content.
There is a lot of library news this week. USNI News reported that in a “cost-saving effort,” libraries on some military bases will be closed, Book Riot wrote about the impact of COVID-19 on library late fees, John McQuillen, the Associate Curator, Printed Books & Bindings at the Morgan Library & Museum, talked about finding writings of nuns which were previously unknown through the use of ultraviolet light, and the Internet Archive noted that Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Anna Eshoo sent an “inquiry to each of the “Big Five” book publishers to investigate their activities in the library e-book market.” Apart from this is a new Library of Congress (LOC) guide on the Morrill Act which “funded the establishment of public colleges by offering land grants to the states to develop or sell,” posts on various subjects, such as the Sami Magna Carta (also known as the Lappkodicillen of 1751), the story of Europeans trying to reach the South Pole in the Age of Colonization, Selena’s song, “Ven Conmigo,” an interview with the late Sarah Dash of Labelle, a post asking whether you can legally import a toucan (you can’t). There was also a description of the StoryCorps Archive, within LOC collections, which is one of the “first and the largest born-digital collections of human voices, featuring tens of thousands of conversations recorded across the United States and around the world.”
I enjoyed reading Erika Whinihan’s description of special libraries in Hack Library School. She described them as non-traditional libraries, with jobs including duties like one’s use, workflows, creation, digital literacy, and information retention, with “specific focus on a certain industry or particular user,” with the said users having certain information needs. Good examples of this include the libraries of the CIA/Cocaine Import Agency and the FBI/Federal Bureau of Intimidation, among many others, usually located at universities or within corporations. Hack Library School had posts about surviving pandemic library grad school as a parent and being terrified by doing practical things (and challenging oneself). Connected to this, in a sense, is April Hathcock’s post about race fatigue, in June 2017, after spending time at the ALA conference. She described race fatigue as the “physical, mental, and emotional condition that people of color experience after spending a considerable amount of time dealing with the micro- and macro-aggressions” that happen in the presence of White people. She gives examples like being talked over, tone-policed, condescended, listening to White male librarians claim they are the “minority” in the profession, and having colleagues corner you to hear about what you have experienced. This was, in her words, coupled with days of mounting anger and frustration to keep emotions below the surface so she wasn’t seen as the “angry and emotional person of color.”
There are other library matters, not directly related to race fatigue. I loved hearing about the International Ink Library which collects “pen samples from around the world on a regular basis” and is run by the Secret Service, and arguably a special library, the value of being a bookworm, a database of MLIS dissertations and theses, LOC looking to AI to help the users sift through its collection, librarians asking whether libraries are going “back to normal” (they never are going back to a so-called “normal”), and a post from a couple years ago where NYPL lists adult and young adult books with main characters who work in libraries (and one in an archives).
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There were some fascinating genealogy posts. IrelandXO asked whether people have Irish ancestors named Mick or Michael and provided a beginners guide to Irish surnames. Daniel Loftus wrote about what can be found on an Irish birth record. A Scottish professor traced a family back to the Scottish lowlands, Family Tree Magazine shared records and resources for tracing Caribbean ancestry, and explained how to create one of the most important things: a genealogy source citation. That’s something I will have to do more of going forward, in the best way I can. Other genealogists wrote about the value of free genealogy websites, what it takes to have access to genealogical records, and shared a critical family history of a grandmother’s fight for a better world and against White supremacy and systemic racism. Also of note are assorted stories about a message found in a bottle by a Michigan boat captain, an English professor acknowledging Maori ancestors in a school convocation, and another ruling on those suing Ancestry.com for digitizing yearbooks with their “personal information” without their consent, which I have written about in this newsletter before, time and time again.
With that, let me summarize some recent articles on history I’ve come across. The oft-updated Journal of the American Revolution had posts about the Carlisle Peace Commissions Initiative in March 1778 pushed by Lord North, the story of the last of the Jersey Pine Robbers, Captain John Bacon, in 1780, a review of a book (Stranger Citizens: Migrant Influence and National Power in the Early American Republic) by John McNelis O’Keefe, saying that in the early days of the U.S., “migrant groups were actively and politically engaged in defining citizenship in a way that worked for their survival and success,” and Lt. Col. Richard Varick creating an “a backup copy of Washington’s official papers created during the American Revolution, and brought order to a large amount of material…mak[ing] it the first act of archival work sanctioned by the new country.” However, I liked reading, most of all, the review of Julie Flavell’s The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Military Family and the Women Behind Britain’s Wars for America, recounting the stories of the Howe Family in the 1750s to 1780s “as told from a woman’s perspective,” specifically looking at letters of Caroline Howe, explaining “intricate political and social maneuvering” of the Howe women, while at the same time debunking criticisms of the Howes, in a book that is said to be a mix of family and military history.
On another subject are articles in Smithsonian magazine and Perspectives on History. This includes looking into why medieval Europeans reopened their graves, the story of William O’Dwyer and the Mob, the objects of (and related to) a gay man who was brutally murdered in October 1998, Matthew Shepard, now displayed at the National Museum of American History, the public’s view of history as stated in a national poll, and the Return of the Dead Program following World War II. I liked reading stories on topics such as Canadian tourists in India in 1900, the history of overlanders in the Columbia River gorge from 1840 to 1870, the road to women’s suffrage, an exhibit at the Bosque Rodondo Memorial examining the history of the Long Walk from an Indigenous perspective, and the origin of the mug shot.
As always, there are posts that don’t fit neatly into the parts of this newsletter about archives, libraries, genealogy, or history. Smithsonian magazine articles covered the gamut, from the eruption of the Kīlauea volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island to a study showing that Indigenous people not surprisingly have practiced forest conservation for millennia, and another by scientists finding that waterproof mascara and long-lasting lipsticks have toxic chemicals. Stitch had a post about imperialism in Fire Emblem. The Artifice had an article on Plato’s cave and the construction of reality in postmodern movies. The New Yorker reviewed Octavia Butler’s book, Parable of the Sower, and its vision of a MAGA zealot. Owen Dennis, the showrunner of Infinity Train, explained, in a post that branched out from his Twitter thread, how to pitch an animated show. Forbes noted that “roughly two thirds of the searches on Google never leave the search results page” which are called no-click searches, and notes that the big tech companies “aren’t monopolies in the classic sense, but dominate because of their scale and integration.” Finally there’s Hathcock again, with posts on exchanging “ideas, issues, and solutions regarding scholarly communication and the sharing of knowledge” and a description of White people who go out of their way to support racism as they claim their “free speech” rights are being “violated.”
The Nib, as always, has some wonderful illustrations. Some focused on hoarding, lampooned conspiracies “we” wish were true, talked about the distraction caused by those complaining about kinks at pride parades, the struggles of Korean women, especially in manual labor, suffering even more with the pandemic, the stories of migrant families, the privileged nature of yet another SpaceX mission, a woman being ashamed of having a vibrator, and the view that gender is a spectrum rather than a binary, which allows for more choices, possibilities, and fluidity. Others focused on the punitive pot-to-prison pipeline and hope for the future, the “friendly” drone that wants to kill people with impunity, four artists explaining how they are decolonizing their lives, and conservative cartoonist Ben Garrison getting COVID but refusing to go to a hospital to treat it, of course.
That’s all for this week. I hope you all have a productive week ahead!
- Burkely