Presidential records, racism, library unionization, Black librarians, animation, and beyond!
This week's "too long for email" newsletter will share the latest news about archives, libraries, history, genealogy, LGBTQ topics, and more
This week I’ve been a bit prolific. Last Tuesday, I continued my series on fictional librarians with a post about Amity Blight in The Owl House. On the following day, I published a post arguing that archives and archivists are “anything but neutral,” which made some people on /r/archivists annoyed, despite positive responses on Twitter from Sam Cross and others. Otherwise, I’ve been writing a review of the newest ten episodes of Disenchantment, which will hopefully be finished sometime this week. Today, I published a post about the fictional library in the animated series LoliRock, and am ready to write a review of Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, which I talked about on Twitter. With that, let me move onto the rest of my newsletter.
There has been a lot of focus on archives this week. This is in part because NARA went to Mar-a-Lago to retrieve 15 boxes of records that were supposed to be submitted at the end of the term of the former president. Some of these boxes reportedly included classified material, putting a spotlight on NARA. Regardless of the reports that he flushed records down the toilet, it is obvious that he violated the Presidential Records Act (PRA), despite his claims to the contrary. This led some to call for congressional investigations. It remains to be seen whether prosecutors will try him for violations of the act and held accountable. One of the consequences of the PRA is that with a conviction he could be disqualified from office. There has been a lot of chatter about this among archivists. Courtney Chartier of the SAA was quoted by the Washington Post. My work colleague, Lauren Harper, noted that NARA asked for an investigation into the former president. Others noted the weird records he kept, and joked, in Harper’s words, about an “exciting day for the 27 people in the world who are obsessed with the PRA.”
My employer, the NSA, published a post about how the former president likely violated federal laws when destroying and removing records, in conjunction with another NGO, CREW. Similar statements were made by the SAA and AHA. Additionally, some said that having all the records is important for NARA to get a “complete picture” of the presidency. For its part, the Washington Post put out a blistering editorial. This is nothing new for him. When on The Apprentice, he shredded production notes, tear up copies of financial documents, articles, and print-out of tweets as a signal that he had finished with something, so it’s no shock that he continued this habit as president, with a report that he even chewed up one document.
There was a post welcoming new SNAP committee members which are from North Carolina Central University, New York University, University of Mississippi, Towson University, University of California, Berkeley, and UNC Chapel Hill. There were others on Azie Taylor Morton, Treasurer of the U.S. during the Carter Administration, female archivist Bess Glenn who worked at NARA from 1936 to 1962, and examination of a quality review of digital images by the Library of Congress (LOC). Others noted NARA’s diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility initiatives, and digitization of maps of Virginia and Chesapeake Bay. Another article argued that “uninhibited access to archives is — and should be — an essential characteristic of a democracy,” by examining collections of the National Archives of India. One person pointed to online data which is being deleted. There was an additional post about the Remote Access Archive, along with those on a manuscript about community-driven archives, a tweet about deploying backlogs for climate adaptation, and a YouTube video from the Norfolk Record Office about preservation for community archives.
Of note is the Deviants Archive. It has “100,000+ pages of archival documents that form the backbone of The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America,” with a section for FBI files alone. There’s also a group called Archivists Against. The latter is an “informal collective of archivists and archival studies scholars seeking to enact structural change and to use traces of the past to interrupt cycles of oppression in the now.”
That brings me to libraries. There has been recent chatter about a White female librarian (@SStegemeyer, a.k.a. “amazinglibrarianmom”) calling a Black woman a racist term, with their followers defending them for actions and their supposed “apologies.” Some rightly called for White women to express more empathy toward those experiencing racism, criticized those defending the aforementioned librarian, and noted problems with White librarianship. Others rightly pointed out that neurodivergence does not excuse racism and highlighted the importance of White librarians holding other White librarians accountable. At the same time, some criticized when salary ranges aren’t posted for library jobs. Otherwise, on Twitter, I noted the story of Valerie the Librarian and criticized a person who had a poorly thought out argument about library classifications.
There were more library-related articles. Library Journal noted growing unionization among library workers in public and academic settings, in keeping with higher public approval of unions, which is at 68% currently. The article noted pitfalls for those in larger national unions which may have different interests than librarians and the ongoing issue of seniority-based contracts which benefit longtime employees more than new employees. As would be expected, there have been management efforts, at times, to push against unionization within libraries. The article ends with resources such as easy steps toward unionizing libraries, a guide for labor unions and the internet, a guide on collective bargaining, labor relations, and labor unions, another guide designed for mock collective bargaining exercises, and a blog about union activity in libraries, archives, and the information sector.
A new article on the website Word in Black asked why there aren’t more Black librarians. The article first noted the importance of having Black librarians, the overwhelming Whiteness of U.S. librarianship with Black librarians as not even 10% of librarians out there, networks and connections for said librarians. Unfortunately, the article didn’t directly answer the question in the title (“Why Aren’t There More Black Librarians?”) but it does hint at the answer, pointing to removals of anti-racist books. Much of the article is, instead, about efforts to promote more Black librarians rather than explaining why there aren’t as many Black librarians as possible in the first place. It is, however, more explained in books like Topographies of Whiteness: Mapping Whiteness in Library and Information Science, Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in LIS, Where are all the Librarians of Color?: The Experiences of People of Color in Academia, and many others.
Otherwise, Tamar Evangelestia-Doughtery, Director of the Smithsonian Libraries and Smithsonian Archives spoke about confronting toxic work cultures, while librarians countered the “reopen” argument, told the story of a push to remove LGBTQ-themed books in Hood County, Texas, promoting national pride with librarians in Pakistan, the story of the 1928 Indiana Library Association Meeting and the Hotel Lincoln on Michele T. Fenton’s Little Known Black Librarians Facts blog, and Jennifer Snoek-Brown described the difference between microfilm and microfiche. In the latter article I was cited as saying that the character in Winter’s Tale, was a records clerk but that a recordkeeper is “basically equivalent to archivist from what I’ve read.” Book Riot had articles defending slow reading, noting famous libraries in movies and TV, descriptions of celestial bookmarks to mark your space, answering when kids start their reading, the carbon footprint of the book industry (and possibility of e-readers reducing emissions), the story of Pura Belpre is a “champion of bilingual literature,” a second grader’s hand-drawn book becoming a hit at the library, continued harassment of library workers in Illinois, and how to bring teachers in your school library. Hack Library School had posts about hashtags to follow on library Twitter, shared tools for collaboration, pedagogy, and training, and managing imposter syndrome throughout library school.
With that, I move onto a different subject: history. Smithsonian magazine had articles on the oldest modern human fossil, how the ‘Green Book’ became an atlas of self-reliance for Black motorists, meeting the most important Jewish women in medieval England, sects that rejected sex in 19th century America (John Humphrey Noyes’ Oneida community, Shaker celibates and Mormon polygamists), the gory origins of Valentine’s Day, uncovering tens of thousands of Egyptian notepads, and the chemical fingerprint of a cosmic event which began the decline of Hopewell culture. Afro Legends examined the French colonial tax at the heart of Mali-France tensions. Others provided a historical guide to FOIA (related to Muckrock’s release notes), noted contemporary Indigenous art at the Heard Museum, how Black people fought for freedom in the antebellum North, the Black male Civil War regiments from Hingham (of all places) and the political history of dubbing in films. The latter noted dubbing of sound cinema began in the 1920s and 1930s, becoming a tool for film censorship, and that even “seemingly minor, technical or banal elements of film and television production can serve very concrete and significant political ends,” which we should pay attention to. I wasn’t familiar with that history, but I am aware of dubbing especially when it comes to anime.
LOC had posts on the civil rights lawyer Dovey Johnson Roundtree, evidence in 17th century witchcraft trials, the lyricist of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” James Weldon Johnson, and a Black cartographer named Louise E. Jefferson. Journal of American Revolution similarly had articles on Thomas Ditson, Jr., who was tarred and feathered by the British, fought in the local militia, and became “invalid” as a result of the war, and the disillusionment of America’s founders.
A related subject is genealogy. Nancy Loe noted U.S. presidents in the census, Wanda Whitney and Candice Buchanan of LOC, the head of the History & Genealogy Section and a reference librarian in the section respectfully, wrote about the effect of DNA testing on Black family histories. NBC News noted how family trees fill in the gaps for Black people seeking their ancestral roots. Irish Family Roots had posts about researching at the General Register Office and researching at the National Library of Ireland. Other genealogists talked about roots work, genealogy presentations, a family tree found in a home, and ancestors which moved from place to place. There’s also the story of archaeologists uncovering more graves at a lost Williamsburg Black cemetery, and definitions of the terms “genealogist” and “family historian.” I’m not sure I totally agree with treating sites like Ancestry, FamilySearch like a “physical repository” as that would undermine public institutions, i.e. archives. Genealogy journal has articles noting that “critical family history requires scrutiny of the lived events uncovered—some of which may be in sharp contrast to family myths passed down through generations,” and another on gendered genealogies and memories of enslaved fatherhood in America’s antebellum South.
This brings me to last part of the newsletter which focuses on other topics, including articles about or related to LGBTQ+ people. Book Riot shared various romance manga to read, including A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow by Makoto Hagino, an Chéri, My Destiny! by Okoge Mochino. On a related note, Anime News Network (ANN) announced on February 9 that Seven Seas had licensed a light novel and complete manga collection named Qualia the Purple, which is a “romantic science fiction thriller with a yuri core,” asking what it “mean[s] to be human when humans look like robots through your eyes.” Others wrote on the differences between the terms “bisexual” and “pansexual” and provided a guide of sorts to writing asexual characters (related to this is a post about writing an autistic gender nonconforming character). The Queer Encyclopedia of Film and Television (p. 205) stated that Japan is the “only world cinema that mass-produces sexually transgressive films, in the form of gender-bending anime, for children and adolescents.” Good luck finding that in U.S. cinema!
This is interrelated to articles about animation. Animated films like Luca, Raya and the Last Dragon, and The Mitchells vs. The Machines were nominated for Oscars. Just is relevant is the upcoming animated series The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder (premiering on February 23), The Ghost and Molly McGee which started airing new episodes on February 12 and The Owl House and Amphibia which will be back for more episodes on March 19 of this year. I loved reading a summary of the most watched and the best-rated Fall 2021 anime according to ANN. The post included some of my favorites like The Aquatope on White Sand and Komi Can't Communicate. So-alled “abandoned series,” i.e. those which people did not watch all the way through, included Fena: Pirate Princess, Komi Can’t Communicate (hilariously), and The Great Jahy Will Not Be Defeated! It was great to see that Komi Can’t Communicate won Crunchyroll’s recent award for Best Comedy. Although there were other shows nominated, none of the others that won I have ever watched or plan to watch. Apart from this, one of the more interesting articles reviewed anime back from Winter 2012. One of those listed is Bodacious Space Pirates, otherwise known as Miniskirt Space Pirates, a hidden gem, and a sci-fi adventure series I recommend. So far, from ANN’s “Best and Worst of Winter 2022, Jan 1-Feb 4” list, there are only a few I know: Princess Connect! Re:Dive, My Dress-Up Darling, and Akebi's Sailor Uniform. I stopped the last two series as I felt they had too much fan service for me.
There was other animation news, whether about how Adventure Time changed cartoons, reveal of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur characters, a clip from the animated film, Catwoman: Hunted, the appearances of the “mystery girl” in Steven Universe, and the fact that Alex Brightman, who is voicing characters in the Helluva Boss and the upcoming Dead End: Paranormal Park, will return to a production of Beetlejuice on Broadway. The biggest news is the announcement that Futurama will be revived on Hulu for an eighth season, premiering in 2023. While there was excitement at first, this quickly changed to disappointment and anger because John DiMaggio, who voices Bender, has not signed on to be part of the series. This led some to say they will boycott the new season if DiMaggio isn’t part of it. I agree with that sentiment completely. I’d add that the series ended on a fine note already, so why does it need to be revived? It seems unnecessary. Its revival pushes away any pitches for original series to make room for reboots like this one.
There are many more articles. Some focused on re-reading Fahrenheit 451 in what was described as an “age of mass censorship,” and 33 “must-read” South Asian books which will be out this year. Others asked whether masters degrees were worth it, saying they have become an “enormous moneymaking scheme,” noted Hollywood has ignored the Haitian revolution, the expansion of the American LGBTQ museum, and storytelling through textiles. In response to a FOIA request, the Justice Department released 15 pages of records about the George Floyd protests, with lots or redacting, as would be expected.
I then come to the last part of this newsletter, which summarizes some illustrations in The Nib I have read over the past week. Some were on witches, challenging the term “invasive species” and proposing “non-local beings” instead, the history of Black socialism in America, misinformation, disturbing “valentines” for 2022, addiction to internet culture (i.e. needing likes and positive reinforcement), the slave revolution that gave birth to Haiti, bottled water, and limits of White people wanting “Black content.” There were others on Peter Thiel leaving Facebook’s board to fund reactionary candidates, gun and ammo sales in America, human rights abuse in the U.S., and Jill Biden declaring that free community college is off the table.
That’s all for now. Until next week!
- Burkely