Despair

Today I did not rise. The bed was too soft and the air too heavy and stale for me to resist. So I succumbed to exhaustion and stayed in bed.

Today I should have found and applied to five jobs – it was Sunday and I’ve been having more good feedback recently in my quest to become a real adult – a real person – recently. The sun went in one of my windows and out the other and the day lapsed; yet still I did not rise. I loafed.

There was a stash of chocolates in my bag – remnants from a birthday party – and I consumed it rather than move.

I did nothing.

I lay curled in bed, occasionally hitting play on another youtube video. That was only occasionally.

Accompanying me all day, crouched on my chest like some creature from Fuseli, was Despair.

Most days, I don’t feel him. Most days I fill my life with laughter – with friends – with music – with life. Today, however, I could not pull him from my skin. Instead, I pulled the blankets around me, hoping to shut him out, but he only burrowed deeper.

Today it was not enough to reiterate that I am qualified to be a librarian or an archivist, it was not enough to tell myself that I am experienced, that I have the skills, that I can do the work if given the opportunity. Because on days when Despair visits, I cannot hear my own words. I cannot hear my own voice.

What I hear is my failures: my rejections, my passups, my phone silent, my hopes tinkling into pieces.

You have a useless degree.

I don’t have a useless degree. I can organize an office, a record keeping system, an online database, a closet full of supplies, a spreadsheet of data. I can pull off an effective, accurate Google search in under 30 seconds, know which database to use, evaluate sources, critically analyze prose and layouts. I can help you get what you want – what you need – even if no one’s ever heard of it before, even if my department doesn’t support it. I will not leave you without an answer.

But today, with despair looming over me, breathing the musty smell of his stale breath at my neck, all I can hear is his voice: You will never be important to anyone.

That is the hardest idea to fight, even though it is the most ludicrous. I have friends, I have family, I have the friends I’ve taken in as family. I have co-workers and fairy-god sisters. I have fake brothers and old roommates. I have new roommates. I am not alone, I am not without love. I joke, I smile, I sing to them, fold them star shaped boxes on their birthdays, and tell them they are beautiful. But today, the only one with my was Despair.

Today is just one day. The sun has set and will rise again tomorrow. With it, I will have another chance at changing my state – at rising from that bed and seeking my chances. It seems almost impossible, right now, that someday I will have what I want: a job. I will matter to people in ways I will never understand.

I hauled myself out of bed and to the bathroom at around 8pm. I soaked beneath the spay of hot water and soaped away Despair’s dank words. It took scrubbing. Despair cakes his words thick on my skin. It was a better part of an hour before I raw and clean.

When I went back to my room, he had left. All that remained were crumpled sheets and bits of chocolate.

Unlikely Job Skills Series: I Know Why the AV Geek is a Smug Bastard

I am currently, like many archivists freshly graduated, in a gap year. This isn’t anything unique or revolutionary. Sadly, this is the norm. I am endeavoring to survive: I apply to jobs, I read articles, I bind books, and I go to my part-time job.

I work at a college’s Technology Support Desk.

Technology Support and Archives are two fields that don’t sound like they often overlap, I admit that. However, much like swath of Lannisters all sitting around one table, appearances can be deceiving. Sure most archives do not have to deal with fixing broken classroom projectors, setting up multiple wired microphones to a mixer, or tearing apart a Mac mini because a homemade DVD has become irrevocably stuck in there.

However, there is the little thing of customer service, patience, and metadata input. Numerous times I have been deployed to a classroom to fix non-functioning equipment to find a livid professor and the need to defuse not only the room, but the professor as well. My patience has been expanded as I deal with certain “handle with care” customers. There is something to be said for walking a customers slowly through how to open and save a word file. Not to mention the copious metadata I had to implement to an internal knowledge base system.

But the skill I prize above all is best illustrated with the following tale:

The Chicago River

ArchiValerie and I attended the SAA Annual Conference in Chicago, Illinois. It was my first time in Chicago – in fact, it was my first time in a Western time zone. I gazed out of the cab window with giddy anticipation, much like I did the entire plane ride. The city was gorgeous.

The hotel was gorgeous, right on the Chicago river by those buildings on the cover of that Wilco album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It was literally the swankiest place I’d ever stayed. The elevator was completely glass. All the swank.

Once we were actually in the hotel room, we discovered an accidental view of the river, a king sized bed, and a 64″ television.

A 64″ television.

64″.

It was like gazing at David Bowie, but as a TV.

(Though, without the Labyrinth codpiece.)

Once we turned on the cable, though, it was clear that the cable was very much not in high definition. It was grainy, like bad mac and cheese. Such a disappointment for such a swanky place.

Soon after we finished being in awe of the hotel room, ArchiValerie’s good friend showed up, as our guide to “his” city. Imagine if you will that guy. You know, the guy who sort of looks like David Tennant (but shorter), who’s in three bands, who works as a bartender, and has always been hanging around being Joe Cool for as long as you or anyone else can remember.

That’s him. That’s Noodles.

ArchiValerie has the coolest friends.

He arrived at our hotel room with a bottle of very fine scotch and the best idea:

Sharktopus.

General conversation had lead us through general pleasantries, college stories, English literature, and straight into pop culture. More specifically: really, really bad SyFy channel made for TV movies.

“I really wish it was on tonight,  man I’d watch the hell out of that,” Noodles said.

“Well,” I said, “I bet they have it on Netflix, and ArchiValerie and I both brought our laptops.”

“But the screen is so tiny,” he objected.

“Dude, if only we’d thought to bring cables from work,” ArchiValerie said, “we could hook them up to that TV.”

And that’s when the second best idea happened. The second best idea in the realm of ideas. The second best idea of the whole trip.

“We can just go to a Best Buy or something and get some.”

There was a 15-pin female VGA port on the side of the beautiful, fabulous David Bowie of a television. Likewise there was one on my tiny little netbook. All we needed was:

“Hi, I need a 15 pin male to male VGA cable with audio, please,” I told the clerk at the Radioshack.

The clerk looked at me as if he’d never seen a frilly looking girl, in a polka dot dress, ever ask him for extremely specific media equipment before. It was sort of a gaping look – like a fish.

But no matter what I looked like, what I knew how to do was plain and simple: I knew how to jerry-rig a computer to a television. I knew exactly what cables were needed. I knew how to switch inputs and to alter the image ratio on the computer.

In short: I knew how to take the limited sources I had and make something awesome with it.

Back in the hotel, we couldn’t get Sharktopus on Netflix Watch-It-Now; but we could get Megashark v. Crocosaurus.

I love being an AV Nerd.

How an Archives is Like Hogwarts, or An Introduction

You might not know this, but the Archives Profession is Hogwarts. Yes, you heard me correctly, Hogwarts. I see that this might take so elaboration, so let me begin.

Christ Church hall and stair, used in the filming of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Hogwarts is known for having a vast amount of hidden door ways and stairs. To put it precisely:

There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide,sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led  somewhere different on Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn’t open unless you asked politely, or tickled them exactly in the right place, and doors that weren’t really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending (Sorcerer’s Stone, p. 131-2). 

When entering an archives for the first time, many a patron can feel very much like Harry in his first year: overwhelmed.

But just like Harry, there is a always a map to find your way. Granted, in an archive, a finding aid does not move and flow and show little dots as to where each person is residing, but then again, most of a collection is rather stationary. Though, I do not deny that several times in my searches I have discovered some wandering papers – through either ill luck or determined purpose. Whenever anything is determined, is it rather hard to stop it. When asking for a Marauder’s Map, however, there is nothing yet that I have seen which comes closer – especially when that finding aid is digitized and hyperlinks have been embedded.

One cannot deny that, very much like Hogwarts, an archive is filled with very interesting characters. There are the faithful Hufflepuffs, working tirelessly to bring users their needed information. Brave Gryffindors delve into the backlogs, endevoring endlessly to sort through, weed, and archive records and papers. Clever Ravenclaws assess our progress and our projects, creating better and/or newer systems with which to do our calling. Ambitious Slytherins look at our archives, see what power it holds, and pushes us to do more – to reach out to a community, to digitize more, to apply for grants. In short to be all that we can.

In my archives classes at Simmons College Graduate School of Library Science there were huge herds of Hufflepuffs, great gaggles of Gryffindors, robust rookeries of Ravenclaws, and shifty swarms of Slytherins. We each brought a needed alternate perspective to the needs of an archive. Processing, outreach, reference, preservation, access, digitization, management: all of these things are needed – but to find a perfect balance in one person is a very rare occurrence. Whether or not you are a Potterhead, you cannot deny the great Houses of Hogwarts are engrained within us.

One might liken an archive’s reading room to the library at Hogwarts – with restricted sections, an overwhelming amount of information, and an angry Madame Pince who hounds over records and enforces a strict code of silence. But a library is not an archive, though they often share the same space. When approaching the reading room, I like to think of it more as the Room of Requirement, rather than the Hogwarts library.

The first encounter with the Room of Requirement is a pointed jest of Dumbledore’s:

“Oh I Would never dream of assuming I Know all Hogwarts’ secrets, Igor,” said Dumbledore amicably. “Only this morning, for instance, I Took a wrong turning on the way to the bathroom and found myself in a beautifully proportioned room I have never seen before, containing a really rather magnificent collection of chamber pots” (Goblet of Fire, p. 417).

Oftentimes a patron’s first interaction with an archive is by accident. They are lead further and further into their studies and searches – whether historical, geneological, or contextual – and suddenly there is all of this knowledge at their fingertips. What they need, however, is still not precisely known. That’s where the reference interview is at hand. Just like walking up and down the corridor three times, thinking about what is needed, the reference archivist will narrow down the needs of a patron. An archive can supply you with your need, you just need to know what it is you need.

Perhaps it’s a tunnel to the kitchens or a reference to another archive, but the Reading Room is a Room of Requirement.

If you are still not convinced that the Archive Profession is Hogwarts, perhaps I could explain just a little more. These parallels, no matter how small and silly, would not have been realized if I had not gone to SAA 2011 in Chicago, IL.

The closing plenary session was much like the goodbye feast at Hogwarts, even if the room was a large, windowless conference space in a basement, rather than an exquisite dining hall in a remarkable castle. It was entitled Road to the Future: Collaboration and Cooperation. The room could sit at least 500 people, but it was scarcely populated; only smatterings of archivists sitting throughout the hall. The east coast was currently under threat of Hurricane Irene and all who could were flocking back to their collections and the wind and the rain; rather than being trapped in Chicago for an uncertain term of days.

My companion, ArchiValerie (much the George to my Fred), and I sat toward the front, still reeling with the fluttering excitement of our first SAA (though slightly muted due to the late nights and early mornings we attempted to maintain). We watched as the incoming SAA President, Gregor Trinkaus-Randall, took the podium and looked out over his few, brave holdouts for Chicago. He looked at all of us and told us that we needed to stick together. He told us that an archive does not stand by itself, rather it holds itself up with the strength of its friends and companions. He told us that, above all, we could learn from one another.

What struck me most about his speech, was that I had heard it before: from the wise mouth of Albus Dumbledore:

“… in the light of Lord Voldemort’s return, we are only as strong as we are united, as weak as we are divided. Lord Voldemort’s gift for spreading sidcord and enmity is very great. We can fight it only by showing an equally strong bond of friendship and trust. Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts open.

“It is my belief — and never have I hoped that I am mistaken — that we are all facing dark and difficult times. SOme of you in this Hall have already suffered directly at the hands of Lord Voldemort. Many of your families have been torn asunder. A week ago, a student was taken from our midst.

“Remember Cedric. Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy. remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Digory” (Goblet of Fire, p. 723-4).

While the Archives Profession might not be facing a literal Lord Voldemort, we are facing an economic downturn, a growing flux of graduating professionals who are experiencing a “gap year” of up to three years, and budgets and time slashed at every corner. We face a world with a changing face of records creation with no solid procedure of archiving digital materials. We face a world in which our profession is continual not understood or explained. We face questions to our relevance and the relevance to the documents under our protection.

Standing those challenges all together, it does seem like Lord Voldemort’s snakelike face is cackling at us; but we must face it. Communication and collaboration are what Dumbledore advocated and is likewise what Gregor Trinkaus-Randall advocates. Is it simple? No. Is it easy? No. Is it what we have to do to maintain the life of our profession? Yes.

The Archives Profession is indeed like Hogwarts: ever striving to help, educate, and save all we can. Ever striving to keep alive the memories of those who have passed before us. Ever striving to remember our own Cedric Digorys.

Hogwarts, Hogwarts, Hoggy Warty Hogwarts,

Teach us something please,

Whether we be old and bald

or young with scabby knees,

Our heads could do with fillng

With some interesting stuff,

FOr now they’re bare and full of air,

Dead flies and bits of fluff,

So teach us things worth knowing,

Bring back what we’ve forgot,

Just do your best, we’ll do the rest,

And learn until our brains all rot.”

Sorcerer’s Stone, p. 128

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For those of us experiencing a gap year (or two or three), please look into a new roundtable for New Archivists. We should stand together and make our voices heard.

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Works Cited:

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Scholastic. New York: 1997.

Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Scholastic. New York: 2000.