Tag: Wikipedia

Archivists on the Issues: Building a Community of Loners

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Today’s post comes from Joanna Black, the Digital Archivist at the Sierra Club’s William E. Colby Memorial Library.

When graduating with my MLIS about nine years ago — deep in the trenches of the economic recession — I had a very difficult time breaking into the professional archives world. Applications went out, nothing came back. I felt disheartened, inadequate, unprepared, and increasingly isolated. Amidst these difficult feelings, I recalled the guidance of the wise whose voices rang out in my ear, “Network! Connect! Participate!” 3b48729vSo I did what my introverted self was so hesitant to do: I reached out. I joined the SAA mentoring program and the Society of California Archivists Publications Committee. I started an archives-focused blog (very outdated now) to discuss issues in the field. I set up informational interviews at collecting institutions. I helped friends and family tackle their own archives. I did anything I could to get my foot in the door and move my career forward.

I eventually snagged a job. And a few year later, another, and another. As my professional experiences expanded, so too did my instincts for archival practice. So when I was thrown into a lone arranger position without notice, I wasn’t entirely unprepared. “You’ve got good instincts,” my colleague and friend Marjorie Bryer once told me, “you’ll make the right decisions.” But being a lone arranger can be difficult and, well, lonely. YOU make the decisions. YOU endure the consequences. YOU advocate for yourself. And although our professional organizations do provide some support, it is hard to resist falling victim to imposter syndrome from time to time.

 

At the Society of California Archivists (SCA) annual general meeting this last April, I attended a wonderful session called “Solution Room: Archivist at Work / as Workers.” As pexels-photo-935870part of the session, participants identified one of five key topics listed on the screen and broke into groups to discuss the one that resonated with them most. Topics ranged from wages and working conditions to supporting a more diverse profession. Although all the topics were significant, I was personally drawn to Group 1: Communities of Support which asked, “How can we create communities of support, and find common cause? How can SCA support archivists working in isolation?” Our small group burst with ideas for creating more communities of support within our profession, such as establishing an SCA mentoring program, providing a “helpline” for lone arrangers to call if a question comes up, and coordinating virtual and in-person meet ups for lone arrangers to support one another. As the session ended, I felt grateful knowing I was not alone and professional organizations want to do more to support lone arranger archivists. I felt grateful knowing that there is a larger dialog taking place about the need for community building in the archival profession. The implications of networking go so much farther than just snagging a job; they also ensure that once we have a job we’re able to sustain it.

Cultivating relationships with other archivists outside our institutions can be a form of survival for lone arrangers. When we have a problem, we can ask someone who has solved it before. When we are pushed to the brink of what we can accomplish on a shoestring budget, we can lean on our colleagues for support. When we feel like frauds, 3b50247rour archivist colleagues dispel that falesy and remind us of our worth. Especially for lone arrangers, being part of a “community of loners” can provide camaraderie and shared experience within an otherwise isolated environment.

When I pushed my shy, naive self to network with colleagues after graduating all those years ago, I thought the point was to gain employment. I didn’t realize I was also cultivating friendships that I would one day rely on for professional growth and support. I didn’t realize that by engaging with other professionals, I was laying the groundwork for my future membership in a community of lone arrangers.

For archivists, jobs can be few and far between. We may not choose to be lone arrangers but nonetheless find ourselves in that position at some point in our career. As if advocating for our work is not hard enough, doing so alone can feel near impossible. But having a professional community to lean on helps alleviate some of these challenges and provides a sense of connectedness. Belonging to a community is such an essential element of life outside of work, why not do more to establish them within our careers? If we can be advocates for our colleagues, those outside of the profession will begin to know our value too.

 

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Archivists on the Issues: Archives as Art, Part 1

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Today’s post comes from a regular writer for I&A’s blog, Cate Peebles. Cate is the NDSR Art fellow at the Yale Center for British Art, where she works with permanent-collection-related born-digital records. This is part 1 of a 2-part essay.

To conclude my blog series about archives as prominent cultural and artistic influences, I’ll turn to the visual arts, a broad and varied category, to be sure. As an archivist at an art museum, I am highly aware of the importance institutional archives can have within museums as historical records of the museum itself, or as repositories for artists’ archives, but there are also countless examples of archives, archival materials, and archival practices as major forces within an artwork, or the artwork itself.

To consider the archive as an artistic medium in and of itself, it is helpful to begin with James O’Toole’s essay, “The Symbolic Significance of Archives,” an important piece of writing by an archivist on the aesthetic and transformative qualities inherent in the role of some documents. His examination of archives as symbolic entities casts light on a side of the archival profession that had not yet been given much attention by archivists themselves, although many visual artists have been working in “the archival mode” since the early 20th century. Archivists are trained to care for records of enduring value and emphasis is placed on “utilitarian motivations for the making of written records” [1]. O’Toole begins his discussion with an invocation of Frank Burke’s 1981 essay, “The Future Course of Archival Theory in the United States,” in which he provokes archivists to consider archives beyond their practical operations and use, and to ask larger, more philosophical questions of the profession, such as “what is the motivation for the act” of recordkeeping and making.

O’Toole’s very question suggests that there is more to records than their practical uses, however dismissed these uses may have been by the majority of archivists who agreed with Lester Cappon’s conjecture that there is nothing to theorize about; the job of the archivist is to “shuffle the damn papers.”[2] Indeed, the conversation about archival theory that Burke began in the late 20th century seems to have caused some rancor among many archivists who stick firmly to the school of thought that archival records are purely practical. This, O’Toole argues extensively, excludes the role of archives and records as symbolic objects. By examining examples from history, such as the Declaration of Independence and the Domesday Book, O’Toole demonstrates the manner in which a document can change from being a record that is useful in the traditional sense, into a record whose use extends beyond practicality and conveys meaning symbolically. Since the very essence of an archival document lies in its having transitioned from primary to secondary use, it follows that the secondary use is not necessarily always going to be practical in the evidentiary sense.  O’Toole’s discussion concludes, significantly, by affirming that archival records can have both practical and symbolic uses; one side is not more important than the other, and if we value archives and archival materials solely for their practical features, we are missing half the picture.

In the twentieth century, the use of archival materials as artistic media became increasingly popular, particularly with the arrival of conceptual art and structuralism on the scene. In her seminal lecture, A Voyage on the North Sea” Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, art critic and professor of art history at Columbia University, Rosalind Krauss presents a discussion of art that does not belong to classical modes and mediums like painting and sculpture, but incorporates any number of expressive modes.[5]  She describes a break from traditional classifications and a movement toward mixed media, video art, installations, readymades (like those made by Marcel Duchamp), collections, and conceptual art. The latter might even lack physical form; the ideas and contextual performance are the artwork.

Krauss focuses on the work of Belgian poet and artist Marcel Broodthaers, who created a fictitious museum called “The Museum of Modern Art, Eagles Division” around which he built collections of objects, such as an installation of stuffed eagles and other objects pertaining to the eagle, much like one might see presented in a natural history museum. Each object is labeled, not with information about its species, but with the admission (joke?): “This Is Not a Work of Art.” Broodtaears picks up where Duchamp left off, creating an imaginary museum, structured around readymades and antiquated modes of display, poking fun at art world expectations and conventions. Broodthaers’ work is often referred to as “institutional critique,” a form that attempts to call out the inner workings of establishments such as the museum and archive; official spaces that command respect, embody some degree of power (financial, intellectual), and authority.

This shift has made the work of many contemporary artists possible such as the work of Lebanese-American artist, Walid Raad. While Broodthaers re-envisions the colonialist structure that names, categorizes and capitalizes upon fine arts, Raad reimagines the archive as a structure wherein truth is not tied to fact while still relying on archives’ hydra-like power to tell many stories at once.

References

[1] O’Toole, James. “The Symbolic Significance of Archives,” The American Archivist, 1982, 234-255

[2] Ibid., 235

[3] Craig and O’Toole, 98

[4] Ibid., 98

[5] Krauss, Rosalind, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 5

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News Monitoring Team: Indian Schools and Historical Othering

The News Monitoring Research Team works on archives and archivists issues in the news. This post, part of our Research Post series, was written by Steering Committee member and team coordinator Steve Duckworth.

For our last official News Monitoring Team post of the season, I thought I would step out of my role as the Coordinator of the News Team and talk a bit about something from a story that popped up last month. The article, turned up by one of the News Team members, focuses on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an “Indian” boarding school in Carlisle, PA that operated from 1879 to 1918.

This struck a chord with me as issues around America’s indigenous peoples and archives and cultural artifacts have been on my mind frequently in my career, ever since my first full-time position with the National Park Service in Alaska and lasting through to today as I work in the Pacific Northwest and hear about projects and programs around the historical mistreatment of these communities (not to mention the similar information coming from Canada). But I had also just read Kate Theimer’s recent post on the Carlisle Indian School and the text of her talk, “Archiving Against the Apocalypse,” for the Canadian-American Archives Conference. I also spent a good chunk of my life living in Philadelphia and Allentown, PA, so a confluence of things held this story in my mind.

While curating an exhibit on public health in the early 20th century last year, I stumbled upon the theory of eugenics, which I’ll admit I hadn’t really ever heard of (and I’ve spent a lot of my life in school). Turns out the U.S., during the later parts of the 1800s and early parts of the 1900s, was really into the idea of creating a purer race of people. Sound familiar? Yeah, American eugenics actually inspired Hitler and that whole Nazi race-purifying thing. Doctors, government workers, and regular Joes alike were all into the idea of weeding out “defective” and “undesirable” traits through controlling who got to reproduce through court-ordered sterilization and segregation, and with “child guidance” clinics that remind me of more recent gay conversion institutions. This didn’t end all that long ago; Oregon’s eugenics board lasted until 1983, having carried out its last sterilization in 1981.

Indian schools were a slightly earlier version of population control. White, European-Americans of the 1800s wanted to assimilate indigenous people into their culture. They thought if they removed youths from their families, language, culture, and traditions, and trained and educated them in European style, they could eventually breed out the “savage” aspects of their people. It was a way of exterminating the indigenous people of their new country that was considered more civil and socially acceptable than all out murder or war. Though, as you can see from recent reports, beatings, illness, and death were all common outcomes for these students.

The Carlisle school was America’s first, off-reservation boarding school, but it wasn’t the last. Twenty six boarding schools were established across the country, along with hundreds of private religious schools. Over 10,000 children attended the Carlisle school alone, with estimates of over 100,000 children total throughout the system. Canada’s similar system, the Residential Schools, lasted into the 1970s and had over 150,000 “students.” (Canada’s system was also more heavily documented and the government has been a lot more public about speaking out about it, most likely due to the unprecedented class-action lawsuit survivors brought against the government.)

So, first eugenics got stuck in my mind, and now I keep learning about more and more ways in which atrocious acts have been committed, for this reason or that (have you listened to the Seeing White podcast series?), which all really boil down to othering certain groups to keep the white people on top – assimilation, cleansing, separation, racial purity, etc. And I think, damn, we humans are really horrible (this, itself, is not really a revelation for me, but more of an expansion).

But humans can also manage to do some good here and there. So, and here I relate it back to archives, it’s painful to learn of this history, but it’s refreshing (in a way) to read stories of how archival records and cultural history are being used to return remains, artifacts, memory, and culture to people who have been wronged by our country (and others) – and perhaps even provide some healing to the wronged. These acts of restitution provide some concrete examples that can be used to influence archival ethics and practices today and perhaps encourage people to look up and out from their lives and small worlds, to see far afield and take in the big picture of all of us on this planet and what we’re doing to each other.

My goal here isn’t so much to bring about change through this short post, but more to add another voice to the education on happenings such as this and to help make connections between what we do in our daily work that could potentially have a huge benefit. Also I want to urge people with these types of historical records (or even more contemporary records), to not hide from the past. Face it and work to better the future.

 

Resources and additional information

Listed chronologically, starting with the most recent

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Archivists on the Issues: Welcome to the Séance, Voices from the Archives in Contemporary American Poetry

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Today’s post comes from a regular writer for I&A’s blog, Cate Peebles. Cate is the NDSR Art fellow at the Yale Center for British Art, where she works with permanent-collection-related born-digital records. 

In my last post, I focused on the prevalence of archival source material in popular recent true crime docuseries, including The Keepers, The Jinx, and Making a Murderer, and the active role of records as essential narrative components and aesthetic representations of the criminal justice system’s silences and revelations. Under the guise of entertainment, these often sensational tales offer mainstream audiences a glimpse of archives and records in action, with little to no mention of professional archivists. This inquiry has prompted the question: where else in cultural and artistic practice are archives and records used as both resource and aesthetic medium?

The image of historians and genealogists spending long afternoons in the reading room is a familiar one—backs hunched over a table as they leaf through finding aids and folders, culling primary source materials to investigate, reconstruct, and re-present personal and cultural histories. However, this is not the only outcome time spent in the archives. What about less familiar modes of archival research and representation of primary sources? In honor of April, National Poetry Month (and also the cruelest!), this post will blast through literary tradition, history, and trends to take a look at three recent books of poetry that repossess archival source material and reanimate it as lyric lines in a manner that is no less impactful than a biographer’s refined synthesis of research materials.

Since the early twentieth-century (think: Marcel Duchamp and other Surrealists), and more so since the rise of conceptual and institutional critique art in the 1960s, documents, archival practice, and research have become valid and popular mediums for artistic works. In conjunction with these movements, some contemporary literary artists, particularly poets, have adopted a mode of writing that places archival sources at the center of their work. The work is often labeled “experimental” for lack of a better nutshell in which to encapsulate this genre-fluid kind of writing. In some instances, and with certain writers in particular, the mode is referred to as “Documentary Poetry” and “Poetry of Witness”, which document a particular moment, event, or cultural movement through the use of primary sources, photographs, video, and testimonial accounts. [i]

Archival collections are often fragmentary by nature and structurally lend themselves well to the production of evocative, lyrical, and time-bending poems. Since the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1923), which includes frenetic splicing of sources, “borrowed” fragments, and telltale inclusion of an extensive “Notes” section, many poets have been attracted to this fragmentary, academic style that highlights interaction with the past and places seemingly unrelated references, quotations, and text side by side, reverberating so to speak, to create new associative leaps through sound and image in the reader’s mind; the word “medium” springs to mind—pun intended.

Similar devices are used by other Modernist and Surrealist writers, including Andre Breton, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf.  The incorporation of found language and images has become a powerful technique of giving voice to the previously silenced; it is a kind of time travel via linguistic stitching of the past into our present moment. As in archival work, voices from the past are brought into the present.

In the following three micro-essays – one below and two posted separately later this week – I share but three examples of recent books of poetry that exemplify this mode of “ripped from the archives” writing, each in its own distinct way.

[i] See: C.D. Wright’s One Big Self, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Carolyn Forché’s Angel of History, and Tyehimba Jess’ Olio. The common impulse in this mode is one of social activism and revising cultural erasures.

 

 

The Work-Shy

Blunt Research Group

Wesleyan University Press, 2016

 

Published anonymously under the collective authorship of the Blunt Research Group, a collective of writers, scholars, and artists, the book begins with a brief, expository essay: “The following poems operate under a strict constraint: they are composed entirely of phrases drawn from the case files of inmates in the earliest youth prisons in California between 1910 and 1925…The histories contained in these files were gathered and archived by the now defunct Eugenics Records Office” as well as testimonies from the “chronically insane” collected by the Prinzhorn Collection in Germany and the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in New York.

What follows in the book’s first section are the voices of predominately African American and Chicano youths, aged 12-17, many of whom were subjected to psychological and physical experimentation. Experiments which, a decade or two later, influenced the eugenics practices at Nazi concentration camps.  Many of the book’s poems are named for the ward, whose words are italicized and spliced with the words of the “fieldworkers” who studied them. (The lineation is difficult to replicate here, sadly.)

Jose

Joe possesses

all the bad characteristics of all the boys

was heard to say

this is the last time

        I’m coming in here

twice accused of murder twice acquitted

made a fool of himself

too much already

he wanted us to keep on goin’ with the bottle

            at age 14 went out

to work in the fruit

(27)

The Work-Shy weaves together many voices, from multiple geographic and temporal locations, to build a chorus of the unheard and forgotten. The book calls out past wrongs that were once ignored by society at large and brings the reader face to face with the present, prompting us to take a closer look at the institutional systems of oppression that surround us yet.

 

 

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Archives in the News: Retention, Repatriation, and Reproduction

Shaun Hayes is a member of the I&A News Monitoring Research Team, which brings us this Archives in the News Research post. Hayes is the Archives Program Specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and is passionate about sharing current news articles regarding archives and the profession with his students and others. 

 

Three recent news stories have highlighted the relationship between records important to their countries’ histories. The first, “Halting Auction, France Designates Marquis de Sade Manuscript a ‘National Treasure’,” appeared in the New York Times on December 19, 2017. The article details the history of the Marquis de Sade’s famous work 120 Days of Sodom and efforts made by the French government to cancel a planned auction of the original manuscript so that public funds could be raised for its purchase. Interestingly, the article cites the manuscript’s “sulfurous reputation” as one of the reasons for its designation as a national treasure.

The article “Morocco Retrieves 43,000 Archival Documents About Moroccan Jews From France“ describes the repatriation of archival documents created by Moroccan Jews in the late 19th and mid-20th centuries. This example of a country seeking to control records important to their national history differs from the example above in that it deals with the repatriation of records that had been outside of the country seeking control of them for some time, as far back as 1948. According to the article, a main impetus for retrieving the records stems from the 2011 Moroccan Constitution’s recognition of Jewish heritage as an integral part of Morocco’s heritage.  

The third article, “Gabriel García Márquez’s Archive Freely Available Online,” focuses on the online archive of Gabriel García Márquez‘s papers provided by the University of Texas Harry Ransom Center. The article alludes to the controversy surrounding the sale of Márquez’s papers to an archive outside of his native Colombia, or in Mexico, where Márquez spent a part of his life. A previous New York Times article illustrated the outrage in Colombia over the Colombian government’s failure to acquire Márquez’s papers. The more recent article seemingly brushes aside issues of the collection’s ultimate location by stating that “But now, the university’s Harry Ransom Center has digitized and made freely available about half of the collection, making some 27,000 page scans and other images visible to anyone in the world with an internet connection.”

The incongruous views about the importance of records remaining physically located in communities that claim ownership of them is interesting; in the first two examples, France halted an auction and plans to raise millions of dollars in order to retain ownership of de Sade’s manuscript, while Morocco spent years attempting to repatriate records related to its Jewish history. In both instances, the governments of those nations felt that accessing the records that were deemed to be of national significance was not enough and that efforts had to be made to retain or have them returned. In the third example, the Times suggests that simply having access to online versions of some of the records in the Márquez papers should mollify any concerns about the collection’s physical location.

What the Márquez article by Jennifer Schuessler fails to consider is the intrinsic value of the physical papers. The Society of American Archivists’ Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology defines intrinsic value as “the usefulness or significance of an item derived from its physical or associational qualities, inherent in its original form and generally independent of its content, that are integral to its material nature and would be lost in reproduction.” The intrinsic value of the Márquez papers can be found in their uniqueness as important examples of Colombian culture and history. This uniqueness is subverted when Colombians are relegated to simply accessing records that anyone else with an Internet connection can access as well.

This is not to criticize the Ransom Center for purchasing the collection, and it is certainly laudable how publicly accessible it has made some of the papers. What is most troublesome about the perspective of the Times‘ Schuessler is how she conflates issues of ownership and access. Ownership gives the owner power over how and when something is accessed; simply having access to something puts the accessors at the whims of the owners. This is a power relationship that is as old as time, and yet Ms. Schuessler suggests that one is as good as the other when it comes to records.

As archivists, we are well aware of the power that records can have as central aspects of a community’s cultural identity and as the rise of community archives demonstrates, ownership of these records can play a key role in ensuring that records are kept and maintained in ways that reflect community values and priorities. It is our job to continue to educate the public on the role that records play in strengthening and supporting social memory and culture and the vital role that the ownership of records can play in doing so.  

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Research Post: “Protect from Potential Grizzlies”: How Local, State and Federal Concealed Carry Rules Apply to Libraries, Archives, and Museums

I&A Research Teams are groups of dedicated volunteers who monitor breaking news and delve into ongoing topics affecting archives and the archival profession. Under the leadership of the I&A Steering Committee, the Research Teams compile their findings into Research Posts for the I&A blog. Each Research Post offers a summary and coverage of an issue. This Research Post comes from On-Call Research Team #1, which looks into real-time issues affecting archivists and archives. 

Please be aware that the sources cited have not been vetted and do not indicate an official stance of SAA or the Issues and Advocacy Roundtable.

Proposed and already enacted concealed carry legislation in numerous states has spurred questions regarding policies for libraries, archives, and museums. What can – and cannot – individual institutions and organizations do regarding patrons and guns given their locally applicable bills? Concerns vary not just by state and institution type, but even by possible need for concealed weapons.  For example, Wyoming’s need for weapons in primary and secondary schools may be affected by the potential for grizzly bears nearby, a suggestion posed by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

On American college campuses, various state rules apply to concealed carry. Four states allow guns on campuses, six states allow for guns on campus in restricted areas, 10 states allow campuses to choose, 10 states allow storage of weapons in vehicles, and 20 states prohibit guns on all campuses. Employment status can be a factor, as well. In Tennessee, although students can only store weapons in vehicles, faculty and staff are allowed concealed carry. While these variations only apply to college campuses, laws can be more convoluted with other institutions: public or federal buildings and state parks, for example. Since libraries, archives, and museums can be within public, state, corporate, federal, or college entities, we will all be affected by concealed carry laws differently.

Proponents for concealed carry argue that states that allow it on campuses, provide improved safety and that threats to the learning environment are false. These proponents argue instead that active shooter incidents such as the Virginia Tech massacre may have ended more quickly and safely with an armed student body on hand.

People working in libraries, archives, and museums voice concerns that guns can create more violence rather than less, but they are also concerned that concealed carry can limit free speech and introduces complicated security issues. Faculty and students may not safe practicing academic freedom under the new rules. In one instance in Utah, a feminist speaker backed out of a campus event after threats were made on her life and the Utah State University could not provide increased support for her safety. Concealed carry proponents believe that such situations can be mitigated and that the university could have provided better security, albeit at increased cost and intrusiveness of individual searches.

Another, more common example of security complications can be found in archives and manuscript repositories. They typically have patrons place bulky materials, such as jackets and bags, in lockers, but having patrons remove guns can violate state laws and possibly be illegal.

Many states have been in the news for legislation regarding concealed weapons on college campuses, which covers Oregon, Minnesota, Michigan, Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Texas. At the University of Texas at Austin, guns are restricted in its Tower area, due to the 1966 sniper attacks by Charles Whitman. Often, libraries are not included as restricted areas on college campuses. Some areas can be negotiated, but if a state wholly allows for concealed carry, then libraries and archives cannot create rules or policies that negate the relevant legislation. Virginia’s Richmond Public Library found this out when they posted that guns were prohibited and the Virginia’s Citizens Defense League (rightly) disagreed. After changing the rule to read that it was prohibited “except as permitted by the law,” the League still determined the language was not acceptable and protested.

Overall, it is the burden of each library, archives, and museum to determine what policies they are allowed to enact based on the laws and regulations of their state and the rules within their affiliated institutions. This poses issues for creating standards and for enacting and managing policies effectively. After all, your institution may need protection from a grizzly.

A bibliography is provided below. Of course, this is not an exhaustive list and some articles may require a subscription.

All States

Texas

Tennessee

Colorado

Utah

  • Annale Renneker, “Packing More than Just a Backpack.” Journal of Law and
    Education, vol. 44, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 273-282.
  • Jennifer Sinor, “Guns on Campus Have Already Curtailed Free Speech.”
    Chronicle of Higher Education, vol. 61, no. 10., 2014 October 27. Accessed January 3, 2017. http://www.chronicle.com/article/Guns-on-Campus-Have-Already/149663

Idaho

Resources for understanding and tracking legislation

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Steering Share: Rachel Mandell

Steering Shares are an opportunity to find out more about the I&A Steering Committee. This post is from I&A Vice Chair Rachel Mandell. She is Digital Archivist at California State University, Dominguez Hills.

Rachel Mandell

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

As an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, I worked in Doe Library, the university’s main library stacks. The student library employees switched tasks every hour of our shifts; tasks included re-shelving books, collecting discarded books or belongings left behind by patrons, and participating in larger projects like shifting books. Re-shelving books involved gathering an entire library cart full of books and first arranging them in the proper Library of Congress order before bringing them back to the stacks. One of my favorite memories of that job was competing with my fellow student workers to see who could put together an entire cart the quickest without any mistakes!

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

Last year, I served as the Issues and Advocacy Intern. As a project archivist, I have found it difficult to acquire institutional support for professional development opportunities outside of my current position. I saw the internship as a great way to get involved in SAA, without taking too much time away from my daily tasks. After spending a semester working with the Issues and Advocacy team, I was hooked! It’s a great way to stay up to date with important archival issues and stay connected to larger archival community!

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

I would love to see linked data incorporated into the archival field. In the linked data environment, connections between data points are created with links that are machine accessible rather than human accessible. The library community has already begun to tackle this issue. By using encoding schemas such as BIBFRAME created by the Library of Congress, the library catalog gets transformed into something more than structured information. These links become actual “things” that are connected to each other. For example, exposing library metadata as linked data means it could be crawled by search engine bots and included in user search results along with articles from Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). In the archival environment, we can imagine using linked data to connect many different vocabularies to a collection of materials. We don’t need to risk interoperability by choosing one vocabulary over another, because we can link to many. Through linked data, we can make our projects more dynamic and flexible.

What archive issue means a lot to you?

My current work on the Japanese American Digitization Project at California State University, Dominguez Hills deals with an archival issue that has become very important to me: accurate archival description. The controversy surrounding how the Japanese American experience in the 20th century was historically and typically described by government agencies such as the War Relocation Authority is very present in this project. For example, internment is not a preferred or even an accurate term when describing nearly 120,000 people who were forced to leave their homes; internment refers to the legally permissible detention of enemy aliens in the time of war. So it is extremely problematic to apply this term to the unlawful incarceration of American citizens — and nearly 2/3 of those people incarcerated were U.S. citizens. As archivists, we have the power to describe and therefore perpetuate a particular perspective of history. Archival description should not be taken lightly. Terminology and description are power tools.

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

While living and working in Vienna on a Fulbright grant, I spent part of my time learning how to digitize Super 8 mm films at the Austrian Film Museum. In addition to the already impressive collection housed in the Film Museum’s archive, I was introduced to their wonderful collection of home movies and other ephemeral films. Ephemeral films are a very interesting archival artefact. They are defined as films with a limited purpose and not meant to endure– and include amateur, institutional, industrial, educational, and other films. They are often discovered by collectors or hobbyists, however there is often very little known about these films. One way that the Austrian Film Museum is tackling this issue of limited metadata, is to digitize the films and incorporate them into online platforms. An example of one such platform is the Ephemeral Films Project, which focuses on ephemeral films from the Austrian Nazi era. Researchers, historians, and other interested users can view the digitized films and actually provide feedback if anything is known about the film such as locations within the film. By crowdsourcing metadata, we can discover more about these unique and rare films.

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National Tracing Center of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives

Archivists on the Issues is a forum for archivists to discuss the issues we are facing today. Below is a post from Steve Duckworth and Steve Ammidown about the problem of records management and the ATF’s National Tracing Center. 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.

Let’s talk about guns. And records management. And maybe some advocacy.

According to their website, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is:

 a law enforcement agency … that protects our communities from violent criminals, criminal organizations, the illegal use and trafficking of firearms, the illegal use and storage of explosives, acts of arson and bombings, acts of terrorism, and the illegal diversion of alcohol and tobacco products. [They] partner with communities, industries, law enforcement, and public safety agencies to safeguard the public [they] serve through information sharing, training, research, and use of technology.

That’s a big job. But as we’re about to see, “information sharing” and the “use of technology” are pretty restricted at the ATF.

The National Tracing Center (NTC) is the firearms tracing facility of the ATF. Located in Martinsburg, WV, they are the only facility in the United States that can provide information to law enforcement agencies (local, state, federal, and international) that can be used to trace firearms in criminal investigations, gun trafficking, and other movement of firearms, both domestically and internationally. And they are drowning in records. From recent reports, roughly 1.6 million records arrive at the facility each month. Records usually come from defunct firearms dealers who are required to submit their records when they go out of business. (For dealers still in business, the NTC contacts them after tracing a weapon through its manufacturer.) There appear to be no standards in place for how dealers have to keep or submit these records. There is a form (4473) for the actual gun purchase, but other records can come in on computer media or hand-written documents. They often arrive somewhat damaged, with partially shredded or water-damaged records being frequently cited in news reports. Some people even send theirs in on rolls of toilet paper.

As it is currently illegal to create a registry of firearms in the U.S., the idea of a searchable database is also off the table. This leaves workers at the facility with the task of sifting through these records manually to complete traces. Upwards of 365,000 traces are requested each year, and the number will just keep growing (due in part to the Obama administration’s requirement that every gun involved in a crime be traced). While records are now being digitized to provide some easier access and relief for the physical space needed, the records remain non-searchable and amount to a newer version of microfilmed records.

Some of the problems at the NTC can be traced to the lack of consistent leadership and chronic underfunding. The position of the agency director was unfilled from 2006 to 2013 due to legislation backed by the National Rifle Association (NRA) that requires Senate confirmation to fill the position. In 2013, acting director B. Todd Jones was narrowly confirmed to fill the Director role, but he retired soon after (in 2015) and the position has yet to be filled permanently. Stagnant funding has prevented the ATF from keeping up with demand. In addition to the overwhelmed workers at NTC, the agency has just over 600 inspectors dedicated to inspecting the record-keeping at over 140,000 gun dealers across the country.

The data collected by the NTC is also subject to the NRA’s legislative sway in Washington. As mentioned, they have been successful in heading off any attempts at creating a searchable database, arguing that such a mechanism would be a “registry” in violation of the Second Amendment. Taking it one step further, a set of provisions known as the “Tiahrt Amendments” has been attached to every U.S. Department of Justice appropriations bill since 2003, prohibiting the NTC from releasing information to anyone other than a law enforcement agency or prosecutor in connection with a criminal investigation. The law effectively blocks this data from being used in academic research on criminal gun use or in civil lawsuits against gun sellers or manufacturers. It also prevents the ATF from collecting the inventory information from gun dealers, which would further help identify lost or stolen guns. The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence argues that these amendments only empower criminals and reckless dealers.

Restrictive laws and a lack of quality management lead to a massive backlog of records and a very limited system of filling the great number of trace requests the NTC receives. The antiquated measures required by the NTC restrict law enforcement’s ability to perform their duties. While public opinion regarding gun sales seems to be turning (unlike Congress’s voting record), the idea of a database seems quite far off. An effective and permanent director at the ATF would be a good starting place, but as of this writing, a nomination doesn’t appear to even be in place (and given the upcoming election, it’s not likely to happen anytime soon).

Not unlike the rest of the gun debate, the political debate around the NTC and gun tracing data seems intractable and unlikely to change. Luckily for us, however, we’re archivists and records managers! We offer a unique perspective on this subject when we contact our elected officials on this topic. We’ve been in the dusty stacks (yes, we said it) and dealt with unwieldy access systems when time was of the essence. We should be arguing for the modernization and full funding of the NTC and the repeal of the Tiahrt Amendments, at the least to improve access to government information and at the most to help save lives. So consider this your call to advocacy (as mentioned at the start). If you feel this situation warrants some action, take it and contact your legislators now!

 News/Links:

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), https://www.atf.gov

Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, “Maintaining Records on Gun Sales,” http://smartgunlaws.org/gun-laws/policy-areas/gun-dealer-sales/maintaining-records-on-gun-sales/

National Tracing Center (NTC), https://www.atf.gov/firearms/national-tracing-center, (informational brochure: https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/national-tracing-center-information-industry-members-atf-p-331210/download)

National Tracing Center via Wikipedia (good general overview), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Tracing_Center

The White House, “Presidential Memorandum – Tracing of Firearms in Connection with Criminal Investigations,” https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/01/16/presidential-memorandum-tracing-firearms-connection-criminal-investigati

 News reports:

2016 March 24, America’s 1st Freedom [NRA magazine], “Where the ATF Scans Gun Sales Records,” https://www.americas1stfreedom.org/articles/2016/3/24/where-the-atf-scans-gun-sales-records/

2016 January 6, The Guardian, “Agency tasked with enforcing Obama’s gun control measures has been gutted,” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/06/bureau-alcohol-tobacco-firearms-obama-gun-control-measures-funding-understaffing

2015 October 27, USA Today, “Millions of Firearms Records Languish at National Tracing Center” http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/10/27/firearms-national-tracing-center-atf/74401060/

2015 March 20, USA Today, “ATF director announces resignation,” http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/03/20/atf-director-b-todd-jones-resigns/25081713/

2013 June 11, Media Matters, “How the NRA Hinders the ATF Director Confirmation Process,” http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/06/11/how-the-nra-hinders-the-atf-director-confirmati/194412

2013 May 20, NPR, “The Low-Tech Way Guns Get Traced,” http://www.npr.org/2013/05/20/185530763/the-low-tech-way-guns-get-traced

2013 March 13, InformationWeek, “ATF’s Gun Tracing System is a Dud,” http://www.informationweek.com/applications/atfs-gun-tracing-system-is-a-dud/d/d-id/1109062

2013 February 19, WJLA ABC7 (Washington, D.C.), “ATF National Tracing Center Traces Guns the Old-Fashioned Way,” http://wjla.com/news/nation-world/atf-national-tracing-center-traces-guns-the-old-fashioned-way-85417 (YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lFdLaYcDNQ)

2013 January 30, CBS Evening News, “Tracing Guns is Low-tech Operation for ATF,” http://www.cbsnews.com/news/tracing-guns-is-low-tech-operation-for-atf/

2011 November 2, Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, “Federal Law on Tiahrt Amendments,” http://smartgunlaws.org/federal-law-on-tiahrt-amendments/

2010 October 26, Washington Post, “ATF’s Oversight Limited in Face of Gun Lobby,” http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/25/AR2010102505823.html

Steve Duckworth is the Processing Archivist at the University of Florida where he wrangles and tames all sorts of archival collections. Previously, he has held roles with the National Park Service in Anchorage, AK and the PACSCL/CLIR Hidden Collections Project in Philadelphia, PA.

Steve Ammidown is the Manuscripts and Outreach Archivist for the Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio.

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Identifying and Crushing Barriers, Women’s History, and Workplace Inclusion: The National Archives’ Women’s Affinity Group

The post below was first published on the Women Archivists Roundtable’s blog on June 16, 2016. In it, Elizabeth Dinschel, founder of the Women’s Affinity Group (WAG) at the National Archives and Records Administration, discusses some of the challenges women face in the workplace.

The country, or mostly women, are buzzing about the wage gap, but does the gap exist in fields dominated by women such as Museums, Archives, or Libraries? Maybe not in the way you think, but the gap exists. I founded the Women’s Affinity Group (WAG) at the National Archives and Records Administration to address some of the obvious barriers, highlight the important contributions women have made to history through our collections, and provide inclusive activities to help women who may be struggling in the workplace. It is worthy of note that the executives and senior level staff have been abundantly supportive of the Women’s Affinity Group and all affinity groups across NARA. In fact, the first people I discussed the affinity group with were Debra Wall, Deputy Archivist of the United States, and Maria Stanwich, Chief of Staff, who encouraged me to start the affinity group. I had that conversation with Maria and Deb in 2013, but WAG was not officially chartered until December 2015.

The National Archives uses a database called Performance Measurement and Reporting System (PMRS) to collect and track all kinds of NARA data. Shortly after I started working for NARA, I was introduced to the wonders of PMRS. I am kind of a statistics geek, so I dug into the numbers and what I found was alarming. Number one – even though women made up more than half of the workforce (51% to be exact), we did not even make up half of the executive positions (27% to be exact). In fact, women stacked up at one pay level (the glass ceiling) and rapidly decline in pay grades after that. Why? I wish I knew. The pay grade where women stack up feeds into management, so there is not a pipeline issue. I know this is complicated by several factors, but no one could seem to place their finger on why this was happening, so NARA is working on a barrier analysis to identify the root causes.

Number two – women were leaving NARA and retention of female employees is 2-3% below male employees. On the issue of retention, most people assume, falsely, that women leave their jobs to start or tend to families. They are wrong. But for the group of women who do have children and return to the workforce, they may be faced with challenges where they are discriminated against and not protected by FMLA. The American Association of State and Local History just posted a blog about the experience of motherhood in small museums. Fortunately, federal employees do enjoy FMLA leave, but retention is a concern, of course. For the women we fear are leaving for lack of opportunity, WAG started working with Learning and Development to advertise career advancement trainings such as- resume writing, applying for jobs, building Individual Development Plans (IDP), etc. We are also committed to advertising leadership training opportunities and providing spaces for women to discuss the unique difficulties or challenges they face.

One of the issues women are faced with is the lack of historical recognition of the accomplishments of women. Since most of us are, in some way, public historians, this is a big blow to our professions. In an effort to remedy that, the Women’s Affinity Group will be revamping the women’s sections of the NARA webpages, hosting social media events like Wikipedia edit-a-thons (our social media team told me that 90% of Wikipedia contributors are male and they recognize there is a gender gap in contributions. Wikipedia knows it). WAG will be reaching out across the country to bring NARA’s records of the Suffrage Movement and the centennial of the 19th Amendment to as many people as possible as well. Fortunately we can help bring the story of women to the country through NARA’s rich collections.

Lastly, WAG is launching some activities across NARA to promote inclusion. Recently, we launched a quarterly book club where members of WAG, all genders, select a book and then we hold a discussion with Debra Wall, the Deputy Archivist of the United States. WAG members are encouraged to start clubs at their respective sites and discuss the book on our employee pages. Our first book selection was, Wendy McClure, The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of the Little House on the Prairie. We have discussed clothing swaps and mentorships, but everything is in its infancy.

We know the mountain is steep and things will not change overnight, but we will encourage our colleagues to keep applying for management positions, take advantage of professional development opportunities, and to lean on each other because it is not just about “leaning in.” After all, Madeleine Albright said, “there is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women,” so we will make sure we help each other take credit for our work and ideas and we will always take our seat at the table.

Elizabeth Dinschel is a historian and the founder and Chair of the Women’s Affinity Group for the National Archives and Records Administration. She is currently the Education Specialist at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum in West Branch, Iowa. Formerly, she was the Oral History and Education Coordinator for the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Museum. All views expressed in this blog post are that of Elizabeth Dinschel and do not necessarily represent the views of the National Archives and Records Administration or the United States Government.

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Research Post: Fire at the Cinemateca Brasileira

I&A Research Teams are groups of dedicated volunteers who monitor breaking news and delve into ongoing topics affecting archives and the archival profession. Under the leadership of the I&A Steering Committee, the Research Teams compile their findings into Research Posts for the I&A blog. Each Research Post offers a summary and coverage of an issue. This Research Post comes from On-Call Research Team #2, which is mobilized to investigate issues as they arise.

Please be aware that the sources cited have not been vetted and do not indicate an official stance of SAA or the Issues and Advocacy Roundtable.

Summary of the Issue

A fire broke out in the film library of the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paolo on February 3, 2016. The exact cause of the fire was not reported, but the area involved was where nitrate film was stored. This material is known to be volatile and can spontaneously combust due to environmental factors. Sources reported that approximately 1,000 rolls of film burned in the fire. All is not lost, however, as the institution states that all films lost in the fire had been preserved in other media formats (though some of the reports located state that number at 80%). Reports of the fire came out soon after the event occurred, but updates and further information has not been located. While there are many reports, especially reports in Portuguese, almost all of them date from February 3 or 4. They each appear to leave some questions on the table.

The fire occurred in one of the institution’s nitrate film warehouses, which are specially designed to house such film. There is no electric grid, and interior walls do not reach the ceilings. Most sources report that it took about 30 minutes to contain the fire. Some video footage of the scene can be found here.

The Cinemateca Brasileira holds some 250,000 film rolls, including features, short films, and newsreels, as well as books, papers, movie posters, and other paper records; this loss represents 0.4% of their film holdings. The history of the Cinemateca can be traced back to 1946 as the Second Film Club of São Paolo (after the First had been closed by the Department of Press and Propaganda in 1941). In 1948, the Club became affiliated with the International Federation of Film Clubs and, in 1949, with the film department of São Paolo’s newly created Museum of Modern Art. In 1964, it was incorporated into the Ministry of Culture, becoming a governmental institution. Previous fires have occurred in 1957, 1969, and 1982, all due to nitrate film. The institute moved into its current facilities, built under the technical guidance of the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), in 1998.

The Archivist Rising blog reported that the institution suffered somewhat recent budget cuts due to a large financial crisis. Blogger Aurélio Michiles blames the incident on the previous budget cuts as well, but describes the cuts as more of a punishment towards the administration rather than having to do with an overall financial crisis. Further sources state the number of employees has been reduced from over 100 in 2013 to just over 20 currently, though it remains unclear how many employees are governmental workers and how many are actually employed by the Cinematheque’s Friends Society (Sociedade Amigos da Cinemateca) and whether or not that affects the various numbers reported from different sources. The truth behind this budget controversy is left for further research – and preferably by someone proficient in Portuguese.

bibliography of coverage of the issue:

“Some thousand film rolls burnt in Cinemateca Brasileira fire.” EBC Agencia Brasil. Accessed 2016 March 25. http://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/en/cultura/noticia/2016-02/some-thousand-film-rolls-burnt-cinemateca-brasileira-fire (EBC manages TV Brasil, TV Brasil International, Agência Brasil, Radioagência, and the National Public Broadcast System. Besides the commitment to public communication, their values are characterized by editorial independence, transparency, and participatory management.)

“Cinemateca Brasileira.” Wikipedia. Accessed 2016 March 25. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinemateca_Brasileira

“Ministério da Cultura não tem plano para evitar novos incêndios na Cinemateca Brasileira.” Estãdo. Accessed 2016 March 25. http://cultura.estadao.com.br/noticias/cinema,ministerio-da-cultura-nao-tem-plano-para-evitar-novos-incendios-na-cinemateca-brasileira,10000014848

“Ministério da Cultura mudará gestão da Cinemateca.” Folha De S. Paolo. Accessed 2016 March 25. http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ilustrada/1220662-ministerio-da-cultura-mudara-gestao-da-cinemateca.shtml

The I&A Steering Committee would like to thank Steve Duckworth for writing this post, and Rachel Seale and Alison Stankrauff for doing key research on the issue.

I&A On-Call Research Team #2 is:

Alison Stankrauff, Leader
Katherine Barbera
Anna Chen
Steven Duckworth
David McAllister
Rachel Seale

If you are aware of an issue that might benefit from a Research Post, please get in touch with us: archivesissues@gmail.com.

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