Pop culture, David Ferriero's retirement, archivist duties, librarians under stress, genealogy excitement, and beyond
Happy MLK Day! This week I'll be sharing with you the latest news about archives, libraries, genealogy, history, the climate crisis, animated series, diversity recruitment, and many other topics
Hello everyone! I hope you are having a good week. I created a new page where I listed shows and films with libraries and librarians by network. I wrote new reviews in the past week about three animated shows (gen:LOCK, Metal Family, and Milo Murphy’s Law), and the webcomic Chroma Key. I also wrote about the “sanctity of library property” in Too Loud and restricted records, record seizure, and record management in Star Wars Rebels, and reviewed a lesbian librarian in The Owl House named Amity Blight and libraries in the same show. With that, let me move onto the rest of my newsletter, which has again been considered “too long for email.”
There was a lot of news about archives this week. The biggest news of all is the retirement of David Ferriero in April of this year, ending his 12-year term as Archivist of the U.S., which heads NARA. This will leave Deputy Archivist Debra Steidel Wall as Acting Archivist until Biden nominates a successor and the Senate confirms that successor, with the nomination going first to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs. Biden, Obama, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, NARA’s Chief Innovation Officer Pamela Wright, and many others praised his service in a press release. Some media outlets noted the record blur incident back in 2020, while others praised Ferriero having an “incredibly challenging” role, or “great.” Maarja Krusten shared her thoughts on Ferriero retiring. Lauren Harper, my colleague at NSA, wondered who is up after him and how quickly the White House would work to “find a replacement to fill Ferriero's big shoes.” Some advocates of the Equal Rights Amendment would probably remember that Ferriero did not publish the amendment, relying on a DOJ legal memo “saying the 1979 deadline that Congress had set for states to ratify the ERA is valid and legally binding,” with the three states, Illinois, Nevada, and Virginia taking “ratification votes four decades after the deadline, with Virginia legislators granting their approval in January 2020.”
On related archival subjects, articles focused on job search credentials and community, USPS surveillance and the Capitol attack, Herbert Hoover and the Veterans Administration, and processing a painful past through historic places. There were posts on /r/Archivists on how to best preserve and store a newspaper, to remove or not remove staples, whether acrylic is considered archival quality, newsprint change, solutions for collections accessible on the cloud, and asking whether there is anyone who works on a digital archive. There was also a video about exploring Caribbean record forms and archival studies. I also liked re-reading the review of The Mystic Archives of Dantalian, which Samantha Cross described as being about “women acting as vessels for an archives” and my colleagues at NSA having a new podcast which explores the pursuit of justice for 43 Disappeared students in Mexico.
Apart from this, Alexandra deGraffenreid (@alexiadpuravida on Twitter), noted that the processing manual for Penn State (specifically the Eberly Family Special Collections Library) has been uploaded to the Archival Processing Manuals section of the SAA’s Description Section micro-site. The manual talks about archival arrangement, while processing and prioritizing limited description over full description for some items. It also notes standardized practices, revision and review, professional theories, core principles, definitions, access, records management, finding aids, and processing. On January 18, the SAA, ARL, and ALA observed National Day of Racial Healings. There were, at the same time, assorted tweets about rubber bands, current state of the world, archival processing, archive-themed erotica, and an article about Becky Cline talking about what treasures to feature and caring for the history of the Disney company.
There is news about libraries which I’d like to share this week. Some are tweets about working outside the field, making “local revisions to LCC,” Shakespeare’s First Folio acquired by UBC in ‘once-in-eternity’ purchase, Northwestern librarians organizing “after pandemic-related budget cuts,” librarians being pushed into roles they weren’t trained for even as they are “underpaid, underappreciated, [and] underfunded,” and asking for a raise or promotion.
In addition, there were posts about library workers, with one such website shared by callan on Twitter, criticism of approach of Baltimore County Public Library management, and others noting “COVID fuckery” going in libraries. In addition to this were articles about library user experience, favorite Reel Librarians posts of 2021 and a continuing goal for 2022 shared by Jennifer Snoek-Brown, including librarians in campus-wide initiatives to help students, how a library can be a place standing against racism, and the intimidating, and important, work of building financial literacy. Accompanying this are assorted posts about the world’s most beautiful libraries, ways that AI changes libraries, and typical day-to-day of a librarian. Of course, April Hathcock had a relevant post, as always, back from February 2016. This post where she argue that the question of ownership is a question of access as “who owns what is about who controls access to what,” touching all parts of the research lifecycle, says there needs to be a “balance between rights of authors and access for other scholars and public,” and said that “ownership doesn’t have to be a barrier to access in the humanities; instead, it can, and should, be an asset.” This seems to be taking a middle ground between corporate owners and everyone else, seeming much more moderate than her posts in later years, calling for liberation and the like.
I was also intrigued by an article from August 2020 which quoted Kaetrena Davis Kendrick, Dean of the Dacus Library and Pettus Archives of Winthrop University, on what she called a “21st century library,” a place re-imagined where “people are gladly received…make sure people feel welcome in our space…a place that you can come and have a sense of comfort…[Libraries] are concepts and a lot of the things we will be doing are not necessarily tied to the library as a building to let people know that the work we do is outside of the building…The things that libraries, workers and employees do, are not necessarily tied to a building. That’s why you’re able to get the services that you have during this time…to help people understand that libraries are accessible and open even if the doors on the building are locked.” All important lessons with the pandemic shuttering many libraries.
There is an interesting pop culture depiction of librarians in The Bank of Bantorra. In this anime and manga, librarians “guard the books of the dead, where anyone's past may be read in their corresponding book once they're deceased.” It was even mentioned on /r/anime discussion where libraries and librarians in anime were mentioned, including Read or Die, Library Wars, 3-4 episodes of The World God Only Knows (first season), early episode of Hyouka, A Good Librarian Like a Good Shepherd, Kino’s Journey (an episode inside the library), a setting in various anime (Gosick, Re:Zero, No Game No Life, Hyouka, Wolf Children), Space Dandy (episode 11 features a planet filled with nothing but libraries), and the Mystic Archives of Dantalian. Honestly, I’m not interested in most of these series, but it is worth knowing that libraries and librarians in anime are out there, ready to be watched and consumed.
There were interesting genealogy articles I came across this week. Some focused on accuracy in genealogy research, defining what is a source, while others talked about what family history can teach you, and Swiss forensic geneticists analyzing DNA recovered from postage stamps dating back to World War I, solving a century-old paternity puzzle. Also of interest were posts on shared DNA matches, the age of a birth certificate, going through your ancestor’s books, and excitement among genealogists about the 1921 census release. There were articles in the Genealogy journal that I came across this week about punitive raids, democracy and the White family in Australia, shadow history of one Chinese family’s multi-generational transnational migrations, and decolonizing ways of knowing. NBC News had an article about how DNA tests like 23andMe and Ancestry.com are “leading to surprising paternity discoveries for some families” and lawsuits against paternity doctors. Even worse is the fact that these DNA tests are unregulated, meaning there is no guarantee the genetic data given to any genetic testing company will remain private.
Apart from this is a list of flax growers in Ireland in 1796, how genealogy unearths family truths, and innovation in a Swedish cemetery. The first of these articles was intriguing because of all the Millses that came up when I did a search for the surname! That was extremely exciting to see.
With that, I come to the subject of history. Smithsonian magazine had articles about how Yellowstone was saved, the summer of Soul, and Italy banning a McDonald’s drive through at an ancient Roman baths site. There were articles in Perspectives of History about looking at the most popular articles for 2021, displacement of Vietnamese Americans in east New Orleans, teaching the Middle Ages in the Modern South, and whether plants can help us understand COVID-19. There were assorted articles about the afterlives of German colonialism in East Africa, and Indian author Amitav Ghosh arguing that pillaging of Indigenous lands and violence against such people laid the foundation for the current climate crisis, saying “…for two centuries, European colonists tore across the world, viewing nature and land as something inert to be conquered and consumed without limits and the indigenous people as savages whose knowledge of nature was worthless and who needed to be erased. It was this settler colonial worldview – of just accumulate, accumulate, accumulate, consume, consume, consume – that has got us where we are now.” He couldn’t be more right. Although I can agree with him that “political mechanisms and institutions of liberal world governance…have failed us,” I would not, for a second, believe that social movements like Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock protests, or Occupy, which are “driven by human spirit,” will provide "hope." They are, unfortunately, transient, not long-standing, like the liberal world institutions he speaks of. That is a problem, which should change.
Other articles focused on introducing Southern studies, the origins of the Betsy Ross flag controversy, the history of overlanders in the Columbia River Gorge from 1840 to 1870, roles of animals, like snakes, in the American Revolution, with various qualities, a Babylonian stone tablet from thousands of years ago was translated, new ways of seeing women in every historic place as every place has a woman’s story to tell, and a window into depression-era Kansas. Just as relevant was an article about DDT disbelievers, health, and new economic poisons in Georgia after World War II, how the pandemic reshaped U.S. foreign relations histories, a church unearthed in Germany, and a historian of the Soviet Union and modern Russia who has a “particular interest in the formation and popular experience of revolution, radical discourse, and utopian models,” named Andy Willimott, although he may lean toward the anti-communist side, from what I can see.
There are many additional articles which don’t fit neatly into other parts of this article. Some are about reasons to binge Archive 81 which I am not interested in after seeing responses about it on Twitter, a gen-Z journey through fandom, the two-year anniversary of The Owl House, and 10 LGBTQ anime to watch. Of those anime listed, I’ve watched Wandering Son, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Aoi Hana (also known as Sweet Blue Flowers), and Antique Bakery, but not Blue Period, Banana Fish, Sukisho, No. 6, Dakaichi, or Dramatical Murder. At the beginning of this year, Crunchyroll editorial staff recommended what they saw as the top anime of 2021. I have to agree with them when it comes to Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid S and The Aquatope on White Sand.
Speaking of animation, I’m looking forward to the reboot of The Proud Family, which is named The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder, the series The Legend of Vox Machina, and am a little intrigued by Supernatural Academy. Otherwise, there were articles about having “split” attractions between men and women, some saying they are sexually attracted to men but emotionally attracted to women, a database by the Washington Post of the more than 1,700 congresspeople who enslaved people, the problems of YouTube’s recommender AI, meth pollution in waterways turning trout into addicts, the power of correspondence, and a call to end unpaid internships. Then there’s Hathcock talking about diversity recruitment, calling it a “a passive response to…a very active, systemic, and institutional problem.” Instead, she says employers should focus on diversity and inclusion, confronting organizational biases, make clear diversity is important without “tokenizing or causing unwarranted and unwanted visibility” in messages, and accompany those messages with “proactive, off-the-beaten-path outreach,” with the post seemingly aimed at managers.
That brings me to The Nib. There were illustrations about global wealth, refugees getting scammed, bosses who don’t care about COVID, high prices of college tuition (related to a New York Times article entitled “Lawsuit Says 16 Elite Colleges Are Part of Price-Fixing Cartel”), overfishing, GITMO (also see here), having too much coffee, and the spread of the Omnicron variant in the U.S. and UK. There was an illustration about Biden requiring insurers to cover eight at-home test kits, but not distributing them for free, something which Biden rejected in October, then later adopted, somewhat. The tests that you can request are said to ship “within seven to 12 days of ordering, meaning most Americans won’t receive them until the end of January.” My guess is that the website will crash. There were some other illustrations about the wild origins of the Oxford English Dictionary, which was crowdsourced by a paranoid but learned doctor, W.C. Minor, the faltering of election officials, faulty CDC guidance, and misinformation you can learn on the internet.
That’s all for this week. Until next week’s newsletter!
- Burkely