Flood at Library and Archives Canada

Want a good way of testing your disaster recovery planning? A flood! As the CBC reported, "A broken water pipe flooded the main building of Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa early Tuesday morning, closing the building and causing a small amount of damage to some books." You can read the whole story whose headline (Flood shuts Canada's national archives) says it all.

I do find it interesting that the CBC uses the phrase, national archives. In terms of institutional age, the national archives goes back to the 1870s whereas Canada only acquired a national library in the middle of the twentieth century. Even more interesting is that the article only refers to books being damaged, not archival materials per se.

That said, it could have been so much worse. One has only to think of the terrible library flood damage that occurred in Florence in 1966.

Library and Archives Canada - an arranged and uneasy marriage?

As far as I am aware, Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is the only national institution that combines the functions of libraries and archives. The merger of Canada's National Library and Archives in 2004 into LAC is still a work in progress. Staff still identify as working on the "library" side or the "archives" side. Such identification is difficult to change as it is based on professional education, many years of experience and, as far as I have seen, rather different ways of approaching users and information. This division is also reflected, to some degree, in the internal structure of the organization. It is possible that this division will melt away as a new generation of staff work there but I doubt it somehow. As long as LAC is the institutional outlier on this (i..e. most libraries are still stand-alone libraries, many archives are only archives etc), this new world of the "knowledge institution" may not be introduced.

Yet, if you read statements about LAC by its senior leadership, annual reports and the like, you wil encounter a different vision. This view sees to leave behind the above divisions as relics and as inappropriate to the needs and expectations of the Internet era. As Ian Wilson (of LAC) put it, the ability to master search is now more important than the mastery of specific information. That is to say, knowing Canada's first prime minister is less important than knowing where to find that out. This is not to say that specific knowledge is without value - the professions provide a clear example of where it is important to actually know things, for example. However, placing a greater priority on search over knowlege might have interesting implications for libraries, archives and related instiitutions.

A Dream Come True: Library and Archives Canada

Several months ago, I was asked about my professional goals in an archives class. Some students articulated an interest in specific media or had not yet come up with such ideas. I was always keen to work at Library and Archives Canada.

Well, that is going to happen! I begin a summer position at LAC next week and I am quite excited. No longer will I be languishing in a basement archives, an institutional after thought. I would very much like to blog about what it is like to work there, but I may not be able to. The staff there are (rightly) very concerned with security, but hopefully I can share some general impressions. As much as reference work interests me, that is not what I will be doing this summer.

On archival research

Archival research is a special case of the general messiness of life.
- Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 619

Ah, I like that.

This Saturday has been a long day of doing research and writing as well. I'm preparing a study proposal (not doing the actual study though - the proposal itself is an assignment) on studying users of archival search engines on the Web. I have managed to maintain my interest in the subject in face of the pressure of strict deadlines... It helps that I can also cheer myself up with the great summer archival position I was offered a few days ago.

Several interesting studies on archives

Over the past few weeks, I have been introduced to a variety of new studies that strike me as incredibly fascinating. The academic crunch that is late March does not permit me to list them all let alone comment.

I will try to mention a few very interesting items that I have recently discovered. Today, I learned about this fascinating forum done by the OCLC: Digitization matters: Breaking through the barriers—scaling up digitization of special collections (and the summary essay that goes with it). This forum and essay argue that digitization has to be done and in high VOLUME. If this means compromising on an obsession with standards, then so be it. I like this idea but archives especially (libraries, as usual, are way ahead of archives) need to heed the message. There are still quite a few Archives' websites that simply provide contact information and a photo or two may have been impressive for 1994.

There is also a British study that I should like to comment on. It does not directly concern archives but its analysis of information seeking behavior is of relevance to our field. Of the various sections, I thought the study on student information behavior to be of greatest interest.

The final item of today's post is something that I would love to see more of; research into users of archives. AX-SNet (Archival eXcellence in Information Seeking Studies Network) is a model that has good potential. It apparently grew out of a British project to understand users of archives better, particularly online users. The project's bibliography is a good starting point for anyone interested in pursuing research in this field.

A graduate degree to shelve books?

Some people misunderstand what information professionals do and that can be frustrating. For many people, "information professional" is an opaque term that quickly collapses into "librarian" which collapses into "item check-out clerk." A friend recently joked, partly seriously, that my university has rendered librarians obsolete by having automatic check-out machines and investing in tens of thousands e-resources. Part of the work of correcting this impression has to start with showing that research can be more complex than punching some text into Google or Wikipedia. Both of those resources are certainly very useful but they have certain limits one needs to be aware of (e.g. Google results can be manipulated for marketing reasons).

I have been thinking of ways to correct this impression. Allowing it to persist can have a definite impact on libraries and archives; why fund such lowly clerks well? Outreach needs to be seen as crucial. Reference services can always be better. The archival preoccupation with authenticity, preservation, and the like are certainly necessary but I think we have something to learn from the more user-centred approach that librarians often take.

March Madness and Biographer Archivists

The big crunch of getting assignments done of various kinds is well upon everybody at my Faculty. Happily, the stress of this is somewhat mitigated by the stress of job interviews for summer employment. I'm hoping to obtain work in Ottawa this summer and that is looking increasingly likely.

This morning's class raised an interesting possibility for me. The class was concerned with the subject of authority control. It was mentioned that there is a kind of archival work that essentially involves composing short biographies. That strikes me as highly appealing. It would be great if I could have a position where contributions to publications such as the Canadian Dictionary of Biography were encouraged.