the patriarchive

I alluded to this in an earlier post — it’s interesting to me that while I’ve heard snide comments about the SAA code of ethics and its inefficacy since I came here, and heard a bit more in the same vein at last weekend’s conference, I’ve noticed almost no enthusiasm for reforming the code or moving SAA in a new direction.

So, what exactly is wrong with the code?

Deirdre Stam from the Palmer School of Library and Information Science at Long Island University spoke at the conference about what makes codes of ethics effective. A useful code usually includes four elements - justice, integrity, competence, and utility. Every code should contain these elements. By justice is usually meant treating others as we would be treated ourselves (I would add here my new favorite guiding mantra, Derrida’s maxim that the antonym of forgetting may not be remembering, but rather “justice”). Integrity means that we’re honest about our successes and our mistakes and are transparent. Competence demands that we do our work well, especially considering that when we’re working with the records of powerful bodies, we have the opportunity and responsibility to make these bodies accountable. Utility demands that these ideas are transformed into some kind of social good, beyond the archivist’s personal moral satisfaction.

How does the SAA code of ethics perform against this rubric? Let’s start with opportunities for justice:

IX. Law

Archivists must uphold all federal, state, and local laws.

So, there are a few things that are kind of funny here. I’m sure that the authors of the code meant that archivists must uphold all laws in the context of their work - but I love the idea that it’s somehow a breach of professional responsibility to jaywalk.

More pertinent to issues that might face an archivist, though, is what to do when laws contradict responsible archival practice. There are very few laws that protect whistle-blowers, and in most cases, leaking government records, even when doing so would be considered a public good by most, will land an archivist in jail. Don’t we as professionals have a responsibility for not just the contents of our archives but the societal contexts and consequences of them?

If this code is just guiding us to existing legal standards, why have a code in the first place? Journalists have ethical standards that make sure that they act in the public good even when doing so may be illegal — for instance, the laws of the United States don’t allow journalists to protect their sources but journalists do so anyway because they’ve decided as a profession that this will help keep a check on power. Sometimes journalists go to jail, and sometimes lawmakers write journalist-friendly laws; laws aren’t static, and professional organizations could be a powerful force to change them.

However, the SAA would have to have a deep, thoughtful conversation with itself about what exactly we do and how our work contributes to society before we could have anything approaching this kind of power. As it is now, this idea that we must obey laws without thinking about how we could affect them or challenge them is a huge mistake and does nothing to protect archivists.

Indeed, the SAA code of ethics doesn’t seem to recognize that archivists are people, guided by experiences and ethics and values and beliefs.

II. Judgment

Archivists should exercise professional judgment in acquiring, appraising, and processing historical materials. They should not allow personal beliefs or perspectives to affect their decisions.

This sentiment isn’t just silly, it’s also wrong-headed. Margaret Hedstrom made the spot-on comment that it doesn’t make any sense to encourage diversity within the profession if we’re then going to discourage differences in beliefs or perspectives. Archivists make choices; they interpret history and interact with communities. Whether we like it or not, we’re making judgments every day. We would be better off if we embraced our subjectivities and worked through how to approach our work ethically rather than continuing the fiction that we can approach it with dispassion and a gods’-eye view.

Here, I think the idea of integrity should come into play. If we inevitably bring our personal experiences and points of view into our work, isn’t it more honest and fair to be upfront about it, rather than burying our biases and promoting them as neutral and natural?

Finally, I think that the SAA code of ethics is the least useful in the realm of utility. While it does say that archivists may not alter or destroy evidence and that we must protect the privacy of our users, the ALA has done much, much more in an activist role to make sure that librarians actually have the power to fight back against the powers that might try to access this information. As we know, archivists are under-funded and don’t have much of a profile. What exactly is the SAA offering to the archivist caught between a rock and a hard place?

It’s been a big few weeks in the patriarchive - my cohort graduated from our program, I had a phone interview for my dream job, and I volunteered at a conference this weekend that reminded me why I want to be an archivist.

This is my favorite photo from graduation. Many thanks to Mick McQuaid for the image.

Later this week, nthlibrarian and I (and possibly a new contributor, Bill, who jokingly refers to his contribution as “views from the patriarchy”) will be writing a series of “want ads” about what we want from an institution. Job searching is a lot of things - hard and scary and often demoralizing, and I think that it’s important for us as young archivists to have just as high expectations of the institutions we want to join as they do of us. So stay tuned for that.

I look forward to talking more about my job search later this week, as I’m crossing my fingers for good news about my dream job - it seems unlucky to say more now.

About the conference - I have plenty to say about the themes and questions with which I was presented, but I’d like to give some of my initial thoughts on the program. Each presentation was exceptional in its own way — my three favorites were Fatma Müge Göçek, a sociologist who gave us an “archive story” of state-sponsored forgetting in Turkey; Verne Harris, a South African archivist who provided a framework for archivists who may feel normalized, bureaucratized and rudderless in issues of ethics and purpose; and Jack Tchen and Dylan Yeats, historians who explained the ethics of categorization and the importance of working locally in the context of “yellow peril.

What was most exciting (and, alternately, frustrating) was the discussion that came afterwards. It ran the gamut from “but, wait, aren’t archivists supposed to be objective, descriptive rather than prescriptive and activist?” [the answer, of course, is who are you trying to kid here?) to “um, what does this have to do with my backlog?” to archivists relationship to nostalgia and what exactly are the ethics of nostalgia.

Although there were the requisite pot-shots about SAA and the SAA code of ethics, it was interesting to me that discussions of “ethics from below” overshadowed a discussion of “ethics from above,” that is, how we might imagine SAA becoming an organization that represents our interests, protects archivists facing unfair consequences because of tough ethical decisions that they had to make, and provides a space for a continued conversation about these problems.

More on all of this later.

But because I have a huge screaming web-crush on Michael Berubé, I’m going to go ahead and encourage you all to read his post on the candidates’ positions on disability.

My favorite part:

It’s as if we Americans have been talking about disability all our lives, as Molière’s M. Jourdain has been speaking in prose, without realizing it. Remember that debate about SCHIP? You know, the one we lost on Bush’s veto? What the hell was that about? It was about disability, folks – about children suffering catastrophic illnesses and traumatic injuries for which their parents couldn’t (and their parents’ dastardly, moustache-twirling health-insurance providers wouldn’t) provide. Vets returning from Iraq with PTSD or TBI (post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury) and being warehoused and/or underserved and/or neglected by VA hospitals? Uh, well, once again, here we’re talking about disability. Why in the world do we frame these things as matters of “health” or “employment” or “veterans’ benefits,” when doing so prevents us from realizing that we’re all touching different appendages of the 8000-pound elephant in the room? The subject is disability, people. It’s about our common frailty and vulnerability. Get used to it.

So, um, go vote.

My professor, Margaret Hedstrom, was interviewed in the New York Times today about digital preservation. These sorts of issues are very distant from anything I find remotely interesting, although it’s possible that there’s a cultural history to be written about under what circumstances we create records with preservation in mind — a history of the “permanent.”

Thinking about digitization for access and digitization for preservation for my paper on Northern collaborations with African archives, I like the degree to which the digitization process forces us to recognize that there is no such thing as permanent preservation. We’re just delaying the inevitable, dudes. We’re alllll gonna die. To what degree is the archival impulse is just us not dealing with forgetting and death?

I was noticing the cheap jabs the folks at Crooked Timber have been taking at gimmicky, over-modest (or, alternately, un-modest), irrelevant histories that forsake archival research for theory. Or whatever. The problem (as I read it) seems to be that young historians are “getting away with” empirically underwhelming work and padding their books with faddish theoretical trends. Or whatever. Oh, and their book titles are predictable. Or whatever.

It’s hard to argue with this sort of piece, considering that no one is naming names, but considering the realities of [and the epistemological PROBLEMS involved with] working in the archives, I think that theory is good for us as a profession.

I’ve been working on backing up this statement for a week now but it’s FINALS. So we’ll all have to wait. Anyway.

This post at Early Modern Notes discusses researchers’ tendencies to compare archival war stories. I’m reminded of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust, where she talks about “archive fever” as a pathogen, the process of being cramped and frustrated and surrounded by decaying old stuff. My favorite part is when she talks about how so often, there isn’t anything, really, in the archives. Manuscript repositories are a crapshoot; nineteenth-century archives are foreign and weird. Twentieth-century archives are filled with irrelevant records, built on models that mirror the structures of the corporate bodies that they document — bureaucratic, top-heavy. The thing that strikes me about twentieth-century archives is how difficult it can be to find the document that explains WHY any body made the decision it did — there is, rather, too much of the how and when and where.

So, if historians are interested in these why questions, we often have to resort to “theory,” that is, ways of thinking about how agency is encoded in larger patterns and trends, why decisions become inevitable and natural, and how to think about contingency when the archives don’t provide dissenting voices.

Short version: archives are boring, thinking is awesome.

Or! We complain about working in the archives because working in the archives often sucks.

See conference page here.

No, You Can’t Cite Wikipedia – But Not for the Reasons You Think

While much of the debate about the use of wikipedia in academic settings, particularly academic libraries, has to do with questions of reliability and authenticity, a more fundamental question regarding the use of encyclopedias and the librarian’s role in helping a patron to credential knowledge—related to the basic question of the purpose of academic writing–has been largely ignored.

If part of a librarian’s role is to help patrons determine criteria for what counts as legitimate knowledge and then evaluate sources based on these criteria, wikipedia is an ideal teaching tool. The nature of wiki software allows users to review the debate, see how the “sausage” of knowledge production is made. Similar cycles of writing, editing, fact-checking and debating approaches that happen behind the scenes in traditional publishing are laid bare for the world to see and evaluate in the wiki model.

At a more abstract level, wikipedia offers librarians and researchers an opportunity to deconstruct the process of the production of knowledge, to evaluate how particular epistemes are maintained and who maintains them (Foucault 1966). After all, just as traditional publishing is controlled by an elite and tied to an epistemic agenda, so too is wikipedia controlled by an “oligarchy” of frequent contributors who tend to belong to specific patterns of race, class, gender and sexuality. What does it mean that the “world’s knowledge” as represented on wikipedia is largely western-, white- and male-created? What lessons can we draw from this fact to help inform our patrons’ research?

Finally, I will conclude this presentation with an explanation of how wikipedia conforms to the purpose of academic writing, be it analytic or synthetic.  I often tell patrons that the reason one doesn’t cite wikipedia is because one shouldn’t cite any encyclopedia – an academic paper aims to explore tensions within a topic, not to regurgitate facts. Source material from any encyclopedia is simply too superficial for use in higher education and doesn’t allow the paper-writer to develop his or her analysis, to give the topic his or her own spin. Perhaps ironically, then, if the purpose of academic research is to explore controversies, contradictions and tensions, wikipedia is a far better source than a “closed-source” encyclopedia, because on wikipedia the memory of a debate about an article lives in the background of the article itself, available for the user to peruse.

I graduate from library school in about eight weeks, and anything could happen after that. There are, however, interesting projects in the works.

• Two papers for the Questioning Authority conference — one on my own about the real teaching value of wikipedia (it’s not what you think — I’ll post the abstract later, maybe) and one about how to navigate the different and converging knowledge cultures of libraries and IT in an e-library environment.
• I’m still thinking through my gender and labor paper, but it may be a chance to get back to a few ideas about gendered professional development, public space and public knowledge, and the gendered nature of the service sector.
• My Aluka project. More on this in another post, but it is the brilliant, possibly redeeming red-headed stepchild terror of the semester.
• Looking for work!
• Curriculum committee project — addressing performance gaps by gender in tech-intensive courses. I did a few interviews this weekend and am working hard to turn it all into some sort of usable evaluation plan.

More on each of these later…

Art for everyone.

In addition to all of that lovely reading, I’ll also be doing a four-credit project.

I originally wanted some way to think about continuing professional development (particularly training new technologies/information technology) for mid-career librarians, operating under the assumption of a knowledge gap, and was approaching this problem through the feminist/community/zine/DIY tradition.

Thinking about it more, I think what’s more interesting than “fixing” a knowledge gap would be first, ascertaining whether one exists, and second, thinking about how knowledge is acknowledged in professional environments.

So, in some ways, I’m not sure where this project will go. I was excited about the idea of actually producing something - a graphic tutorial, I guess - about not just how particular resources can be used, but also about how to re-frame conversations about technology so that they aren’t conducted in fear and uncertainty (and with the associated jargon and gaslighting that too often happens). I was talking to a friend who works as a librarian at the AADL who mentioned that mid-career librarians with whom he works are often apprehensive about calling tech services — which is odd, I think, because librarians produce a culture where asking questions is okay, encouraged, and the reference interview is all about making people understand that they’re not stupid for not knowing this already. So, I was thinking about producing some sort of material that helps de-mystify the tech training process — maybe thinking about tech support the way one thinks about a reference interview.

And again, I assume a knowledge deficit. I think that the first order of business is to do some research, both within the professional literature and talking to persons who think about this regularly (professional librarians) to see what the state of mid-career professional development is, what people really know and what they’re presenting to their communities, and where the need lies.

Regardless of my findings, I’m not convinced that there isn’t a place for conceptualizing what continued professional development for librarians would look like — there are two models that I’m grappling with, here. First is the university extension service model, by which these people would be sitting in the same bullshit classes that I find myself in (although, hopefully, they wouldn’t be infantilized to the same degree that we are, and I certainly hope it wouldn’t operate under the same usurious tuition model). Writing a “fantasy” proposal of how my school could reach out to the rest of the state could be an interesting exercise and culmination of my research.

The other approach would be the zine/DIY model, which honestly sounds like a lot more fun but would sort of do different work. I would need to do quite a bit of research about how this kind of community learning happens, and what makes for an effective guide. There’s also the problem of not providing the same credentialing mechanism. I firmly believe that a funny, smart, clear piece of literature could have taught me more about professional searching than fourteen weeks in a classroom did, but my classroom experience is what makes me ALA accredited.

This is where, I hope, my reading projects will dovetail nicely into this project — I want to understand how people demonstrate knowledge, how (if!) they’re rewarded for it, and how this works across professions and race and gender lines.