Well, obviously blogging isn't really for me. Cold, rainy day. Working at Archives I downtown and want to stay here. College Park is great, but I want to live and work in the city. Doing research for the exhibits staff as part of my Archivist Development Program plan. Undecided about inaugural plans...saw Obama's motorcade yesterday and I got excited again.

last post..

a little frustration...sorry. But I seriously am reconsidering my decision to leave Boston and do the UMD program and not, say, the Simmons. The paper I refer to in an earlier post has to do with the state of archival education. Is it serving new archivists. We started this paper out thinking that what is lacking in graduate archival education is hands-on experience. But, while I still believe that, I think the problem is more that we are so subsumed by the library part of library school that they overlook our uniqueness. Our unique archival identity. I have to argue with people when I tell them what I do, that I am not a glorified librarian. I am proud of my profession, but this academic experience makes me think I might, indeed, be a glorified librarian.

LBSC 670

Information Access Midterm. I here and now call for the archival community to demand that we be recognized as something other than glorified librarians. I call for our educations in archival science to be based in courses that are archives centered. I call for a divorce from Library Schools. I resent taking a course in which I ask the professor what possible relevance his class has on my future as an archivist and he can't tell me. I spent a day in my reference rotation at NARA today and asked how library and archives reference are similar. What part of my reference class applies to what they do. They seemed puzzled. Two different beasts, two different approaches. UGH. I hate library school.

Archival Education

The real reason for this blog is that eventually I want to share the results of a paper I am co-writing with a fellow UMD student/NARA employee, Dawn Sherman. We got ahead of ourselves and didn't get the IRB permissions we needed to publish our results (we used surveys). So, I hope we can put some things on this blog without getting ourselves kicked out or arrested by the IRB police. I also hope as the blog ages and develops it will become a place, outside of the formal literature, for archivists and students of archives to chat, debate, vent, and say the things they can't in the SAA listserv or the pages of the American Archivist. I put the adult content warning on so that we can be ourselves (I swear like a truck driver) not for anything dirty. Do archivists like dirty things? That is my two cents for now. Dawn has been invited to be an author here...but she can speak for herself.

New Archives Blog

This is something I never thought I'd do...blog. I read them, I comment on them, but I never thought I would create one. But I want a place to vent about my life in the world of archives...well, right now, my life in the world of graduate level archives education. Stay tuned.