The Authority File Round-Up: April 2023
A quick overview of last month's episodes, in case you missed them
Posted on in Blog
Posted on December 29, 2022 in Blog
To celebrate The Authority File reaching 300 episodes, the Choice team put together several lists highlighting key episodes and topics. Today’s list digs into the collection, preservation, and use of primary sources. Topics include the impact of digitization, the library’s role in archival work, and, of course, dynamic examples of primary sources themselves. Enjoy!
When we look back on this year, 10, 20, or 50 years down the line, what will we remember? What will become the official narrative of 2020? What will slip between the cracks of our collective memory? (Murder hornets, hopefully.) Read more and listen here.
Writers like Sinclair Ross and W.O. Mitchell shaped the popular image of the Canadian prairie settler as white, anglophone, and male, and the region’s image as sweeping grasslands broken by farms and small towns. The prairies in fact have a much more diverse history—and collection of writers—than the popular images suggest. Read more and listen here.
The abundance of materials at students’ fingertips. The pitfalls of the keyword search. The lack of serendipity in online databases. Thanks to digitization and text recognition developments, these factors now affect modern-day primary source research practices. Read more and listen here.
Dr. Carol Ember, president of HRAF, and Peter N. Peregrine, professor of archaeology at Lawrence University, join Bill to talk about the history, make-up, and relevance of HRAF—and how the cultures and cultural practices contained within its million pages of information can illuminate a wide variety research areas. Read more and listen here.
The digital age has brought an onslaught of changes to the practice of information preservation. With so much out there at a time, how can archivists keep up? How do librarians fit into the task of finding and safeguarding materials? How can archivists, curators, and librarians work together to collect, restore, and preserve information for years to come? Read more and listen here.
Primary sources provide unique insights into the past. But for Rachel Friars, a PhD student in the Department of English Language and Literature at Queen’s University, they also offer a context and history that informs the present. Read more and listen here.
The take-charge, cultural icon Rosie the Riveter depicted in the famous “We Can Do It” poster, it turns out, isn’t who you think she is. We’ll talk about that and how this particular document might be less of a “document that changed the world” than the other way around. Read more and listen here.
Global approaches to the Middle Ages have long been part of historical and literary studies, but only over the last ten years or so has a global approach emerged within the field of art history. Bryan C. Keene of the J. Paul Getty Museum discusses the timeline of assembling his edited volume Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts, and what a “Global Middle Ages” actually means. Read more and listen here.
Whether it’s a dog-eared stack of The Boxcar Children, an annotated collection of Sylvia Plath poetry, or an encyclopedic array of Guinness World Records, a personal library can reflect a holder’s academic interests, personal values, or position in a community. But more often than not, after a scholar’s death or retirement, their personal libraries face a crossroads. Read more and listen here.
A quick overview of last month's episodes, in case you missed them
Posted on in Blog
A quick overview of last month's episodes, in case you missed them
Posted on in Blog
Apply your collection assessment skills and gain subject expertise
Posted on in News, Blog
A quick overview of last month's episodes, in case you missed them
Posted on in Blog