This is the latest entry in our series Keeping ArchivesAWARE: News and Highlights, a recurring roundup of some of the latest archives-related news stories, features, commentaries, announcements, and projects that have caught our eye, with links to the original sources. This post written by COPA member Nick Pavlik.

Jody Rosen writes in a recent New York Times Magazine feature about the disastrous 2008 fire at a Universal Studios Hollywood warehouse that served as the vault for the most historically significant master recordings of the Universal Music Group, in which approximately 175,000 master recordings were destroyed.

A Europol press release details how three men were arrested in France last month for stealing rare maps from archival collections from different libraries throughout Europe.

NPR reports that while digitizing a collection at Mexico’s National Sound Library, archivists came across a recording containing a voice they believe may be that of celebrated Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.

New Hampshire State Archivist Brian Burford was recently featured in an article in the Concord Monitor, in which he warned of the risk posed to the state’s digital records in the absence of a statewide digital preservation program.

The New York Times recently featured an article on the donation of Nachman Blumental’s personal papers to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.  Blumental, a philologist and one of the earliest historians of the Holocaust, documented how the Nazis’ “used the German language to obscure the mechanics of mass murder and make genocide more palatable to themselves.”

In The Conversation, Axel Bruns writes about the National Library of Australia’s newly launched Australian Web Archive, and the immense web archiving challenges the Library will continue to face going forward.

The University of Pittsburgh Library System recently acquired the archive of legendary horror filmmaker George A. Romero, which will serve as the foundation for a larger horror studies archive that the university intends to establish within its Archives & Special Collections.

The Monuments Men Foundation recently donated the diary of S. Lane Faison to the National Archives.  Faison, a member of the “Monuments Men” unit during World War II, supervised the return of millions of historical artifacts stolen by the Nazis to their countries of origin.

Controversy recently arose at Doane University in Nebraska after the director of the university’s Perkins Library was placed on administrative leave after including a photograph showing students wearing blackface in a “Parties from the Past” exhibit outside the library.

The CBC recently reported on the launch of a new website from the City of Edmonton Archives that provides access to thousands of digitized historical photographs from the Archives’ collection.

At the end of May, the New York Times reported that the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture had acquired the personal collection of Fred “Fab 5 Freddy” Brathwaite, the original host of “Yo! MTV Raps,” which first aired in 1988.

Have some interesting archival news items or highlights you’d like us to share?  Email us at archivesaware@archivists.org and we may include it in our next Keeping ArchivesAWARE roundup!