I tweeted about this a little earlier, but it stayed in my mind for a while today, so I thought it deserved a fuller exploration. This is all very sketchy and not fully thought-out, but it’s something I’ve thought about before and don’t have any easy answers for. I spent this morning curled with a […]
Reclassifying DVDs, Part 2: Wrestling with Genres
Over the past few months, I have been reclassifying the “Popular Movie Collection” at the small academic library where I work. This is the second of two blog posts about the project. In the first entry, I wrote about finding a way to fit movies into the Library of Congress classification system. In this post, […]
Reclassifying DVDs, Part 1: Creating a System
Over the last few months, I have been working on reclassifying the “Popular Movie Collection” at the small academic library where I work. This is the first of two blog posts I am planning about the project, describing the process of deciding how to classify the movies. [Update: Part 2 can be found here.] The […]
Archives of Queer Geography
I just got home from a great talk at the Stonewall National Museum and Archives. The talk was about the queer geography of South Florida from the 1970s to today, using census data and advertisements in archived gay magazines to track movements of lesbian and gay households and businesses through different communities in the area. […]
Allen Ginsberg and the Power of Archives
I recently read this article about the Allen Ginsberg collection at Stanford, which I saw on Twitter, and was really struck by several things about it. The first was the description of how thinking about his personal collection inspired Ginsberg himself to become more interested in photography: Morgan, [Ginsberg’s personal archivist] who spent 20 years cataloging […]
Describing Queer Mathematicians
Just in time for Pride month, I spent most of June processing the collections of two (probably) lesbian mathematicians. I really enjoy my job at the Archives of American Mathematics, which collects the papers of mathematicians and mathematics organizations, and over the past year, I have developed a real affection for the world of mathematics. […]
Presentation at SSA
This morning, I am presenting my first-ever talk at a professional conference! This week is the Society of Southwest Archivists annual meeting here in Austin, and I am giving a talk entitled “Web Archiving for University Records” on a panel about digital records in university archives. I’m a little nervous, but glad to be giving […]
Queer Time, Archives Time
I was lucky enough to spend most of the day yesterday at a symposium put on by a group of UT graduate students entitled “Queer Archives, Queer Affect.” The symposium was the culmination of a seminar taught by Ann Cvetkovich exploring the intersections of queer theory, affect theory, and theories of “the archive.” The presenters […]
Web archiving in a virtual machine
This semester, I took a class on Digital Archives and Preservation, taught by the inestimable Dr. Pat Galloway. One of distinctive things about this course is that students are assigned into teams that spend the semester tackling a real digital preservation problem. This semester, groups worked with materials from the School of Information and from […]
Open-source software: Expertise required?
I have spent a lot of time in the last few weeks installing software. Or, to put it more precisely, I have spent a lot of time trying to install software. Some of my attempts have been successful; some, less so. The time I spent tinkering with various programs (and occasionally wanting to bang my […]