The One Book, Many Communities has 3 digital book discussion events in the month of August. This project draws inspiration from the “one book, one town” idea, wherein people in local communities come together to read and discuss a common book. Librarians and Archivists with Palestine invites readers, librarians, and others to organize gatherings to discuss Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. This campaign is designed to introduce readers to the richness of Palestinian literature, and create a...
The Nelson Mandela Foundation has acquired an archival document with great historical significance. Dating from the final stages of the Treason Trial (1956-1961), it is an open letter by the trialists to the people of Britain calling for support in their defence against the apartheid state’s charges of treason. The letter features original signatures by the trialists, including Nelson Mandela, Lilian Ngoyi, Walter Sisulu and Ahmed Kathrada.Read more here.
Many archivists are reevaluating workflows and practices in order to create more equitable, anti-oppressive, and anti-racist metadata in their repositories. This important work is foregrounded by the Anti-Racist Description Resources, authored by the Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia’s (A4BLiP) Anti-Racist Description Working Group.
Archives in Context spoke with A4BLiP’s Anti-Racist Description Working Group members Alexis A. Antracoli, Annalise Berdini, Faith Charlton, Valencia...
In March 2021, Lecturer-rank employees at the University of Michigan Libraries—specifically the Librarians, Archivists, and Curators (LAC)—voted to form a union as part of the University of Michigan’s Lecturers’ Employees Organization. This involved coordinating among the Ann Arbor, Flint, and Dearborn campuses and setting standards and goals for all three work environments.
The members of SAA’s Issues and Advocacy section stand in solidarity with the union and, beyond signal boosting their...
Every Friday for the past nine weeks, artists and activists have been carrying on weekly rallies, assemblies and teach-ins in front of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Building on several years of earlier organizing work calling out the ties of board members at the Whitney Museum and MoMA to carceral violence, war and climate crisis, the Strike MoMA initiative was sparked early this year by revelations about the close association between museum chairman and private equity...
Given the use of social media by people living in areas of armed conflict or severe repression, social media platforms have become accidental and unstable archives for human rights content. The last two decades have witnessed a fundamental shift in how people around the world communicate. During this period, the proliferation of smartphones and the rise of social media platforms have enabled increased identification, collection, and sharing of digital information related to international crimes...
Twenty-two years after the National Security Archive published the notorious “Death Squad Dossier” of Guatemala – which chronicled the kidnapping and disappearance of 183 people by government agents over a period from 1983-85 – police arrested 11 former military and security force officials on varying charges of forced disappearance, torture, rape, and assassination connected to the document.Read more here.
Academics continuously loosen the concept of the archives in vigorous debate and flowery speech, while hundreds of linear feet of Black history are stacked in secure shelving, unbeknownst and inaccessible to implicated communities. “Why do we even have this?” is a recurring question whispered across institutions as complex histories of provenance and acquisitions lead to single box collections with titles like “Miscellaneous Slavery Documents,” a collection of Freedman’s Bureau papers and Bills...
On May 27th, 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced the discovery of an unmarked burial site of 215 children at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. The Archives Association of Ontario (AAO) wishes to express our deepest condolences to the families of the victims, the survivors, and all Indigenous peoples impacted by the discovery. We recognize that the findings serve as yet another example of the atrocities committed and enabled by white settlers, their churches and...
The agency added available historical records will be surveyed from federal repositories like the National Archives, the American Indian records repository and non-governmental organizations that operated Indian residential boarding schools.A final written report will be submitted to Haaland by April 1, 2022, and will be supervised by the office of the assistant secretary for Indian Affairs.“We must shed light on what happened at federal boarding schools,” Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary...
WARNING: This story contains details some readers may find distressing.
"The [Sisters of St. Anne's] remain unwilling to authorize disclosure of [its] records currently in the possession of the government of Canada," said Scott, in a statement to CBC News.
Several Catholic entities never turned over any records to the TRC. According to an internal TRC document obtained by CBC News, 17 Catholic entities failed to hand over any archival material to the commission.
"There are a lot of records in...
Since the year 1999, I’ve been on a journey to discover a call that transcends political necessity and, instead, calls on our inner humanity. In my oral history of the Ambedkarite community, I have been able to explore the significance of one such clarion call, expressed by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar at the All India Depressed Classes conference in July 1942 in Nagpur, India. His call to his followers was: Educate, Agitate, Organize.Dr. Ambedkar believed that caste-based marginalization had led millions...
“The pandemic has been a horror,” says Rachel Mattson, Curator of the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies. One of the projects that has kept the Tretter staff connected, supported, engaged — and able to support a wide range of research inquiries — throughout the pandemic is a project organized around a Twin Cities public access television show, GAZE-TV.GAZE-TV ran from 1986 until Pride season 1992, and then as Green And Yellow (GAY) TV until Pride...
The Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Jakes Gerwel Foundation has signed a Memorandum of Understanding whereby the Foundation’s Centre of Memory will become the custodian of the Jakes Gerwel Archive. Prof Gerwel had a long association with Nelson Mandela and the Foundation.
He served as Director-General in the office of President Nelson Mandela, and as Mandela's Cabinet Secretary. When Madiba retired in 1999 and established the Nelson Mandela Foundation as his post-presidential office, Prof...
In Professor Sheer Ganor’s course “History of the Holocaust,” students’ final projects were designed with three core goals: to highlight the spatial dimension of the Holocaust, to give students an opportunity to intimately learn individuals’ life stories, and to analyze primary sources and scholarly studies that shed further light on survivors’ stories.The students used StoryMaps, a digital platform intended for telling spatial stories. “[Story maps generally] use geography as a means of...
As part of the Cura Continua: Art, Curating, and Practices of Radical Care series hosted by the Art and Archaeology Department at Princeton, keynote speakers Mari Carmen Ramírez and Yasmin Ramírez were invited to speak on the transformative role of archives in the belligerent safeguarding of Latinx art, culture, and authenticity in America.Both Y. Ramírez and M.C. Ramírez spoke about their professional work in archival preservation. At the forefront of their discussion was the argument that the...
The bones of Black children who died in 1985 after their home was bombed by Philadelphia police in a confrontation with the Black liberation group which was raising them are being used as a “case study” in an online forensic anthropology course presented by an Ivy League professor.It has emerged that the physical remains of one, or possibly two, of the children who were killed in the aerial bombing of the Move organization in May 1985 have been guarded over the past 36 years in the...
To mark the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Syrian conflict, the ICRC Library is publishing a special issue of the IHL bibliography covering 10 years of international humanitarian law scholarship on the conflict. Unsurprisingly, the issue of accountability for violations of IHL features heavily in these publications. The diversity of issues covered, from foreign fighters to chemical weapons and cultural heritage, gives us a somewhat clinical picture of the Syrian tragedy.Read more ...
This podcast aims to bring the latest academic research on the Holocaust into the classroom. ‘Survivors’ is a conversation between Dr Rebecca Clifford of Swansea University and the Centre for Holocaust Education about her recent ground-breaking book ‘Survivors: Children’s Lives After the Holocaust.’Aimed at educators who are teaching about the Holocaust, it’s also fascinating for anyone just curious about the past and the intriguing stories of child survivors of the Holocaust. It explores...
This quasi-systematic review uses a critical disability framework to assess definitions of disability, use of critical disability approaches, and hierarchies of credibility in LIS research between 1978 and 2018. We present quantitative and qualitative findings about trends and gaps in the research, and discuss the importance of critical and justice-based frameworks for continued development of a liberatory LIS theory and practice.Read more here.
The 5,500-page spending and relief bill that Congress passed Monday night includes the authorization of two Smithsonian museums — one focused on American Latinos, the other on American women — that pave the way for the world’s largest museum complex to become even more diverse.The omnibus bill calls on the Smithsonian to begin the lengthy process of creating the National Museum of the American Latino and the American Women’s History Museum by giving the quasi-federal institution permission to...
Among the most shocking images from the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill were pictures of a man wearing a sweatshirt that said “Camp Auschwitz” and “work brings freedom.” It’s an anti-Semitic reference to the Nazi concentration camp and extermination center where over 1 million Jewish people died or were murdered during the Holocaust.
The hoodie-wearer Robert Keith Packer was arrested in Virginia a week after the attack on Jan. 13. Two days later, at an emotional press conference, House...
Since 2018, the Archival History Section has given out each year its Archival History Article Award. 'This prize encourages and rewards an article, book chapter, or other short piece of superior excellence in the field of archival history, irrespective of subject, time period, or national focus' (https://www2.archivists.org/groups/archival-history-section/ahs-archival-history-article-award). Since 2020 the award has been split to honor contributions from SAA members as well as from non-...
Join the Science, Technology and Healthcare Section for our annual section meeting on Friday, July 30 at 1:00pm-2:30pm CST! Please register [zoom.us] to receive the Zoom information.
Following an update from SAA Council Liaison Petrina Jackson and the STHC business meeting, Steering Committee Members Nora Zaldivar and Peter Collopy will present and lead a discussion on ways STHC archives can develop collections, policies, and practices that reflect and accommodate the diversity of our...
Elisa Landaverde
Special Collections LGBTQ+ Librarian
Stephen O. Murray and Keelung Hong Special Collections
Michigan State University Libraries
I am the Special Collections LGBTQ+ Librarian at Michigan State University Libraries. In my current position I am involved in almost every step of an archival collection’s lifecycle, this can include initial reach out to potential donors, negotiation, appraisal, processing, finding aid creation, reference, as well as promotion and outreach.
As a...
