An Archivist's Tale

Karen Trivette and Geof Huth, hosts of the podcast, return to discuss their archival lives during the pandemic and their plans for the podcast's future and even the one archival trip they have planned for this year.

Karen Jamison Trivette and guest host Alex Joseph interview fashion scholar Lourdes Font, professor of history of art at the Fashion Institute of Technology. They discuss the life and work of Max Meyer, a principal at Abraham Beller and Company, a New York City-based women's cloak and suit manufacturer, and examine how archival materials helped tell his story.

After a long absence, An Archivist's Tale presents a poem to David B. Gracy II, one of our guests. Geof Huth of AAT wrote and read this poem.

Saad Eskander, former National Archivist of Iraq, speaking to us from Iraqi Kurdistan, tells an inspiring story about his work running his nation's archives and his struggle to repatriate national records taken by the US government and even journalists, and he explains how archives can show us a way to the truth and toward a better and more just world.

Rosemary Pleva Flynn, the Chair of the Society of American Archivists' Dictionary Working Group, talks about the origins of this just-released Dictionary of Archives Terminology, an online-only dictionary for archivists, explains how entries are created, and details the rich features of the dictionary. Find DAT at dictionary.archivists.org.

Greg Hunter, Professor at the Palmer School of Library and Information Science at Long Island University, tells the stories of his career, stories of almost always starting from scratch and creating archival improvements for the United Negro College Fund, ITT, the Academy of Certified Archivists, the US National Archives, and historical societies on Long Island.

Cliff Hight, Head of Special Collections and the University Archivist at Kansas State University, sits down to discuss his life as an archivist, how his archives was prepared for working at home for covid-19 because of another disaster they had experienced, and shows how his career and ours have intersected many times over the years.

Karen Trivette and Geof Huth, hosts of An Archivist's Tale, discuss how they are conducting their archival and library work while confined at home and living their lives in Manhattan, in the epicenter of the global coronavirus pandemic.

Ostap Kin, Archivist, Librarian, and Research Center Coordinator at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, tells us the story of chance that redirected part of his life from literature to archives, his immigration to the United States, and how archives capture valuable and coherent fragments of the world. (Photo credit: http://alkadabraphotography.com)

Rachel Binnington, an American archivist in England, reveals her peripatetic life story that begins when she was a child, tells us of her archival yearnings which began many years be most of ours did, and surprises us with her wide array of archives jobs covering corporate records, US congressional records, and the colonial records of Louisiana.

Kerstin Arnold, a cultural heritage professional at Archives Portal Europe tells us of her beginnings at the German Federal Archives and provides the amazing story of how a small band of people aggregate metadata on 55,000 fonds and collections held by European archives to allow people all over the world an easy way to find the information they need through Archives Portal Europe.

Tamara Thornhill, Corporate Archives Manager at Transport for London, tells us not only her own tale but also the often surprising history of her organization, which oversees almost all of the transportation system in Greater London, include most famously the London Underground.