Change Is Okay Sometimes

For the last two weeks I've been gung ho about returning to Ireland within the next month. Then the Iceland volcano erupted and I thought that put the kibosh on the trip. It still might, but right now (as of this day and this hour) things are looking up. However, when the reality of the effect of the volcanic ash set in, I got really frustrated and sad and not exactly in a blogging mood. Today's my birthday, though, and I intend to keep my chin up for the entire day, no matter what, and finally put words to my thoughts about, well, the Eleventh Doctor.

What does Ireland or volcanic ash have to do with Doctor Who? Well, there is The Fires of Pompeii episode, but I'm not trying to connect anything here anyway. The point is that Matt Smith appeared as the newly regenerated Doctor this past Saturday and it is way past time to reflect upon it.

David Tennant was my first Doctor, so I am relatively new to the series. In fact, since the series started in 1963, I am really new here. At any rate, I loved everything about him. His humor, his physicality, his emotion – it was the whole package that made up this skinny Scottish bloke that appealed to me. I swore my first Doctor was the best Doctor, and I hated that he was leaving the show after three seasons (although it felt more like four with all of the specials). Like other Who fans before who had their favorite Doctor, I was not anticipating the regeneration that opens the door for a new actor to pick up the role. I was going to miss David Tennant sorely, and today when I found this YouTube musical montage about the Tenth Doctor, it soothed me.

So, how did the Eleventh Doctor fare? Well, color me surprised, because Matt Smith was great. My initial reaction was that he might be too energetic and too frantic for me to keep up with week to week. I mean, he was just all over the place at first, and in the beginning when he was tasting dozens of different foods to find out what his "new" taste buds craved (you see, it's the same Doctor with the same memories, intelligence, etc., but a new body and personality), was kind of annoying. He was too crazy and off the wall. However, when little Amelia Pond told him about the crack in her wall and the voices she heard, and he got his investigative hat on, I started to see him pull on the Doctor mantle I know and love. At the end, on the rooftop, when he confronted the aliens and told them that he defends the Earth, he became the Doctor for me. He is not David Tennant, by any means, but Matt Smith will keep me watching. Even if it will take some getting used to the TARDIS overhaul.

Photo by Ben Sutherland. License: Creative Commons Attribute

And that's my indulgent Doctor Who moment for the day.

Now back to that job hunt.

Indulgence

Me, today. There are no words.




Except maybe, "Sigh."

SSC: Steady State of Confusion

I get confused easily. In a world of acronyms, I guess I should expect that. Take DROID, for example. I've seen the commercials for the new phone by Motorola, not that I immediately ran out and bought one. I'm a Tracfone user, so take from that what you will. I know that it is a Smartphone, it has thousands of applications called ANDROID, and it has Google search. I don't know much more than that, even if the Verizon website has a lot more to say about it. But, for a while there, I thought that it also had a connection to archives.

You see, The National Archives of the United Kingdom has developed a software called Digital Repository Object Identifier or – wait for it – DROID. All for the sake of digital preservation, DROID identifies file formats to be utilized in another software program designed by The National Archives called PRONOM, which is a public file format registry. If I understood this all better, I'd explain it better, but I don't. I usually need to see software and other various technologies in action before it starts to make a lick of sense. However, if you find yourself desperate to know more, check out this post from the Practical E-Records blog. The author tried out the software and posted some helpful screenshots to make the experience more visual.

DROID and PRONOM (PRONOM PUID if you're nasty) are simply two examples of multitudinous software developed over the last several years to make archivists' lives either better and easier or all the more confusing. There are content management systems like PastPerfect, Archivist's Toolkit, and Archon. There are EAD (that encoding standard I mentioned briefly in a previous post) authoring tools. There are acronyms galore. I'd love to get my mind around all of it, but it just doesn't seem possible. I envisioned a series of posts profiling tasks or items that I taught myself to do or use, and I might succeed yet, but looking at what DROID does and the other software that surrounds it and feeling totally at sea, I wonder if it's all more than my brain drive capacity can handle. But my eyes have always been bigger than my stomach. Take, for example, a plan I hatched years ago to go through my local library's online catalog and start reading about every subject on there. Every single one. Talk about information overload. Sometimes I think I'd rather be confused.

Showing My Face

I went to my second archival conference in as many months yesterday. The Society of Ohio Archivists Annual Spring Meeting was held for one day at the OCLC in Dublin. The OCLC is the Online Computer Library Center and has been a big name in the library field for a long time. To go to OCLC was exciting enough, even if they were only hosting the event.

Anyway, not being a member of SOA and not yet an archivist (in the employed sense of the term), I felt a little like I may have been crashing the party, but there was absolutely no basis for it. As I walked past small groups of people, all very professional-looking and greeting each other as colleagues, I tried not to be uptight. Luckily, I didn't have the chance to because at the registration table my supervisor from my practicum the previous summer hopped right up and gave me a hug. I was immediately put at ease, although it did take some time for me to be confident enough to introduce myself to others. When the name tags were available, I still felt I had to offer additional explanation that I was a recent graduate, because unlike everyone else (most everyone else; there was a very frustrated woman who earned her MLS last year and has had no luck), I didn't have my employer's name under mine.

The meeting really felt like an opportunity for colleagues to reunite and catch up, and discuss the current issues in the profession. Maybe that is what all conferences really are. This certainly wasn't a networking event. There were no recruiters, no hopefuls with their resumes in hand. It seems that the Society of American Archivists do have recruiters at their big, national annual conference, but that's big-time, both in the number of people there and the cost to attend. At any rate, I made it clear to those I met that I was in the market for a job, but other than knowing my name, they knew nothing more by which to contact or recommend me.

The information was great. I learned a little more about NHPRC grants, electronic record-keeping, and content management systems (something I would love to have for my dad's office--an agency management system--but the cost can be prohibitive for small businesses). It was all much more interesting than the continuing education courses I occasionally take for insurance. Isn't that why I'm switching careers? Archival issues are issues I want to face and hopefully help to find solutions.

Who knows? Maybe this time next year I will be presenting at one of these meetings.

I'm very optimistic. "Ain't nobody gonna break my stride..."

Facilitating Discovery

As a late-adopter, I tend to run into a very annoying problem. Whenever I get comfortable with a piece of technology, something else comes onto the market to replace it. For example, pagers gave way to cell phones, and then cell phones morphed into has-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink phones. Even laptops seem to be less popular due to netbooks (because after all, who needs anything else but the Internet?) While it's unlikely that these things will disappear forever, obsolescence happens. That's why there are computer museums that have dusty old technology on which to extract information from those ancient 3.5 floppy disks.


A recent thread on the SAA listserv (when I say recent, I mean a week or two ago--I'm really not all that up to the minute here) questioned the obsolescence of finding aids. Just reading the title of the thread made me sad. Although finding aids can come in HTML or searchable web formats (called Encoded Archival Description, a web encoding standard), as collections become available online, they become searchable within databases that seem, on the surface, to make finding aids superfluous. At least, that is how I understand the argument against finding aids. However, there is greater support for them and I was heartened by all of the strong reasons for how they still play a vital role in archives presented by other professionals on the listserv.


Why would the loss of finding aids make me sad? What is a finding aid? Well, like its name suggests, the finding aid is a document that aids the researcher in finding the material he or she needs. Or, to be more official, according the Society of American Archivists glossary, a finding aid is “a tool that facilitates discovery of information within a collection of records, or a description of records that gives the repository physical and intellectual control over the materials and that assists users to gain access to and understand the materials.” It can come in many formats, such as indexes, inventories, and calendars. I often compare it with a catalog entry in a library, but it is so much more.


A great thing about a finding aid is that it provides context to a collection of materials, so that it’s more than just a box or boxes of papers and objects with no sense of where they originated and how they were used. My favorite form of finding aid is a document that provides everything from how the collection was acquired, the biographical history of the creator, and notes on arrangement to a sometimes detailed description of what is in each box and even in each folder. I say sometimes because the extent of a finding aid will really be determined by the extent of the arrangement of the collection. The more detailed the arrangement (i.e. arranged item by item versus arranged by groups of items), the more detailed the description. The arrangement and description aspect of processing is really where creativity and archival theory meet, and the finding aid is the result.


The creation of finding aids is one of the tasks to which I look forward when I get my first archival job. I’ve written a few, some for fun and some to be used in an archives. The most recent one I created was of the fun variety for a collection of family photos I scanned for my siblings. I determined that the best way to describe the photos was just as an inventory of the files. I could have created folders for each time period, or specific sibling, but the inventory was more expedient. The language of the biographical history and such is meant to be light and not necessarily reflective of a more professional example, but the format is very similar (although different institutions will likely each have its own template).


While I look at finding aids in terms of writing one, of processing a collection, of doing the research to give that collection context and background, the most important thing about them is what it does for the researcher. It's a guide to the complex cultural and social history of the human race. It's very cool.

Sunday Best

Happy Easter!

Rejection

I am fully aware that I'm spoiled. For the last seven years, I've worked in my family's insurance agency. I was hired in with no resume, no interviews, nothing but my pretty face and some smarts. Prior to that, I had two jobs that only asked for an application and an informal interview. Between those two jobs, there was a month of unemployment and anxiety as I searched the ads and prepped application materials, and there were a few rejections that came my way, but after all this time, I don't remember how I felt about them.

When I started this current journey, I wondered how I would handle the inevitable run of "Thanks, but no thanks." I tend to be sensitive and take things personally, so I was sure there would be a lot of tears shed and a consistent state of the blues. So far, however, I've been okay.

Last night, scrolling through my email, I saw a message with the subject line referring to an application I recently submitted. I hesitated, daring not to hope, and looked at all my other messages before returning to that one. The message opened with, "We regret to inform you…" That's never a good way to start a conversation, however one-sided. I had gotten the point with those few words and didn't need to read the rest, but I just had to feed my neurosis. While the institution didn't say it outright, I could read between the lines: They could tell by my cover letter and curriculum vitae that my heart wasn't in it.

This was an academic library position which, in truth, is secondary to my desire to work in archives. Yet I was drawn to the academic environment, the work with electronic resources, and the opportunity to get experience. Still, my concentration is archives, my references are archival professionals, and my affiliation is with the Society of American Archivists; I think it's pretty clear where the wind blows with me. So, upon the initial read-through of the email, I shrugged it off with nary a care.

Then I started to think about it while doing the dishes. I hate to fail at anything. I wouldn't consider myself an overachiever, but when I do something, I intend to do it well. To be kicked out of the running after the first screening of candidates is more than a little disappointing. When the rejection comes from an organization for a position that I have a stronger pull towards, that disappointment has the potential to morph me into a sniveling basket case.

I know it's just part of the process, and this is only the first inning (oh my God, I just used a sports analogy and I am so not a sports person), so I better keep my chin up, even if it's trembling a little.