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I’ve been a member of the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) for a while now. I joined it because I thought it would be a good way to get a sense for the concerns of the kinds of institutions that it represents. When my membership was up for renewal, I thought it was time to take a look at what I was getting for my membership dollars, and by extension, what AASLH has to offer for archivists. In this post I’ll examine what AASLH has to offer to you as an individual archivist, and in the follow-up post I’ll talk about what it has to offer archivists in general.

Like SAA, AASLH has both individual and institutional memberships. An individual membership is a flat $60 (no sliding income scale). As with SAA, for that membership you get some tangible benefits—publications, discounts on books and programs, and access to services. They produce a monthly newsletter (available in print or online) which efficiently delivers news about the organization and announcements. You also get a slim glossy color magazine, History News, four times a year (not available by separate subscription). If you’re interested in the general field of history and museums in America, this is a pretty good publication. It has some excellent columns and the features are meatier and more thoughtful than I expected. It’s not an academic journal, but for me, that’s a bit of an advantage. Each issue also contains as an insert the most recent in AASLH’s series of “technical leaflets” Most recently the leaflet was on planning commemorations. (More on the technical leaflets in Part 2.)

You also get the usual discounts on publications, workshops, and meeting conference fees. AASLH is partnered with AltaMira press, which I think offers a very tempting assortment of books on history and museums—almost nothing specifically on archives, however. They offer some workshops on topics relevant to archivists—board development, digitizing audio collections, and digitizing historical collections, for example. Like SAA these workshops are offered around the country so it’s worth keeping an eye out for them.

One membership benefit that might make a great deal of difference to some people is access to health insurance—I didn’t look into the details of the plan, but this seems like a pretty valuable benefit for either individuals or organizations. On a more recreational subject, AASLH features a “Members Get in Free” program at hundreds of history museums around the country. I’m sure I know a few archivists who could take advantage of that!

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It’s a cold rainy morning here at ArchivesNext worldwide headquarters, and I’m doing a little housekeeping. So today’s post will be another in our popular blog round-up series.

• First, thanks to everyone to contributed to the MARAC discussion sessions (in person and here online). I’m sure some of you still have things to say about MPLP, so don’t hesitate to contribute to the existing comment thread.
• The presentation that I Arian and I did on Web 2.o for Archivists is now up to 944 views on SlideShare. Think about that. What an incredible demonstration of what 2.0 is all about. This is why all our professional organizations should be posting presentations online (as I hear SAA is planning to do this year). Have you posted any of your presentations about archives up on the web? If so, let me know and I’ll put a link to them up on my resources page.
• Karen Schneider, the Free-Range Librarian, writes “LinkedIn is *NOT* Facebook for Grownups” If you’re interested in either one I suggest you read this, and check out the comments too for more opinions. We were running out of time in our workshop when we got to LinkedIn, so it’s a good follow up for our workshop participants too.
• I highly recommend you follow the links on the LibrarianInBlack post, “How del.icio.us is your site?” and follow the directions to find out how users have tagged your archives’ web pages. And if you’re still a little fuzzy about what del.icio.us is all about, this might help explain it too.
• And, for all you Twitter lovers out there (and you know who you are), here’s something you might want to look into, courtesy of LibraryStuff, “Tweet What You Read.”
• Holly Robertson, the voice behind the “Do I really touch that with my hand?” blog recently wrote about a group of conservators attending the AIC meeting in Denver who stayed on an extra day after the conference to help preserve some local collections in need. A worthy cause and good PR for the conservators–maybe some national and regional archival associations can think about a similar model? An archival barn-raising?
• If you haven’t done so lately, please go take a look at the Archives Issues blog. I started this as a way to easily distribute quick summaries and links to news stories about archives. I think it’s got a lot of promise, but what’s going to make it really work is if more people sign on to be contributors. Right now, it’s just me and Jordon, but I encourage you to take a look at what we’re doing and think about volunteering to be a contributor.

And, since I owe the campaign chair a favor, I’ll close with a reminder to all MARAC members (and anybody else with a checkbook) to please contribute to the “35 for 35″ campaign for the MARAC Educational Endowment. To celebrate its 35th anniversary, MARAC is asking all its members to contribute $35 (or more!) to help build the endowment that supports our scholarship program. Make your check out to MARAC and put a note in the memo field that it’s for the “35 for 35 “campaign–here’s a link to the website with the mailing address (top right).

The final two discussion sessions at the spring MARAC meeting were devoted to preservation and advocacy. The preservation session was led by the wise and knowing Jane Smith Stewart. The fact that I’m not going to try to summarize it is no reflection on the discussion–which was quite interesting–but rather reflects that I don’t really know that much about preservation. If you’ve never tried it, it’s almost impossible to try to capture the main threads of a discussion when it’s not an area you understand well. If anyone who was in the session wants to write up their notes, I’d be happy to post them. I know bugs were a topic, as were velcro, boxes, humidity, and good housekeeping. See? I’ll stick to things I understand.

The advocacy session was led by the formidable Kathleen Roe, who engaged the group in a discussion of message, not methods. What I took away from the session were two key points: identify who are the key people you need to reach with your advocacy and identify the positive value of your repository to communicate in your message.

In working through some examples from the group, Kathleen probed them to identify whose support was really critical to the success of their archives. She asked, “Who is of importance? What are they interested in?” and then told the group to court these interests. For many situations, she suggested creating an advisory committee of stakeholders as a good way to co-opt potential advocates. Having your supporters advocate on your behalf with their peers, she advised, is always better than doing the advocacy yourself.

She also challenged the group to identify the “positive value” of their repository–not in terms of the value of the objects it holds, but in terms of the outcomes it achieves, the impacts on people’s lives. Being able to justify the value of your archives because of what it can do (and has done) for people makes a much more compelling case than explaining what kinds of items it holds. She told the group to collect stories of how their archives had been used and touched people’s lives. I was reminded of how often I saw this done back at the National Archives–the former Archivist, John Carlin (or whoever wrote his speeches), was great at it. In his case it was often a story about a veteran, or a family of a veteran, who was successful in finding records that would enable them to receive much needed benefits. Those stories tugged at the heartstrings–as did the one Kathleen used as her example–much more effectively than statistics about linear feet.

Our thanks to all the people who moderated these sessions (especially Kathleen, who was a pinch-hitter). These sessions were a bit of an experiment, and in my view they succeeded. I think giving people the opportunity to talk to experts and each other about critical issues provides a good balance to more formal sessions. Conferences should be about talking as well as listening, don’t you agree?

You may remember that the presentation Arian and I did for our MARAC workshop about Archivists and Web 2.o was posted on SlideShare. Today Arian got an email telling him that the “editorial team” at SlideShare had selected it to be one of the featured presentations on their homepage. Web fame for a fleeting moment!

(You have to scroll pretty far down the page. Past the “Cute Dog Theory” one.)

As of this writing the presentation has been viewed 347 times. Considering that there were sixteen people in the workshop, that’s expanding the audience for the presentation quite a bit, don’t you think?

We’re taking a short break from the MARAC posts to bring you an assortment of interesting links.

• I highly recommend you take a look at the newly launched Civil Rights Digital Library based at the University of Georgia. The site features 30 hours of historical news film, as well as digitized primary sources and educational materials from 75 libraries, archives, museums, public broadcasters and others across the U.S.
• Speaking of digital libraries, if you’re involved in one, please take the survey sponsored by researchers from SDSC and UCSD Libraries on the topic of “Data Mapping in Digital Libraries”.
• For those of you interested in theoretical or philosophical discussions of archives, or who were following with interest the recent exchange in the comments about post-modernism, you might like the most recent post on the UK Archives Hub Blog, “Everything is open to interpretation.”
• On a completely different topic, there’s a post on ZA3038 (a new blog for me) titled “What is OAI and why should you care?” which might be of interest to both people who think they already know the answer to that question and those who are sure they don’t.

The third discussion session was dedicated to Web 2.0 and archives, and was led by the illustrious Arian Ravanbakhsh. Since Arian and I co-taught a pre-conference workshop on the same topic, it makes sense to talk about these two sessions together.

I was very pleased by the outcome of the workshop. I don’t know why I would have expected otherwise, but our audience was engaged and enthusiastic, and it was a pleasure to share our experiences with them. We only had three hours for the workshop, so it was really like preparing a dessert sampler platter–a yummy little taste of a lot of different things to encourage you to come back and order more next time. On the sampler were:

• RSS – makes it all possible
• Blogs & microblogs (such as Twitter)
• Podcasts (video and audio)
• Image sharing sites (such as Flickr)
• Video sharing sites (such as YouTube)
• Wikis
• Tagging and social bookmarking
• Social Networking sites (such as Facebook and LinkedIn)
• Second Life

Our presentation is available on SlideShare .

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Next up in the discussion sessions at the spring MARAC meeting was one on the impact of the article “More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing” (hereafter “MPLP”) by Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner. This discussion was led by the unflappable Christine Di Bella and attracted an almost full house (as had Geof in the previous session).

My impression (correct me if I’m wrong, readers), is that there was a general consensus in the room that MPLP was, in many ways, just a restatement or validation of what most archives had always been doing. There seemed to be agreement that no archives processed every collection to some ideal micro-level; professional judgment is always used. There was some discussion about whether or not the true value of MPLP was that it gave some kind of validation or seal of approval to what many archivists thought was their own dirty little secret–that we don’t process every collection to the n-th degree. Several people said that they are now revising their processing manuals or processes to describe multi-tiered approaches to processing. People from the New York State Archives, the University of Maryland, the Beinecke Library at Yale University and Penn State described some of their strategies and processes.

What I found interesting was the reaction when people raised concerns about some of the impacts of MPLP–my impression was that these concerns were ignored or dismissed by the dominant voices in the discussion. People in the discussion (or immediately after it, in the post-meeting chat) raised what I think are four valid concerns.

• Many of the preservation “shortcuts” that MPLP advocates, such as not re-foldering or removing metal attachments, are based on the assumption that an archives has adequate climate control. How are archives with these less-than-ideal conditions addressing this aspect of MPLP?
• MPLP discourages the level of processing necessary to conduct “weeding” (the process of identifying and removing unwanted materials from a larger body of materials–hat tip SAA Glossary). For archives with limited space, reducing the bulk of collections can be essential. Are archivists concerned about potentially providing valuable shelf space and expensive climate control for materials that have no archival value? Are the efficiencies we are achieving in the short-term coming at the risk of long-term costs?
• Using MPLP as a justification, some archives might choose to acquire and minimally process collections that they might previously have not accepted. Is MPLP allowing archives to be more acquisitive than they should be? If an archives is considering acquiring a collection, knowing that it will never do more than minimally process it, should that archives attempt to find a home for the materials where they will be more fully processed and described?
• Isn’t MPLP just shifting the burden of reviewing and understanding archival materials from processing archivists to reference archivists and our users? (When this issue was raised in the discussion, it was met with what I thought was a somewhat callous response that showed a lack of consideration for our users–something along the lines of, “they just need to start doing their own work.” I think it is not in the long-term interest of the archival profession to show this kind of disregard for our customers.) Again, will the short-term efficiencies being gained in processing be offset by the need for more work in reference and the cost (on many levels) to our researchers?

I anticipate that the response to these issues will be the same–that MPLP must always be exercised within responsible professional judgment. But in repositories that are under pressure to get rid of their backlogs or take in more volume, is MPLP providing “cover” for exercising less-than-ideal professional judgment? The people in the audience of the discussion section seemed to want to dismiss these concerns as being trivial–of course everyone exercises good professional judgment, we don’t need to talk about this. But are we at risk of creating a new dirty little secret in the archival profession? Is MPLP just creating a new seamy underbelly of archives that people don’t want to talk about?

I was more active than usual in the MARAC meeting that wrapped up successfully this weekend. I taught my first workshop (on Web 2.0, with a fellow blogger) and a colleague and I were responsible for introducing a new track of discussion sessions. As soon as my workshop partner gets the slides up, I’ll write about that event and give a link to our slides. In the meantime I’ll go out of chronological order and write about some of the discussion sessions. But I’d also like to solicit people who attended some of the other sessions–particularly the ones on using Web 2.0 for education and the future of MARAC–to serve as “guest bloggers.” Let me know if you want to write up a summary for me to post.

The effervescent Geof Huth lead the discussion session on electronic records. The conversation took a bit of a different turn than the one we had expected. We thought this might be an opportunity for people to talk about the concrete problems they were having in their archives and get advice from their peers. Instead it turned out to be more of a philosophical conversation (not that there’s anything wrong with that). What follows is a summary of my notes–remember that it was a discussion so things jumped around quite a bit.

Geof began by asking how many people were actually working with electronic records (show of hands). Then he asked of the people who had not raised their hands, why not? He then raised some of the points he thought might be holding people back from addressing electronic records (hereafter ER) issues:

• fear of technology
• lack of records management expertise
• the need to be involved with records creation
• the fact that with ER things are “slippery,” responsibilities are less clear, and
• a desire to wait for the uber-solution to be delivered to solve the problem.

A recurring theme was that many of the challenges presented by ER were essentially needs for good fundamental records management. Another theme was the increased need for archivists to “get out of the basement” and work with people–records creators, IT staff, records management staff. Some saw this as a good thing; being more active in the records management end of things gave them more visibility. Many people said they had difficulties getting their IT staff to work with them and understand their needs (for example, for server space). In response others advised looking for support from the general counsel’s office or the auditing department. Others said their efforts to implement ER management had helped them win the cooperation of their IT people.

One person (sorry, don’t remember who) suggested taking a look at the case studies recently created by SAA that provided models for how colleges and universities treated specific forms of electronically-created records, such as bulletins and files related to the tenure review process. He or she thought this was a valuable model–how one kind of archives was dealing with one common record type. (I looked for these on the SAA website and couldn’t find them there–anyone got a link?) (Just added: Campus Case Studies Portal from SAA: http://archivists.org/publications/epubs/CampusCaseStudies/index.asp - thanks Erin!)

Someone else raised concerns about ER created in non-organizational settings–in other words the “personal papers” of the electronic world. What do we do about those? We can’t be out there trying to educate all potential donors now about what formats to use or how to properly manage their personal records. (Sadly, the group had no answer for this.)

Geof observed that we are all little “engines of creation,” churning out more records (or potential records) than our predecessors ever did. There’s just more crap than there used to be. (I don’t think “crap” was the word Geof used. That came from the audience.) There was support for the idea that a lot of these problems were really records problems, not specifically electronic records problems. Again, there was a theme that there was a need to get back to the basics of records management.

Geof encouraged the group to “get to love chaos”– because often the original context of electronic records is the chaos that is a user’s computer. People aren’t necessarily creating records in the kinds of series that we’ve come to expect, and that maybe we shouldn’t be trying to impose those kinds of expectations in this new environment.

He closed by calling on everyone to get out there and do something, to take a risk. He said that we have to brave enough to fail, because to do nothing at all rather than risk failure was not acceptable. The challenge presented by electronic records to archivists is “our one chance to be great,” this is where we will make our contribution–or not. “If we fail at this,” he said, “we fail at everything.”

I’ve got a backlog of posts waiting to be written (what is it with archivists and backlogs?), but I wanted to encourage people to take the one-question survey on employment over at The DIGITAL Archive blog. A brief description:

Basically, I created this survey because I wanted to ask the powers that be at the American Library Association (ALA) and Library School Administrators across North America why so many recent graduates and not-so-recent graduates in library and information studies end up toiling in contractual positions for years without a single permanent position on the horizon. Additionally, why does it seem as though only a few people in this profession have permanent positions, like an oligarchy?

Since I am seeking facts, I want to know what is the employment status of the librarians and archivists among the readership of this blog? The choices are presented in the survey widget. Feel free to leave comments, too.

I don’t know that I agree that “only a few people” have permanent positions. Actually, I think most of the people I know have permanent positions–does that make me part of the oligarchy? Oh, wait, I don’t have one, so I guess I’m part of the underclass as well.

“…Chautauqua is part of the American imagination. It belongs with Concord, Massachusetts, or Hannibal, Missouri…as one of those places that help us define who we are or what we believe in” (David McCullough).

Who could resist that kind of recommendation? Certainly not me. I’m leaving tomorrow to attend the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference’s spring meeting at the Chautauqua Institution. I’ve been a bit pre-occupied these past few days pulling things together for the first workshop I’ve ever taught on Web 2.0 for archivists. I hope it goes well. I’m also responsible for a new session track at this conference–a series of discussion sessions on hot archival topics. I’m not as nervous about those because we have a great group of moderators lined up who I’m sure can handle any crowd.

If you’re having ArchivesNext withdrawal over the next few days, go back and check out the discussions in the comments on the last few posts. “Archivists as Activists” has seen quite a bit of activity and I’m sure some more of you could weigh in with your opinions.

And last, but not least, congratulations to Peter Gottlieb (Wisconsin Historical Society), Tom Hyry (Beinecke Library, Yale University), Rosalye Settles (US Department of the Treasury), Robert Spindler (Arizona State University Libraries), Chris Prom (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Julie Herrada (Special Collections Library, University of Michigan), and Helen Wong Smith (Edwin H. Mookini Library, University of Hawai’i, Hilo) who all won their elections to SAA offices.

(And, yes, tomorrow’s the last day to get your nominations in. You didn’t think I would leave that out, did you?)