lots of archival goodness this week

I found some more archival blogs, some of which posed some excellent questions about the discipline. Firstly, I wanted to recap with some more information from my last post about the National Archives and Library of Ireland. Turns out unlike here, they are putting the two institutions together to save money. What does that entirely mean?? Job losses? or it is merely fewer buildings? I am guessing this has been done by politicians who have little to no concept about what it is these two institutions are about. Something to keep an eye on...

I found this excellent blog called ArchivesNext where Katie asks some truly thought provoking questions about archives. I thought I'd have missed all her insights as she claimed to be heading off on a vacation from blogging, but then came back with a brilliant posting about archives as a luxury. Read it here. And she is entirely right. It come up over and over in my classes that we are fighting for the same funds as the police or fire brigades or community centres. In light of the definite economic slowdown (read recession), how do you convince people that you are just as important as safety?

I thought this was an important point:

"Are libraries a luxury? Maybe, but far less of one than archives. Public libraries make a good case for why they are an essential part of their communities. Can archives do the same? Why should the ever-shrinking pool of available government (or private) funds be granted to your archives so that you can process your backlog or digitize your collection? What’s the public good? What’s the benefit to anyone other than historians?"

These are all important questions that we will have to answer in order to defend what we do. And I am not sure I have any good answers. As Katie points out, we need to know our importance in communities so we can fight smartly for funding. We need to prove that archives might be a luxury in tight times, but we have a purpose and use.

I am a little spooked about trying to find a job after graduation next year, what with the probable recession that will hit, so we will all need to work harder to prove our worth when times are tight.

sometimes you gotta chase the story down

I have been anxiously awaiting exciting archival news, and none has appeared (at least via my passive methods of collection. I love bloglines). So I went a-huntin' tonight to see what I could find. I tripped onto this interesting post from the University of London's Computer Centre's Digital Archives blog (or ULCC DA blog). Anyway, one of their staff posted about the move to unite the National Library and National Archives in Ireland (see post here) and how completely awful this could be as the Archives will lose its independence.

I found this to be an interesting position as the National Library and Archives here have been put together to make Library and Archives Canada. Now I haven't any idea if there was even minimal uproar over this a few years ago, but after working there over the summer, I don't think the move was a bad one. And I also don't think I met anyone who disagreed with putting the two together either; they were more upset with the move to the middle of nowhere, Gatineau.

So is putting one's national library and archives together a bad decision? We had one woman from Switzerland and another from Tasmania who both came to see how the amalgamation worked. In smaller countries, this may be a viable option as it puts two similar institutions together and might increase budgets and resources (this might be optimistic...). This would never work in the US or Britain as either institution there is LARGE and I would not want to know how large a building would be needed for a combined library and archivesin either place.

I could understand the poster's dismay if the Archives in Ireland was getting absorbed and the archivists were being laid off, leaving librarians in charge. But I was surprised at the overwhelming negative reaction to this.....I'd love to know why the Irish Government is doing it.

Now they have me seeing red....

So I spent a good deal of my summer learning all there was to know about the Canadian DCMA and was thrilled to pieces when the bill was stopped due to the election. Then what do I spot at boingboing??

"The Conservative Party has released its platform and it devotes a half-page to copyright that leaves little doubt that it plans to bring back Bill C-61 and continue to support ACTA. According to the platform:

A re-elected Conservative Government led by Stephen Harper will reintroduce federal copyright legislation that strikes the appropriate balance among the rights of musicians, artists, programmers and other creators and brings Canada's intellectual property protection in line with that of other industrialized countries, but also protects consumers who want to access copyright works for their personal use. We will also introduce tougher laws on counterfeiting and piracy and give our customs and law enforcement services the resources to enforce them. This will protect consumers from phoney and sometimes dangerous products that are passed off as reliable brand-name goods."

(See Cory Doctorow's full post here)

In a sound, not a word: faugh. This bill was done without consultation and harms rather than helps the parties involved. Time to gird ourselves for the copyfight AGAIN.

For background information as well as updates on this (possibly) unfolding mess, check out Michael Geist's blog at www.michaelgeist.ca

Google in the archives

The lethargy got me (although there wasn't a heck of a lot in blogland....although I didn't quite check) so I haven't posted in a spell....

One story that caught my eye today was this little number from The Industry Standard which asks what if Google's mission extended to public records?? An excellent question, and as we know, public perception of what has been digitized and what actually has been transferred are quite different. Ian Lamont here speaks about genealogy and how little there is available to help internet savvy searchers find more about their families. This simple seemign question brings to my mind a whole series of questions like what woudl Google's interests be in this? Would they then own the public records of what they scanned, like censuses (censusi?) or ship records? And would this indeed help the public sector as the documents would be scanned and thus would increased access for this insitutions' users? And again, with digitizing all these records, what becomes of the archivist? A good set of questions that I can see coming back in a few years.