What Do Out-Of-Work Archivists Do?

This post comes from a general frustration I feel because I'm hearing more and more about archivists who are losing their jobs due to downsizing from our bad economy. I just heard about two more today and that scares me.

As I myself apply for jobs, I realize that there are so few jobs and so many archivists out of work and looking. This latter group includes students who just finished their graduate program in anticipation of a bright future at a job they would immediately get.

Several years ago, when I decided to become an archivist, I heard and read that the profession was changing and would continue to change because there were going to be scores and scores of archivists retiring before 2005, meaning there would be a need in our profession for new blood. The number was then revised to 2007, then 2009, and now it looks like the smart archivists will keep their jobs as long as they are able.

So what are out-of-work archivists to do? Volunteering in an archives is hard when you have to find a job to put food on the table and pay rent, utilities, etc.

So I'm asking all of you out there, is anything needed to help out-of-work archivists? Should there be a website or clearinghouse of some sort to help archivists stay current and get involved so they can put SOMETHING on their resumes for the time they were out of work?

PhD Programs in Archival Studies???

I am preparing some thoughts in hopes of expressing some of them at the upcoming open forum on accreditation of graduate archival programs in the U.S. at the upcoming SAA Annual Meeting in Austin. I have run into something I can’t quite get my finger around and I’d like some help, if possible.

I was looking today at PhD programs that an archivist might want to matriculate into. But of the iSchools and library schools I found had PhD programs, none of them seemed suited for an archivist or someone who wanted to teach archives at a graduate level. Of course, I admit to not knowing all such programs, so I may have missed a few.

What I saw were great programs that offered a lot of information science or library science in a very quantitative research methodology, which may or may not be something an archivist wanting to become an archival educator might want. Of course, I realize that all our wonderful archival educators in the U.S. have some type of degree like the one I just described and put their education to positive and productive use teaching archives students.

But is there a program that exists that is 1) a PhD program that 2) caters specifically to archives students and 3) allows them to not have to take general library science or general information science courses? One of the things I have discovered looking at the master’s level curricula in most library and information schools that offer archival studies programs is that the programs require archives students to take a lot of library and information science courses (reference, information science, systems science, history of libraries, cataloging) that include skills that will help archivists, but which also contain portions of the courses that might not benefit archivists as well as similar courses taught with an archives-bent. This makes it hard for an archives graduate program to offer enough archives courses to satisfy the seven areas of archival study delineated by the Academy of Certified Archivists. In my library school, we had to take thirteen three-credit courses, of which (for a normal student) only five or six could be archives courses, the rest being library science and information science courses.

In other words, since a PhD is so specialized, is there a program out there that offers PhD education for an archivist with courses directly (not indirectly) related to an archives “track” or “concentration” or “focus” or “emphasis”? Are there any such programs in library schools or through history departments that might allow a PhD candidate to write a dissertation on an archival history topic or other non-quantitative subjects? Do all or most PhD programs that an archivist might enter require rigorous quantitative research or is qualitative research acceptable in some?

Archives and Wikis

Last night, as I was finishing episode 7 of Series 3 (season 3, to those of us in the U.S.) of Robin Hood, the great BBC show, I looked up the list of British monarchs on Wikipedia and that got me to thinking about wikis and their use in archives.

For nearly two and a half years now, I have been administering the "History of Archives, Recordkeeping, and Records Wiki" (link to the right of main blog page) and the number of persons adding to it has greatly dropped off this past year. Was it a fad?

I love wikis and I use them in the history classroom as a knowledge base to help students in their preparation for the final examination. It has proven very effective there and I am writing an article about it because I feel wikis could be great teaching tools in the college level classroom. But are they useful at all for archives and manuscript repositories?

I remember early on in the days of wikis that everyone jumped on the bandwagon, like they did with Flickr and Twitter, among many others. Wikis were put up for every conceivable thing, some of them even rivalling Wikipedia (for a while). But lately I have not seen any wikis come out of archives. Do archives still use them?

I am narrow minded when using wikis - I see them as means of presenting the history of a place or event or person. I also see them as great tools for group work - the SAA Records Management Roundtable has used wikis in six of its groups over the past two years and I am using one for the book I am editing. They are tools for sharing information.

So I ask a number of questions I have no answer to. How many archives currently have a wiki that is regularly updated? Does the wiki only pertain to histories or are they used for other purposes, like internal knowledge bases like some Fortune 500 companies use? Do wikis have any purpose in our profession besides fun little asides like the one I administer? Are wikis a Web 2.0 technology/tool that will go the way of the dodo because they are no longer useful?