White Lab Coats

While working at the small educational archive today, I felt rather uncomfortably cool due to the large AC unit. As a result, the powers that be mentioned that I might like to wear a white lab coat. It gave the whole enterprise a rather more scientific bent than it normally has.

Creativity gap plagues... archivists?

In today's Globe and Mail (a newspaper based in Toronto, Canada), there was an article titled, "Creativity gap plagues workers." In part, the article reads, "A good number of workers say they're creative types, but fewer say their jobs allow them to express that creativity, according to a recent survery. It's a conundrum that some say is leaving to a 'creativity gap' in the work force., leaving workers feeling unfilled and sometimes willing to job hop, occasionally for less pay." The survey sample is so small (+500) that is effectively meaningless, but I think the concern articulated here is an interesting one.

I have two kinds of reaction to this sort of claim. The first, cynical reaction is to metaphorically shrug my shoulders and think something like, "How sad for you - you can't be creative at work. There's a reason that it is called work. If you want creative, go write a damn novel or act in a play or something in your spare time." My other reaction concerns archival work. I have worked, in a rather junior capacity, in two archives now and the work is quite the opposite of creative. Some of my archives readings have argued that archivists play a creative role in creating records, through selection, appraisal and so forth but I wonder if archivists really have that much influence in what happens. In institutional archives (i.e. most archives), what is archived is often defined by somebody else in the organization (e.g. accountants, lawyers etc).

The question of the day: Are archivists creative workers? Is much creativity involved? Or to put my spin on this: Is it intellectually satisfying work for somebody with three university degrees or is it, as I sometimes fear, little more than glorified file clerks who have tried to inflate their status?

No CBC tour for me, but conference hopes...

It turns out that I will be receiving my MA degree in history the same day my program is going to the CBC Archives / Museum. Argh. This is quite depressing, as you might imagine. In contrast to this disappointment, I submitted a conference proposal to the Association of Canadian Archivists recently. If accepted, I will get to go to Fredericton, New Brunswick next summer. I hope that comes together, but it is now in the hands of the archival powers that be.

Tour of the CBC Library and Archives!, further reflections on going to school as an archivist

Through my program, I have the chance to take a tour of the Library and Archives of the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) in Toronto. I'm quite excited about this as I've long been a fan of the CBC and think that they are one of Canada's interesting institutions. Apparently this event is so popular that I might not get a chance to see it. If I do end going in October, I expect to make a post about it here.

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I am now a few weeks into my studies at "Information School" and it is a fairly interesting place so far. I wasn't sure how to compare it with other kinds of professional / graduate programs. It isn't as expensive (though the tuition level is steadily approaching the cost of most Canadian law schools) or competitive as medical or law school, so this makes for a more collegial atmosphere. Presumably, I think that archivists (and librarians etc) are often very collegial and interested in cooperation - these are professional characteristics that interest me.

On the other hand, the professional aspect mean that there is a fairly strong careerist undercurrent to most classes, which can be strongly articulated by mature students in particular though I think most people share it to some degree. While I enjoy some of my readings, about the social and political politics of classification (there was some great medical examples too, but archives/library methods also determine the limits of knowledge in some interesting ways), I'm still a bit ambivalent about the whole process. The pendulm tends to swing between stimulating academic/theoretical reflection (e.g. "What is the underlying theory of archives?") and rigidly, professional workshop type training (er, hard to express but certainly something that comes to mind).

Still around but so much busier

It has been close to two weeks since I last posted. There have been several subjects that I have been meaning to write about here - such as the disconnect between enrolment at Information Studies programs and the current state of the job market and some comments on some of my assigned readings. However, I have been kept extremely busy by a long commute to and from campus and by a considerable amount of part-time work. I'm hoping to do a longer post on some of these subjects later this week.

Yesterday, I had my first ever Archives class. It looks quite stimulating - the flexibility in paper assignments is welcome as is the the visit to Major City Archives. Grad (/professional) school should not be so fast to dismiss the merit of field trips.

The question of archival professionalization: should there be volunteers in the archives?

I have now finished my summer placement at the small religious archive. As with many small archives, it suffers from having a terribly small budget which forces all sorts of stop-gap measures. One of these measures is the use of volunteers. This is a difficult subject for a professional. I would like to see (or at least see it throughly discussed) some kind of archives college or society, similar to a College of Surgeons, to license archivists in the same way that physicians and lawyers are regulated.

As I see it, one can make quite a good argument that permitting volunteers undermines the professional archivist. The argument against volunteers is that it devalues the skills and education of archivists (i.e. if I can train a volunteer to do 50% of the tasks at the archive in 2 weeks, why the hell did I spend two years during an archives Master's degree), it undermines arguments for reasonable compensation (e.g. if I can get a volunteer to do most of your job for free, then why should I hire you for $50,000 a year plus benefits?), and so on. On the question of status, I worry that having a volunteer (especially if they work in an important capacity) could imply that archival work is little but a hobbyist activity.

The argument in favour of permitting volunteers to work in an archive is a mix of pragmatic concerns and archival PR. If planned properly, having volunteers can raise the profile of a given archive and raise public awareness of same. Pragmatically, some tasks could be offloaded onto volunteers are effectively no cost. I think these are some of the reasons that public libraries so readily accept volunteers. Indeed, back in my high school days, I volunteered at the local public library (before it became mandatory in my province) and it eventually help me land my first job there.

What's the thinking out there on volunteers in archives? Only in small archives and then under certain conditions? I'm certainly curious to find out what others think about this issue.

City of Winnipeg Archives has artist in residence

In partnership with the Winnipeg Arts Council, the City of Winnipeg Archives will host an Artist in Residence for six months beginning in September 2007. The selected artist is local filmmaker Paula Kelly, see press release for further information on Ms Kelly's work.

Through the Artist in Residence program and in collaboration with Ms Kelly, the City of Winnipeg Archives hopes to enhance public understanding of why cities create and keep records and the role records play in defining and expanding upon our understanding of "place."

As far as I am aware, this is a unique program in Canadian archives. Indeed, I have never heard of anything like it at any archives. I think this is a brilliant idea. In her 1925 essay, Virgina Woolf wrote that, "...a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction," but I would submit that this is true of any creative person. Writing a novel, composing an opera and so on are major projects that are unlikely to generate income for the artist while they are in progress. Some could critique this as a distraction from the "archival mission," and that might be true. I am still developing my ideas as to what archives should be concerned about myself. Though I think this Winnipeg program is one very much worthy of emulation (or at least experimentation), I realize that some might consider it inappropriate. If so, I would be curious to see why exactly it would be resisted. It would raise the public profile of the archives in a good way and stimulate local culture. Both of these strike me as a laudable concerns.

What about a scholar in residence program then? A lavish program of this type would provide scholars (I assume mainly historians here, but I should certainly make it open to any academic or writer who can make a case that an extended stay at the archives would be beneficial to their work) with an office (complete with phone and Internet access and so forth) as well as a stipend of some kind (somewhere ranging from $5000 to $50,000 - it depends on length of stay and the cost of living in the area).

My interest in these kinds of programs was sparked by reading the opening pages of, "To the Castle and Back," a memoir by Václav Havel (dramatist and former President of the Czech Republic) where he writes, "I'm here as a guest of the Library of Congress, which has given me a very quiet and pleasant room where I can come whenever I want, to do whatever I want. They ask nothing from me in return. It's wonderful."

Notes on Winnipeg. For those readers not familiar with the city, Winnipeg has a population of 630,000 and is the capital of the province of Manitoba in Canada. It has two universities (University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg) and some interesting writers of its own, including David Bergen. The city makes up about 55% of the province's population.