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In Illustration and Heritage (Bloomsbury, 2024), Rachel Emily Taylor explores the re-materialisation of absent, lost, and invisible stories through illustrative practice and examines the potential role of contemporary illustration in cultural heritage. Heritage is a 'process' that is active and takes place in the present. In the heritage industry, there are opposing discourses and positions, and illustrators are a critical voice within the field.
Grounding discussions in concepts fundamental to the illustrator, the book examines how the historical voice might be 'found' or reconstructed. Rachel Emily Taylor uses her own work and other illustrators' projects as case studies to explore how the making of creative work – through the exploration of archival material and experimental fieldwork – is an important investigative process and engagement strategy when working with heritage.
What are the similar functions of heritage and illustration? How can an illustrator 'give voice' to a historical person? How can an illustrator disrupt an archive or museum? How can an illustrator represent a historical landscape or site?
This book is a contribution to the expanding field of illustration research that focusses on its position in heritage practice. Taylor examines the illustrator's role within the field, while positioning it alongside the disciplines of museology, anthropology, archaeology, performance, and fine art.
Dr Rachel Emily Taylor is an illustrator, artist, researcher, and is Course Leader on BA Illustration at Camberwell College of Arts. She uses interdisciplinary research methods drawn from theatre, archaeology, history, and anthropology, in both the analysis and making of practical work.
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.
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Today I’m speaking with Erich Hatala Matthes, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Advisory Faculty for Environmental Studies at Wellesley College. We are discussing his Oxford University Press, What to Save and Why: Identity, Authenticity, and the Ethics of Conservation (Oxford University Press, 2024). Erich’s book explores the idea of conservation: the practice of preserving things for posterity and fighting against the tides of entropy. What we choose to save can range from famous paintings and natural landscapes, to Marilyn Monroe’s dress and endangered species. Depending on your personal concerns, what we save, how we should save it, and why differs for everyone. This philosophical and investigation will make you think deeply about what matters and what should be saved.
Caleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network.
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Since the early 20th century, American academic libraries have collected and championed rare and unique non-circulating materials now referred to as special collections. Because of the rarity and value of these materials, they are handled differently than materials in other parts of academic library collections. Thus, a different set of access policies and procedures, as well as specialized staff, have been employed.
In Access to Special Collections and Archives: Bridging Theory and Practice (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), Jae Rossman provides a thorough exploration of access. Rossman looks at how practitioners’ perceptions of access to special collections have changed from the formative period of the 1930s to today. An exploration of access through the lens of special collections is especially meaningful because of the tension between the principles of preservation and access within the special collections community. This project is also significant as the library profession explores how representation of diversity within collections and the profession impacts readers. Exploring how we think about access should be part of these ongoing conversations.
Jae Jennifer Rossman, Ph.D., is associate director for Special Collections Instruction and Research Services at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. She has published on library history and practice and the field of artists’ books for over twenty years. Her publications through the jenny-press have been collected by academic libraries nationally and internationally. Rossman has served on the Board of Trustees, American Printing History Association and the Board of Directors, Center for Book Arts. She has worked in the libraries of Brandeis University, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Yale University.
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (Libraries Unlimited, 2022) and The Social Movement Archive (Litwin Books, 2021).
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Becoming a more equitable librarian is an ongoing process. In the face of the last decade’s events and increased public awareness of issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA), library workers in music libraries can do things to create the space in our teaching for optimal creativity and connection by and with our library users. As the editors of Music Information Literacy: Inclusion and Advocacy (Library Juice Press, 2024), Kathleen A. Abromeit and Dyani Sabin bring together contributions that imagine what it would be like to expand our inclusion structures so that we increasingly recognize and accommodate differences in our music libraries.
The ways librarians teach and assist students must change to amplify the voices of those who have been traditionally marginalized and create effective and equitable libraries and classrooms. Doing so is a multi-part process, where critical information literacy overlaps with self-reflection as a librarian and a deep understanding that our students have identities and experiences that influence how they navigate their world. Many of our students have experienced trauma from the generational oppression of systemic racism, gender fluidity, invisible disabilities, discrimination, or poverty. Ongoing trauma triggers toxic stress that can rewire parts of the brain and impact one’s ability to process information, formulate questions, and feel safe enough to be creative and in the zone of ideas. The chapters in the volume are authored by librarians who have actively been learning and self-reflecting on what is needed to invite users into their libraries and teaching spaces fully. The book is divided into three sections: Critical Theories, Concepts, & Reflections, Bringing Underrepresentation to the Forefront, and Supporting Activism. Each chapter includes case studies and discussion questions supporting ideas and concepts. A sample reading guide for each chapter is included as well.
Kathleen A. Abromeit is the Head of the Conservatory Library at Oberlin College and Conservatory, and Dyani Sabin is a writer based in the Midwest.
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.
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The opening of classified documents from the Soviet era has been dubbed the "archival revolution" due to its unprecedented scale, drama, and impact. With a storyteller's sensibility, in Reading the Archival Revolution: Declassified Stories and Their Challenges (Stanford University Press, 2024), Cristina Vatulescu identifies and takes on the main challenges of reading in these archives.
This transnational study foregrounds peripheral Eastern European perspectives and the ethical stakes of archival research. In so doing, it contributes to the urgent task of decolonizing the field of Eastern European and Russian studies at this critical moment in the region's history. Drawing on diverse work ranging from Mikhail Bakhtin to Tina Campt, the book enters into broader conversations about the limits and potential of reading documents, fictions, and one another. Pairing one key reading challenge with a particularly arresting story, Vatulescu in turn investigates Michel Foucault's traces in Polish secret police archives; tackles the files, reenactment film, and photo albums of a socialist bank heist; pits autofiction against disinformation in the secret police files of Nobel Prize laureate Herta Müller; and takes on the digital remediation of Soviet-era archives by analyzing contested translations of the Iron Curtain trope from its 1946 origins to the current war in Ukraine. The result is a bona fide reader's guide to Eastern Europe's ongoing archival revolution.
Cristina Vatulescu is Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, New York University and the author of Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film, and the Secret Police Archives in Soviet Times (Stanford, 2010).
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.
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Today’s book is: That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America (Bloomsbury, 2024) by Amanda Jones, which offers her story of life as a small-town librarian. One of the things she values most about books is how they can affirm a young person's sense of self. So in 2022, when she caught wind of a local public hearing that would discuss “book content,” she knew what was at stake. Schools and libraries nationwide have been bombarded by demands for books with LGTBQ+ references, discussions of racism, and more to be purged from the shelves. She spoke out that night at the meeting. Days later, she woke up to a nightmare that is still ongoing. Her decision to support a collection of books with diverse perspectives made her a target for extremists using book banning campaigns-funded by dark money organizations and advanced by hard right politicians-in a crusade to make America more white, straight, and "Christian." But she wouldn't give up without a fight: she sued her harassers for defamation and urged others to join her in the resistance. Mapping the book banning crisis occurring all across the nation, That Librarian draws the battle lines in the war against equity and inclusion, calling book lovers everywhere to rise in defense of our readers.
Our guest is: Amanda Jones, who is the school librarian at the same school she attended as a child. She is the author of That Librarian: Fighting Book Banners in Today’s America. She was the 2021 School Library Journal Co-Librarian of the Year, a 2021 Library Journal Mover and Shaker, and the 2020 Louisiana Librarian of the Year. She presents nationally and internationally on the importance of certified school librarians, book joy, and why every child deserves to see themselves reflected in the books on library shelves. Amanda has received intellectual freedom awards from the American Library Association, American Association of School Librarians, and Louisiana Library Association. She is the Executive Director of the Livingston Parish Library Alliance, and a co-founding member of Louisiana Citizens Against Censorship. She lives in Louisiana with her husband, daughter, and their cat.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the producer of the Academic Life podcast.
Listeners may enjoy this playlist:
Books, Antisemitism, and a Viral Tweet
Stitching Freedom
What to Know About Book Banning : A Discussion with the National Coalition Against Censorship
Before and After the Book Deal
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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Academic library hiring can be a bureaucratic and exclusionary process. Inclusive hiring practices can help libraries recenter the people in the process and incorporate transparency, empathy, and accessibility. Toward Inclusive Academic Librarian Hiring Practices (2024, ACRL), rather than focusing just on how to diversify applicant pools, breaks down the many considerations involved in hiring and the intentional, thoughtful preparation and self-examination that leads to successful recruitment and retention in three parts.
Training for Search Committees and Stakeholders
Removing Barriers for Candidates
Transforming the Process for All
Throughout are practical solutions for emphasizing inclusivity and accessibility throughout the hiring process, including instructions and examples for developing the position description and job postings, tips for creating diversity statements, interview instructions and preparation lists, interview itineraries, sample candidate emails and feedback forms, evaluation rubrics, ideas for onboarding and mentorship, and more. While you are evaluating potential hires, they are evaluating you. Toward Inclusive Academic Librarian Hiring Practices can help you center equity in your hiring, attract job seekers, and support both candidates and search committees through these time-intensive, laborious, and crucial processes.
Kathryn M. Houk is associate professor and undergraduate medical education librarian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), School of Medicine Library.
Jordan Nielsen is an associate professor and the Head of Access Services in the James E. Walker Library at Middle Tennessee State University.
Jenny Wong-Welch is the Director of the build IT Makerspace and Head of Research, Instruction, Outreach at San Diego State University.
Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.
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With the advent of print in the fifteenth century, Europe's cultural elite assembled personal libraries as refuges from persecutions and pandemics. Andrew Hui tells the remarkable story of the Renaissance studiolo--a "little studio"--and reveals how these spaces dedicated to self-cultivation became both a remedy and a poison for the soul.
Blending fresh, insightful readings of literary and visual works with engaging accounts of his life as an insatiable bookworm, Hui traces how humanists from Petrarch to Machiavelli to Montaigne created their own intimate studies. He looks at imaginary libraries in Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Marlowe, and discusses how Renaissance painters depicted the Virgin Mary and St. Jerome as saintly bibliophiles. Yet writers of the period also saw a dark side to solitary reading. It drove Don Quixote to madness, Prospero to exile, and Faustus to perdition. Hui draws parallels with our own age of information surplus and charts the studiolo's influence on bibliographic fabulists like Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco.
Beautifully illustrated, The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries (Princeton UP, 2024) is at once a celebration of bibliophilia and a critique of bibliomania. Incorporating perspectives on Islamic, Mughal, and Chinese book cultures, it offers a timely and eloquent meditation on the ways we read and misread today.
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In Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian through Her Letters (Harvard University Press, October 2024), Deborah Parker chronicles the making and empowerment of a female connoisseur, curator, and library director in a world where such positions were held by men. Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950) was Pierpont Morgan’s personal librarian (1908–1913) and the first Director of the Morgan Library (1924–1948). She was also the daughter of two mixed-race parents and passed for white. In the nearly six hundred letters that Greene sent to art historian Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), Parker identifies Greene’s energetic pursuit of exceptional opportunities, illuminating the artistry and imaginative features of Greene’s writing—her self-invention, her vibrant responses to books and art, and her pathbreaking work as a librarian. As Greene transformed a private library into a magnificent public institution, she also transformed herself: hers was a life both lived and writ large.
Deborah Parker is Professor of Italian at the University of Virginia, and her books include Commentary and Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance, Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet, and Michelangelo and the Art of Letter Writing. Her writings also appear in the exhibition catalog for the Morgan Library & Museum’s centenary exhibition, Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy.
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.
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Contested Spaces: A Critical History of Canadian Public Libraries As Neutral Places, 1960-2020 (Library Juice Press, 2024) is the first comprehensive and critical history of controversial events at Canadian public libraries, and an examination of the real-world impacts of neutrality policies in Canadian public library space use.
What events at public libraries in Canada have created controversies and prompted protests? What were the issues at stake? What kinds of outcry or protest occurred? Did politicians get involved? Did the events happen, or did they get cancelled, and why? What kinds of impacts or outcomes resulted? This book answers these questions and brings the Canadian historical context into the ongoing conversations that are critiquing the concept of neutrality in libraries. It considers relevant librarian perspectives alongside critical theories to interrogate the myth of library neutrality, and to seek positive and productive ways for libraries to engage with and serve their communities that honour library values and foster inclusivity, care, safety, and social justice.
Whitney Kemble is the Liaison Librarian for Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her interests include critical librarianship, social justice in libraries, abolition, fat liberation, and privacy rights and surveillance.
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.
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In early 1996, the web was ephemeral. But by 2001, the internet was forever. How did websites transform from having a brief life to becoming long-lasting? Drawing on archival material from the Internet Archive and exclusive interviews, Ian Milligan's Averting the Digital Dark Age (John Hopkins University Press, December 2024) explores how Western society evolved from fearing a digital dark age to building the robust digital memory we rely on today.
By the mid-1990s, the specter of a "digital dark age" haunted libraries, portending a bleak future with no historical record that threatened cyber obsolescence, deletion, and apathy. People around the world worked to solve this impending problem. In San Francisco, technology entrepreneur Brewster Kahle launched his scrappy nonprofit, Internet Archive, filling tape drives with internet content. Elsewhere, in Washington, Canberra, Ottawa, and Stockholm, librarians developed innovative new programs to safeguard digital heritage.
Cataloging worries among librarians, technologists, futurists, and writers from WWII onward, through early practitioners, to an extended case study of how September 11 prompted institutions to preserve thousands of digital artifacts related to the attacks, Averting the Digital Dark Age explores how the web gained a long-lasting memory. By understanding this history, we can equip our society to better grapple with future internet shifts.
Ian Milligan is a professor of history at the University of Waterloo, where he also serves as an associate vice president in the Office of Research. Milligan is the author of The Transformation of Historical Research in the Digital Age and History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web Is Transforming Historical Research.
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.
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In The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain (U Chicago Press, 2024) Seth Kimmel explores the material history of libraries to challenge debates about the practice and politics of information management in early modern Europe. Ancient bibliographers and medieval scholastics, Kimmel reminds us, imagined the library as a microcosm of the world, but for early modern scholars, the world was likewise a projection of the library. This notion, at first glance, may seem counterintuitive, especially as reports from late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers in the New World slowly refined-but also destabilized-the Old World's cosmographic and historical consensus.
Yet the mapping and ethnographic projects commissioned by early modern rulers, like Spain's Charles V and Philip I, anxious to comprehend and inventory their far-flung territorial possessions in the Americas, nevertheless relied heavily on methods of information management honed in the library. Kimmel focuses on the period that marked the birth of both print and transatlantic exploration. Through close readings of a wide array of materials-library catalogues, marginal glosses, book indexes, biblical commentaries, dictionaries and thesauruses, natural histories, and maps-Kimmel shows how the book-lover's dream of total knowledge in an era of "too much information" helped to shape the early modern period's expanded sense of the world itself. The book should find its audience among scholars of early modern European history, specialists in the early modern cultures of the Mediterranean and Iberia, and a range of students interested in the history of the book and of maps.
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In The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property (Duke University Press, 2024), Eunsong Kim traces how racial capitalism and colonialism situated the rise of US museum collections and conceptual art forms. Investigating historical legal and property claims, she argues that regimes of expropriation—rather than merit or good taste—are responsible for popular ideas of formal innovation and artistic genius. In doing so, she details how Marcel Duchamp’s canonization has more to do with his patron’s donations to museums than it does the quality of Duchamp’s work, and she uncovers the racialized and financialized logic behind the Archive of New Poetry’s collecting practices. Ranging from the conception of philanthropy devised by the robber barons of the late nineteenth century to ongoing digitization projects, Kim provides a new history of contemporary art that accounts for the complicated entanglement of race, capital, and labor behind storied art institutions and artists. Drawing on history, theory, and economics, Kim challenges received notions of artistic success and talent and calls for a new vision of art beyond the cultural institution.
Eunsong Kim is Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University.
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.
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Conducting Original Research for Your Library (Bloomsbury Libraries Unlimited, 2024) is a concise manual for professionals in the field, this book helps librarians master the skills to conduct, interpret, and analyze their own original research. Many working librarians discover that original research would help them advocate for their libraries, but some graduate programs teach only limited research skills. Designed for all librarians, this book is a practical guide to engaging with the research process, from identifying a problem to sharing findings with others. Authors Kaitlin Gerrity and Scott Lanning have packed this introductory guide and reference book with short, to-the-point information that librarians will refer to often at all stages of a research project. From research ethics to statistical significance and everything in between, this primer is the point-of-need resource for librarians in public, academic, and school libraries who wish to use original research to support the profession.
NBN can get 20% off Conducting Original Research for Your Library by using the discount code NBN20 on the Blooomsbury.com US website.
Caitlin Gerrity is an Associate Professor and Director of the School Library Endorsement Program in the Department of Library and Information Science at Southern Utah University.
Scott Lanning is a LIS Professor an Assessment Librarian/Business, Computer Science and Math Librarian in the Department of Library & Information Science at Southern Utah University.
Discuss in this episode is Philadelphia Alliance to Restore School Librarians (PARSL). In addition to connecting through the PARSL website, you can connect on Instagram and Facebook.
Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.
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Librarians around the country are currently on a battleground, defending their right to purchase and circulate books dealing with issues of race and systemic racism. Despite this work, the library community has often overlooked—even ignored—its own history of White supremacy and deliberate inaction on the part of White librarians and library leadership. Author Wayne A. Wiegand takes a crucial step to amend this historical record. In Silence or Indifference: Racism and Jim Crow Segregated Public School Libraries (University of Mississippi Press, 2024) analyzes and critiques the world of professional librarianship between 1954 and 1974.
Wiegand begins by identifying racism in the practice and customs of public school libraries in the years leading up to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. This culture permeated the next two decades, as subsequent Supreme Court decisions led to feeble and mostly unsuccessful attempts to integrate Jim Crow public schools and their libraries. During this same period, the profession was honing its national image as a defender of intellectual freedom, a proponent of the freedom to read, and an opponent of censorship. Still, the community did not take any unified action to support Brown or to visibly oppose racial segregation. As Black school librarians and their Black patrons suffered through the humiliations and hostility of the Jim Crow educational establishment, the American library community remained largely ambivalent and silent.
The book brings to light a distressing history that continues to impact the library community, its students, and its patrons. Currently available school library literature skews the historical perspective that informs the present. In Silence or Indifference is the first attempt to establish historical accountability for the systemic racism contemporary school librarianship inherited in the twenty-first century.
Wayne A. Wiegand is F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies Emeritus at Florida State University. Often referred to as “the Dean of American library historians,” he is author of many scholarly articles and books, including Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey; Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library; and American Public School Librarianship: A History.
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.
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Filling a gap in the literature, Inclusive Cataloging: Histories, Context, and Reparative Approaches (ALA Editions and Core, 2024) provides librarians and catalogers with practical approaches to reparative cataloging as well as a broader understanding of the topic and its place in the technical services landscape. As part of the profession's ongoing EDISJ efforts to redress librarianship’s problematic past, practitioners from across the field are questioning long-held library authorities and standards. They’re undertaking a critical and rigorous re-examination of so-called “best” practices and the decisionmakers behind them, pointing out heretofore unscrutinized injustices within our library systems of organization and making concrete steps towards progressive change. In this conversation, co-editors Billey Albina (Amber Billey), Elizabeth Nelson, and Rebecca Uhl discuss their work to bring together chapters that detail the efforts of librarians who are working to improve our systems and collections, in the process inspiring those who have yet to enact change by demonstrating that this work is scalable, possible, and necessary.
From this book, readers will gain an understanding of the theoretical underpinning for the actions that create our history and be challenged to reconsider their perspectives; learn about the important role of the library catalog in real-world EDISJ initiatives through examples ranging from accessibility metadata and gendered information to inclusive comics cataloging and revising LC call numbers for Black people and Indigenous people; discover more than a dozen case studies drawn from a variety of contexts including archives, academic and public libraries, and research institutions; and see ways to incorporate these ideas into their own work, with a variety of sample policies, “how to” documents, and other helpful tools provided in the text.
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From airport bookstores to deckchairs, as audiobooks downloaded by commuters, and on Kindles and other portable devices, twenty-first century bestsellers move in old and new ways. In Space, Place, and Bestsellers: Moving Books (Cambridge University Press Elements in Publishing and Book Culture series, 2024), Lisa Fletcher and Elizabeth Leane examine the locations and mobilities of the contemporary bestseller as a multi-format commercial object. It employs paratextual, textual, and site-based analysis of the spatiality of bestsellers and considers the centrality of geography to the commercial promise of these books. Space, Place, and Bestsellers provides analysis of the spatial logic of bestseller lists, evidence-rich accounts of the physical and digital retail sites through which bestsellers flow, and new interpretations of how affixing the label 'bestseller' individual authors and titles generates industrial, social, and textual effects. Through its multi-layered analysis, this book offers a new model for studying the spatiality of popular fiction.
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In Museums, Archives and Protest Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), Red Chidgey and Joanne Garde-Hansen address the emergence of ‘protest memory’ as a powerful contemporary shaper of ideas and practices in culture, media and heritage domains. Directly focused on the role of museum and archive practitioners in protest memory curation, they make a compelling contribution to our understanding of how social movements and activist experiences are publicly remembered and activated for social and environmental justice.
Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive.
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In Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 2023), Dan Stone tells the story of the last great unknown archive of Nazism, the International Tracing Service. Set up by the Allies at the end of World War II, the ITS has worked until today to find missing persons and to aid survivors with restitution claims or to reunite them with loved ones. From retracing the steps of the 'death marches' with the aim of discovering the burial sites of those murdered across the towns and villages of Central Europe, to knocking on doors of German foster homes to find the children of forced laborers, Fate Unknown uncovers the history of this remarkable archive and its more than 30 million documents. Under the leadership of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the tracing service became one of the most secretive of postwar institutions, unknown even to historians of the period.
Delving deeply into the archival material, Stone examines the little-known sub-camps and, after the war, survivors' experience of displaced persons' camps, bringing to life remarkable stories of tracing. Fate Unknown combs the archives to reveal the real horror of the Holocaust by following survivors' horrific journeys through the Nazi camp system and its aftermath. The postwar period was an age of shortage of resources, bitterness, and revenge. Yet the ITS tells a different story: of international collaboration, of commitment to justice, and of helping survivors and their relatives in the context of Cold War suspicion. These stories speak to a remarkable attempt by the ITS, before the Holocaust was a matter of worldwide interest, to carry out a program of ethical repair and to counteract some of the worst effects of the Nazis' crimes.
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In Indigenous Materials in Libraries and the Curriculum: Latin American and Latinx Sources (Routledge, 2024), Javier Muñoz-Díaz, Kathia Ibacache, and Leila Gómez argue for a decolonial engagement with Indigenous peoples’ creative work to build awareness of divergent epistemologies and foster healing in the learning community.
This interview discusses how faculty and librarians can collaborate to develop inclusive library collections and curricula by supporting Indigenous peoples’ reclamation of lands and languages. In their book, the authors present practices to build and disseminate collections that showcase the work of Indigenous creators from Latin America and compensate for historical erasure and misrepresentation. Consideration is also given to developing a non-hegemonic curriculum in Indigenous languages and cultures for faculty and students from multicultural backgrounds, particularly Latinx students of Indigenous descent. Above all, the book aspires to facilitate the participation of Indigenous peoples in the scholarly conversation to counteract epistemic and material extractivism and transform the scaffolding of higher education in the current global climate crisis. Indigenous Materials in Libraries and the Curriculum is inspired by a transhemispheric vision to elicit conversation between Indigenous peoples from Latin America (Abiayala) and North America (Turtle Island).
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