Library and literary miscellany from your pals at Library Journal.
(Maintained by Molly McArdle, Assistant Editor, LJ Reviews)
Pretty medieval manuscript of the day is a lovely decorated initial from a fourteenth century manuscript produced in England.
Image source: British Library MS Lansdowne 475. Image declared as public domain on the British Library website.
I love the way this letter looks like an amoeba or space.
The Finding Aid: Black Women at the Intersection of Art and Archiving is an interactive, multi-media dialogue that explores the intersection of experimental art practices and community-based archiving.
The event’s organization is based on the idea of a finding aid. A finding aid is a document used in archives for accessibility and discovery. We will transform a finding aid from an archival inventory/guide into an artistic archival experience.
Our goal for this event is that people leave knowing what an archive and archivist is or can be, and that people feel empowered to begin their own archival/artistic practice or feel moved to engage with existing archives.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013 @ 6:30pm
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Langston Hughes Auditorium
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Joyce-LeeAnn is a writer, archivist and performance artist from Denver, Colorado based in Brooklyn, New York. She received a BA in Writing and Literature from Naropa University via Hampton University. She received a MILS with an Archives Certificate from Pratt Institute. She works as a professional project archivist. Joyce-LeeAnn’s writing explores the poetics of archival processing and investigates ways to tell stories through preserved documents. Subjects covered in her prose | poetry include: grief, healing processes, beautiful moments, writings on restroom walls and a fragment of black Denver history. Her experimental literary performances usually include a makeshift typewriter-drum-kit.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985) is a photo-based artist, writer, and educator from East Palo Alto, CA based in Brooklyn, NY. She is a Gallery/Studio Instructor at the Brooklyn Museum as well as a public school teacher working with court involved youth in East New York. Kameelah’s work enlists archival as well as archaeological traditions to explore collective memory and her family narratives through found images from eBay and estate sells, material objects, and original photography. An object-based body of work, she interrogates the trinity of spatial trauma within Black communities — homelessness, incarceration, and forced migration and how this influences both collective memory and the way we reconstruct narratives from material fragments. Currently, she is an Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Book Arts. In 2012, Kameelah was an Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock. She will have her first solo exhibit at Real Art Ways in July 2013 tentatively entitled The Imagined Archive. A former Fulbright Scholar to South Africa, Kameelah received her Master of Education from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Arts in Policy and Africana Studies from Pomona College.
Marilyn Nance is an American visual artist known for her images of 20th century African American life—spirituality, music, art, and African retentions, She grew up through many movements—The Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, Black Arts, Anti War, Students Rights, the Women’s Movement, and the Anti-Apartheid Movement.
A two-time finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Award in Humanistic Photography, her photographs can be found in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and in the Library of Congress.
Image © Albert Chong
Arianne Edmonds is a Los Angeles native, storyteller and archivist. Her historical collection spans from 1886-1950 and explores the uniqueness of early black Los Angeles, through the lens of genealogy. She received her Bachelors of Science in Communications, from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and started her career in educational media at Sesame Workshop. She currently works with the Taproot Foundation managing consultant relations and community partnerships.
// edmondsfamilyexploration.tumblr.com
Ladi’Sasha Jones is a is a collector and witness worker of oral history narratives with a special interest in documenting Black women’s stories and Black American family life. She approaches her documentation practice by working from the intersections of cultural equity and collective community memory.
Currently, Ladi’Sasha is working on the curation of a public forum to share her collection of oral history records via a digital sound art gallery — coming Summer 2013. Having earned her B.A. in African American Studies from Temple University in 2010 and a M.A. in Arts Politics from NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2012, she recently completed a Certificate in Oral History from Baylor University in April of 2013. She aims to move towards freelancing and sharing her documenting services with community and cultural arts organizations along with individual artists.
Shawn(ta) Smithis a lesbian separatist, writer, archivist and reference librarian. Her essays blend storytelling with documentation and archiving. Her work will appear in “Black Gay Genius Interview with Lisa C. Moore” in Black Gay Genius: Joseph Beam and In the Life (forthcoming). She is currently editing a new anthology Her Saturn Returns: Queer Women of Color Life Transitions, a compilation of narratives of queer women and color in their Saturn. Shawn is a collective member of the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the WOW Cafe Theater where she co-produces Rivers of Honey, a monthly Cabaret highlighting the art of women of color. Shawn is pursuing her MFA in Fiction at Queens College while working as a reference & instruction librarian at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the former Archive Coordinator for StoryCorps.
//hersaturnreturns.com //riversofhoney.com
Photo © Arianne Benford
Sonia Louise Davis(b. 1988, New York City) is an artist and photographer. Using a large format view camera, her work mines the public and private archive, exploring collective memory and family history through site-specific and community-based projects. Sonia is currently participating in the Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) Program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. An honors graduate of Wesleyan University, she holds a BA in African American Studies, with a concentration in Music and Visual Art.
Born in Las Vegas,Salome Asega is an Ethiopian visual artist and independent curator working in Brooklyn. She received her BA in Transnational Visual Art and Social Practice from the Gallatin School at NYU and is currently an MFA candidate in the Design and Technology program at Parsons The New School for Design. She is also a founding member of the Sistah Friends Project.
The intersection of art and archiving? Yes please.
Freedmen who fled from slavery during and after the Civil War did not expect that their flight toward freedom would lead to sickness, disease, and death. As Jim Downs reveals in Sick from Freedom, the war produced the largest biological crisis of the 19th century.
Join us Friday, May 17, at noon at the National Archives in Washington, DC, for “Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction.”
You can also watch online as we stream this program live on our Ustream channel.
A book signing will follow the program.
Are you curious about the past? Have you ever wanted to know more about a treasured object or document that belongs to your cultural heritage?
The Africa Centre and Black Cultural Archives would like to invite you to bring along an object or documents connected with your heritage to be looked at by our panel of experts.
The item could be an object, photograph, print or drawing; or documents such as letters, diaries, minutes from between 1950-2000, and must be easily portable.
Your item will be examined by three experts who will give you information on the history of the item and how to look after it.
The event will take place at the Africa Centre on the 28th May between 5-6:30 pm as an antique-road-show-style compliment to our partnership event Past Performance: Part II which starts later at 7 pm
If you are interested in booking a slot please email your name, contact number and brief item description to events@africacentre.org.uk.
If you are in the UK, this seems like the place to be.
Well that’s an upsetting primary source.
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While this comment was in reference to this morning’s letter requesting the National Guard’s assistance at Kent State, you could probably say that about many of our posts. But these comments are an opportunity we hate to miss. Sometimes history is upsetting (a lot of the time, actually). This is probably a good time to mention our post from last year:
“All the documents of “homesteaders” stealing land from Native Americans is bumming me out.”
In short, if you’re not bummed out sometimes by our posts, then we’re probably not doing our job.
But to make up for it, maybe you missed our post from Bugs Bunny’s sort-of-75th birthday?
And thanks for writing!
(via todaysdocument)
Today’s Document (aka the Tumblr of the U.S. National Archives) is doing it right.
When Abdel Kader Haidara was 17 years old, he took a vow. Among the families of Timbuktu with manuscript collections (and the Haidaras had one of the largest), it’s traditional for one family member from each generation to swear publicly that he will protect the library for as long as he lives. The families revere their manuscripts, even honoring them once a year through a holiday called Maouloud, on which imams and family elders perform a reading from the ancient prayer books to mark the birth of the Prophet Mohammed. “Those manuscripts were my father’s life,” Haidara told me. “They became my life as well.”
That life came under serious threat last year, when a military coup ousted Mali’s democratically elected leader just as a loose alliance of Tuareg separatists and three Islamist militias began conquering broad swaths of the north. The rebels quickly routed the Malian army, and Timbuktu fell in April 2012.
As the militias poured into his city, Haidara knew he had to do something to protect the approximately 300,000 manuscripts in different libraries and homes in and around Timbuktu.
The amazing rescue of Timbuktu’s medieval manuscripts.
Maurita Baldock, one longtime member, jaunty in red-tinged glasses and an asymmetrical haircut, keeps watch by day over records that document American history as the curator of manuscripts at the New-York Historical Society. Included among them is a frank letter that Gen. George Washington wrote in 1782, before stretch jeans hit the scene. In it, he begs his tailor to make his britches “roomy in the seat and not tight in the thigh.”
Archivists Bringing Past Into Future Are Now Less Cloistered - NYTimes.com
Another librarian (well, in this case, archivist) trend piece. Thanks, NYT, for describing this woman’s asymmetrical hair, another’s nose stud, and a third’s “thick-rimmed hipster glasses.” The public has really been served by this hard-hitting reporting.
(That being said, archivists are awesome.)
… is to not act furtive about it. One barbecue sauce stain looks much like another on these manuscripts, I assure you. I’ve lost track of my own at this point. You’ll want to let it dry out before you rearchive the page, of course. If you’re lucky, you’ll have dripped onto the someone who deserves it like, say, the Celine. [Scribbled in the margins: The I.B. Singer socks serve as a fine napkin in a pinch. Be careful though, (illegible) dissert. (illegible) pork drippings, might be asking questions.]
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A rare look at the handbook to the Harry Ransom archives. » MobyLives
Over at Melville House, Dustin Kurtz imagines what the Harry Ransom Center director’s handbook looks like.
Well at least we know whose copy of ‘The Adventures of Captain Gulliver’ this was…
Thomas Glenn clearly wanted to get his signature right.
Each Friday, the Ransom Center shares photos from throughout the week that highlight a range of activities and collection holdings. We hope you enjoy these photos that reveal some of the everyday happenings at the Center.
Take a Peep into the Conservation Lab!
More images here: http://www.katherineswiftkelly.com/peeps/peeps.html
Happy Spring!
BE STILL MY HEART.
I’ve been adding lots of new archives and archivists lately, so I thought I’d send around the list again. Want to get on the list? Just send me a note! Much like the thelifeguardlibrarian’s list of libraries and librarians, your blog doesn’t have to be related to archives or special collections to be added. As long as you identify with the community, you’re in!
^Sup.
Tanisha Mitchell, Hitting the High Notes | Library Journal Movers & Shakers
The collection was inspiring, but it was also virtually uncataloged. She began research to see if the Met was unusual and discovered that very few opera houses have systems in place to catalog their holdings. “Tanisha moved into action,” says Robinson.
Soon hired to work part-time at the Met, Mitchell began organizing these precious works. Since then, she’s cataloged roughly 170 pieces of sheet music and songbooks, more than 200 manuscripts (scores and parts), and about 1,000 rare piano-vocal scores and full scores.
Pretty medieval manuscript of the day shows an emperor kneeling before a pope. Showcasing the grisaille style, using shades of black and white, it was produced in the low countries but became a part of the English royal collection by 1535.
Image source: British Library MS Royal 14 D I. Image declared as public domain via the British Library website.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s birthday is today and in celebration why not check out one of these four first editions of The Song of Hiawatha from 1855. You can see an astounding Bayntun binding with an inlaid porcelain portrait of Longfellow, as well as one with a regular library binding, and even one with a letter from Longfellow inside.
So lovely!
