t the request of The Chronicle of Higher Education, with which I’ve had a great publishing experience up until now, I wrote what was supposed to be an affectionate and humorous piece about types of archivists one might run into.
It has upset enough archivists that I can see it is offensive to many of them, and as far as I am concerned, it would be good if The Chronicle were to retract the piece. It is most certainly not worth harming people – especially archivists, who work hard for little recognition – as apparently it is doing.
I’ve worked in a lot of archives and libraries over the years, including the Lilly Library at Indiana University (where I got my Ph.D.), the Kinsey collection at IU, the Wangensteen Historical Library at the University of Minnesota, Special Collections at Michigan State University, the Galter Library’s rare books collection at Northwestern University’s medical school, University of North Carolina’s archives on the Bunker family, the Mutter Museum and the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society, the Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris), and, more recently, the Library of Congress, to name a few.
So when Jennifer Ruark, an editor at The Chronicle, wrote to ask me to do a piece on archivists, I thought it would be a great opportunity to both express my appreciation of the work of archivists and also tell some now-funny stories without naming names.
Until this, I had nothing but good experiences with The Chronicle as a writer. You can read my previous writing for them here (on the value of academe), here (sex), and here (dark webs).
Here’s what Jennifer asked me to do for my fourth piece for The Chronicle:
“A few of us here are putting together a guide to productive research, which will include archival and new content. We mean it to be chatty, useful, and entertaining, and we’d like to include a short piece (maybe 1,000 – 1,200 words) on the different personalities you might encounter in the archives, and advice on how to deal with them most effectively. When working on your books did you encounter different ‘types’ – e.g., the archivist who appears to resent your presence, and seems always to present another obstacle to giving you what you’re looking for? The archivist who’s so enthusiastic that he/she keeps pointing you in tangential directions that interfere with your focus? How did you manage them?”
A few things to note here. One is that I was asked to write about types. I didn’t originate this idea, but there’s a mistake I walked right into. Any time we type a profession, including our own, we are liable to be accused of unfair stereotyping, as I have justifiably been.
Another thing to note is that I was given to believe this piece would basically be a foreword to a dedicated collection specifically about doing productive research, not presented as a stand-alone online piece that looks like I set out to warn about archivists who can be challenging. I was genuinely shocked when the piece came out on Monday in The Chronicle online, because I thought it was only going to appear in a guidebook, which would provide some very important context.
Third, I did not see – and certainly did not approve – the art that came with the piece. It’s got a clearly mocking tone (“Blah, blah blah” – really?), which in turn makes the piece clearly mocking. I would have nixed the art had it been shown to me.
Finally, the headline was not mine, nor was it checked with me. “The Delicate Art of Dealing with Your Archivist” makes it sound like archivists are a bunch of basket-cases.
As I said, the Chronicle can retract the piece as far as I’m concerned, and I’m not normally one to support retraction. As an historian, I don’t like disappearing records. But I wrote in May – in The Chronicle, no less – “Pissing people off is something to be done accidentally, as a side effect, when you’re trying to fix a significant problem.”
There was no problem here to be fixed, and so there is no reason for this piece to remain out there, pissing people off. While I meant no harm in the piece – it really was written with affection and appreciation – I now wish I had never written this piece, and I certainly wish it had never been published as it was.
As I said in the piece, most archivists are great people to work with, and, as I also said, they should be acknowledged, thanked, and made to feel as valuable as they are to those of us lucky enough to work with them.