I nearly didn’t take this class. I needed one more course to finish out my degree and I was originally planning on taking something that would directly relate to my current job. At the last minute however I decided that this was also my last chance to have any kind of archival experience - it’s possible I could end up in archives some day, but it’s never been on my career path. I am very glad that I decided to go this route and learn something a little “off track” to round out my schooling.
I was surprised by how separate yet entwined archives are from libraries, and how clearly I identify myself as a librarian, not an archivist. It’s such a similar job - you are organizing typically paper-based materials into a coherent order, then teaching people how to fill out a form to retrieve data from those materials (I was at a presentation recently where the speaker - a librarian - said librarianship was fundamentally teaching people how to fill out forms. I’m still stinging at how true that is: you search catalogs and databases using forms, fill out patron accounts and request forms, etc. But I digress). Our views on privacy are the same.
We fundamentally both believe that people should have access to the materials, but our path to get to that access differs quite a lot. In my work, we account for attrition. Books are lost or misplaced, our patrons occasionally pay a fee for them (we usually waive it) and we replace the items (or not - often getting another copy is more trouble than it would be worth to our library). In contrast, the archivist needs to be much more cautious with their materials, as even putting everything back but out of order could alter the historical record.
In some ways, archives are more like a makers space than a library, a place to get the tools to build something rather than a location to get things that have already been built. Original documents are the raw material that the research needs to interpret to create their own scholarly work. In contrast, almost everything that I work with as a librarian is “pre-interpreted.” There’s still a great deal of new knowledge that can be created from books, but it’s different from the type of knowledge that can be created from archival collections.
It’s odd reflecting on a semester of schooling that has taken place during a pandemic. I wonder what different things I would have gotten from this course otherwise. A few things jump out to me. Digitization seems more pressing now. It’s not just a convenience, it’s the only way that people can safely use most collections. But having had the convenience, I doubt that people will want to go back after we return to the status quo, especially as it ties into global research. I think it’s so cool that we have ways of doing research with people internationally, whether that’s through completely digitizing a collection, or sitting on Zoom with a researcher while the archivist turns the page for them.
The past year has also heightened people’s understanding of the need for greater racial diversity in archives. I’ve really appreciated that there’s an underlying agreement that Black Lives Matter and diversity matters throughout discussions and assignments. There’s still so far to go, but the awakening is satisfying. The intractable problem keeps coming up for me however. It’s one thing to diversify our collections - this is good, ethical, and needed. But it’s a much harder thing to diversify our profession, and doing so is going to require white archivists to do some hard internal work to ensure they aren’t being a barrier.
My knowledge of archival practice has already helped my career. I’m on the committee to hire a new faculty member who will be our public services supervisor in our special collections and archives (we call them SCARC - Special Collections and Archives Research Center - here at OSU). This class has given me a better understanding of what is done day-to-day in the archives, which means I can better design questions for our interviews and hopefully make a stronger hire. I’m also very excited for when I can begin to collaborate with SCARC. My boss has long said she is interested in collaborations happening between our departments, and now that I understand their work a little better, I feel more equipped to suggest ideas and get them into reality. The pandemic “helped” us to complete some work together. I needed tasks my many student workers could do remotely, SCARC had a backlog of oral histories that needed their transcripts matched up. We even had one of our star student workers help with writing the biographical background for a collection - now that I’ve completed the finding aid assignments, I’m even more wowed by her work.
Our discussion boards had some great ideas for new directions this class could take. I think I could have taken a whole class on finding aids very happily. That was a perfect assignment, it was easily one of the most hands-on projects I’ve done over the course of my degree.
I would love to learn more about the process of digitizing a collection in its entirety. A ‘start-to-finish’ course would be helpful, beginning with learning how to determine what collection should be digitized, creating a project proposal, developing a methodology, and ensuring the materials stay findable. Between this class, a class I took on metadata, and my own work experience helping develop a procedure for digitizing our course reserves, I feel like I have many of the pieces together, but not an overarching understanding of the process. I also think this would give us the chance to talk more about the needs of different materials, as audio/visual materials and photographs have specific needs.
Overall, this class has been fascinating, and I’ve learned a lot. It’s been more closely tied to my job than I anticipated. Who knows, maybe in my career, someday I’ll be an archivist.
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