Why I Thought Becoming an Archivist Was a Good Idea: Part 5: What Now?

I have made a mistake. I had reasons for making the mistake, and the process of making that mistake has led me to understand certain realities about archives, history, education, work, and my own nature, not the least of which is that I must experience something to truly understand it. The process of making that mistake has been one of those “learning experiences.” “Learning experiences” are always painful. Now, what do I do with this knowledge?

If this story, my story about becoming an archivist, were one of those pseudo-literary, chick-lit novels, a happy resolution would appear at this point like deus ex machina. Instead, this is my life and, at this point, I have no resolution. I do have a job, such as it is. I am underpaid, underutilized for my talents, and uncommitted. Still, I am also insured, and I can keep a roof over my head, gas in the tank, and coffee in the can. I may not be able to pay the debt that I incurred while getting to this point. I may not be able to remain this dissatisfied and angry for much longer. I may not be able to respect myself for much longer. I do know that I have achieved the goal that I set out to attain. I do know that I have discreet periods of time in my week that I can devote to writing. I also know that, even if there were a resolution to this story, this story would have a sequel in another crisis.

In some ways, I feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (I refer to the movie because it had the greater and earlier impact). She so badly wanted something else besides Kansas. Then, she ended up in Oz and all she wanted was to go home again. As a kid, I never understood that. Oz was in Technicolor and had glorious, ruby shoes. Kansas was gray and had pigs and tornados. I now understand that the experience in Oz made her realize the value in Kansas. My experience as an archivist has made me realize the value of being a historian. Yet, I’m also not sure that I want to go back to my Kansas of academia. As Thomas Wolfe wrote, You Can’t Go Home Again. Those problems that drove me down this path are still there.

At this moment, writing this essay, I find that I can tally my plot points. I can weave metaphors. I can describe emotions. I can explain motivations. I cannot give an honest ending to this story. So, like many creative people, I slog to work during the day (and it really is not a bad job) and I practice my craft when I can. Anything else that happens must happen outside of an institutional setting. Anything else that happens must be made to happen, and made to happen by me.

This story is open-ended.

Why I Thought Becoming an Archivist Was a Good Idea: Part 4: Unintended Lesson

This is how I define myself: I am a historian. I see the world as a long process of events and activities. Every place, every person, every idea has a past, and this is what interests me about them. The study of history alters, changes, incorporates new concepts and perceptions, deepens, becomes more complex and textured. Nothing is anything and anything is nothing without its historical context, without its story. History is the path to understanding all things. This is how I approach the world.

Being an archivist and being a historian, however, are two different things. They seem compatible on the surface. Indeed, many archives education programs offer a dual-degree course of study in which the student earns a master’s degree in both library science and history. This perhaps helps the historian more than it does the archivist. The historian is better served by learning the tools and methods of an archivist, but the archivist does not benefit from the training of a historian at this early point in her career. The archivist is better served with training in information technology and management, not in the humanities, because most of what an archivist does is deliver information using new technological developments and managing staff, donors, and other sorts of business-related problems. Certainly understanding the issues of history and historical research helps an archivist do her job better, but this training is better left until she has greater experience in her craft.

I did not realize this problem because I had not enough of the proper experience in the profession of an archivist and because the advice that I received was not accurate. The experience I had gained had taken place at a time before computers had made a great impact on archives, and the places where I had conducted research had not made conversions to such things as Encoded Archival Description, electronic finding aids, and use of online catalogs for describing archival collections. Furthermore, I was being told by faculty at the library school that I attended and by other archivists that an advanced history degree would be enormously beneficial to my career as an archivist. My history degree has actually been an obstacle to my career as an archivist due to a significant amount of prejudice against historians by archivists, among other things. Beyond that, my training as a historian leads me to approach collections as a historian would approach collections.

Archivists see the documents as object to be stored, classified, and described. They are, as my cataloging professor described them, “information packages.” An archivist does not necessarily need to know what is contained in that package beyond a descriptive level. The archivist also does not need to know much about the creation of these packages beyond their provenance into the archive. Theorists in the archival profession have discussed these issues as they impact the goal of preserving the evidence of human activity, but those archivists are, again the academic archivists. The practicing archivist are much more utilitarian. They do not so much ask “how can these documents be used in the interpretation of history” as they ask “do we have the time and personnel to finish processing this collection” and “what does this collection look like.” Researchers are left to sort out the details of context, importance, and contents.

This is not to chastise the archivist in any way. The archivist is just as constrained by time and money as anyone. Also, the archivist is not supposed to anticipate the uses of the collection. She is just supposed to make the collection available for use. As utilitarian as that task may be, it is a very important component in the process of writing history. As an archivist, my knowledge of history gives me greater insight into the sorts of things that a researcher might look for in a description of a collection and might one day be put to use in developing an archive’s collection as a whole, but that trait is not the most important part of the job. What is important is knowing about such things as subject headings and databases and standards (and, trust me, the library and archives profession is obsessed with standards and revising standards and revising the revisions of standards).

When I approach the processing of a collection – putting it in a logical order and describing it – I do so as a historian. I want to know the history of the collection beyond just the provenance to the archive. I want to know how the documents were created. I want to know the history of the people and the organization that created it. I want to include this information in the description of the collection. I want to explain how different part of the collection could be useful for the study of different topics. I want to consider how the collections will be used. I want to write an article about the story that this collection tells. I want to put this collection in some sort of intellectual context. This is the way a historian thinks.

Thinking like a historian is a fundamental problem with me as an archivist. I am approaching the collections as a story to be told, not as an object to be described. In fact, while sitting in my library school classes and in meetings at work, I find that I have very little to contribute to the discussion of collection management. I find that I have no desire to contribute to the discussion of collection management. I find that I have little desire to learn more about the tools of my profession beyond how they will better help me to research history. I find that I have no interest in collections that do not tell interesting stories. The archivists are not wrong. They are very capable. What they do is important to me; but it is important to me as a historian. I do not think like an archivist. I think like a historian. I have no desire to change.

Why I Thought Becoming an Archivist Was a Good Idea: Part 3: Bad Education

The first problem that I noticed was my loss of respect for the archival profession. This realization puzzled me because I had a tremendous amount of respect for all of the archivists and librarians that I had known (and continue to meet). At which point I realized that I had known the archivists as professionals. In school, I was encountering them as academics.

As academics, I found archivists to lack scholarly rigor. Research papers required no more than 10 sources, all of which were secondary research. Few of the articles that comprised this “research” involved any rigorous research themselves, most being little more than memoirs of collection processing. In class, discussion was discouraged and I was reduced to raising my hand to make a comment. The lectures were little more than text-based PowerPoint presentations, with no intellectual depth. Classes were run much like high school classes and the level of scholarship expected was not much better. Academic advising was non-existent. Advisors seldom knew their advisees, and acted aggrieved if those advisees made themselves known. This was probably a mercy because, I soon realized, they could give little advice about being an archivist. Few had actually practiced the profession in the previous twenty years, and in one or two instances, never at all. By the graduation, I felt as if I had purchased a credential rather than received an education.

Of course, I had not entered library school to become educated in the classical sense of the word. I had gone to be trained, as one would for a vocation. I expected to learn how to do the work of an archivist. I expected to learn how to encode finding aids. I expected to learn how to create databases. I expected to learn how to catalog collections. I expected to learn how to preserve collections, and I expected to learn how to find funding for collections. I took classes toward these goals. Indeed, the most successful courses, or class sessions within a course, were those that actually involved learning how to do something. These included cataloging, which was the sole exception to the lack-of-intellectual-rigor rule, the day in which our class encoded finding aids into eXtensible Markup Language (XML), and the book repair mini-course. In 36 semester hours of coursework, 9 semester hours and one class session taught me how to do anything useful. (I suppose that I should include the Reference course, but that merely taught me how to do poor research for other people.). The rest of the course work consisted of learning about the subject matter rather than how to do the subject manner. Thus, in this respect, I again felt as if I had purchase a credential rather than received training.

Graduate school in library science clearly left me bitter and skeptical about the academic training for the profession. The price of the training exacerbated the bitterness because I just gone heavily into debt to earn this credential, but had learned nothing that would place me beyond the sort of entry-level jobs at which I was already working before and during graduate school. Indeed, in my list of useful training above, I do not include the internships in my evaluation of my training because they did not teach me how to do anything new. While they perhaps were the most important component of my schoolwork because they gave me practical experience and sources for references, I was being paid for the same work at various and sundry part-time jobs. The training that I have received in these jobs has been much more useful than all of my coursework. This is the training that will allow me to advance in this field, should I so desire.

Perhaps, eventually, I shall see that the library science degree has been useful if for no other reason than that its appearance on my resume will have earned me an interview. Right now, I feel as if the degree was a colossal waste of money and time relative to my ability to find employment as an archivist. I feel that it could have easily been an undergraduate degree, that I might have appreciated it more as an undergraduate degree. In fact, library science might be more practical as an undergraduate degree given that its attainment does not lead to much more than entry-level positions and that, as with most undergraduate degrees, work experience in the field advances a person in the profession faster than the degree.

Despite my frustration and disappointment with my archival education, I still do respect archivist as professionals. My respect is a response to their work experience and their abilities as professionals. That they have a master’s degree is immaterial to me as long as they are making archival materials ever more accessible to the public and as they are making the tools to search those materials more efficient. The master’s degree did not teach them to do any of this. Their job did.

If, however, on-the-job training is more important than the degree, and if I actually have a job in an archive, then most of my bitterness should dissipate as my career advances. The worst is over and happy endings are just ahead. Except, I find that, despite my respect for archivist, and perhaps a bit because of my terrible experience in my education to become an archivist myself, I am not satisfied in being one. When I wrote that something had gone terribly awry, this is really what I meant. The archival education may have been poor, but I did learn a few unintended lessons. Those lessons have led me to this current crisis.

Part 1: A Coiffure Memoir: Long Hair is for Girls and Short Hair is for Boys

My mother thought she had given birth to a monkey. Not only did I have a thatch of black hair on my head, but also a thick, dark down covered my body and limbs. This fuzz soon fell out leaving me completely bald. At this same time, my gender was met with some consternation. Not only had my mother given birth to a simian infant, but also that simian was a girl. No one had prepared for a girl. My grandmother had crocheted a blue baby blanket, after all, everything else was blue, too. Yet, here was a pink little girl.

Babies are essentially androgynous. With the blue blanket and other blue baby accoutrement, many people mistook me for a boy. These people included the doctor who had delivered me. My parents decided to remedy the situation by equipping me with a bow. Since my head was by this time bald, they taped the bow to my scalp. I was then deemed pretty.

In pre-school I loved fairy tales, particularly Rapunzel with her freakishly long locks. In elementary school I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder then Princess Leia. My playtime in which those worlds became real to me often morphed dangerously into my regular existence. To make my imaginings more real, I longed for long, flowing, beautiful hair. I wanted braids. I wanted buns. I wanted hairdos. I even envied the black girls with their multiple ponytails that kept their intricate braids intact even when held by only a barette. I envied that they could wear barettes. I envied that they could wear multiple barettes (little did I know that they had their own hair issues). Instead, my mother kept my hair cropped short, sometimes in a Louise Brooks bob, sometimes like Dorothy Hamill, sometimes much like my brother. She had two kids with a third on the way and worked full time. She kept her own hair short. She did not want to mess with putting my hair into ponytails, much less the more elaborate arrangements that I envisioned. Having had short hair since she was eight, and having grown to adulthood in the south in the early sixties, she did not associate girl’s hair length with gender identity. I was more confused.

The boyish haircuts began sometime after the birth of my second brother, while I was in second grade. This was in the seventies, and my hair was actually shorter than most of the boys’ in my class. My elementary school segregated us by gender on the playground. One day at recess, a teacher approached me as I sat against the school wall reading On the Banks of Plum Creek. “You are supposed to be on the boys playground,” she said. The boys’ playground was actually much more fun than the girls’. Girls had hopscotch and four-squares painted on the blacktop. Boys had jungle gyms and monkey bars. (The injustice of this discrepancy most certainly influenced my early feminist leanings.) Rather than go along with her mistake, however, I protested. “I’m a girl,” I said. “See, my shirt has flowers on it.” After all, no self-respecting parent in the south would send their son out in a flowered shirt, of all things. “I don’t believe it,” the teacher said. She stood there, looming above me and shaking her head in amazement for an interminable amount of time. “I just don’t believe it.” Ironically, she had short, straight hair. Looking back now, I think the fact that she was black was also significant. She also became my third grade homeroom teacher the next year, but did not betray any memory of the incident.

My shorthaired childhood took place in the south in the seventies. Decades later, I read an article that said that the phenomenon of the Sixties took place at different times in different locations. Louisiana, according to this article, did not experience the Sixties until the 1970s. That seemed to fit with my memory, despite the fact that I did not really have much of a basis for comparison. In any case, I was a girl in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the early 1970s, which was not too much different from the late 1960s from others’ accounts. This meant that I regularly encountered Hippies when our family ventured out of our suburb in our Vista Cruiser.

According to the definition given by my mother and grandmother, Hippies were men with long hair. My observations also told me that hippies dressed a bit differently than my father and grandfather, and that they listened to rock music and sometimes rode motorcycles. The hair part fascinated me the most for some reason. Parked outside of a store one evening, somewhere in the French Quarter, and waiting for my mother to return to the car, I crouched in the backseat and spied on the passers-by. One of those Hippies walked down the sidewalk towards our station wagon and met with a woman in a t-shirt and jeans much like his own. He put his arm around her and they walked off together. The woman had a short, blonde haircut.

“Ah,” I thought. “Boy Hippies have long hair and girl hippies have short hair.” Being a Hippie was about boys and girls switching. Yet, within moments that theory began to disintegrate. Nothing but the long hair was particularly feminine about the guy Hippie. The girl hippie did come a bit closer to switching, with her short hair and pants. Still, the switching theory did not seem sound. The shorthair part did not seem sound, either. My hair was short, but I was not a Hippie. Was I? My mother and my grandmothers all three had short hair, and they certainly were not Hippies. I decided to stick with the rule that boy Hippies had long hair, and girl Hippies had short hair; but, while all longhaired boys were Hippies, the same was not true for all shorthaired girls.

After all, I was not innocent of such mistakes myself. In fourth grade, I moved to a new school. A sweet-faced kid from another class started acting far too friendly for a boy, in my opinion. Boys pushed and shoved and chased you around. You pushed and shoved and chased them back, or told on them to the teacher. Boys did not tilt their heads down shyly, and smile at you through their bangs. Boys did not give you small waves in the hall as your classes passed one another. Already, at nine, I had become suspicious of the motives of men, and flattered by the attention. Then this sweet-faced, smiling, waving kid showed up in school wearing a lovely flowered dress with a full skirt that I coveted. “Oh, no,” I thought. “He’s a girl.” The source of my mistake was her exceptionally short hair. Her hair, in fact, was as short as mine had been for the previous several years.

I also stuck with the rule that long hair was pretty; and short hair got a girl mistaken for a boy more frequently than for a hippie. Hippies may or may not have been good, but boys were certainly bad. As a result, in fourth grade, when my mother gave up on worrying about my hair, I decided to grow it as long as possible. I also became obsessed with being identified as a girl. This meant that I always wore a skirt, even with t-shirts.

Skirts, too, had been a point of contention, along with my hair. I had always been very girly in regard to fashion. I loved pink, frills, dresses, longhair, and ribbons. At the same time, I also liked to climb anything perpendicular to the ground, wrestle the boys in the neighborhood, and build tree houses. These things did not seem incompatible to me. They were very incompatible to my mother. A girl could wear frilly pink clothes and have long hair with ribbons, but she must play quietly. A girl could also climb trees or light poles, but then she must wear jeans and have short hair and accept that people would think she was a boy. According to my mother, my decision to wear only skirts was silly. People would not mistake me for a boy if I stopped acting like one. If I was going to continue to act like a boy with my climbing and wrestling and running around, then a wardrobe consisting only of skirts made no sense. I lifted my skirt to show her the shorts I had worn to hide my under pants.

The obsession with skirts waned and then disappeared by sixth grade. This obsession coincided with a decrease in my physical activity and an increase in the length of my hair. Long hair did not resolve the gender problems. Long hair may have, in fact, complicated them. Meanwhile, long hair and adolescence ushered in a new obsession with hairstyle and appearance that consumed far too much of my mental capacity for the next decade, if not longer.



Edited May 27, 2006

Why I Thought Becoming an Archivist Was a Good Idea: Part 2, What went wrong

I had a friend in graduate school who one day left class, went to the registrar’s office, and dropped all of her courses, never to return to school. A revelation had overwhelmed her during the lecture, she later told me. She did not want to pursue this graduate degree. This was not what she wanted to do with her life. I knew that something had gone horribly awry when I began to think of her. Every single day, after less than a month in library school, I had the same epiphany as my friend. Some days, I physically held myself in my chair to prevent myself from following in my friend’s footsteps.

Several neuroses gave me the strength to do this. First, I felt an obsessive need to finish what I had started if for no other reason than to prove that I had not made a mistake. Second, I felt that I had no other course of action. Living in the dorms on student loans and a patchwork of part-time employment, school became my only means of legitimizing my current lifestyle. I felt I had failed as a professor. I felt I had burned too many bridges as an editor. I felt that I had nowhere else to go, and nothing else that I could do. Third, I felt that I should just “suck it up,” “soldier on,” endure because life is difficult and full of such challenges. Finally, I clung to the belief that, if I only finished this degree, my goal of full-time and steady employment would be realized. That I enjoyed my internships and my summer job allowed me to console myself that such work and better awaited me upon graduation. Professional schools, after all, have very little to do with the actual work of the profession.

Most of these feelings were legitimate on their own. Returning to school as an adult is difficult. This was more so for me because I had taught college for so long, and to return to the position of student was a humbling learning experience (and a topic for another essay). Similarly, serving an internship and taking low-paying entry-level jobs after having held well-paying jobs with status makes a person believe that their life has taken a turn for the worse. Working as a subordinate among a group of people after having had a tremendous amount of independence causes some adjustment, as well. Yet, these were all personal problems that time would presumably alleviate. Furthermore, the expectation of dependable and improved employment continues to be the main reason that people get an education, no matter how mythical such an expectation has become.

Time and employment did not cure my ills. In the end, I found that I had other, bigger problems relating to my expectations about my education as an archivist, about my identity as an historian, and about my own naivety, immaturity, and coping strategies.

Civil Rights Movies

The Happy Feminist began a discussion about the good old film To Kill a Mockingbird. Some of the points she raised hit on a problem that I have with movies about the Civil Rights era. So, I had to comment.

Hair

More ventures into comment world at BitchPhD. The discussion is on hair and gender. Having had a lifelong relationship with hair, I had to comment.

Dread

My mother will be having both knees replaced next month. The surgeons will slice open her leg, saw off the ends of the bones, remove the joint, insert a metal knee, and sew her up. She will spend the next several months learning to overcome the pain and use the new joint. This will be done on both legs.

My mother is overweight. She calls herself “fluffy.” Doctors would call her “morbidly obese.” Doctors say that this dramatically affects her health.

Five years ago, my dad sent an e-mail to me and my brothers saying, “Now that it’s over, I can tell you.” My mother had been awoken one night with severe pains in her gut. My father took her to the emergency room. They admitted her to the hospital and removed her gall bladder.

Three years ago, when I returned to Texas for a brief visit at the beginning of the summer, I arrived to find her in intensive care. She and my father had planned a trip to Germany. She knew that she would be walking more than usual and her legs felt funny, so she went to the doctor to find out what was wrong. Several days after her visit, the doctor called and reached my dad. “Get your wife to the hospital,” the doctor said. “Now.” Her blood sugar levels were shockingly high. She should have been in a coma. After they determined that she did not have pancreatic cancer, and after they stabilized her blood sugar levels, they sent her home with a new diet and insulin shots.

While she was in the hospital, a cousin visited. This cousin also had been diagnosed with diabetes some years earlier. “If they put you on shots,” this cousin said, “you lose years off of your life. The shots are as good as a death sentence.” She did not mean that the insulin shots would kill the diabetic. She meant that, if a diabetic is to the point where she must take insulin shots, too much damage had been done. This cousin, ever the ray of sunshine, turned to my father and said, “You are next.”

Two years ago, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. She had constant pain in her lower back. X-rays showed bone spurs and swelling in her connective tissue. Her finger joints began to ache and expand. The cartilage in top joint on the ring finger of her left hand has puffed up and popped out of place, leaving her finger looking as if it has a goiter. First, she could not climb stairs because her knee joints hurt too badly. Then, she could not descend stairs. Now, she can barely walk. Her legs collapse beneath her.

My mother says that she is anxious about the surgery in all senses of the word. On the one hand, she would like to get on with it. On the other hand, she is afraid. Everyone who has had the surgery tells her that it is the worst pain they have ever felt. One woman told her that she would rather go through childbirth again, without an epidural, than have another knee replaced. My friend Dwight says that he still lives with pain from his surgery. I don’t tell this to my mother. The pain she has now has no end without the surgery. The pain that she anticipates will have an end. Once she is healed, she will be able to walk, climb stairs, and play with her grandbabies.

My mother was once all-powerful to me. She was the source of all good and all evil. I was a baby then, a child and a teenager. Now, she is just a woman whom I love. I feel quite protective of her. When a former boyfriend of mine made a comment to me in private about her weight, I restrained myself from physically attacking him. When fat people are chastised, objectified, or slandered, I want to hide her from the cruelty. I hate myself for having been mean and spiteful toward her. When she is in pain, I want to end it. I have a little girl inside of me that wants my mommy to go back to being all-powerful. I have a grown woman inside of me that wants this woman I love to not hurt. I begin to understand how she has felt as my mother, wanting everything to be good for me, wanting me not to feel pain, not to be hurt, not to be at risk. I understand her frustration when I did not take care of myself, when I endangered myself. I begin to understand her worry for me my whole life because I worry now.

I dread that she will die during this operation.

Why I Thought Becoming an Archivist Was a Good Idea....Part 1

I have made a mistake in becoming an archivist. This mistake involved greater debt than I have experienced in my entire life, a lowering of status in my profession, and significant amounts of humiliation. In reviewing this mistake of my life, I am forced to evaluate the reasons that I embarked upon this particular career path in the first place.

I trained as a historian because I wanted to be a novelist, but had neither the maturity nor the experience to make up stories of my own. The field of history provided the stories, I would just have to research and write them. Research in particular drew me into the field because I had a voracious appetite for learning and an almost mystical infatuation with primary sources. The stories, I must have believed, would simply present themselves for me to transcribe. Lack of maturity would also be a barrier in my path to becoming an historian, as well.

To become a historian, a person must become a professor. Certainly since then I have learned that there are other types of job titles that a historian can have, but “professor” is the one that involves the strongest focus on research and writing about history. A large portion of a professor’s time, however, is spent in teaching rather than researching. A large portion of the history professor’s teaching, and the sort in which most people with doctoral degrees in history participate, is dedicated to freshman-level survey courses. I myself was ambivalent about teaching. The performance of a lecture engaged me, but the grading, interacting with students, tedium of teaching the same class year after year, and the constant work to prevent the tedium aggravated me. If I had wanted to be a teacher, I reasoned, then I would have obtained an education degree.

Teaching is the price that a professor pays in order to research, which was why I was willing to teach for ten years. Yet, I ran into problems with researching, as well. Research is only a part of an historian’s job. An historian must not only research and construct a narrative around that research; but must also interpret that research and interpret the research of other historians. In fact, a historian must develop new and original interpretations based on the documentation and previous interpretations. I could research and write a narrative. I was not so good at the interpretation part. After all, I just wanted to tell stories, and that is the lowest-level of historical work. Some historians even argue that they should not tell any story, only construct theories. Those historians earn jobs at universities where they are able to spend a larger portion of their time on research, and less in the classroom; and, should they teach, they teach courses in their specialty or have assistants to do the grading and manage the students. The rest of us teach the survey courses and are encouraged to continue research on our own time.

Given my limited desire to teach and my limitations as a theorist, I was lucky enough to find a job in editing historical documents. This is a little known field in history. Most people thought that I corrected the grammar and spelling of historical figures. Actually, the job involved the preparation of historical documents for publication. This involved gathering the documents, usually the papers of a particular figure or around a particular event or subject, transcribing them and annotating them to provide historical context. The job required more than that; but essentially the editor writes a biography without actually writing the biography. This involved much research, but very little theorizing, and no teaching. I loved this work. I felt that I was making the words of an important historical figure accessible to a larger audience. I could research. I could see new patterns in this person’s life emerge from this research. I became a better historian.

Unfortunately, the project that I worked for was plagued with problems, not the least of which was a very lazy and poor editor who was not accountable to anyone but the funding agencies. The funding agencies made their displeasure with his work known by not funding the project. While the university where this project was located would help the project in a crisis, they were seeing little return on their investment when the crises became common. As a result, my position, which was entirely grant funded, was in constant jeopardy from year-to-year. Some months I was not paid. Some years I was forced to teach in addition to working 40 or more hours a week editing. Throw in the editor’s inability to maintain a professional working relationship, and I had to leave. My experience in this field had taught me that jobs like mine were few and far between and usually funded solely by grants and populated by scholars on that particular subject (most of whom were between academic jobs). The only real security that an employee of such a project could have would be to run their own project, which involved becoming a professor at a research university.

In search of financial security and work in a profession involving history, I determined to become an archivist. During graduate school, I had worked in two archives. In graduate school and as an editor, I had researched in many archives, and had developed systems of organizing research and paperwork. In fact, I felt that I might have very little to contribute to the world as a historian, given my lack of theoretical skills, but much more to offer as an archivist because archivist preserve the very stuff of history. They preserve history’s evidence. This seemed much more essential than interpretation, and certainly something that I could do much better than interpretation.

At the time, however, simply jumping into a job at an archive was nearly impossible. With a doctoral degree, no one would consider my application for an entry-level position. Without a master of library science degree and with limited practical experience, no one would consider me for anything higher. To pursue this career path seemed require more education. (I was also told that the pursuit of the degree would make me a better prospect for the entry-level jobs because it would prove my dedication to this career change.) Education required relocation. Education and relocation required considerable student loans since professional schools, particularly the one that I attended, offer little or no financial assistance. I was willing to take that risk of debt because I would be attending one of the leading programs in archival management in the nation. I was willing to take that risk because I would be relocating to a region of the country that was saturated with history, where archives and thus opportunities for experience abounded. I was willing to take that risk because I was certain that I could find full-time, secure employment in any region of the country upon my graduation.

Then, something went horribly awry.

Mistake

Today was the subject headings meeting that, mercifully, takes place only once a month. In this meeting, the librarians, archivists and registrars who are responsible for cataloging the various museum collections gather to review the subject headings entered into the museum’s databases over the previous month. Subject headings, to most people, are those pesky words that must be entered correctly into any library search engine in order to find the proper books or items for which they are looking. Most people do not use subject headings because most search engines operate with “keywords.” Most people use keywords. Most librarians use subject headings.

While I understand the purpose of these meetings to ensure that all museum catalogers are using the same words to describe the same things, and while I understand that this is an important function in ensuring that the museum’s catalog uses the same words to describe the same things in other catalogs, I cannot help but dread and despise these meetings. Aside from the relentless boredom of these meetings, and aside from the constant lingual disjunction between the catalog users and those who enter items into the catalog that becomes obvious in these meetings, they underscore the huge and enormous mistake that I have made in my career path.

For many years, I worked to become a historian. I pursued that path only to realize that I did not particularly like teaching, and that I am not particularly brilliant or original in my research. This realization led to a position in editing, which provided much satisfaction, but almost no security. To ensure that security, the path led next to an expensive library science program to become an archivist, which is where I find myself today, sitting in the subject headings meeting, pondering my mistake and what making a mistake means.

To admit error, particularly one of this proportion, involving great financial debt, decline in employment status, and potentially no return to the path of an historian, takes great stupidity. Mistakes are never permitted in people’s lives. People are expected to always know what they are doing. “Knowing what you are doing” tends to mean that a person has planned and followed a clear and rational path toward a particular goal. These people deserve reward, respect, and trust. To fail to follow that path suggests a lack of commitment, a flighty or flakey personality, a want of gravity. Error is, essentially, failure. Past failure means the risk of future failure.

To admit error also results in great humiliation. After a failure on such a scale, a person must explain her actions to family, friends, advisors, and potential employers. In doing so, a person must find meaning in her own decisions. For potential employers, she will explain that she now has a diverse pool of experience, a broader set of skills, a wider view of the uses of her field. I, for instance, can explain that I am more familiar with research resources, of employment potential for history majors, of the ways and means by which documents are retained and can be used in studying history. I must convince people that I am a better historian for having been an archivist, rather than a lesser one for having abandoned academia.

How do I convince myself? I have, after all, made a mistake. While admitting that mistake is relieving to me psychologically, living with it is much more complicated.

The Archivist and the Researcher Should be Friends...

I live a double life (actually, I live more, but for the purposes of this essay, let’s keep it to two), one as a historical researcher and one as an archivist. This double life has given me insight into the acrimony between the two professions. An outside observer would think that a historian and an archivist would have a symbiotic relationship, given that one side needs historical documents and the other side makes them available. In fact, the two sides view each other with a great deal of disgust or dismissal, both considering the other lazy and self-important.

To the archivist, the researcher is unwilling to do her own work and unwilling to observe the rules of the archive. The researcher perpetually wants copies of every document. The researcher wants the archivist to tell her where documents and information can be found in the archive without going to the catalog. Indeed, the researcher seems to think that the archivist is herself a human catalog. The researcher wants the archivist to do extensive amounts of research in the service of the researcher, often treating the archivist like a personal assistant. The researcher wants the archivist to make exceptions to the rules of access and handling of documents just for that researcher alone because, after all, the researcher is an important scholar in the subject of the documents. Finally, the researcher tends to be rude, seldom saying “thank you” or “please” or even “have a nice day” throughout the entire transaction.

To the researcher, the archivist is overly protective of the documents and has an inflated opinion of her job. The archivist sits at a desk all day, retrieving and shelving collections. The archivist’s job is to help the researcher conduct research, but seems annoyed at being asked to do so. The archivist directs the researcher to online sources or microfilm rather than bring original documents to the researcher. The archivist monitors the researcher as if the archivist were Big Brother, insisting upon the use of white gloves that impede the researcher in the use of the documents. The archivist insists upon constant paperwork through call slips and use agreements, and seems unaware of the contents of the collection. Throughout this research transaction, the archivist tends to be rude and distracted, acting as if the researcher were interrupting the flow of work rather than being the focus of the flow of work.

Should a member of one profession attempt to cross over into the other’s profession, they are again met with hostility and disrespect. Historians attempting to become archivists are treated with suspicion. They are met with the belief that the historian must have been mediocre at best in their own field and is now settling for a position in a clearly inferior but easier field. Archivists attempting to become historians are met with the attitude that an archivist could not possibly be a good historian because archivists are too interested in the minutiae and are unable to grasp the larger, theoretical frameworks of historical research. Historians also suspect archivists entering the historical profession of being dabblers, of treating the work of history as a hobby, not as serious scholarship.

The problem here is, however, the fact that members of neither profession completely comprehend the purpose of the other. They meet in the research room of an archive; and that meeting point is only a small fraction of the work of either the archivist or the historian.

Most researchers only see the archivist at the reference desk in the research room. They connect this to other similar jobs such as receptionist, secretary, or restaurant hostess. In other words, the researcher assumes that this reference desk position is the full scope of the archivist’s duties; and, having equated those duties with jobs that do not require extensive education, also assumes that this archivist has, at best, an undergraduate degree. The researcher, at the least, is probably working on a graduate degree. This raises certain class issues at which the archivist balks. For most researchers, education and work experience are very closely tied. The researcher does not understand that the archivist actually has a master’s degree in library science (or is well into the process of getting one), in addition to significant professional experience in her field.

Moreover, the researcher does not realize that, for most archivists, the reference desk position is actually a very small, perhaps day or half-day long task that interrupts the other work that they do. That other work requires significant training in databases, programming languages, controlled vocabularies, and management. That work may also involve answering research requests from many other patrons, in addition to processing and cataloging collections. Working on the desk in the reference room, where the librarian will come into the closest contact with the researcher is actually a major interruption in the daily work routine of the archivist.

The archivists work also includes an awareness of the long-term threats to the very existence of the collections, such as environmental conditions and handling. Their function as caretakers of the collections is to make decisions that allow preservation of documents while also providing access to the information contained within those documents, even when those two goals are at odds. Their protectiveness of the documents by directing researchers to online or microfilmed resources results from a compromise between these conflicting duties. They must keep in mind not only the researcher using the collection today, but also the researchers who will be using the collection next year or in the next century.

At the same time, the archivist is also not aware of the constraints under which the researcher operates, nor that research in collections has a different set of goals from maintaining the collection. Often, the researcher does not live anywhere near the collection in which she is conducting her research. She must raise the funds to travel, including not only the cost of the travel itself but the cost of room and board in the location of the archive. She must take the time from her paying job or other responsibilities. Very often, this time falls during vacation seasons, when prices for lodging and travel are higher, thereby compounding the financial difficulties.

The researcher wants to make absolutely sure that her research trip will be efficient and fruitful. In doing so, she will inundate the archivist with specific questions about collections. If the archive has necessary documents, but not enough financially to justify a trip to the archive, then the researcher will request copies, sometimes in quantities that seem extravagant to the archivist. If the archive has a sufficient quantity of necessary documents to justify a trip, then the researcher will attempt to get as much research accomplished in the short time generally allotted to that trip. This might mean that the researcher shows up very early and stays to the very last minute at the archive. This might mean that the researcher still requests a large number of copies because she does not have enough time to fully digest the information contained in the documents while in the archive itself. This also might mean that she is so focused on getting as much information as possible while in the archive that she forgets to be polite.

The researcher knows, as the archivist does, that the documents provide evidence for historical arguments. Much like a lawyer in a trial, the historian must ensure the integrity of the evidence. This is best done by seeing the actual, original, authentic document, rather than a scanned or microfilmed reproduction (not to mention the quality of much microfilm often negates its informational purpose). This will ensure the integrity of the historian’s arguments in the final product of the research. The researcher may also assume or hope that she is one of very few people over the centuries to handle the documents, and therefore not consider the threat that she herself might pose to the life of the documents.

The work that the researcher does in the archive is only a fraction of the entire purpose for the research. The researcher is gathering evidence from primary sources on which to base her arguments. She must also read secondary sources in order to learn about the context of the documents and address other interpretations of the period. She must develop her own ideas, revise those ideas, and review the documents and secondary sources to refine those ideas. Then, she must write out those ideas and their evidence. She will probably have to revise several more times as the final product goes through different readers, editors, or dissertation committees. The work done in the library is the foundation for the final product, and is the one that requires the most of the researchers limited resources.

While the archivist’s job is centered on the documents, their arrangement, preservation, and use; and while the archivist has constant access to these documents, the researcher has limited access to those documents, requires a significant amount of data from those documents, but also must ensure that those documents are authentic. Both the archivist and the researcher fulfill very important cultural roles through their uses of the archival collections. The archivist preserves the documents and makes them accessible. They ensure that the evidence exists. The researcher uses the documents to make interpretations about the past, which in turn shapes the understanding of that past. As clichéd as the sentiment may sound, the two professions have so much to offer one another and would benefit from understanding the full scope of the other’s job. After all, neither serves much of a purpose without the other.

A Slightly More Public Voice

Clio K. Bluestocking has peeped out and made her voice slightly more public by posting a comment at Critical Mass, the Book Critics Circle weblog. The post is on plagairism in schools, and Bluestocking has seen quite a bit of that. She, however, could have used some editing in that comment.

She has also commented on the same subject at Bitch Ph.D.