#

Project Management is about being able to see the big picture, and break it down into steps/processes in order to facilitate completion.

There are a lot (a lot) of books about PM and almost all of them are geared towards the corporate sector: construction, software development, manufacturing, product design, etc. It is easy to think that there is no place for PM, with all its risk benefit analyses and cost efficiencies, in archives or libraries.

I disagree.

I’m currently working on a paper on how to implement PM strategies in archives. Honestly, it tends to read a lot like common sense, but I think that as professionals we get lulled into habits of doing things a certain way both because it is traditionally effective and because it is familiar. We know from experience many of the metrics (time, resources, personnel, etc.) that we need to know. We do PM informally and it works, if not giving us peak efficiency then at least reliable results.

But with the level of backlog of collections that almost every archives faces today, we need different methods. The “More Product, Less Process” concept for 20^th century collections has a place, but it is not the panacea for all backlogs. On the other hand, Project Management concepts are not necessarily helpful for very small collections. There is, in short, no one size fits all solution.

But I believe that PM can help a lot, because when used in appropriate situations, it helps everyone do their jobs better, which means better productivity and faster processing without sacrificing standards.

I’ll be writing more about this, but I wanted to make this introduction to the topic for those curious.

#

But for InfoSci professionals, curation is something that is taking front-and-center in our jobs whether we want it to or not. This was really hit home to me last week at the Society of Florida Archivists 2012 conference in Sarasota. Almost all of the presentations about specific collections confronted the issue of curation, usually from the standpoint of determining how to develop digital content (as collections or as actual exhibits).

For museum professionals, curating works of art or historical objects is second nature. They are trained in it and do it regularly and get feedback from colleagues, all of which contributes to a professional culture that understands the difficulties of curation as well as its necessity.

While archivists have historically done a modicum of curation for small, in house exhibits, it is not a field with a culture of curation to draw from. To be perfectly frank, on the line between “hoard it all” and “free stuff!” we’re more on the hoarder end of things. We share, but carefully and in a secure environment with people who have to show us ID first (typically). This puts us more in line with museum professionals than librarians, in that we don’t let our stuff out of our sight.

But we’re completely unprepared for the idea of letting it all hang out. It’s simply not something archivists are trained or have been expected to do.

Curation is a craft as well as an art. Like so many other aspects of InfoSci, it seems simple and obvious until you try to actually do it. My graduate seminar in curation was an eye opener for me, because from a historical perspective curation is a field of landmines and mazes. Curation does not mean taking a collection, digitizing it and slapping it into Omeka; it’s about thoughtfully and purposefully linking objects together based on a purpose, and sharing that information in a very directed, focused way. It’s wonderful when done well.

I was really impressed with a presentation by the Special Collections department at the  University of South Florida about their inaugural online exhibit using Omeka, Selling Sunshine: Florida’s Citrus Industry, because of the amount of thought that went into the curation of it.

I think this all contributes to the “job function” blurring I’ve talked about before. While elements of specific jobs will always be particular to that job (archivist vs. school media specialist, for instance) other “meta” elements are crossing borders. Particularly in regards to social networking, everyone needs to learn curation history and theory in graduate school. If you learn about curation as trade craft, then it will not matter what platform you are using, be it a hosted Omeka instance or a free account on tumblr.

#

Gail is a reference librarian at NCF’s Jane Bancroft Cook Library (I remember when that was the new building on campus! *cringes*) and is also the NCF archivist. This is a relatively new job at the library; as most alumni know, the “archives” at NCF was usually a spare room crammed with boxes. Sometimes people thought the Thesis Room was “the archives” (not really). Gail, who has worked part time at NCF for years, is now full time and working like a mad thing on getting our history archived properly.

If you can’t tell from my exuberance, I am a NCF alum myself (Class of ’88, which in NCF parlance is the year I started…our graduation rate is that low, and our attrition rate that high). To be fair, I have a love/hate relationship with the place, but on the whole I truly admire the institution, what it stands for, and the caliber of students who go there. It is, after all, the #1 Nerdiest college in America! If that’s not bragging rights, I don’t know what is!

While I am displeased with the news that the college is considering raising the student population total again (it was limited to 500 when I went, is I think 800 today…where will the madness end? 1000 students? *shudders*) I was very impressed with what Gail is accomplishing. She’s got 50+ years of chaos to herd into a finding aid.

Yes, we have Dr. Peggy Bates’ papers, and will probably be getting Mac Miller’s papers down the road (of course I asked) as well as other long term (which at New College means, “life sentence”!) professors. There are decades of student publications to sort and organize and make available, as well.

But what Gail is specifically looking for right now are publications by/featuring work by New College alums, such as academic papers or even books, and items pertaining to NCF’s history that might have fallen through the cracks. If you have something you want to contribute, give Gail a shout  (941-487-4405 or email) and let her know. Also think about how we, as alums, can help financially support her work.

I’m pretty much a total geek when it comes to archives, so I think this is pretty exciting; but Gail’s not going to be able to do all that needs to be done without us. New College alums, PRESENT!

#

No really, I  plan on being very productive. I do!

My poster presentation is on “Project Management in Archives” (link is to PDF of draft version of the paper) which is, essentially, less an instruction manual than a shout out to the profession that we need to have some serious research and study done on the usefulness project management techniques  in tackling the major backlogs most institutions face. I’m looking forward to the feedback on it!

We’ll be hitting up the Ringling Museum and, on the ride back on Friday, the Dali Museum which I have not seen since the new building went up.

I’ll be tweeting when I can, provided the Hyatt has free wireless (catch me at @kimboo_york on twitter!) with the hashtag #sfa2012.

See you on the flip side!

It’s an old refrain, at this point, to say that our profession was caught off guard by the whole “tagging” concept. We were used to standards and practices and standardized practices that involved cataloguers, classification schemas, and jargon. It worked. It still does work, because it has to, because we need that structure on the backend.

But users don’t. They glommed onto OPACs because they could never find what they wanted in a card catalogue without help, and they glommed onto Google because, well, everything. They love tagging, and use it mercilessly everywhere – tumblr, pinterest, goodreads, you name it—or rather, they name it.

The end result is conflicted InfoSci professionals; we love engagement, after all. We love participation. We LOVE people using the resources we give them. But…we get all squinty eyed about legitimizing folksonomies. We worry. We know that folksonomies won’t ever replace librarians (even if other people think so) but we fret about structure, classification, ORDER.

Hey, that’s what we do.

But while we stand around dialoguing, users have solved their own problem. And by “users” I mean the Archive of Own Own fanfiction archive. This new kid on the block has done an outstanding job of doing what they call “tag wrangling” with a veritable army of volunteers. You can snicker about fanfic all you want, but this is one hell of a serious (and large) bunch of data crunchers.

A recent blog post at the OTW explains the whole thing; go read it.

Then let me know what you think. Because me? I’m pretty damn impressed. They’ve made a potentially chaotic system one of the most useful features of the whole site. In fact, I would recommend to any InfoSci professional thinking about databases and tagging and user needs to study that archive set up carefully. It’s not perfect and it’s officially in beta but even so it is compact, useful, and scalable.

Which is to say, we just got our collective ass spanked by an amateur project* staffed by volunteers. I’m not too worried about that, as long as we learn from it.

#

*I waffled over this word choice, since I know for a fact that there are more than a few InfoSci people involved with AO3 at various levels, and some people might object to calling the AO3 an amateur project given how professionally put together (and run) it is. However my intention is to indicate that this very large, very popular information tool was not created by any library or similar organization staffed by LIS people. Wikipedia is no different, and I would honestly put AO3 on the same level as Wikipedia, in regards to just how damn well it does what it is meant to do. So the phrase “amateur project” is not intended as a put down but rather in a more literal sense, that is, a project developed and run outside of any official, professional LIS purview.

I raised the question on the 4/19/12 LibChat concerning the acronym “LAM”, standing for Library/Archives/Museum professionals, which I’ve seen used around but not extensively. I was curious about people’s reaction to it, because I like the idea of having an encompassing term to use in addition to our functional job titles, but honestly I thought LAM was not quite up to the task.

The majority agreed, in fact I don’t think there was one genuine supporter for the term, at best there was indifference. Most people downright hated it (and, admittedly, it is too close to the word “lame” to be comfortably used in a positive way!) and there was much grousing about adding yet another acronym to our already heavy larder of them.

In particular, @pnkrcklibrarian took me to task to trying to find an umbrella term to use, and we had a very lively conversation about it. She was very concerned that such a term could be used to identify InfoSci professionals as generalists, with the result of making it appear as if we are all interchangeable.

I had not quite thought that out from that angle and was disturbed by it, because with all the cutbacks on budget going on everywhere, that really does seem to be the case. The Florida State Archives, for instance, cut their preservation archivist a couple of years ago under the misapprehension that the job could be covered by other archivists, and if not then easily outsourced. Well, yes, outsourcing is certainly possible — for a cost much greater than keeping a preservationist on staff. (DOH.) The Legislature then merged the physical locations of the State Archives and the State Library under the totally misguided assumption that library and archive reading rooms are essentially the same (very, very not the case, if you don’t know; archives by their nature need much tighter security than libraries).

On the other hand, the issue of job blurring also came up which is something I also see happening in a lot of places — a university special collections library such as FSU is an environment that is part library, part archives, and part museum to start with, and with cutbacks staffers are expected to wear every hat. Many librarians are being put in charge of local “history collections” that include not just books but personal papers because the library cannot afford a staff archivist.

So the cornerstone of the issue is acknowledging that yes, our jobs do have a lot of overlap in concept and purpose, thus having a high-level term recognizing that is important; while keeping in mind that different jobs function very differently and require different training. A systems librarian, a school librarian, a museum archivist, a digital library project manager, and a state archivist all have vastly different duties, responsibilities, and skill sets. I would even argue they have different cultures, in the main. But we are all still information science professionals, with the mission of “improving society through facilitating knowledge creation in our communities” (Lankes, 2011).

Maybe if we reversed LAM to MAL, we would at least get the super-cool Firefly reference?

Or we could just circumvent all the fuss and call ourselves Brown Coats!

…yeah, obviously I’m kind of at a dead end. You will note I continue to use the unwieldy “InfoSci Professionals” for now.

#

Let me repeat: THAT IS IT.

I have a fantastic internship lined up for the summer with my mentor, a couple of conferences I’m going to, and some papers I hope to get published. Other than that, I’m FREE of graduate school work! No more classes! No group assignments! No discussion board posts! No cramming a reading in late at night with blurry eyes! FREE!

At least for now…Mentor is pushing for PhD studies, which I’m not as opposed to as I was earlier this year, but I’m still taking a year off because I’m burnt out.

Also, I’m ending this term the way I started it: coughing. If you don’t remember, I contracted whooping cough right before the winter holidays and that bitch hung in until  late January (at which point my back gave out catastrophically due to all the coughing, making it difficult for me to walk, sit or lie down for the following month). Well, earlier this month I got a face full of mold on the job (archives=dirty job!) which resulted in a bad case of asthma (something I don’t suffer from otherwise), involving a lot of wheezing and, yes, coughing.

The meds ran their course and I’m doing much better, but don’t walk behind me because I’m prone to stopping suddenly, bending in half, and trying to cough a lung up.

I’ll be job hunting like a fiend later, and thinking about PhD studies (would love to go to London to do it, but that would be incredibly expensive). Trying to find a place at the convergence of InfoSci, bibliography, archives and the history of text technology…yeah, I never take the easy way out.

But a week from now, I’ll be FREE. And I intend to make the most of it!

#

If you want to know the qualifier that separates “archival practice” from archiving as a hobby, it is the concept of “weeding.” That is the process by which an archivist thins a collection of documents by throwing away items deemed unimportant, either historically or in relation to the subject matter. For instance, in collections of personal papers, a lot of time the household bills, cancelled checks, or common receipts (groceries, for instance) are thrown out.

People who are not trained in archival methodology find this inexcusable. Personally, I find it incredibly tragic but there are valid reasons for it: space, time, and money. Talk for thirty seconds to any professional archivist and the lamentations of budget shortfalls, short staffing, cramped vault space and backlogs will come up. Repeatedly. With vigor. Archivists don’t weed a collection because we are arrogant or foolish, but because we don’t have room, time, or money to deal with it intact. It’s a profoundly practical consideration to a deeply philosophical question: by what standards are the future understandings of the past being created today?

And there is the rub, as they say, because while lip service is given to this issue in archival training, it is not really being addressed at the ground level. Or I should say, the theoretical level.

Theory is a given quite the fish-eye in LIS circles, in my experience. There is a strong defense that the FSU program has a solid theoretical component, but I question that. I believe there is a lot of “that word does not mean what you think it means” in that defense. Honestly, the archivists and librarians I work with do not want to discuss theory; they feel that is the purview of the Humanities and History departments. Archivists and librarians have a job to do. Theory is for the aesthetes.

But the question of weeding is and should be addressed as both a practical solution and as a philosophical quandary. We are affectively reshaping the future with our necessary decisions; future scholars will not thank us for preserving what we have saved if what they need has been discarded.

It is all well and good to focus on archiving as a functional role that requires specific criteria for processing and management, but we are absolving ourselves of a core responsibility if we refuse to address this issue with the disingenuous justification that theory is not our purview. The reasons why are vitally important to what we do and how we do it, and not simply at the level of “for the sake of posterity.”

Librarians face up to this from the direction of acquisition of books/journals/magazines, although with a less severe consequence if they choose based on current fads or erroneous assumptions. A librarian’s focus is by necessity the immediate need of the community they serve; an archivist differs in that the community served is both present (researchers using the archive) and future (researchers using the archive 10, 20, 50, 100+ years from today).

But there is no “theory of weeding” that I’m aware of. It is always presented as a practice with a purpose which is determined by the specific collection being processed, rather than as a grand statement to the future of what we consider to be important today. We should not be proud of the power we are wielding in determining the future; we should be humbled by it, study it, question it, and theorize about our choices.

#

I’m a perfectionist. One reason I don’t update this blog often enough to be interesting is that I loathe the idea of posting something that isn’t well thought out, perfectly constructed, footnoted and with references. I’m changing that habit because the point here is dialogue, not meticulous flawlessness. Right?

I’ve got a lot of things to talk about though, and it’s a shame to never bring up anything here because of my fear of being inadequate. Seriously: not helpful, Brain!

Today’s post is a short one anyway, mostly a happy-happy-joy-joy collection of thoughts on meeting Dr. Jerome McGann yesterday. He is a brilliant man and delightful person, and I was overjoyed (and honored) to sit next to him during dinner. We had a lovely discussion that went nearly two hours about too many topics to even remember, alas.

He was in town to give a lecture as part of a small symposium on “authenticity” and he spoke mainly to the issue of philology in regards to the study of texts and documents, from a digital humanities perspective. I am in no way prepared to relate what he actually said, but I did find it fascinating.

He encouraged me to write on the ontology of “everyday writing,” which to be perfectly honest is far outside of my abilities. I’m no philosopher, or student of literature. However I do think the issue is important for infosci professionals, as we are the librarians and archivists who classify objects, and create classification schemas, and then wonder why nobody uses them. Google built an empire by ignoring classifications completely (and it is arguable that Yahoo destroyed itself in part by trying to hew to them) and instead focused on “search terms.”

We were the FIRST searchers for terms. How did we get left behind? Why are folksonomies playing such a huge part in the future of metadata? Why people constantly reinventing the wheel?

In class the other day a professional state government archivist discussed her ongoing arguments with her cataloguer, and ended on a rant about how useless the Library of Congress standards are in her job of making information available. This is heresay; no doubt I’ll get a comment or two championing the necessity of the LoC subject heading listing. But while it plays a huge part on the back end, for the sake of infosci people organizing information, is it really doing anything for the rank and file researchers?

McGann’s concern with the ontology of “everyday writing” is academically sound, because an idea cannot be debated or studied if it remains an amorphous sludge of a concept.  But the flip side, for archivists and librarians, is having a solid classification to use in order to sort and organize. We don’t really want to argue the deep, conflicted and complex meaning of the phrase. We want to slap a label on it and put it on a shelf. But there is no having one without the other; we cannot classify without understanding what is meant by the phrase, and humanities researchers cannot study the items in order to explore the definition if they cannot find the original material.

Which I think means, really, using “everyday writing” as an adjective; it is not something that is (a noun) but is an aspect of something  — a state of being for it, rather than a definition of its nature. We tend to em-dash descriptions (“Writing—Romantic—British, 18^th c.” or “Sculpture—British”) but we know better than most that even the most accurate classification doesn’t allow for adjectives or, indeed, multiple classifications. The reason tagging systems and broad search methods are so popular is because they work at delivering the information that people are searching for. While our profession is slowly embracing that reality, I don’t think we are grasping the full implications of it.

Try to properly process an archival item as an example of “everyday writing”. At this point, it cannot be done effectively in any finding aid I’ve seen, without resorting to tagging outside of the classification system. This isn’t an argument for standardizing tagging terms (although I see the value in that, it’s also an impossibility) but rather a question on how we, as infosci professionals, can define tagging as a critical component of information organization.

We cannot leave the adjectives behind.

#