For the past year or so, we have been gathering poems, essays, art, and other creative works about archives, archival work, and recordkeeping and posting them to https://imagesofarchives.org.
It is a wide net we have cast but fun and thought-provoking.
We are now looking for others to join us. We seek especially archivists who are poets, storytellers, and essayists; we seek archivists who would be willing to put down on paper their reactions to other writers, within or outside the archives. Submissions will be considered for the website and, ultimately, for a book.
In terms of the images, we encourage those with backgrounds in art history to respond not only with images they select but also to those images chosen by Barbara Craig and James O’Toole in “Looking at Archives in Art” (2000) or those in the recent project of José Luís Bonal and his investigation of the representations of archival documents in art in the National Gallery (UK). Visual images (photographs or artwork showing records, record keepers, or settings) should be submitted as low-resolution copies.
To recap, acceptable submissions may include, but are not limited to:
• Your fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, or mixed media;
• Personal essays that explore the history, architecture, practices, locations, and representation of archives in the cultural imagination, whether in fiction, poetry, recordings, images, art, or film;
• Images of records and recordkeeping as seen and interpreted by archivists;
• The examination of particular documents or sets of records that move archivists to consider the broader meanings of our profession or the utilization of documents to inspire poetics or literature;
• And finally, other creative work you can suggest pursuing.
Please send submissions, ideas, and queries, by July 1, to:
Susan Tucker and Camille Craig, via visionsofarchives@gmail.com. As we proceed, we will organize a peer review process under other readers.
Best wishes,
Susan Tucker, CA., PhD. (she/her/hers)
Co-editor, The Letters of Josephine Louise Newcomb
504-616-8297
susannah@tulane.edu
and
Camille Craig (she/her/hers)
Graduate Student, LSU School of Information Science
Poet and Aspiring Archivist
ccrai34@lsu.edu
Publishing in the Archives Profession 