At the 2005 SAA annual meeting in New Orleans, there
was a session on just this topic, on how people let their titles or degrees
define them (often for reasons of social status), instead of defining what they
do by the responsibilities of the job
at hand.
Several years ago, I tried to discuss an archival
issue with someone who was head of an important architectural archives. He cut
off the discussion by saying “Oh, I’m a curator, so I really don’t have to know
archival work.”
He was head of one of the more important architectural
archival collections in the country and yet because of his title, he thought he
didn’t have to know “archival work.” The fact that he was responsible for major
archival collections and for running an archives didn’t matter. He never
bothered to learn archival work, he never bothered to go to an archival
workshop, he wouldn’t have been caught dead at an SAA meeting. His title was
“curator,” so that was that.
In 1989 I visited a small Wisconsin county museum. In
a back room were about twenty volunteers sitting at half a dozen card tables.
The museum had just acquired a relatively large archival collection and the
volunteers, supervised by museum curators, were meticulously taking each piece
of paper, flattening it, cleaning it, transcribing it, indexing it, and then
moving on to the next piece of paper.
In other words, they were applying curatorial methods
(or what they thought were curatorial methods) to an archival collection,
treating each piece of paper as an individual artifact worthy of the highest
standards of museum, not archival, practice. The result was predictable:
enormous resources wasted on a project that shouldn’t have taken a hundredth of
the time or money.
In the years since, I’ve repeatedly witnessed museum
employees applying museum practices to archival collections. Much worse, I’ve
often witnessed museums acquiring documents as if they were artifacts, picking
and choosing the “best examples” from a fonds or “cherry picking” what they
thought was important out of an archival collection and throwing away the
rest.
I have also repeatedly witnessed a sort of reverse
version of this: archivists who did not understand the difference between
archival, library, and museum materials. They therefore accessioned library and
museum items into their archival collections and applied archival procedures to
them. I’ve seen archivists consider every “thing” donated as a valuable artifact
and so they keep all and weed nothing
(with their ignorance being a convenient and lazy excuse not to make
difficult appraisal decisions). I was
fascinated by the note to the listserv last week from someone who said her boss
defined “archival” as “something donated,” so anything a donor gives them is
permanently preserved and placed in the archives. That happens more often than
you would think.
In other words, your title, your degrees, where you
got your training and experience, are all
pretty much crap. The archival profession needs to do a far, far better job of
making the point that regardless of someone’s title, a person responsible for
archival collections had damn well better be an archivist, had better have a
thorough professional-level understanding of archival theory and practice
(which, in the US today, usually means an MLS with a minimum of twelve semester
credit hours in areas defined as core archival knowledge followed by archival
certification within a year or two of graduation, although that is not quite yet
the only route) and had better be able to apply archival theory and practice to
their work.
If you are responsible
for archives, then it doesn't matter if your title is curator, librarian,
butcher, baker, or candlestick maker; despite your title, you should be an
archivist, and archival values should drive everything you
do.
Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html