One of my work projects this week was putting together the logistics for our summer webinars. This is the first summer I've opted to do webinars and I'm oddly excited. Since our on-campus students and faculty numbers are lower, I'm focusing on broader topics to see if I can attract outside interest. 

One of the sessions, personal archiving, grew out of a class workshop I provided at the end of this semester. The professor was teaching a course on global archives and she wanted her students to understand the role of archival work in their personal lives. As a former preservation librarian with inherited knowledge of archival practices (thanks, dad!) who happens to have just worked on her own personal archive, I was eager to provide this session. The class went great and the students asked wonderful questions. I'm going to use that input to improve the presentation. (People need to know about transcribing handwriting!)

I'm thrilled to provide this as a broader webinar because I don't think people consider their photographs, diaries, cookbooks, memorabilia, and online presence as an archive. But it is! We are the archivists of our own personal and family history. Before "stuff" can make it in to an institutional museum or archive, it has to be collected and saved by someone. Even if a person never "makes it big," these personal collections are important.

I'm using this session to share what it means to curate a personal archive. I'm including best practices - physical and digital - as well as ideas of what to save and how to save it. Plus, I'm digging into extra information like what to do with your archive once you have it. To provide an example of what this work looks like, I'm sharing photos and insights from my own personal archival journey.

I have never been so enthusiastic about a webinar before. I think, given our student and community population, I may turn this into a standing thing I offer a few times each year. 

Do you have a personal archive?

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I picked Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds by Greg Milner because nothing else looked good at home. (I really should make library requests faster.) I'm only a handful of pages in, but the story of GPS is already interesting. I had no idea that it was a completely free, U.S. government-run system. While I'm not really in the mood to read non-fiction right now, this is an okay stop gap until the book I requested from the library comes in.

*Books shared here are affiliate links for Bookshop.org

• An artist's quiet project to redesign homemade flyers. [WaPo - gift link]

• How to enjoy coffee around the world. [The Discoverer]

• Science backs up the idea of kids and babies being great viral incubators. [WaPo - gift link]

• "Sometimes I think about my actions across different devices and platforms as a kind of performance." [The Syllabus Project]

• We don't think of development like we used to. [The Deleted Scenes]

• "Stand your ground laws" need to end. [Anti-Racism Daily]

• No one wants to figure out how to make coffee at two in the morning. [David Lebovitz Newsletter]

• Why women's clothing sizes suck. [The Audacity]

• When songs go to trial for copyright. [The Indicator]

• How Fox came to settle with Dominion Voting Systems. [The Daily]

• Cryptozoology. [Atlas Obscura]

• Apologies as product. [Throughline]

• Is there a better way to build housing? [Planet Money]

• I finally got around to watching On The Basis of Sex. This is a pretty typical biopic. Felicity Jones, as RBG, is good but but predictable. I was uncomfortable with Armie Hammer getting to play her husband. That's poor casting in retrospect. This film only works as well as it does because it focuses on one part of RBG's life and not her whole life. Also, the costume work is fantastic. [Amazon Prime]

• On Tuesday, I watched Baz Luhrmann's Elvis. I am still debating if it is a good film or not. I can decidedly say that Tom Hanks is not good in this movie. It's not that he's playing a bad person (which he is), it's also bad acting. Too put on and over the top. You can see him working the prosthetics. Austin Butler as Elvis is also over the top, but in a good way. He just went for embodying all the physicality and emotion of the musician himself. The style of the film is all Luhrmann - fast cuts, vibrant colors, gaudy set pieces, and highly stylized shooting. What works best in this film is showing how Elvis' musical roots developed and flow through to today. But, I just can't decide if I like it. The fact that I'm still thinking about it nearly a week later bugs me. [HBO Max]

• Needing some light fare, I rented Mr. Malcom's List. This is a regency romance novel adaptation. It's very reminiscent of Bridgerton. Great casting and lovely imagery. [Amazon Prime]

• Solo parenting this week so I went with easy dinners. I got the kiddo's input when I was meal planning and she asked for "snack dinner." That was an easy yes. I chopped some veggies and an apple, sliced some cheese, grabbed crackers, and tossed everything on a plate. Easy peasy. [Instagram]

A strong geomagnetic storm caused the northern lights to be visible in the southern latitudes. Due to DC light pollution, I didn’t get to see them in person, but I enjoyed all the photos from those who did. [WaPo - gift link]

On Friday, I drafted the staff newsletter for May. There’s a section for a staff recommendation and I needed some content. My colleague shared Random Street View as an idea. This tool just plops you down in a random spot on the globe. You can then explore the area or click “next” for another random view. We had fun sharing links in our chat. So many cows and green hedges. Also, it’s amazing of how many open roads there are.

Finals week which means there is lots of printing at the library which means our machines will, of course, break down for no reason. A lot. Happens every semester.