Maureen

Is it good to have an Outreach and Community person to serve as the archives' Omelas Child?

The most useful political distinction to pay attention to in my experience is asking whether children and young adults are most likely to suffer harm from people inside or outside their family. Only people who say “inside” are sensitive to power dynamics that matter

I definitely fouled up a Quaker School interview when I got asked about "reparative description" and I went, "It's not even the 10th most important thing we can do"

Maybe that was harsh, but I have also seen repdesc become "In honor of African Americans let us transcribe the diaries of this slaver"

you are my favorite

The discipline has been cultivating an Avoidant Personality forever, and so the notion that you would seek to meet People and treat their contemporary stuff with all our tradecraft is just, alien.

None of this behavior is harmful, lots of nice people in our field. But this can't be how we are led

I wish that I could help every archivist know that they WILL get yelled at somehow somewhere because we work with people and some people are nuts. We cannot put complainers in charge. Your work should be in service of building access to the past by people who could benefit from it.

And real ones know this, it's worth evaluating whether your work is actually building community, or if you're just seeking a cleanup task with a contemporary flavor

What kind of myths and backsliding are you seeing?

Dang teachers truly doing God's work to create agentive adults.

A geographic subject entry for Richard Scarry's busytown, which points to the Richard Scarry papers

I do not claim to understand LC rules for establishing subjects and from what I can tell they don't make much internal sense but any system that produces this is fine by me.

A profession of external locus of control!!!!!!!

"We can't scan this b/c of copyright"
"We might not be able to process it right away but at least it's in an archive"
"We need to put this in [alphabetical order / neat piles / my favorite schema] so that it's useful to researchers"
"We need to close it because b/c it might have privacy problems"

I really miss the days of archives Twitter because I have been hearing so many myths about professional practice these days and I have very few venues for reminding everyone that it doesn’t have to be this hard.

Pope Leo XIV Mourns Maronite Priest Killed by Israeli Tank Fire in Southern Lebanon Father Pierre el-Rahi ran toward the wounded after a Merkava tank shelled a home in Qlayaa. A second shell killed him. The Vatican named him within hours.

Father Pierre el-Rahi told his parish three days before his death: "We carry only the weapons of peace."

An Israeli Merkava tank fired twice at the same home in Qlayaa. He ran toward the wounded after the first shell.

The second one killed him.

www.thelettersfromleo.com/p/pope-leo-x...

Extremely pleased to announce 🎉that the new-new @saa-official.bsky.social Selecting and Appraising Archives and Manuscripts is out now, with two crucial chapters by @meau.bsky.social and me

Make it your own: mysaa.archivists.org/productdetai...

i blew some minds the other day when I explained that a series represents records that were produced serially – they are, as you say, traces of the same function over and over

Also I am happy to say that 15 years after I lived in West Philly, Avril 50 is STILL on Sansom and is STILL grouchy and over-priced. 2004 issues of magazines asking for multiples more than cover price! My friend got tricked into buying a $20 un-marked chocolate bar!

I was in Philadelphia last week and I had a 11 am Saturday train home, and there was NOWHERE to buy a newspaper or magazine for love or money except for eight bad titles at the Hudson News. Are we a post-literate society (we're not, but it's weird that print is dead)?!?!

At the time I was working at Williams Sonoma and there was a big red, white and blue display on the whiteboard in the back encouraging us to do our part for the country by selling as much kitchenware as we could

GitHub - the-markup/blacklight-query Contribute to the-markup/blacklight-query development by creating an account on GitHub.

Whitney Christopher gave a great talk about using a tool called Blacklight to do this work. github.com/the-markup/b... #c4lib26 📚

At Cornell, librarians are investigating how vendors are tracking patrons and putting that information library catalog to better inform them. 📚 #code4lib #c4l26

Nightingale explicates the Black press as infrastructure (a robust system with redundancies, distribution) and explains how digitization has the potential to support or obscure that infrastructure. 📚 #code4lib #c4l26

Brandon Nightengale “Archives are an engineered system that decide what persists.” He reminds us that systems are series of affirmative decisions by people about what’s important. 📚 #c4l26

Aw dang I need to write three different "sorry, I suck, we'll have to find another way to solve your problem" emails this afternoon.

Thousands of institutions abandoned programs, ended or rewrote scholarships, closed down clubs and publications, all in pre-emptive compliance.

And you know why?

Mostly because they wanted to do it if they thought they could blame someone else for it.

The people of Mansfield, Connecticut are upset that students are allowed to vote in local elections. 🤡

Every time. One of the campus cops came to my office to talk through something and when I invited him to sit down, he said he couldn’t because he wouldn’t fit into the chair with his gun. What kind of a coward needs a gun in a library?

I am sorry and I have been there (am there). I’m always available to talk.

Oh no. That really hurts. I’m so sorry to hear that.

The Kids Trump Sent to ICE’s Dilley Detention Center ProPublica went inside the immigrant detention center for families in Dilley, Texas. Children held there told us about the anguish of being ripped from their lives in the United States and the fear of...

NEW: ProPublica went inside the detention center for immigrant families in Dilley, Texas.

Children held there told us about the anguish of being ripped from their lives in the United States and the fear of what comes next.