Photo taken by 5chw4r7z at the Cincinnati Sanctuary City Rally, January 2017

So if you hang out in science or climate change circles, you probably know there are two BIG back-to-back marches coming up in the next ten days: on 4/22 there is the March for Science, and on 4/29 there is the People’s Climate March. Both marches aim to have a huge presence in Washington DC, accompanied by sister marches in many cities.

ProjectARCC is preparing for both of these marches by organizing to ensure LAM (Libraries, Archives, Museums) participation at both marches. We’re calling this Project mARCCh in recognition that as professionals charged with the preservation of cultural heritage, and an abiding commitment to information and knowledge access, we stand proudly in solidarity with our sisters and brothers who are at the forefront of information work around climate change, particularly scientists and journalists.

We’re keeping this pretty simple: if you are a librarian, archivist, or curator who would like to be a point of contact for an upcoming sister city march, we’d like to count you as a Project mARCCh point of contact. Contacts will be expected to serve as a local point of contact for organizing to increase the visibility and solidarity of LAM professionals at the 4/22 and 4/29 events. If you volunteer with Project mARCCh, you will be publicly identified on our website (on the map here) as the point of contact for your area. If you plan to remain local, we hope you will recruit other LAM professionals to attend sister city events. If you plan to come to DC, we will do our best to all congregate together.

If you would like to volunteer as a point of contact, please email Eira, the current ProjectARCC resident caretaker, the following information:

• March:
• Location (City, State):
• Name:
• Contact Info (Email and/or phone):

Please use the hashtag #project_mARCCh to tag pictures of you and your LAM colleagues in the streets so we can recognize you!

FAQ:

• So wait, what do I have to do as a point of contact?

  • Think of local Project mARCCh points of contact similar to the hosts that often lead a restaurant outing at conferences – they typically say “Hey, meet us here at 8pm and we’ll go to the place together!” That is the bare minimum expectation – that you are willing to have your name and contact information listed on the Project mARCCh map so that if other LAM professionals in your area would like to march with other colleagues, they have that opportunity.

    Of course, you can take this as far as you want! Some points of contacts in other cities are making buttons that make puns about archivists and preservation, others are actually organizing carpools from their workplaces to go, and others are busy people who don’t have time to organize, but wanted to simply just have their name on the website just in case it turns out another librarian or archivist in their region wants someone to march with. If you make a kick ass banner, and take a picture of your LAM crew with it, Eira will find you and give you a big hug one day.

• Are y’all documenting/archiving the marches?
  • Short answer, no. Right now, projectARCC does not have the capacity or bandwidth to organize this the way that archivists organized after the Women’s March. But if you know of any repositories documenting the marches, let us know! We’d love for you to guest author something on our blog!

• What should we put on our posters or banners?
  • We encourage anything that serves as public identification of you/your group as a librarian/archivist/curator. It’s incredibly important that communities of scientists and frontline communities on climate issues know that we’re paying attention to their issues. Some ideas being batted around by current project mARCCh contacts are “Archivists Preserve” or depicting the Earth inside an archival records box. I bet you have awesome ideas!