Aboutness: Alex Champion's Week 5

Dr. Salvatore doesn't like to lecture sitting down

Too often in our society, perhaps our civilization, we remove the meaning from the action. Looking at our contemporary politics I see many examples of this profound separation. I trust that Barack Obama, an idealist pragmatist, knows the true difference between “outsourcing” to a third party company to handle human resources or physical plant matters, and “off shoring,” which sends the job over-seas. I also trust that Mitt Romney recognizes the similarities between his health care plan as a centrist Republican in liberal Massachusetts and Obama’s plan as a centrist Democrat in a conservative country. The substance of this intellectual debate for the highest, most important office in the United States is not policy but rather who, in the undecided masses, will sway their way in 2012. That is the “aboutness” of their campaigns.

This week at The HistoryMakers I thought about this topic extensively. All information regardless of setting has “aboutness.” In our weekly archives lecture with Cecelia Salvatore we talk of aboutness in some detail. The HistoryMakers collection is unique from a descriptive metadata perspective and our circumstances here--as recently graduated archivists or librarians--is even more-so. Every interview is treated as an archival collection with its own finding aid (and various administrative accoutrements) yet the entire HistoryMakers collection, which includes interview related paper materials, scans of said paper, tapes, high density magnetic tapes, and server data in various formats will be part of one collection when it is donated to the host repository.

“How do you think The HistoryMakers would fill out this form?” Cecelia asked when she handed out the Hathi Trust submission sheet. In as many words the form asked to describe the collection as a whole rather than by the interview. Every week Dr. Salvatore asks us to consider the aboutness of the collections of interviews we are describing. During the appraisal lecture we were asked to consider how our processing work was similar to MPLP; this week it was digital preservation and we told her how (as far as we knew) THM digitally preserved their collections. Beyond formats and off-site server back-ups, THM follows a digital curatorial model that adheres to strict identifiers and naming conventions for all files. So sophisticated is this methodology that THM server may extract and manipulate particular information types for all collection; this also makes selection and appraisal much easier and reliable when the collection(s) is donated to the host repository.

It feels strange that Microsoft Word, the application I am composing this blog on, accepts “curatorial” but not “curation" as valid. Similarly I see the pale, squiggly red line beneath “aboutness”; even in the information management world of libraries and archives the terminology escapes a 2007 vocabulary. I have had similar troubles with my own words, albeit figuratively. I acknowledge that I am not an archival scholar; I will never be a Schellenberg, Gracy, Greene, or Duranti (to name a few) who will profoundly affect the intellectual development of the profession; I am open to that outcomes because, as my HistoryMakers interviews tell me, even persons like Valerie Jarrett were unsure about their abilities and desires well into their 30s. In Jarrett’s case that happened in the 1980s so factoring for inflation I have—realistically—my early 40s.

One annoyance to my fragile ego is that many of my peers are already doing well. It is a habit of the intelligent to constantly second guess their own abilities and downplay accomplishments but coupling these feelings with an un-mercenary attitude is a recipe for mediocrity.  The 2011 and 2012 Gerry Ham scholarship winners both come from the UW-Madison library school but the program is hardly to thank for their success. Both men are in their 30s and hold masters degrees from other disciplines; they know what is expected from them as burgeoning professionals and they play the game well. The 2011 winner was cited for writing an essay on the appraisal of queer archives; although I am sure he put quite a bit of thought and effort into his evaluation, he played into a professional sweet spot; homosexuals are the new Negroes. One of our classmates even thought he was gay. The 2012 winner wrote about post-modernism; while I agree with Zinn and Derrida that that all archivists have biases and may simply reinforce the status quo, this mode of thinking reeks of the purely academic “angels on the head of a pin” nonsense that does not go anywhere or ask questions that have not already been asked. Both the 2011 and the 2012 winners are playing to the expectations of their professional betters. They know the aboutness of archives.

I had a similar reaction to Simmons College student Meghan Bailey’s article in the May/June 2012 Archival Outlook entitled “Documenting a Movement.” Ms. Bailey composed a well written article about her experiences as one of the half-dozen burgeoning information professionals involved in the anti-inequality “Occupy” movement that provided an alternative to the anti-tax, so-called “tea-party” movement. I personally participated in similar protests during the Wisconsin collective bargaining battle of 2010 and 2011 and I found her take on the occupy movement from the microcosm of library world intriguing. However I did not come away with a flattering aboutness. 

Her comrades brought order to the chaos of a lefty author library, they created spreadsheets on Google docs, and devised an emergency evacuation plan that—surprise surprise—came in handy when the city followed through on its warning to evict them. All these actions are well and good but they do not strike me as archival. Although it is difficult to know what Ms. Bailey did on her own or as part of a team, the substance of the article seems to be that she created a reference binder of legal documents and printed hard copy backups of electronic records. The archiving that Occupy Boston seemed to undergo sounds awfully similar to work of IT persons or reference librarians; make documents accessible in the likely but rare event someone will need to consult them.

At the close she admits the group, or at least the self appointed inner circle that looks after the records, is mulling over donating their binders and files to a trusted repository because they would lose ownership of its meaning and open it to misrepresentation. Following an easy jab at Fox News’ poor track record with using incorrect or grossly inappropriate juxtaposed B-Roll, she bemoaned that two repositories took it upon themselves to save protest signage; these repositories' behaviors were unacceptable, very un-Documentation Strategy, yet the Occupy Boston collection languishes with persons who feel the self-importance that only dedicated protesters who camp out during the winter. This archival dysfunction reminds me of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment psychological test where, violating scientific common sense, the professor brought himself into the experiment.

For most of my life I’ve periodically read about Dr. Philip Zimbardo. Each time he was honorably portrayed as a kind, conscientious man who was corrupted by the very influences he was trying to understand; I eventually came to disagree with this perspective. The moment Dr. Zimbardo assumed the role as warden he was not conducting an experiment, he was of the experiment.  So too was Ms. Meghan Bailey’s experiences at “Occupy Boston”; regardless of the appraisal of their binders and files their aboutness is too precious to simply give away. Just like President Obama and Governor Romney understand the difference between substantive debate and scoring political points, Ms. Bailey knows the substance of archives--it's aboutness--separate from her experiences' component parts. Just like Obama and Romney she is advocating for herself.

Perhaps there is an advantage to playing their game. Stay tuned.