Upcoming Talk on A Practical Guidebook to Trauma-Informed Archival Practice, Feb. 25th

Please join us for the first public online talk of 2026 of the Society of American Archivists’ (SAA) Crisis, Disaster, and Tragedy Response Working Group (CDTRWG). 

CDTRWG maintains and updates SAA’s Documenting in Times of Crisis: A Resource Kit; develops and provides immediate and ongoing resources and response assistance to archivists, allied cultural heritage professionals, and their communities in times of tragedies, disasters, or other crises; and builds partnerships with organizations focused on relief efforts and cultural stewardship and preservation. As part of that partnership building, we are conducting a series of public talks in 2026 to hear about related work. 

Book launch for A Practical Guidebook to Trauma-Informed Archival Practice

Wednesday, February 25th 2026, 12 noon EST (9am PST; 5pm BST)

Register for the event

Summary

Join editors and authors, Michelle Ganz, Veronica Denison, and Sarah Aisenbrey as they discuss their new book about archival trauma. The authors will discuss their experiences with trauma and how it impacted their approach to archives and how the book can be used to develop your own policies around trauma.

Biographies

Sarah Aisenbrey has served as the Archivist for the Sisters of the Precious Blood in Dayton, Ohio since 2018. She also serves as Vice President/President-Elect of the Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious. Sarah became a Certified Archivist in 2020 and holds a Master’s in Public History from Wright State University.

Veronica Denison is an Assistant Professor, and the Digital Archivist and Special Collections Librarian at Rhode Island College. She received her MLIS from Simmons University in 2013 and has published articles and book chapters on disability and accessibility in the archival profession, as well as teaching with primary sources.

Michelle Ganz is the Archives Director for the Dominican Sisters of Peace. She has previously worked in academic, museum, corporate, and private archives. Michelle has served in section leadership roles in the Accessibility & Disability Section, the Independent Archivists Section, and was part of the working group who first developed the Best Practices for Working with Archives Researchers with Physical Disabilities in 2008. Michelle received her MLIS from the University of Arizona in 2006, her Archival Certification in 2008, and her Bachelors in Medieval literature from The Ohio State University in 2003.

The event will be recorded and be made available on the CDTRWG Website after the event. 

New/Recent Books

In my ongoing quest to know about every book and journal published (which I know won’t happen, but I’ll still dream), I came across a publisher I hadn’t heard of.

Mission Bell Media is library-focused, but they publish about topics that are potentially relevant to archivists working in libraries. They have a leadership series that is topic specific, including African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic-American, Sports, and a Glossary. I have not seen these in person, but they seem to be reference guides with multiple entries.

I’m more intrigued by their Peak Series, which has an forthcoming book about library academic publishing and writing.

If anyone has heard about or looked at/read them, let me know!

New/Recent Books

This blog is about publishing, but much of the focus so far has been about journals. That fills a gap, as the journals provide reviews about books. I don’t plan on turning this blog into one for book reviews, but I want to provide information about books.

As I’ve thought about this, I realize the challenges of keeping up with what books come out and when. Recently I subscribed to email lists and RSS feeds from a few publishers. Also, my own research for my book leads me to discover more. So here’s a few that I learned of recently. This is not an endorsement of the quality of contents, just for information. Mostly, it’s a way for me to try to keep up-to-date on what’s out there.

Some of these are strictly archives-focused, some are a bit peripheral. I haven’t decided exact parameters for what I’ll include going forward, so there will be overlap with journal reviews. Most are very recent, though some are a few years old. Not all are “scholarly” (the focus of this blog), but I also think it’s important to showcase the broader world of books related to archives. And if you know of others, please send them my way. I hope you find this helpful.

Fostering Family History Services: A Guide for Librarians, Archivists, and Volunteers. Rhonda L. Clark and Nicole Wedemeyer Miller. Libraries Unlimited, 2016.

Paper: Paging Through History. Mark Kurlansky. W.W. Norton & Co., forthcoming.

Just My Type: A Book About Fonts. Simon Garfield. Gotham/Penguin, 2012.

On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand Years History. Nichoals A. Basbanes. Vintage, 2014.

Paper: An Elegy. Ian Sansom. HarperCollins, 2015.

The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers. Tom Standage. Bloomsbury, 2014.

Sports History in the Digital Era. Edited by Gary Osmond and Murray G. Phillips. University of Illinois Press, 2015.

Practical Tips for Facilitating Research. Moira J. Bent. Facet Publishing, 2016.