Dreamtime Village, West Lima, WisconsinDay 7: 27 June 2008Waking up has become not difficult but labored this morning, after so many days of so little sleep, and others are feeling tired, too. This has been an exhausting week. Yet we move through the days well enough.
Mentoring and TeamingThe morning opened with Christine Weideman talking to us about mentoring, and we spent some time defining what a mentor is and the skills of a mentor. This was followed by a talk about team building, led by Fynnette Eaton.
The most interesting part of the morning was the small mentoring session we held. We were presented with seven students of the library school, each of whom had described their interests and their needs, and we divided ourselves (quite evenly) among those. Rosemary Pleva Flynn, Sammie Morris, Fynnette Eaton, and I talked to a young woman who was interested in electronic records and records management. We asked her questions about what she was doing and gave her plenty of advice and direction. Most of all, though, we made sure she retained the passion she had for this line of work. I slipped into my speech about how we need to work on electronic records even if we end up failing, because the challenge of electronic records is providing us with a chance to be great. I even came up with a new saying: “Dealing with electronic records is not smooth sailing, but like sailing over rocks.” During my discussion of records management, I used another one of my sayings, which Rosemary and Fynnette asked me to post here: “Records management is only tangentially about the management of people; it is primarily concerned with the management of people.” For my collection of such sayings, check
here.
Can a Professional Association Diversify a Profession?Most of our class waiting the whole week to find out what the diversity case study was going to be. In our handouts for the institute, there was simply a question (provided as the heading to this section) without the normal apparatus of a case study. Those of us not on Team 5 had little or not information on this case study, and there was acute curiosity about the reason for this lack of information. So when we faced Team 5 after lunch, the case study we found was expectedly unexpected.
With much grace, Tom opened the session by noting that this topic might make people a bit uncomfortable, and he asked everyone to be respectful. He then noted the question that faced his team (“Can a professional association diversify a profession?”) before noting, dramatically, that his team decided the answer was, “NO.” He noted that the question we had to answer was, “What can a professional association do to diversity a profession?” He gave a history of their work on this case study, which included discussions with Karen Jefferson, Nancy Beaumont, and Peter Gottlieb. He noted that discussing the issue of race can be difficult as he showed us a picture of an elephant and noted that race is the “elephant in the room.”
Taronda Spencer followed with a history of the slow progress of the Society of American Archivists’ diversity efforts. Neil Dahlstrom continued this story, noting that SAA had made diversity one of its three priorities in its 2006/2007 strategic plan. He explained the outcomes envisioned by this plan (which are available on SAA’s website) and SAA President Elizabeth Adkin’s speech on diversity, which outlined strategies to highlight and stress the issue. He noted that reports on the issue of diversity were due to SAA Council today (June 27th).
Amy Cooper Cary spoke to us next, opening with “Let’s take the elephant out of the room, but it still stalks among us. She said that her team focused on diversity in terms of race and ethnicity, and she noted that it can be difficult to have a true cross-cultural dialog. She explained that her team had decided to use the term “minorities” to discuss those people not represented by the white anglo majority.
Sammie Morries opened up with a long list of opportunities we had to address diversity. She ended with the idea of developing a toolkit that archivists could use to encourage diverse candidates to join the profession. I noted that it would be better to teach people how to use this toolkit to support their efforts, since human contact is what we will need to make a diversity initiative work and since people will learn better from flesh-and-blood humans who are talking to them.
Gina Vergara-Buatista then pushed us farther into the conversation, asking us about diversity initiatives in regional archival associations. After a strange pause from the audience, I answered the question in terms of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference, and we were off. There were many ideas handed out, and I was a frequent contributor to this conversation (having somehow lived a life that gave me plenty of ideas on this topic). We discussed hiring practices, cultivating minority archivists, looking for personal opportunities to make a change, and encouraging interest in the profession via impassioned training on the subject of archives.
Neil closed the session by saying that the team hoped to heighten our awareness and keep us engaged. He noted, “We’re all facilitators, and we’re all advocates.”
This session was the big session of the day, and maybe of the entire institute. The team did a great job presenting the material and facilitating the discussion, and we were aglow with a sense of some accomplishment by the end of it all.
Archives Leadership Institute Team 5: Neil Dahlstrom, Tom Hyry, Amy Cooper Cary, Taronda Spencer, Sammie Morris, and Gina Vergara-Bautista, Madison, Wisconsin (27 Jun 2008)Professional AssociationsNancy Beaumont, the executive director of SAA (and a weeklong observer of the institute) gave a presentation and guided a discussion on professional associations for archivists. She noted that only a small percentage of people (10 to 20%) volunteer to work in professional and other associations, and we even discussed the most common Myers-Briggs results for archivists. We spent much of our time, however, talking about specific issues related to SAA and about the issue of responding to archivists who volunteered for roles in their professional associations.
The Tom Hyry Chronicles
Tom Hyry Holding Water (27 Jun 2008)The seventh day of our institute marked the last time I took a picture of Tom Hyry holding up a beverage in salute to all of us. It’s hard not to appreciate someone who can participate in such a funny activity so many times in one week.
NighttimeWe ended our day together. All of us—including Nancy Beaumont, Lucy Barber (of the NHPRC), and Lydia Reid (the project evaluator for the Institute)—went out to dinner at Gino’s. I couldn’t stay at my table at all, but had to move from table to table to talk to everyone and to ask them to help me come up with the third word. Here was my issue: I decided to try to design a T-shirt for the institute, since the T-shirt we received was simply a generic archives T-shirt some of us already owned. I decided that it would make sense to add to the back of the T-shirt, as some kind of motto, a few words of significance to this institute:
intertwingularity (a word I introduced everyone to) and
nimbility (a group neologism designed to fit with
intertwingularity, but I had no third word. People came up with many many possibilities
(
community
cohortivity [community translated into a word to go with intertwingularity]
bone folder [a joke about one of our classmate’s ignorance of this term]
fetchers and keepers [the two kinds of archivists in one repository we were told about]
Madibility [Madison (Wisc.) + ability]
passionist [feeding off mine and others’ frequent calls for passion as a moving force]
mingularity [mingling + intertwingularity]
passionista [working off of passionist
jumpsuit [a joke about the power of identical jumpsuits to bring teams of people together]
passionivity [and attempt to turn passionist into an –ity word]
teamability
possibility
fetchability
keepability
consensibility [consensus + ability]
)
but none seemed quite right. The most votes went to
passionista (11), followed by five for
cohortivity, and one to three for five other words.
At some point, I decided that we needed to leave the restaurant (primarily because I was antsy), so I encouraged us all out of the restaurant and onto the street. One better than half of us (14) walked to the capitol then took a bar crawl all the way down State Street and ending at Kollege Klub, which sits kitty-corner from our hotel. We visited eight bars in all, and I had at least half a glass of beer in each bar, quite an accomplishment for someone who never drinks beer. (I believe that I’ve drunk more beer at this institute than the rest of my life combined.) The beer had absolutely no effect on me, which I found interesting, and almost unnerving. But we had a great time. Each bar was radically different from the one before it. Moving to a new bar was like visiting a new planet. We generally had terrible lagers (like Pabst Blue Ribbon), but we talked constantly, we hit cut nails into a stump with a sledge hammer at one bar, we sat out on the Terrace, we texted joke messages to a big video screen at another bar, we lost Scott Goodine at the last bar, we failed miserably (time and time again) to coordinate beer purchases and ended up buying more beer than we really needed, and we had a great time. We came to this place as strangers and became friends, tied together by our experiences here and in our professional life beforehand.
Peter Gottlieb’s advice that we spend time together at bars paid dividends after all.
Thought for the DayRemember: If you don’t write the strategic plan and put it on the shelf, the shelf will be empty.
archivity furthers