Smashing library stereotypes, archives, genealogy, and the wider world
This week's newsletter covers a plethora of topics, ranging from a recent article I published in ilovelibraries, to posts talking about archives, genealogy, and more!
Hello everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful week. This week’s newsletter will cover several different topics, whether in the library, archives, or genealogy fields.
I’d like to start on the library field. I begin with an article I wrote for ilovelibraries, focusing on two animated shows which buck library stereotypes: Cleopatra in Space and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. I’m glad this was published, especially because the former show has been rarely reviewed, and I have an article in the works about libraries in Hilda too, I am happy to report. It will hopefully be published in mid-September. I’m not isolating my analysis to those shows, of course. For example, on my blog, Libraries in Popular Culture, I published two posts which show the vital role of libraries in two anime shows: Paradise Kiss and Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet. In the latter case, there is a librarian who works in the equivalent of an ivory tower and is also a medical doctor! He is a bit archivy, as his library serves as the civilization’s only record of the early events of humanity.
That brings me to the archival field. On my blog, Treading Through The Archival Stacks, I noted the archivy themes in the She-Ra series, building off the ilovelibraries article. There were some interesting articles I came across on NARA blogs about Washington, D.C. public pools, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. At the same time, there were articles about other archival concepts. Some wrote about the value of collections management systems, the power of archives, the rural-urban divide and how it affects archives. I mentioned it before, but its important to point out, again, that the SAA receiving a IMLS grant for the second Archival Census and Education Needs Survey in the United States. Such a census will undoubtedly help the archival field strive to make the field more diverse and solve inequities to the best extent possible.
I’d like to highlight some articles and posts I’ve put together in the past week as well. Beginning this is a post on my Genealogy in Popular Culture blog where I examine family history themes in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power and The Simpsons. My friend also posted the final part of their long-running fiction series, which is gushing with gay energy. In one scene, a character, Cleo, tells her friends that she can never forget where came from, no matter how hard she tries. In future stories my friend says they may explore this more, as she tries to understand fully who she is as a person dealing with a strange magical power. On a completely different topic, Brian Frye wrote a piece in Jurist defending the Internet Archive from attacks by publishers, while Hack Library School had articles spotlighting Indigenous librarians and things they wished their professors knew, and WBGH talked about how libraries in Massachusetts are coping with COVID as they reopen slowly. Apart from this, Jeannette Holland Austin wrote about attempts to solve complicated genealogies and considering how your ancestors tended their gardens (assuming they had one). There are many more articles, but what I have included is, I believe, sufficient for the topics covered in this newsletter.
I hope you all have a great weekend and week to come.
- Burkely