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 January newsletter, please send you submission by January 24, 2020.
Happy...
The second phase of the University Libraries’ Transgender Oral History Project has begun. Led by Myrl Beam, the project will feature interviews that highlight transgender social movements and organizing.
Beam, Oral Historian for the project — housed in the Libraries’ Tretter Collection — will build on the work of Andrea Jenkins, who interviewed almost 200 trans and gender non-conforming people as they narrated their life stories.
Beam is currently on a two-year scholarly leave from his role...
A new film by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) will be screened in Montréal on Sunday about the work of the Rwandan-Canadian community to pursue justice against suspected war criminals identified in Canada after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.
The short documentary film, created in partnership with the organization PAGE-Rwanda, looks at the surprising discovery in Canada of Léon Mugesera and Désiré Munyaneza – accused of crimes against humanity for inciting genocide and...
Join us for a special event about the woman’s suffrage movement, challenges faced by early women leaders, and why suffrage still matters today. Explore the synergies of the suffrage and abolition movements as well as the many challenges faced by black women, who continue to struggle for both gender and racial equality. Speakers will include Dr Carol Lasser, Dr. Treva B. Lindsey, and Jen Miller.
The League of Women Voters of Ohio will also be providing free intersectional book reading lists and...
Working with partners Nadia’s Initiative (NI), Un Ponte Per (UPP), and local stakeholder groups, the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience is currently developing plans for a museum and memorial that recognizes the atrocities committed against the Yazidi people in Iraq since 2014 and shares the larger history of the Yazidi community.
Content note: this post mentions abuse of children and sexual violence, including sexual slavery. Read the post in its entirety here.
Two weeks ago I met with a community leader whose own community was devastated by a genocide that happened decades ago in a place halfway around the world. We talked about how his community marks the event, the pain its survivors continue to experience and the challenge of getting his new neighbors to care about something so foreign to them. One of the things he mentioned struck a chord with me: “Recognition is about completing the fabric of our wider community.” To him, recognizing genocide...
Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia (A4BLiP) is a loose association of archivists, librarians, and allied professionals in the Philadelphia region responding to the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement. The A4BLiP Anti-Racist Description Resources project began as an initiative formed by various A4BLiP members in fall of 2017, specifically after a presentation they collaborated on at the 2017 SAA Liberated Archive forum with Teressa Raiford.
Teressa is a Portland-based...
In case you missed it, there is a new SAA section that may be of interest to HRA Section members. It's the Accessibility and Disability Section! The section statement is below and you can see the group page, including standing rules and other resources, here.
The hope for this section is that is it can be an inclusive community for people with disabilities and allies, where they can learn from each other, compile resources, and showcase work and collections promoting accessibility and...
272 million people around the world, according to the statistics of the International Organisation for Migration, are migrants. One in ten people in developed countries are foreign-born.
They are working to build new lives and livelihoods for themselves in other countries, often far from home, leaving behind danger, poverty or discrimination. With the effects of climate change, the phenomenon of displacement linked to extreme or changing weather patterns is set to become more and more common (...
For the occasion of International Human Rights Day, which falls on December 10th every year, I sat down with Chris Laico, Archivist at RBML, who along with Carrie Smith, is responsible for processing human rights related collections. I asked Chris a few questions about archives, human rights, his daily work, what keeps him up at night, and what keeps him going, and here is what he said.
Read the interview here.
We are calling on our members to share any resources they think should be included. We've created a Submission Form where you can send us your favorite website, book, blog, article, or any other resource that helps you with your work with design records. We would like to cover the following categories:
Acquisition, Donor, Deed of Gift • Processing and Description • Preservation and Conservation (analog and digital) • Storage (analog and digital) • Reference, Outreach, User Instruction •...
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 December newsletter, please send you submission by December 13, 2019.
A whistleblower who works in Project Nightingale, the secret transfer of the personal medical data of up to 50 million Americans from one of the largest healthcare providers in the US to Google, has expressed anger to the Guardian that patients are being kept in the dark about the massive deal.
The anonymous whistleblower has posted a video on the social media platform Daily Motion that contains a document dump of hundreds of images of confidential files relating to Project Nightingale. The...
For years, the New York Police Department illegally maintained a database containing the fingerprints of thousands of children charged as juvenile delinquents — in direct violation of state law mandating that police destroy these records after turning them over to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services. When lawyers representing some of those youths discovered the violation, the police department dragged its feet, at first denying but eventually admitting that it was retaining prints...
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...
