Filed under: Professional Quandries | Tags: archives, learning, professional development, SAA, school, training
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.
Filed under: Professional Quandries | Tags: archives, babysteps, collections
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.
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.
Soooo from what I can tell from my blog stats, most of the random google traffic I get is from this post about a paper I was writing in the fall term. Although (and trust me, this upsets me more than anyone else) it would appear that these google searches are looking for a very rarified market of bonnet-and-wide-brimmed-hat pornography, I suppose it’s possible that there’s someone out there looking for more about dress and social memory. So, let’s give the people what they want.
Anyway, the class was about archives, evidence and institutions of social memory, and was a way to get at the idea that the way that societies engage with their past may or may not have very much to do with archives or professional historical practice. Memory is transmitted all kinds of ways, and many of us tend to think of the links between past and present as more direct and inevitable than is true.
The paper for the class was a research paper on social memory, which I thought was conceptually flawed. It’s difficult to be analytical without falling into the trap of “X group thinks that their history is Y but it’s REALLY Z!” and it’s very hard to explain or measure the social history of a group without a bit more ethnographic skill. The most successful papers were from classmates who were very intimate with a particular social tradition, but their papers were the most vulnerable to empirical blind spots, For instance, someone was writing about the influence of the Adventist Village (a site in Battle Creek, Michigan, that preserves the homes and buildings used by church founders) among Seventh-Day Adventists and how the church’s past is used to create a sense of shared past among members and proselytize to potential new members. But what, really, was the author supposed to say about the relationship between place and memory? There’s plenty of room for description, but how exactly does one measure how successfully this kind of site can create social identity?
My project was similar and somewhat easier. I was interested in a micro-trend I had found while blog-surfing of present-day Quakers (usually women) wearing “plain dress.” Entire pages of websites were devoted to the definitions and permutations of plain, but the results often resembled historical Quaker women from the 18th and 19th centuries, or present-day Amish women. And, as I mentioned, I had the benefit of a living archive, entire blogs and web communities of plain-dressing Quakers who vociferously explained their reasons for wearing plain dress and how these reasons related to religious practice, community identity and spiritual beliefs.
But whence analysis? I decided to use the paper as a critique of the limits of describing what the past (and practices of the past) mean to groups of people.
It is not uncommon for members of a religious tradition to look to their collective pasts for spiritual inspiration and direction. However, the concept of a “collective past” is slippery and the lived practices of how this inspiration from the past is transmitted to the present is unclear. The phenomenon of modern Quaker women donning “plain dress” brings many of these questions into sharp relief. In a tradition marked by competing views of the role of mysticism versus the place of tradition, foundationalism and doctrine, some groups of Friends in the 20th and 21st centuries have often eschewed doctrine and practiced a faith based on continued revelation that looked toward the future and social justice rather than to the past. Thus, women who look to the past do so outside of (and according to some, contrary to) the current practices of their religious communities….
As I looked at the history of plain dress, I was faced with something of a methodological crisis. If I’m trying to measure some distance between “history” (plain dress from the late seventeenth century until it was largely discontinued in the early twentieth century) and “recurrence” or “nostalgia” or “revival” (plain-dressing Friends today), on what authority do I measure that distance? How do I say that I can identify the “true” history of Quaker dress? Even if plain-dressing Friends today don’t claim exact authenticity, they are claiming to be part of a particular tradition.
As I look over my work, it’s clear that I couldn’t figure out what to make of this paper and these problems. After all, in order to really measure the distance between what is remembered and what was lived, I have to some how measure how wearing this kind of costume makes people feel and why it makes them feel connected to the past. And really, what I want to know is what kind of power there is in this connection to the past.
These are important questions to an archivist. What we’re really doing in our archives is wielding our own bits of power. In the case of government or institutional records, it’s easy to understand the potential for power in our documents. Decisions are made on precedent; records can provide evidence for restitution or compel another to acknowledge past events. But what of memories? What is the power in the feeling that one gains from reproducing the past?
So, googlers, if you’ve come to this blog by searching these themes and you have some insights, please let me know.
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: Professional Quandries | Tags: archival badasses, archives, ethics, job seeking, new directions, SAA
It’s been a big few weeks in the patriarchive – my cohort graduated from our program 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
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.
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.
