I was sorry to miss this week\u2019s class, especially because disaster prevention and security are exciting topics! I look forward to catching up on the stories and notes from this week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While reading these articles, I was reminded of the work of Eira Tansey<\/a>, the archivist who wrote the piece about trauma we reflected on in week 1. I so enjoyed that piece that I read through Tansey\u2019s website and found links to her other materials and work. Tansey, is an archivist who specializes in \u201cpreparing archives for the effects of climate change.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Tansey, along with archivists Ben Goldman and Whitney Ray, run the Repository Data Project<\/a>, which aims to catalog archives, libraries, art facilities, and museums in the US, in order to figure out which are most at risk from climate change. The project asks provocative questions about how to preserve \u201cculturally rich\u201d areas in the face of rising sea levels. The project found that 98% of archives are likely to be affected by some aspect of climate change. While the database cannot prevent or preserve at-risk archives, the knowledge about who <\/em>precisely is most at risk can perhaps mitigate some of the damage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Of the importance of this project, Tansey says \u201cThere are going to be some places where it won\u2019t be possible to live anymore\u2014or, if people do live in them, then we will have a very different relationship with what it looks like\u2026in some places, the only documentary traces left will be in archives.\u201d It is disaster planning not just for a moment but for a fundamental shift in the relationship between archive and place. These archivists see their disaster planning as a political, revolutionary act. They were also honored by the SAA<\/a> for their project in 2019. I also found that based on the readings we did this week, simply suggesting \u201cdigitization\u201d as a response to disasters and climate change is a woeful misunderstanding of the resources available to archives (especially small ones) and the value of print materials. (I study the eighteenth century, and for me, the digitized copy is not a replacement for handling the actual material!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was sorry to miss this week\u2019s class, especially because disaster prevention and security are exciting topics! I look forward to catching up on the…<\/p>\n