August, 2022 — The Library is bustling this summer with new and returning visitors, new projects, and the widest offering of public drop-in hours in its history.
Residency News: Please help us welcome our incoming research resident, Eira Tansey. Eira is an archivist at the University of Cincinnati Libraries. Her active areas of research include the effects of climate change on archives and archivists, the role of records within environmental regulation, and the enforcement of recordkeeping laws. She has a longstanding interest in the New Deal/WPA and is currently working on a publication titled “A Green New Deal for Archives.” During her weeklong intensive Eira will be working in-house daily between August 30 and September 5.
Hosting & public hours News:
After settling in to the California Digial Library (as applications programmer in the Publishing, Archives, and Digitzation division) Devin Smith has returned to hosting, now on Thursdays! Welcome back!
Thom Blum continues to host Sunday afternoon hours enhanced by weekly performances of his sound art installation [You Are [Here] You [Are] Here], which “animates the Library through a sonic treasure hunt that aims to transform the visitor’s experience of the stacks….” (https://www.thomblum.com./)
Carolee Gilligan Wheeler (https://www.superdilettante.com/) hosts Tuesday hours, and is processing the Correll collection this summer following the major springtime project of co-producing the Library’s 2022 annual publication with MSP.
Sean Kawa, an SFPL staff and new collections volunteer since spring, is at work writing a Finding Aid for the Library’s widely distributed holdings that represent Indigenous histories and voices.
…add those open days to the co-founders + Jay Bartguy-hosted ongoing Wednesdays, and the Library is offering four days a week of public drop-in hours! Special thanks to Jay, and also to Carolee who hosted Wednesdays while we co-founders were away on a break recently. See some of Jay’s recent contributions to BART history here: https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2022/news20220525
Everything else is ongoing since Spring: The residencies of Sheri Simons and of Kristin Wong are each of the low-intensity and long-durational variety, and are ongoing. Ongoing also since Spring also is the reemergence of the Library into the world, as it rebuilds after the seasons of public closure and community dispersal that characterized the first year of the pandemic. Although some sunny days are occasionally quiet, in general the Library is reemerging weekly into a busy world of new and returning visitors. Just this week we hosted visits from Melissa Dollman of Tribesourcingfilm.org (https://tribesourcingfilm.org/) and Devin Orgeron, both representing Deserted Films (https://desertedfilms.org/), and also from Willow Germs of California Revealed (https://californiarevealed.org/)
Public events coming up this fall: BART history events the second week of September (with Jay); a planned Thom Blum performance event to be scheduled; a planned screening of filmmaker Amy Reid’s documentary about women truckers; a new [untitled] Lost Landscapes series installation in partnership with Long Now, documenting a mix of California regional and San Francisco histories that have emerged in the past year in the Prelinger Archives (the film archives) and elsewhere. More yet to unfold.
On behalf of all the Library’s users we want to express our profound gratitude to the Support Community that has kept the lights on for the past two years and now into year three of the pandemic times (year two of being reopen). We wish for everyone to continue staying well, and look forward to seeing you in the stacks!
Thank you, from the Prelinger Library