Blog Archives

Latest Posts

Monthly

Categories

July 9, 2015 - Comments Off on Book Club No. 3

Book Club No. 3

All are invited to participate in the LAAC Book Club, where LA-area archivists and friends read and discuss publications exploring all matters archives. Books will be selected every 6 weeks by the group, and may cover topics such as archival theory and practice, historical understandings, current issues and trends in information science, informational technologies, etc....we’re open!

The summer book selection is Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala by Kirsten Weld

papercad

Publisher's Description: In Paper Cadavers, an inside account of the astonishing discovery and rescue of Guatemala's secret police archives, Kirsten Weld probes the politics of memory, the wages of the Cold War, and the stakes of historical knowledge production. After Guatemala's bloody thirty-six years of civil war (1960–1996), silence and impunity reigned. That is, until 2005, when human rights investigators stumbled on the archives of the country's National Police, which, at 75 million pages, proved to be the largest trove of secret state records ever found in Latin America.

The unearthing of the archives renewed fierce debates about history, memory, and justice. In Paper Cadavers, Weld explores Guatemala's struggles to manage this avalanche of evidence of past war crimes, providing a firsthand look at how postwar justice activists worked to reconfigure terror archives into implements of social change. Tracing the history of the police files as they were transformed from weapons of counterinsurgency into tools for post-conflict reckoning, Weld sheds light on the country's fraught transition from war to an uneasy peace, reflecting on how societies forget and remember political violence.

The group will meet on Wednesday, August 26, from 6:30-8 pm at Canter’s Restaurant (419 N. Fairfax Ave). Participants to the Book Club will be capped at 12. Please email laacollective@gmail.com to reserve a spot.

Can’t make the meeting, but are still reading the book? Let us know!

June 16, 2015 - Comments Off on In Process | Learning About Digital Libraries

In Process | Learning About Digital Libraries

In Process is a blog series that highlights the activities and experiences of current archival studies students in the Los Angeles area. Check in every two weeks, for grad students’ insights and fresh perspectives on new and emerging trends, issues, and events in the field.

By Alyssa Loera

A few years ago, while working on an archival collection regarding the history of the Los Angeles Unified School District, I decided to apply to an MLIS program. The collection itself was important and inspiring, as was the archivist I was working on the project with. Watching her interact and learn with this first-hand history of Los Angeles offered me a vivid look into archival work. As we reached the end of the processing portion of the project, the likelihood of digitization and online access became a realizable goal.  I soon learned that the steps from accession to online access contain an onslaught of variables requiring a flexible methodology, and a strong digital framework in order to be successful.

At the time, my understanding of the field was simplistic. There were archivists and there were librarians. It was not until later that curators, subject specialists, digital archivists, digital librarians, processors, and catalogers would come into my purview. Digital libraries and how they support archives held great intrigue for me after working through that project, and so I chose to focus my studies on that dynamic.

June 8, 2015 - Comments Off on Person | Gloria Gonzalez

Person | Gloria Gonzalez

PERSON explores local archival culture through interviews with professionals active in the field. This edition features Gloria Gonzalez in conversation with Mary Haberle.

Gonzalez2

Name: Gloria Gonzalez
Education: MLIS, 2013 (UCLA)
Current Work: Library Strategist at Zepheira since November, 2014
Previous Work: Digital Archivist, UCLA Library Special Collections

How do you describe what you do to people who aren’t familiar with archival work?

As a digital archivist, I’d often tell people “I work to save things for the sake of knowledge. I work to provide users with things like e-mail, photographs, text documents, data sets, and other computer files for research purposes.”

In my current role, I usually say “I help make libraries and archives visible on the Web to increase knowledge. Believe it or not, most products are easier to find and access online compared to resources from libraries and archives because the descriptions aren’t interoperable. My colleagues and I help libraries migrate their catalogs to a new description format. This process publicly exposes their data and allows library books and other stuff pop up in your Web search results along with resources from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other companies.”

Meeting people who aren’t familiar with archival work or Linked Data is always fun for me. It gives me a chance to see if what I’m saying makes sense to them or catches their interest. The interactions let me rethink how I explain technical concepts and methods when I talk to people who don’t use libraries and archives.

Read more