December 11, 2008
Runaway time
It’s difficult to find time to blog. I really wanted to write about the decision of the Irish Government to merge their National Archives, Irish Manuscripts Commission and National Library. This seems a blatantly bad move, one that reveals a genuine lack of understanding of how these institutions work and the services they provide. I also wanted to write about the decision in Japan to demolish their Kabuki-za, a truly beautiful and historic building in Tokyo, a city that has almost run out of architectural evidence of it’s past. Unfortunately, it’s a busy time at home and work and blogging on these and other important issues hasn’t happened.
November 17, 2008
Bulgaria does the best bread
Recently I went to Sofia. While there I was shown the national archives and took these photos:
October 15, 2008
Blog Action Day
This post is participating in Blog Action Day. The idea is that bloggers all over the world use one day a year to discuss a common topic. This year that topic is Poverty. The idea is to raise awareness, generate discussion, raise money (through the donation of blog ad revenue), and instigate change. I’m in favour of all these things, although to be honest I’m sceptical of how much real change will ever be made in the area of poverty. There has always been an imbalance between the rich and poor. Why should this change? Why does it exist in the first place? It seems to me that people living in poverty are there through the greed and selfishness of others, namely those who make the rules, wield the power, have the wealth, own the land and property, dictate how the money flows, have access to education, and generally are in a position to choose their own life-styles and life-views and to not give a damn about their fellow human beings. Sometimes poverty leads to death. Sometimes it leads to revolution.
I’m supposed to post about poverty as it relates to the theme of my blog. So, poverty and archives….
There has been a dedicated movement during the last couple of years to get world governments to seriously tackle the problem of poverty, both in their own countries and on an international scale. This will be documented in newspapers, government policy papers, live aid videos, etc. But a lot of material will be lost because it originates from small, grass level movements that are run by volunteers, that exist for a couple of years (or less) and then disappear. Many of these groups operate in electronic environments, relying on the internet and email to get their messages across and to communicate with their membership and the wider public. As archivists, how can we identify, collect and preserve the records of these groups? Should we even try? Is this our role?
Well I could write a bit more about that, but there are other angles to poverty and archives. People living in poverty have to worry about food, shelter, fresh water, education, heating, access to medicine, and other basics of survival. How many of the truly impoverished visit our institutions? How do our outreach programmes tackle this? The Archives Awareness Campaign for 2008 is “Take your place in history”. How does the position of the poverty-stricken fit into this? (I don’t mean to critique the Awareness Campaign, which, by the way, I think is brilliant.) But, poor people exist in history and always have and many of them make it into archives only via government statistics, or studies on social and health conditions. I suspect not many institutions contain the personal collections of families or individuals living in poverty. What records are they creating anyway?
This last thought really is my way of getting to the point that poverty excludes people from a full engagement with archival collections, both as creators and as readers. This lack of engagement denies them a connection with their history, their culture, their identity, the memories of their communities and ancestors, and all the other wonderful ways that archives enrich our lives and our feelings of personal identity and belonging.
Poverty sucks. It should be done away with.
I’m supposed to post about poverty as it relates to the theme of my blog. So, poverty and archives….
There has been a dedicated movement during the last couple of years to get world governments to seriously tackle the problem of poverty, both in their own countries and on an international scale. This will be documented in newspapers, government policy papers, live aid videos, etc. But a lot of material will be lost because it originates from small, grass level movements that are run by volunteers, that exist for a couple of years (or less) and then disappear. Many of these groups operate in electronic environments, relying on the internet and email to get their messages across and to communicate with their membership and the wider public. As archivists, how can we identify, collect and preserve the records of these groups? Should we even try? Is this our role?
Well I could write a bit more about that, but there are other angles to poverty and archives. People living in poverty have to worry about food, shelter, fresh water, education, heating, access to medicine, and other basics of survival. How many of the truly impoverished visit our institutions? How do our outreach programmes tackle this? The Archives Awareness Campaign for 2008 is “Take your place in history”. How does the position of the poverty-stricken fit into this? (I don’t mean to critique the Awareness Campaign, which, by the way, I think is brilliant.) But, poor people exist in history and always have and many of them make it into archives only via government statistics, or studies on social and health conditions. I suspect not many institutions contain the personal collections of families or individuals living in poverty. What records are they creating anyway?
This last thought really is my way of getting to the point that poverty excludes people from a full engagement with archival collections, both as creators and as readers. This lack of engagement denies them a connection with their history, their culture, their identity, the memories of their communities and ancestors, and all the other wonderful ways that archives enrich our lives and our feelings of personal identity and belonging.
Poverty sucks. It should be done away with.
September 24, 2008
Librarians make it in the movies
Ann Seidl’s The Hollywood Librarian: A Look at Librarians through Film is a new documentary looking at librarians working in America today. The film takes the form of interviews with real librarians, interspersed with film clips from movies showing some of the more stereotyped and humorous views of librarians, libraries and library work. The clips comment on library settings, the public, books, the value of reading and younger patrons of libraries. The documentary part of the film portrays the wide variety of work done by librarians in their jobs, mainly through interviews with different types of librarians working in different kinds of libraries.
The second half of the film is taken over by the documentary side. The script focuses on aspects of the political milieu in which American librarians work. The Patriot Act, and its freedom-threatening laws, is criticised and put into perspective of history’s witch hunts of the past – the American government feared communists in the 1950’s, free radicals in the 1970’s and now terrorists in the 21st Century. Attention then turns to the plight of the libraries in Salinas, John Steinbeck’s home town, which were threatened with closure due to Council budget cuts.
We thought there were really two movies/documentaries here – one on portrayals of librarians in Hollywood versus the reality, and one on the real working conditions of librarians and libraries in the US. I went expecting to see some of the movie librarians I remembered from my own movie-watching experience, but only a handful of movies were clipped. The wealth of suitable material out there must be huge and it seems a lost opportunity not to have explored this idea in more depth. Also, the situation of American librarians working under the Patriot Act, as shown in the movie, yields a lot of interesting dilemmas that are linked to American society as a whole, and the nation’s view of itself as a land of freedom and opportunity. The inclusion of a San Quentin literacy group that campaigned on behalf of the Salinas libraries was interesting. The inmates recognised the value of a decent education and of having somewhere to go that encourages kids to learn. Their campaign pointed out that “if you take away the libraries and recreation centres, the only place kids have to end up is a place like this”. Coupled with the statistic that the yearly library budget for the US is about the same amount as is spent each day on the war in Iraq, clearly there’s a lot more to be explored re America’s view of libraries and their role in society.
I saw the movie last night thanks to Sue Hill. Most of the audience were librarians, or at least they appeared to be. I laughed in the same places they did. Librarians and archivists suffer from the same (sometimes true, sometimes laughable) stereotypes. I did however feel somewhat marginalised when Ann Seidl referred to the looting of the “Iraq National Library and Museum”, getting the name of the institution wrong and thereby cutting us out of the picture.
And now I have to go feed my cat.
The second half of the film is taken over by the documentary side. The script focuses on aspects of the political milieu in which American librarians work. The Patriot Act, and its freedom-threatening laws, is criticised and put into perspective of history’s witch hunts of the past – the American government feared communists in the 1950’s, free radicals in the 1970’s and now terrorists in the 21st Century. Attention then turns to the plight of the libraries in Salinas, John Steinbeck’s home town, which were threatened with closure due to Council budget cuts.
We thought there were really two movies/documentaries here – one on portrayals of librarians in Hollywood versus the reality, and one on the real working conditions of librarians and libraries in the US. I went expecting to see some of the movie librarians I remembered from my own movie-watching experience, but only a handful of movies were clipped. The wealth of suitable material out there must be huge and it seems a lost opportunity not to have explored this idea in more depth. Also, the situation of American librarians working under the Patriot Act, as shown in the movie, yields a lot of interesting dilemmas that are linked to American society as a whole, and the nation’s view of itself as a land of freedom and opportunity. The inclusion of a San Quentin literacy group that campaigned on behalf of the Salinas libraries was interesting. The inmates recognised the value of a decent education and of having somewhere to go that encourages kids to learn. Their campaign pointed out that “if you take away the libraries and recreation centres, the only place kids have to end up is a place like this”. Coupled with the statistic that the yearly library budget for the US is about the same amount as is spent each day on the war in Iraq, clearly there’s a lot more to be explored re America’s view of libraries and their role in society.
I saw the movie last night thanks to Sue Hill. Most of the audience were librarians, or at least they appeared to be. I laughed in the same places they did. Librarians and archivists suffer from the same (sometimes true, sometimes laughable) stereotypes. I did however feel somewhat marginalised when Ann Seidl referred to the looting of the “Iraq National Library and Museum”, getting the name of the institution wrong and thereby cutting us out of the picture.
And now I have to go feed my cat.
September 10, 2008
A strategy for national collections
TNA has launched The National Collections Strategy with a draft document for consultation, available from TNA website. The aim behind this initiative is to locate areas of weak representation in archival collections and collecting institutions in England and Wales, and make them stronger. Potentially, this is big news. But before offering too much praise, here are my negative points: I’m sceptical of these types of all-encompassing endeavours that aim to achieve broad overviews and wide reaching changes/improvements. My first questions would be: where is the money coming from? Who will pay the staff to carry out the research, and how much? How long will these posts be funded for? Once gaps are identified, who will pay for the community engagement, transfer, storage, processing, cataloguing, access-related-costs, etc of all the new material? My concerns are mostly economic, but human too. Will staff in local record offices, libraries and charities be given even greater backlogs plus added responsibility for public and internal outreach? Will support be given to libraries or record offices threatened with closure or funding cuts?
These concerns aside, I'm in favour of a national collections strategy. Active engagement with potential donors and sources of deposit-able material is important work. Likewise, cooperation and coordination of collecting activities is important. And I believe it’s crucial that gaps in collections and collecting missions are identified and addressed. This is particularly true, obviously, because a lot of material will be electronic. Fuller histories and better understanding come from fuller archives.
These concerns aside, I'm in favour of a national collections strategy. Active engagement with potential donors and sources of deposit-able material is important work. Likewise, cooperation and coordination of collecting activities is important. And I believe it’s crucial that gaps in collections and collecting missions are identified and addressed. This is particularly true, obviously, because a lot of material will be electronic. Fuller histories and better understanding come from fuller archives.
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