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The Mohegan tribe recently partnered with Cornell University Library to repatriate the papers of Fidelia Fielding, one of the last fluent speakers of the Mohegan language, as part of the tribe’s efforts to revive it as a spoken tongue. Below, tribal and library representatives share their story as a potential example to be adopted and adapted by other libraries, archives, and museums in collaboratively repatriating papers and artifacts.

In an effort to archive all aspects of America’s political life, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History is in the process of collecting items from the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol Building during the counting of the Electoral College votes.

For more than 60 years, Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) member schools have combined purchasing power and shared software licenses, aggregated course sharing and information technology services, and maintained an extensive faculty community. In mid-January, the library deans and directors of the BTAA announced the next step in the consortium’s collaboration: the BIG Collection, which will manage the institutions’ separate library collections as a single entity.

When Slave Biographies: The Atlantic Database Network launched in 2011, it aggregated data on slavery and enslaved people from three scholarly sources. Nearly 10 years later, Enslaved.org: Peoples of the Historic Slave Trade—built on the original project and using linked open data technology for a new, more comprehensive iteration—launched in December 2020.

Carnegie Mellon University Libraries has developed CAMPI, a new web application that uses computer vision to assist librarians processing digital photograph collections.

When people think of Federal presidential elections and the Electoral College, they do not typically think of the role of archivists. Nonetheless, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) plays a critical role in collecting documents, ensuring that everyone who needs them has them, and finally keeping them for prosperity.

Libraries and archives nationwide have launched initiatives to diversify their collections, institute antiracist descriptive practices, and conduct outreach to marginalized communities. We knew that our collections lacked all these things, but questioned how we could authentically start this work. What can libraries and archives do when confronted with limited resources, material, and community engagement to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion in their work?

Carl Grant, former president of Ex Libris North America and interim dean of the University of Oklahoma Libraries, this summer became managing director of The Revs Institute, a Naples, FL–based not-for-profit dedicated to the research and historical study of automobiles.

There are many ways that public libraries have helped during the West coast’s wildfire seasons: providing Wi-Fi and charging stations, helping residents file insurance and FEMA claims, offering parking lots as food and supply drop-offs, and even opening their doors as cooling centers. In a more dramatic turn, the University of California–Merced Libraries stepped up to safeguard the archives and records of the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in a last-minute evacuation.

It was once accepted practice to call married women by their husbands’ names, with the honorific “Mrs.” attached—for example, “Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” During the library shutdown, archivists at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library began to remedy that issue in their finding aids.

After initially exploring the donation of some of its library collections to nearby Wayne State University, Marygrove College ultimately decided to give its 70,000 books and 3,000 journal volumes to the Internet Archive, which digitized the collection and made it available via Controlled Digital Lending.

Wayne State University College of Education and the Walter P. Reuther Library Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs were recently awarded a joint $83,100 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to support the ongoing project, “Bridging the Gap: Archives in the Classroom and Community.”

Notre Dame Library curators and conservators have collaborated on Compendium Animalium, a facsimile of an early modern book combining images from several volumes featured in a recent exhibition, complete with engravings, wooden boards, and leather bindings, that students can hold and investigate.

In Iowa City, a group known as the Iowa Freedom Riders (IFR) demonstrated against systemic racism and police violence during the first week of June, by blocking traffic and spray-painting messages across the city, including on the walls of a number of University of Iowa (UI) buildings. UI archivists recognized that the messages were part of the school’s institutional memory.

Ry Moran is the founding director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba, Canada. For the past five years Moran, a member of the Red River Métis, has led the creation of a permanent home of a national archive for all materials gathered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. LJ caught up with him recently to learn more about what it took to build an archive of such a critical chapter of Canada’s Indigenous history.

Ry Moran, founding director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) at the University of Manitoba, Canada, will become the inaugural Associate University Librarian for Reconciliation at the University of Victoria (UVic), BC, this fall. LJ caught up with him recently to hear more about his plans and thoughts on helping create institutional equity.

Across the nation, libraries big and small are embracing the quaranzine. A portmanteau of “quarantine” and “zine,” the quaranzine is a creative outlet that allows individuals and communities to process difficult thoughts and emotions concerning the COVID-19 pandemic—and is widely emerging as an artistic, therapeutic way to cope with this unique and trying time in history.

As a majority of academic libraries have transitioned to remote work in the wake of coronavirus-closed campuses, a growing number of United States–based archival workers—many of whom are in part-time, hourly, term-limited, or contract positions—are facing financial challenges. To help address some immediate needs, a team of archives workers partnered with the Society of American Archivists Foundation to create the Archival Workers Emergency Fund.

In the midst of the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, many library workers and archivists have carried on with what they do best—gathering and preserving information for future researchers. Numerous digital archives are already capturing life during lockdown, represented through images, journals, videos, and other formats.

To maximize service—and to help safeguard the jobs of their colleagues from layoffs and furloughs—library and archives workers are crowdsourcing lists of work-from-home assignments. These lists continue to grow—as does the need for them.

In her new role at the NYPL Performing Arts Library, Jennifer Schantz will blend her passion for classical music and her dedication to libraries and museums.

Consider these library (and library-adjacent) crowdsourcing projects as a fun way to connect to the community and make a difference during the COVID-19 outbreak.

In a week of closures and cancelations, the New York Public Library announced some rare good news: The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has acquired artist and activist Harry Belafonte’s personal archives.

On January 13, the staff at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Federal Archives and Records Center in Seattle, WA, were informed that the facility would be closed within the next four years, and the records moved to NARA facilities in Kansas, City, MO and Riverside, CA. The decision was announced with no prior notice to staff, stakeholders, or users—and Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson has threatened legal action against the agency that recommended its closure.

The archives of Anne Rice have found a new home in New Orleans, where Rice was born and many of her iconic novels, including 1976’s Interview with the Vampire, are set. Tulane University recently announced its acquisition of a large collection of the author’s papers, to be housed among the Howard-Tilton Memorial Library’s rare books and special collections.

In response to a January 17 Washington Post article by reporter Joe Heim, the Washington, DC–based National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) has restored an altered promotional photograph in its lobby to its original state and published an apology on its website .

The Internet Archive (IA) on November 6 announced that its longtime not-for-profit partner, Better World Libraries, had acquired Better World Books. When libraries and other organizations weed or deaccession titles and donate to Better World Books, selected titles will now be directed into IA’s massive book digitization program.

Several new initiatives will expand African American experiences beyond the archives and make them publicly available.

Each year, millions of dollars awarded to libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) fund a variety of processing, digitization, and digital infrastructure projects. In the process, the field creates hundreds of contingent and precarious positions. Workers dedicated to their fields’ missions to steward, preserve, and share knowledge and culture accept low salaries, benefit-less positions, and cycles of precarity.

This year’s National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities was delivered on October 7 by Father Columba Stewart, OSB—a Benedictine monk, scholar of early religions, and executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) at St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN. Stewart has spent the past 15 years working to digitize documents at risk of theft, damage, and destruction due to war, regime change, or climate instability in the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and South Asia.

Civic unrest and natural disasters are not unique to the 21st century. But with the growth of rapid news cycles and citizen documentation through social media, careful documentation of these tragedies—in real time or close to it—is a responsibility that public and academic libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions are taking on more and more.

Academic librarians struggle with how to meet their users’ need for print collections while coping with limited budgets and expanded demands on their physical space. While resource sharing has a long history in libraries, an approach that treats it as more than an afterthought has potential to reduce both unnecessary duplication and gaps in the collection. Technological advances can help make storage more efficient, faster delivery feasible, and management easier.

The Obama Foundation selected the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, at New York’s Columbia University, to produce the official oral history of Barack Obama’s eight-year presidency. Working in collaboration with the University of Hawai’i’s Center for Oral History and the University of Chicago, the Columbia Center for Oral History will conduct the Obama Presidency Oral History Project over the next five years

Establishing what archivists hope will become a recurring, comprehensive training program, the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive hosted the first Biennial Audio-Visual Archival Summer School, May 13–26, in collaboration with the International Federation of Film Archives and the Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations.

For the past 26 years, the Xwi7xwa (pronounced “whei-wha”) Library at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver—the only Aboriginal branch of a university library system in Canada—has served as a model for how educational and community institutions can center the knowledge and experiences of the communities they serve by better representing them in the collections they share.

University archives can be a resting place for papers and special collections—or they can reanimate them so that they may live on. The University of Pittsburgh’s University Library System (ULS) has acquired the archives of pioneering horror filmmaker George A. Romero (1940–2017), including correspondence, scripts, footage, promotional material, and props from his legendary films. These include Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, both shot near Pittsburgh. The new archive will form the foundation for a future horror studies center, building on collections already housed in ULS archives and special collections and funded in part by the George A. Romero Foundation.

A team of historians, researchers, and developers have joined forces to establish Freedom on the Move, a database focused on materials regarding fugitives from slavery in North America. The free, open-source site, created by an interdisciplinary team of scholars and researchers, compiles a wide collection of “runaway ads”—notices about fugitives, placed in newspapers from colonial days through the end of the Civil War.

The Internet Archive is seeking partners for its Open Libraries project. Recent contributors include Trent University, ON, which donated more than 250,000 books last year during the renovation of its Bata Library, and longtime project partner Boston Public Library (BPL), which donated its sound archives for digitization in 2017.

Demonstrating a growing institutional commitment to virtual reality and augmented reality, also known as extended reality (XR) technology for educational applications, the Nevada State Library, Archives and Public Records has continued to expand its NV XR Libraries pilot program.

Lowell, MA, is home to the second-highest Cambodian population in the country, many of whom (or their families) settled there after fleeing genocide. The University of Massachusetts Lowell recently launched its Southeast Asian Digital Archive to serve as a resource for the community, teachers, scholars, and more.

San Diego State University (SDSU) is currently archiving and digitizing a trove of letters from detainees at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Otay Mesa Detention Center facility in southern San Diego, 25 miles south of the SDSU campus and less than two miles from the United States–Mexico border. The Otay Mesa Detention Center Detainee Letter Collection is the product of correspondence initiated by members of Detainee Allies, a grassroots group organized in summer 2018 to offer support to refugees arriving from Central America.