Pop culture reviews, archives, libraries, records, COVID, genealogy, and so on
This week's newsletter focuses on news about the archives and library fields, current and upcoming pop culture reviews, and more
Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great week. This week’s newsletter will focus on archives, libraries, genealogy, and other topics.
Let me start with the archives field. A couple days ago, I reviewed a series titled Mystic Archives of Dantalian. I analyzed how it confuses libraries and archives, similar to other series I have written about, specifically Star Wars and Amphibia, to give two prominent examples. I basically gave up on watching the series because of this. While, I haven’t found any other series which have archivy elements, I have a post about Hilda and another about various possible archivists, so look forward to that. I’d like to highlight an interview with a Polynesian genealogist, the WWI Museum, and five actions that archives can take to combat the COVID-19 fallout. There were other interesting articles, whether from an archivist who works at the Fashion Institute of Technology, the story of being an archivist during the COVID pandemic, and following the US-Dakota war through newspaper headlines. Also of note is a Science magazine article about how dozens of scientific journals vanished from the internet and no one preserved them, an open letter from Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia (A4BLiP) in Solidarity with Don’t Shoot Portland, and the summer 2020 newsletter of the SAA’s Performing Arts Section. Hopefully later this month, I’ll have an article about archivy elements in Recorded by Arizal published on The American Archivist Reviews Portal, which is currently in the process of being reviewed.
With that, I’d like to move onto the library field. Hack Library School had a number of fascinating articles about returning to the library during the pandemic, reflections on Labor Day, and grad school. This past week I enjoyed reading about the Digital Library Federation’s recently-released born-digital access values, the Progressive Library Guild’s Black Lives Matter guide, school librarians helping address upheaval as a result of COVID, and the library director being investigated for supporting Black Lives Matter (which is pretty ridiculous). Apart from this, articles about the publishers suing the Internet Archive, using integrated library systems and open data to analyze library cardholders, and a study of vanished open access journals. Next week, hopefully, I’ll publish a long post about the R.O.D. the TV series, an anime which is brimming to the top with libraries. Later this month, I expect to have an article about the cool librarian in Hilda published in the ALA publication, ilovelibraries.
There are some articles on varied subjects I would like to give special mention to in this newsletter as well. For instance, Jeanette Holland Austin wrote about looking for the names of your ancestors and the siege of Charleston. At the same time, MuckRock had some interesting posts about COVID-related reasons as to why they are denying or delaying records requests and the Wisconsin response deadlines let the police control narrative following Kenosha shootings. The same could be said about the detailed court documents for 15 FOIA cases, personal email accounts used by U.S. government employees, and the DOTS driver who was reprimanded for not allowing a few people who didn’t wear masks onto the bus. That’s all for this week.
I hope you all have a great weekend and week to come.
- Burkely