Popular culture, libraries, and archives
This year's second newsletter will focus on pop culture representations of libraries and archives, along with related topics. Enjoy!
Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great week so far. I’m sending this out today rather than my usual Wednesday so you can read the newsletter during the weekend and the week to come. Welcome to my new subscribers!
So, I put together an e-book, titled “‘It Does Not Exist’: Libraries And Archives In Popular Culture,” which brings together 13 blogposts I wrote on various library and archives topics. Newsletter readers may be familiar with my past writings about pop culture representations of libraries and archives, along with posts on records erasure, digital archives, digitization, the ephemeral nature of online records (like social media posts), and more. I hope this publication helps people navigate what I’ve written better and build on it for their own analyses in the future. I plan to put a few more together in the future, all of which will likely be published on the Internet Archive, which isn’t an archives, but is actually a digital library.
I also wrote another popular culture review this past week, focusing specifically on one of my favorite shows, Steven Universe (and its new epilogue series, Steven Universe Future), and media representation for vegetarianism. I hope, ultimately, to turn it into a full-fledged article to publish somewhere else, but in the mean time, this article should suffice. This was another case where very few were writing about this, so I thought that it made sense to pen a piece on this subject.
Moving on, there are a number of articles I’d like to share with you this week. I was genuinely surprised and relieved to see a statement from the Society of the American Archivists criticizing declarations that Iran’s cultural heritage sites will be destroyed, noting rightly that it is a violation of international law. At the same time, I was also glad to see that researchers have found an early copy of a 19th-century gay rights essay, now housed in Johns Hopkins University Library, in my hometown of Baltimore, and the articles by the prolific Margot Note on secrets to improved research and how to enhance your (M)LIS career, if that’s the path you’ve taken.
This past week I also read a number of interesting articles, some about the e-book embargo of public libraries by big publishers, the libraries which received funds from the American Library Association to help with census-taking in their regions, and reappraisal of archival collections. Apart from reading through the December issue of Past Points, a newsletter of the St. Louis County Library, with genealogy-leaning topics, I also enjoyed learning about how the Library of Congress unrolled a 2,000-Year-Old Buddhist scroll or a rare manuscript that revealed names of various 16th-century books. Clearly, despite some faulty thinking to the contrary, people STILL use books and libraries. This brings me to a number of articles in Hack Library School which have been published recently. Some focused on mindfulness and controversy in the library, while others were reflections on library school or those unsure of what to do when in the so-called “murky middle” of library school.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Hope everyone has a great rest of their week to come!
- Burkely