Upcoming articles, NARA, archivists, libraries, and privileged genealogists
This week, like last week, I will be noting news from the archives and library fields, but also will discuss the value of archives, extreme "book love," and more!
Hello everyone! I hope you all had a good week. Before moving onto the rest of my newsletter I’d like to highlight some positives of the last week. For one, I wrote about research within libraries as shown in various animated series, and about well-known animated series with archives but no archivists. Secondly, my article for I Love Libraries about the screenshot from the animation at the beginning of this post is upcoming in early March, while two posts for Jennifer Snoek-Brown’s Reel Librarians are in the works as is a post about the proposed closure of the Seattle NARA facility for Issues & Advocacy. With that, I’ll continue with the rest of this newsletter.
There are a lot of posts and articles about archives that I’d like to share with you all. My fellow colleagues at the National Security Archive wrote about the Able Archer War Scare in 1983 while Archives Aware! talked about using short videos for archival outreach, an archivist explained an effort by the University of Illinois to put in place a web archiving program, and archival researchers rightly called for NARA’s budget to be increased. On that note are NARA blogs in the past week focusing on government transparency, a tribute to Cicely Tyson, Black Americans and the war industry, and graduations that never happened, like was the case of Laura Ingalls Wilder in South Dakota. There were fascinating articles about the race to save Black history archives, preservation of photographic negatives, the Collective Responsibility Labor Advocacy Toolkit, and the value of preparing for possible disasters when they strike archives. Just as important are articles on virtual deinstallation during the pandemic, NARA’s Citizen Archivist program uplifting stories of Black people, how Frederick Douglass did some of his anti-slavery work in Hingham, Massachusetts, the newsletter of the Archivists and Archives of Color, and a review by Samantha Cross of the short film “Dead Ink Archive.” The prolific archival consultant, Margot Note, wrote about seamless integration for archives, crafting an archival mission statement, and achieving business process integration in archives. Finally, the closing part of the newsletter of the Archives & Manuscripts Department at the University of Hawaiʻi (at Manoa) noted something that I’ve mentioned in this newsletter before:
There is a thrill in being able to satisfy an uncommon research request, but archivists can’t collect everything, and furthermore can’t always predict what the ‘just-in-case’ value of a particular collection will be decades into the future. When collections are rarely—if ever—used, it can lead us to wonder whether the need our predecessors predicted for that collection might have evaporated. So, when those rarely-used collections do get requested, it reaffirms a more-expansive approach to collecting. It also brings an opportunity to delve into areas we might otherwise have never thought to explore!
An interesting perspective from an archivist!
Let me move onto the related field of libraries. One librarian, in the past week, asked why people are angry when libraries reject their donated books. The whole thread made me think about a lot, especially as a person who donates books who has donated books to libraries. This connects, in a sense, to the story I wrote about last week. A part-time library specialist, Cameron Dequintez Williams, who took books written by the former president and Ann Coulter, reportedly burned them on a Facebook Live stream, saying that the library took the books and said he could take them. Of course, people are outraged about this, but it sounds more like a love of books equivalent to bibliolatry. Libraries should, and cannot, keep everything. If Williams had weeded the books instead of burning them, then likely this wouldn’t have become an incident in the first place. Perhaps, that was his point. It’s very different from that arch-conservative (and reactionary) White woman who cried about how she was stopped from rapping about libraries, being told it was cultural appropriation, declaring she was being “discriminated” for this. Yikes. Apart from these topics, the Library of Congress had posts about Black funeral homes, pruning search results to find exactly what you are looking for, and an interview with an intern (Courtney Kennedy) working on transcribing centuries of Spanish legal documents. Hack Library School noted about asking in a library chat anonymously and expectations of library knowledge, Snoek-Brown over at Reel Librarians talked about the role of librarians in the 2013 film, Beautiful Creatures, and readers sharing, to I Love Libraries, their most cherished memories of libraries. The Internet Archive, which defines itself as a digital library rather than an archive, has worked to make the history of American newspapers searchable, has over 2 million volumes in its modern book collection, and noted one of its employees who scans in their books. Other articles noted how a teenager helped launch “seed libraries” in every state, library re-opening strategies, weeding your books like a librarian, rural libraries coming to the rescue in terms of the pandemic, the case of an Asian-American librarian, Ellen Ogihara, resigning from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, citing discrimination and bias within the library at that college. Of course, people on the school’s subreddit mocked her concerns. She definitely should be supported and her case should be mentioned, as other librarians, educators, and researchers have noted. At the same time, a new book by Jamaican-born library scholar Mark-Shane Scale, Colonization and Imperialism in Libraries, notes how the legacy of colonialism and imperialism haunts the “world’s modern libraries” as he calls for an approach to “finally decolonize global libraries.” This is something which I am thinking of not only reading but writing reviewing it in an article for American Libraries.
That brings me to the next part of my newsletter, focusing on genealogy. When it comes to genealogy, I’d say that the directory of military archival collections could be very helpful, as could posts about researching railroad ancestors, everyday streets, and how seasons affected those in the past. I enjoyed reading the interview with Kale Hobbes, a genealogist who has been doing research for nearly 50 years. There was something I saw which disturbed me in the past week: a Jewish genealogist, Caitlin Hollander, claiming that she has felt that she has “no place” in the genealogy field, that she constantly feels like she is “being silenced,” and was told that the stories of her ancestors “don’t matter.” She also said that she is exhausted with the “constant othering and the exclusionary microaggressions.” While I could have offered a hot take on her tweet, which had almost universal “oh no, how could this happen to you” response from White genealogists, I decided to not respond so to avoid an argument. Instead, I thought it better to deconstruct her tweet here. For one, Hollander’s comment comes from a LOT of White privilege as non-White genealogists have to work harder in their roots work and the records themselves favor White ancestors. There is undoubtedly anti-Semitism in the genealogy field, as there is in every field and part of our society in some form or another, but genealogy has racism ingrained within it, since the very beginning. This is why some have called for “critical family history,” supported Jennifer Mendelsohn’s “Resistance Genealogy,” and are working to have more progressive family histories. It’s not easy but it is possible, and it can be done. As Ellen Fernandez-Sacco put it in 2016, the task for genealogists is to make it more visible, and end, “the historical erasure of difference (ethnic, race, gender, class) in the historical and genealogical record.” Related to this is Michelle Franzoni Thorley’s post, focusing on Black, indigenous, and other people of color, saying that internalized racism is hindering their roots work.
Then there is one final part of this newsletter of topics which don’t easily fit into the realms of libraries or archives, but are still worth mentioning, nonetheless. It was great to see the posts on Perspectives of History about the illustrated envelope of Eleanor Roosevelt, a crusade for Black history, and the American Historical Association (AHA) is opposing financial cuts at the University Press of Kansas. However, the AHA disappointed me in the past week. As I pointed out on Twitter, while I understand their concerns about school renaming in San Francisco, since they are protecting the historian profession, they put out a reactionary, and snarky, statement. They declared that many of the rationales for renaming the schools from individuals who are bigoted, racist, or otherwise awful for one reason or another, are “misguided or riddled with errors of historical fact,” complaining about citing Wikipedia, and decried that the committee “showed little interest in consulting professional historians.” Perhaps that is for a reason? Even if everything they are saying is true, the statement has a tenor of elitism in it which I really don’t like and is very cringe-worthy on many levels. I’d have to stand with those wanting to rename the schools on this one. Sure, more public debate would be good. However, it would be better to involve actual people in the community than just professional historians. Who is to say that professional historians are always right? Or that they always do the best “serious research”? Anyway, this AHA statement appears to side with our former traitorous president, calling it “ridiculous and unfair.” Yikes. There are some other posts which need to be highlighted too. History Associates wrote about the triumph of public health in post-World War II New York, Alice Fleca talked about a feat of book binding design, a copyright lawyer noted how photographs you post online can be protected so you can maintain your copyright, Scalawag focused on how a court victory changed racist municipal policies in a small Georgia city and Wired mentioned the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, a resource to trace the made-up words of sci-fi. JSTOR focused on the Zanj Rebellion, a remarkable episode of Medieval Islamic history where a group of Black slaves in Africa, over a 15 year period (868 to 883 CE), built their own city, printed their own currency, and controlling their own polities. While there is a lot more to what happened, it is a story worth remembering, regardless.
With that, I hope you all have a productive week ahead. Until next time!
- Burkely