Another example of how annoying the SAA listserv is…

So, someone writes in asking, more or less, how to be an archivist — she asks in terms of where she should go to school. And since everyone on this list has, assumedly, gone through some sort of process to become an archivist, everyone declares himself entitled to an opinion.

And then the career gripes start. I have a degree! I can’t get a job! I have no degree! I can’t get a job! The prevailing question in this thread seems to be “what sort of credential do I need in order to convince someone to hire me?” rather than “what’s the best way for me to prepare myself to be an archivist?”

I don’t know, man, but I’ve never been into the idea of a degree as a credential. Like, what’s the point? It should be, and has to be, so much more. You’re immersed in a community of faculty and researchers that have proven themselves to be among the best thinkers in the field! Make something of that! A really cool thing about going to a graduate school that has PhD students in archives is that I was exposed to so much research and new thinking — there are people there who are solely devoted to imagining how the profession can be better and different. If it were up to the practitioners, this could never happen. We’re all too broke — all research and innovation would be left to government agencies and big corporations — fine, but do we really want to be at their mercy? Wouldn’t it be better if we were all trained to anticipate challenges rather than to simply perfect current practices?

This leads me to my current koan — “we are the they.” Instead of complaining that “they” haven’t developed good digital infrastructure for archivists, let’s remember that we’re just as smart and capable of thinking about digital stewardship as anyone else. Let’s try to think of a better solution. Let’s join a consortium. Let’s at least review the current archival literature before we assume that nothing has been done. My favorite thing about the PACSCL conference last fall was an unspoken but strong admonition to quit whining already and come up with creative solutions.  For my money, the best way to learn to do this is in a creative, risk-free, sandbox environment — graduate school.

Being an archivist is just getting harder. We’re dealing with new preservation challenges, new formats, and possibly new ways of approaching the records that we already have. Graduate school is more than a place to learn how to be an archivist -– it’s also a place to think about archives differently, in a setting where no one yet cares about how many linear feet you’re getting through. It’s a place to talk about critical appraisal theory (the central site, I believe, of enduring issues of archival ethics) -– few entry-level archivists get to do any appraisal work at all. I also liked that I got to hang out with librarians and people doing human-computer interaction and people working on information policy, etc. I’m not saying that you can’t develop these ways of thinking without graduate school, but it’s a pretty efficient avenue.

On the other hand, there are MANY weaknesses in the current model of graduate-level archival education. One could have finished the program I was in without ever having read or written a finding aid. Faculty mentoring isn’t the same thing as an internship/apprenticeship model, and the flipside of having a bunch of computing kids in the program (I went to an i-school) is that there are plenty of non-archives faculty who just don’t get archival practice. The push toward interdisciplinarity doesn’t extend to historical practice – colleagues of mine from graduate school have mused that they don’t really understand the nuts and bolts of the kinds of questions that historians are trying to answer.

If one learns best by the apprenticeship model, maybe it makes more sense to devote the resources (debt, time) of graduate school to some unpaid internships. What I appreciate about the SAA reports, and what I would love to see more of, is a list of things that archivists need to know and the best ways of learning them.

$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.

How to create LC subject headings (a group effort by myself, Bill Cron* and Beth Panozzo):

To do LC headings, simply take the first two letters of the author’s middle name. Pick a random number between 40 and 80, and multiply it by 162. Add the letters to the numbers, then type it out in MS Word, convert font to Haettenschweiler Narrow, and enter into the free iGoogle German to English translator.

I seem to remember that in the case of anonymous authors, I need to find someone who had chinese take-out for lunch, add the first and third numbers of the fortune cookie, and multiply by current longitude. Then, if Mercury is retrograde, plug this number into WorldCat, close my eyes, take a walk around the block, and the subject heading will be on a postit in my middle desk drawer when I get back.

However, I was later reminded that this technique only works for videodiscs.

*Forgive the color scheme. Bill’s site is a throw-back to the days when the internet was wild and slow.

Maybe it’s because I’m now collecting a paycheck, or maybe I have a more nuanced approach to conflict in my old age, but for some reason I keep starting and deleting posts. I haven’t decided if I want to make this blog anonymous so that I can maintain the pain-in-the-ass tone I’ve developed (alright, it’s mostly disposition but also some training). Up to this point, I’ve made it really easy to figure out who I am (not that anyone cares), but now I would hate to make things awkward for myself or my colleagues.

On the other hand, I think that there’s some value in trying to document what it’s like to be a new archivist and how completely clueless I feel — especially if I can develop a readership of archivists that might be able to provide insights, or who might be able to at least sympathize. I often wish that I could find a discussion list other than the SAA listserv so that I can ask my “dumb” questions that have probably been brought up a zillion times before in the last ten years, especially since there’s probably some value in young archivists figuring it out together without having to dodge the politcal footballs that seem to be constantly kicked around ARCHIVES-L.

For instance, here’s an interesting task. We have a collection of about 30-40 78rpm records, all published materials, all totally beyond our interest or collecting scope. I have no idea how they came to us — when I ask my boss about them he gets sidetracked into another story. There’s really funny stuff like “Malawi Marimba Madness” and “The Most Popular Hawaiian Melodies” but also some totally weird shit — Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” etc. My supervisor is fine with getting rid of them, but I have no idea what the procedure for that is. They’re all published materials, so it’s not really archival, and I can’t think of a library that has the resources or patience or interest to deal with the format. So, it seems obvious that they should go to ebay (this collection really would be some hipster’s dream), but what’s the protocol for that? What are the possible disadvantages to selling the collection? How would I price it?

Or how about this for confusing — I just opened our accessions files to discover no new accessions numbers since 1997. Is there a good way to retroactively update accessions? Going into the future, I would like to do some kind of high-level inventory so that I can have almost everything accounted for (I’m thinking archivist’s toolkit). This way, we can get organized with our processing and web efforts (which are pretty much as unorganized as our accessions situation). How do I approach an inventory with 2.5 FTE and a handful of work-study students?

As my friend Christa would say, I’m a BABY. I’m new! Plus, the pressure of creating new systems that some future archivist will have to negotiate is overwhelming.

Maybe I should just have google scan everything and then burn it all.

Jill: Maureen, come here. I want your help with something.
:: we walk out to quiet journals browsing area ::
Jill: So here’s what I’m thinking. We clear out all of these shelves of journals — they’re all being discontinued anyway because we have electronic access** — and then we set up a huge screen and a projector and patrons can play video games about public health!
Maureen: Jill, there are no such things as video games about public health
Jill: Sure there are. You can set up an outbreak on the Sims, or the wii fit…
Maureen: People do serious work here. Do you think someone studying for comps is going to appreciate the asshole in the corner learning about his wii fit age?
Jill: I work SO HARD to justify our existence! If we don’t do programming, we’re just another study space!
Maureen (rolling eyes): Fine, I’ll write the proposal for you.

** this is a really bad idea for a lot of reasons, the least of which is that archivists DO NOT have digital preservation figured out and it seems like a bad idea to leave it to the publishers.

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.

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!

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!

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.