1) What was your first experience working with archives?
The first time I ever worked with archives was when I was an undergraduate doing research on Coney Island and went to the local history division at the Brooklyn Public Library, which at that time was a small closet-sized space tucked behind the history section in the main branch.
2) What is an archival issue that means a lot to you?
I am passionate about seeking out and exposing labor advocacy pathways, which are all too frequently buried and hidden.
3) What do you hope to gain by being on the I&A Steering Committee?
Being a part of a group that forms community around, and gives space to, those in the archives profession to openly discuss both entrenched and emerging issues they either have witnessed and/or experienced.
4) What can we find you doing outside of the archival profession?
Outside of work, I spend time with my partner, Jesse, and our two daughters. I enjoy cooking, walking our mini-schnauzer, Whitman, through Rochester’s small parks and amazing cemetery, Mt. Hope, and curating my growing collection of body art.
Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This post comes courtesy of the Vice Chair/Chair-Elect, Lauren McDaniel, Special Collections Archivist at the Getty Research Institute.
1) What was your first experience working with archives?
Half by chance, I got a student job at UCLA Library Special Collections–20 years ago now! That experience dovetailed perfectly with my undergraduate studies in history and art history, leading me to realize I wanted to work with special collections materials professionally. Staff encouraged me to apply to library school and I began UCLA’s MLIS program planning to become a rare book cataloger. But my introductory coursework introduced me to archival studies and I realized that archival processing is what I was really interested in, particularly of arts-related and material culture collections. The many dual aspects of the job–cerebral/physical, detailed/big-picture, solitary/service-oriented, innovative/reparative–fit my skills, goals, and values really well. I feel very lucky to have found work I love. #ILoveBeingAnArchivist
2) What is an archival issue that means a lot to you?
But although we love and value our own work as archivists, those whom we work for often do not. This has become painfully obvious in the past decade or so as contract positions have become the norm, and has had an especially devastating effect on our lives over the past year. It is more important than ever that we collectively advocate for ourselves. Fortunately, many of us are already hard at work resisting vocational awe, establishing guidelines for more ethical hiring practices, and taking care of each other during the pandemic through mutual aid campaigns!
In my previous contract position, my colleagues and I used the collective power of our union to push back against the misuse of temporary appointments in UCLA Library Special Collections. Two years in, we are still fighting, and it has been powerful to see the positive effect of our organizing beyond our library: from receiving public support and professional recognition to raising more awareness of the widespread problem of precarious labor in the cultural heritage and education fields.
3) What do you hope to gain by being on the I&A Steering Committee?
My union experience inspired me to step up my labor activism by running for a leadership position in the Issues & Advocacy Section. Since joining the Steering Committee in August, I have met a range of committed archivists from across the country (albeit virtually) and learned more about the issues they and their colleagues are facing. During the pandemic, workplace safety has been the biggest concern, of course, with furloughs and layoffs a close second. I have observed that this Section is a crucial network for sharing information, collaborating, and providing support as well as a platform for members’ interests. Over my next 2+ years serving on this committee, I hope to help us become an even more important resource and an even louder voice for everyone in the profession.
4) What can we find you doing outside of the archival profession?
Organizing my own stuff, for fun(!); endlessly searching for and looking at objects, art, and ephemera (mostly online these days, of course–sigh); listening to Agatha Christie audiobooks (favorite narrator: Hugh Fraser); and hanging out with (you guessed it) my cat!
Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This post comes courtesy of committee member Sara DeCaro, the university archivist at Baker University Library.
1) What was your first experience working with archives?
I was lucky enough receive the Mary Louise Meder Internship in the State Archives division of the Kansas Historical Society when I was working on my MLS. It was a great introduction to archives, and it was paid! I wrote finding aids for two collections of personal papers and did some work with Kansas Memory, the KSHS’ digital image website. I enjoyed every minute of it, too. It reaffirmed my decision to pursue a career in archives.
2) What do you hope to gain by being on the I&A Steering Committee?
I initially became a part of I&A because I had never served on a committee in any of the professional organizations I belong to, and I&A seemed to match my interests. This is my second year on the steering committee, and I already feel like I’ve gained a lot. Having the opportunity to work on our temporary labor survey was meaningful to me personally, as someone who has held temporary positions in the past, and although analyzing all that data was a bit challenging, I learned a great deal. One of my Steering Shares from last year also led to participation in a panel discussion at the Annual Meeting in July, which was also a very worthwhile experience.
3) What is an archival issue that means a lot to you?
Low wages in the archives profession is a very important issue, in my opinion, and one that I’ve been able to explore as a result of my involvement in this committee. That was the focus of the panel discussion I mentioned before. It’s a widespread problem in the archives world, for a number of reasons. I knew that after reading the responses to our survey, but listening to the other panelists and hearing their stories made the scope of the problem very clear. I like being able to contribute to a solution, even if it is in a small way.
4) What can we find you doing outside of the archival profession?
I’ve recently started volunteering with Kansas City Pet Project, my local animal shelter. I wasn’t ready for a new pet when my cat passed away, but I missed cats and wanted to be around them. Shelter environments can be stressful for cats, so I’m glad I can give them a little comfort.
Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This post comes courtesy of committee member Holly Croft, the digital archivist at Georgia College.
1) What was your first experience working with archives?
Archiving is a second career for me, and I quit the first without a clear plan with what I wanted to do next. I started volunteering on an indexing project for a nonprofit where I would attach metadata to digital versions of their collection materials. It was extremely calming in a time where I felt that many things were up in the air, and I would spend hours working on the indexes.
Because it was a volunteer position, I didn’t catch on immediately that the indexing project was part of a larger career field, but I eventually researched it and learned the avenues through which one becomes an archivist. The following fall, I applied to graduate school, and I have never looked back!
2) What do you hope to gain by being on the I&A Steering Committee?
I am so delighted to be a part of the I&A Steering Committee, and I am looking forward to working with the rest of the committee to assist archivists who need support in a variety of ways. As Joanna mentioned in her Steering Share, this is a small community, so it only makes sense that we’re stronger together.
3) What is an archival issue that means a lot to you?
Recently, this committee has taken a look at labor practices particularly surrounding temporary positions and the precarity they create for those who end up taking them. This is, unfortunately, an ongoing concern.
I also am increasingly uneasy with additional labor dumped on archivists, particularly under the guise of “other duties as assigned” and “doing less with more.” This is a topic that hits labor markets well beyond archives, but I’ll bet the majority of archivists have a story about these phrases biting them in some way at their jobs.
These are only two of a myriad of topics affecting archivists today, and I am looking forward to being able to assist where possible.
4) What can we find you doing outside of the archival profession?
I have become the crazy cat lady people warn you about becoming in library school! Two months ago, I had two cats. I took in a stray that looked a little rotund at the beginning of October, and mid-October, I suddenly had six cats.
Just kidding – I could tell there were kittens coming when I took in the third. So, I’m spending a lot of time socializing these little ones and getting them ready for their forever homes.
Additionally, I love cooking and preserving food, gardening, and reading.
Our ICYMI series provide summaries of presentations, publications, webinars, and other educational opportunities that are of interest to I&A members. 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. The following is from Courtney Dean, Head of the Center for Primary Research and Training in UCLA Library Special Collections.
Some of you may remember that I&A launched a survey earlier this year to gather preliminary data about the state of temporary labor in archives. (A PDF of the questions can be found via our public facing survey documentation: https://tinyurl.com/TempArchives. We intended for this data to gird conversations about archival labor and to serve as one piece of a series of ongoing labor advocacy efforts across LAM professions.
A subteam of the I&A Steering Committee- Sara DeCaro, Steve Duckworth, Rachel Mandell, and me, along with I&A member Angel Diaz, took a DIY approach to both developing and analyzing the survey. (Many thanks to Lana Munip, Analysis and Planning Consultant, Pennsylvania State University, for her assistance.) Major themes and takeaways were shared out at the joint I&A/SNAP section meeting at SAA’s Annual Meeting in Austin. Since two of us are from California, and one of us was getting married, Steve Duckworth kindly presented on the results, on his birthday. (Thanks again, Steve!) Those slides are available here: I-A-Survey-presentation
Not surprisingly, many of the results supported current assumptions- archivists in precarious positions are for the most part anxious, stressed, and actively looking for work, even while temporarily employed. Academic libraries create the most temp positions, and interestingly, funding for temp positions, over half of the time, comes from the institution itself, not grant funding. What this means is that that the widespread perception of temp labor being caused by overreliance on grant funding is patently false. (For the raw quantitative survey data see the full spreadsheet: https://tinyurl.com/TempArchives)
Angel Diaz and I also shared out the results of I&A’s survey during a panel on the state of temporary labor at the DLF Forum in Tampa, FL last month. I&A’s findings are congruent with the results of the Collective Responsibility project’s survey and white paper which focus on the experiences of grant-funded digital LAM workers. In other words, we’re all in this together.
Many of us have been thinking a lot about how to move forward from data and information gathering into future advocacy phases. How do we leverage what we now know?
In the immediate future, we can inspire and support others to do more in-depth research and amplify these conversations. Sheridan Sayles, a new member of the I&A Steering Committee, has been working with colleagues at the University of Delaware and NYU on a research project into the status of term-limited (project) archivists to help define the scope of project positions.
We can also collaborate. A lot of labor issues overlap. For example, some of us from I&A have joined recent salary advocacy efforts around SAA job board policies and salary transparency. You may have also seen the archives salary spreadsheet floating around. And recently several folks from the leadership of AMIA (Association of Moving Image Archivists) have plugged into these conversations. I’ll also mention that the Society of California Archivists (SCA) formed a labor issues task-force, and the next Western Archives Meeting (WAM), a joint meeting with several of the western regional archival orgs, has central theme of Labor, Power, and Privilege. In short, these conversations are happening in increasingly more places. Let’s not reinvent the wheel go at it alone. Check out some of the resources below, and let us know who else out there is engaging in similar work.
Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This post comes courtesy of I&A committee member, Sara DeCaro, University Archivist and Old Castle Museum Director at Baker University Library.
This blog post was prompted by a conversation I had with another archivist. It also addresses the use of temporary labor.
If you are reading this, you are almost certainly a regular reader of the Issues and Advocacy blog. That means you are likely aware of the survey studying temporary labor that our section recently created. You may have even taken the survey, or held one, or multiple, temporary jobs within the archival profession, and are probably very familiar with the frustrations of working in a temporary position. You might be surprised to learn, then, that at least one employer believes that archivists prefer temporary positions.
The archivist I was chatting with had recently learned about the temporary labor survey. They were unaware of it when we initially requested respondents, but were happy to hear that our section had started the project. They agreed with me that the survey was a useful and important undertaking. One of their reasons for this, however, was news to me.
“My boss thinks younger archivists prefer temporary positions,” said the other archivist. “She thinks they don’t want to be tied down, and want to have freedom to move around.”
I was aghast.
Yes, there are some archivists who like the flexibility of temporary positions. I don’t mean to disparage them. Some archivists can afford to have that freedom, due to a breadwinning spouse or another means of income. If you are one of these people, that’s great. Our survey indicates, however, that this is by far the exception rather than the rule.
A theme that ran consistently through the survey responses was one of instability, and the frustrations it creates. “I’m ready to start having children, but I don’t know if I’ll have a job in a year” or “My partner and I would like to buy a house, but we might have to move for my job” were” were some responses that stood out to me. Several people mentioned delaying one major life decision or another and cited the uncertainty of their position as the reason why.
Another thing I noticed was the use of the word “anxiety.” It was everywhere. Many respondents used it. Would their job be renewed for another year? Would they be able to find another job if it wasn’t? Would they have to move again? What about all the time they would have to devote to the application process itself? Anxiety seems like a very appropriate word to describe these responses, and one that just begins to scratch the surface.
Responses like the ones above far outweighed the responses that expressed a preference for temporary jobs. There were several hundred responses, too, which is an amount that seems to be a decent sample of archivists in general. Based on that information alone, I believe it’s fair to say that a desire for a stable, permanent position is definitely the norm.
I don’t know that other archivist’s supervisor, or how widespread their assumption is that there is a preference for temporary positions among archivists. I do, however, feel like I should dispel that notion immediately. The ubiquity of temporary jobs in the archives profession is taking a toll on us, mentally and financially. We need to have many more conversations about how we can address this.
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.
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.
Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This end-of-the-year post is from Steering Committee member Samantha Brown, Assistant Archivist at the New-York Historical Society.
As this committee year comes to an end, I have begun thinking about the issues that our committee and SAA at large will be facing in the coming years. While questions of accessibility and preservation will still be looming far into the future, the biggest problem our profession will face in the years to come is retention. How does our field retain talented and enthusiastic young archivists when their career prospects are so uncertain?
While many of us enter the field with big hopes and dreams, we’re soon confronted with the reality of the limited positions available in our profession. Job applicants soon discover that jobs are hard to come by and the ones that are available are either part-time or contract gigs. Even though securing one these positions feels like a success the reality of the position soon becomes evident. You might have a job now but positions is temporary and you need to start applying for new positions immediately. Unless you’re lucky enough to find a permanent job, you’re constantly in a cycle of applying and reapplying for new positions. This situation begs the question of whether it’s ethical to have a field that largely consists of part-time and temporary positions. Is it right to allow people to enter a field that has such limited options?
When discussing this dilemma, people have suggested that universities should limit the amount of students allowed to enter archival studies tracks. As of right now, it’s unknown whether less students entering the archival field would fix the jobs problem. However, what we do know is that limiting entry into the field creates a whole new set of problems. When setting limits, universities must create a set of criteria that students must meet to enter a university’s program. Unless universities develop a way to do blind admissions, these criteria could very well reinforce biases that already exist within the profession and prevent underrepresented groups from being able to enter the profession.
Another issue with limiting entry into archival studies programs is that it just deals with the surface issue of our profession. While there will be less people fighting and competing for jobs, there is no guarantee that more permanent, full-time jobs will be created or that higher wages will be offered. While there is definitely a pool of people applying for archives positions, the issue isn’t the number of people searching or the number of jobs available but how institutions value archival labor. Since archival work isn’t seen as valuable to the institutions that employ us, our employers don’t see the need to provide decent compensations. Unless we can convince people that the work we do is important and contributes something positive to the world, no one will want to create jobs for us. In order for our profession to thrive and grow, we need others to see our value and desire to employ us so that archivists can stay in the field rather than having to leave and find other work to support themselves.
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 courtesy of committee member Steve Duckworth, University Archivist at Oregon Health & Science University.
It’s my last Steering Share! Until a week ago, I thought I had another year left in my term and now that I find I’m about to be off the team, my perspective on what to write today has changed. I’ve been asked to run for chair or vice-chair for the section to help keep the momentum going, but I’m now really looking forward to a year off (at least) from SAA service. I&A has focused a lot on issues around labor and equity within the profession. I think we’ve raised some good questions and hopefully we’ve helped get people thinking about these big issues.
But personally, I’m conflicted. We have a problem with diversity in the profession (admit it or not – it’s there and don’t come at me with your rebuttals to this claim). We’re underpaid. We’re frequently undervalued. There is a large focus on temporary and other project-based work. And, on the positive side, there is professional movement against all of this. However, I’m not sure where best to focus to help make meaningful change.
Should we try to “diversify” the profession? Should I really be encouraging more people to come into a profession with a fairly limited market for jobs that are also generally underpaid?
Should we try to tamp down on temporary jobs? Does that mean that – overall – even fewer people will be employed? Will it be even harder for recent graduates to get a foot in the door? Will more records go unprocessed and hidden?
Should we advocate for more visibility and better funding? If we are paid better for our work, where does that money come from? Budgets always have trade-offs. Do I get more money but less staff? Does higher pay necessitate higher workload and stress level? Given our high percentage of academic affiliation, as we push up our requirements, do we also raise qualifications? Will archivists eventually all need a PhD – raising the bar for entrance to the profession even higher?
These are some thoughts that go through my head when someone asks me to serve on a committee or a career panel or teach a course. I honestly really enjoy the work I do and I’d love to have more cool people in the profession, but I’m not sure the profession is one that I can squarely get behind and encourage people to enter. I don’t know.
So this is why I’m looking forward to a little bit of down time. I mean – I’ve been out of library school for just over 5 years and in that time, I’ve held 4 (or so) archival jobs in Philadelphia, PA; Anchorage, AK; Gainesville, FL; and Portland, OR (in that order – that’s a lot of moving). I’ve served on SAA’s Diversity Committee and the I&A Steering Committee (plus local and regional group work). I’ve published articles and written blog posts. I’ve presented at over 10 conferences. I’ve mentored 8 or so other budding archival professionals. And in two weeks I’ll begin teaching an introductory archives course (ironic, right?).
I’m tired! And we all need to take time to clear our heads now and then.
So, thank you to I&A for the chance to meet some amazing people, provide some service to this profession (which I do really enjoy despite what some may think after reading this), and open my eyes to a lot of things I wish I could change.
Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This post comes from I&A Chair Courtney Dean, Head of the Center for Primary Research and Training in UCLA Library Special Collections.
For the final Steering Share of my term as I&A Chair I was planning to provide an update on our section’s temporary labor survey which closed earlier this month. (We had 412 responses!) Instead, when I sat down to write last evening, I quickly found myself going down the wormhole of comments about a recent blog post that was shared via Library Journal’s Twitter account. I won’t go into too much detail (you can look it up yourself) but for those unfamiliar with the situation, a WOC librarian wrote a blog post about the whiteness of library collections, and as so often happens when POC speak truth about racism, the internet trolls came out en masse. (I encourage those of you on Twitter to go in and report them. It’s a quick and somewhat satisfying process.) Appalling enough as it is to have THOUSANDS of strangers leaving vitriolic, hateful, and blatantly racist comments, while also posting photos of the author and details about her workplace, it was especially reprehensible to see other librarians attacking her.
As archivists we’re sometimes inclined to think we don’t have a similar whiteness problem in our field, however one only needs to look at the numbers, or recall the backlash to Dr. Michelle Caswell’s Dismantling White Supremacy session at SAA a few years ago. For all of our talk of diversity, equity, and inclusion, we still struggle to recruit and retain archivists of color, and to acknowledge bias in our collecting practices. To this day I have colleagues who refuse to recognize that archives are not neutral.
Instead of continuing to rely on the on the intellectual and emotional labor of POC colleagues to tirelessly critique and challenge this problematic myth of neutrality, I encourage my fellow white archivists to check out the reading list below and start practicing allyship. We can all be doing better.
Below is a brief reading list in no particular order:
Honma, T. (2005). Trippin’ Over the Color Line: The Invisibility of Race in Library and Information Studies. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 1(2). Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4nj0w1mp
Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, records, and power: The making of modern memory” Archival Science (2002) 2: 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435628.
Lae’l Hughes-Watkins, “Moving Toward a Reparative Archive: A Roadmap for a Holistic Approach to Disrupting Homogenous Histories in Academic Repositories and Creating Inclusive Spaces for Marginalized Voices” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies vol. 5, (2018) https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol5/iss1/6/
Nicole A. Cook Information Services to Diverse Populations: Developing Culturally Competent Library Professionals (California: ABC-CLIO, 2017)
Mario H. Ramirez (2015) Being Assumed Not to Be: A Critique of Whiteness as an Archival Imperative. The American Archivist: Fall/Winter 2015, Vol. 78, No. 2, pp. 339-356. https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081.78.2.339
1) What was your first experience working with archives?
Issues & Advocacy 