Joy Ketron - Watauga Regional Library

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"Never trust a man who reads only one book." ~Arturo Perez-Reverte

Dear Mr. Vernon,

Oh dear here we go again.  I am sending this to you and the list.  I am glad that you have sympathy for Mr. Erdmann as he probably deserves it, but I'm afraid you do not know all the facts.  Therefore I would appreciate it if you would please  not bring up my name in the listserv again.  Did not Maarja, diplomatic as she is, discuss this? It would be simple enough for anyone to discuss personal names off-list if that's what they want to do, and then they could say whatever they want and those of us who are over it can move on.    

You may find my words outrageous, but I find anyone engaging in a personal attack on the list to be just as outrageous.  Somehow it was glossed over that after I had put in what I thought was my last 2 cents on this topic on the listserv, Mr. Erdmann contacted me first off-list, I responded to his questions but asked that we drop the issue- I happen to think that when discussions like this run too long unresolved we all become navel-gazers and it makes a nuisance of the listserv.  When he persisted by contacting me off-list a second time and unnecessarily dragged in the female question [I had been earlier assumed to be male because of my name but I am female and I dislike being assumed male for whatever reason]- I perceived it as approaching a soft kind of gender harassment- and I still do, because in his email there was no reason for him to capitalize HER or to use the example of suffrage because it simply did not make sense to his argument, and if you want I could write you a 5 page treatise defending my reaction.  With logic missing as a reason, I thus concluded he was dragging gender in to annoy me.  That qualifies as harassment, and it was somewhat gender based, so there you go.  Being needled further about a point which one has tried to walk away from?- also harassment, just not gender based.  Dragging my name up again after this should have been long buried... you can guess what I think about that, and here I am again trying to swim through the netting.  

Finally, I will admit that I worded my statement incorrectly because everyone perceived it differently than I meant it- all apologies.  By saying that one would "be surprised what higher-ups I might know" I meant to point out rather sharply to Mr. Erdmann- so that he would let me alone rather than instigate a personal attack (kinda like this one)- that a professional should not engage in harassment of anyone via personal email because you never know who you might be looking to for a job one day.  That was all I meant.  Unless perhaps you'd like to believe that as a new professional I am secretly behind the every move of the SAA and am plotting to have all the anti-educationalists rounded up in DC and carted off to an interrogation room... give me a break.  I said I was a newbie, what more do you want? I am not a powerful or threatening figure in the field, except if you engage me in meaningless arguments, harass me, and call it an issue of free speech, and then I just get fiesty, and obviously nobody likes that.   

Now can everybody please stop saying "Dana Miller" (except the lottery man!) so we can all just continue having a pleasant day, okay? We can burn me in effigy or something later but let's do it quietly, for heaven's sake.  Sheesh!      

Silent from here out! I swear!

DM

PS- Oh but I DO happen to have some outrageously cute shoes on today, for anyone interested in following my outrageous behavior.  And I might have tacos for lunch.  I know, I know, I'm out of control...

 

On 6/20/06, Vernon Rood <[log in to unmask] > wrote:

Archival Education

1) Sympathy for John Erdmann.
I agree with you, Mr. Erdmann, that it is outrageous for Dana Miller to accuse you of gender harassment merely for holding opinions different from hers.  Her statements speak volumes about the parlous state of free speech in today's politically correct university.  It is doubly outrageous for an archivist to threaten to blackball a student.  It is striking how blithely she threatens to destroy your career and then ends with a kind of "have a nice day."  Does nobody else think that this is outrageous?


2)  Archival Education at NARA

NARA is the nation's largest employer of archivists, and I have been surprised that the current Listserv discussion has not included the practices of this agency.  Although I am not any kind of spokesperson for NARA, a few basic facts about NARA's program are not privileged information..  Basically, NARA existed before today's university programs to train archivists, and as a result, NARA has traditionally trained its own archivists.

When I came through the archivist training program in the 1980s, it was called the CIDS program (which I think stood for Career Intern Development System, or something similar).  A group of a couple dozen of us trainees began the program with two weeks of instruction on the theory and practice of archival work.  For the following two years, we trainees then worked in a number of different departments.  In those two years, we each gained about 4,000 hours of on-the-job experience in arrangement & description, reference, appraisal, as well as other fields.  Personally, I thought that this was an unrivalled program for training archivists.  The program still exists, and most archivists at the National Archives have gone through it.


3) Library Training and NARA
Unlike much of the rest of the archival world, very few NARA archivists have librarian degrees.  Until recently, NARA hired as archivists mostly people with backgrounds in American history.  The educational requirements for archivists have changed recently, however, as has also the work of archivists at NARA.  As our work becomes more centered on the computer, our work of processing records, for example, has become much more like library cataloging than traditional arrangement and description.

Personally, I have a librarian's degree, and I also went through F. Gerald Ham's excellent archival training program at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.  All of this training has been useful to some degree, because it is largely complementary, concerned as it is with the storage and retrieval of information.  I also have happy memories of wonderful information professionals, like Dr. Ham, that I worked with and learned from in those days.

While I am on the subject of NARA's differences from other archives, one could mention also the paucity of NARA archivists-please correct me if I am wrong!-who have become Certified Archivists.  Perhaps that will change with time, also.


4) In Conclusion

Although NARA traditionally has trained its archivists on-the-job, I would not argue that it is inherently superior to academic training.  In fact, I think that there is merit in both classroom and on-the-job training.  In Germany, for example, its world-class archival training programs inherently combine study and on-the-job archival work.

Finally, I wish to repeat that I am in no way an official spokesperson for NARA.  I am merely providing the archival community with non-privileged information about archival education at NARA so that well-considered judgments are possible.


V. Paul Rood, MA, MALS, Ph.D
Archivist, Initial Processing and Declassification Division (NWMD)
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
8601 Adelphi Road
College Park, Maryland 20740

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