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

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

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!

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

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

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)

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")

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.