The members of the Technical Subcommittee on Archival Facilities Guidelines seek public comment on its proposed revisions to the Archival and Special Collections Facilities Standards.
Last published in 2009, the committee has worked diligently over the last several years - navigating numerous unforeseen circumstances - to update and revise the entire standard. This has been a mammoth undertaking, and we're excited to finally share the draft for public review!
Here are a few highlights of our...
VOTE HERE: http://www2.archivists.org/groups/electionsNote: You must be an SAA member to vote.
TESSA FALLONWeb Curator, Columbia University
I am a web collection curator at Columbia University Libraries and I am currently focused on building our Human Rights Web Archive. In addition to my work at Columbia, I am currently the co-director of the International Council on Archives Human Rights Working Group archives directory project. I earned a MLIS and a certificate in Archives and Records...
The Human Rights Archives Roundtable has been approached by three panels who are seeking endorsemsents. Since the Roundtable can endorse up to two panels, I would like Roundtable members to vote on the two panels that resonate the most with the membership's interests.
Below are the panel names and abstracts with the full proposals attached. After reading the proposals, please click on the Survey Monkey link to vote on which panels you believe should receive the Roundtable's endorsement....
Candidate Statement for Web Liaison
I am currently a student at Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science in the Archives and History dual-degree program. In addition to being a full-time student, I am the Social Media Intern with the Archives and Archivists of Color Roundtable, as well as a founding member of the Core Working Group for Archivists without Borders, U.S. Chapter. My interest in human rights developed prior to my entry into the information science field,...
The Roundtable has endorsed the following two proposals for SAA 2013:
1. Displaced Archives
Nations and peoples have suffered throughout history from the removal of their documentary heritage. Records have been removed during war, revolution, and other conflicts for purposes ranging from plunder to propaganda to intelligence to documenting war crimes to the rescue of archives threatened with destruction. Such "displaced archives" are scattered in institutions across the globe; access to...
The Human Rights Archives Roundtable is seeking nominations for the positions of Co-Chair and Web Liaison, both 2 year terms. Help us plan for the coming year, engage members, manage our web presence, and organize our participation in the annual meeting. If you are interested, please submit a brief bio and candidate statement to Theresa Polk at tepolk@gmail.com by Friday, May 30.
For more information about the Human Rights Archives Roundtable, visit our Wordpress blog or our Twitter account, @...
Candidate statements for 2014 Human Rights Archives Roundtable elections follow below. Please remember to vote!!!
JUNIOR CO-CHAIR
Jr. Co-Chair Candidate Statement: Emily Gibson
I learned about human rights from my mother. Through her activism, she showed her love, and through her example I learned to have compassion for the marginalized and underserved. As a library and information science student, I focused on serving poor and urban communities. Internships at the Walter P. Reuther...
The human rights archives blog is making a comeback and we need your contributions! Is there an issue that really irks you and you have something to say? Is there something in the news that can benefit from an archival perspective? Did you work on an incredible project related to archives and human rights and you want to share you insights?
Send blog post pitches to hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. Include a short summary of your idea and why you're the best person to write it. Publication...
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 15, 2017.
A group of "engineers, designers, business executives, and others" created and signed a pledge vowing not to create a database of individuals based on their religious beliefs. In doing so, the writers of the pledge acknowledge the role of technology in human rights abuses throughout history and vow to identify and advocate against the targeting of marginalized communities such as Muslims and immigrants.
The full pledge can be found at http://neveragain.tech/
January 27, 2016 6:00-8:00p.m. The Burke Library Reading Room (3rd Floor)
Union Theological Seminary, 3041 Broadway
Panelists: Larry Cox, Co-Director, Kairos: The Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice and former Executive Director, Amnesty International USA; Gail Hovey, Former member of the Southern Africa Committee, American Committee on Africa; Rev. William Wipfler, Former Director of the Latin American Department of the National Council of Churches
Moderator: Carolyn...
The Philip M. Hamer and Elizabeth Hamer Kegan Award Subcommittee of the Society of American Archivists seeks nominations (including self-nominations) for the 2017 award.
This award recognizes an archivist, editor, group of individuals, or institution that has increased public awareness of a specific body of documents through compilation, transcription, exhibition, or public presentation of archives or manuscript materials for educational, instructional, or other public purpose. Archives...
Operation Condor, the trans-border, multinational effort by Southern Cone secret police services to track down and “liquidate” opponents of their regimes in the 1970s, targeted officials of Amnesty International as well as other human rights groups, and planned overseas missions in Paris and London, according to a comprehensive CIA report on Condor operations just released by the Obama administration. “The basic mission of Condor teams to be sent overseas,” according to the CIA, was...
The Archives Association of Ontario (AAO) is pleased to share the first of two pages aimed at supporting the Truth and Reconciliation process and improving access to Indigenous focused archival and cultural resources. Toward Truth and Reconciliation (http://aao-archivists.ca/truth-and-reconciliation) is a dedicated page aimed at assisting Ontario's archival community to navigate the path toward the decolonisation and Indigenization of our practice. The page consists of free and openly...
On January 15, a group of archivists released a letter to members of our profession regarding the Trump administration and potential abuses of information technology. They call themselves the Concerned Archivists and their statement reads in part:
President-elect Donald Trump has made a long series of statements and proposed policies at odds with our Constitution, our history, our system of law, and our international human rights obligations, and which are a direct affront and threat to...
The US Holocaust Museum, located in Washington, D.C., has issued a statement yesterday clearly defining the Holocaust so as to curtail any further confusion following President Trump’s vague remarks—which did not mention Jews or Nazi anti-semitism—on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators … Nazi ideology cast the world as a racial struggle, and the singular focus on the...
It is amazing what you can discover in the archives – sometimes a piece of history itself! In 2014, History Associates archivist Valerie Vanden Bossche was working to organize and preserve the archives of the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site in Washington, D.C. The Council House was the first headquarters of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), founded by Bethune and led by Civil Rights icon Dorothy I. Height. In this house, the NCNW spearheaded strategies...
Librarians and Archivists with Palestine invites you to join our annual international reading campaign, One Book, Many Communities held in April 2017, in concurrence with National Reading Week in Palestine. This year’s reading is “Returning to Haifa” by Ghassan Kanafani, a novella that can be found in the collection Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories.
This project draws inspiration from the “one book, one town" idea, wherein people in local communities come...
Chapter 1: How Khmer Rouge Came to Power
With the support of the European Union and Rei Foundation Limited, Bophana Center is currently developing a smart-device application for learning Khmer Rouge history. In line with this project, Bophana Center launches a series of thematic panel discussions about Khmer Rouge history and its education with special guests.
The first edition will be dedicated to the theme of "How the Khmer Rouge came to power" which constitutes the first chapter of...
The human rights archives blog is making a comeback and we need your contributions! Is there an issue that really irks you and you have something to say? Is there something in the news that can benefit from an archival perspective? Did you work on an incredible project related to archives and human rights and you want to share you insights?
Send blog post pitches to hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. Include a short summary of your idea and why you're the best person to write it. Publication...
Something important to you missing from this newsletter? Send a submission my way and let me know what you would like to see. I did not get any newsletter submissions last month (shocking, I know) but you can remedy that!
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...
In 2016 the Nelson Mandela Foundation and the Global Leadership Academy of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) convened two six-day dialogues with “memory workers” from nine countries. This was the second series of international Mandela Dialogues, the first having taken place in 2013-2014. Informing the first series had been a discomfort with what was seen as a growing orthodoxy around “transitional justice”. The discomfort gave rise to a range of questions aimed...
On January 11, 2017, Senators Mike Lee (Utah) and Marco Rubio (Florida) introduced S.103–115th Congress, the “Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2017.” The language is blunt: “no Federal funds may be used to design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a Federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing.” A similar billwas also proposed in the House of Representatives.
Read more here.
We are very excited to talk with Jarrett Drake, digital archivist at Princeton University’s Mudd Manuscript Library. He was awarded an Innovation Award from the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) in 2016 for his work in challenging and re-examining the practices of archiving and documenting history, particularly relating to preserving the under-represented voices in history. Follow his writings here.
Read the interview here.
Washington, D.C. February 7, 2017 – CIA covert aid to Italy continued well after the agency’s involvement in the 1948 elections – into the early 1960s – averaging around $5 million a year, according to a draft Defense Department historical study published today for the first time by the National Security Archive at The George Washington University.
Read more here.
