skjanes.com

I spend about half my Saturday mornings at work. This is a good thing, not only because it enables me to take bits and pieces of time off during the week, but also because it enables me and the rest of the team to get things done without interruption.

I’ve complained before that this job tends to be very reactive, rather than proactive: possibly 85% of my time is spent responding to immediate user needs, with not much left available to make progress towards improvements. Frustrating, as you can imagine. A good Saturday or two should be able to really turn that around.

Today was dedicated towards what I can flippantly term “disaster planning”; more accurately, planning for how to recover from the ongoing disaster that has been the past few years. I shan’t go into them publicly, but let it suffice to say that there have been Problems.

“If we don’t take care of that soon, it will come back to haunt us,” one of my co-workers said this morning. “Too late,” I replied. Things have already not been taken care of, and they are currently on an intense haunting spree. We know what needs to be done, but there are issues with time (how much time can we reasonably dedicate to these things? how can we re-schedule existing workload so that they can get done?) and space (we have no extra storage space, and no room to work on another major project.)

At this point, there’s really no good way to get started. We’ve worked ourselves into a corner, where we can’t do anything until we have space and we can’t have space until we do something. The few projects that clearly ~can~ be tackled at this point would make such little impact on the total situation that we are reluctant to endorse them as worthwhile.

I’m of the opinion that it would be best to “just start, dammit,” as a little tiny insignificant amount of progress would be better than none at all. But there’s still all that other stuff to consider, the 80% of staff time taking care of urgent requests (all requests are urgent, aren’t they?) and immediate maintenance needs.

It’s all leaving me to think that the current atmosphere of indecision is just as harmful as the years of inactivity.

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?