Junior Co-Chair: Brandon Pieczko
Steering Committee Members at Large:Nicole TopichEdith EscobedoTali HanJulia Pope
Early Career Member: Anna Marie Lucas
This will be my last newsletter as Web Liasion/Newsletter Editor. I am happy to answer questions about the position and give lots of info to whomever is chosen to replace me. I can be contacted via hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com
I am very grateful to current and previous chairs and steering committee members for making this an excellent section to be a part of! As I've mentioned before, I am stepping down for no other reason than it feels like time (I've been doing this for more than 4 years) and I...
Read the latest newsletter from the International Council on Archives Section on Archives and Human Rights here! The SAHR Newsletter is written and compiled by Trudy Huskamp Peterson.
Abolitionist Library Association is a collective of library workers, students, and community members taking action to divest from all forms of policing in libraries and invest in our collective liberation.We envision a world without policing or prisons. Our goal is to create libraries that are rooted in community self-determination and intellectual freedom through collective action.Read more here.
The latest episodes of the Lost in the Stacks Podcast features Colleen Marquis discussing archivists, librarians, and curators joining the Lecturers’ Employee Organization union at the University of Michigan.
Listen here.
Crafting Resistance challenged the idea of political prisoners as ‘passive victims’ which fails to recognise the degree of agency many prisoners retain despite the horrific circumstances they endure. During the military dictatorship of General Pinochet in Chile (1973-1990) hundreds of political prisoners were held in concentration camps throughout the country. In a number of these camps, prisoners organised themselves and crafted items from the very limited materials and improvised tools...
Ensuring that all histories – especially the most marginalized – are preserved and shared is a priority for Sites of Conscience around the globe. To support this, in partnership with our Asian and Pacific Sites of Conscience Network, we are pleased to launch “Shared Journeys,” a virtual exhibit that showcases the hidden, lost, or sidelined histories of the Asian region. The project is a collaboration between 12 Sites of Conscience in the region and is curated by Radhika Hettiarachchi.Read more ...
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 ...
