Filed under: Uncategorized
$5,000 Award offered for improving library workers’ Salaries, Status
The American Library Association-Allied Professional Association (ALA-APA) is seeking nominees for a $5,000 award, courtesy of the SirsiDynix Corp. Nominees will include individuals and organizations that have made a positive change in the salaries or status of librarians and/or support staff. The Award Jury is looking forward to receiving the stories of champions that have had a local, regional or national impact.
Each candidate must have three nominations, using the electronic application form at www.ala-apa.org/salaries/sirsidynixnominationform.html. The deadline is Friday, Dec. 12.
Nominations will be reviewed by the Award Jury, chaired by Linda Dobb, of the California State University Library East Bay, at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in January 2009 in Denver, Colo. The winner(s) will be honored at the Annual Conference in June 2009 in Chicago.
The Award Jury encourages the library community to nominate staff and libraries of all sizes and types that are actively working to secure equitable pay for people in librarianship. Please submit three strong letters of support, since only the first three received will be reviewed. Self-nominations are permitted. Supporting documents may be e-mailed to ALA-APA, faxed to (312) 280-5013 or mailed to SirsiDynix Award, ALA-APA, 50 East Huron, Chicago, IL 60611.
The recipient of the award does not have to be an ALA member or a current or past library staff member. The award recipient’s achievement(s) must be notable in improving the pay and status of library workers.
Filed under: Uncategorized
My five- (and thinking about it, possibly six- ) part series on the social history of the paper cup continues on my friend Jason Young’s blog, Food in the Library. In this installment, a bit about waste and the invention of disposable culture.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Here’s a Wordie of my blog so far.
I am back from Philadelphia and DC and exhausted.
Historiann (who joins my list of fab women historians that includes this woman and this woman and this woman and, the patron saint of the Bryn Mawr history department, this woman) reports on the Berkshire Conference and the clarion call to uncover unexplored histories languishing in the archives. So, I thought that I would, over the course of the next week, tell my archive stories of stuff I’ve found that may never see the light of analysis and try to think about the archivist’s role in this process. Actually, I’m going to tell two of my own and borrow one from a friend.
Before then, though, I’m off to a wedding in DC and an interview in Philadelphia. Wish me luck!
* Archive/archives? I have no opinion, but the digital pioneer says archives, so there you have it.
Because, see, I measure a victory in how cool the players look and how much better their collections are.
Let me set the scene. Katie has given her version of events, but I think that the game deserves elaboration. A few weeks ago, I had the idea that it would be really, really cool to have a softball game that was archivists vs. librarians. Bill and I sent out an email to the school to invite librarians and archivists to a friendly game of SEEING WHAT WE’RE MADE OF (and clarified that no, non-archivists and librarians are not welcome; isn’t it enough that they get more resources and better-paying jobs for their degrees in facebook with concentrations in poking? If they want a game they can simulate play in Second Life).
So, I had some shirts printed:
This is a play on respect des fonds, the major commandment of archival practice. Anyway.
I have to say that my friend Alice won the most spirit award — she fielded, batted and pitched and encouraged us to do it for Schellenberg.*
So, yes, maybe the librarians had more points at the end, but they also had more players and had to supplement their ranks with non-librarians. But the archivists looked awesome, played well, and belong to a more interesting profession!
* I wrote that wikipedia entry. It was a question on my final for the appraisal class, and it seemed silly to not post it since there wasn’t already a page. I hope my professor doesn’t hate me for that — it probably means that she can’t re-use the question.
Anyone who’s ever worked in a library knows that among the interesting reference interviews and information literacy projects are also tedious kill-me-now projects. I was handed one of these projects last week — I’m to find the official website for 1,300 health sciences journals. This involves pasting each title into google, running a search, finding the official page and pasting that back into my spreadsheet. Kill me now, right?
Well, no. Because I thought to myself “there has to be a better way.” Then I called my friend Dianne. She was so delighted by the fact that I wanted to automate that she didn’t seem to mind that this would turn into a two-hour coding project.
So, we asked ourselves, if computers are really good at doing things over and over and over, and this is a task that requires repetition, why wouldn’t we just have the computer do it?
Here’s the idea — we’ll write a script that inputs our list of journals into google, spits back the first ten results, and puts them into an html document so that all I have to do is check, rather than search. As we played with it, we realized that we didn’t want any results from google or its cache, we didn’t want anything from elsevier or science direct, and we wanted to make sure to add the word “journal” to our search string so we didn’t get unrelated results.
So, here’s Dianne’s code (in all its glory):
#!/bin/bash
IFS='
'
for i in `cat testjournals2008.txt`; do
search=`echo $i | awk -F "\t" ' { print $3 " journal"} '`
lynx -dump -force_html -listonly $search | grep -v google |
grep -v youtube | grep -v elsevier | grep -v sciencedirect |
grep -v wikipedia | grep -v cache | grep -v amazon | grep -v
nytimes | head -n 13 | tail -n 10 > results
echo -n $i
for j in `cat results`; do
if [[ $j != "References" || $j != "" ]]; then
echo -n " "
result=`echo $j | awk ' { print $2 } '`
echo -n $result
fi
done
echo
done
She talked me through this as we were doing it, and I understand most of what’s in there. As well as the spreadsheet, we produced an html page so that I could just click through and test sites.
And, I have to say that our results are AWESOME. In most cases, the first result is the proper page — it just goes to show that where mad librarian skills (setting up a good search) and a healthy approach to technology (making it work for me) combine, magic can happen.
Filed under: Professional Quandries, Uncategorized | Tags: archives, ethics, justice, SAA
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?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: archival impulse, archives, death, preservation
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.
