Pop culture, archives, libraries, genealogy, history, and various illustrations
This week I'm focusing on the same topics as always, while mentioning upcoming posts which review libraries in some of my favorite animated series.
Hello everyone! I hope you had a good and productive week. Apart from beginning to write a review for my genealogy blog about Mira, Royal Detective, I published a post about Francis Clara Censordoll, the librarian in Moral Orel, who takes censorship to extremes, and the non-neutrality of librarians. I have a post upcoming, on Tuesday, about the Sieran Academy Library in Dear Brother, a 1991-1992 anime. So, look forward to that. With that, let me begin my newsletter.
When it comes to archives, Samantha “Sam” Cross reviewed a 1988 episode of The Smurfs titled “Archives of Evil,” and notes the archives is in the library basement, can only be accessed by “unlocking a gate and descending the staircase into a level that is barely distinguishable from the floor above.” Even so, the archives factor very little into the episode, despite the title. This reminds me of how in a few episodes of Sofia the First, the name “secret library” is in the title, but…the library barely features in the episode at all! It was interesting to read feedback and recommendations following Black Lives and Archives Forums from the SAA’s Diversity Committee, the upcoming collection titled Cripping the Archive: Disability, Power, and History, which will explore the relationship between disability and the archive, and the announcement of the Performing Arts Web Archive. In other news, NARA talked about the release of the 1950 census, collaboration between University Libraries at Virginia Tech and NARA, the Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) Collective, and more about privacy and confidentiality issues within archival collections. Otherwise, there were stories about documents digitally saved from a courthouse which caught fire, the acquisition of ProQuest, and the Winter / Spring 2021 edition of Performance!, the newsletter of SAA’s Performing Arts Section, and a site specifically about Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage from the National Archives.
That brings me to libraries. Apart from the Season 2 finale of Amphibia, shown at the beginning of this post, one of the new episodes of Mira, Royal Detective in the past week, has Mira helped by her two mongoose friends, returning books to the mobile library. Additionally, an upcoming episode of The Owl House’s second season, has the characters Luz and Amity journeying into “the most dangerous section of the library.” Hack Library School had posts this past week about self-care, decoding job posts, and getting a library job. Library of Congress (LOC) had all sorts of blogposts in the past week on various subjects. This includes an interview with the daughter of Shizuko Ina, named Satsuki Ina, a young Japanese American woman incarcerated in 1942, and the story of their incarceration in World War II, old and highly flammable movies, a report about recognition of foreign passports, and DC Comics. American Libraries published their 2021 report on library systems, similar to the one I talked about in last week’s newsletter (“State of America's Libraries Report 2021”), except this one focuses on advancing library technologies in challenging times, as the tagline goes, and seems much more technical than that report, even from a quick read. Finally, there were stories about the Internet Archive digitizing records, library cutbacks in South Australia, diverse authors and creators, and a new deal between the Digital Public Library of America and Amazon Publishing to lend digital content in libraries.
In the past week, genealogy came to the front pages. This upcoming week, a federal judge, Laurel Beeler will hear the case Callahan et al v. Ancestry.com Inc., which Ancestry urging her to again dismiss a case “alleging the company uses and profits from photographs and personal details in its U.S. school yearbooks database without consent.” Beeler heard the case back in March, dismissing it, saying that the plaintiffs did not have standing, and argued that the company is “immune from liability under the Communications Decency Act.” I liked reading about a research guide about fire insurance maps and a guide on interpreting the maps, along with posts about family lineage in Quebec, Kathleen Brandt writing about 10 research trips to fast forward, a post who talks about the “secret life” of their Grandma, and an article about genetic genealogy and cold cases. The same could be said about links for online genealogy research and various ways to jumpstart your Eastern European research.
I’d like to talk a little about history. Some wrote about the transnational cultures of print, the 1940s fight against the Equal Rights Amendment was bipartisan and crossed ideological lines (an excerpt from Rebecca DeWolf’s upcoming book, Gendered Citizenship), and how medieval manuscripts reveal the reading communities of the early Middle Ages. Some articles debated how history should be taught in classrooms across the U.S., a Twitter hashtag with some historians presenting “evidence to disrupt, correct, or fill out the oversimplified and problematic messages too often communicated by the nation’s memorial landscape,” with many historians connecting with each other, Washington and Oregon passing bills to make Juneteenth a holiday, and the creation of the National Archives building.
There are some stories on other topics I’d like to share. This includes confidentiality and data utility in the US census, and decolonizing public health in India. Like always, The Nib had wonderful illustrations. This included one lampooning those who talk about the supposedly secret “gay agenda” (no such agenda actually exists), the right-wing “outrage cycle) from the always poignant Tom Tomorrow, the changing way to reserve videos, employers wanting people to take their terrible jobs back, the “blindness” of those on all sides of the debate over Palestine. Some focused on a “conservative” detective in a Tom Tomorrow cartoon, saying attacks on Palestine were justified by “attacking” Hamas which provided cover for U.S. military aid to go to Israel, the supposedly “rough” relationship between Biden and Netanyahu, and about the rationalization, by Jewish settlers, of attacks on Palestine. These were only some of the illustrations, as many more were published in the past week, but there were so many that I’ve had to put them in newsletters for future weeks instead of this one.
That’s all for this week. I hope you have a great week ahead.
- Burkely