Tomorrow’s History & the Role of Public Libraries

I’ve been thinking about digitization and history; specifically the trusim that history is written by the victors (aka the privileged), and what that means for our current era.
With literacy and war-conquests-slash-oppression on the part of literate groups, orality became devalued as “official” history in most of the mainstream, dominant, Western societies.  Non-literate or illiterate people [...]

Community Archives Workshop in Los Angeles

For any readers who are in Los Angeles – or more broadly as a discussion prompt for anyone interested in community-based archives
I’m helping to coordinate a workshop on skills for community archives on Saturday, March 1st, at the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research (SoCal Library), located at 6120 S. Vermont Ave., Los [...]

Social Justice in The American Archivist (!)

I’ve been home with the flu, which has provided time to catch up on some reading (ok, also television. But that’s not for this blog.) The latest issue of The American Archivist crossed my desk about a week ago, and I was pleased to see an article worth writing about here: Randall Jimerson’s “Archives for [...]

Records as Spoils of War

This is just depressing.
http://chronicle.com/free/2008/01/1335n.htm
The Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank associated with Stanford University
…signed a deal on Monday with the Iraq Memory Foundation—a private, nonprofit group that has had custody of the documents since just after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003—for the transfer of about seven million pages of records and other artifacts [...]

Tagging in Archives

The U.S. Library of Congress’ new Flickr photo tagging effort The Commons is getting lots of attention from info studies folks and the wider blogosphere. The upload of historical photos owned by LC onto such a popular “Web 2.0″ site has generated talk about possibilities for incorporating user tags into library and archive collections. [...]

Why did I become a librarian (or, archivist)?

In response to Greyson’s audience-participation post about why we became librarians, I thought I’d chime in with thoughts of my own. It’s been great to read the comments from others, and I probably should have put this in the comments, as she requested, but figured it might run to post length. So here it is, [...]

Housing and Accessing the Record of a Genocide

Over on Feministe, contributor Anne has an interesting post on the fate of the archives documenting the proceedings and findings of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). These archives include case files, transcripts, confidential records and audio/visual materials that document the brutal history of the Rwandan genocide.
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2007/12/10/the-archives-of-a-genocide-where-do-they-stay/
According to Anne (who attended a [...]

Archives, accountability, and the deleted CIA interrogation tapes

News about the deletion of CIA tapes of “harsh” interrogation techniques is getting a lot of coverage in U.S. papers. (See The Washington Post and The New York Times). Why bring it up here? Because it directly illustrates the tensions between memory, forgetting, and accountability in records.
The CIA’s public justification for the deletion of [...]

Archives, personal records, and privacy

Greyson alerted me to an article from the Vancouver Sun detailing new access policies for British Columbian archives that contain private personal data. Researchers who want to access records with sensitive personal data are being subjected to security checks of their computers, offices, and even homes. Apparently such checks, which seem on the surface [...]

Blogging, Remembering and Forgetting

Blogging, Documentation and Retention
As I hemmed and hawed over my first blog post – changing topics, editing, deleting – I realized that behind my newbie jitters was lurking an issue I’ve been devoting a lot of time and space to over the last year. And that is: will this blog post be around forever? If [...]