Tag: Eira Tansey

Interview with Eira Tansey about “A Green New Deal for Archives”

Today’s post is an interview with Eira Tansey, with questions formulated by Burkely Hermann, Metadata Librarian for the National Security Archive and current I&A Blog Coordinator.
 
Eira Tansey is a researcher and archivist who focuses on climate change impacts on cultural heritage and archives. She also founded Memory Rising, in December 2022, which provides archival, consulting, and research services for humanities and cultural organizations, and worked in academic libraries from 2008 to 2023, first at the Louisiana Research Collection of Tulane University Library, and more recently at the Archives and Rare Books Library of the University of Cincinnati. This post is an interview with Tansey about her recently published report “A Green New Deal for Archives,” which was published by CLIR in July.

Question 1: The public policy program, which you propose in your report, outlines three foundational principles for a Green New Deal for Archives (increasing permanent staffing for archives “that steward vital public records”, “create a nationwide plan for collection continuity and emergency response,” and developing “climate change documentation projects organized by watersheds”). Do you envision this program as applying to community archives or activist archives, in the United States, which are not formal institutions? 

Eira Tansey: In a Green New Deal for Archives policy platform I think there’s an important role for community archives to play in documenting watersheds and local environmental problems. Community and activist archives can do this in ways that government archives likely could not or would not. Even in the original Historical Records Survey which I explore in the publication, WPA workers did important work to identify archives from informal institutions. I think that work can and should be replicated in a Green New Deal for Archives.

With that said, there is a reason why I put the first priority as increasing staffing at archives that steward vital public records, because I think this is the most important priority facing American archives. To be clear, vital records have a specific definition: “a record necessary to begin recovery of business after a disaster, as well as a record necessary to protect the assets, obligations, and resources of an organization” and “a record that documents significant life events, including births, deaths, marriages, and divorces.”

Vital records are usually stewarded by public-facing archives like local, state, and federal government archives. Without the preservation and access of vital public records, we are at major risk of losing individual rights and the collective ability to hold public institutions accountable. Like the original New Deal that emphasized the importance of strengthening government institutions as a means to better serve the public (instead of primarily relying on the private sector), I believe we need to apply similar thinking to meet the scale of climate change adaptation in archives.

My stance on this is shaped by my professional trajectory, which comes from working in academic libraries for 15 years until I left earlier this year to build my business. In my last role I was the records manager for one of the largest public universities in the state of Ohio for nearly a decade. Records management work, even in higher education, has far more in common with the kind of archives work carried out by government archivists than a topical focused curatorial collecting model. Even though my institution was legally mandated by Ohio law to carry out records management, and retention scheduling directly supported our most popular use area – university archives – I received zero dedicated budget resources for records management. Meanwhile collections of non-institutional materials that had comparatively little use had endowed funds. This led me to appreciate how the records that receive the most use and are required to be managed according to law rarely receive the resources needed to do this work effectively, and are especially vulnerable to becoming unfunded mandates.

In my city of Cincinnati, we do not have a municipal archive that makes the records of the city easily available to the public. So based on my own local experience, I’m not convinced that formal institutional archives are always receiving the support they need to make the records of government and public institutions accessible and accountable to local residents. In many cases, they don’t exist to begin with.

Librarians – regardless of where they work – understand that public libraries are integral to the larger enterprise of librarianship and that public libraries are an essential part of the democratic experiment. I’d like to see archivists – regardless of where they work – embrace the same kind of support for government and other archives that serve the larger public. This is why although I hope A Green New Deal for Archives will resonate with all archivists, I assert that the priority needs to be on bolstering the capacity of archives that have a broad public mandate.

Question 2: In your view, how should readers, who agree with your “Green New Deal for Archives” public policy proposal, share their support? 

Eira Tansey: Learning how to advocate on behalf of archives to elected officials is really important. Within SAA, the Committee on Public Policy has done great work on this front, especially with the Archives on the Hill event that happens when SAA meets in Washington DC.

I have been excited to have some encouraging recent conversations with Congressional staffers about the importance of archives. There are a lot of folks in Congress who care both about climate change and archives, but they don’t necessarily connect the dots between how archives can both identify climate risks and help communities be more resilient in the face of climate disaster. It’s up to archivists to have these conversations and put this issue squarely in front of our elected officials.

Question 3: If you could make a change (or changes) to the core values statement (which states that archivists “must necessarily involve an ongoing awareness of the impact of archival work on the environment”) or recent strategic plan of the Society of American Archivists, based on what you have written in your report, what would you change?

Eira Tansey: SAA’s Core Values statement includes Sustainability, and that section is very thoughtfully worded. However, the current Strategic Plan does not specifically address or name environmental concerns or climate change among its activities. I’d like to see this change in future iterations. For example, many of the strategic plan actions rightfully focus on workforce issues. There is a climate change link here – as increasingly severe and frequent disasters disproportionately impact more vulnerable communities, how will this impact hiring and retention of archivists? Climate change is already affecting our work, and will only continue to do so. Our strategic plan should reflect those realities so we can prepare and respond accordingly.

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Archivists on the Issues: Creating Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation: A Workshop

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. The following post is from Laura Alagna, Digital Preservation Librarian at Northwestern University; Keith Pendergrass, Digital Archivist at Baker Library Special Collections at Harvard Business School; Walker Sampson, Assistant Professor and Digital Archivist at the University of Colorado Boulder; and Tim Walsh, Software Developer at Artefactual Systems.

Background

In 2017, we  came together due to a shared concern over the increasing environmental impact of digital preservation. Despite some notable recent work calling attention to and investigating the environmental costs of practices in our field,[1] we observed that most discussion of sustainable digital preservation was still focused on financial and staffing concerns, sustaining practices as a long-term program, or on the large amount of electricity used by digital storage infrastructure. Additionally, we noticed that current frameworks and standards push practitioners toward optimal digital preservation whenever resources allow, instead of providing guidance when lower levels or standards may be sufficient.

In light of these trends, we proposed a paradigm shift in digital preservation practice in our 2019 article, “Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation.”[2] Rather than focusing on strategies that simply reduce the unsustainability of current practice by improving the efficiency of the technological infrastructure we use to do our work, we argue that truly sustainable digital preservation can be achieved only when digital object management, successful use, and environmental sustainability are explicitly balanced and integrated into decision-making criteria. Suggesting a paradigm shift[3] along these lines, we outline ways for practitioners to critically reevaluate appraisal, permanence, and availability of digital content—providing a framework for integrating environmental sustainability into digital preservation practice.

Workshop Protocol

Throughout our research and writing, we returned again and again to a driving factor behind our work: that the changes we propose can make a difference. The breadth and enormity of the climate crisis should not drive us to despair that our actions are inefficacious. When aggregated, our actions can result in significant positive change. To this end, we want to continue sharing our work in the hope that it will inspire others to implement and advocate for environmental sustainability at their own organizations. To facilitate this, we developed a workshop protocol designed for participants to discuss issues of environmental sustainability in digital preservation, identify and enact change toward sustainable practices in their organizational contexts, and identify and plan further research. The protocol is available at: https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-hxe1-m195.

BitCurator Users Forum 2019: Workshop First Run

We ran the workshop for the first time at the BitCurator Users Forum 2019 on October 24, 2019 at Yale University. We briefly introduced our article’s core arguments, set the ground rules for discussion, and split into three discussion groups based on the paradigm shift areas. Groups reported back in two sessions, with participant-created notes available here.

In the first session, we broke into three groups, each lead by a facilitator:

  • Appraisal. Discussion in the appraisal group focused on collecting policies, and in particular that many participants feel that they do not have the authority to influence the appraisal process or collecting decisions. There was consensus that the low cost of storage has resulted in an reluctance to invest in staff and technological resources to conduct critical appraisal, and that reappraisal is even more difficult to accomplish.
  • Permanence. Participants in this discussion group also discussed digital storage, particularly whether participants’ organizations accounted for environmental factors when implementing new (or refreshed) on-premises or cloud storage solutions. On the idea of acceptable loss, participants discussed how much loss would be acceptable at their organizations in different contexts, and how the concept could be communicated with collection curators. Those in the permanence group also compared notes on how each organization approached fixity checking, with a wide variety of practices reported among participants.
  • Availability. This discussion group observed that the availability of digital content is tied to reappraisal and permanence decisions. Decisions earlier in a digital object’s life cycle have consequences for access that should be incorporated into organizations’ decision making and transparently explained to researchers. Participants discussed digitization projects in detail, particularly the issue of on-demand digitization versus mass digitization, and the lack of clear guidelines on determining what the critical mass of user need is that would move a collection or group of materials from on-demand to mass digitization.

After the general discussion on each of these areas, the three groups focused on plans for implementation, and the facilitators encouraged participants to think about actionable steps that they could take at their own organizations. A sample of these action items follows:

  • Appraisal
    • Develop and implement policies for regular reappraisal.
    • Ensure that curatorial and collecting guidelines cover digital content.
    • Write preservation policies that include tiered levels of preservation so that organizations can consistently select the most appropriate level during acquisition (and communicate this to donors).
  • Permanence
    • Promote collaboration with those responsible for appraisal to ensure implementations of tiered preservation solutions are meeting donor/organizational/user expectations.
    • Implement a lower tier of preservation commitment for digitized content that has a stable analog original.
    • Enact file format policies that do not migrate stable file formats.
  • Availability
    • Document demand for digitization to inform preservation approaches in line with the tiers advocated for in OCLC’s 2011 Scan and Deliver
    • Develop criteria for shifting collections or groups of materials from on-demand to mass digitization, especially for audiovisual materials.
    • Investigate central or interoperable discovery systems, to avoid duplicating digitization efforts across organizations.

When the groups reported out, it became clear that there were some implementation ideas common across all three areas. Foremost among these was advocating for environmental sustainability: all three groups brainstormed ways to advocate at their own organizations, from demonstrating the need for environmentally sustainable practice to working with existing environmental initiatives. Additionally, some participants noted that having more quantifiable data on the environmental impact of digital preservation, and the positive correlation between environmentally sustainable actions with staffing and financial sustainability, would help them make the case for their action plans to their organizations’ administrators.

Next Steps

We are making the workshop protocol available so that others can run this workshop at conferences and in their local organizations and communities. Conducting the workshop at BUF2019 made it clear that participants had many areas of shared interest, and significant enthusiasm for the subject. There is ample further opportunity to learn from each other and work together to implement specific actions across organizations.

We hope that individuals and existing or newly-formed working groups will take on investigating subjects such as:

  • Data and metrics on the impact of digital preservation at cultural heritage organizations.
  • Strategies for advocating for sustainable digital preservation practices.
  • Frameworks for gathering use statistics or user demand for digitization.
  • Guidelines and policies for implementing tiered preservation approaches.

We are excited to continue working with the digital preservation community on moving toward environmentally sustainable digital preservation and look forward to seeing new research on this topic from others.

[1] See for example Eira Tansey, “Archival Adaptation to Climate Change,” Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy 11, no. 2 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2015.11908146; Benjamin Goldman, “It’s Not Easy Being Green(e): Digital Preservation in the Age of Climate Change,” in Archival Values: Essays in Honor of Mark Greene (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2019); and Linda Tadic, “The Environmental Impact of Digital Preservation” (presentation, Association of Moving Image Archivists conference, Portland, OR, November 18–21, 2015), updated December 2018, https://www.digitalbedrock.com/resources-2.

[2] Keith Pendergrass, Walker Sampson, Tim Walsh, and Laura Alagna, “Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation,” American Archivist 82, no. 1 (2019), https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-82.1.165, open access via Harvard DASH: https://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/40741399.

[3] See Donella Meadows, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System (Hartland, VT: The Sustainability Institute, 1999), open access via the Academy for Systems Change: http://donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Leverage_Points.pdf; and John R. Ehrenfeld, Sustainability by Design: A Subversive Strategy for Transforming Our Consumer Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).

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Archivists on the Issues: Discussion and Disagreement in Good Faith

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. The following post is from Bradley J. Wiles, a PhD student in Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, School of Information Studies. 

In August of 2019, I rejoined SAA and the general archives fold after several years away due to professional and personal factors that diverted my time and energy into other areas. I immediately second guessed this decision after reading about what happened at the SAA annual meeting with the cancelled Brown Bag Lunch discussion on Frank Boles’ unpublished article, “To Everything There is a Season.” I was not at the meeting, so I can’t speak firsthand about the “pall” cast over the proceedings by the session or whatever other immediate fallout resulted from the decision to cancel it. However, the subsequent explanations by the SAA council and American Archivist editors, along with the apparently unquestioning acceptance by the membership at large, demonstrated what has become so disappointing about discourse in academy-dominated professions like archives. Or, in this case, the resoundingly negative discourse on social media that seemed satisfied with mostly attacking Boles’ character while providing minimal analysis of the article or its arguments.[1]

In any event, when it comes to instances like the session cancellation, I would never accuse anyone of acting in bad faith nor would I question anyone’s motives for defending their principles and doing what they think is right. I have no doubt that there are many valid points that people could make and did make from a variety of perspectives. Specific responses to the Boles article recently made available on the American Archivist website offer some illumination from an oppositional standpoint.[2] My disappointment stems from the apparent inability or unwillingness to engage with ideas or opinions that do not fit prescribed insider viewpoints or that might merely suggest the slightest deviation from a set of rigid premises that now seem to dominate the professional discourse. Heck, I probably even agree with most of these premises, but the notion that I should not be spoiled by other views that disagree with them is absurd. I read the Boles article and there were some things that I liked in his argument and other things that I didn’t. Imagine my surprise when my brain didn’t explode upon this realization.

On the one hand, I can understand the distaste of highlighting controversy for its own sake, as expressed in the statement by the Archivists and Archives of Color Section. But it stretches credulity to claim that the article and lunch session were categorically divisive in intent, design, and execution. As far as I can tell, other reasons for it being canceled were flawed planning and because it was deemed incompatible with the program requirements for inclusivity. Ostensibly, it failed to adequately question how archivists are “navigating power dynamics, facilitating transparency, preserving the history of transgender and other marginalized communities, or researching transnational records to actively transform our pedagogy and practice, and how do our actions affect the people and communities we serve.” In my reading, Boles’ article generally fits within the spirit of this statement, but apparently his approach or conclusions did not properly align with how the program committee and others thought this should be expressed. Although, it’s not clear if anyone who made the decision to cancel the session had a problem with the article until the social media backlash began.

Unsurprisingly, Boles’ account anticipated the reaction that unfolded at the meeting. All official responding parties made it a point to say they reject censorship, welcome vigorous debate, and appreciate multiple viewpoints, but the cancellation makes clear that this is only true to a certain extent. And if Boles’ article represents the intellectual tolerance threshold or demarcates what is or is not acceptable in disciplinary discussions, then the profession and our institutions are in big trouble. In so many ways, the archives profession has gladly assumed many of the highly caricatured qualities of the academic left, but we’ve really leaned-in to the ideological calcification aspect of it without generating the commensurate usable knowledge an applied discipline demands. The resulting self-congratulatory spiral of conspicuous wokeness is both exhausting and meaningless, offering the veneer of intellectual robustness and social value without the substance. The admirable and necessary impulse to rethink and reform institutions and practices in the name of inclusivity, representation, and justice too often shifts into a knee-jerk rejection of anything that smacks of convention or tradition.

In a telling sign of these Trumpian times, the archives profession appears more likely than at any other point in my career to embrace a narrow orthodoxy that leaves little room for criticism or consideration of frameworks that do not mirror the inviolable beliefs of those now making the rules. I suppose that’s where my regret mostly resides—not because I reject those frameworks or beliefs out of hand, or because I think there is something so important or essential about Boles’ perspective or the cancelled discussion, but that this incident further galvanizes a standard that can be easily applied against anyone else who finds themselves out of step with that orthodoxy or the hashtag warriors enforcing it. And let’s be honest: it’s not like we’re shouting down neo-Nazis or tangling with fascists in the streets here. Attempting to spare the archives world from Boles’ perspective perfectly embodies the half-baked approach by the academic left to policing itself through speech and thought codes. At the end of the day it allows the archives profession to do what it has become so good at: patting ourselves on one side of our back, while flogging ourselves on the other.

It comes down to this: a judgement was made in the service of zero-sum identity politics that preempted anyone from having to think about the matter any more than necessary. But that’s just the world we live in now and I regret re-entering the archives professional fray in an atmosphere where intellectual freedom has become so loaded with preconditions and unwritten rules that are arbitrarily applied. But I also know that my regret—my ability to have it and express it—is tied to the relative privileges that I enjoy and I do not take this for granted, nor do I begrudge anyone’s right to be offended. My hope is that good faith professional discussions can still occur even if they are uncomfortable or contentious. Good faith assumes civility or at least the lack of malign intent. I don’t see how archivists advance as a profession if we cannot move forward on this basis, especially if our default reaction is umbrage against those with whom we might disagree, effectively killing necessary conversations before they begin.

[1] See the Twitter hashtag #thatdarnarticle for the tenor of the discussion, and for substantive analysis in other non-SAA venues see these blog posts by Geof Huth and Eira Tansey.

[2] See the responses by George, Inefuku, and Stuchel.

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Archivists on the Issues: Rare & Ephemeral: a snapshot of full-time New England archives jobs, 2018-2019

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Today’s post comes from Genna Duplisea, the Archivist and Special Collections Librarian at Salve Regina University. Genna would like to send special thanks to Caitlin Birch, Jaimie Fritz, and Olivia Mandica-Hart for reading and commenting on this piece, and to Suzy Morgan and everyone else who gave feedback during the initial data collection phase.

 

At the university where I currently work, there is a small but enthusiastic contingent of undergraduate students in the cultural and historic preservation and history majors interested in pursuing library school. As I am asked to give a picture of the archives profession to newly-declared majors every year, I think of the inadequate job market and question whether I am advising them well. This spring, feeling disheartened by what seemed like very few job postings and a rash of term positions, I found myself wondering if the data supported my perception that there weren’t enough opportunities for all the archivists in the region.

Methodology

I compiled information on full-time archives positions in the six New England states (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont) posted between April 1, 2018 and April 1, 2019. My sources were the Simmons University Jobline (http://blogs.simmons.edu/slis/jobline/), ArchivesGig (https://archivesgig.com/), and the New England Archivists and Society of American Archivists listservs.

Compiling this data required making decisions about what constituted an archives job. I included any position shared through archivist professional venues, even if it was unclear whether most archival training would be appropriate to the position. I included museum positions that related to collections care, digital collections, or other skill sets that overlap with archives training (but not positions unrelated to archives work, such as development). I included corporate positions as well as public, academic, government, or non-profit positions. A position needed to dedicate at least half of its time to archival work to be included. Temporary positions were included if those postings were full-time, as were positions that did not require a Master’s degree.

Because I began this project after many job postings had expired, some information is missing. In some cases I had to make assumptions about whether a salary grade was posted, after reviewing the institution’s general practices in job postings. (For example, I knew several larger institutions (such as Harvard and Yale Universities) always post salary grades; conversely, if a review of an institution’s current positions generally did not include salary information, then I assumed that there had not been any in the post I was researching.) Future research would be more effective if job posting information were to be downloaded and recorded as it is posted, so that original postings can serve as reference points and more information can be gathered before the removal of inactive positions from job boards.

This study is a snapshot of a year in the New England archives profession, allowing for some broad conclusions rather than a statistically significant analysis. Undoubtedly, I have still missed a few, but positions I hope to draw useful conclusions from the data. The full table is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YglMlu_SOIUXyknVzTvxiJSj_VC9v-Pb/view?usp=sharing.

The survey found 115 full-time archives jobs at institutions within the six New England states posted between April 1, 2018 and April 1, 2019.

Salary information

Most of the job postings did not include any salary information at all, whether a flat number, a grade, or a range. Of the 115 total positions, posting information was insufficient in 30 of them and it was impossible to tell whether salary information had originally been present. Of the remaining 85 positions, 47 (55.3%) included salary information, and 38 (44.7%) did not.

If we exclude Harvard and Yale, the two largest employers in this survey, then the salary information becomes paltry — only 17 positions at other institutions included salary information. There was not enough information on salary amounts to conclude anything substantial.

Location

Of the 115 positions, 30 of them (26%) were at Harvard or Yale Universities, meaning that over a quarter of all archives jobs posted in New England last year were at one of those institutions. The state with the highest number of postings was Massachusetts with 73 (63.4%). Connecticut had 25 (21.7%) postings, and Rhode Island had nine (8%). Vermont and Maine each had three postings (2.6% each) for the entire year, and New Hampshire had two (1.7%).

Temporary & Contingent Positions

The permanency of 11 positions was unclear. Of the remaining 104 positions, 72 (69.2%) were permanent. The rest were temporary positions, with terms ranging from two months to five years but mostly appointments lasting less than two years.

The value of the MS or MSLIS

Of the 115 positions, it was unclear in 25 of them whether a Master’s degree was required. Of the remaining 90, 61 (67.7%) required a Master’s or higher (one position required a Ph. D). Twenty-nine positions (27.7%) did not require it, and of those, 12 positions did not require a Master’s but preferred it.

Archives grads

For context, I was interested in finding out how many new archivists there were every year. The only archives management degree in an ALA-accredited LIS program in the New England region is at Simmons University in Boston. The Simmons University Office of Institutional Research provided information regarding the number of graduates with the archives management concentration. This includes graduates who earned the concentration in-person or online, and also includes graduates who pursued the dual-Master’s MS/MA program in Archives Management and History. (I myself am a graduate of this program.) Of course, not all archivists have Master’s degrees; not all Simmons University graduates stay in the region; not all archives graduates seek jobs in the archives field; and not all archivists in New England went to Simmons. The University of Rhode Island also has a library school (though not an archives-focused degree), and there are several public history Master’s programs in the region; all of these, as well as online programs, also train area professionals who work in archives, but the number of archivist graduates would be more difficult to track. Still, Simmons’s data provides an idea of how many new archivists enter the job market in the region annually.

NE_graddata
Graph created by the author using data from the Simmons University Office of Institutional Research.

For the past ten years, the annual number of Simmons archives graduates has more than doubled, from 56 in 2008 to 121 in 2017. (The latest figure for archives degrees awarded in academic year 2018-2019 is 38, but this does not include the 2019 spring semester.) The increase has not been steady, with a drop between 2012 and 2014, but the program has consistently grown since then. The online program began awarding degrees in 2014, and represents a substantial minority of those degrees. All told, 872 professionals have graduated with archives degrees from Simmons in the past decade.

Discussion

It does not seem that the job market in New England is supporting the influx of new graduates, or emerging and seasoned professionals. The exponential annual increase of digital information alone means, in my view, that society needs more archivists. A separate but related conversation with current archivists would surely conclude that people in this profession are overworked and understaffed, with job responsibilities ranging from processing to digitization to records management to teaching to digital preservation.

The Society of Southwest Archivists (SSA) has demonstrated concern for a dearth of salary information and low pay. SSA President Mark Lambert has published a series on the failure of national organizations and top archives directors are failing the profession (https://www.southwestarchivists.org/poor-pay-in-archives-how-top-archives-directors-and-our-national-organizations-are-failing-us/). Lack of transparency about archivist salaries allows institutions to avoid providing competitive compensation, and can generate huge wastes of time for candidates and hiring committees when applicants do not know whether a position will compensate them adequately. Last fall, SSA began collecting regional salary data (https://www.southwestarchivists.org/home/archives-regional-salary-research/). At its spring 2019 meeting, the Society of Southwest Archivists voted to stop posting or sharing job advertisements that did not include salary information (https://www.southwestarchivists.org/salary-information-now-required-in-job-postings/). As of this writing, a group of archivists is collecting information for a proposal to SAA Council to require the organization to require salaries in job postings (https://harvard.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_efCj42MurbrLAj3), and New England Archivists is considering a similar change. More regional and national organizations, not to mention library schools, could make similar statements and take action to support its communities of learners and professionals.

It has been a decade and a half since the Society of American Archivists conducted A*CENSUS (Archival Census and Education Needs Survey in the United States), which revealed trends about the archival profession and archival education. The SAA annual meeting this year includes a task force on A*CENSUS II. Pre-planning for the survey will be complete by early 2020, with the Committee on Research, Data, and Assessment (CoRDA) implementing it thereafter. (https://www2.archivists.org/news/2018/saa-council-affirms-strategic-goals-creates-research-committee)

The frequency of temporary and project postings demonstrates how dependent the archives profession is on external or limited funding. It is alarming that nearly a third of the archives positions posted last year were term-limited. I focused on full-time positions because I wanted to get a grasp on the types of positions people graduating from archives programs ideally want — secure, full-time, in a relevant field. Yet even this set of supposedly ideal positions show that job insecurity prevails. Professional organizations have a role to play in supporting the creation of stable, benefited, appropriately-compensated positions for its members. New England Archivists supported a study on contingent employment, released in January 2017 (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aFVWuA6zJsrTGFoPuKeU8K6SJ1Sggv2h/view). In response to the UCLA Special Collections Librarians open letter on contingent employment published in June 2018, NEA released a statement later that year (https://www.newenglandarchivists.org/Official-Statements/6814976).

A trend of precarious stewardship threatens archival collections, to say nothing of the impact on individuals struggling for economic stability. Eira Tansey’s recent May Day blog post pointed out that the best way to protect collections is to secure stable, ongoing support for staff (http://eiratansey.com/2018/05/01/mayday-on-may-day/). Yet the inadequate number of new positions, combined with the trends of salary secrecy and contingent positions, seem to demonstrate that archives are not valued as core functions necessitating ongoing operational funding within an organization. If the collections that archivists steward have enduring value to their institutions, then the staff should experience similar value and respect for their work.

 

 

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End-of-Year Steering Share: Accomplishments and What’s Next

Steering Shares  provide an opportunity to learn more about the I&A Steering Committee and the issues that the committee members care about. This post comes from soon-to-be-outgoing (but still current!) I&A Chair Rachel Mandell, Metadata Librarian at the University of Southern California Digital Library.

Though we are not quite down to the final moments of the year (in terms of the SAA leadership schedule), we are indeed approaching the final push and thus, as I&A Chair, it is my final Steering Share. First of all, I want to thank everyone on the Steering Committee for being such a great team. You were all vital components of the work that we accomplished this year and working with you all was such a treat! I can’t wait to see/meet all of you in August!

I wanted to take this opportunity to briefly recap everything that we worked on this year and what we hope to continue next year.

Projects accomplished this year:

  • Blog series: Probably our most focused project. We really tried to add valuable content to each of our 3 blog series.
    • Steering Shares: Each Steering Committee member writes 3 posts throughout the year
    • Archivists on the Issues: 3 contributors each writes 3 posts about a topic of their choice.
    • Research Teams: Two research teams each write 3 posts.
      • News Monitoring Team: This year, the News Monitoring Research team, led by our very own Steve Duckworth, created monthly updates as well as more focused posts.
      • Legis* Team: We revamped the Legislative Research teams this year. We encouraged each member on the team to monitor topics of interest relating to legislation, legislators, and/or resources relating to discovering information.
      • Also had some additional guest contributors like Eira Tansey and international blog follower François Dansereau
  • #AskanArchivist Day: Our Steering Committee participated by taking turns monitoring our Twitter feed. It was great fun!
  • Social Media: Our amazing I&A Intern, Samantha Brown, took on handling our social media—and she rocked it! Thanks, Samantha! See us on Facebook and/or Twitter!
  • Archives Design Share Portal in collaboration with the Regional Archival Associations Consortium (RAAC): Just getting started with collaborators at RAAC—hoping to get more going soon!
  • Collaboration with DLF’s Labor Working Group: Two phone calls to touch base and a possible project on the horizon!
  • SAA Advocacy groups quarterly calls. Keep each other informed, run ideas by each other. Also helped CoPP edit /update SAA’s public policy agenda
  • Developing program for section meeting at Annual Meeting

Projects to continue next year:

  • Continue the blog series tradition!
  • Collaboration with DLF
  • Temporary labor in libraries/archives survey/study
  • Archives Design Share Portal

While in many ways it seems like I wasn’t able to accomplish as much as I wanted, I also  definitely feel proud of what we did work on this year and the new projects that we got started on. I look forward to watching Courtney Dean, our esteemed Vice-Chair, who was really more of a co-chair, take over next year.

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Archivists on the Issues: Making Archives Visible Through Maps

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Today’s post is by Eira Tansey, Digital Archivist and Records Manager at the University of Cincinnati.

This post is about the Repository Data project, an SAA Foundation grant funded project to assemble a comprehensive data set of US archival repositories. The research team consists of Ben Goldman (Penn State University), Eira Tansey (University of Cincinnati), and Whitney Ray (UNC-Chapel Hill). By contacting over 145 archival organizations, they have received data on thousands of archival repositories across the United States. They are still processing the data, but it will eventually be made accessible to the public. Read on!

As we previously noted, the only existing open data set for archival repositories – OCLC’s ArchiveGrid – lacks representation of many small archives, historical societies, and other nebulously-defined archives. As many of you know, inclusion in ArchiveGrid is primarily driven by having various descriptive data (MARC records, EAD finding aids, etc) online and crawlable to OCLC. This means that repositories with professional archivists on staff and the resources to make archival description available online are over-represented in the ArchiveGrid data set. In reality, there are many archives that don’t fit this description, and are therefore literally invisible to much of the profession.

This has been frustrating to us as we pursue our work on archival vulnerability to climate change. The institutions that are most at risk for sea-level rise and climate change influenced disasters are also the least likely to have professional staff and sufficient resources to sustain archival collections even in “normal” times – let alone during an emergency. And yet, these are the archives that weren’t visible in our first pass at mappingrepository vulnerability to climate change.

But now we’d like to show you the dramatic way in which our research project has uncovered how many archives exist – even if they aren’t putting their finding aids online.

This is the “Before” map, reflecting OCLC’s data – according to ArchiveGrid as of 2016, there are approximately 44 repositories in the state of Ohio:

ArchiveGrid_2016_BEFORE_OhioData
Map by Eira Tansey

Although this data is not yet final, this is our beta data set for Ohio – i.e., our “After” map. You can see a dramatic difference in how many more archives have been revealed thanks to our efforts (and especially that of Whitney, our fantastic research assistant, who has done the heavy lifting in reaching out to archival organizations to compile and clean data). According to our preliminary* data, there are well over 500 repositories in the state of Ohio.

RepoData_2018_AFTER_OhioData
Map by Eira Tansey

I want to highlight that constructing archives as those repositories that participate in networked archival descriptive infrastructure tends to erase the visibility of small archives, especially those outside of major population centers. Let’s use southeastern Ohio – aka Appalachia – as an example.

The light-green counties are those that are part of the federally-defined Appalachian Regional Commission’s jurisdiction. (Clearly there are cultural constructions of Appalachia that do not fit in with these county delineations, but those aren’t as easy to find as open GIS data!)

In the “before” map, only 3 archives exist in Ohio’s Appalachian counties, and they are all associated with higher education: Marietta College, Youngstown State, and Ohio University.

ArchiveGrid_2016_BEFORE_ARCcounties_OhioData
Map by Eira Tansey

But in the after map, we see that there are roughly 100 (100!!!!!!!!!!) archives in Ohio’s Appalachian counties. Why the massive difference? Because our efforts to get as much data from local, regional and state archival organizations means we have pulled in dozens of small historical societies, public libraries, and museums.

RepoData_2018_AFTER_ARCcounties_OhioData
Map by Eira Tansey

We haven’t done before and after comparisons yet with other states, but I anticipate they would look very similar to what we’ve seen with Ohio. Building the first comprehensive data set of US repositories is no small task, but we think the preliminary results speak for the importance of our work.

*We say preliminary because we still have some cleaning and minor de-duplication tasks left with our data.

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So SAA’s Going to Austin. Now What?

This post was written by Stephanie Bennett and the Issues & Advocacy Section’s Steering Committee, in light of the recent news that SAA was keeping its commitment to hold 2019’s annual meeting in Austin, Texas. 

With the announcement from SAA president Tanya Zanish-Belcher that SAA’s 2019 will be in Austin, despite a Council discussion about moving it, SAA members – and all archivists and humans who move about the world – have some thinking to do. And some work to do. Some of us – though not the Californian archivists among us – will attend the meeting. The I&A Steering Committee once more poses questions that we’ve been asking amongst ourselves:

  • How can we, as an organization and as individuals, support the activists of Texas?
  • Is it a betrayal of our personal beliefs or heteronormative myopia if we do attend, in part because we “pass” the Texas legislature’s guide of acceptable personhood?
  • As Eira Tansey points out, the battles between more liberal cities and restrictive, conservative legislatures are happening across the U.S.; where will our harassed queer colleagues find safe harbor?
  • Should we, how can we, support our professional organization(s) in the long run so that these choices between financial precarity or personal harm are no longer required? Does SAA need  (as writer Paulette Perhach called it) a F*ck Off Fund?
  • How can we work within the profession to change foundational systems of oppression? (And all of the questions we posed previously, really)

As an institution, SAA and its component groups, including the sections, have the responsibility to be mindful of how we spend our time and money – especially in Austin. We’ve been watching and listening as Representative John Lewis models the ethics and actions of “good trouble.” At Issues & Advocacy, we are committed to spending our money at LGBTQ-owned and -friendly businesses and establishments that recognize that black lives matter. We will seek opportunities to collaborate with queer archivists to do service and/or fundraising to benefit Texan activists and organizations fighting against the state’s restrictive and occasionally unconstitutional or overturned laws. And we welcome your ideas! If there is an event or organization that you would like to see supported or a topic that you would like to be discussed but do not have the bandwidth to undertake, let us know.

That said, the Society of American Archivists, as a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is not permitted to engage in “political campaign activities“ as defined by the IRS. We are not lawyers, but we do understand that  limits to SAA’s work exist, and, as a body within SAA, the limits for Issues & Advocacy’s work as well. But as individuals, we have the right to political activity and related speech. For those of us who will attend the meeting, we look forward to working in Austin, as both individuals and professional archivists.

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What Can Archivists Do about Concerns Regarding Federal Climate and Environmental Data?

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. If you have an issue you would like to write about for this blog series or a previous post that you would like to respond to, please email archivesissues@gmail.com. Please note that opinions expressed in Archivists on the Issues posts do not indicate an official stance of SAA or the Issues and Advocacy Roundtable.

This post is by Eira Tansey, University of Cincinnati and a leader in the Project Archivists Responding to Climate Change (Project ARCC).

Shortly after the US election results, many who rely on federal climate and environmental data became very concerned about the continuing public availability of this data in the new administration. I am among this group myself, as my research partners from Penn State and I use data sets from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to map climate change risks to American archival repositories. In the past few weeks, institutions such as the University of Toronto and the Penn Environmental Humanities Lab began to organize hackathons in order to seed the End of Term Web Archive project with climate and environmental webpages, and determine ways to effectively copy large data sets. The issue gained steam over the weekend when climate journalist and meteorologist Eric Holthaus began tweeting about it, and has gained major news coverage with stories in the Washington Post and Vice.

As a leader within Project ARCC (Archivists Responding to Climate Change), I had reached out to individuals at Toronto and Penn to get more information about their projects as soon as I heard about them, including the role of librarians and archivists in their efforts. Representatives from the University of Toronto and Penn joined last night’s monthly Project ARCC conference call to update us on their efforts.

Things are moving very swiftly on all fronts, so additional posts will be forthcoming as information and efforts are updated.

What is already in place?

Fellows from the Penn Environmental Humanities Lab began raising the issue of vulnerable environmental data with a hackathon earlier this month. The Lab is now quickly organizing on many of the issues associated with downloading and distributing the work of copying the many data sets scientists rely on. You can read their initial vision here, their preliminary take on how not all data sets may be equally vulnerable, and yesterday’s update regarding their taking over the initial crowdsourced spreadsheet that Eric Holthaus started, as well as their collaborative work with the University of Toronto.

The University of Toronto is hosting a “guerrilla archiving” event on December 17. This event will focus on Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) page URLs that will be seeded for the End of Term project.

What is next?

The folks at Penn and Toronto have received a massive outpouring of interest. Which is great! It also means that they need time to organize their efforts and evaluate offers of help, storage space, etc., most effectively. You can visit Penn’s #DataRefuge website, which went live December 13, to learn more about efforts as they evolve.

Beyond the work that is coming out of the Toronto event on December 17, Toronto and Penn are planning to develop a toolkit so other institutions can host hackathons.

The Penn folks are currently setting up contacts with many organizations’ representatives, including the Society of American Archivists.

How can you help?

The Penn #DataRefuge project now has a “I’d like to help” form. You can submit your response here. To nominate .gov pages for the End of Term Web Archive, you can use the End of Term Nomination Tool.

Why are people so worried about this to begin with?

Several departments and agencies within the federal government, including EPA, NOAA, Department of Interior, Department of Energy, and National Aeronautic and Space Administration (to name but a few), create myriad and massive data sets related to monitoring pollution of air and water, weather patterns, energy usage, and tracking indicators associated with climate change (ocean temperature and acidification, sea level modeling, and global temperature records).  

The incoming Trump administration is signalling that it will likely be hostile to the established consensus science on climate change, as well as existing pollution regulations. The President Elect has denied global warming’s reality and has selected a series of people that have a legislative or business record of undermining environmental regulation and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Many proposed appointees have extensive ties to the fossil fuel industry, including the EPA nominee (Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma Attorney General) and the Secretary of State nominee (Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil CEO). Multiple meta-surveys of climate science papers have established that climate change is real and primarily driven by human activities. Recent publication on this extensively documented issue includes one published in April 2016, showing that between 90-100% of climate scientists themselves are in consensus on the causes of global warming. 18 of America’s prominent scientific organizations are in agreement on the science showing that climate change is primarily driven by human activities.

Researchers are worried that funding will be cut from existing federal environmental and climate monitoring and research efforts, but also about continued access to currently public data sets. It remains to be seen whether recent Open Government initiatives that increased public access to federal data will receive the same level of support in the next administration. If data sets are removed from public access, this could mean that researchers would be required to file FOIA requests for access. During the Bush administration, with similarly extensive ties to the fossil fuel industry, scientists documented dozens of instances of scientific advice manipulation, restrictions on federal scientists’ work, and cutbacks on public access to environmental information (the most famous case is probably the proposed closure of EPA libraries). Some Canadians are alarmed by what could happen in the United States, given how the Harper administration reduced public access to federal environmental data there.

For now, researchers are in wait-and-see mode, but most are erring on the side of being overly cautious—hence why so many have mobilized to copy currently available data as fast as possible.

For questions about this work’s current status, please feel free to contact eira.tansey@uc.edu.

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Steering Share: Daria Labinsky

darialabinsky_smallSteering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This post is from I&A Steering Committee Member Daria Labinsky. She is an archivist at the National Archives in St. Louis, who works primarily with 20th century military personal data records.

What was your first job in a library, archive, or museum?

As an undergrad at Northwestern, my first work-study job was to shelve books at the Evanston Public Library. The next year I was promoted to QC’ing data entry into the brand-new electronic catalog! I checked the entered data and metadata against what was on the cards and made edits when needed. I remember falling asleep sitting in front of an open card catalog drawer, and my supervisor waking me up. She was amused.

What made you want to join the I&A Steering Committee?

I attended the Archives Leadership Institute in June, and Barbara Teague taught the classes on advocacy. She mentioned that getting involved in some kind of advocacy committee, or joining a group that champions a specific issue, is a way to share your opinions through a collective voice. As a federal employee I sometimes feel constrained when it comes to being able to speak out about issues that affect our profession, and I think I&A can aid others who may feel the same way. I was a member of the General News Research Team last year and have been monitoring issues that impact archives and libraries for years.

What is one major issue you see archives tackling in the next five to ten years?

Efforts to make archives and the profession more diverse and inclusive will grow stronger. It’s exciting to see how the archiving of social media continues to enable the voices of historically marginalized people to be saved and shared. More needs to be done; we need to raise awareness by educating current archivists and those who control archival purse strings. And we also need to work harder to retain people once they’re hired. Quite a few people are writing eloquently about these kind of topics, but Jarrett M. Drake’s and Bergis Jules’ blogs are two of my must-reads.

What archive issue means a lot to you?

The destruction of records that should be permanent is a significant problem. In “Institutional Silences and the Digital Dark Age” Eira Tansey writes, “ … because those with the most power within organizations are rarely the same individuals tasked with carrying out records mandates, there will always be archival silences despite archivists’ and records managers’ best efforts.” The problems she sees in public universities are probably more prevalent in government agencies. Sometimes creators deliberately destroy records; sometimes it’s inadvertent—out of ignorance, accidentally during a move, or because they assume incorrectly that someone or some system is archiving their emails for them. In a perfect world laws requiring public employees to save the records they are legally mandated to save would be strictly enforced. We need to step up and make sure our elected officials know why enforceable records management policies are important, and we need to continue to educate records creators on how to integrate archival best practices into records management.

Describe and share an interesting archive you have come across over the years.

The holdings of the National Archives at St. Louis contain many, many interesting items. One of our most recent acquisitions are the Research and Experimental Case Files, records compiled during Army tests of potential chemical agents and/or antidotes on volunteers conducted during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. These records provide fascinating written documentation by test subjects who were under the influence of a variety of drugs. Although the reports are sometimes humorous—patients’ acid trip drawings are not uncommon—there’s an undercurrent of tragedy within them. Just how “voluntary” were the tests for those subjects who were inmates in Holmesburg Prison? What kind of physical and mental health problems did the participants later experience? The files shed light on another troubling chapter in our history.

Note: The contents of this message are mine personally and do not necessarily reflect any position of the federal government or the National Archives and Records Administration.

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Steering Share: Stephanie Bennett

face-2016aprilSteering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This post is from  Steering Committee member Stephanie Bennett.

Hello, internet! I am a new member of the Issues & Advocacy Roundtable Steering Committee, so I’d like to introduce myself. As some of you know, I currently work as Collections Archivist at Wake Forest University Special Collections & Archives in Winston Salem, NC. Wake is my alma mater, though not the site of my first library or archives job.

What was your first job in a library, archive, or museum?

Prior to earning my Masters, I was a consultant in Washington, D.C.; as a lifelong library user, when I was looking around for volunteer opportunities, I was excited to take one shelving books at my local library. I loved the work environment and enjoyed working among the librarians and library workers, so I turned my love of research, organization, and library/archives/museum folks into an MLS.

What made you want to join the I&A Steering Committee?

I first learned about IART when my friend Jasmine Jones became active with the roundtable while we were in graduate school. I love that it provides a forum for people to advocate for their point of view on any manner of subjects as well as learn about advocacy in general. As archivists, we see and learn about and touch a wide swath of topics issues in our work—not to mention what we experience as humans—so let’s talk about them, conduct research, and share our knowledge with influencers in many walks of life. And of course I love being part of advocacy efforts for archivists and archives! After graduate school, I became curious about salaries in the field because very little salary or benefits information is transparently presented in job ads. Thus a survey (and a report) was born.

What is one major issue you see archives tackling in the next five to ten years?

I love the ongoing conversations about labor and archives and hope that we continue to work on improving and diversifying archivist labor as well as archival content. My survey gets at the ideas of compensation and, relatedly, compensation-related stress, and also presents thoughts from archives workers who see work-life support as an invaluable bonus to our labor. We lose folks in the field due to the stresses and sometimes the simple impracticality of pursuing work in the field, who I occasionally hear from due to my survey. Others have started writing and talking about archivist and archives labor as well. Stacie Williams has written poignantly about systemic inequalities in labor and how to disrupt those. Eira Tansey has published research on the topic in addition to writing here about labor as well. Just this week, folks again have been discussing prison labor on archives projects in the context of Ava DuVernay’s film for Netflix, 13th. Archivists are professionals but we are also laborers and it’s to our detriment if we forget that.

What archive issue means a lot to you? Describe and share an interesting archive you have come across over the years.

I care deeply about our field and those of us who move through it. I am always stopping by libraries and archives when I travel, looking at the ways in which people interact with their local history and heritage. I recently had the opportunity to attend a National Council on Public History Camping Conference (as cool as it sounds) and was thrilled to be among historians and even a fellow archivist all the way from Washington! We were able to talk about the history and the future of culture and the outdoors, archival resources and perspectives, diversity and inclusion particularly in outdoor spaces, and of course stars and s’mores construction (have you tried making s’more with peanut butter cups?!). The connections that we’re able to make with others and turn into benefits for our communities never fail to inspire me.

Please let me know if you have an issue (or issues!) that you would like to write about here on the blog or if there’s something on your mind that you hope IART will tackle in the coming years. I look forward to being part of the IART Steering Committee and am here to help y’all to the best of my abilities. Thank you for the opportunity to serve!

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