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.
 

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Leon C. Miller, Manuscripts Librarian
Special Collections, Jones Hall
Tulane University Libraries
New Orleans, Louisiana 70118
ph: 504-865-5685, fx: 504-865-5761, [log in to unmask]
http://specialcollections.tulane.edu
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