Records, keepers, and the value of libraries

This week's newsletter will talk about my new review of a recent animated show, along with news about archives and libraries. Enjoy!

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful week. This week’s newsletter will focus on archives, libraries, and much more as usual, including my recent review published in The American Archivist Reviews Portal!

I’d like to start with that review first. After about a month of back-and-forth, I finally got a review of the animated show, Recorded by Arizal, published on the aforementioned Reviews Portal! A screenshot from the show is shown at the beginning of this newsletter. While the show’s prelude, which is only about 20 minutes, does not explicitly have archives, the show has strong archival themes. The protagonist wants to become a record keeper, known as “keeper” for short, as she figures out what to do with her life. If there is a full season of the show, hopefully they can explore this more, which will mean that there will be another review from me on the subject. That wasn’t the only news about the archives field I’d like to mention in this newsletter. For one, David Ferriero released NARA’s new social media strategy for the next five years, showing that the agency is trying to effectively reach out to those online. Secondly, he talked about how the Electoral College is a process rather than a place. Also of note are posts by the SAA’s Human Rights Section on artist-archivist collaborations, foregrounding underrepresented communities, and more recaps of the SAA 2020 conference by the SAA’s SNAP Section here and here. I enjoyed reading the Summer 2020 newsletter of the SAA’s Archivists and Archives of Color Section, which was surprisingly short, the interview with Bridgett Kathryn Pride, the reference librarian who works at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and a review, on the same site where I published my article, about Asana, a task management web application.

This brings me to the library field. There were stories about publishers worrying about the continued expansion of e-books, the problem of passivity in library school from Hack Library School, and libraries adapting, once again, to the conditions of the pandemic. Apart from the fascinating post about the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) Library’s collections, the Library of Congress (LOC) had a number of intriguing posts on their various blogs. Some talked about the use of DNA to solve crimes in Sweden, others highlighted new transcripts of Congressional hearings available online, the Black beauty industry, and the story of a theater historian, Jennifer Ashley Tepper, who used LOC’s resources to create a song cycle of previously unheard works by Jonathan Larson, the late composer and playwright.

With that, here are this week’s honorable mentions. The National Security Archive had an interesting post at the beginning of last month about cyber issues and the current U.S. Presidential Election. At the same time, I liked reading about the campaign to investigate the academic ebook market in the UK, the Ocmulgee Archaeological Excavations, and the specific elements of the puritanical and restrictive Hays Code in film, lasting, effectively, from 1934 to 1968. On a more solemn note, The Guardian summarized the report from the American Library Association (ALA) which mentioned the “100 books that readers and parents have most frequently tried to have removed from libraries and schools in the US” over the last 10 years.

And that’s it for this week! I hope you all have a great weekend and week to come.

- Burkely