Pandemics to family history, fiction to reality: institutions adapt during the ongoing crisis

This week's newsletter will focus on my new family history post about a previous pandemic (the one from 1918-20), archivists writing fiction, news in the library and archives fields, and much more!

Hello everyone! I hope you are all having a great week despite COVID-19, with some of you likely at home under lockdown and/or self-quarantine.

Without further ado, let me get started. Recently, I wrote about my great grandfather, Angelo LanFranchi, and how his story intersects with the H1N1 pandemic (1918-1920). I note how it affected Vermont and Pennsylvania, specifically Barre and Avonmore, connected to the granite mines where he worked. Here are some excerpts:

…due to COVID-19, there is something that I am apt to write during these times: a story about my ancestors and the H1N1 flu pandemic…The family story that he left because of dust in the stone mines, which is still a possibility, as a reason he came to Western Pennsylvania…as for the H1N1 flu pandemic, we know it first cropped up in Vermont in late September 1918…As the pandemic, then called the “grippe,” leveled out by late 1919, it had torn through the population “like a grassfire”…While it is hard to know if Avonmore was like the communities across the U.S. that escaped the H1N1 virus…the state of Pennsylvania was hard hit…from October 1918 onward, the flu roared through Western Pennsylvania, sickening tens of thousands in Allegheny and Westmoreland County, with 2,000 dying in Westmoreland County alone. Since Avonmore sits on the edge of Westmoreland County, Angelo was lucky he didn’t die from the flu…While there are, sadly, no original records of noting how Angelo, his immediate or extended family, dealt with the pandemic and their thoughts at the time, there is no doubt that it affected him and those nearby in ways that he probably couldn’t imagine.

That brings me to an interview with Samantha Cross, creator of the POP Archives blog, who I have mentioned in this newsletter before, specifically in September and May of last year. On the blog she notes that a lot of TV shows and movies don’t understand the archivist profession, treating it as synonymous with librarians, noting that while some creators put effort in, a lot don’t. For her, she thinks that the book by Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few, is a good example of representation while enjoying the film, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which features a photograph archivist, and criticizes the archivist in Lord of the Rings. She argues, rightly, that often archivists are portrayed as white, male, and middle-aged, if not older, stating that is worrisome that archivists are not featured in media where they should be present, and that it is troubling that most people think of Indiana Jones when they think of archivists (which doesn’t even make sense). She goes onto say that journalists write about archives an exploration with historians “discovering” something, making work of archivists invisible. With this, confusion from pop culture, and other issues, the generation population doesn’t usually recognize what archivists do. Cross’s solution to this is to acknowledge existing portrayals, negative (like in Raiders of the Lost Ark) and positive (like in Captain Marvel), engage with the public, possibly with movie nights. She advocates for the SAA to put together an anthology of short stories, poems, etc. created by archivists, like they have done before, as in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 (when it was back “by popular demand”), and 2019. She ends with a call to action which writers, especially archivists, should follow:

Identity is and always will be an important factor to any professional and archivists are no different. Every archivist has a story. Every archivist has a perspective uniquely their own. Every archivist experiences the world differently and we need to let that aspect of our profession thrive. The more art produced by archivists, in whatever the format, the better our community is for it.

Cross has written some great articles in the past reviewing archivy themes in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, The Simpsons, National Treasure, and Futurama, to name a few. She praised AO3 (Archive of Our Own) too, which is cool.

Let me move onto some other news in the library and archives fields. Starting with the former, Hack Library School had articles this past week which talked about critical uncertainties for libraries related to the COVID-19 crisis, provided resources for MLIS students, and libraries in quarantine. I also found the articles about quarantine book clubs, librarians calling for an end to curbside book pickup (because of COVID-19), and copyright education in libraries (and archives and museums) as interesting reading. In terms of the latter, NARA blogs focused on the death of FDR, a famed Black explorer Matthew Henson, the declassification backlog, online student programs, an Universal Newsreel which highlights female baseball players, and the National Archives building in D.C. (with a tour by Archivist of the U.S. David Ferriero). They also highlighted the record book of a Philadelphia justice of the peace (1799-1800) digitized by NARA, how NARA is donating protective gear and Code Girls records. Apart from that, Margot Note re-published posts about the appraisal of architectural records and photographs, a new emergency fund for archival workers launched by the SAA foundation. Other posts were about student engagement, the posts on the SAA Electronic Records Collection in their “Dispatches from a Distance” series and a round-up of web-archiving which includes my digital archive I am continually adding to, called the COVID-19 Digital Archive.

I’d also like to mentions a few other articles which I found interesting this past week about creating a family history timeline, the comic book industry shutdown because of COVID-19 and record management (as related to the crisis).

That’s all for this week! Hope you all have a great rest of your week.

- Burkely