reviews
Review of Several Archival Studies Works
· ☕ 4 min read
I want to respond primarily to memory, (re)membering, and forgetting in two ways; 1) in institutional/historical/archival senses and in personal ones; and 2) in physico-cognitive and digital senses. Douglas’ article (appropriately) moved me in a number of ways, especially the descriptions she had of Montgomery’s creation, recreation, remembering and literal re/dis-membering of her self and her journals: The journal served, initially, as an “old friend” in whom she could confide and an outlet—her “only safe outlet”—for her “grumbles” ….

Reviews on Archives and Digitization
· ☕ 5 min read

Reviewed articles:
(1) Dryden, Jean. “The Role of Copyright in Selection for Digitization.”
(2) Miller, Larisa. “All Text Considered: A Perspective on Mass Digitizing and Archival Processing.”
(3) Ogilvie, Brian. “Scientific Archives in the Age of Digitization.”
(4) Terras, Melissa M. “The Rise of Digitization: An Overview.”

At the recent serendipitous American Historical Association and Modern Language Association Annual Meeting/Conference/mashup that happened in Chicago in January of 2019, Session 40 happened to attract a lot of crossover members. The session, titled “The Future Is Now: Lessons Learned from Three Digital Dissertations in History” featured a mix of 7 historians, archivists, literature scholars, digital humanities and librarians discussing some of the promises and features of digital humanities, archives and research for PhD. projects.1

If there was a theme that carried through each of these speakers and the panel as a whole it was the fearsome and oft-whispered term copyright. Indeed, this was a term that hung over and was carried through much of these conferences, as they took place amidst a major public domain copyright expiry.2 Copyright is the spectre haunting the humanities—and it is the major limitation on what archives can achieve today and how much librarians and archivists are willing to go as a vast variety of authorities point out: