Two Charleston County sites with histories rooted in slavery have been accepted into an international coalition of places that connect the past and the present in thoughtful ways.
McLeod Plantation on James Island and the Caw Caw Interpretive Center in Ravenel, both operated by Charleston County Parks, are the first historic sites in South Carolina to be included in the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, a global network of historic sites, museums and memorials.
The Charleston...
Some of you may remember that I&A launched a survey earlier this year to gather preliminary data about the state of temporary labor in archives. We intended for this data to gird conversations about archival labor and to serve as one piece of a series of ongoing labor advocacy efforts across LAM professions.
Not surprisingly, many of the results supported current assumptions- archivists in precarious positions are for the most part anxious, stressed, and actively looking for work, even...
The Historical Archive of the National Police of Guatemala (AHPN) is in trouble. This unparalleled collection of Guatemalan police records, renowned throughout the hemisphere and across the world, limps along in a drastically reduced state.
A staff that once numbered in the hundreds has dwindled to 35 people, operating on temporary contracts that need to be renewed every couple of months. Guatemala’s government pledged to continue funding the AHPN but refused to accept international assistance...
I spent the days after my meeting with the [Toronto Public Library] being attacked on social media by “gender critical” activists who called me a man, said I was ugly and called my speech “narcissistic” and “nuts.” The connection between the TPL’s decision and the emboldening of transphobic speech and attacks on trans women in public life seems to have been lost on most commentators, but it’s clear that the TPL’s actions have already resulted in significant harm to trans folks in Toronto and...
As a fellow librarian, I’m here to warn you: ICE is in your library stacks. Whether directly or indirectly, some of the companies that sell your library research services also sell surveillance data to law enforcement, including ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Companies like Thomson Reuters and RELX Group (formerly Reed Elsevier), are supplying billions of data points, bits of our personal information, updated in real time, to ICE’s surveillance program. Our data is being...
Thousands of digitized records reflecting major historical events of the 20th century related to PEN International, a global writers’ organization, are available online beginning this month. A project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and completed by the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin has resulted in a new online finding aid for researchers, as well as access to teaching guides and nearly 5,000 digitized records.
PEN, an acronym for Poets,...
In 2017, the CPS approved a new strategic plan that aligns the Section’s goals with those articulated in the SAA 2018-2020 strategic plan. Goal 1 in both plans addresses “advocating for archives and archivists.” Specifically, CPS committed to providing leadership in “promoting the value of congressional archives and archivists to members of Congress…” and to organizing an “advocacy activity during its 2018 meeting in Washington, DC, with congressional members and staff.” Further, CPS members...
Based on the election results, appointments, and the usual rotation of the chairs, here is the STHC Steering Committee membership that will be effective for the 2019-2020 academic year:
Jennifer Ulrich - Senior Co-chair
Jennifer Langford - Junior Co-chair and Newsletter Editor
Alison Oswald - Immediate past chair
DiAnna Hemsath - Web Liaison
Peter Collopy - Newsletter Committee member
Nora Zaldivar - Newsletter Committee member
The At-Large Steering Committee members are
DiAnna Hemsath
Todd...
The Students and New Archives Professionals (SNAP) Section is seeking nominations for the appointed ex-officio positions of Junior Blog Editors (2 positions), Junior Social Media Coordinators (2 positions), Web Liaison, and Student Chapter Coordinator (see descriptions below). Ex-officio positions are open to all SNAP members.
The term for each office is one year, beginning on December 1, 2019 and ending on December 1, 2020. A second year may optionally be considered after the end of the first...
Good news!
The steering committee has made final revisions based on your comments and the section standing rules are ready for the next step, voting! You will be receiving an email from SAA in the next couple of days, voting will be open November 4-15. Once the section membership approves the standing rules they will go to Council for approval. This is the last step to make the Accessibility and Disability Section an official SAA section!
Please let us know if you have any questions....
Something important to you missing from this newsletter? Send a submission my way and let me know what you would like to see.
Please submit newsletter items about archives and human rights (writ broadly) to hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. These can be recent publications, upcoming events or exhibitions, opportunities and scholarships, or something else entirely as long as it connects to archives and human rights. For the November newsletter, please send you submission by November 22, 2019.
Happy...
On the 15th of October, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, in collaboration with the Hanns Seidel Foundation and Breathe Films, hosted a dialogue titled “Mining Bodies” in line with its mandate to address poverty and inequality as well as to reckon with the past. The dialogue delved significantly into the lived conditions of mineworkers, mining communities and South Africa’s historical economic reliance on the mining industry. Preluding the conversation, the Mining Bodies exhibition was opened at...
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson yesterday ordered the White House to preserve all records relating to meetings and phone calls with foreign leaders, as well as all records on White House practices and policies for creating and keeping such records.
The unexpected order came in response to the lawsuit brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) together with the National Security Archive and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, filed in May...
Archives are meant to hold the memory of Australia, but whose memory? The history these official archives preserve and tell is funded, collected, configured, curated, and often created by the colonial settler state. As such, they reflect the state’s values and ideology. This is the power that the archives wield: they can turn ideology into history, opinion into fact.
Archives are unreliable witnesses, especially here on these lands of invasion and occupation. As a collection of fragments of...
From its origins in the 1750s, the white-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of "moral suasion" and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. But by the 1850s, the population of enslaved Americans had increased exponentially, and such legislative efforts as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Supreme Court's 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott case effectively voided any rights black Americans held as enslaved or free people. As conditions deteriorated for...
Ni una menos (Not One Less) Chile and the programmatic line of memory and feminism of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights present the exhibition "Ni una menos Chile: Three years of struggle, resistance and rebellion."
This exhibition commemorates the three years of Ni Una menos Chile, a movement that began in response to the femicides that occurred in Argentina, and that in Chile has its beginning on October 19, the day on which it is convened, at the national level, to march against the...
The World Wide Web has had a profound impact on how we research and understand the past. The sheer amount of cultural information that is generated and, crucially, preserved every day in electronic form, presents exciting new opportunities for researchers. Much of this information is captured within web archives.
The project team invites archivists, researchers (from the humanities, social sciences, and beyond), librarians, computer scientists, and web archiving enthusiasts to join us over the...
On Indigenous Peoples Day, the Human Rights Archives Section co-hosted a webinar with the Native American Archives Section about Native American boarding school records. If you couldn't make the event live, you can now view a recording via SAA's Online Learning Portal. Click here, log in, and "purchase" the recording (it's free and you won't be charged).
Thanks so much to National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and the Native American Archives Section for working with us to...
Vice Chair/Chair-Elect
Justin Kovar is the Audio and Moving Image Archivist for the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin and has been at the Center since 2011. Previous to that he was a Graduate Research Assistant for the University's Historical Music Recordings Collections and intern for the Texas Archive of the Moving Image. Justin earned his MSIS Degree from the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, and is an ACA certified...
Regardless of what institution we work for, we all have the shared experience of archives education. Those long days (and nights) of studying archival theory and principles. What most of us found, however, is that when we started our career in business archives, we had to adapt what we’d learned to the needs of our particular organization. The realities of the corporate world, more often than not, require us to take our knowledge of archival best practices and customize solutions that fit our...
Hello,
My company is looking at changing its current servers and backups to Amazon WorkDocs. I do not have any experience with this so I am looking for feedback from people who do. I need to be able to maintain security, access, and digital preservation over our records, which includes over 27TB of dervived digital images, born digital images, and moving images. Any thoughts positive or negative would be appreciated. I have cross posted my question, I do apologize if you receive it multiiple...
Hello,
My company is looking at changing its current servers and backups to Amazon WorkDocs. I do not have any experience with this so I am looking for feedback from people who do. I need to be able to maintain security, access, and digital preservation over our records, which includes over 27TB of dervived digital images, born digital images, and moving images. Any thoughts positive or negative would be appreciated. I have cross posted my question, I do apologize if you receive it multiiple...
Hello,
My company is looking at changing its current servers and backups to Amazon WorkDocs. I do not have any experience with this so I am looking for feedback from people who do. I need to be able to maintain security, access, and digital preservation over our records, which includes over 27TB of dervived digital images, born digital images, and moving images. Any thoughts positive or negative would be appreciated. I have cross posted my question, I do apologize if you receive it multiiple...
Hello,
My company is looking at changing its current servers and backups to Amazon WorkDocs. I do not have any experience with this so I am looking for feedback from people who do. I need to be able to maintain security, access, and digital preservation over our records, which includes over 27TB of dervived digital images, born digital images, and moving images. Any thoughts positive or negative would be appreciated. I have cross posted my question, I do apologize if you receive it multiiple...
Hello,
My company is looking at changing its current servers and backups to Amazon WorkDocs. I do not have any experience with this so I am looking for feedback from people who do. I need to be able to maintain security, access, and digital preservation over our records, which includes over 27TB of dervived digital images, born digital images, and moving images. Any thoughts positive or negative would be appreciated. I have cross posted my question, I do apologize if you receive it multiiple...
