Archives and a new fictional narrative

For this newsletter, I focus posts about the archival field and a fictional work I published last night

Hello everyone! I hope your week is going well so far.

There’s a number of articles I’d like to share with you all about the archives field. There was an interesting interview with Jacqueline Seargeant, Global Archive Manager of John Dewar & Sons Ltd. She manages the company’s business archives, which connects to its brand identity and developments, while they also have extensive museum collections, showing that archives can still be seen as important to for-profit entities, although most of us likely won’t go that route. On a more fascinating note was Nathan Sentancce’s article reviewing a book by poet Dr. Natalie Harkin, Archival-Poetics, noting how official archives have “the power to sustain and reproduce” colonial violence, specifically noting archives in Australia. This article made a good point that “archives are unreliable witnesses, especially here on these lands of invasion and occupation” meaning that they are “full of misremembered histories, partial truths, and falsifications…propaganda machines for the settler fantasy.” Even so, they note how there is truth within archives, some records holding “damning evidence of atrocities committed” against indigenous peoples, and how some "archivists see themselves as “gatekeepers and defenders of the archives enforcing colonial bureaucracies that impede access to the information in archives.” This book specifically notes how colonial surveillance is the “foundation of many state archives.” Although she is talking about Australia, her comments are still relevant.

There was one more article I’d like to include. It is Maarja Krusten’s “Making space for others” on her Archival Explorations blog. She talked about her love for Star Trek, tying it to Watergate, the SAA’s best practices and code of ethics, with Leonard Nimoy using his stardom to “support environmental causes,” with 81 freelance photographers hired by the federal government to “take photographs reflecting life in urban and rural environmental conditions” in the late 1970s. She also noted about NARA’s new efforts to carry out their archival mission, with new challenges, but also brings with it many new opportunities. Krusten always does a good job in analyzing issues like this.

Rather than focusing on the library field, I’ll share those articles for next week, so I can make this newsletter more focused. As a result, I’d like to link to a new magical fantasy fiction I published last night, titled “From Sunrise to Sunrise: A Skirmish in Japan and Carmen’s V.I.L.E. Island Assault.” Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to include library and archives themes, but I can say that there is wide inclusivity in this story with themes of acceptance, understanding, respect, and friendship. I guess, perhaps, there is some romance there too, but its more about teams working together to achieve a goal: defeating the forces of evil. I’m not going to say what is the ultimate result of skirmish in Japan or the assault on V.I.L.E. island, but I can say that everything noted in this story will affect stories in the future.

That’s all I have to say for this week! Hope you have a great rest of your week!

- Burkely
https://historyhermann.substack.com/p/archives-and-a-new-fictional-narrative
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