skjanes.com

I got to attend ACA 2010 in Halifax last week. I’ve for years strongly believed ACA to be the best conference ever, and I was not disappointed. It’s got a perfect combination of sessions, workshops, and social events both scheduled and casual. I was in good company last week.

Session summaries will be showing up on this site over the next little while.

As part of the Outreach Committee, I was involved in the ACA 35th Anniversary Oral History project — which meant that I spent most of the refreshment breaks and several session periods out on the balcony, talking with some of the people who have made archives in Canada what they are. (Missed some sessions, sure, but probably learned far more than I would have otherwise.)

This was my third ACA, but the first I attended as a fully-graduated, working professional. The first (2006) I was a student, the second (2007) I was months out of school, working a tenuous contract barely related to my skill set. So the thing at the back of my brain ~constantly~ was: will I be getting a job out of this?

(Answer: no, but not for lack of trying.)

So it was much, much better to be there as a normal, working delegate, to approach strangers are a colleague rather than as a supplicant, to be able to relax and hang out with the people I wanted to be with rather than worrying about where I should be at any given time.

A great conference, and once again demonstrated that I get more out of things when I stop trying so hard and just enjoy the experience.

I’ve encountered this very same problem a couple of times this week: there tends to be a very strictly reinforced dichotomy between “technology expert” and “technologically illiterate.” I consider myself to be moderately knowledgeable regarding computers, and I am finding it very difficult to be addressed at that level.

The seminar I attended Wednesday had two talks: the first, addressed to “managers,” I found to be mostly things I already knew. The second, addressed to front-line IT staff, went a bit over my head (perhaps in part because of excessive TLAs.) No big deal, though; that was just for interest’s sake.

Today, though, dealing with a software sales rep, exactly the same problem came up again, and this time it was interfering with my ability to do my job. When I’m being sold a “solution,” I’m not going to be very impressed by a shiny front-end, I want to see a bit of how the data is structured and what’s going to be involved in setting up and maintaining the thing. Instead I got this:

“Can you show me a bit more of how this is set up on the back end?”

“It uses Java. Do you know how to program in Java?”

“No.”

“All right, well, here’s a bit of the code, and our experts can do this for you, now here’s another look at the search screen that your users will see …” etc etc.

I don’t think I’m being unreasonable. I don’t think that just because I can’t write the code myself, I don’t deserve an account of what it is doing. This same vendor threw a lot of jargon at me, in an attempt (I think?) to impress me, and took issue with most of the comments I made based on my having got some of the terminology wrong.

So maybe this one is a bit of an extreme case. Still, I’m noticing this sort of thing all over the place. I deal with our IT department a lot, and with each new contact the first assumption is that I’d know next to nothing about what’s going on.  I’ve been able to “train” the people I work with frequently, but it seems like a new challenge every time. It’s a process, I guess.

At a seminar today I was asked one of the most frustrating questions around:

“Why exactly do you need a degree to do that sort of stuff?”

It’s not the first time I’ve encountered skepticism of this sort. Neither archives nor records management is really a high profile position (except in those television shows where people break into filing cabinets in dark basements to find all the answers) but I’ve even seen people wondering why librarians need degrees. And the public tends to know what librarians are.

It’s also a great question to be asked, because it means I get to give an answer. I’m never sure if the answer I’m giving is good enough, though — especially when it starts from a place where I feel defensive.

It may be the sort of thing that I should prepare an elevator pitch for: one of those pat, 30-second answers that sums up everything and that I don’t need to scramble for when put on the spot.

What is the best way to deal with this sort of thing?

Just under a week ago, it was Take Our Kids To Work Day.

(I’ve got fond memories of this event. Back when I was in Grade 9, I got to glance into the world of contract negotiations. It seemed momentous.)

Two of my co-workers have children of the proper grade, so I must admit I was expecting the worst. I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting. After all, young teenagers probably wouldn’t think a records centre would be the most exciting place to spend an afternoon …

And they didn’t find it exciting. If pressed, I don’t think I’d say it was “exciting” either. My work is most interesting in its details, in the intricate ways in which all the very different systems are made to fit together. It’s not something readily apparent to the public, and which I even find hard to get across in conversation.

And do these kids want to work in records, or in the information profession in any capacity? Probably not, at least not yet. Most people don’t see the work of archivists or records people in their daily lives; the public librarian is the sole representation of LIS.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing, though. It seems to me that most of the right people are getting into the archival profession, somehow. For most, including myself, it’s a decision made after a certain amount of experience or education in another field. And that appears to be working.

Is there any way that archives can be made ~exciting~ to young people at the “what do I want to do when I grow up?” stage? Is it something that we should be concerned about?