Eira Tansey @TeamMidwest@glammr.us

SAA sponsored trips of archivists to visit the Soviet Union and China during the 1980s and here we are 40 years later fretting about whether putting a salary in a job ad is too radical. Also, this acronym is wild:

Genuinely considering getting a physical before I become executive committee chair of the library faculty so I have a new baseline bc I am 99% sure I am going to develop high blood pressure by the end of my term

final thought: jfc of course the white woman melting down and calling the police is from University of Chicago school of business. This is the least surprising thing of all time.

also.........society is organized to cater to wealthy white dog owners and it's obnoxious as hell. Why are there public subsidies in the forms of dog parks? Where's my taxpayer support for my cat?

Just watched that awful Central Park video. As someone who used to do a lot more hiking in both rural Kentucky and big city parks, I can say with tons of experience that white people, poor and wealthy, rural and urban, believe letting their dogs run off leash is up there with the First Amendment. I'd never hesitate to defend myself against an offleash dog that runs up to me, and when I tell people this they act like I'm a monster bc I 100% don't trust off leash dogs.

jesus take the wheel, there is now a "pandemics in literature" CFP in my inbox

maybe what I'm trying to say here is that.... the most thorough diarists who are writing about the pandemic in ways that creates a lot of connective tissue between their life and the larger world from the before times into now will have very little interest in giving their diaries away anytime soon. Y'all can have mine when I'm dead.

i mean i guess a lot of the projects are asking people to create sort of special documents for these projects...... but it still feels weird to me for reasons I have difficulty articulating. The strength of so many surviving historical diaries is because while they were written for both an eye to documenting things for the writer and possibly other readers, it wasn't because they were writing it for a specific repository. It just feels so much like trauma extractivism for The Historical Record.

I wonder if any archivists who have kept a long-time diary or journal find the whole "one day you can give your journal to us about COVID!" thing weird as hell or if it's just me. I've been keeping diaries for nearly 30 years.For the last couple years my diary is very much a therapeutic tool, and these pleas from archivists would be like someone saying "send us a recording of your session with your therapist for our oral history program" that's how gross it feels to me

oh.

hell yeah baby, round 2

This is absolutely fascinating and the first time I have encountered this claim regarding SAA's history in terms of intra-associational divisions

there are actually some great lines in this, it'd been a while since I'd revisited it. I'm here for anyone who uses the phrase "vendor propaganda" https://americanarchivist.org/doi/pdf/10.17723/aarc.43.1.h17l47gr746876j2

hell yeah baby

even discussions about the merits of an MLIS vs other non-grad forms of certification misses this point. If we aren't demanding and winning funding of the commons, nothing else matters.

i find the frequently invoked idea that we should improve employment by throttling MLIS programs instead of demanding increased funding for the commons to employ more librarians and archivists intensely and uncomfortably revealing about the politicial consciousness of our profession

i don't know who needs to hear this but things in libraries are going to keep getting worse until we have at minimum a New Deal level political realignment in the country and mass unionization. Managers aren't gonna change shit.

Male privilege and white privilege are expressions of fundamentally bad systems of oppression we need to dismantle. Things like childcare and worker autonomy are.... not?

i don't know how to express this well but I don't like the tendency to characterize things like parental leave and time for service etc etc as a luxury or privilege. It's not like other forms of privilege where you can really tell people to "check their privilege", it's a fundamental right for working people that others are being denied and that we need greater depths of worker organizing to achieve for more people.

hahahahahahahahahahahaha why am I only just now learning the Folger Shakespeare Library has its origins in Standard Oil. My kingdom for someone to write a book about how closely linked the fossil fuel industry is with elite cultural heritage institutions