Student Archivists at Maryland

Dear sir, I wish to register a complaint. I was promised Big Bird in the session on digital preservation of A/V materials, and yet, with one exception, the large yellow avian was nowhere to be found. I think I should get my money back. Please send the registration fee to the registrant address found on my form. Yours Sincerely, Me

Actually, the session was pretty good, though my least favorite of the three I attended and thus the one about which I have the least to say. Tom Connors gave an interesting presentation about the collection archives side of this, and in particular on the methodology he used in the Public Broadcasting Archives to appraise materials for preservation. He was (rightly I think) skeptical of the claim by Brewster Kahle that inpreservation of every piece of human information is a) possible and b) preferable. (Among other things, such preservation would involve saving this blog, which I don’t really think anyone wants that much.) I was also intrigued by the criteria which Connors used to determine the worth of preserving an item.

Lisa Carter’s presentation was mainly an advocacy piece—it documented the current sad state of archiving in TV stations, examined the challenges inherent in doing archival work specifically for such an organization, and gave some suggestions to archivists as to how they could undertake this process and (more importantly) how to convince station management that the process is necessary. Really, it annoys me that in this day and age it’s still necessary to go through that second step—as she pointed out, all of the tapes, etc. are going to have to be archived anyway, and until they are they’re just taking up office space—why NOT let an archivist get to the stuff ahead of time, thus saving them and you time in the long run? This, I think, is possibly the most frustrating part of being an archivist—people seem almost willfully ignorant of good recordkeeping processes, even when you tell them how to do it repeatedly, which ends in more work for both you and them when it comes time to put those records in an archives. (This may be me being bitter after working in Federal Records Management for 2 ½ months.)

Unfortunately my notes are not very good on Leah Weisse’s presentation—maybe someone else who was there can fill us in?

The “Secrecy vs. Access” session was interesting, if perhaps predictable. It won’t surprise anyone, of course, to hear that the GW Bush administration is the most secretive administration since the height of the Cold War; what DID cause me to look at it in a different way was Tom Connors’ noting of the fact that while more secrets are created now than ever before, simultaneously more documents are available to the public than ever before, thanks to the internet and electronic copies of documents. In addition, noted Ira Chinoy, this trend towards secrecy is not a new thing with the Bush Administration; Clinton also took a number of steps towards limiting access to information, and even LBJ, who originally signed the Freedom of Information Act, only did so reluctantly. However, for the most part the panel was critical specifically of the Bush administration’s overabundance of secrecy. Tom Blanton, for example, talked up the absurdity of the flap over the NYT disclosure of the wiretapping program: “There ARE real secrets”, Blanton noted, “but the Deputy Attorney General’s thoughts on the legality of wiretapping should not be so.”

Another interesting point brought up by the panel was the idea that the overabundance of security may not actually make us safer. As an example, Blanton cited the refusal of Homeland Security to disclose port information on the grounds that terrorists might then target the weaker ones; in fact, the real reason the information was not disclosed was because NONE of the ports had adequate security. My personal favorite example used by Blanton was actually literary (sort of): he used the example of the climax of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix to show how keeping secrets could have fatal consequences. This being an, ahem, well-read crowd, this example was well-received.

I should note that this seems to have been one of the more popular sessions in the 3rd slot—the audience was standing-room only, and in fact a few people were turned away. This comforts me somewhat, though it is not really surprising—one would expect that archivists would be in favor of as much open access as possible. Otherwise, what are you doing in the profession? (Unfortunately, this is not as much of a rhetorical question as it sounds, based on what I read in the literature, though it is getting better, I think.) I did have a conversation with a gentleman on the way out regarding the lack of an alternative perspective on the issue of secrecy, which I admit confused me at first—what do you argue from the other side? As he pointed out, there is a need for secrecy sometimes, which neither I nor the presenters would argue with. Rather, I think that the ‘secrecy’ line is drawn too broadly and not always for good reasons, which in turn dilutes the value of classification altogether. Certainly, though, the line is hard to find on certain documents.

Other things—Student Forum and Student Mixer

Very briefly—the Student Forum was held at lunch on Thursday and was, I think, very productive—we broke up into focus groups and came up with a number of things SAA was doing right for students and things on which they could improve. Among the suggestions (from memory, as I didn’t take good notes, alas) were a week of “Archivists without Borders”, where institutions gave students off a week to do archives-building projects in places like New Orleans and the like, and the institution of a student calendar on the SAA websites to let student chapters know what their obligations are and when they are due. Again, other contributions to this are welcome.

Wednesday Night was the SAA student mixer, and Thursday Night the Maryland Alum mixer, both of which were organized by SAM and/or SAM alumni and both of which were big successes. Many thanks to Sara and Megan Smith for their work ironing out the details of the former, and to Rob Jensen for booking the space and organizing the latter.

Whew. Day one is done, and it only took 2 days to write up! (Oy.) Stay tuned for the rest of the thing.