They come from everywhere, and go everywhere.
This was hit home yesterday for me when I had the pleasure and honor of getting a tour of the amazing Pebble Hill Plantation in Georgia. The Registrar, Anne Wade, spoke at the ALA Student Chapter/FSU on Friday night, and it was a great presentation.
I was lucky enough to be invited along with a few other chapter members to talk with Ms. Wade on property at Pebble Hill, in order to get a better idea of what she is doing there.
You may notice that her title does not actually include the following words: librarian, archivist, or curator. Her job, however, contains elements of all of those responsibilities.
Pebble Hill was opened as a public museum/historic house back in the early 1980s. Essentially frozen in time, the house was kept in good working order due to the trust set up by the last owner, who ensured through her own fortune that Pebble Hill Plantation would continue for generations after her death. However, a long term strategic plan for the thousands of objects in the house was never created; inventory includes an impressive fine art collection, a small but important library, housewares, furniture, clothing and linens, and mountains of photos and personal and business archives. The house is huge, and was packed to the rafters with nearly 100 years of active history.
What Pebble Hill lacked was a trained information professional.
Anne Wade began by volunteering at Pebble Hill, and was eventually hired on contract as the “registrar.” Her job entails making an accurate inventory of the truly impressive holdings, much of which was stuffed into closets and drawers and the huge basement. She’s had to find and implement new software to replace the old database, which could not even handle the simplest of searches, much less complex cataloging. She makes key decisions on what to keep and what to deaccession, based on “rules” she and the director have made (the first time any deaccessioning rules have been put into place in the museum’s history, as far as I could gather). She performs what she calls “triage preservation” on items of value that are unstable or damaged. All this, while trying to find, record, catalog and inventory ALL THE THINGS.
I could go on and on about the amazing job Ms. Wade is doing there — after the standard house tour, Ms. Wade took us aside and gave us a three hour behind the scenes tour, which took us everywhere but the attic. Afterwards, I needed a nap. I can only imagine how overwhelming it must be to work there.
But back to the point: this is not a job we are told about in grad school. Maybe hinted at, but not in a meaningful, helpful way. The MLIS programs of today are still mired (on the whole) in the field as it stood in the late 1990s. That’s no harsh criticism; institutions change slowly if at all, so it is not surprising that this is the case. But it is up to us as emerging professionals to A) look outside the boundaries and B) share with each other and with those who come after us what we find.
And FYI, if you’re in the area, Ms. Wade is gladly accepting applications for internships at Pebble Hill. It would be any information professional’s dream internship, especially for those willing to step outside of the traditional library environment.
