Pop culture reviews, preservation, libraries, immigration control, genealogy, and more!
In this "too long for email" newsletter, I'll be sharing the latest news about archives, libraries, genealogy, history, a new candidate for the ALA presidency, and beyond!
Hello everyone! I hope you are all having a good week. I was glad to see Tapas noting my article which highlighted a webcomic, Ryder. Last Thursday, I published a post about archivists of color on my blog about archives in popular culture, and Monday I published another review of a mature animated series. Yesterday I published a post about the library in Kokoro Library, and today I had reviews of a webcomic, The Pirate and the Princess, and of the anime series, Eden’s Zero published. With that, let me move onto the rest of this newsletter. As an aside, here’s a cute account about a cat walking around a model train yard.
Let me start with archives. On the one hand it was interesting to read about how Mark Meadows tried to skirt federal records retention policies, undoubtedly because was “doing something illegal and traitorous” as Holly Croft put it. On the other, Christopher J. Morten, Reshma Ramachandran, Joseph S. Ross, and Amy Kapczynski argued that the FDA needs to reform its data sharing practices, and historian Nicholas Scott Baker lamented the “slow death of Italy’s archives” as he described it. On another topic, my colleague at the NSA, William Burr, wrote about strategic stability and instability during the middle years of the Cold War using declassified presidential, State Department, federal, and otherwise archival records.
There were posts on /r/Archivists about job requirements for working with NARA, whether analog video techs are still needed in the workforce, someone looking to find a scanner for books, and physical storage of digital items. While it seemed exciting that Cambridge University hired an archivist to “catalog 160 boxes of Stephen Hawking’s work,” I would say more than one person should be hired for that job, perhaps have a whole team of people. Other articles focused on capturing and archiving MiniDV Tapes on macOS and the ICA Roma 2022 Conference which will focus on “archives as a means of bridging a transversal and multi-level gap.”
I was intrigued by last week’s word of the week: embedded archivist. It means, quite simply, an archivist who “facilitates the appraisal and preservation of records of enduring value by closely observing or becoming involved in the work of records creators” or an archivist who “collaborates extensively with an instructor who is teaching a course with or about archives.” Such archivists, as the page says, “become involved in organizations in order to develop relationships, better understand the records of an organization, or participate in documentation efforts.”
I look forward to reading the responses to today’s SNAP chat which takes time to “reflect of another year in the pandemic and how it has affected us and our work as archivists.” It was held on December 22 at 8 PM Eastern Time (7 PM Central Time, 6 PM Mountain Time, 5 PM Pacific Time). Grace Brilmyer, who describes herself as a chronically ill, happily disabled PhD working on archives, disability studies, natural history museums, and colonialism, is calling for contributions from disabled archivists & archival users about critical perspectives and approaches to the archival profession for a forthcoming book named Preserving Disability: Disability and the Archival Profession. Abstracts for that book are due by February 19 of next year if you are curious.
There has been a lot of chatter about libraries on social media recently. It was sad to hear about the librarian who was denied tenure, library administrators screwing a union out of its win for higher pay for librarians, that it’s good to know your librarian, the introductory chapter to a book about zines in libraries being published, a librarian asking why they would be friends with “someone who is doing their damndest to take away my rights, kill people with a plague, and is threatening to throw me in jail for the high crime of being a school librarian,” and a library cataloger saying that those librarians who believe that specific tasks like labeling, sorting, shelving, and so on are “beneath their paygrade” are annoying, and is tied up with professional identity of librarians. I’d read the replies to their tweets, as it is fascinating to see other perspectives, even some who say that librarians do those tasks to avoid other work.
There have been continued efforts to pull books out of school libraries, whether Black queer memoirs (All Boys Aren’t Blue), a queer handbook of sorts (The Book Is Gay), and many others about topics such as “racial and gender equality, sexual orientation and abortion,” along with those declared as supposedly “obscene.” Library of Congress (LOC) had various articles of note. They interviewed Erika Wesch, Herencia Crowdsourcing Intern, Japan in U.S. children’s books, FALQs about Greenlandic autonomy, government formation, and mineral resource policy, described the preservation of World War II Pacific Theater relief maps, and explained the library’s new Open Access Books Collection, with new books added every day!
Hack Library School had posts about going from public to academic libraries and about on the job learning. Not surprising is the story of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) suing to stop the library e-book laws in Maryland and New York, with the Authors Guild, and others on the side of the AAP with the law requiring “publishers who offer to license e-books to consumers in the state to also offer to license the works to libraries on "reasonable" terms.” On a different topic, April Hathcock, in a June 2018 post, talked about her trip to the ALA, and at the time, being hopeful, and hoping to change the ALA as a councilmember. By June of this year, her perspective had changed. She described the ALA as an organization that will (and has been) be “centered on promoting the “neutrality” of white supremacy and capitalism.”
Speaking of the latter aspects of our current society, there was a story, back in July, about seven people sent back to Canada after using a library lawn to enter the U.S. from Quebec, yet another example of overreach of immigration power and immigration restrictions. The library itself, the Haskell Free Library was, according to the article “deliberately built straddling the border in the early 20th century so people from both countries can use it,” as the entrance is in Vermont, and before it was closed by the pandemic, “Canadians were allowed to enter the United States to visit the library without having to visit a customs post.” Of course, that isn’t allowed anymore, at least it doesn’t seem that way, which is unfortunate.
On another topic, Emily Drabinski, Interim Chief at Mina Rees Library at The Graduate Center, CUNY, is running for the ALA presidency, arguing that “libraries are core to any vision of justice.” The official website for her candidacy says that she will argue for a very progressive platform, one where the ALA advocates for “reinvestment in schools, libraries, and communities, economic and racial justice for library workers and the communities in which we live and work, environmental sustainability, and collaboration and cooperation beyond our borders.” I wish her the best of luck in running for the ALA presidency and most definitely support her.
That brings me to genealogy. Genealogy journal had articles about Leoncia Lasalle’s Slave Narrative from Moca, Puerto Rico, tribal health and wellness through land-based healing, and transnational practices and emotional belonging among early 20th-century Greek migrants in the United States. Melanie Frick’s Homestead Genealogy had posts about her ancestors settling in Canada, a photographic analysis, and finding your Danish immigrant ancestors.
There was also a genealogist relying their experience of a cousin who declared they were working for MyHeritage because they didn’t answer fast enough, another who asks if you know the “stand” of your German farm ancestor (if you have one), and a third genealogist that explains how to use and find historical newspapers in your genealogy research. It was wonderful to hear that by the end of this year, the Internet Association will be no more, as it organized against net neutrality, in favor of stronger laws to protect corporate property, and opposed laws to allow ride-sharing drivers to unionize, and supported Airbnb in San Francisco and Chicago when additional regulations were proposed.
That brings me to history. The Art Newspaper had an article about how 14 major museums in the U.S. were “caught up in a ‘morally dubious’ tour of Germany's art treasures after the Second World War,” LOC wrote about Nicolò Paganini, which they called “virtuosic rock star of the 19th century,” Dawn Peterson wrote in Southern Spaces about adoption and the politics of Antebellum expansion, and Tahitia L. McCabe examined Americans and return migrants in the 1881 Scottish census. Kelli Gibson talked about protecting the legacy of Nina Simone, Myers Reece explained what is included in the late Ed Gilliland’s extraordinary historical photo collection, specifically a “massive assortment of prints and negatives, including glass-plate negatives, a technique used before the invention of cellulose nitrate film in the early 1900s.” Perspectives of History noted how to tell a narrative through podcasting, and Erica X. Eisen argued that the failures in “prosecuting the businessmen who profited from the Nazi war machine show[s] just how far postwar Europe and America were willing to go in the Cold War quest to protect capitalism.”
Imperial Global Exeter had posts about a law to end decolonizing debates and German colonialism. There are some good genealogy-related/history-related databases. One of those is named the England’s Immigrants Database. It which contains “over 64,000 names of people known to have migrated to England during the period of the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses and the Reformation.” The other is American September, a “documentary archive collecting memories of September 11th, 2001 from all 50 states and across the world.” In the former database, there is no mention of “packard,” although there is a “Peter Padard.”
That brings me to other topics which are worth noting in this article but don’t fit into neatly into the parts of this newsletter about archives, libraries, genealogy, or history. Starting with anime, CBR had articles about separated single working moms, the strongest anime gun-slinging girls, and two about the Adachi to Shimamura light novels, asking why Shimamura is so distant and why Adachi’s behavior is toxic. There are assorted articles which named the top manga in 2021 or an article about the upcoming anime, Vampire in the Garden. Of these articles, it was fascinating to read about the latter anime, Adachi to Shimamura, The Aquatope on White Sand (which just concluded), and many others.
There is some other animation news. Some noted the trailer for the new series, Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, while others pointed to the creator of Lumberjanes planning a queer young adult take on Sleepy Hollow, and the second season of mature dark comedy web series Helluva Boss on its way, sometime in 2022! It was great to see that animation writers are fighting for better pay and working conditions, pushing a new deal in animation, banding together across the animation industry and trying to unionize. It’s something I support.
There were other articles I came across this week. Some defined words like metamours (your lover’s lover, i.e. husband’s girlfriend), the difference between polyamory and polygamy, misconceptions about pansexuality, and the double-edged sword of relationship energy in polyamorous relationships. There was continuing discussion over whether to use the word “Hispanic,” “Latino,” “Latinx,” or one I’ve started using, “Latine” for those from Latin American countries. There doesn’t seem to be much support for using “Latinx,” according to a new article in NBC News.
I liked reading about why book clubs are said by some therapists to be an approved form of self-care, a review of a book about a prophet, assassins, and religious freedom in the 1844 presidential election, the travel of a book from an ancient bog to a museum treasure, and a bestseller book comparing being trans to pretending to be a walrus. The World Meteorological Organization said that record heat in June 2020 raises alarm bells about a changing climate. The Dictionary of the Spanish Language of the Royal Academy added new words like “New normality”, “bot”, “vaccinology”, “transgender”, “polyamory” or “worth mother,” among many others.
Yahoo! News reported on a secret immigration control unit which investigates Americans, called Operation Whistle Pig, using databases to “obtain the travel records and financial and personal information of journalists, government officials, congressional members and their staff, NGO workers and others” with the main agent Jeffrey Rambo behind this declaring he did nothing wrong. Those at the Counter Network Division probably thought the same, while getting away with their illegal actions and facing no consequences whatsoever. I sure hope that Rambo loses his job over speaking to them over this. He needs to be fired and I’m glad people in the neighborhood where he has his coffee shop are pointing him out for the scum he is, and he should be afraid.
Otherwise, it was fascinating to read about Afrodescendant women, witchcraft, and the remaking of urban Cartagena, whether searching full text is more effective than searching abstracts, transracial families, race, and Whiteness in Sweden, the governor in Maine who got rid of the “tampon tax,” as some call it, a tax that in 32 states, “women’s hygiene products (like tampons, menstrual cups, and sanitary pads) are subject to a luxury tax placed on products or services deemed non-essential or unneeded,” and how wildfires during Permian-Triassic transition caused vegetation change in ecosystem. Monica Muñoz Martinez & Karl Jacoby argued in Public Books that borders don’t stop violence but rather create violence, connected to the history of racial violence on the Mexico-Texas border, and Hathcock noting her issue with how “people with privilege and power enact so-called empathy,” calling it oppressive empathy, and giving an example where an archivist asked people to feel empathy and understand a White medical doctor who had White supremacist beliefs. Yikes.
With that, let me move to the last part of this newsletter. As always, The Nib had wonderful illustrations. Some focused on Biden getting a blank check for military spending, story of a White woman who had a change of heart and stopped saying racist things to a Black nurse, the experience of living in a spaceship, and leaked hospital records reveal huge, automated markups for healthcare. Others were about the last days of people’s lives, the absurdity of saying we are living in a computer simulation, the idea of “wide cars” to “dominate” the road, the plots of every Christmas commercial, and the crumbling of U.S. public transit. There are many more illustrations I’d include here, but I’ll put them in next week’s newsletter instead.
That’s all for this week. I hope you all have a good week ahead!
- Burkely