Questioning the Past and Possible Futures: Digital Historiography and Critical Librarianship

The role of history as a discipline is, as Burton and Sweeny claim, not only to transform our understanding of the past and the present but also to shape possible futures. Digital historical projects are transformative endeavors that attempt to negotiate and navigate the past and articulate these possible futures. Drawing on the foundational ideas of critical librarianship to “intervene in and disrupt” structural inequities and on examples from digital historiography, we argue for a more robust role for librarians within these transformative endeavors. In so doing, librarians can use conscious, deliberate, reflexive actions to work toward animating values central to librarianship

The Țigani Community Adaptability to Changes in Rural Romania and the COVID-19 Impact

Romanian rural villages are struggling to survive present times when youngsters leave for a better life in the city while elders work the land like a hundred years ago. Our paper integrates human environments research with public health preparedness, presenting the Țigani (Gypsy/Roma) ethnic group from rural Romania as an example to the world. The future security of mankind will require a new understanding of the human place in its environment. That will lead to a new society, not the most powerful or intelligent, but the one that is more adaptable to changes, with sensitive and interconnected community members. Therefore, the Țigani ethnic group that fought for its rights and flourished despite unfavorable odds, including the recent COVID-19 pandemic, represents the best example for a new world that prioritizes humans, promotes health and wellbeing, facilitating innovation and transformative networks environmental integration. This research attempts to quantify the Țigani′s unique attributes that helped their communities survive and made them more adaptive to change. Always marginalized, they identified the other ethnic groups’ weaknesses to penetrate the villages and learned to use the smartphone apps to communicate, for their trades, coppersmith, metal roof tiles and drainage systems. Our research was based on Geographical Information System, Microsoft Power Bi analytics data visualization tools and statistical analysis with SPSS V20 to demonstrate what enables their flourishing and what resistance they face locally. We argue that the Țigani′s intense social cooperation, strong sense of family, community and mutual assistance helped them to fight COVID-19, generating their significant adaptability to the societal changes and their power to keep intact their cultural identity. The results show how the constant growing Țigani population changed and may change Romania′s rural environments in the future