Sep 22 2008
Advocating for ourselves
Regarding the idea of archivists and advocacy, there are two main ideas rolling around in my head at the moment– and I’d like to share them here. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s meant to provoke thought and other ideas.
The first thought is related to my post about the Issues and Advocacy roundtable at SAA, and to today’s post over at Archives Next. A friend posted this on Twitter ages ago, and I’ve been meaning to talk about it since then. The NYT article is titled “Girl Power at School, but not at the Office,” and I think that it mentions some of the same issues presented at I&A; namely the problems associated with not advocating for oneself, and being marginalized in the workplace, and to an extent, in the larger world. The Issues and Advocacy roundtable is attempting to address issues that were raised in the meeting, relating to this topic statement:
Our goal is to explore issues related to the financial and professional issues archivists and related information professionals face in trying to earn acceptable compensation, access to health care insurance, professional advancement and financial challenges while staying in the archival profession.
If you’re interested in this at all, check out the wiki, and think about volunteering to be part of a session proposal for next year’s SAA meeting.
The other main (related) issue that’s been jumping out at me is advocacy for the defining and professionalizing of the archives profession. I doubt that I was the only one out there who was reading (or listening to) Mark Greene’s plenary address and saying “Yes! We need to think about this!” I think that Mark was right on the money in many areas, and I think that he did a great job of putting words to some latent frustrations in the field. I think that the recent push for SAA accreditation is borne from some of that frustration, and I intend to discuss my thoughts on that some other time. (For background look here, here, here, and here, and if you’re still behind, look through past posts on the A&A list).
Some of my thoughts: we do need to do a better job, as a group, of defining what an archivist is, not just what an archivist does in order to move past “functionary” status. We need to actively work to gain power and agency for ourselves and our profession in order to professionalize the work that we do and elevate the status from optional to critical.
I think Mark hits it exactly right when he says,” When we seek resources, we cannot continue to behave as if we “deserve” resources and recognition because we are meritorious; that is we do good work.” This ties directly to the above article– why are we so quiet when it comes to advocating for ourselves and our collections? Do we really believe that we’ll get paid what we’re worth if we don’t speak up?
In fact, I think if we don’t speak up, we’re probably getting exactly what we deserve.
ETA: Mark Greene’s address can be found here (pdf)
2 Responses to “Advocating for ourselves”
How do you suppose we could do what Mark wants us to do? Will accreditation of our professional graduate education schools do? How about promoting everyone becoming a certified archivist? Is there something else?
It occurs to me that wanting to be professionals does not mean we are professionals, does it? We have to act like professionals and there are so many of us who either don’t care and do their job to make money. Others want to make something happen and put the egg before the chicken. We have to establish just what it means to be a professional archivist and why that is important before we can establish an identity. Doctors have to have an MD and pass a gruesome test and do a residency and be licenses. Perhaps licensing of archivists? Lawyers have to have a JD or LL.D and pass a bar exam and they are subject to disbarment if they violate laws or ethics. Perhaps we need to have one set of ethics for our profession supported by SAA, CoSA, and NAGARA and have some sort of national body set up to “disbar” archivists?
These are just some ideas that come to mind. We need to work on this, but we have to find the right page in the book for us all to be on before we can begin.
[...] started as a response to Russell’s post on my previous musings, but I thought I’d share it here instead because it was getting a bit [...]