I think a good deal more of this kind of thing—Mr. Gillette’s presentation to middle-school students—has to happen in order to counter what Maarja rightly talks about as an abysmal public ignorance of archives:  what they are and what we do.

 

I went into Library School thinking it might be a good way to use what I had learned as a medical transcriptionist, and I had spent a good deal of time as a volunteer but untrained librarian or as a librarian without certification of any kind.  Maybe I would be a medical librarian, I thought.  Then I encountered archives.  Somehow I had gone my entire life up to that point without ever really knowing what an archives was.  (I’d heard of them, naturally—The National Archives, The Hoover Institution Archives, etc.  Just didn’t have a clue what they were.)  It seemed like a natural fit.  I suffer/benefit from chronic (no pun intended) chronodislocation anyway (best defined as the first sentence of a Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. book—“Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”), so preserving materials for future use is something I instinctively understand and want to participate in.

 

As soon as she was old enough (a lot of archives have minimum age limits for patrons), I took my daughter to the Stanford Archives and Special Collections, where I worked while a library student.  I found things for her that piqued her interest; she was a high-school student at the time, and fascinated by “Star Wars,” so I found some original manuscripts of Lucas’s there.  While in Ontario I worked with a local high school to serve up local history after giving a white-glove lesson to the students at their school.  They came to our archives/museum, and we made a place for them in the museum, paged museum artifacts and archival records for them.  They had literal first-hand experience of what archives are and how we operate.  They didn’t all fall in love with it—they were high-school students, after all.  But at least they now know what and who we are.

 

While on a job interview at the Ford Museum and Greenfield Village I learned that the Ford Archives, as part of their partnership with the school at Greenfield Village, had renovated its facilities to accommodate elementary-school students, who used the archives as part of their schoolwork.

 

I think that archivists have got to stop thinking of ourselves as an exclusive club to which only historians, authors, and archivists, with a sprinkling of others, belong.  The buzzword is “outreach.”  We keep records.  We preserve them.  So we got degrees and certification to learn how to do that.  Big deal.  Doctors and nurses and lawyers—as has been pointed out—have to get degrees and spend much time in internships to serve the public as they do, but everyone goes to them.  The entire public is our clientele.  How do we get to them?  Presentations on how to keep photographs, keeping heirlooms, teaching local classes, reaching out to schools, exhibits in public places and schools.  Bringing tour groups into archives, bringing classes into archives.  With proper supervision and subject matter, I believe that children should be brought into archives, even if it’s only to view photos and papers under Mylar.  We need for the public to know who we are, or why *should* they pay us?

 

Arel

(the usual disclaimers)

Arel Lucas, C.A.

Archives/Special Collections Librarian

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Prescott Campus

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Harry Heiss
<[log in to unmask]>Sent: Jun 19, 2006 3:38 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Archives as a profession


I wonder how many other archivists have encountered this line of conversation at dinner parties, clubs, and social gatherings:

        "So what do you do for a living?"

        "I'm an archivist."

        "An archivist, eh.  Have you designed any buildings that I'd recognize?"

        "Probably not."


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