CSI: Archives

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

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!)