Welcoming a new year: abandoned scrolls, libraries, and beyond!
This is the first newsletter of 2021. There will be talk, as always, about archives and libraries, but also talk on much more, so be ready for that, my fellow readers.
Hello everyone and happy 2021! This is the first newsletter of the new year and I have so much to talk about! I have a review of Hilda coming up this month on I Love Libraries and I have a few recent reviews I wrote in the past week about libraries and archives I’d share with you all. I am continually grateful that Jennifer Snoek-Brown added more entries which I suggested on her list of TV series, animated and live-action, and I’ll be writing an article and/or doing an interview with her later this year! So that’s great news. With that, let me begin the newsletter!
Let me start with two articles on my own blogs. Yesterday I published a post about archivy themes and abandoned scrolls in Tangled (the series). Of course, no archivists are shown, but I thought it was interesting in terms of how much archival documents show up. I wish archivists had appeared, because the scrolls in the episodes had to be organized by someone! And a few days before that post was another about information gathering, knowledge, and more within libraries in various animated series, Tangled, Amphibia, and even Soylent Green. I am also very excited by the article I published in Pop Culture Maniacs which focused on LGBTQ representation in animated series 2020, looking forward. Here’s an excerpt from that article:
In the past year, various series have premiered on broadcast television and streaming platforms with LGBTQ characters and diverse casts…Despite the dismal events of 2020, these series are making a big impact when it comes to interesting, strong, and complicated stories for LGBTQ characters, and should be praised for that, regardless of whether the shows are aimed at young adults, children, or mature adults. Three big animated series ended this year: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, and Steven Universe Future…And, perhaps the most interesting intersection of gender and sexuality in 2020 was the episode “Obsidian” of Adventure Time: Distant Lands, which focused on the relationship between a bisexual woman Marceline “Marcy” the Vampire Queen and Princess Bonnibel “Bonnie” Bubblegum, of a not-yet-known sexual orientation…So, there’s a lot to look forward to in 2021 in terms of animated series
It’s a definite must read!
With that, let me talk first about archives. NARA blogs talked about the presidential transition, the Henry Peabody collection, Chuck Yeager, and most fascinating of all, securing the vote in the U.S. Virgin Islands! While those were fascinating, I thought the same when it came to the articles about cataloging in the time of COVID-19, the Hollywood archivist, Lillian Michelson, donating their library to the Internet Archive. I further enjoyed reading Margot Note’s article titled “How to be a better researcher,” something that we can all learn from, the archivist on a quest to preserve literature of the marginalized, and upcoming Smithsonian museums for women’s history and Latinos! Not sure where they will be in D.C., but that’s great to hear. At the same time, it was inspiring to read the Vermont state archivist talk about their tweet threads highlighting records in their collections about the 1918-20 flu pandemic, the LGBTQ game archive documenting the history of queer video games, a former archivist noting how they found out that the town had been using the wrong dates of the town’s founding by looking…at the documents! It was worrisome to read articles about the Presidential Records Act not being followed, how White House records may be trashed by the ‘Rump before his departure from the White House, and the bad archivist from NARA who pocketed money for TEN YEARS from a German company for digitizing film records which were provided to the public for free! Yeah, that’s pretty bad. And this person even got a lifetime award from them. I hope after this they take away his award. At the same time, I liked hearing the introduction the Reclaim the Records organization, even as I saw the SAA’s action item to Senators on the “Educating for Democracy Act of 2020,” which will give more money to history and civics education. Finally, I’d like to object to a mentality noted in a Nature article about what “COVID archivists” are keeping for historians in the future, “the tendency today has therefore been to collect everything, within each organization’s broad remit.” Anyone that thinks it makes sense to collect everything is bonkers, because that is not a sound strategy (and the archival field has soundly rejected it). Only certain materials, sites, initiatives, and so on should be preserved. Archivists should never be preserving everything of any event, under any circumstance. It would be too much to handle and there would never be the resources or labor to such collecting on a mass scale anyhow.
With that, let me talk about libraries. Thanks to an email (or text) from my dad, an article which talked about women who rode miles on horseback to deliver library books! Now, that’s what I call dedication! There were, as always, a number of helpful articles from Hack Library School about how to be a student planner, what you should know before beginning grad school, how you can be in library school…without a library, and how to talk about structural racism. I came across other articles about a library which hired a social worker in order to help residents, how libraries support nonprofits, how to transform a library on a small budget (although you should have a bigger budget), and a number of films which have joined the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry! Again, if you have suggestions for them, feel free to tell them directly, as they have a handy nomination form, and more information about the nominations here. It is a list which should be expanded.
In the last part of this newsletter, I’d like to focus on stories which are often important but don’t fit neatly into the categories of archives or libraries. One of those includes a post about topical maps, while others talk about Harriet Tubman, enslaved labor and the British Royal Navy from 1790-1820, and old cars. Apart from this, there were articles about collecting materials, Augusta Savage (the only Black woman who made art for the 1939 World’s Fair), the biggest literary scandals of 2020, and ancient remains which prove that “there were more gender-equal roles in ancient tribes than modern scholars thought,” meaning that sexual division of labor at the time was “fundamentally different — likely more equitable” unlike society today.
That concludes my newsletter. I hope you all have a great weekend and week to come.
- Burkely