#archival studies

[hurglewurm]

in 2024, i was asked to design a tote bag for my school !!! super super cool opportunity, and i've been seeing my classmates and professors carrying around my drawings of furries which is a huge win

[goblossum]

tma entity but it's the vending machine of the archive that tries to kill you with its horrible hot tea.

[dizzycycl0ne]

working in a museum and archives is so crazy to me because my writing is in those archives and on those boxes and in 20 years or longer it will still be there and someone who i’ve never met might see it and wonder who’s handwriting it was like i do with what’s already there. or maybe it will be covered by more labels and all you will see is the shadow of it underneath and it will be part of the history of that place buried under other peoples work. i get to hold books written in indigenous languages that i can’t read from the 1700s that maybe don’t even exist anymore and listen to tapes of traditional songs recorded so that they won’t be forgotten and look through original documents from Residential Schools and Elder interviews and book manuscripts and newspapers and i am not the first person in that space nor will i be the last but somehow it feels so special and beautiful and heartbreaking all at the same time and it feels like i’m seeing things nobody else has and it just blows my mind every day i love my job

[chaoticacademia]

the accessible archivist coalition database is now live!

Home - Accessible Archivist Coalition - Accessible Archivist Coalition

The AAC is a group of researchers, archivists, and historians working to preserve modern history and make it accessible for others.

this incredibly cool & important project is now live! the aac database is a free digital database of publicly accessible information spanning a variety of topics, including a dedicated hurricane katrina database. the project was started by an archivist, librarian, and educator named alexis amber and has expanded thanks to volunteer contributions. please check it out!

here is the founder’s linktree if you’re interested in more of their work and content.

[bootmutt]

Small post from college touring and thrifting might post the haul later

[archivyrep]

Creating Your Own History: Archival Themes in "The Watermelon Woman" [Part 1]

An archivist speaks to the film’s protagonist about having a “great system” to organize archival records within the community archive.

The Core Values Statement of the Society of American Archivists says that archivists should expand access, respect diversity found in humanity, and advocate for archival collections that reflect humanity’s complexity. [1] The reality is often different from that ideal in a field that is overwhelmingly White, as a recent article about Black archives pointed out. [2] This is evident in Cheryl Dunye’s 1996 romantic comedy-drama film, The Watermelon Woman, which the Library of Congress added to the National Film Registry in December 2021 for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” [3] The film follows the story of one Black woman’s determined effort to create her own history and connect with the past. Although this eighty-six-minute mockumentary is over twenty-six years old, its themes of archival limits, power, silences, erasure, and fabrication continue to resonate today.

Reprinted from The American Archivist Reviews Portal. Thanks to Rose and Stephanie for their editing of this article! It was also posted on my Wading Through the Cultural Stacks WordPress blog on Jul. 5, 2022. This review contains some spoilers for the film The Watermelon Woman.

In the film, Cheryl Dunye plays a videographer (also named Cheryl Dunye) who works at a video rental store in Philadelphia with her friend Tamara (played by Valarie Walker). Cheryl watches a videocassette of an old 1930s film, Plantation Memories, and becomes interested in the character Elsie, a stereotypical ‘mammy’ character credited as “The Watermelon Woman.” She then strives to learn more about the actress who played Elsie. One of the first places Cheryl looks is in the basement of her mother’s house. Cheryl tells the audience that her mother, played by Irene Dunye, who is Cheryl’s mother in real life, throws nothing away. She says that Irene’s filing system needs updating. Her mother tells her about the films she watched growing up in the 1930s and notes that she saw “Elsie” singing in some clubs.

Cheryl continues her dogged search by talking to a person with a collection of old Black films and then traveling to the local public library, likely the Free Library of Philadelphia. After perusing the stacks, she checks out as many books as she can and talks to the reference librarian, a White man who is played by David Rakoff. Wanting information about the Watermelon Woman, she encounters her first archival limit, which scholars Sue McKemmish, Michael Piggott, Barbara Reed, Frank Upward, Jocelyn Fenton Stitt, and Sarah Tyson define as barriers created when documents pass into the hands of archival institutions from those who created them, inhibiting attempts to use records to tell family stories and circumscribing efforts to reclaim records about enslaved people. [4]

The librarian dismissively tells Cheryl to check the “Black,” “film,” and “women” sections of reference books for information about the Watermelon Woman. With much prodding, he eventually searches his computer and identifies Martha Page as the film’s director, telling Cheryl that information about Page is on a reserve desk on another floor. Although reserve desks serve students and faculty with materials typically meant for university courses, Cheryl is given an exception and is able to access the relevant information for her research. Yet, she is still unsuccessful because the materials she looks at don’t have exactly what she is looking for.

© 2022 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Notes

[1] “SAA Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics,” Society of American Archivists, accessed February 20, 2022, https://www2.archivists.org/statements/saa-core-values-statement-and-code-of-ethics.

[2] Harmeet Kaur, “How Black Archives Are Highlighting Overlooked Parts of History and Culture,” CNN, February 19, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/19/us/black-archivists-history-culture-cec/index.html.

[3] Nancy Tartaglione, “National Film Registry Adds ‘Return Of The Jedi’, ‘Fellowship Of The Ring’, ‘Strangers On A Train’, ’Sounder’, ‘WALL-E’ & More,” Deadline Hollywood, December 21, 2021, https://deadline.com/2021/12/national-film-registry-2021-list-star-wars-return-of-the-jedi-fellowship-of-the-ring-sounder-nightmare-on-elm-street-wall-e-1234890666/. The film is available for rent on platforms such as Vimeo, Hulu, Apple TV, Prime Video, and BFI. I watched it, using my library card, on Kanopy. It can be watched free of charge on the Internet Archive.

[4] Sue McKemmish, Michael Piggott, Barbara Reed, and Frank Upward, Archives: Recordkeeping in Society (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier, 2005), 205; Jocelyn Fenton Stitt, Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Caribbean Life Writing (New York: Rutgers University Press, 2021), 42; Sarah Tyson, Where Are the Women?: Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better (New York, Columbia University Press, 2018), 148.

[lumen-du-reves]

pov: you’re a mysteries librarian, smuggling resources to punk teens, taking red ink notes, updating cryptid records, codebreaking, and tracking down long-forgotten audiovisual footage

[lets-talk-archives]

Academic Archives

After the first season of this popular horror fiction podcast things go a little off the rails, but the premise of the first season is fairly simple: Jonathan Sims, head archivist for the archives at the Magnus Institute, is making audio recordings of a collection of supernatural testimonies collected by researchers of the strange and unusual. He claims the archives are rather ill maintained by researchers too caught up in academia and attempts to digitize the written testimonies by recording himself reading them all.

Academic archives can be administrative, special collections, and/or results of research like at the fictional Magnus Institute. Once you turn 18, in the U.S. your university cannot release any records about you to anyone, not even your relatives, without your consent under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). When you think about it, your university typically has a lot of information about you. Your financial status for your financial aid and scholarship applications, your citizenship status including your state residency, your parents' educational backgrounds, every grade you've ever earned, and if you've ever used campus counseling resources they could even have sensitive mental health issues on file. These are just a few examples. Some jobs or internships may require a transcript, but no parent, employer, or landlord can contact your school and demand to see your grades or anything else about you thanks to these privacy acts. Jonathan Sims' audio transcripts being aired online as a podcast might be breaking some privacy acts, but oh well. The Magnus Institute has bigger issues going on. The Magnus Archives (the podcast itself, not the fictional institute) has an archive too containing transcripts of all the episodes here.

Many academic libraries also hold special collections, which are often technically archives even if they're under a library heading. Sometimes, archives struggling with funding or location  can benefit from partnerships with academic institutions. One such example is the ONE Archives, the largest and oldest LGBTQ+ archive in the U.S., which was absorbed into the University of Southern California library in 2010 following struggles with funding. Becoming part of USC (a private university) provided a stable budget as well as access to appropriate facilities to preserve analog materials as well as digitize items from the collection. However, universities in America are massive bureaucratic institutions often steeped in whiteness and imperialism. It is not guaranteed that being swept into an institution like this (especially when public universities are subject to state governmental funding allocation) is universally beneficial to all archives.