Purpose
This blog is called The Archivist's Hiraeth and aims to provide posts about the work that is done by Allegheny Archives & Media LLC as well as other topics. These topics include reading, literature, preservation techniques, archival studies, library science, and more.
Name meaning
An archivist, of course, is an individual who is responsible for an archive. They maintain, preserve, and provide access to these archives.
Hiraeth is a Welsh word that doesn't neatly translate into English. To the best of my reading and knowledge, it translates to a feeling of homesickness for a place that you cannot go or return to or a home that just doesn't exist. A blog post by Samantha Kielar has a wonderful explanation and is hyperlinked in this sentence. She writes that the word's meaning is multi-layered and that it evokes:
"The place where your spirit feels most at home may be a physical location that you can return to at any time, or it may be more nostalgic of a home, not attached to a place, but a time from the past that you can only return to by revisiting old memories. Maybe your spirits home could even be neither of the above, one from which you are not only separated by space or time but instead a place that never was, where you can only go in your imagination."
Therefore, based on this wonderful explanation and definition, the blog's name is an attempt to describe the postings that will be made as a digital home and place of desire for archivists, history lovers, bookworms, and more.
Blogger Background
I (Gwen) graduated from Ohio University with a degree in Visual Communications with a focus on photojournalism in 2013. Currently, I work at a small newspaper 30 minutes north of Pittsburgh, PA as a videographer. Working for a newspaper has allowed me to explore many different topics. By no means am I a writer. This is my first attempt at any sort of blog (excluding the half-hearted attempt at a Xanga progile in the early 2000s). If I hadn't majored in visual communications, I would have gone for some sort of archival studies. I love to read, I love storytelling, and I love dogs. I really, really love dogs.
