Not A Guybrarian

CSI: Archives

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Houston) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:43:00 +0000

As promised, the second post in as many days! (Man... I hope you guys don't think I'm making a habit of this.)

So, Tuesday morning, I am having a meeting with the Library Staff Association here to plan our annual holiday party. At the conclusion of this meeting, my student informs me that while I was in said meeting, someone from the bookstore called looking for information about the school's logo, specifically when the various iterations thereof are adopted. He also mentioned something about police officers, to which I said to myself, "He must have heard wrong. Police Officers don't go to the university archives." I have him look it up in a couple of locations while I'm at lunch, planning to call the bookstore director when I get back.

Returning from lunch, it turns out that my student got the boxes, but apparently did not get the memo that I wanted him to, you know, actually look in them. Sigh. I do the research myself, double check our course catalogs for the appropriate branding, make some photocopies, and call the bookstore director. "Great!" says he. "The officers and I will be right over."

Me: "Wait, what?"

As it turns out, the police officers are real! They are in from Los Angeles investigating a cold case from around 1985. I don't know many of the details, nor am I probably allowed to mention them even if I did, but apparently they recently discovered a portion of a missing person's anatomy in a ditch, wrapped in... wait for it... a University Bookstore bag. They brought pictures to show to me and the director of the bookstore. Ahem: EEEEEW.

The reason they need to talk to me is because the logo appears on one side of the bag, and identifying when said logo was in use is apparently critical to determining the possible range of dates the, um, separation could have happened. What a great opportunity to explain about archives! Sort of! I walk them through the various documents, talk about their provenance and their authenticity, and help them with the interpretation thereof. They seem very interested in what I have to say about the logo while I am trying to not throw up in my mouth a bit, take down my statement and my contact info, make an oblique reference to the possibility that I will have to fly down to LA as an expert witness, and thank me for my time and assistance. I am left more than a little nonplussed.

I have to say, I've seen a lot of weird stuff in my archival career thus far-- for example, the University of Maryland College Park Archives has a portrait of Spiro Agnew made out of feathers-- but I think providing evidence that a bookstore bag is from the appropriate time period based on when the logo was or was not in use is the strangest thing I've yet had to do. They don't really prepare you for this sort of thing in Library School (and as such I hope I'm not doing anything wrong by posting this here! It was just such a surreal experience that I had to share it. Hopefully I'm being vague enough that I'm not contaminating anything).

One does wonder what whoever did this was thinking when they wrapped up said body part in a bag with location-specific branding on it. Clearly the person was not exercising... *puts on sunglasses* Respect des Fonds.

YEEEEAAAAAHHHHH

(If you don't get that, go here. You're welcome.)

Jon Stewart, Archival Education, and Other Things That Are Far Out, Man

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Houston) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:07:00 +0000

We're back, baby! Wow, really haven't posted here since January? Guess this is proof that while lack of content can't keep a good blog down, it CAN keep a mediocre one down. (My discovery of Twitter in March probably didn't help.) Buuuut, this week there are not one, but TWO newsworthy things to talk about! Whee! (The second of which will come tomorrow.)

So, as essential background, last week the University of California-Santa Cruz posted a, shall we say, unique job opportunity on the SAA website. Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen, you too can smoke pot and drop acid for 30 years and still have a respectable archives career:

The University Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, seeks an enterprising, creative, and service-oriented archivist to join the staff of Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) as Archivist for the Grateful Dead Archive. This is a potential career status position. The Archivist will be part of a dynamic, collegial, and highly motivated department dedicated to building, preserving, promoting, and providing maximum access both physically and virtually to one of the Library's most exciting and unique collections, The Grateful Dead Archive (GDA). The UCSC University Library utilizes innovative approaches to allow the discovery, use, management, and sharing of information in support of research, teaching, and learning.

Under the general direction of the Head of Special Collections and Archives, the GDA Archivist will provide managerial and curatorial oversight of the Grateful Dead Archive, plan for and oversee the physical and digital processing of Archives related material, and promote the GDA to the public and facilitate its use by scholars, fans, and students.

Full disclosure here: When I saw this posting, I may or may not have proclaimed it the "best job ever posted on the SAA Career Center" on my twitter account. (This is, to be fair, not that hard of a thing to be.)

Naturally, this sort of thing doesn't go unnoticed by people who are not archivists. The posting was picked up by Cory Doctorow on Monday, and of course people on the site saw fit to complain about how silliness like this is why the UC system is over budget all of the time. Uhhh, way to not understand how university finance works at all there, buddy. Of course, the real shitstorm hit when, presumably learning of it from Boingboing, The Daily Show saw fit to mock the posting on its 11/11 show. Let's take a look:

Hot stuff. I can embed video on this thing. Suck it, twitter.

Anyway. FOR SHAME, JON STEWART! You pronounced "Archivist" incorrectly. This is, of course, not what most of the archives twitterati and commenters on the Daily Show website were primarily concerned about. The primary problem was with Stewart's characterization of the Archives profession as overpaid and overqualified for what they do, which is, according to him, determining whether or not to file something alphabetically or numerically. ("What?! Alphanumerically? Slow down, I don’t have a doctorate!") The current thread on the A&A list is 15 posts long, and, as these things do, has quickly escalated from writing him letters to making up videos mocking him from an archives perspective to calling for his head on a platter. (I may have made that last one up, but stay tuned.)

Can we calm down here and put things in perspective before we do anything dumb like having SAA write the Daily Show an official letter of disapproval? (Because he won't mock that on the show or anything.) As I see it, there are two issues at play here: one, the fact that Jon Stewart and the Daily Show writers are underinformed about the nature of the Archives profession (no argument here), and two, that they are using that lack of information to deliberately and maliciously denigrate the profession and the fact that most of the serious jobs require an MA or MLS of some sort. Whoa, Nelly. Let's think about this last one.

First of all, it IS a comedy news program. The Grateful Dead Archivist is sort of inherently a funny concept, but it's not something you can write a whole bit about. I think it likely that the writers of the Daily Show rely on librarians, archivists, and other information professionals to help them research their bits and put together clips and montages, so they're probably not as ignorant about the profession as they let on. Maliciously insulting their in-house info staff seems like a bad decision if they ever want to show videos on the show again, so I suspect that "for the sake of the bit" was invoked here somewhat.

(Though, of course, the need for additional education about what it is an Archivist actually does is always there. My girlfriend, 2 years after we started going out, still says my primary job is "telling people where to put their email". She's only half-joking.)

Second of all, is it possible that part of the reason for this outrage is that Stewart's comments hit a little close to home for people? Two-and-a-half years after leaving library school, I am still not entirely sure what I learned from the archives classes that is immediately useful for my everyday work (though of course the practicums WERE immediately useful). Provenance and Original Order? Do I really need a master's degree for that? Of course there's more to being an Archivist than alphabetizing and categorizing, but I feel like most of what I do at my job I learned from my on-site experiences rather than from the classes themselves. (EAD and MARC? National Geographic Internship. Preservation? Phillips Collection Internship. Reference and Outreach? Working at the UMD Archives.)

I will maybe, MAYBE concede that I got a lot out of my Records Management class, but I didn't really understand how to put it into practice until I got my EOP job and started writing records schedules. Even my appraisal skills, which are by far the most "abstract" of the main Archives/RM functions, I got mostly from my History coursework and evaluating which documents are likely to retain historical value, rather than from Archives coursework.

There's been a lot of talk of late about revamping the state of Archival education in this country to make sure that the knowledge and skills being taught are the ones that will serve future archivists well in their careers. There's been considerably less action on same, as task force after task force has concluded that it's not an immediate concern and that the idea of having ALA or SAA accredit Archives programs is probably an unnecessary expense. Maybe the mockery at the hands of Jon Stewart will get people to reevaluate this stance, at which point I will laugh and laugh. It's bad enough that the Daily Show, as a "fake" news outlet, is already one of the best real news sources out there; if we use him to justify stop putting off reevaluating archival education, it's just further proof that truth is stranger than fiction.

All that said, there is no such thing as bad publicity for Archives and Archivists. Also, that part about finding a Grateful Dead fan with exceptional organizational skills was pretty hilarious.

EDIT: "No one cares about how you pronounce the word "archivist."--Mark Matienzo, via Twitter

EDIT 2: The official Daily Show forum for discussing last night's episode is also good for some lulz. THE DAILY SHOW IS SERIOUS BUSINESS

I'm in ur kongres, openin ur gubmint

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Houston) — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:21:00 +0000

Change we can believe in:

The end may finally in sight to the seven-year battle historians and archivists have waged to overturn President Bush’s Executive Order 13233 of November 2001 that restricted access to presidential records. On January 7, 2009, the House of Representatives approved H.R. 35, the “Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2009,” by an overwhelmingly bi-partisan vote of 359-58. H.R. 35 was chosen by the House leadership as the first piece of substantive legislation passed in 2009 as a symbol of government transparency.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. For those of you not up with your archival issues, EO 13233 was passed by President Bush in November 2001 and allowed any president to withhold access to the records of any OTHER president "reflecting military, diplomatic, or national security secrets, Presidential communications, legal advice, legal work, or the deliberative processes of the President and the President's advisers, and to do so in a manner consistent with the Supreme Court's decisions in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S. 425 (1977), and other cases...".

For those of you who were wondering, that just about covers everything that a historian might possibly want to look at from a president's records. It's not up there with, say, EO 9066, but it is nonetheless a pretty odious directive, a pretty obvious subversion of the Presidential Records Act, and an extremely flagrant attempt to protect the legacy of Ronald Reagan, who, conveniently enough, would have had his papers released in 2001.

Welp, saddle up the horses, boys, 'cause it's time to go riding. Here are a few of the provisions of the act:

Overturn Bush Executive Order 13233. Huzzah, huzzah, we already knew this though. Moving on:
Establish a Deadline for Review of Records. No more of this 'waiting indefinitely for the president to give his permission' foolishness, which is always a good thing.
Limit the Authority of Former Presidents to Withhold Presidential Records.
Basically, EO 13233 said that if a former president didn't want his records released, he could tell the incumbent so and said incumbent would have to withhold the records. This was, of course, specifically inserted into the EO so that Democratic presidents could not overturn executive privilege for the papers of some of the, um, more 'ethically dubious' GOP CinCs.
No more! The incumbent MAY withhold the records, but is no longer required to do so. Obama, coincidentally, has promised to support this kind of transparency in government. I'd be sweating if I were Oliver North right now.
Require the President to Make Privilege Claims Personally. Not that former presidents have to physically go down to their presidential libraries and stop the researcher, but that any privilege claims expire once he does. In other words, Ronald Reagan DOUBLY has no way to withhold his papers now.
Eliminate Executive Privilege Claims for Vice Presidents. This is a pretty obvious F-U to Vice President Cheney. Not that I'm complaining.

A similar bill actually passed in the House in 2007, but died when President Bush threatened to veto. It is unlikely that President Obama will do the same. Assuming people in the senate are non-stupid, this will be a boon to archivists, historians, and the general public alike. I for one am very excited about HR 35. If you're an information professional, you should be, too.

Happy 2009!

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Houston) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:40:00 +0000

Well, since my girlfriend has updated her own infrequently-updated blog, I figure I should update mine. Happy New Year, folks! 2008 was a pretty darn good year for me, if I do say so myself. Not that you would know it from my posting record, which was... erm... sporadic. Sorry about that. I will attempt to update at least once a week from here on out as a New Years' Resolution. We'll see how that goes.

The first 'real' post of the New Year will probably be some musings on outreach and the difficulties posed by doing such when the records management position is 4 levels into the Library hierarchy. Look for that soon (I hope). Meanwhile, the big news for me personally is that I will be (probably) presenting at a conference in May. Stay tuned for that when I have talked to the program committee people to finalize.

Also, OCLC is really dumb

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Houston) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:01:00 +0000

I admittedly do not have much of a horse in this race, because as an archivist any cataloging I do is by definition unique, but this is still a dumb change:

I took a sometime this morning to read through the proposed changes as well as the FAQs, and essentially OCLC is looking for a way to tell libraries that they don’t own the data that’s in their own catalogs. In essence — this is what this policy comes down to. The policy wraps some very nice changes for non-members into the statement in order to hide some really sucky changes that I don’t believe that they have the ability to ask for or enforce. And OCLC has some real balls here, because starting in Feb., records downloaded from OCLC will potentially include a license statement. Per the FAQ:
Prospectively. As of the effective date of the Policy, every record downloaded from WorldCat will automatically contain field 996 populated with the following:
MARC:
996 $aOCLCWCRUP $iUse and transfer of this record is governed by
the OCLC® Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat® Records.
$uhttp://purl.org/oclc/wcrup
There is no need to add the 996 field to records by hand. OCLC systems will do this for you.
Retrospectively. For records that already exist in your local system, we encourage you to use the 996 field, which should have an explicit note like the examples below:
MARC:
996 $aOCLCWCRUP $iUse and transfer of this record is governed by
the OCLC® Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat® Records.
$uhttp://purl.org/oclc/wcrup

Hott. So, we pay you to give you copies of the records we catalog, and in return you tell us that those records, 95% of each of which is composed of factual information, now belong to you, the distributor, rather than the original cataloger. Oh, and by the way, "Use must not discourage the contribution of bibliographic and holdings data to WorldCat or substantially replicate the function, purpose, and/or size of WorldCat." Smoooth.

So, it appears that OCLC is positioning itself as the RIAA of the Library world in terms of its attitude towards intellectual property. Hey, how's that working out for the RIAA? I'm just askin'.

That said, I think I agree with the Annoyed Librarian that, at least for the short term, OCLC is going to win this fight, because any organization that can get libraries to pay for their service TWICE is pretty obviously much smarter than its clients, and because librarians as a group are not so good at effective advocacy on this kind of stuff. Still, from a PR perspective and from a perspective of using vs. fighting against Web 2.0, I suspect this will come back to bite OCLC in the ass down the road.

Yet another Obama giving up his BlackBerry post

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Houston) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:47:00 +0000

See, now, THIS is how presidents should take care of their email issues:

For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side — on most days, it was fastened to his belt — to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign.
“How about that?” Mr. Obama replied to a friend’s congratulatory e-mail message on the night of his victory.
But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

I do admit that it would be awesome for him to be the 'first e-mailing president', but it sounds like his records management team has suggested to him that this would not be a good idea. Which, fair enough, given how presumably the president has better things to do than check his email obsessively. But I do think that this shows that his staff is up on some of the information problems that could occur in a 21st century presidency, which is more than I can say about the incumbent.

Sarah Palin's e-mail chicanery (Warning: Political)

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Houston) — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:22:00 +0000

I thought we had enough of this from the CURRENT administration, but no.

Palin routinely uses a private Yahoo e-mail account to conduct state business. Others in the governor's office sometimes use personal e-mail accounts, too.
The practice raises questions about backdoor secrecy in an administration that vowed during the 2006 campaign to be "open and transparent."
[...]

She is allowed to keep e-mails confidential if they fall into certain categories, such as "deliberative process," said her press secretary, Bill McAllister.

[...]

"I don't hear any public clamor for access to internal communications of the governor's office," McAllister said.

No, no, Mr. McAllister, that's not how Public Records Laws work. The question is not whether there IS public clamor for the records; the question is whether there COULD be public clamor, say, I don't know, if she were to run for the Vice Presidency of the United States? Admittedly I have not read the Alaska Public Records Law, but I am reasonably certain that there is not a clause in there that says "unless it would be politically inconvenient." There is a reason these things are in place, you know.

Also, it's pretty clear to me that Gov. Palin and you both know that this is sort of a disingenuous argument at best, seeing as how the whole reason that she would use a Yahoo Account is so her emails wouldn't be trackable by the State of Alaska's email system.

No one in the Palin administration could say if the governor is saving her Yahoo e-mails. If she's emptying her e-mail trash, they are zapped from Yahoo's storage system within days or at the longest, months, Yahoo says.

"If you are asking do we have those e-mails, then the answer is no," said Anand Dubey, director of the state's Enterprise Technology Services. "We don't control Yahoo or Gmail or Hotmail or anything like that."

This to me seems awfully convenient, particularly in the wake of the 1100 emails that WERE on official Alaska servers which were withheld from a FOIA request on the grounds of 'executive privilege.' One has to wonder what is in the emails that aren't technically subject to Alaska public records laws. Except that they are. Unless the Governor's personal attorney says that they aren't. Hmmm.

I don't know. I just think it's very frustrating to give an email seminar in which you instruct people not to send business email from their personal accounts, and then read about a vice-presidential candidate for a major party who specifically instructs HER staff to do just that. It's enough to make a grown records manager cry.

Dean Dawson, state-records manager, is working on an e-mail-archive system for state employees, who tend to want to hang onto e-mail forever, he said. E-mail records should be kept as long as paper records of the same type — for instance, three years for general correspondence, he said. Top executives such as commissioners and the governor often must keep records longer, under state schedules.

Introducing Dean Dawson, ladies and gentlemen! The man with the most thankless job in the state of Alaska. (I would say 'in the United States', except you have to contend also with Missouri's records manager... or Texas's records manager... or the guy at NARA who has to archive the emails of the Bush Administration... Ah, right, this is why I am not working for the U.S. government!)

JOURNALISM! (Or,"Do a little more research before you mouth off")

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Houston) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:12:00 +0000

Oh, for Bob's sake. Alex Heard LOOKS like he is complaining in Slate today about the willy-nilly destruction of records, but in reality he is demonstrating a profound ignorance of how records management works. Some choice quotes:

The letter conjured up images of my file getting scrutinized by furrow-browed NARA scholars who decided that, alas, John R. Poole was not of sufficient historical interest to keep around.

Yeeesss. This would be called 'their job.' Believe it or not, most of what most agencies create IS junk! I know. I was shocked too.

Dismayed, I looked into how the Records Retention Plan works, with help from several generous FOIA experts. What they described sounded more like a Records Destruction Plan, since it allows the FBI to discard roughly 80 percent of its files at any given time. ... Though the NARA experts who helped create the plan tried to come up with a fair, workable system, the bottom line is that the FBI gets to trash mountains of historical source material without adequate oversight.

The oversight thing is a concern, yes, but the fact is that that roughly 80 percent of its files mostly IS junk. In fact, having worked with records for just over 4 years now, I'd venture that 80 percent is generous.

Like many people who make FOIA requests, I'm probably hypersensitive to the potential loss of any one file among millions,

Yep. You are. Look, it sucks that the archival profession can't save everything, but the fact is that archivists are overworked as it is, and our space requirements are never as large as we'd like them to be. If we didn't weed, we'd drown in paper and NONE of our users would be able to find ANYTHING.

The system's fundamentals make sense, I guess—very complicated sense—but to me the disturbing part comes at the end of the line. At some point 25 years after a case closes, a file that isn't marked "permanent" gets pulled and looked at by one or two people inside the FBI. There are no "knowledgeable representatives of the NARA" monitoring this crucial moment. If it's decided internally that the file isn't important, it's gone.

Umm... how are you determining that there are 'no knowledgeable representatives of NARA' within the FBI? You know, there may, in fact, be archivists within the FBI, and they may, in fact, know what they're doing (and, my guess is, they do work closely with NARA to determine what is important). I know that the FBI has a history of destroying files it doesn't want people to see, but you know, not ALL of its destruction is malicious.

Michael Ravnitzky, an FOIA researcher based in the Washington, D.C., area, is no fan of the Records Retention Plan and likens it to an open-ended manual for strip-mining a priceless public record.

Oh, because he's not biased AT ALL or anything.

But isn't the FBI destroying only junk? I doubt it. Ernie Lazar, an independent researcher in California whose particular interest is in far-right groups, sent me a list of "destroyed" responses he's received over the years from FBI headquarters and field offices. There are dozens. We'll never know if they were significant—they don't exist anymore—but they sure look interesting to me. In 1994, for example, the Baltimore field office destroyed a file called "Arab Participation and Influence of Hate Literature in the United States."

See above snark. Also, you REALLY can't judge the value of a folder by its name. For example, we have a ton of folders in our Student Affairs files about student organizations, but for the most part these are just registration forms. Not remotely interesting, but we keep them for evidential value. Based on the signal:noise ratio over most of the records that have been created since the 1950s, my guess is that these were similarly useless.

Even if the Records Retention Plan team had scrutinized every page, I wouldn't trust their ability to decide now what might be significant to someone 100 years down the road.

...I don't even know how to respond to this. Do you think maybe somebody on the team had a background in history? Maybe? And no, that doesn't make their judgment infallible, but it's not a bad start. Also, please keep in mind that given the volume of documentation that's been produced since 1950, and given the volume of it that HAS been saved, the chances are pretty good that we're saving SOMETHING of import to future historians.

There's no general index to the NARA holdings that lists this information using comprehensible subject headings like "John Birch Society" or "Judge Crater."

Look, I'm sure that the NARA folks would LOVE to have a general index of their holdings. I'm sure they're working on it. Their entire job is to provide service and information to the public, for crying out loud. But part of their providing service and information is dealing with people who are whining because they haven't created that index yet, which, you know, takes time.

My final gripe: The volume of the FBI files isn't that mind-boggling.... The half-million cubic feet of FBI documents from 1981 would have fit into about a dozen McMansions, packed floor to ceiling. The stuff was already cataloged and cross-referenced, so a simpler strategy would have been to keep it all together....To protect this priceless collection of FBI material, all it would have taken was shelves, guards, and about 20,000 smoke alarms.

Uhh... I don't think you realize how much material that actually is. A really good archivist can process a cubic foot of material in about 2 hours, if the material is well-organized to begin with. By this measure, the 500,000 c.f. of material will take 1 million man hours to complete, or 125,000 work days of 8 hours each. I REALLY don't think NARA wants to devote that much time to one collection. Also, you do know that shelves, guards, and smoke alarms cost money, right? You know, that thing that NARA doesn't have a ton of?

Gah. I'm no defender of the FBI's penchant for secrecy, but this is a kerfluffle over nothing. Records get destroyed! Sometimes the record you want is a casualty! It happens! It happens a lot LESS now that retention schedules are in place! There's probably SOME malice involved, but I doubt very much that the FBI said "let's cover our tracks by destroying every minor file in our collection, muahahaha." More likely, they said "We're drowning in paper, help us Obi-Wan NARA, you're our only hope."

This is exactly why I think every academic who works in the archives should take a course on appraisal. I mean HONESTLY.

Library School 0, Brad's Girlfriend 1

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Houston) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 18:49:00 +0000

Early this week, I decided that my current approach to scheduling offices' records-- i.e. "we need to bring you into compliance with State records law"-- wasn't working for me as well as I had hoped, and so chose to tackle the problem wearing my archivist hat instead. Instead of using the stick of compliance to get offices to go along with records scheduling, I would use the carrot of Immortality! (That sounds like a deranged Dungeons and Dragons item. Anyway.) To this end, I sent out emails to several academic departments, indicating that the UWM archives wanted to do an appraisal of those departments' records for addition to our collections and the historical record of UWM.

Amazingly, I actually received replies from a number of the emailed folks. Even more amazingly, the one surveyee thus far has been more than happy to give me subject files, syllabi files, departmental review stuff, and other types of records that I have been trying to get into the archives since I arrived at UWM. Even MORE more amazingly, when I talked about the prospect of writing records schedules for some of the non-archival files, they warmed to the topic! "We haven't known what to do with these," they said. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, it seems. Who knew?

Flash forward 20 minutes from that meeting. I tell my girlfriend, who is a Rhetoric Ph.D. student at UWM, about this epiphany of mine. The following exchange occurs:

Me: Isn't that cool?
Her: Um, Brad?
Me: ...What?
Her: That's called 'rhetoric'. Talking to people to get the desired result.
Me: ...Really?
Her: Yep. So I already knew what you just told me. But I knew you would get there eventually!
Me: ...Epic fail on my part, right?
Her: Pretty much, yeah.

So, yeah. I feel pretty dumb now. On the plus side, I am slowly but surely developing tactics to better cultivate donors. (At first, I thought the acquisition of University Records was going to be easier than manuscript curating because they HAD to give them to me. How naive I was in October.) On the minus side, this really IS the kind of thing they should be teaching us in Library School, rather than Dialog or semantic frames or similar nonsense. I want my money back. (Well, not really, I did learn stuff in my actual archives courses. On the other hand, it WAS a lot of money...)

Speaking of information architecture, I've just read David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous and have some thoughts, but those are for a different post.

Thoughts on the AHA Archives Wiki, or, "There's no such thing as bad publicity"

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Houston) — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:56:00 +0000

Kate Theimer over at ArchivesNext has alerted me and much of the rest of the archival community to the American Historical Association's Archives Wiki, which according to the site is "intended to be a clearinghouse of information about archival resources throughout the world". I admit that I am a bit ashamed to not have heard about this through my history contacts, but then I am an archivist first, a records manager second, and a historian bringing up the rear, so I'm not TOO ashamed. I had meant to respond to her post immediately but for one reason or another did not do so. Happily, David Mattison's post on the subject on the Ten Thousand Year Blog reminded me that I did want to talk about it. So let's to it:

Do I think it's a useful resource at the moment? Not particularly.
Do I think it can BECOME a useful resource? Absolutely.

Kate's first impression of the site is that "The site has potential, but I have a few reservations." I think some of her reservations are spot on: the initial population of the site is a bit random, the formatting on some of the pages is irregular and a little disquieting, it's unclear how much administrative control the AHA is going to wield, etc. But these, ultimately, are problems that are going to be solved in time if enough archivists and historians learn about the existence of the site. Wikipedia, to use the most immediately accessible example, is not a foolproof, 100% accurate site by any means, but it works at least as a quick ready reference source or a link to more authoritative sources because it has a large community of editors and contributors who are willing to examine the articles and edit them for accuracy, clean them up, etc. If people use this wiki, the same thing will happen here. In fact, because in theory you have academics and professionals using this, there's the potential for a lot more information-rich pages! So, yes, legitimate concerns, but I think ones that are solvable by the nature of Web 2.0.

I'm a little more disturbed by the philosophical reservations Kate voices on her blog:

I am all for having a wiki that has information about different kinds of archives (although most of the basic information would probably have been pretty accessible through a Google search), but I wonder how eager historians will be to share really detailed information about their experiences with collections. (Cheap hotels, maybe, but not tips on how to get access to “the good stuff.”) I had the impression that most historians were rather close-mouthed about their sources. Or is my stereotype of the historian just as unfair as the stereotypes of archivist that I complain about regularly in this blog?
And, to play devil’s advocate, how much of this background information is really useful or necessary to be gathered in this format? Do historians really not know where to go for archival resources in their area, and if they don’t, would they really discover an archives by this kind of broad categorization? (As opposed to a more targeted Google search?) And, I think most researchers wanting information about hours, policies, and contacts would always rely more heavily on the archives’ own web site than on the information in this wiki (which might very well be out of date).

Sorry, Kate, but I think your stereotype is unfair. It's true that there's some degree of hoarding the 'good stuff' in the profession, particularly in newly-opened, important collections, but I think there is much more collaboration in the profession than the above would seem to imply. For one thing, as soon as you publish your article or monograph or whatever, people are going to know where you found your stuff anyway (at least if you're being intellectually honest about it); for another, giving access tips to the material you used, or related material, helps people build on your argument and expands the discourse of that particular subject. Even if they disagree with you, they are still bringing your argument into the forefront of that particular journal or collection-- and in that case, that's free publicity and prestige for you in the profession. There ARE people who hide the path to their sources-- but I haven't come across them in my historical research, or even in talking to other people in my history program.

As far as the necessity of this resource, I would have KILLED for something like this in undergrad, or even (to a lesser extent) in grad school. I think EVENTUALLY historians know where to go for archival resources in their area, but what about those who are just starting out? What about historians who are, for whatever reason or another, compelled to seek out archives in a different region? In one of my undergrad history seminars, I wrote a paper about small-town brass bands, but it was not nearly as comprehensive as it could have been because I did not know about which towns had archives, and even then I did not know which had collections relevant to my paper. A resource like this would have at least helped me to determine where some of these collections MIGHT be, and depending on how effectively the wiki is used, even may have helped me find some relevant collections outright.

Now, the immediate counterargument to THIS argument is that these kinds of directories already exist in various forms, either as entries in NUCMC or as listed in Terry Abraham's Repository of Primary Sources. Honestly? Before David's post, I never knew the latter existed. Which is, I think, the point of the AHA Wiki-- the more places that list your repository, the more exposure your repository gets, the more likely a researcher who only uses one repository list will find your particular archives, and-- thanks to the algorithm used by Google-- the more likely that a Google search will turn up your archives. And what if your archives doesn't HAVE a website? Well, shame on you, because it's really easy to set up a website. But meanwhile, if your repository is listed here with even rudimentary information about hours, etc., that's better than not having any listing at all.

This is definitely a project which, much as I tell my Records Management clients, won't happen without user buy-in and effort. But if the wiki DOES get the buy-in which it needs-- and I think it will-- I think it will be a great resource for historians, particularly those historians who are new to the profession and haven't created the scholarly network to get the word-of-mouth information that this wiki is meant to imitate/supplement. In fact, I think I'm going to put UWM's info up there right now.

ETA: Jeanne Kramer-Smythe has some interesting musings about structured data and the AHA Archives Wiki at Spellbound Blog. As someone who's trying to configure an ERMS for an entire university I sympathize with her views, but I think having structured data for this kind of project is less critical than having it for the purposes of records retention and disposition. I am happy, however, to be convinced otherwise.

Zimbra, E-mail management, and all that rot

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Houston) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 22:27:00 +0000

Good morning, campers! This post is being written via Zimbra, the engine underpinning PantherLink, the new email/collaboration suite that is being rolled out at UWM sometime next month (and which allows direct blog posting! Very cool). UWM's IT department is surprisingly understanding of records management needs and concerns, considering some of the horror stories I heard last week at the UWROC semi-annual meeting, and they have given me a test account to play with and check out the records management capabilities of the system. So far? I like it, with a few reservations. Not really surprising, considering it's an email system first, a collaboration system second, and a records management application last-- but it's still a bit distressing, considering how much of a problem email management is for both archivists and records managers.

So, without further ado:

THE GOOD
--Tags! Oh man, tags are exciting, and they're implemented here very well. Unlike a lot of tag-enabled applications, which make you input tags separately for each email, Zimbra lets you tag a document, then saves that tag in a visual tag library with color-coded icons. This is REALLY useful for taxonomy, because if a user sees tags, and they are readily available for application to emails, that user is more likely to apply them to the emails they receive. This, in turn, makes searching for e-discovery, reference, etc. That much more likely. Well done Zimbra!
--The Ajax-based UI is a gigantic improvement over the PantherMail interface currently in use. Essentially, what Ajax does for the client is to allow for full interactivity in email management. In practical purposes, this means that things I was doing with Thunderbird-- dragging files, right-clicking to get email properties, etc.-- can be done through the web interface. This is fantastic for standardizing RM training for emails (more people are likely to use the webclient, which in turn means that I don't have to present three scenarios), and also makes it more likely that emails will be dragged to appropriate tags/folders. Speaking of which:
--The foldering schema in Zimbra allows for multi-level hierarchy, which is something not even Thunderbird does. This is great for records management purposes, because it allows users to organize by subject and date, which can (in theory) correspond to records series and disposition date. Of course, this is all still dependent on user application, but to a certain extent this can be partially automated by:
--Message filtering, which appears as a big blue plus sign on every email. With a little training on setting up filters, people can send emails from a certain address or containing certain subject terms directly to the appropriate folder, do not pass Go, do not collect $200 or create inbox clutter. I tell people to use Thunderbird because it has this functionality, but if the web client ALSO has the functionality people may be inclined to use that AND to set up filters.
--Advanced search capabilities built right in, including the use of all appropriate metadata (including tags) as well as keyword search. I don't need to mention how nice this is.

THE BAD
--As far as I can tell, there is no mechanism for actually archiving emails. This is obviously a major flaw from a records management standpoint, exacerbated by the problem from an IT standpoint of people keeping everything on the email server again instead of downloading to a departmental server. This, in turn, will lead to more "reduce your inbox size"-type emails from IT, which will lead to more difficulties with record emails being destroyed. I am hoping this will be addressed in the PantherLink meetings to which I have been invited, but I (admittedly no techie, but at the very least a "clueful user") couldn't figure it out from here.
--A lot of functionality-- but I wonder if that may also lead people to conclude it's too busy. Right now, I count 21 buttons and/or tabs to push on the main screen, and I suspect people-- particularly non-tech-savvy people-- might get intimidated by that, thus not using the RM functionality of the program at all. Similarly:
--The Ajax UI is radically different from the HTML interface being used by the PantherMail system currently in place. For me this is good because I like new and shiny things. For a lot of people this will be bad because they've gotten in the groove of their old email system and don't want to learn a new one. Ultimately, this will result in a lot of people not using the RM functionality out of sheer orneriness. In addition:
--While some aspects of the UI are very user-friendly, like dragging files and creating folders, others are, well, not. For example, it took me about 15 minutes to figure out how to even CREATE a tag, let alone how to apply a pre-existing tag to an already-existing email. This will ultimately mean A TON of training resources expended on my part and on the part of UITS. Speaking of which:
--Zimbra does not, as far as I can tell, include functionality for top-down tag dissemination or categorization. This is problematic because if I don't have the power to make tags immediately available for insertion into people's clients, they will invent their own tags, categories, and folders. This works well for one-computer searching, but not so well for multi-computer searching of the kind that universities often have to do. To a certain extent I can ameliorate this by posting a list of suggested tags on the RM website or something, but again, it's a case of "you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make him drink".

THE UGLY
--The Help menu, in addition to not working right at the moment, takes you to a page on purging the trash folder when you click on "archiving email" in the index listing of topics. Yikes. I hope that's just a link error and not what passes for records management at the Zimbra corporate offices, 'cause if so I think a couple of fellows named Sarbanes and Oxley are going to want to have a few words with them.

So, my initial impressions? As an email management system, very good! This will help a lot of people keep their emails straight, which means less work for me in explaining to people how to find that one email. As an enterprise records management system, less good! There doesn't seem to be any account taken for disposition, workflow, or even exporting of email into a program that CAN do that stuff. Which is fine, considering that Zimbra didn't design the client to incorporate disposition scheduling or archiving, so I can't really blame them for doing that. But it also means more work for me in attempting to come up with a workaround for the lack of university-wide control. If it's helping people organize their emails it's probably a no-score win, but when people start deleting stuff to meet quotas... Oy.

Anyway, this is all subject to change after the PantherLink meetings and/or the actual rollout. We'll see what happens.

ETA: Apparently, I'm not the first person to note that there's no archiving tool in the Zimbra Client, as a little poking around on their website yielded a link to Zimbra Archiving and Discovery. So I stand partially corrected. However, I will keep the original concern up in the post because this is an add-on rather than an automatically included part of the Zimbra email client, and at $24/mailbox, I'm not sure that UITS will be entirely happy to invest in that. Also, the archiving/discovery functionality is administrator-based, which DOES take the onus off of users to archive their email (good) but relies entirely on the discretion of the IT professionals to determine which mailboxes and email messages are worth keeping (potentially not so good). Anyway, I reserve judgment until such time as I actually meet with the PantherLink folks and voice these concerns.

Cry Havoc and Loose the 7th-Graders of War!

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Houston) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 16:59:00 +0000

(Yeah, one person in the entire universe will get why I chose that particular title. Considering there are all of about 6 people who actually read this blog, though, I am not yet terribly worried about an abundance of in-jokes. So it goes.)

Yesterday, the UWM Archives played host to a veritable horde of 7th graders from a local Milwaukee middle school, as a way of helping said horde with their National History Day projects. Let's get this out of the way right now: God I'm old. These kids, with a couple of exceptions, seemed so YOUNG, even though most of them were probably 12 or 13 (which, at the top end, is still almost 13 years younger than me). Don't believe the hype about kids growing up faster these days, because it's a damn dirty lie. I know that as archivists go I am a mere sprout myself, but yikes. Somebody get me my walker.

That said, it was a pleasure to open up the archives to these students, whose behavior ran counter to what I have come to expect from children that age. For the most part, these students came in with interesting and well-fleshed out topics, and they were very attentive regarding the Archives staff's mini-Bibliographic Instruction and respectful of the materials. Our reference archivist was wished a mass "Merry Christmas" (I didn't think kids still did that at that age), and all of my students were very respectful and even thanked me on their way out (I REALLY didn't think kids did that! Though perhaps working in a public library for a time has biased me). It was, overall, a lot less frightening than I thought it was going to be, and makes me think there may yet be hope for the future of humanity. (I reserve final judgment, however, until I see what these kids are like WITHOUT their teacher hovering in the next room.)

Overall, I think it's a great idea to get kids interested in archives this early. Everybody knows what a library is, but I had no idea what an archive was for until COLLEGE, and I didn't seriously consider it as a profession until the second half of that. Getting kids into the archives, or at the very least using archival material, is a great way, from my perspective, of increasing the exposure of both individual archives and the profession as a whole. Early exposure to archives makes it more likely that the student will become interested in the collections, use them or other archives later in life, tell other people about this cool rare stuff tucked away in the library, etc. etc. "Give me a child until the seventh grade, and I will give you the man," as the saying goes. Or something like that.

On the other hand, getting students that young to use archives EFFECTIVELY can be a challenge for archives who are used to serving more seasoned researchers. I had to send a couple of my students back out to the library because they did not have adequate background on their topic to use their collections correctly. More needed guidance on how to do research more efficiently-- he was using a scrapbook and reading all of the articles contained within cover to cover, rather than skimming the headlines for useful articles first. And I think all of the students needed some guidance regarding using the documentation not only for informational value, but also for evidential value (I pointed out to one group, for example, that child labor permits, by the nature of the fields it contained, told the researcher a lot about what educational expectations were at that time, and they were amazed). These issues are not the fault of the students, but merely stem from an understandable lack of experience.

I think there's a lot of opportunity in getting younger researchers into the archives, but I also think that there's a lot more preparation involved on the part of the archives and its archivists. What follows, then, is a brief list of observations and/or suggestions on some ways of doing this effectively, based on my experience here and at other institutions.

1) Familiarize them with primary documents before bringing them to the archives. This is something that the teacher can do either independently or with the help of the archives he intends to have his students use. There are a ton of published primary sources out there, and before the younger researcher steps foot in the archives he/she should have at least a rudimentary grasp of what a primary document is and what it can or can't tell them. (Particularly important to impress upon students at this point is that EVERYBODY has a point of view, and just because it's a primary source doesn't make it gospel truth.) Alternately, individual repositories can pull together documents on a topic of particular interest and make copies of those documents available to the class in question. For example, the Truman Presidential Library has produced a number of Student Research Files, which are artificial collections pulled together by archivists on certain broad topics, such as the decision to drop the atomic bomb or the Marshall Plan, that allow students to "get their hands dirty" and play with the files, but allow the students to skip the often tedious process of combing collections to find relevant documents.

2a) Encourage preliminary research on the part of the students. This, I think, is something we could have done better here. If students have picked their own research topics, as was the case with the students we hosted yesterday, they are going to get a lot more out of the archival documentation if they have the background to contextualize it. During our arrangement with the teacher(s), we as archivists should encourage them to require students to do at least a little library research on their topic before coming to the archives. After all, this is going to be an expectation if students decide to do research in the archives later in their academic careers; why should we encourage bad habits early on?

2b) Provide background information for the provided material. In the cases where archivists pick out specific collections for students to browse for an assignment, it seems similarly incumbent upon us to give the students enough information to use the collections effectively. The finding aid header notes, including scope/content and biographical/administrative history notes, should be the bare minimum for this purpose. Ideally, archivists making specific collections available to students should write a much extended history note for the students to use in determining what in the documents at which they are looking is important.

3) Pick out interesting material ahead of time. In this case, by contrast, our reference archivist did an excellent job. The students we hosted provided us with some general topics, and in almost all cases she was able to find and pull portions of collections that were directly relevant to what they were studying. Eventually, of course, you want to have the students actually learning the entirety of the research process-- the thrill of discovery is often the best part of research, I find-- but the tedium of trudging through the files you don't need is usually the worst part of it. As the idea is to get them hooked on how cool archives can be, it's probably best at this point to eliminate the less-glamorous parts of it.

4) Assist the students with basic research skills. We provided the students with finding aids for their collections in case they wanted to conduct further research on their topics. None of my students had topics in which the UWM archives is particularly deep, but a number of the other archivists' students did, and they were very helpful with showing the students how to use a finding aid, pointing them in the direction of related material, etc. Meanwhile, it is useful to reinforce the tips and tricks that archivists/historians/whoever use to maximize the efficiency of their research, such as skimming, looking for evidential value, selecting pithy and appropriate examples, etc. With luck, the teacher has cooperated on #1 of this list, and this will be review for most students.

4a) Get students in the citing habit. All of the archivists working with the students were (as far as I can tell) extremely conscientious about making sure the collections were cited correctly, which is as it should be. During my term as a teaching assistant for History of Science, by far the most common error students made on their papers was undercitation or incorrect citation of materials. I couldn't do much about it except write little chastising notes on the papers, because you can't fail an entire class! But this is, to my mind, not a matter of malicious intent so much as it is a matter of not knowing when, where, or how to cite properly. If you emphasize the correct manner of citing material-- and especially the correct matter of citing archival material, which has extremely confusing rules by its very nature-- you get them started on the road to having it be second nature by the time they get to college. You're welcome, History TAs of tomorrow.

5) Remember your audience! I definitely used words like "pertinent", "provenance", and "promulgate", to use just the examples that start with P, when briefing the students on the rules of the archives, what it was an archivist did, and how they could best use the collections with which we had provided them. Cut to 10 minutes later, when I happened to glance at the notes of one of my students, which included a reminder to look up the word "pauper." Oops. Fortunately one of the other archivists said later that she did the same thing, so I didn't feel AS bad, but that just drives home the point that you can't talk to 7th graders the same way you talk to academics or undergraduate researchers. It's not a matter of bringing yourself down to their level or a question of oversimplification, but you really have to put in a concerted effort to remember who you're talking to, and then adjust your vocabulary and/or phrasing accordingly.

None of the above, of course, should be taken as gospel, coming as it does from one experience with a class of 7th graders, some work on student research files for the Truman Library, and some reference experience with a surprise class of undergraduates all coming in to do the same assignment. Still, I thought I would share my observations of what could be taken away from the experience in the hopes that someone will find it useful. I, for one, would love to hear other people's experiences with archives use by children and/or young adults. If nothing else, comments on that might be useful to pass back for the next time we have a younger-than-average research group.

I suppose the same principle of getting to 'em while they're young could also apply to records management. Maybe. On the other hand, I kind of doubt 12 and 13 year olds are really going to be all that interested in retention schedules and file management schema...

Michael Gorman makes me cry

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Houston) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:33:00 +0000

Not strictly archives or RM, but important nonetheless-- anyone reading this blog is no doubt at least passing familiar with the Library of Congress' recent report on the future of bibliographic control, or are at least aware that it exists. I haven't read it, because cataloging is not STRICTLY my job, but it is an interest of mine, particularly as regards value-added finding aids and subject terms in 6xx MARC fields (which, I should note, the UWM archives adds as a matter of course to its HTML and EAD finding aids. Good on us!)

Predictably, Michael Gorman weighs in on the regressive side of the argument (h/t Karen Schneider):

The simplistic idea is that vast numbers of electronic documents can be catalogued effectively by having their creators apply uncontrolled terms in a few simple categories. In other words, that the results achieved by cataloguing using controlled vocabularies and the bibliographic structures of catalogues— complex, labor-intensive, skilled activities—can be achieved on the cheap and without the use of those essential structures. It is as though a school of cuisine—let us call it cuisine dégoŭtante—arose that prescribed only seventeen ingredients used randomly in random proportions mixed by people with no knowledge of cooking using random temperatures.

...Wow. There are no words. We want to talk about simplistic? How about reducing folksonomy to an anarchic, uncontrolled and uncontrollable straw man? I think that everybody's favorite technophobic ex-ALA president is conveniently ignoring the fact that NOBODY IS PROPOSING ELIMINATING CONTROLLED VOCABULARY. Of COURSE folksonomy is less exact than LCSH-- that isn't the point of it. Controlled Vocabulary is amazing for precision purposes, but if you don't KNOW about the terms it's not that helpful. Tagging, by contrast, allows users to determine what about the document is important to THEM, and note it that way. Remember them? The people we're supposed to be serving?

Yes, it's not perfect, and you get a lot of variations on the same term that would be eliminated if you controlled vocabulary. This is why you have professionals, to go through and consolidate stuff like that into terms people can use. Meanwhile, the users who are contributing these terms are looking at these documents from angles that we as professional librarians/archivists may not have even considered, the addition of which brings document recall way up. Precision without recall is not good either!

I am also a big fan of his objections to FRBR:

FRBR may have some merit as a way of looking at the theory of cataloguing—it has little as a foundational document for creating a cataloguing code. Never mind that the structure of bibliographic records set out in AACR2/ISBD is well established, accepted by scholars and other catalogue users for decades, and with minor flaws in concept and expression that could easily be corrected—it works in practice, but does it work in theory?

Because every library user has always been able to find stuff in AACR-compliant catalogs quickly and easily! After all, if a system has been in place for decades, it must be effective, right? It couldn't possibly be because conservatives in the Library world have a vested interest in not seeing it change, because then they would need a new skill set, right? Nah. Couldn't be.

My favorite, favorite complaint of his, however, is the following:

Fourth, the draft RDA is an editorial disaster. Many of its “guidelines” (rules are passé to these people) are incomprehensible, internally inconsistent, and belied by their examples. I read more than 60 pages very carefully and came up with 15 pages of editorial errors.

That would be why it is called a *draft*, rather than a publishable document. Are you really so hard up for ways to attack this document that you need to attack grammatical problems?

I'm sure the document isn't perfect, but ironically Gorman's post only makes me want to read it more and/or endorse it. Roy Tennant, I think, sums it up well:

I no longer believe in the future of bibliographic control. I no longer believe that the term "bibliographic" encompasses the universe in which we should be interested, and I no longer think "control" is either achievable or even desirable. We have entered the age of "descriptive enrichment" and we'd better get bloody well good at it.

Damn skippy. Of course, considering that Mr. Gorman is the mind behind "Revenge of the Blog People", (which has always sounded to me like the title of an awesome B-movie), I don't expect any of the sound and fury on this issue to change his mind, either. Oh well.

Yeah... that went well.

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Houston) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 21:05:00 +0000

*clears out cobwebs* Hi, folks. I said I was going to actually update this blog, but that did not so much happen. Well, that changes now! Possibly. Maybe.

In any case. Since my introductory post waaaay back in August, I have been hired as Records Archivist for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, so this blog is going to take a slightly different turn than I originally envisioned. As Records Archivist, I am responsible for maintaining, processing, and providing access to the records produced by the various offices on campus. But wait, there's more! I am also the University Records Officer (The title on my business cards), which in Wisconsin means that I am the representative of the State Archivist on the University and pass along his permission (actually the permission of the Public Records Board) to destroy records according to state law. Furthermore, my OFFICIAL title is Academic Archivist I, which means I ALSO deal with manuscript collections that pertain to the university but aren't actual university records, such as the records of Student Organization. As you can tell, I wear a bunch of different hats in this job. And yes, all of them are silly.

As a result of the above, this blog is going to have a very definite Records Management bias-- I will talk about scheduling, policy development, records surveys, General Records Schedule development, e-records disposition, and training and outreach issues. But, again, because my official title is as an ARCHIVIST, I will also take on archives-specific issues of access systems, appraisal strategies, description and cataloging (I still <3 EAD, even if my job doesn't involve me using it a lot), reference, and fun stuff like format issues and exhibit design. Plus, if all else fails, I'll just talk about what I'm working on right now. Because, I gotta say, guys, this job is pretty great and most of the time that will actually be interesting.

For example: Right now I am doing preliminary appraisal and writing a processing plan for a collection we received from University Relations. This collection is all photographs, which I've had some experience with, but never with anything this extensive-- and it's great. Part of it is publication files from UWM newsletters and such, but most of it is detailed subject files-- campus scenes and important/yearly events and celebrity visits and important people on campus and aerials of Milwaukee. This is a fantastic collection, I don't mind telling you. I kind of envy the student who's going to be working on this collection for her field study-- she's going to be the one who really gets to go in-depth looking at the photos and doing the cool arrangement and description work (although, as her site advisor, presumably I will have something to do with it). It will be interesting to see how she chooses to approach the collection in arranging and describing it, and I'm excited to get this collection ready for the big show (i.e. the Processed Collections page).

So yeah, that's me right now. Doing some appraisal, meeting with some offices, writing some Records Retention and Disposition Authorities for office approval, and, you know, writing the blog. Oh! And doing research on email preservation, more about which later. Right now I should get back to work.

Hi!

noreply@blogger.com (Brad Houston) — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 20:29:00 +0000

Welcome to ze blog. First, the title: the term 'guybrarian' is sometimes used, to varying degrees of tongue-in-cheek, to denote a male who happens to be a librarian, a traditionally female profession (and still dominated by women, if my library school classes are any indication). Technically, as a May 2007 recipient of an MLS and soon-to-be employment as a librarian or archivist, this term does apply to me.

Except I hate the term Guybrarian.

Not only is it stupid, it reinforces the stereotype of archives/library work as a female profession, suggesting that it is somehow 'normal' if a woman ends up being a librarian, but if a man is in this line of work it's unusual or bizarre somehow. Nonsense. Do we still use the terms 'woman doctor' or 'woman lawyer'? (We DO still use the term 'male nurse', but that's a whole other rant altogether). Why should an unnecessary differentiation be necessary in this case? Yes, yes, I know, 'tongue in cheek', I even admitted such in my introduction, but words have power. If I want to be a male librarian or a male archivist, it is my right to have that career choice be considered normative by society. (If you have to use a gender-specific term, I prefer 'libratorr', which at least has the benefit of not sounding completely idiotic.)

Anyway! This blog will serve as a source for my professional musings as I enter the field of libraries, archives, and all other things information-sciency. For right now, this means blogging the Society of American Archivists Conference that is happening this week in Chicago. In future, expect book reviews, observations on working with special collections and/or records, Web 2.0 stuff, training reflections, and other such things as are appropriate for a library/archives blog. See you in Chicago!