tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17336214808475726382024-03-13T13:58:59.484-07:00Attila the ArchivistArlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.comBlogger56125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-86384751534139589162018-08-31T12:48:00.001-07:002018-08-31T14:40:07.623-07:00Something about those who don't learn from history...Some years ago, ten-plus, our local public library reorganized staff. The full time Alaskana expert was no longer really a fulltime local expert position. And a few years later, he retired. And his position wasn't replaced. There had been others who had it as a portion of their job, but nobody really full-time. Hours for that section of the library, which was physically segregated from the rest of the library, were cut substantially.<br />
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I'm tempted to say "Crickets" but the truth is I wasn't really paying serious attention myself--enough troubles of my own at the time with budgets and staffing--and I don't know how much really was said about it, how much public outcry happened. Maybe there was some and it just didn't go anywhere. Whatever the outcry was, it didn't change the outcome.<br />
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A few years later, our professional archivist heading up our local National Archives branch retired. Along with a few of the other long-time workers. Some of those positions were sort of refilled, but not entirely.<br />
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Again, I'm tempted to say "Crickets" but the truth is I wasn't really paying
serious attention myself--enough troubles of my own at the time with budgets
and staffing--and I don't know how much really was said about it, how
much public outcry happened. Maybe there was some and it just didn't go
anywhere.<br />
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I know the use levels at the NARA branch had been dropping for some time, I don't know what the use of the collection/space at the public library had looked like but I'd gotten the impression that maybe it had dropped some too? I don't know, that's purely speculation.<br />
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Flash forward a bit to about 4 years ago. The National Archives is facing budget shortfalls, looks around at the least used vs most expensive facilities vs existing staffing, decision made, our branch gets closed and most of the stuff gets shipped about 1200 miles away (some very few collections were removed from federal custody and placed with public institutions in state but the details of that are quite nuanced and long and not worth delving into at this point).<br />
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Not crickets. Massive public outcry. Fair enough. I'll admit, it kind of went through my head that maybe we should have been yelling about this a tidge bit earlier, like at the time of the no replacement for the retiree level, but we didn't. Game over, NARA is gone. FYI: it's still having massive funding issues on the federal level, too. The cuts continue.<br />
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Flash forward to recently. City library has a flood in their local collections space, the circulating materials that survived the flood are moved to other parts of the library, it speeds up a master plan to move the collection to a not-so-segregated space closer to other library collections, word gets out. Massive outcry. There's something special about that space! We need the expertise of the Alaskana specialists! I'm not mocking this attitude, I happen to agree, about the expertise at least. And I'm wondering why we didn't fight it when we had a fighting chance to fix it, back when the last expert left 10 years ago and wasn't replaced. Or even before that, as the staff of seven full-time subject experts dwindled. Or the facilities types were allowed to defer the maintenance on the space because of budget cuts and things that were regarded as higher priorities. We all know the longer a position goes unfilled, the less likely it is to ever be filled again. And the longer a facility goes without upgrades or maintenance, the more expensive it gets to overhaul it, especially if it's a space that's going to need some specific environmental conditions aimed at long-term preservation of materials.<br />
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Here's some other things some of you have maybe noticed but haven't really understood to be a possible forecast for the future of locally focused collections (archives collections, library collections, museum collections and by the way no, none of those are interchangeable terms) here and elsewhere in state. Ready for it?<br />
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The library for the local universities? Hasn't had a full-time Alaskana librarian for over 15 years. Currently the work is being shared among several librarians with the retiree still putting in a fair amount of time of her own on a volunteer basis but certainly it's not the same level of effort as had been happening when this was a full-time position. Several other library positions have fallen vacant and have been cut. Not to mention that the parking lots and parking garages at the university are expected to be self-funded (no tuition dollars, no state appropriations) so the cost of parking is steadily increasing proving an obstacle to access. And yes, we pay for parking too, it's not just the community members and students suffering from this.<br />
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Our State Archivist position went unfilled for well over a year. We have one now, thankfully, and it appears their staffing is finally full up over there not that they couldn't use more, but I didn't hear much, if any, public outcry over that position while it was vacant. <br />
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Our State Library and State Museum has a bunch of unfilled positions, many of them working with their Alaskana and historical materials. Who's yelling? Who is pushing the Legislature to get them the funding they need to fill those positions? <br />
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The archives of the state's flagship university library has two people (including one retiree convinced to come out of retirement temporarily) doing the work with textual and photographic archives that used to be done by several people not five years ago, not to mention many other vacant and now gone positions elsewhere in the library, including the head of that department that encompasses the special collections at that university. Those vacant jobs aren't being advertised so it's probably a fair assumption that they won't be, either. Because of a flood that damaged the space (thankfully not the collections) well over a year ago, they've been operating by appointment only and their website will tell you that it's due to continue til next February because apparently the renovation keeps getting delayed and delayed and delayed and the delays aren't coming from within the library. The 600 pound gorilla of archives in the state is accessible to researchers by appointment only. <b>By Appointment Only</b>. Does anybody else have an issue with this? <br />
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Our local museum's library and archives just had a librarian leave. The remaining staff can't/won't talk about what might be happening with that position, but I'm wondering what the Museum's administration would say about their plans to replace that individual. Know what I think? I think the job line will be repurposed elsewhere in the Museum and there's not a darn thing the others in that department can do about it. Will somebody please ask the Museum's administration about this? And then publicize the answer?<br />
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And these are some of the most visible, purportedly well-funded orgs in the state. This doesn't even include the many cultural, tribal, historical libraries, archives, and museums all over Alaska that have been struggling for a very long time and continue to struggle because they don't get the financial and other support they need to do what they do. Occasionally they're able to hire or train staff for the work that needs to be done but then because of other shortages, those specialists end up working the reception desk or providing security for one of the exhibits because there's nobody else there to do it. These institutions are doing incredible work in the face of huge challenges, but it's not til they've closed that anybody seems to notice and then it's often far too late.<br />
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And I'm betting all of the rest of these institutions in the state that don't appear to be in crisis are one employee retirement/departure from going into free fall. It's that bad out there, folks. And it's a state-wide problem. <br />
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Are you asking why we, the people who work at these institutions aren't saying anything? Asking for help earlier?<br />
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Often we can't. It can be dangerous for us to try and drum up public support for a program in crisis: if the outcry is sourced back to one of the employees, and the administration is embarrassed by it, do you really think most of these employees are going to chance their jobs? But it's not even fear of retribution, really. Honestly. When your program is in that level of crisis that you're doing all you can do just to keep the doors open and the email and phone answered and point people to the stuff they need/want to use and put as much online as possible because people think if it's not online it might as well not exist, but yet nobody is giving you the insane amount of money that putting stuff online costs so you have to skip other required work to do it, you honestly have no additional time to go out and try and get attention. You're way too busy trying to get the work done. Or possibly job searching so you don't have to go unemployed if the worst happens and your repository closes. And besides, who is going to pay attention to you anyhow? Administration? The legislature? The workers in these institutions can't advocate at the level that really needs to be done because almost everybody who hears that assumes we're just trying to protect our jobs. Those in public institutions are probably actively forbidden from budget advocacy. If our users, our researchers, our public don't defend us, if they don't feel we're necessary enough to defend, our resource allocators certainly aren't going to defend our budgets. And while librarians, archivists, and curators tend to be a pretty generous bunch when it comes to sharing our time and expertise in support of colleagues who need our assistance, most of us aren't working for institutions that support us spending time on other institutions that aren't us.<br />
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Are you seeing an institution in crisis? Want to protect your local library/archives/museum from going down this path?<br />
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Increase your visits. Increase your use of stuff. Make sure you attribute it correctly. Encourage others to use it. One of the common threads in some of those above examples? Was decreasing use and the lack of the staff's ability to prove that these collections were being used. And lack of public recognition from users. That cool photo up on the <a href="http://vilda.alaska.edu/" target="_blank">Alaska's Digital Archives</a>? Probably took about a half hour minimum of some worker's time to put up (multiply that by the 90,000+ items up on the Digital Archives) and that doesn't even include the $30-65,000 a year it has taken over the past 15 years just to maintain that website. Make an effort, please, to learn about the largely invisible labor that it takes to make this stuff available and what that labor realistically costs. Share that information. And when you download that image and use it in whatever, cite it properly. And contact the institution who put it up and let them know what you're up to with it so they can prove that this is an effective use of their time when they do have a chance to have these conversations with their resource allocators.<br />
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Thank the people who are doing this work. Thank them publicly. Write their administrators and your legislators and explain why what they do is important. If you have some money, even $5, donate some money earmarked to their departments in thanks for the work they do and if you have to earmark it further, earmark it for things that are not currently being funded (like employee development travel or expensive specialized supplies) instead of operational aspects that should be funded by administration like staffing and collection materials. Ask your librarians/archivists/curators: they'll gladly tell you what things they need but will never get under their regular funding. It's amazing what you can buy with enough $5 donations.<br />
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Here's an Attila rant: skip the next paragraph if you don't want to hear the things we need you to stop doing:<br />
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Please stop telling us that if we'd just do exhibits, we'd get the attention we need. People have to be coming into the building to see exhibits. And if we don't have the funding to do our normal work, where in the heck are we going to get the funding to create a proper exhibit? Why are you under the impression that those don't cost money and time? Please stop telling us to just put everything online: take the time to learn why that may or may not be the answer and how much that actually costs. Hint: it's phenomenally more expensive than you think it is. Before you yell at us for a decision we've made, take a moment to talk to us about why we did that and be respectful of an answer that revolves around making the best of a bad situation while, especially in public institutions, trying to ensure we respect some basics about the functioning of public institutions like equal access. Remember that hosting events costs money and time and may cut into other services for us. Please stop telling us to seek out grant funding: grant funding is great for short term projects but we can't make it work for programs where the funding runs out but the work and the costs don't, like digitization. Plus have you noticed that a lot of granting agencies don't have as much funding anymore either? Please stop telling us our collections don't have what you need in local documentation: talk to us about what documentation exists and help us bring it in so you and others can benefit from it. Please don't say: just hand that stuff over to this other organization, they can do the work. Chances are they don't have the funding/support/staffing/mission to take it on either. <br />
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Please think about how to show the benefits of the things you've used from local information resources. Don't just rely on abstract concepts like "history is important!" Your average person who is worrying about the next meal, the next job shift, the next rent check, isn't going to view that as relevant to their lives. Think about how you can demonstrate how what you've found in a library, in an archives, in a museum has had a real, tangible effect on people recently, on people now. <br />
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Please remember that our ability to advocate for ourselves and for our professional colleagues may be limited and may not be heard. You will always be a louder voice for us than we ever can. Please: go talk to your librarians/archivists/curators. Listen to what they say and try and work for what they say they need; within the context of what you need, of course. Go press the funders--whether that be the city, the borough, the state, private organizations, or all of them. Donate what you can and not just for your own access: for the access of anybody else that could use those materials but who don't have your financial wherewithal.<br />
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Above all, speak up before the place you love, the resources you use, the resources you'll want to have access to in future, are having to reduce hours and access. That's a very hard slope to get away from. Once they're gone, they're unlikely to come back. In the meantime, we'll be doing what we can, as we always do, hoping that we'll be able to beat the trend.Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-60706448046539451092017-01-31T14:32:00.000-08:002017-01-31T15:10:30.059-08:00The Archival Quilt!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dyHbOBGh7Pg/WJEGXLvsK8I/AAAAAAAAAY8/ulrB53DcJ3IVQkT0qfXSbVnw9tfaiRvBwCLcB/s1600/IMG_2391.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dyHbOBGh7Pg/WJEGXLvsK8I/AAAAAAAAAY8/ulrB53DcJ3IVQkT0qfXSbVnw9tfaiRvBwCLcB/s320/IMG_2391.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
Okay, so here's the deal. I'm auctioning off this quilted throw as a fundraiser for the <a href="http://archivists.org/" target="_blank">Society of American Archivists</a>. SAA isn't sponsoring this in any way, this is just me as a member of the org. Proceeds will be given as unrestricted funds to the SAA Foundation. <br />
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Bid in the comments. Minimum bid is $100. Please, no bidding increments of less than $1.00. No anonymous bids (how will I know who won? Make sure your bid--or the first if you bid bunches--has something that will allow me to find you if you win.) Bidding will be closed on February 17, 2017 at midnight, AST. Highest bid at that point wins. I'll get in touch with the winner to confirm details. Winner will make the payment directly to the SAA Foundation and send me a copy of the receipt at which point I'll ship the quilt to the US, APO, or Canada address the winner designates.<br />
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The quilt is 62"x62", not bed size, but a good size for curling up on the couch. There's about $150 worth of fabric and supplies in it. I've put ~80 hours of work into it. The circle/squares are hand appliqued. The squares, borders, and binding are machine-sewn. It's hand-quilted. All by me. (I didn't weave the fabric as you might have guessed). The fabric and batting are 100% cotton. It's machine washable--use the gentle cycle and cold wash only with a gentle detergent--and can be tumble dried on cool. <br />
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And here's the story behind the quilt.<br />
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I learned to do the circle applique thing a few years back. I really don't like applique work, much less hand applique work, but for some reason I got into these circles. Especially after I discovered how portable the circle/squares were (meetings, airplanes, etc). And then last June I was in a local quilting store and tripped across the patterned fabric from the circles. And thought: archives-themed fabric? Perfect. And started in. Below are some of the stages in the construction. If you want to go through the whole story, I have an <a href="https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10153690133932817.1073741870.507237816&type=1&l=3a91bf963e" target="_blank">album of photographs on my Facebook page</a> you can wander through. <br />
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It's been worked on in Grand Rapids MI (Meijer Botanical Gardens), Chicago IL, Atlanta GA, Juneau AK, Anchorage AK (mostly), Seward AK, in airports, homes, work meetings, hotels, car dealerships, doctor's offices and on the occasional outdoor bench. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The original fabric</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cutting the squares</td></tr>
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Applique layers are glue-basted,</div>
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drawing the lines for applique</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-G_kFkoQiiCo/WJEOJVx8uWI/AAAAAAAAAZw/IZnFUug4engWkmqHJ4lxxXsro3W6XHpHACLcB/s1600/4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-G_kFkoQiiCo/WJEOJVx8uWI/AAAAAAAAAZw/IZnFUug4engWkmqHJ4lxxXsro3W6XHpHACLcB/s200/4.jpg" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Applique work</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ocr50pXJl3g/WJEOJqZqx5I/AAAAAAAAAZ0/2FbHEwa_p2EUf8RDN52pkp5QRGDE2SRWACLcB/s1600/5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ocr50pXJl3g/WJEOJqZqx5I/AAAAAAAAAZ0/2FbHEwa_p2EUf8RDN52pkp5QRGDE2SRWACLcB/s200/5.jpg" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
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Appliqueing at Meijer Gardens,</div>
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Grand Rapids MI while </div>
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waiting for my family to show up</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lRtNlfrggt0/WJEOJs5zOuI/AAAAAAAAAZ4/txVmRKCK7_Qv_9SEpMZT0Pdxuz2R6OsYgCLcB/s1600/6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lRtNlfrggt0/WJEOJs5zOuI/AAAAAAAAAZ4/txVmRKCK7_Qv_9SEpMZT0Pdxuz2R6OsYgCLcB/s200/6.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
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Appliqueing on the Seward waterfront</div>
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while waiting to go out on a wildlife</div>
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watching cruise</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HKR4R8X2fXY/WJEOJ-goJ9I/AAAAAAAAAaA/QX7Ym82AuR4cIQKb1jRlCqSIDDWt0k7FgCLcB/s1600/7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HKR4R8X2fXY/WJEOJ-goJ9I/AAAAAAAAAaA/QX7Ym82AuR4cIQKb1jRlCqSIDDWt0k7FgCLcB/s200/7.jpg" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
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Sewing the circle-squares</div>
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together for the quilt top</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The central top pieced</td></tr>
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Attaching a flange and the</div>
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border</div>
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Quilt top, backing, and binding strips</div>
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ready to go</div>
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Backing, batting, and top laid</div>
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out and basted, ready for</div>
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quilting</div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-W7haLznSIho/WJEOJAwt4LI/AAAAAAAAAZg/gksIAPeLdI8f6ufBQsDwklrgHV3FANlWgCLcB/s1600/12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-W7haLznSIho/WJEOJAwt4LI/AAAAAAAAAZg/gksIAPeLdI8f6ufBQsDwklrgHV3FANlWgCLcB/s200/12.jpg" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div>
Have needles, thread, scissors</div>
<div>
and thimble for the quilting</div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3BlH01u7O28/WJEOJANASDI/AAAAAAAAAZk/SeMHYzcspMYLjo8P34enUj2MTP7BE7wgQCLcB/s1600/13.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3BlH01u7O28/WJEOJANASDI/AAAAAAAAAZk/SeMHYzcspMYLjo8P34enUj2MTP7BE7wgQCLcB/s200/13.jpg" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div>
Quilting in progress, </div>
<div>
at a doctor's office waiting room</div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-we0hCkwGhSg/WJEOJORf1xI/AAAAAAAAAZo/fU40Tz96PzY4LYicm3sPXyD8YEiWVH5GQCLcB/s1600/14.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-we0hCkwGhSg/WJEOJORf1xI/AAAAAAAAAZo/fU40Tz96PzY4LYicm3sPXyD8YEiWVH5GQCLcB/s200/14.jpg" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">All done!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
<br />Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-10229020530309161472016-03-14T15:33:00.000-07:002016-03-14T18:41:22.705-07:00Do you have my stuff?If you've run across this posting by virtue of googling a serial number or something of this cool thing you just got, you may be in possession of stolen property. I'm hoping you'll be willing to talk to me about its possible return. I'll cover shipping and discuss a reward. See info at the bottom. <br />
<br />
In Seattle last week, my rental car got hit by a smash and grab right across from SeaTac at about 6:30 am when I was having breakfast at a local restaurant. The damage to the car was covered by insurance, but my backpack and its contents were not.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yc_Ie4JQ4hY/VuczW2oU6_I/AAAAAAAAAXY/4unJfEgkdnYYphqe7ra7zy5KK_00f71SA/s1600/12841365_10153500562237817_6661595124616047603_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yc_Ie4JQ4hY/VuczW2oU6_I/AAAAAAAAAXY/4unJfEgkdnYYphqe7ra7zy5KK_00f71SA/s320/12841365_10153500562237817_6661595124616047603_o.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
So basically that sucked. Because I had some fairly valuable stuff in that backpack and I'm out the full replacement price of all of it, and that doesn't even touch the stuff that isn't replaceable.<br />
<br />
First up was my fairly new (last November) Lonovo multi-touch tablet.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-L26T_5uEUAo/Vuc0W2AiXfI/AAAAAAAAAXg/nStOoFcPNLMHIX77PdQLgrXgKL1jaUkrA/s1600/lenovo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="121" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-L26T_5uEUAo/Vuc0W2AiXfI/AAAAAAAAAXg/nStOoFcPNLMHIX77PdQLgrXgKL1jaUkrA/s320/lenovo.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
(That photo is from the Lenovo website.) The serial number for the one that is gone is HA0FN63F. By the way, I hope you managed to find a charger on the aftermarket if you're planning to keep it. Lenovo takes about 3 months to ship them. Or if you want, I've got two and without the tablet, there's not much point in my having them so we can probably arrange some sort of a deal.<br />
<br />
Second up was my very old iPad2. Like 4 years old. The serial number on that was PD367LL/A. The back was engraved with Attila the Archivist. Okay, I was thinking of replacing that anyway since the battery life was getting pretty short, but I have to say, I'm really really really sad about losing the black leather Rebecca Minkoff cover. That cover is the reason the iPad is as old as it is. It saved the thing from multiple drops off furniture. I'd really like that back, as worn out as it is.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8pbdYBVEZ8w/Vuc2KCmbdvI/AAAAAAAAAXs/zU-I4CrS8hkyYBrg8q5bO67ceYITjR1vA/s1600/ipadcover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8pbdYBVEZ8w/Vuc2KCmbdvI/AAAAAAAAAXs/zU-I4CrS8hkyYBrg8q5bO67ceYITjR1vA/s320/ipadcover.jpg" width="302" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Here's the one that really hurt, financially. My two year Swarovski EL 8X32 binoculars, serial number F833848302 . Really, truly, I cannot afford to replace these.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/--NnZyJ7CNDc/Vuc3WW4iR4I/AAAAAAAAAX0/21Nq6gmqwVQ2lB3JiP10qzbEGzJkGIWIg/s1600/1800042_10152121965132817_475729370452843665_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/--NnZyJ7CNDc/Vuc3WW4iR4I/AAAAAAAAAX0/21Nq6gmqwVQ2lB3JiP10qzbEGzJkGIWIg/s320/1800042_10152121965132817_475729370452843665_o.jpg" width="239" /></a></div>
Next up, something else I can't replace. This ivory and carnelian stretch bracelet. It's one of a kind.<br />
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Pdf0dMqe7Ko/Vuc3v9i1DnI/AAAAAAAAAX4/lnrSJX0iN-kHbDCe3l24L3rTqwKaQ4LTg/s1600/12823461_10153500562242817_92791421024989597_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Pdf0dMqe7Ko/Vuc3v9i1DnI/AAAAAAAAAX4/lnrSJX0iN-kHbDCe3l24L3rTqwKaQ4LTg/s320/12823461_10153500562242817_92791421024989597_o.jpg" width="179" /></a></div>
I bought it from the artist at the Alaska Native Heritage Center's holiday bazaar. Here's some information you might not know: walrus ivory is legal to sell/own in the US IF you have a permit to sell it (the artist did) and IF when you buy it, it comes with a receipt documenting the sale (which I have.) Being in possession of this bracelet or the ivory from it is going to add a few levels to the possession of stolen goods charge that could be levied against you if you were to be caught with it. Please, instead of that, will you just contact me (or see below for alternatives) so I can get it back?<br />
<br />
I had a signed copy of the Sibley's Guide to Birds of Western North America too. Yeah, I know it's not worth much and it was pretty worn, but it was signed by the author and having to redo all my notes in it is going to be a pain. My name, email, and phone number are inside the front cover.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3G_-TTfGZfc/Vuc7o6kkp-I/AAAAAAAAAYQ/5qGfFHJLfXsrr368aaIUKn7Q2_bs2EpRQ/s1600/11111166_10152904118037817_69778174081085381_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3G_-TTfGZfc/Vuc7o6kkp-I/AAAAAAAAAYQ/5qGfFHJLfXsrr368aaIUKn7Q2_bs2EpRQ/s320/11111166_10152904118037817_69778174081085381_o.jpg" width="239" /></a></div>
Most everything else in the backpack was negligible though there's a few other things I'd like back. I had a crocheted shawl under way with about $50 worth of cream/peach cotton yarn and I'm bummed about losing that (I was almost done!). And the handpainted northern lights-themed silk scarf that I bought in Seward AK last year. Most of the clothing that was in there was aging, but if you'd like to donate that to a thrift store--along with the backpack itself--that's fine by me.<br />
<br />
By the way, if you're not comfortable with contacting me directly, I get that. If you'd prefer to return the stuff to the <a href="http://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/sheriff.aspx" target="_blank">King County Sheriff's Dept</a>, this is my case #: C16011798. They'll be happy to take it in. Or if you don't even want to get that close to an official source, will you please drop it off at a local library with a note referencing either the URL of this blog post or the King County Sheriff's Dept and the case #?<br />
<br />
If you're a library worker and you get this, please contact me or the King County Sheriff's Office? I'll be happy to arrange for pickup/transport/whatever is needed. (Also, I'll happily make a donation to your library.)<br />
<br />
And yes, next time I renew my auto coverage, I'm going to be looking a little more closely at the coverage in case of theft. Although I really have to hope this will never happen again. It was--is--pretty distressing. <br />
<br />
Thanks. --ABSArlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-23698105172173274002015-05-24T20:21:00.003-07:002015-05-24T20:49:21.009-07:00Birding on the edgesBirders are weird. Probably in a lot of ways, especially to non-birders, but what I discovered some time ago while hanging out with a lot of my birding friends is that most seem unwilling to self-identify as birders. It's like being a birder is a claim to some sort of level of expertise they haven't quite achieved yet.* They always have somebody else to point to who is better, just because that person has been to a location they've never been. Or whatever. It's just weird.<br />
<br />
I'm willing to admit I'm a birder. I'm not a very good one, but I will admit to it. I haven't yet gone on a vacation solely for the purpose of looking for birds, but it has in the past couple of years been in the top two reasons for some of the trips I've taken. I think at that point, you just have to claim the label and move on.<br />
<br />
I came late to birding, relatively. I'd moved to Alaska and gone on a few wildlife watching cruises. And something clicked one day in 2004 while I was listening to a tourist rhapsodizing over identifying a crow in Seward by a call. Seriously? A crow? She'd traveled thousands of miles and was excited about a crow? A <a href="http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/northwestern_crow/id" target="_blank">northwestern crow</a>, different from the <a href="http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/american_crow/id" target="_blank">American crow</a> more common in the contiguous US. And suddenly I realized I was seeing birds here that other people took once-in-a-lifetime expensive trips specifically to see. So I started tracking, sporadically, what I saw, or at least the more exotic ones. Then a few years after that around 2007-2008, I started filling in some blanks and by 2011, I was recording the list a little more assiduously. You can tell: that's the year I start writing in more of the "dickey birds" as one birder friend puts it when annoyed at her inability to identify them (LBJs: Little Brown Jobs is perhaps the more common phrase for those).<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3MEe0aAIQ2I/VWKWGyDrthI/AAAAAAAAAWg/6AHjEOsjN3o/s1600/DSCN1043.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3MEe0aAIQ2I/VWKWGyDrthI/AAAAAAAAAWg/6AHjEOsjN3o/s320/DSCN1043.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tree swallow at Potter Marsh (Anchorage, AK)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
It's also a weird list because it is dependent on the date I first documented having seen the bird. So while I've seen <a href="http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/whooping_crane/id" target="_blank">whooping cranes</a> some years ago, I don't have a date on that occasion so they aren't on my life list yet. I have a Northwestern crow in 2004, an American crow in 2011 (I grew up in Seattle. I saw American crows daily in my childhood). An <a href="http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Emperor_Goose/id" target="_blank">emperor goose</a> (check out that range!) predates an <a href="http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/american_goldfinch/id" target="_blank">American goldfinch</a>. I saw a <a href="http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/common_eider/id" target="_blank">common eider</a> a year before I saw a <a href="http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/wood_duck/id" target="_blank">wood duck</a>, that mainstay of the Midwest and east coast and which, I'd like to point out, I still haven't seen in mating plumage. The list displays a few errors of documentation such as when in 2015 I realized that though I'd seen a number of <a href="http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/great_horned_owl/id" target="_blank">great horned owls</a> over time including having been strafed and screamed at by one in the 1990s, I hadn't bothered to put down an exact date. Also it only includes the ones I can verify having seen with possible distinguishing marks, rather than just winging by at high speed or only hearing. (Add the <a href="http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/pacific_wren/id" target="_blank">Pacific wren</a> and <a href="http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Golden-crowned_Kinglet/id" target="_blank">golden-crowned kinglet</a> for the just-heard listing).<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dR8wUdbI_8A/VWKYlPUpF6I/AAAAAAAAAWs/lB95mCU1kgQ/s1600/P6140878.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dR8wUdbI_8A/VWKYlPUpF6I/AAAAAAAAAWs/lB95mCU1kgQ/s320/P6140878.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Northwestern crows. No, I can't really see the difference, either.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In conversations with birders friends elsewhere, I realized what a weird list it was, by virtue of having been started in Alaska. And I decided to list it out not by species but by year, to see how well it reflected the Alaska bias. And it did. It also reflects the bias of my traveling, like to a friend's wedding in Hawaii for a long weekend in 2011, and how much time I had on those trips to bird or not, depending on I was with and their tolerance for "hey, wait, I want to figure out what that is" and definitely dependent on whether the person I was with was a birder who could spot and identify and teach me what I was looking at. It reflects the bias of one of my regular birding companions who is apparently fascinated by shorebirds, which despite my every effort I rarely can identify without copious assistance. It's definitely heavy on the west coast, since that's where I've done the preponderance of my travel, but also reflects an occasional foray further away such as a trip to FL in 2011. I am grateful that when I go visit those elsewhere friends, that they find my "<a href="http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/western_kingbird/id" target="_blank">Western Kingbird</a>? How cool!" amusing and will stop the car so I can get a good look.<br />
<br />
The list so far. At 265, I have a long way to go to get to the 900+ birds that occur in North America and Hawaii. If I never get to the full count? I really am okay with that. I'm not obsessive about this. In the meantime, it's good for my memory and gets me outside a lot more than I'd probably otherwise do. Not such a bad reason to call myself a birder.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
2004<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ul>
<li>Pelagic cormorant</li>
<li>Bald eagle</li>
<li>Black oystercatcher</li>
<li>Tufted puffin</li>
<li>Northwestern crow</li>
<li>Common raven</li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
2005<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ul>
<li>Greater scaup</li>
<li>Ring-necked pheasant</li>
<li>California quail</li>
<li>Red-necked grebe</li>
<li>Red-faced cormorant</li>
<li>Killdeer</li>
<li>Arctic tern</li>
<li>Thick-billed murre</li>
<li>Kittlitz’s murrelet</li>
<li>Rhinoceros auklet</li>
<li>Horned puffin</li>
<li>Belted kingfisher</li>
<li>Blue jay</li>
<li>Steller’s jay</li>
<li>Black-billed magpie</li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
2006<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ul>
<li>Harlequin duck</li>
<li>Sandhill crane</li>
<li>Black-capped chickadee</li>
<li>Red-breasted nuthatch</li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
2007<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ul>
<li>Trumpeter swan</li>
<li>Mallard</li>
<li>Canvasback</li>
<li>Willow ptarmigan</li>
<li>Pigeon guillemot</li>
<li>Marbled murrelet</li>
<li>Grey jay</li>
<li>Bohemian waxwing</li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
2008<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ul>
<li>American wigeon</li>
<li>Northern shoveler</li>
<li>Brown pelican</li>
<li>Great blue heron</li>
<li>Hudsonian godwit</li>
<li>Mew gull</li>
<li>Western gull</li>
<li>Black-legged kittiwake</li>
<li>Common murre</li>
<li>Rock dove</li>
<li>Downy woodpecker</li>
<li>Violet-green swallow</li>
<li>Bank swallow</li>
<li>European starling</li>
<li>Yellow-rumped warbler</li>
<li>Dark-eyed junco</li>
<li>Common redpoll</li>
<li>House sparrow</li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
2009<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ul>
<li>Canada Goose</li>
<li>Barrow’s goldeneye</li>
<li>Common goldeneye</li>
<li>Common loon</li>
<li>Merlin</li>
<li>White-crowned sparrow</li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
2010<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ul>
<li>Gadwall</li>
<li>Green-winged teal</li>
<li>Ring-necked duck</li>
<li>Long-tailed duck</li>
<li>Northern harrier</li>
<li>Lesser yellowlegs</li>
<li>Greater yellowlegs</li>
<li>Short-billed dowitcher</li>
<li>Long-billed dowitcher</li>
<li>Great grey owl</li>
<li>Tree swallow</li>
<li>Snow bunting</li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
2011 <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ul>
<li>Muscovy duck</li>
<li>Northern pintail</li>
<li>American white pelican</li>
<li>Anhinga</li>
<li>Double-crested cormorant</li>
<li>Tri-colored heron</li>
<li>Snowy egret</li>
<li>Great egret</li>
<li>White ibis</li>
<li>Turkey vulture</li>
<li>Black vulture</li>
<li>Osprey</li>
<li>Peregrine falcon</li>
<li>Pacific golden-plover</li>
<li>Rednecked phalarope</li>
<li>Ring-billed gull</li>
<li>Spotted dove</li>
<li>Hairy woodpecker</li>
<li>Western scrub-jay</li>
<li>American crow</li>
<li>Chestnut-backed chickadee</li>
<li>Brown creeper</li>
<li>Northern mockingbird</li>
<li>Common myna</li>
<li>Summer tanager</li>
<li>Savannah sparrow</li>
<li>Lapland longspur</li>
<li>Northern cardinal</li>
<li>Pine grosbeak</li>
<li>Japanese white-eye</li>
<li>Zebra dove</li>
<li>Yellow-billed cardinal</li>
<li>Saffron finch</li>
<li>Yellow-fronted canary</li>
<li>Common waxbill</li>
<li>Java sparrow</li>
<li>Peafowl</li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
2012<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ul>
<li>Greater white-fronted goose</li>
<li>Snow goose</li>
<li>Eurasian wigeon</li>
<li>Cinnamon teal</li>
<li>Redhead</li>
<li>Lesser scaup</li>
<li>Black scoter</li>
<li>White-winged scoter</li>
<li>Surf scoter</li>
<li>Common merganser</li>
<li>Ruddy duck</li>
<li>Pacific loon</li>
<li>Pied-billed grebe</li>
<li>Horned grebe</li>
<li>Eared grebe</li>
<li>Western grebe</li>
<li>White-faced ibis</li>
<li>Red-tailed hawk</li>
<li>American coot</li>
<li>Black-bellied plover</li>
<li>American golden-plover</li>
<li>American avocet</li>
<li>Black-necked stilt</li>
<li>Willet</li>
<li>Whimbrel</li>
<li>Long-billed curlew</li>
<li>Semipalmated plover</li>
<li>Pectoral sandpiper</li>
<li>Franklin’s gull</li>
<li>Bonaparte’s gull</li>
<li>California gull</li>
<li>Herring gull</li>
<li>Glaucous gull</li>
<li>Ivory gull</li>
<li>Parakeet auklet</li>
<li>Mourning dove</li>
<li>Eurasian collared-dove</li>
<li>Barn owl</li>
<li>Snowy owl</li>
<li>Northern flicker</li>
<li>Horned lark</li>
<li>Cliff swallow</li>
<li>Boreal chickadee</li>
<li>Marsh wren</li>
<li>American dipper</li>
<li>Ruby-crowned kinglet</li>
<li>Townsend’s solitaire</li>
<li>Varied thrush</li>
<li>American robin</li>
<li>American pipit</li>
<li>Orange-crowned warbler</li>
<li>Grasshopper sparrow</li>
<li>Song sparrow</li>
<li>Western meadowlark</li>
<li>Yellow-headed blackbird</li>
<li>Red-winged blackbird</li>
<li>House finch</li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
2013<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ul>
<li>Brant</li>
<li>Common eider</li>
<li>Bufflehead</li>
<li>Redbreasted merganser</li>
<li>Hooded merganser</li>
<li>Wild turkey</li>
<li>Red-throated loon</li>
<li>Cattle egret</li>
<li>Golden eagle</li>
<li>Semipalmated plover</li>
<li>Solitary sandpiper</li>
<li>Spotted sandpiper</li>
<li>Dunlin</li>
<li>Least sandpiper</li>
<li>Wilson’s snipe</li>
<li>Common snipe</li>
<li>Red phalarope</li>
<li>Glaucous-winged gull</li>
<li>Parasitic jaeger</li>
<li>Long-tailed jaeger</li>
<li>Alder flycatcher</li>
<li>Barn swallow</li>
<li>Arctic warbler</li>
<li>Grey-cheeked thrush</li>
<li>Red-whiskered bulbul</li>
<li>Eastern yellow wagtail</li>
<li>Yellow warbler</li>
<li>Wilson’s warbler</li>
<li>Northern waterthrush</li>
<li>American tree sparrow</li>
<li>Fox sparrow</li>
<li>Lincoln’s sparrow</li>
<li>Golden-crowned sparrow</li>
<li>Lesser goldfinch</li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ul>
<li>Emperor goose</li>
<li>Mute swan</li>
<li>Wood duck</li>
<li>Arctic loon</li>
<li>Black-footed albatross</li>
<li>Sooty shearwater</li>
<li>Pink-footed shearwater</li>
<li>Black-vented shearwater</li>
<li>Fork-tailed storm petrel</li>
<li>Brandt’s cormorant</li>
<li>Black-crowned night heron</li>
<li>White-tailed kite</li>
<li>Rough-legged hawk</li>
<li>American kestrel</li>
<li>Marbled godwit</li>
<li>Black turnstone</li>
<li>Surfbird</li>
<li>Sanderling</li>
<li>Western sandpiper</li>
<li>Heermann’s gull</li>
<li>Elegant tern</li>
<li>Caspian tern</li>
<li>Aleutian tern</li>
<li>Pomarine jaeger</li>
<li>Cassin’s auklet</li>
<li>Short-eared owl</li>
<li>Black-chinned hummingbird</li>
<li>Anna’s hummingbird</li>
<li>Acorn woodpecker</li>
<li>Nuttall’s woodpecker</li>
<li>Black phoebe</li>
<li>Say’s phoebe</li>
<li>Northern shrike</li>
<li>Hutton’s vireo</li>
<li>Oak titmouse</li>
<li>Mountain chickadee</li>
<li>Bushtit</li>
<li>House wren</li>
<li>Bewick’s wren</li>
<li>Western bluebird</li>
<li>Hermit thrush</li>
<li>Townsend’s warbler</li>
<li>California towhee</li>
<li>Spotted towhee</li>
<li>Rufous-crowned sparrow</li>
<li>Common grackle</li>
<li>Great-tailed grackle</li>
<li>Brewer’s blackbird </li>
</ul>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
2015<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<ul>
<li>Chukar</li>
<li>Clark’s grebe</li>
<li>Sharp-shinned hawk</li>
<li>Swainson’s hawk</li>
<li>Wilson’s phalarope</li>
<li>Lesser black-backed gull</li>
<li>Forster’s tern</li>
<li>Great horned owl</li>
<li>Burrowing owl</li>
<li>Rufous hummingbird</li>
<li>Western kingbird</li>
<li>Eastern kingbird</li>
<li>Loggerhead shrike</li>
<li>Purple martin</li>
<li>California thrasher</li>
<li>Chipping sparrow</li>
<li>Brown-headed cowbird</li>
<li>Bullock’s oriole</li>
<li>Cassin’s finch</li>
<li><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 12pt;">American goldfinch</span></li>
</ul>
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It's been a fun time. I hope to continue adding to the list--it'll be interesting--to me, anyhow--to see how the yearly additions ebb and flow numbers-wise. Presumably at some point I'll only be able to add one (or none) in a year. And I'm starting to affect the people around me, though with varying results. My brother will now text me from a vacation to describe a LBJ. I'm not sure he really cares what the answer is, but he is paying more attention. My parents, who find this a very weird hobby for me to have, are paying more attention too. My mom has a similar reaction to my brother--she'll describe for me to identify--but my dad is less interested in identifications. He continues--and probably always will--to respond to every duck he sees that isn't a mallard with the statement "Oh, we used to have those at the pond on the farm. We called them mud hens." He once described a male <a href="http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/hooded_merganser/id" target="_blank">hooded merganser</a> in full mating plumage as a mud hen! Oh well, as long as on the occasions I'm in their vicinity, they tolerate the occasional quick stop to see something little flitting in the bushes, I'm okay with the whole mud hen thing. Honestly, I find it kind of amusing.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CbOeDpwp45o/VWKaaURO3UI/AAAAAAAAAW0/-3HyMRoTd-4/s1600/1966726_10152047815162817_1394894160_n-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-CbOeDpwp45o/VWKaaURO3UI/AAAAAAAAAW0/-3HyMRoTd-4/s320/1966726_10152047815162817_1394894160_n-2.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Emperor geese. My dad would probably call them mud geese.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
*Of course, one other decent reason for not admitting to being a birder is the stereotype expressed best (and in NSFW language) by Luke Dempsey in <i>A Supremely Bad Idea</i> when he writes what he'd like to say to people when they ask him what he's doing: "Seriously, folks, I'm wearing khaki, I have binoculars strapped to my chest, and I am clearly unfuckable. What does it <i>look</i> like I'm doing?"Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-51003646607915029942015-04-08T13:19:00.000-07:002015-04-08T13:42:52.908-07:00In memoriamI found out yesterday that Bert Rhoads had passed away. Many people might know Bert as the AOTUS (Archivist of the US) during the Nixon administration, but to me and a number of people he was also our first archival educator, guide, and mentor. <br />
<br />
If I'm a decent archivist, a huge percentage of that is due to Bert Rhoads. (If I'm not, that's on me.) I am enough of an archivist to know that the snapshot of two years spent taking classes and meeting with him is hardly representative of his life as a whole, but the man I first met in the summer of '91 was a kind, positive, encouraging, funny, and highly intelligent educator, archivist, and gentleman.<br />
<br />
One of my favorite class memories was the day he was lecturing about forms management. Now this is not normally an entrancing subject, none of us were gripped, and Bert was clearly in "read only" mode as he went through his lecture notes. All of us were madly taking down notes (or possibly daydreaming) when Bert read a sentence that began "It goes without saying." And he stopped there. It took a few seconds for us to figure out he had stopped speaking and once all eyes were upon him, he looked up at us, back down at his script, back up at us and said "Well, I guess it doesn't." Followed by much laughter and much more engagement--from all of us--with the topic. And while I don't remember details of a lot of the daily classes, the forms management one stuck with me. I use it a lot more than I ever thought I would in my daily work life. And the whole incident taught me a little bit about using cliched phrases in writing and speaking, too. <br />
<br />
One of my best memories of Bert and his wife Angela comes not from a professional interaction, but a social one. My second year of grad school, I was sharing an apartment with another grad student in the cohort just after mine. We lived next door to another grad student from my cohort and his wife. We decided to host a Halloween party for fellow grad students in the archives program and invited Bert and Angela. They came and spent several hours with us that evening. We were hanging out in the apartment next door, all the food was in mine, and people just wandered back and forth as they wanted to retrieve munchies. I'd made snickerdoodles mostly because I had all the ingredients for them and didn't have to go shopping on my very limited budget.<br />
<br />
After a while a pattern became evident. Every 15 minutes or so, Bert would get up, wander next door, and come back with a snickerdoodle or two in his hand. Eventually Angela noticed and said [I paraphrase here] "What is up with you and those cookies?" Bert replied: "I love snickerdoodles." While she just stared at him he added: "They're my favorite cookie and you never make them." As the discussion ensued (I use the gentlest possible term for the conversation) it came out that Angela had never made Bert snickerdoodles because he'd never mentioned to her how much he loved them. Keep in mind that they'd been married over 45 years at that point. <br />
<br />
I have no idea if Angela started making snickerdoodles for Bert (I couldn't blame her if she never did) but after that, every time I had a class presentation I made a point of bringing them in. I'm pretty sure it didn't affect my grades. <br />
<br />
I didn't have a lot of interaction with Bert after I finished up my coursework at Western. He retired, actually retired, a couple of years later. I struggled, a lot, post-school with writing a thesis while juggling 2-3 jobs, none of which had anything much in the way of leave benefits. Several times I thought about just chucking the whole degree thing. At some point I must have said something about that to someone who was in a position to tattle to Bert. And he wrote me one of the most encouraging letters I've ever received. I didn't have the wherewithal to pull it out last night and re-read it, but the short version is that he told me that while he understood my frustration, my potential was such that it would be a pity if I didn't finish the degree. It was enough. I couldn't bear to disappoint him (though he certainly never phrased it that way) and I figured if this guy, this man who had withstood everything Richard M. Nixon had done to recordkeeping, thought I had something, I should probably trust his instincts.<br />
<br />
I only had one interaction with Bert after that. A number of years later, after I'd finished my thesis and gotten an actual professional rank job, I had the occasion to call him as a member of a search committee to obtain a reference for a job candidate who had taken classes with him. It all started out as a standard, uniformative pro forma type of reference check, when Bert got honest. I won't tell you what Bert said about our candidate, but in one sentence he dissected the candidate's entire personality vis a vis professional maturity. It wasn't judgmental, it wasn't damning, it was just a clear statement of who this person was at this time and made it clear to us that this individual wouldn't be a good fit right now. I still wonder if Bert would have said that if it was anybody but me on the other end of the line. I guess I'll never know, now, but that doesn't matter. All I know is that every time I conduct a reference check, I pray I'll be talking to somebody with his vision, his understanding, his thoughtfulness, his clarity, his honesty, and his caring, both for me and for the candidate.<br />
<br />
We've lost what I can only regard as one of the pillars of our profession and an all around great guy. I grieve with my fellow Western grads, I grieve with his family.<br />
<br />
And yes, I made a batch of snickerdoodles last night and brought them into work today (at least one other of Bert's grads can indulge.) It seemed a good way to remember him.<br />
<br />
Rest in peace, Bert. I miss you.Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-45017495824366523622014-11-21T00:02:00.000-08:002014-11-21T00:15:11.178-08:00A flock of memoriesA few years ago, I started noticing that my memory, a source of pride for me, had some weird gaps in it. Some old, some new, some more than happy to lose. But also really scary--the fright of Alzheimer's always looms large these days, doesn't it?<br />
<br />
It's tough to know what to do about that kind of thing, but I figured exercising the memory couldn't hurt. And one of the things I'd been doing on a rather casual basis was birding, so I decided maybe I should work a little harder at it. Try and get better at identifications. See what I could see. Learn what I could learn, about behavior, habitat, calls, and identifying plumage. Plus, getting out into nature, especially when you live in a place like Alaska, isn't such a bad thing either. <br />
<br />
I'm really very lucky to have several friends and colleagues who are excellent birders who teach me, drag me to events where I can learn more, who will laugh with me when I do a happy dance at seeing a common eider for the first time, and who will tell me that yes, that yellowlegs that called from the top of a tree above my head for about 45 minutes in late summer in Cordova until I was ready to start screaming "shut up, shut up, shut up" was indeed probably doing so to gather around him or her a group of shorebirds with whom to migrate south after the breeding season was over. And I'm even luckier that I have a job that I love, with decent leave time, that pays me well enough that just occasionally I can run away somewhere interesting for a few days to see what I can see. (And by interesting, I mean like Nome or Monterey. Not Peru or the Lake District. I don't get paid that well.) By the way, go to Monterey. Even in November. Even if you're not into birds, the scenery is spectacular if you like the rugged coastal thing and there's always the whales and otters.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-g0ZBmtEYpxo/VG7yi6rpEDI/AAAAAAAAAVw/R9K0EpfNnio/s1600/1966279_10152494927522817_1933474660971693275_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-g0ZBmtEYpxo/VG7yi6rpEDI/AAAAAAAAAVw/R9K0EpfNnio/s1600/1966279_10152494927522817_1933474660971693275_o.jpg" height="239" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">There's always otters!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Despite the best efforts of my friends and colleagues, and despite some dedicated birdwatching trips this year, I'm still a pretty bad birder. It's hard to feel like I'm any good when I have to pull out the guide every time I see a loon. Or a warbler. (I think I might have finally got to the point where I can ID a song sparrow on sight.) I don't mind that, really. Tonight I finished reading Kingbird Highway by Kenn Kaufmann, which among other things, was a bit of a cautionary tale about getting too focused on numbers instead of enjoying the learning process. I don't find it hard not to get lost in the numbers, I seem to be missing whatever the genetic component for competition might be, but I do like to keep track of what and where I've seen birds for the first time.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-E5sgMefCWZs/VG7zh1-wKzI/AAAAAAAAAV4/8W2hSrbAhGw/s1600/10466999_10152518798977817_1344344445957395870_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-E5sgMefCWZs/VG7zh1-wKzI/AAAAAAAAAV4/8W2hSrbAhGw/s1600/10466999_10152518798977817_1344344445957395870_o.jpg" height="239" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I may not be competitive about bird counts, but I appear to have developed some compulsions regarding the acquisition of bird guides.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
That's where it gets kind of surreal, actually. See, I didn't start tracking the birds I was seeing until I was in my late 30s, early 40s. I was living in Alaska by then and at least once a year taking a wildlife viewing trip out of Seward. So some of my earliest life-list birds are ones that other birders do once-in-a-lifetime trips to see. Parakeet auklets. Thick-billed murres. Kittlitz's murrelets. Seriously. I can't tell you how many crows I'd seen--and ignored because hey, it's just a crow--in Seward before I ran into somebody who was nearly frothing at the mouth at seeing and hearing one because we have Northwestern crows, not American crows like most of the lower 48. (I still couldn't swear to the difference.)<br />
<br />
So my life list is somewhat unique. I didn't add in an American crow until 2011. My record of the Northwestern crow pre-dates that by seven years, the very first year I started writing down when and where I was seeing them. A friend from the intermountain west took me birding at the Bear River Refuge in Utah in spring 2012 and kindly concealed her utter shock at my not knowing what a western meadowlark looked like.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-01eQ_Fz1jFU/VG7n3nzwDNI/AAAAAAAAAVU/QBbFkwxnkAc/s1600/550192_10150703869967817_767636968_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-01eQ_Fz1jFU/VG7n3nzwDNI/AAAAAAAAAVU/QBbFkwxnkAc/s1600/550192_10150703869967817_767636968_n.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is what a western meadowlark looks like. And that's a redwinged blackbird partially hidden behind the no parking sign.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Anyway, that was all a very long intro to my list of this year's birds. Again, I'm not so much with the concept of a <a href="http://www.markobmascik.com/the-big-year" target="_blank">Big Year</a>--I'm just not that competitive, but I thought it would be an interesting look at what I'd seen in one year which, with a few exceptions, I hadn't made major efforts to go birding. I had a few trips where I didn't do any birding at all. I also didn't take my annual boat tour out of Seward this year, so some typical-for-me Alaskan birds aren't represented. But not all my lifelist additions represented here are boring-for-you birds. A short weekend trip to Kodiak this spring to celebrate a friend and colleague's achievement resulted in the addition of the Emperor goose. Take a few seconds to go <a href="http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Emperor_Goose/id" target="_blank">check out that range map</a>. There's a flock of them that winter every year just south of the Coast Guard base about 15 minutes by road south of Kodiak. By the hundreds. Crazy, right? And I've seen them. Gorgeous birds.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bnFt6lXupic/VG7sdp8sjeI/AAAAAAAAAVg/roeS2SNvuVs/s1600/1966726_10152047815162817_1394894160_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bnFt6lXupic/VG7sdp8sjeI/AAAAAAAAAVg/roeS2SNvuVs/s1600/1966726_10152047815162817_1394894160_n.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
So here's this year's list. I'm putting it up in mid-November because I don't have any other out-of-state travel planned and there's nothing missing here typical to Anchorage winters, short of a Bohemian waxwing or 50. (I probably saw some in February and just forgot to write them down. That's the more innocuous non-worrying part of my memory loss. When something is so common that you know you've probably seen it a bunch of times and just didn't make a point of remembering it.) In the meantime, I've learned a few things. With the help of some amazing people along the way. Having problems recognizing surfbirds from amongst the huge numbers of similar looking shorebirds out there? They tend to prefer rocky shores to sandy/silty/muddy ones, the black markings on their tails are pretty unique, and after the one guy in Homer said "they look like the hockey players of the shorebirds" I think I may just have them figured out. Maybe. We'll see, come next spring and the shorebird migration north. 172 birds total for 2014, 49 additions to the life list--those are in italics.<br />
<br />
Not a bad year. And you know what? I still remember where I saw most of them. That's not bad at all.<br />
<ol>
<li>Avocet, American</li>
<li><i>Albatross, Black-footed</i></li>
<li><i>Auklet, Cassin's</i></li>
<li>Auklet, Rhinocerous</li>
<li><i>Blackbird, Brewer's</i></li>
<li>Blackbird, Redwinged (also bicolored variant)</li>
<li><i>Bluebird, Western</i></li>
<li>Brant</li>
<li>Buffleheads</li>
<li><i>Bushtit</i></li>
<li>Canvasback</li>
<li>Cardinal, Northern</li>
<li>Chickadee, Blackcapped</li>
<li>Chickadee, Boreal</li>
<li>Chickadee, Chestnut-Backed</li>
<li><i>Chickadee, Mountain</i></li>
<li>Coot, American</li>
<li><i>Cormorant, Brandt's</i></li>
<li>Cormorant, Doublecrested</li>
<li>Cormorant, Pelagic</li>
<li>Cranes, Sandhill</li>
<li>Creeper, Brown</li>
<li>Crow, American</li>
<li>Crow, Northwestern</li>
<li>Curlew, Long-Billed</li>
<li>Doves, Rock</li>
<li>Dowitcher, Longbilled</li>
<li>Dowitcher, Shortbilled</li>
<li>Duck, Harlequin</li>
<li>Duck, Longtailed</li>
<li>Duck, Ringnecked</li>
<li>Duck, Ruddy</li>
<li><i>Duck, Wood</i></li>
<li>Dunlin</li>
<li>Eagle, Bald</li>
<li>Eagle, Golden</li>
<li>Egret, Great</li>
<li>Egret, Snowy</li>
<li>Falcon, Peregrine</li>
<li>Finch, House</li>
<li>Flicker, Northern (yellow and red-shafted)</li>
<li>Flycatcher, Alder (heard)</li>
<li>Gadwall</li>
<li><i>Geese, Emperor</i></li>
<li>Geese, Greater white-fronted</li>
<li>Geese, Dusky Canada</li>
<li>Geese, Lesser Canada</li>
<li>Godwit, Hudsonian</li>
<li><i>Godwit, Marbled</i></li>
<li>Goldeneye, Barrow's</li>
<li>Goldeneye, Common</li>
<li>Goldfinch, Lesser</li>
<li><i>Grackle, Common</i></li>
<li><i>Grackle, Great-tailed</i></li>
<li>Grebe, Eared</li>
<li>Grebe, Horned</li>
<li>Grebe, Pied-billed</li>
<li>Grebe, Rednecked</li>
<li>Grosbeak, Pine</li>
<li>Guillemots, Pigeon</li>
<li>Gull, Glaucous-winged</li>
<li><i>Gull, Heermann's</i></li>
<li>Gull, Herring</li>
<li>Gull, Mew</li>
<li>Gull, Western</li>
<li>Harrier, Northern</li>
<li>Hawk, Harlan's/Redtailed</li>
<li><i>Hawk, Rough-legged</i></li>
<li>Heron, Great Blue</li>
<li><i>Hummingbird, Anna's</i></li>
<li><i>Hummingbird, Blackchinned</i></li>
<li>Ibis, White-faced</li>
<li>Jaeger, Parasitic</li>
<li><i>Jaeger, Pomarine</i></li>
<li>Jay, Steller's</li>
<li>Junco, Darkeyed (OR subspecies, slaty)</li>
<li>Jay, Steller's</li>
<li>Jay, Western Scrub</li>
<li><i>Kestrel, American</i></li>
<li>Killdeer</li>
<li>Kingfisher, Belted</li>
<li>Kinglet, Goldencrowned (heard)</li>
<li>Kinglet, Rubycrowned</li>
<li><i>Kite, White-tailed</i></li>
<li>Kittiwake, Blacklegged</li>
<li><i>Loon, Arctic</i></li>
<li>Loon, Common</li>
<li>Loon, Pacific</li>
<li>Magpie, Blackbilled</li>
<li>Mallards</li>
<li>Meadowlark, Western</li>
<li>Merganser, Common</li>
<li>Merlin</li>
<li>Mockingbird, Northern</li>
<li>Murre, Common</li>
<li>Murrelets, Kittlitz's</li>
<li><i>Night-heron, Black-crowned</i></li>
<li>Nuthatch, Redbreasted</li>
<li><i>Owl, Short eared</i></li>
<li>Oystercatcher, Black</li>
<li>Pelican, American White</li>
<li>Pelican, Brown</li>
<li><i>Petrels, Fork-tailed Storm</i></li>
<li>Phalarope, Rednecked</li>
<li><i>Phoebe, Black</i></li>
<li><i>Phoebe, Says</i></li>
<li>Pipit, American</li>
<li>Pintails, Northern</li>
<li>Plover, Black-bellied</li>
<li>Plover, Semipalmated</li>
<li>Puffins, Horned</li>
<li>Raven, Common</li>
<li>Redpoll. Common</li>
<li>Robin, American</li>
<li><i>Sanderling</i></li>
<li>Sandpiper, Least</li>
<li>Sandpiper, Pectoral</li>
<li>Sandpiper, Spotted</li>
<li><i>Sandpiper, Western</i></li>
<li>Scaup, Greater</li>
<li>Scaup, Lesser</li>
<li>Scoter, Black</li>
<li>Scoter, Surf</li>
<li><i>Shearwater, Black-vented</i></li>
<li><i>Shearwater, Pink-footed</i></li>
<li><i>Shearwater, Sooty</i></li>
<li>Shoveler, Northern</li>
<li><i>Shrike, Northern</i></li>
<li>Siskin, Pine</li>
<li>Snipe, Wilson's</li>
<li>Sparrow, Goldencrowned</li>
<li>Sparrow, House</li>
<li>Sparrow, Lincoln's</li>
<li><i>Sparrow, Rufous-crowned</i></li>
<li>Sparrow, Savannah</li>
<li>Sparrow, Song</li>
<li>Sparrow, White-crowned</li>
<li>Starlings, European</li>
<li>Stilt, Black-necked</li>
<li><i>Surfbird</i></li>
<li>Swallow, Tree</li>
<li><i>Swan, Mute</i></li>
<li>Swan, Trumpeter</li>
<li>Teal, Greenwinged</li>
<li><i>Tern, Aleutian</i></li>
<li>Tern, Arctic</li>
<li><i>Tern, Caspian</i></li>
<li><i>Tern, Elegant</i></li>
<li><i>Thrush, Hermit</i></li>
<li>Thrush, Varied</li>
<li><i>Titmouse, Oak</i></li>
<li><i>Towhee, California</i></li>
<li><i>Towhee, Spotted</i></li>
<li><i>Turnstones, Black</i></li>
<li><i>Vireo, Hutton's</i></li>
<li>Vulture, Turkey</li>
<li>Warbler, Orange-crowned</li>
<li><i>Warbler, Townsend's</i></li>
<li>Warbler, Wilson's</li>
<li>Warbler, Yellow-rumped</li>
<li>Whimbrel</li>
<li>Wigeon, American</li>
<li>Willet</li>
<li><i>Woodpecker, Acorn</i></li>
<li>Woodpecker, Downy</li>
<li>Woodpecker, Hairy</li>
<li><i>Woodpecker, Nuttall's</i></li>
<li><i>Wren, Bewick's</i></li>
<li><i>Wren, House</i></li>
<li><i>Wren, Pacific (heard)</i></li>
<li>Yellowlegs, Greater</li>
<li>Yellowlegs, Lesser</li>
</ol>
Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-73244414036355867582014-03-09T03:19:00.000-07:002014-03-09T03:19:51.800-07:00Long overdue bibliographyI'm nearly at two decades since I began some "serious" research into the way archives and archivists are portrayed in fiction. This research thus far has resulted in three relatively complete products: a masters thesis, an American Archivist article based on my masters thesis (though substantially cut), and a presentation at SAA-Austin.<br />
<br />
And by relatively complete I don't mean they're the last word on the topic. At least once a year I'm approached by a grad student doing some variant on the subject and though I like to think I've had some really good ideas over the years, I know I haven't drained the well dry. Mostly I mean those are standalone products not subject to my going back and revising them. Am I likely to produce some thing new? I doubt it. My thinking has changed a lot over the years, matured I'd hope, but I don't have any current plans to go in and add something new to the discussion. At least not anything new that would require I concentrate on research and writing for more than oh, say, however long it takes me to read a novel.<br />
<br />
That doesn't mean I've stopped reading, though. And it really doesn't mean I've stopped keeping track of what fiction I read that has archival content. What you may not know is that I have a list. Of books I've read with archival content and books I've been told have archival content. Currently the full list is comprised of 854 titles. 568 of which I've confirmed have archival content.<br />
<br />
Scary thing? I'm well aware it's not comprehensive. For example, it contains only the first Ballantine/Morris <i>Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences</i> novel, and as near as I can tell, there's bunches more to go. And I haven't kept up with my James Axler reading in the past couple of years, though I have a lot of travel booked for this year and those are always great airplane reads, so maybe I will get that series caught up. <br />
<br />
At any rate, last week yet another individual contacted me about this topic. Technically the request was for an e version of my thesis (which doesn't exist anymore) but it got me thinking about the various things I've created over the years on this topic. Especially my book list which I've pretty much been keeping confidential. And what I was or wasn't planning to do with it. And okay, the list isn't pretty, it's not comprehensive, it's not well-crafted, and I had a dozen other self-protective (ego-protective) reasons to just keep it mine.<br />
<br />
But eventually common sense comes along and gives me a swift kick. Common sense that says: what are you saving this for? (Ans: nothing in particular.) Are you ever planning on doing another project? (Ans: yeah, but no, but yeah, but no, but yeah, but likelihood low). What's with the possessiveness? (Ans: But I spent a lot of time researching it! Me! My time! Why should I give it away? Plus it's been a private list since 2006! It's tradition now!) What happened to your alleged attitude about information accessibility? (Ans: Uh...)<br />
<br />
And I realized I was channeling General Buck Turgidson a little too closely. "I mean, he'll see everything, he'll... he'll see the Big Board!" Yeah, I'm a little embarrassed to admit I've read some of this stuff. Then again, at least I can point to them and say "Research Project!" when somebody shakes their head over the fact that I've read Dan Brown not once, but twice. Or whatever other author, book, or series on there makes you raise an eyebrow. <br />
<br />
So what the heck. The product of way too many hours of work and somehow, yet, still not done and never will be, either. About an hour ago, I logged into my account on LibraryThing and hit the switch. The switch that's been set to private since I first set up my account on LibraryThing in 2006. My perpetually-in-progress <a href="https://www.librarything.com/profile/aschmuland" target="_blank">archives in fiction bib</a> is now public.<br />
<br />
By the way, if you somehow missed it, that product I mentioned that I did for the Austin SAA? It's NSFW. No joke. And the bib contains records for the books that were the source of the content for the presentation. Plus some of the books in this list are awful. Badly written, boring, etc. Just, you know, be careful. Read at your own risk. As I suppose we always do, huh? Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-67844245430922222062014-02-09T16:34:00.000-08:002014-02-09T23:34:19.522-08:00Feedback loopsThe first time I ever heard the term feedback, it referred to that teeth-aching, ear-shattering, hair-standing-on-end sound you get coming out of a speaker when the microphone moves into the wrong space.<br />
<br />
Sometimes I think we forget that definition even when it's the most accurate of all of the possible definitions.<br />
<br />
Periodically, I get asked for feedback on interviews by job candidates.<br />
<br />
You can ask. Chances are almost no one will be able to give you that feedback. HR departments tend to be fairly rabid about this. And most of us regard the survival odds of crossing our HR reps as equivalent to our survival odds if we were facing down a few Kodiak bears while wearing a raw steak parka.<br />
<br />
But here's why I won't tell you anyhow.<br />
<br />
Nearly all of the time, there will be absolutely no way that feedback can help you. <br />
<br />
How could it?<br />
<br />
An interview, with me anyway, isn't an algebra test with a pre-determined right answer to each question. It's an opportunity for the interviewer(s) and interviewee to get to know each other. Learn something about what's most important to each, figure out if there's a good match there. And to give us a basis of comparison between candidates to find the best match at the time given the candidate pool available. If you'll forgive me the romance novel metaphor, it's not about Mr. (Ms.) Right, it's about Mr. Right Now At This Speed-Dating Event.<br />
<br />
That goes both ways, by the way. You should be interviewing the people and the position at the same time they're interviewing you, to see if it's a good enough match for you, too. (Uh-oh. Maybe that speed-dating thing is a more accurate metaphor than I'd guessed.)<br />
<br />
Our questions and our combination of questions and even the makeup of the committee are designed for our particular position, for our particular needs, at this particular time. Even if I ask the same question in two different recruitments, I may not be looking for the same answer. And sometimes it isn't even about the answer, it's about the candidate's approach to the question, what they think the question meant. And sometimes it's about the answer. And sometimes it's about the answer to question #3 combined with the answer to #5 and contrasted with the answer to #8 and all that put up against the answers to questions 2 and 4 as answered by candidate C.<br />
<br />
Let me give you an example. A few years back, I included the question about "If you had one word to describe yourself, what would it be?" One candidate took over 5 minutes on the question, to finally settle on 3 words (one was "outgoing.") Normally that would fall under the category of "never do this." Here's why it wasn't a candidate-killer answer: in the context of this candidate and the job on offer and the existing interrelationships in the department, well, it still wasn't great but it wasn't bad. The other candidates hadn't been as good matches and this particular candidate was an excellent match in terms of skills and personality. Mostly the committee shrugged, laughed it off, and continued on with what was one of the longest phone interviews I've ever been a party to. The candidate was indeed a great addition to the department, worked out great, and even years after she'd moved on, those that were around during those days still miss having her here and still laugh over that interview.<br />
<br />
In that case, the word(s) she chose were important. Individually, they were all "right" answers. The method of delivery left a lot to be desired, but it wasn't enough to close off her candidacy.<br />
<br />
It's almost never about the answer to a single question. It may be many answers accrete up to a picture of a candidate that is different than what we're looking for. At this time. In this place. It may be on a side-by-side comparison, this candidate edged out the others. It may be that we messed up the job description and/or requirement statements and we ended up with a pool heavily weighted away from what we were actually seeking and the interview questions were allowing us to bridge that gap. (This possibility keeps me up at night, BTW.) Even if I were to tell you that, what will you be able to do with that information? The next job you apply for will have a very different pool, probably different requirements, most likely a different group of people seeking different traits and skills and prioritizing those traits and skills differently than we do. <br />
<br />
So that's why, HR aside, I won't give you feedback. In short, there's two main reasons. First, If I tell you not to say something because it's not what I wanted to hear, who is to say that will be appropriate for the next interview you have? And second, it's usually not even that simple. It's complex theory, not arithmetic. It's a symphony, not a violin solo or even a string quartet. It's impossible for me to tease out the many variables and would often require I tell you about what other candidates did as well, and remember what I said about HR and the raw steak parka? If I told you what another candidate did, I imagine the results might look something like this.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WWqhjCWtJVo/UvgHJMOJUCI/AAAAAAAAAVE/OiZF-DeGE0Y/s1600/341_43979582816_1511_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WWqhjCWtJVo/UvgHJMOJUCI/AAAAAAAAAVE/OiZF-DeGE0Y/s1600/341_43979582816_1511_n.jpg" height="215" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
But since I know you're not going to let the above be the last word, yes, I have heard answers I would classify as "wrong answers." I usually never know what those are going to be until I hear them. I've heard answers so wrong that every committee member appears to have spontaneously forgotten how to breathe. I've seen those moments after we hung up the phone where there's dead silence and suddenly one committee member will blurt out "Did that actually just happen? Did s/he SAY those things?"<br />
<br />
First, if you have any misgivings, chances are that wasn't you. Only a tiny percentage of interviews will go that stupendously wrong, where the interviewee introduced us to a whole world of "wow, it never occurred to us that somebody might think that way."<br />
<br />
I hesitate to go here, because I'm worried that many of you will read this to mean that it really does come down to there being a wrong answer and a right answer and you just need to know what the right answer is.<br />
<br />
Seriously? Okay, then here's why I'm not going to give you the right answer, in that mythical universe where there is any such thing.<br />
<br />
Why won't I tell you?<br />
<br />
Because maybe, just maybe, your answer to the question matters to me. Your honest answer. The answer you believe, the answer you think, the answer you have to offer. Why on earth would I want you to lie in response to an interview question? What good does that do me?<br />
<br />
Really, if you hate working with the public, I need to know that. I don't want you to say "Oh, I love working in teams" if you'd rather stab your eyeballs out than to cooperate with a colleague. I need to know that you want to focus on 10% of the job description and will do almost anything possible to avoid doing the other 90%. Yes--I'm not going to hire you if you can't play well with others. Or if you are going to try and spend all of your time getting out of processing collections. You're absolutely right. But think for a moment: how does it benefit either you or me if you lie, I hire you, and then I find out six months later that somehow none of your ongoing collection description projects show any progress but the reading room chairs suddenly have coordinated slipcovers? What positive outcome can result from that scenario, workload-wise?<br />
<br />
So be honest. Listen well to the questions, answer them to the best of your ability and recognize that sometimes, no matter how well or poorly you think you did at that interview, the results will not reflect that performance assessment.<br />
<br />
It's not just about you. It's about you and us and everybody else we've talked to. And there's no way you can account for all those variables. The only way to guarantee a specific interview outcome is to not show up to it.<br />
<br />
Will somebody please kill that mic?Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-1341460831780730782013-10-29T14:29:00.000-07:002013-10-29T14:43:13.061-07:00The fantasies of Attila<span style="background-color: #93c47d;">I have this archival placement fantasy.</span><br />
<span style="color: #274e13;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #93c47d;">My archival fantasy</span> is that the first job out of grad school is in a medium to large size archives where the new person has giving, caring, and more experienced archivists available to act as professional mentors.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: #93c47d;">My archival fantasy</span> is that this job pays enough that the worker can afford rent. And food. And make payments on student loans.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: #93c47d;">My archival fantasy</span> is that this job provides the ability to really dig into the basic work of archives (processing AND reference) but also to take part in the broader work of the archival profession (appraisal, donor work, outreach, teaching, digital projects, and whatever the future might hold).<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: #93c47d;">My archival fantasy</span> is that the first professional position is a resume builder, not a placeholder.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: #93c47d;">My archival fantasy</span> is that the position allows the archivist to learn about the wider world of archival work so they can make a conscious decision about their career directions rather than just being forced into a direction based on the focus of the position or their inability to translate it into a new and better job.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: #93c47d;">My archival fantasy</span> is that every archivist regards their first professional position as a stepping stone, not necessarily something to be turned into a permanent sinecure nor something to be survived.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: #93c47d;">My archival fantasy</span> is that university administrations take partial responsibility for the ability of their graduates to be placed post-degree. [The corollary fantasy is that funding allocator for universities stop regarding professional degrees solely as an income-generating resource. Another corollary fantasy is that students thinking about enrolling demand to see longitudinal placement statistics specific to their course of study.]<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: #93c47d;">My archival fantasy</span> is that any archives with 3 or more professionals on staff decide they have an obligation to pay the profession forward and have at least one of those positions dedicated to professional development of a new archivist. [The corollary fantasy here is that they also take ownership of their job descriptions and fight the good fight with HR and Admin to advertise the job they actually have on offer and then do everything in their power to hire appropriately credentialed employees.]<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: #93c47d;">My archival fantasy</span> is mine and not to everyone's tastes.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: #93c47d;">My archival fantasy</span> has a very narrow scope and may not be all that practical in the real world.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: #93c47d;">My archival fantasy</span> is what all fantasies are, and presumes I'm perfect, incredibly flexible, and capable of achieving all of the above, all at once.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="color: #274e13;">But I also have fantasies about the USDA rewriting the food pyramid and putting raspberries and chocolate as one of the foundational levels so FWIW. </span>Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-61802278423111390562013-10-21T14:46:00.000-07:002013-10-21T14:46:29.843-07:00Moonlighting with Northwest ArchivistsOne of my side gigs is to serve as chair of the NWA Professional Development and Education Committee.<br />
<br />
Truth be told, I'm trying to get out of it. I've had this job for a couple of years and made--to my mind--too little progress on it. It's much too important to be left to somebody like me, especially right now when I've got a few too many other committees that I'm chairing with actual outside imposed deadlines and work that could have an immediate and important effect on relaxing my future workload. Not that there's really a committee right now, since I haven't gotten it together to convene one (despite actually having some people volunteering to be on it. I know. It's very sad. And I am ashamed of myself.)<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
But before I handed in that resignation to NWA, I did want to complete at least something committee-wise, so I wouldn't feel like a complete and total loser. So this summer I set up a survey for the NWA membership: asking what they actually want from pre-conference workshops. I'm hoping to have this piece of it moved over to the NWA site since that really should be the host for NWA survey responses, not my personal site. But in the interim, here's some results from the survey. I had 62 responses, 60 from NWA members. Given that NWA has a current individual membership count of 164, that's a pretty great return rate from the NWA membership (over 1/3.) Clearly, this matters to you all. </div>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">Preferred length of workshop: </span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">Nearly 55% said it depends on the content, preference among
those who stated something other than "depends on content" runs
toward half-day to full-day. Despite the fact that no one chose two days as
their preferred length, I wouldn't assume that two-day workshops are completely
out of the picture, but their content would have to be of fairly high interest
to get sufficient attendees.</span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">The food question: Assuming catering will add to the cost of
the workshop, what did people want?</span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">68% wanted coffee/tea/water.</span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">54% wanted snack breaks for workshops over 4 hours. </span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">Less than 10% wanted a sit-down lunch supplied, though 26%
wanted the option of boxed lunches. </span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">Based on this and the comments, I think it's safe to say
that catered food would need to come with an opt-out option, at a minimum. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also that food is important, but the ability
to do some selection would be preferable. This could be achieved through making
sure the workshops are held somewhere that a variety of food options are
available. </span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">Cost of workshops:</span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">I provided 3 options. Must be under $75, could be up to $150
if length and content warrant, could be over $150 if length and content
warrant.</span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">20% of respondees said that workshops needed to remain under
$75.00. 27% said they could be over $150 if length and content warrant. (The
rest fell with the middle selection). Though this is difficult to analyze, I
think the committee should take from this that in general cheaper is better, but
exceptions could be made. </span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">ACA accreditation:</span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">Nearly half of respondents (47.2% of those that answered the
question, 40% of all respondents) requested workshops come with ACA re-certification
credits. This is relatively easy to obtain for workshops, ACA has a form on
their website that needs to be filled out in advance. <a href="http://www.certifiedarchivists.org/members-area/archival-recertification-credits/">http://www.certifiedarchivists.org/members-area/archival-recertification-credits/</a><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Given that nearly half of respondents want
this, and presumably it wouldn't affect the rest one way or another, I think we
need to ensure that this is an option for most, if not all, of the workshops
offered. </span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">Priority for the level of content: broadbased basics,
entry-level but focused, or mid-high level specific: </span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">Nearly 3/4 of the respondents said that the focused topics
are of high priority. The remaining chose them as medium priority. Broadbased
basics were of low priority to most respondents (nearly 90%, 5% each chose them
as medium and high priority). Generally the high-low priority followed the
spectrum of focused development-related topics to broadbased generic
"archival basics." One commenter noted: "Basics are important
for the conference to be welcoming to people new to the profession, but
mid-high level specific keep more experienced folks engaged. A balance is
optimal." At the same time as there was a clear preference for more
focused topics, the comments provided were clear that not all focused topics
were of interest to attendees and sometimes they were too focused. In terms of
taking the Education Committee's marching orders from this: I would assume that
a spectrum of workshops offered over time or at the same time might be the way
to handle this so as to meet the broader needs while ensuring that those who do
need the very specific high level subjects can also obtain them. It might
require coming up with a short-range to medium-range prioritization plan for
workshop offerings, also with keeping some flexibility in terms of offering
topics that may vary in order to meet the needs of the broadest range of the
membership. </span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;"></span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">Topic specific: what do people regard as medium to high priority? The question was structured by giving respondents a list of 22 different topics from which to choose (also allowing them to make suggestions in a comments field, since my brainstorming was unlikely to be a comprehensive list of potential topics). Respondents could chose low, medium, or high for a priority status. These are the
suggested topics that were medium to high priority for a significant majority of
respondents (i.e. less than one-third of respondents chose them as low priority)</span></div>
<br />
<ul>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";"></span></span></span>98% electronic records (of that, 63% said high priority)</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;">93% digital curation (57% said high priority)</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;">88% metadata/description standards (49% said high priority)</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;">83% preservation (34% said high priority)</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">82%<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span>a/v media (39% said high priority)</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;"><span style="color: #274e13;">81% digital forensics (40% said high priority)</span> </span></li>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;">80% outreach (25% said high priority)</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;">72% photographs (25% said high priority)</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;">72% institutional repositories (23% said high priority)</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;">70% records management (32% said high priority)</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;">68% arrangement and description (12% said high priority)</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;">68% grants (25% said high priority)</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;"></span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">Source of training, does it matter and what do you prefer? </span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">This was an open-ended question. A lot indicated no
preference, or no preference with the caveat that the instructors be well-qualified
to teach it (mostly for the learning experience, but also for the ability to
argue for institutional funding). Of those who preferred NWA-regional
instructors (7 of the 44 people who responded to the question), it was partly because of cost but also because of the ability to
keep up connections/networks with the instructors post-workshop. Several
mentioned that they really like some of the workshops coming from national
organizations (presumed non-NWA instructors) and the reasons, if given, varied from the assumption that training from national organizations would be a simpler argument to make in terms of getting institutional support, to the assumption that we might not have local expertise, to the assumption (mistaken) that ACA recertification credits wouldn't be available for home-grown workshops. </span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">Volunteer teachers?</span></div>
<span style="color: #274e13;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;">I found this response somewhat discouraging in light of the interest in NWA teachers in the previous question's responses and given the concern about the costs: most nationally-based workshops are significantly more expensive than home grown. Only 5 people said they'd be willing to teach a workshop and offered their expertise on a subject (only one matched up to a topic that scored above 80% in the med-high priority range). Given that mismatch, going local—at least within
the NWA membership--could prove to be a real challenge. It
raises some significant question for me: is the expertise in these topics available locally? If so, how do we encourage the NWA
membership to view themselves as potential educators for their colleagues? If we need to keep costs low to support the broadest accessibility, how do we build the support within the NWA organization to subsidize or reduce costs for our neediest members and still give them access to the standardized workshops offered by SAA/AMIA/ARMA/etc?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #274e13;"><span style="color: black;">So where next? I'd like to convene a quick committee meeting for those interested in serving on the Education Committee (as chair or otherwise). At the very least, I'd like to get a RFP out for preconference workshops for the May 2014 meeting to see if we can match up any of these priorities with proposals or if we need to start talking to SAA and other orgs about what we might be able to offer from their standard catalogs of available courses. From there, it'll be up to the committee. And by the way, if you're a NWA member and interested in taking on a leadership role in the education/professional development arena, have I got an opportunity for you! </span></span></div>
Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-20162092660362057072013-10-02T20:26:00.000-07:002013-10-02T20:26:43.730-07:00A collision of communicationsI just realized I'm out of step with most people around me. Okay, I know, I know, that I actually figured out when I was about 5 in PE class. But this isn't about my having to learn to ride a bike twice, this is about communication.<br />
<br />
I'm here to tell you: my name is Attila and I hate texting.<br />
<br />
Hate it. As in a level of loathing I rarely feel for a method of communication. Email, phone conversations, instant messaging, F2F conversations, I'm all okay with, mostly. Texting? Nope. Abhor it with white hot heat of a thousand suns.<br />
<br />
Okay, that's hyperbolic, but I'm trying to make a point here. <br />
<br />
It's like all the negatives of emails (no ability to read inflections, bad spelling and grammar, and summary to the point of being unclear) with all the negatives of phone calls (intrusive, and okay, that's all I got, intrusive.) All on a teeny keyboard that tells the world I wasted all those months in 9th grade touch typing class. So much for my hard-earned WPM count which isn't much to brag about, but is much higher than my WPM count when using only my thumbs. And texting isn't really all that great for conversations, or at least not the conversations I like to have. And you have to pay for them, too! Where's the upside?<br />
<br />
I've tried, I really have tried. But despite being an early and avid adopter of a lot of methods of electronic communication, this one isn't it for me.<br />
<br />
I text. Rarely. I text my sister when I have something of limited importance that doesn't require much explanation and know I'll forget it if I wait til a time when my time zone and her time zone and my work schedule and her work schedule coincide for a conversation. I text her on weekends to say "are you free to talk now?" But she refuses to read email more than once a week, she hates using computers for non-work stuff, and the scheduling differentials on weekdays preclude phone calls, and so I'm stuck. Text for quick stuff, voice mail for longer. I'm okay with that use of texting. Once every couple of weeks, no problem.<br />
<br />
Note: Big Sis has an email account. She doesn't like email. I respect her
lack of love for that communication method, though it's one of my
favorites. So I don't use it to initiate contact. Ever. See where I'm going with that?<br />
<br />
Big Bro is pretty much the same, only I'm honor bound as a little sister to occasionally irritate him so I do--rarely--initiate contact via email. Plus he's never really flat out said he hates email, and Big Sis has, so maybe it's not quite the same.<br />
<br />
I could go on and on and on. And frequently do, but that's another reason I don't like texting. But I won't. I'll just ask you: if you're not Big Sis or Big Bro who have way too many blackmail-worthy stories of my childhood for me to get too snarky with them, if there's any other reasonable way to get my attention for information that needs to be imparted either direction or for a conversation, could you maybe try that?<br />
<br />
I, my thumbs, and my phone bill thank you. Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-1383277197605459252013-06-14T20:59:00.004-07:002013-06-14T21:08:04.923-07:00You can't ever go Nome againMost of this week I was in Nome, AK. For a vacation.<br />
<br />
Yes, you read that right, a vacation.<br />
<br />
People kept asking me why Nome. Before, en route, and while there. My answer was the honest truth: cheap fare. I probably just should have said "for the heck of it" which is also completely true, but you have to understand, cheap airline tickets are small talk in Alaska. For all the water cooler conversations that happen in this world over the great new restaurant, recent movies and tv shows, the weather, in Alaska there's an addition: fare sales. Who has what great rate to where?<br />
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So, great fare sale is the honest-to-Pete truth: it was a very good price indeed (the rental car and the hotel, not so much).<br />
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But the reality is, even in the rare occasions of fare sales there, not that many Alaskans vacation in Nome. A lot of people from elsewhere do, especially avid birders, but that's about it. It has something of a reputation as a pit and I won't defend it from that accusation, but I will tell you that to focus on that is to miss a lot too.<br />
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Like the nearly 250 miles of roads leading out of Nome.<br />
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The one to the east runs along the coastline, that's the Council Road, because it eventually winds up in the community of Council. We didn't go that far. It took us about 4 hours to go 30 miles not because the road was in bad shape, it wasn't. We just kept stopping to look at stuff.<br />
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The one to the north, Kougarok Road, that runs inland across mountain passes and tundra filled with the color of wildflowers.<br />
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I'd tell you about the one to the west, the Teller Road, but it's the only one we didn't drive this time.<br />
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And there's other things you'll miss.<br />
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Like the birds you can see there that many people will never see in their lifetimes. Like the eastern yellow wagtail. I don't have any pictures of them--they tend to zip around pretty fast--but we saw lots of them, you'll just have to trust me. I'll share a pic of another rare, if drab, bird we saw many, many of: the arctic warbler.<br />
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Seriously. There were tourists in Nome running around on very expensive guided tours who desperately wanted to see one of these small dun-colored birds with a faint eyebrow stripe. Sibley says it's a secretive bird. Not in my experience in the Nome vicinity. Kind of like snipe, which every bird book you read says they're rarely seen and so much so that there's a long-standing joke about snipe hunts, yet in Nome, they hang out on power lines. "What's that one on the side of the road? Oh, a Wilson's snipe. What else would it be? Never mind, no need to pull over." </div>
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Okay so I never got to see a bluethroat but we were seeing so much that it was to the point of overstimulation. The second bird I saw was a red-throated loon. They're not exactly uncommon, but I really only started paying attention to birds several years after I moved to Anchorage, and they're not all that common in my section of AK. We spotted one right next to the breakwater by the small boat harbor. Then five in the small boat harbor. Then for the rest of the trip, it seemed like a pair in every pond. I was getting rather jaded about them only 5 hours into my trip.</div>
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And then there's the big guys. We saw musk oxen 4 times in a three day trip.</div>
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And the herd of caribou that more or less blocked the road for about 30 minutes, but it's not like we were in a hurry or had to get anywhere quickly.</div>
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Here's a closer-up shot of some of those caribou. You might want to remember what they look like in a bit, and also remember that caribou and reindeer are the same animals genetically, it's just that people herd reindeer and caribou are wild. That'll become valuable information in a moment.<br />
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And the red fox that are kind of skittish, but when you have an itch, you have to scratch it.<br />
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and harbor seals and arctic ground squirrels and so on.<br />
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If you're not so much for the charismatic fauna, there is the beach. We sort of have beaches in Anchorage. If you cross your eyes and wish hard and don't mind dying in stylishly grey-colored glacial silt-based quicksand flats (also known as the mud flats). But in Nome, there's real sand beaches. Where if you don't mind the brisk, you can even dip your toes in the edge of Norton Sound/Bering Sea.<br />
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And after, since the sand has been baking in the sun that barely goes down at night, you can wander barefoot til your toes dry out enough to put your shoes back on. And while you're doing it, go look for beach glass and oh-so-cool rocks in those little pebbly patches in the sand at the waterline.<br />
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As we were leaving, people kept encouraging us to visit again. And that's where it all goes wrong. See, this was my second trip to Nome. And the other one, though very different in terms of what I did, was still during a spell of beautiful, sunny weather. I got sunburned that time, too. But Alaska weather is unpredictable, to say the least. It was sheer luck that it was so gorgeous all three days I was there this time and last time. And I was able to see so much and do so much that even though there's more to see and do, I'm now worried that my luck has run out. That the odds are against me ever being in Nome and having the weather cooperate with my travel plans so well.<br />
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I guess I'll just have to wait and see what the next fare sales are and maybe if there's one to Nome again this time of year, I'll take my chances. But I'm almost positive I'll never see the next sight again. I can't imagine that this is a common thing, even in Nome. Remember where I said that it mattered that there was a difference between caribou and reindeer? And that reindeer were domesticated? I cannot imagine any animal being much more domesticated than this.<br />
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If you ever have the chance, consider doing at least a short trip there. To quote the source of much mirth on tourist t-shirts sold in shops there: "there's no place like Nome." True, that.Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-64614074280824657902013-05-05T02:58:00.004-07:002013-05-05T03:03:56.992-07:00Catching up on some professional reading<br />
I've been working for a long time trying to figure out how to cogently and coherently express my concerns about the volume production of archivists and grad programs with archives courses vis a vis the number of actual positions open.<br />
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Only it turns out I don't have to do so. Nancy Villa Bryk, in the May-June issue of <a href="http://www.aam-us.org/resources/publications/museum-magazine" target="_blank">Museum magazine</a> in their "In My View" section, did it for me. I was lucky enough to have the text forwarded to me by a subscriber friend, but unfortunately the American Alliance of Museums has put all the content of their magazine behind logins. (Um, guys? I know you're a professional association and benefits to membership are very important, but please consider sharing at least the op-ed stuff more widely?)<br />
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Seriously, it was everything I wanted to say about the archives field, just delete museums and fill in archives and my job is done. She talks about the plethora of graduates, the expansion of new programs, the addition of museum-type courses to other degrees, makes suggestions that graduate schools learn from the law profession (yeah, that caught my eye, too) and actually make placement statistics--real and meaningful placement statistics--available to anybody considering enrolling. And asks us to really think about what the future holds for our graduates today: not just their employability in a statistical framework, but in terms of the skills they'll need to get those jobs and to continue in them successfully for some time.<br />
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At the heart, it's all student-centric, Bryk says, and I can do nothing but nod my head in passionate agreement. It's all about being respectful of students in school. Being respectful of their time, their debt loads. Being respectful of their professional needs. Making sure that they have all the information they need to make their decision as to whether or not this is the right thing for them. I mean, let's face it. Many are going to ignore the gloom and doom. That's human nature. I did. But at least I can't get accusatory now and say "but nobody ever told me." They did. I chose to believe I'd beat the odds and be able to make a career out of this. It took a while, but I did. Really, the Bryk op-ed is a spectacular piece and I hope it gets wider distribution. In the meantime, ILL it. It's great.<br />
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And now for the Attila addenda.<br />
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Here's the thing. Almost every archives prof I've ever spoken with says they tell their students there are no guarantees on the employment scene. Almost every student or recent graduate I've spoken with says they never heard any such thing. Why is this disconnect occurring? What I start to imagine is this: the profs may say it. Maybe once. Maybe even twice. Maybe more. But it's being drowned out by so much else of the student experience with graduate school (which, let's face it, the profs teaching the curricula rarely control). What the students are seeing is a university and a graduate program that makes admissions to the programs simple, quick, and easy. No quotas, no waiting lists, no limits on enrollment. Glossy brochures or websites that say "rapidly expanding professional opportunities" or that say "lots of retirements are coming!" Sure the costs are high, but that's what student loans are for, right? And it's not like they're that hard to get.<br />
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And somehow through vagueness or obfuscation, some places suggest this is learning that can be covered as an add-on to something else, but may not require much of the students in time or effort. Glossy brochures that promote not only this degree, but the addition of various elements of it as electives in other programs. Or nothing on the program website that references professional requirements or anything else that would suggest that there's a significant canon of theory here to be learned, a canon of professional practice. [Some would argue there isn't one. I disagree. So be it.] So the student is left with the impression that this degree is just some sort of a piece of bureaucratic red tape to polish off, and why would you have a pointless piece of red tape to cut unless it were there as some sort of elitist attempt to keep you out of this heaven known as the archival career? That's what those pieces of red tape serve as in almost every other piece of their experience. An arbitrary obstacle. How else to explain those financial aid forms?<br />
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I wandered off to the <a href="http://www2.archivists.org/dae" target="_blank">SAA page on graduate archival programs</a>. I was curious about 2 things: did those program webpages a) mention abiding by the SAA guidelines for graduate archival education and b) provide placement stats? 39 schools listed there individually. I started at the bottom of the alpha list and went wandering around the web. (Note: US-centric here.)<br />
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Here's some details about the links and sites I looked at: Don't assume the SAA page descriptions are up to date, I saw a few discrepancies as I was zooming by. The Murfreesboro one took me around in circles on the SAA site but I eventually got there via Google. With South Carolina's, Kent State's, and St. Johns' pages, I couldn't find any mention of an archives degree or focus at all. Austin & a few others took some digging from the landing page. By the time I hit the broken link for the Montreal program, I was sufficiently weary not to go looking for the program which pretty much took Wright State out, too since no link was provided there. Simmons, Clayton State, I could find the grad school easy enough despite a broken link, not true for Loyola. Some of those listed? Don't have anything resembling a dedicated site to archival studies. In some cases, it's impossible to tell there's an archives program there. Maybe those are schools that just offer an archives course or two as part of another program? Here's a question for the Internet age and Academia: can it really be a degree program/concentration if it doesn't have its own website?<br />
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And all of the end results below? Shouldn't be taken as carved in stone. Figure the whole + and - statistical thingie with all of the below. Honestly some of those schools may have had placement scores included, I just didn't see the link. And why would Canadian universities reference SAA guidelines? II probably missed direct references to the guidelines in several US schools, but even if I didn't, some of them had extensive explanations of student learning outcomes that could be taken as parallel or sufficient justification. It's just that to compare would require far more digging or synthesis than I was interested in or willing to do after 10:00 pm on one or two weekend nights. Any misses based on my laziness, that's a fair cop.<br />
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Here's the results:<br />
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<li>39 schools, 8 of which I either couldn't find a program reference or links were problematic, leaving 31.</li>
<li>Of those 31, 4 specifically mentioned the SAA guidelines on graduate education (Arizona, Maryland, Middle Tennessee, and WI-Madison). As I said, that may be a non-starter as a stat since some had other language that probably paralleled.</li>
<li>Of the 31, 3 provided placement stats in some form (San Jose, British Columbia, and WI-Madison). UBC's was a pretty interesting read, and a model for others, I think. </li>
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Graduate educators? Please do some user studies on your websites that take into account both the lessons your potential applicants are learning from them and what their potential employers might be learning too. Don't do this to the employers who are trying to figure out if your degree passes their check-off list of "masters degree in archival studies." Check the currency of your entries on the SAA site. If you're not on the SAA site, get on the SAA site. Okay, so I know there's no one-stop-shop for this kind of information and so I don't rely on it, but it would be nice if I could. [Get a grip, Attila, you say. I know, I'll try.]<br />
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And grad students? Why aren't you asking? If you're truly treating this as a "get a degree to get a job" even if it's "get a degree in this field because this is what my heart is set on doing," why aren't you asking the programs what their placement rates are? Are you looking at the job ads and calculating what they require and how you might get that? Are you talking to employers?<br />
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And even as I say that, I know well it's not crystal here. There's no finger of blame to be placed squarely in any particular quarter. Not when I hear from job candidates and recruiters both that job ads don't necessarily reflect the KSAs needed by the employer or the job on offer. That's not very helpful, either. How can they produce what you want when you're not only not telling them what you want, you may be misleading them? Recruiters: job recruitments should equally be the most exciting and scary times in your professional lives. How careful are you when developing the KSAs and interview questions to make sure they really reflect the ongoing needs of your organization? Are you taking this opportunity to think about the way your place functions? I know, it's not always that easy. Organizations tend to function on precedent and sometimes you can't make changes. As I said, not crystal.<br />
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And then one last thing. Here's where my heart is torn on this whole topic, and it is, I think, fundamental--and worse, preliminary--to the discussion even though I've been completely ignoring it because I just can't make it fit together as a coherent whole.<br />
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I know I presented all of the above within a "teaching to the workforce" context. That's probably not something we can ever escape with a professional degree. It's certainly driving an awful lot of academia these days. And there's a lot of specific things to learn in developing as an archivist. But deep down, I'm insulted and offended and downright scared by what seems to me to be an almost all-consuming focus on workforce development as a motivation for graduate training. Shouldn't school be more than just job placement training? Shouldn't it be about exploring at least a portion of the world, developing critical thinking skills, passion and intellectual curiosity and the development of a mind that will forever be in learning mode? Does it have be about "You can be a processing archivist at the completion of this 9 month program?" What happens when the Spotted Owl shows up in our logjam of descriptive projects and suddenly the jobs as we've been doing them are no longer there? Will that archivist be able to move along with the change, learn what needs to be learned, and oh, please, possibly even be spearheading that change because they have the vision, the foresight, the comprehensive understanding not only of their day to day tasks but of the larger world around them so they can see what needs to happen and start figuring out how perhaps to get there?<br />
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And suddenly with that last bit I realize I've accomplished basically nothing with this blog post, other than to spend way too much time looking at graduate school websites. Insomnia, go figure. And if you want to waste time, there's way better ways to do that on the net (or off the net) than reading this. Go do them. Be happy. Learn something weird. It will make you a better person, probably.<br />
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But, you know, it wouldn't hurt to brush up on Posner, too.Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-17627688643490050312013-01-01T12:59:00.000-08:002013-01-01T13:38:03.516-08:00the standard caveats apply<br />
I've written earlier in this venue about the <a href="http://attilaarchivist.blogspot.com/2011/05/sense-of-humor-thing.html" target="_blank">dangers of practical jokes</a> in a professional setting. In direct reference to that earlier posting, some of you may find it amusing/ironic/what-have-you that I've recently been appointed as co-chair of the 2014 <a href="http://www2.archivists.org/" target="_blank">SAA</a>/<a href="http://www.nagara.org/" target="_blank">NAGARA</a>/<a href="http://www.statearchivists.org/" target="_blank">COSA</a> meeting. But that's neither here nor there and anything I post on this blog should not be regarded as any statement of position regarding that appointment especially since if you know anything about the way program committees function and the way SAA program committees function, the chairs really have very little power. The creation of the session roster for the conference program is--amazingly--a very democratic process. And I, for one, am glad of that. At any rate, let's hope I can keep my sense of humor throughout the process, yes?<br />
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Specifically related to the genesis for that earlier posting: I spent a good deal of time preparing that paper on archives in sensual fiction for the 2009 conference. And though I don't think I came to any spectacular conclusions about the topic, it still wasn't a bad paper, for all that. Not for the faint of heart, definitely. </div>
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Here's the thing. There were some complaints about the session prior to the conference, some public, and some in less public settings that were reported to me later. And some of them raised some fair points. Not the ones that raised the dread spectre of professional nepotism, quite frankly, those were WAY off base and an insult to the session participants and to the program committee. But some people wondered why a professional conference with a focus on educating the membership would waste time on a session such as ours. </div>
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You probably should understand: I'm one of those who tends to say "but is it archival?" when reading the session listing for any upcoming professional conference. Our session was at least related, directly, to archives. It even had it in the title! But I have tended to be biased against things that are only tangentially related to our work so sometimes I have this reaction to sessions as well. Especially those that seem all about some historical topic and very little about the archives behind it. </div>
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And I'm WRONG about that. Broadening knowledge and interests is good for archivists. Okay, I'm still not going to sign up to go to any of the professional baseball games that seem to draw such a huge crowd of archivists when offered in tandem with a conference, but what good would the archival world be if we were all alike? It's kind of nice to know there's room for somebody who doesn't like baseball in this profession, or I'd be in real trouble. Besides, if I don't like the topic of any given session, there's always a bunch of others that I can attend. And here's another place where I've been wrong: on those occasions when I've attended something that didn't seem immediately applicable to my world? Those were often the times I learned the most and found things that did apply to my world even if it took several years for that to happen. Go figure. Obviously the whole program can't be like that, but I still have to go with the lesson that there's still room for the lighter side or for the more tangential stuff. Not to sound too After School Special, but hey, "the more you know." </div>
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Anyway, I'm not going to defend our session or the program committee's choice in including it any longer. Right or wrong, it happened. And of the 100+ people in the audience? They seemed to have a good time. Despite it being at 8:30-9:30 am on Friday, which is normally the kiss of death session slot. For presenters anyway, since many audience members aren't quite awake yet, assuming they even attend. Ours were. And they entered into the spirit of things quite well. </div>
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I'm still okay with my decision not to have the session taped. Not because of my original concern, that it would kill my career mobility. That remains to be seen and truthfully, I probably wouldn't want to work anywhere that people couldn't make a few choices about what they do on their own time. But mostly because at it really wasn't an experience that could be captured effectively by audio recording. A friend's bravura exit from the room at an appropriate time, the laughter that would start in one little corner and then spread explosively across the room as people read through the haikus being put on screen or in my case, as people realized "She actually said that!", or the grabbing for writing instruments as some blog addresses were being displayed. I don't know how we could have captured that effectively. So we didn't. And I won't try to capture it for you now. </div>
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What I do offer is a text. The <a href="http://attilaarchivist.blogspot.com/p/archives-uncut-nsfw.html">text of my paper</a>. I can't capture the presentation effectively, but the text also has a good deal of material in it that was effectively lost or overshadowed in the live presentation. And thus, there's value in it, too. But it is Not Safe For Work. Really. I didn't spend any of my work time writing it or researching it. (I used my library card to check out a few of the books, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't count.) And you probably shouldn't spend any of your work time or equipment to read it, unless you happen to have a lot more interesting job description than mine. And in the spirit of the session, have fun. </div>
Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-8415215516229476182012-11-15T13:40:00.001-08:002012-11-15T13:40:45.463-08:00Let go and let, well, goLet me be clear here. I am not talking about my current gig here, as you'll discover shortly. In fact, I've been rather blessed in this regard.<br />
<br />
Over the past few years there's been a lot of talk about succession plans and transfer of institutional memory and so forth. And the part that isn't about the potential for new hires and upward mobility is usually about how to preserve the institutional memory, how not to lose what was in that person's head when they leave a job they held for 30 years.<br />
<br />
[delete rant about information professionals who don't document their institutional knowledge for those that follow here since it's not fair to a lot of them who make a point of doing this.]<br />
<br />
But there's a flip side that I'm not sure is getting much discussion, or at least not in professional venues. Perhaps over drinks, late at night, in darkened bars where there's not much chance of being overheard...<br />
<br />
What to do with the retiree that just won't let go?<br />
<br />
I'm seeing this happen a lot in a lot of institutions around me of late. And since I don't know what to tell the people at those institutions, I've instead I'm writing my future self a letter of advice as to what I will do when I leave this institution. I think I've been pretty successful at following this advice when leaving other jobs, but the memory is going, so getting it documented as a personal reminder isn't such a bad thing. <br />
<br />
<span style="color: #274e13;">Dear Attila of Retirement Age:</span><br />
<span style="color: #274e13;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #274e13;">Let. Go. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #274e13;">The times, they are a-changing. It's not necessarily a personal attack on your career if your successor mixes things up, can't continue things the same way. Your career and achievements exist whether or not the product of them still does. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #274e13;">You may not be privy to the discussions where their boss tells them that "hey, guess what, the mission of the institution just changed and you need to spend more time doing this thing over there." It's arrogant of you to assume that things can never change, that the way you did it was perfect and not to be improved upon. Remember that time when, well, no details necessary... Remember how long it took to fix that mistake? What a pain that was? Yeah, you didn't do everything perfect at every step. Everybody should be allowed to make their own mistakes: it might have sucked fixing it, but wasn't that about the best learning experience ever?</span><br />
<span style="color: #274e13;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #274e13;">You may not be aware that their budget just got cut by a huge percentage and in order to survive at all, they're having to rethink absolutely every process in the place. </span><br />
<span style="color: #274e13;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #274e13;">And guess what? Maybe some of it is a personal attack on the way you did things. Maybe they weren't the right things to do, but you were blind to certain needs of your organization and now your successor has to do things very differently. Maybe that grandiose structure, that cadre of processes, that perfect program that you built wasn't really what anybody around you wanted and wasn't sustainable. If it is a rejection of your work, even more reason to walk away before your successor pulls out the staple gun and aims it your way.</span><br />
<span style="color: #274e13;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #274e13;">Here's some quick affirmations you will repeat til they are engraved into your brain, Attila:</span><br />
<ul>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;">If I can't say anything nice publicly about my successor, I won't say anything at all. (Reserving, of course, the right to provide warnings directly to employees in case the building is about to explode and people are about to be physically injured.)</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;">I will be available to anybody from the institution who needs whatever information I might be able to provide.</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;">This institution allowed me to have the fun and fulfilling career I've had, to meet many of the friends I have, to develop whatever modicum of professional respect my career has engendered. Those wonderful consulting jobs I can take now that I'm retired? They're built on my employment at this institution. </span></li>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;">No matter how right I am about my predictions of doom and gloom, nobody around me really wants to hear them and maybe, just maybe, they might start wondering if I have a personal problem that behind this witchhunt, rather than a valid cause. Do I really want to be that jerk? Nobody likes a Cassandra.</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;">What if you are WRONG? How embarrassing would that be? </span></li>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;">And what if you are right? Why inflict the self-harm of watching the play-by-play? Is this good for your mental health? Your karma?</span></li>
<li><span style="color: #274e13;">Rest on your laurels, Attila baby. If they really are going off the rails, think of it this way: your legacy will be the rose-colored glasses, good-old-days when things were actually done well and done right. Living well is the best revenge. (how many more cliches can I fit in a sentence?)</span></li>
</ul>
<span style="color: #274e13;"></span><br />
<span style="color: #274e13;">Best wishes on a fun-filled retirement: hope those plans to travel the world and write a few novels come true.</span><br />
<span style="color: #274e13;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #274e13;">Sincerely,</span><br />
<span style="color: #274e13;">Attila of Not-Anywhere-Near-Retirement-Age</span><br />
<br />
Back at the beginning when I said I was blessed in this regard? I wasn't kidding. My predecessor built this program from scratch. Against significant odds. For nearly 30 years he ran it, often with very limited assistance. And when he retired and I took over? He let go. He's available to me whenever I say "hey, do you remember this donor/collection/item/event and what can you tell me about it?" He's even called me a few times to get the off-the-record gossip about some event, just because he's curious. And I can promise you, he really (really, really, really) doesn't agree with many of the decisions I've made, the changes I've made. But he isn't calling me up and complaining about them. He isn't calling my boss up and trying to do undercut me that way. He's NOT running around the community trying to drum up bad blood amongst our constituencies and trying to build resentment, anger, opposition. <br />
<br />
I'm seeing other retirees do that. Badmouthing the institution, including their successors, at which they built a long and successful career. Taking newbies out to lunch in an attempt to inculcate them into their way of thinking and if that doesn't work, making veiled or not-so-veiled threats about their own personal ability to bring things to a screeching halt. Deliberately seeking out stakeholders and trying to poison relationships. What is UP with that? Why don't people understand that basic fact of human nature that when the successors face that level of blatant opposition from their predecessors, it puts them on the defensive, makes them dismiss everything, even the good things, that came from before. It's so sad. So unnecessary. So unhelpful. <br />
<br />
Want to be helpful? Do the best job you can while you still have the job. Keep current on professional changes and implement them smartly, with planning, as you go, leaving no undone legacy work for your successors to fix. Leave copious documentation of what you did and why you did it so if something needs to be undone, it can be. Make a point of learning the larger environment, the changing trends, the financial needs, and do what you can to participate, accommodate, and educate. And when you pack up the box(es) from your office that last day and eat all the brownies and chocolate chip cookies your co-workers were nice enough to bake for your retirement party, let people know you're there as a sounding board, provide contact info, and let them remember you as the person who threw themselves into their retirement with gusto and interest in the wider world about, all those things you didn't have time to do when you were working those 60-80 hour weeks at your job.<br />
<br />
Good luck with that. Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-32364082272907477042012-09-29T00:07:00.000-07:002012-09-29T00:09:42.081-07:00Carbo-loading in the melting potAs long as I can remember, my family has a tradition of breakfast for dinner. And one of those standard breakfasts-disguised-as-dinner meals was something we all called pirogen. Essentially a thick crepe, Mom generally made them about 8-10" across. She and Dad would have them slathered with sweetened cottage cheese and rolled up, us kids would have them spread with jam and rolled up.<br />
<br />
For a long time, it was just one of those things. As an adult, I periodically pull out the recipe and make them when I'm in the mood. But it wasn't til recently that I started pondering this dietary semi-staple.<br />
<br />
My folks both grew up speaking German and our family is German quite a ways back. Didn't always live in Germany, but German-speakers anyhow. But we kids didn't learn the language so much. Sure we'd take the occasional school class, but mostly got just about enough to ask the way to the bus stop. As a kid, I just assumed pirogen was one of those weird German words that I just hadn't heard in any other context. My dad had a few of those, so I was accustomed to that concept.<br />
<br />
When I was in my teens, our family moved to Winnipeg. And for the first time in my life I was exposed to--or perhaps just became aware of--a lot of other European cultures. Serbs, Croats, Ukrainians, Poles, etc. And somewhere along the way I was introduced to pierogies. Nom, nom, nom. Still a personal favorite though I do miss the homemade ones I used to get there. On some level I was aware of the similarity in the words, but I never really processed it.<br />
<br />
Until recently. I've had a friend staying with me as she commutes long distance between her home in Utah and her job in Alaska. And one night not too long ago I was in pirogen mode. And made them for her and she loved them and she asked the origin of the name.<br />
<br />
Stumped, I was. I knew enough by now to know it wasn't German, but none of the cultures I'd come across that used the word pierogi (or variants) had anything like this for the product. I knew the recipe had come from Mom's side of the family and got to wondering: was it just that somebody in the family had gotten really lazy about making pierogies that they didn't even bother to seal them off and boil them, but just fried the dough like pancakes? Grandma did all the cooking even though from all reports she wasn't the supremely gifted cook that some of her daughters became, but she was from far western Germany, so that didn't seem like something that would have come from her side, given the linguistic connect of the name to eastern Europe. Grandpa had come from eastern Europe--what is now Poland but he was from a family/group of German speaking residents in what had technically been the border areas of Russia at the beginning of World War 1 (Poland after). But it's not like he cooked, he'd lost much of his family when he was a teen during World War 1, and he emigrated in the early 20s to the US, so he probably carried very little in the way of cultural heritage with him. And even if the linguistic connect was there, the food product didn't bear any resemblance. So where did this family tradition come from?<br />
<br />
I pondered this semi-publicly on Facebook. And one of my cousins came to the rescue. Apparently she'd asked her mom about it. And my aunt's story was that Grandpa had remembered pierogies fondly from his very young years with Polish neighbors, tried to describe them to Grandma, who set about trying to invent the recipe from scratch based on what I'm sure was by then a pretty vague memory of the actual food. I don't know if she got this far and said "that's it, no more experiments" or Grandpa got tired of eating all the variants and finally said "that's good" or if he honestly thought this was close to his memory. That piece of the story, at least, I've not heard.<br />
<br />
So much for my childhood assumption that this was some sort of traditional German food and that when I was making it, I was carrying on a long cultural tradition. At least it wasn't the other option: that we'd just managed to come up with really lazy cooks who couldn't be bothered to make pierogies correctly. Want to add to the strangeness? When I want them but am too lazy to make them, I hit IHOP and order their Swedish pancakes which are pretty close in texture and flavor.<br />
<br />
I'm okay with the knowledge that this piece of my cultural heritage isn't so authentic. Especially now that my friend has fallen in love with pirogen. It seems strangely appropriate that my family's faux German/Polish recipe should be adopted by an Anglo/Slovak who I know will be carrying on the tradition of the recipe, since her husband, a Mexican/American, loves them too. If you'd like to try them, here's the recipe. It's a half-recipe, since the batter amount Mom used to make for 2 adults and three growing children could feed me for better than a week. The batter will keep in the refrigerator for a day or so. If it separates, just stir it back together.<br />
<br />
Heat oil in a frypan to medium high. Mix:<br />
3 c flour<br />
4 eggs<br />
Milk--enough to make a thin batter<br />
<br />
The batter should be thin enough that it spreads out to about 1/8" thick when it hits the hot pan. Make them about 8-10 inches in diameter. Cook til the bottom is browned and the top no longer has wet batter on it. Flip and cook the other side. If you have a larger crowd, go ahead and layer the cooked pirogen between paper towels and keep on a plate in a warm oven. If you want to try the cheese variant, sweeten small-curd cottage cheese to taste, spread on the pirogen, roll up, and place in warm oven until cheese is heated through. For those of you who, like me, can't bear the thought of the cottage cheese variant, just spread the pirogen with your favorite jam, roll up, and eat. (Using a knife and fork. These are just a little too big and flimsy to try and eat with your hands. Not to mention they should be served at a temp that would be a bit hot for your fingertips.)<br />
<br />
<!--EndFragment-->Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-58101847063073176702012-08-29T23:16:00.001-07:002012-08-29T23:16:55.838-07:00Learning a little in lossI've been thinking a lot lately about donor relations.<br />
<br />
Back in grad school on my five-month-long internship, I had the good fortune to be working for a rockstar archivist, Karyl Winn. Karyl did a lot to make sure I had as broad exposure to the field as she could possibly fit in five months. On a few occasions, she took me out on donor visits. On one of those trips, we had a drive of a little over an hour to get to the donor's house. Karyl, mindful of her role, took the opportunity to take a long drive and turn it into a teachable moment, and started musing about donor relations and archival training.<br />
<br />
The gist of what she said was this: that most formal archival education doesn't really prepare you for some of the specifics of donor relations. She carefully spelled it out for me (I paraphrase since this was 20 or so years ago and my memory isn't that specific): when we work with donors, we're often working with people who are undergoing or who have just undergone a massive life change. Death, retirement, relocation, job endings or startings, all those things that shoot up your score on the list of stressors. Even when working with institutional records, we often are still working with people who are going through similar losses in a work setting. Karyl said she sometimes wished that graduate archival training could include some sort of counseling education to better prepare archivists to work with people going through these events.<br />
<br />
Let's face it. Sometimes the records you're taking away in these situations may be some of the sole reminders of a person's life or career. And whether the individual you're working with is the source of those records or the child or spouse or friend of the creator, the records have a larger meaning than just boxes of paper: they become the physical representation of that individual and or that person's career. And that watching it walk out the door can be like reliving that retirement day, or that decision to move, or even a funeral service. And we need to be cognizant of this and respectful and hopefully convey our understanding and respect to our donors.<br />
<br />
Now how you train for this? I don't know. I don't suppose we can all undergo additional degree programs in grief counseling and maybe for some archivists, that level of training isn't so necessary. I'd had a strong foundation in working with people in emotional distress as a child (no, this isn't the obvious family joke) since my father was a minister before he retired and one of his ministry strengths had always been in counseling. And I'd observed him using those skills with people not just in his churches, but also in a part-time volunteer gig as a chaplain for a local fire/emergency services department when I was a little girl. In fact a lot of my family just seems to "get it" when it comes to working with the bereaved or those who are caught up in other types of stressful and emotional situations. I won't say I'm perfect or that I couldn't be improved by some formal training, but I know that the informal training I've had has helped me negotiate some situations. Mostly, for me, I find it comes down to listening and listening well enough so you truly hear and understand the story and can reflect back your empathy for the person's grief and loss and show your respect for them and their needs.<br />
<br />
So all of that was kind of mulling around in my head when last Friday night at about 9:30 I got a phone call. And was told that an elderly man I'd been talking to off and on for a couple of years about his photographs--he had been a professional wildlife and landscape photographer--had passed away earlier that evening. And it hit me, the grief. I didn't know him all that well--we'd had maybe three or four conversations in total--but I'd visited his house a few times and he'd shown me some of his beautiful photographs and talked about some of the stories behind how he'd taken them. I don't know all that much about what kind of person he was throughout his life but I'd been charmed by him during our interactions and I liked him and very much respected his work. Certainly not the level of grief that those closest to him would be feeling, but still, that sense of loss that somebody I'd known a little and liked was no longer around.<br />
<br />
And what I realized was this: that all that knowledge and empathy and sympathy and respect and the professional ability to bring those into play when working with others? That catch-all phrase about how the collections will serve as an ongoing tribute to and memory of the creator? I know that can be a soothing concept, though it's always struck me as a bit too, well, polished and smooth and without much depth, really. I prefer my sympathy and empathy be expressed in more specific ways. At any rate, all those things? Don't so much work when you're grieving too. I guess that's not all that profound--we all know that our abilities to deal can't always be turned inward--but I wondered: how do others deal with this grief when they're not just an impartial outsider with no emotional connect to the creator of the collection? Do they bury it in professional duties? Close it off and shut it away? Does it inform their interactions with the survivors, and if so, how? Do they grieve in private? Do they let the others engaged in the donor relationship know of their grief? Do the answers to those questions even really matter?<br />
<br />
I'm not sure how I'd respond if another archivist told me that to be a good professional, I couldn't grieve for the loss of a donor. I've always viewed the relationships--the friendships, even the casual ones--I develop with donors to be a strength. I don't want to be the impartial, unbiased, distant archivist. If that's even possible, and I suppose for some it is, but it wouldn't be for me. So the result is occasionally I have to grieve. And occasionally, even though I know that I'm preserving a portion of the person's life and I can do a lot to show my respect for them through the work that I do, I know the loss is still greater than the part that remains. Papers are never more important than people, we learned that in preservation class in the section on disaster recovery, didn't we? The lesson just may have been a little more universal than we thought at the time.<br />
<br />
What I do know is that this isn't going to change. As I told a colleague earlier this week, if one of the great joys of the donor relations portion of my job is getting to know incredibly interesting people? The downside is that sometimes I have to deal with the loss of those people too. And in the end, I think that's okay. I'm still a better person for having met them, known them, heard their stories. And for all those collections in our holdings for which we didn't know the creators? I like to think that the respect we've learned for those creators we did know can spill over into our caretaking of the records of those we never got to meet. The knowledge perhaps, that those stories existed for them too, we just weren't graced with the hearing of them. And perhaps, after all, there is some solace in the thought that as we make these materials accessible to others, the researchers who work with the materials can discover some of those stories for themselves. And learn from them and share them too.Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-79281282650734729542012-05-25T20:57:00.002-07:002012-05-25T23:52:53.777-07:00Epic birdingI'm not a very good birder. I'll call myself a birder, unlike so many of my birding friends, but the reality is, I'm pretty bad at it. LBJs? Yeah, right. Does anybody know what a juvenile rock dove (i.e. pigeon aka sky rat) actually looks like? And don't ask me to tell the difference between a greater and a lesser scaup without both of the sitting dead ahead of me without moving for a minimum of 20 minutes.<br />
<br />
This past couple of weeks, I had a couple of birder friends come visit. In 9 days total, we put over 1000 miles on my car plus some additional miles on my Alaska Airlines account. Our route went something like this:<br />
Tuesday: drive around Anchorage<br />
Wednesday: drive to Seward, visit the SeaLife Center, take a 6 hour boat cruise out to Aialik Bay and the Chiswell Islands, drive back to Anchorage<br />
Thursday: drive to Whittier, take the ferry to Valdez, drive around Valdez<br />
Friday: drive from Valdez to Anchorage<br />
Saturday: drive around Anchorage<br />
Sunday: get up at Stupid O'Clock and fly to Barrow (with a brief stop at Prudhoe Bay) and drive around Barrow all day<br />
Monday: drive around Barrow all day, return to Anchorage late night<br />
Tuesday: drive from Anchorage to Homer, drive around Homer<br />
Wednesday: drive around Homer, drive back to Anchorage<br />
Thursday morning: take my friends back out to the airport, crash, and sleep for approximately 32 hours (I got sick round about the time we came back from Valdez. It's not quite over yet.)<br />
<br />
The following is the list of birds I saw and felt I could reasonably identify. Locale helped a little: if it's a big gull with pink legs in Barrow? It's a glaucous. There's really no other option. Don't ask me to identify a glaucous in Seward. Though for some strange reason I'm pretty confident with the dowitchers these days. Not so much with the other sandpipers and variants, but dowitchers, I got 'em. And after seeing what seemed like billions of greater white-fronted geese in Barrow, having one strafe the car on the Spit out in Homer a day later allowed me to identify it immediately. I may not be able to do that next summer.<br />
<br />
Here's my list:<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #351c75;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8;">American dipper</span>
</span>American golden plover
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">American pipit</span>
American robin
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">American wigeon</span>
Arctic tern
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Bald eagle</span>
Barrow's Goldeneye
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Belted kingfisher</span>
Black bellied plover
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Black scoter</span>
Black-billed magpie
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Blackcapped chickadee</span>
Blacklegged kittiwake
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Bonaparte's gull</span>
Canada goose
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Cliff swallow</span>
Common merganser
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Common raven</span>
Common redpoll
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Dark eyed junco</span>
Double crested cormorant
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #351c75;">Eurasian wigeon</span>
</span>Gadwall
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Glaucous gull</span>
Gray jay
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Greater scaup</span>
Greater white fronted goose
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Greater yellowlegs</span>
Green winged teal
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Harlequin duck</span>
Herring gull
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Horned grebe</span>
Ivory gull
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Lapland longspur</span>
Lesser scaup
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Lesser yellowlegs</span>
Mallard
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Marbled murrelet</span>
Merlin
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Mew gull</span>
Northern harrier
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Northern pintail</span>
Northern shoveler
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Northwestern crow</span>
Pacific loon
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Pectoral sandpiper</span>
Pelagic cormorant
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Pigeon guillemot</span>
Red necked grebe
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Red necked phalarope</span>
Ring necked duck
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Ring-necked pheasant</span>
Rock dove
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #351c75;">Sandhill crane</span>
</span>Savannah sparrow
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Semi-palmated sandpiper</span>
Short billed dowitcher
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Snow bunting</span>
Snow geese
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Snowy owl</span>
Song sparrow
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Surf scoter</span>
Tree swallow
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Trumpeter swan</span>
Tundra swan
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Varied thrush</span>
Violet green swallow
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Whimbrel</span>
White crowned sparrow
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">White winged scoter</span>
Yellow rumped warbler <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #b6d7a8; color: #351c75;">Peregrine falcon</span><br />
<br />
That would be 73 species, total. Yes, the falcon is out of alpha order, but I just remembered it and didn't want to reformat the last third of that list. My friends got a few more--some birds I caught glimpses of, but not enough for me to take a shot at identifying, like a hoary redpoll up in Barrow and one of the woodpecker types at Westchester Lagoon here in Anchorage. And of course, all those gulls that I'm no good at picking up the tells on, like glaucous winged gulls in Seward. Or the thrush up on Hillside that was tentatively identified as either a Swainson's or a Hermit, and I really have no hope of further identification on that one.<br />
<br />
Since I'm relatively new to birding, I ended up with 20 species for my life list. Many of which I've probably seen in the wild before, just that I wasn't counting them--or even paying much attention--at the time, so this is a first.<br />
<br />
But I'm not all about the checking off the list thing, though I do that too. Some of these were far more fascinating for what was going on with them. The pectoral sandpipers? Okay, those were a new one for my life list, but we were parked at an overlook by a slough area in Valdez when we spotted the flock. And suddenly whoosh: most of the flock took wing. Why? A merlin (which I have seen before) was hunting them. The American dipper? That's a fairly new one to my list (saw it just two weeks before this trip) but while observing a pair of them near Valdez, one put on a great show for us by swimming underwater where we could see him/her, catching a small fish, feeding it to the other, and then going out and fishing some more.<br />
<br />
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If I'd have read the guide and what it said about dippers I'd have known they can swim underwater, but how cool was it to actually see the behavior? And the 100 or so bald eagles and bald eagle juveniles just hanging out in this grassy field near the mouth of Deep Creek north of Homer. I took a picture of one section of the field.<br />
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I can count about 22 eagles in it, but I know there are more. And what the heck was the American Robin--one of the most ubiquitous harbingers of spring--doing in Barrow, Alaska, in mid-May anyway? (Global warming, anybody?)<br />
<br />
We had a pretty funny travel guide up in Barrow the first day. He's the one who spotted the first snowy owl for us. (You look for high points on the tundra and look for the owl-shaped silhouette to see them. Really. This one was still in full winter plumage so spotting a white bird against white ground against a light grey sky?) Our guide was a little bemused by the whole birder thing. Accustomed to birders, yes, he sees lots of them, but he doesn't entirely get why people do this and often pay lots of money to do it. I made him laugh out loud when he asked if we were all birders and I answered yes, but I was the Ringo Starr of the group.<br />
<br />
Honestly? I don't entirely get why people pay lots of money to do this, either. The Barrow trip wasn't as costly as could be--another friend donated use of her place to house my friends while in Anchorage so that saved them several nights worth of hotel costs which in turn helped pay for the flight to Barrow (I didn't have any plans for that AkAir companion fare anyhow and I have a goodly amount of air miles stocked up. 3 full fares to Barrow? Not so much. 1 full, 1 companion fare, and 1 air miles fare? That's doable). I really started paying attention to the birds partly once I moved to Alaska because at some point while traveling around the state I realized that I was seeing birds, regularly, that other people took once-in-a-lifetime trips to see. Like the Kittlitz's Murrelet. Or Thick-Billed Murres. Or Northwestern Crows (don't ask, I don't understand that one either.)<br />
<br />
And honestly, I still get way more excited by some of the charismatic megafauna in Alaska than I do by the birds. On that boat trip out of Seward? We saw a fin whale. What a fin whale was doing in the entrance to Resurrection Bay, nobody quite knows, but that was very cool. And orcas. And northern sea otters. And stellar sea lions. And harbor seals. And a muskrat. And Dall sheep. And Dall porpoise. And a humpbacked whale. And mountain goats. And a black bear. And a snowshoe hare. And caribou along the Glenn Highway just outside of Glennallen. And the mother moose with her gangly babies that were probably no more than 3 days old in Homer.<br />
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<br /></div>
How cute are they? You don't even want to know how many photos I took of them. (Less than 20).<br />
<br />
But, okay. I saw a snowy owl. A real, live, snowy owl. Not in a zoo. On a snowdrift on the tundra (and later on a utility pole). Still in winter plumage. A snowy owl. That was cool. No eiders yet, but this totally makes up for that. Besides, this was my third trip to Barrow. One of these days, I'll get up there and I'll get to see eiders. I SAW A SNOWY OWL.<br />
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<br />Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-27383355232900880312012-05-13T21:36:00.000-07:002012-05-13T21:36:08.371-07:00Travel crankies[for those of you who are wondering... American Airlines does have a complaint form on their website. It has a limit of 1500 characters. I had way too much to explain.]<br />
<br />
Dear American Airlines:<br />
<br />
I think you have a severe morale problem. Actually, I think you have more than that, but I’ll start there.<br />
<br />
Last Tuesday, May 8, I was on flight 1448: ORD-DCA departing 10:35 am CDT along with a number of elderly Japanese tourists. As the gate attendant began calling sections, the tourists lined up behind their guide who was able to board early, presumably because of his priority status with the airline. When the first two of this group attempted to board prior to their group number being called, they were turned away with what I can only describe as extreme surliness on the part of the attendant. He actually yelled at them: “Go away” a couple of times with shooing hand motions. Frankly, if anybody deserved to be yelled at, it was their American guide who hadn’t provided sufficient instructions to them regarding the boarding process and who did not stay with his group. I was appalled at the rudeness displayed to these tourists in our country, I was shocked that the gate attendant made no effort whatsoever to communicate with them regarding when they could board. A simple pointing at the group number on their boarding passes and a “wait” probably would have been sufficient, despite the language barrier.<br />
<br />
Added to this the fact that all but two of the flight attendants on this flight appeared to be monosyllabic, and it all shouts to me that American Airlines staff are exceedingly unhappy. Nobody would be as actively or passively rude—especially people in positions like these who presumably undergo regular customer service training—unless something was seriously wrong in the workplace. Do these personnel need a reminder of how to treat customers in order to sustain their continued use of the airline? Yes, but perhaps American should also investigate what is happening that causes their workers not to live up to their customer service promise.<br />
<br />
And then there was the return flight, 507, on Saturday, May 12. The flight and gate attendants were perfectly courteous and kind, no complaints there (one wonders what would cause such a difference in behavior). However, I’m still trying to figure out why American Airlines would not have fueled the plane with sufficient fuel to survive a few times circling (or in this case, traveling to the west and turning around) O’Hare when O’Hare is notorious for landing delays. Instead, we were diverted to Indianapolis to refuel so we could land safely at O’Hare. I understand in these days of high fuel costs and the relationship of fuel weight to fuel consumption issues with an airplane that it must be tempting to load just enough fuel for any given flight. But diverting could not have been inexpensive for the airline, and it was a significant pain for me.<br />
<br />
Because of the diversion, I missed my direct flight to Anchorage by just a few minutes, when I had deliberately scheduled sufficient time for the transfer at O’Hare. I was re-routed to Seattle and then to Anchorage, and what should have been an 11-hour travel day ended up be a 15.5 hour travel day. Then there was the extreme crowding on the ORD-SEA flight: I would have thought some attempt would have been made to accommodate those of use who had been subjects of the diverted flight with slightly more comfortable seats. No, I had a middle seat in such crowded conditions that I couldn’t work on my laptop, work on my needlework, or, in fact, even work on my smartphone—there simply wasn’t elbow room for me to move at all. I’m not a particularly small woman, I’ll admit, but I’ve never had a 4+ hour flight where I could do nothing but sleep or stare at the head of the person in front of me. Under the circumstances, i.e. traveler already significantly discommoded by the airline, an aisle or window seat was the least you could have done. Really, I expect better treatment of your clientele who have had their travel plans disrupted through issues well within the airline’s control. The pilot of the DCA-ORD flight was very communicative and apologized for the diversion, the flight attendants expressed their dismay, but frankly, the airline needed to do more.<br />
<br />
If these kinds of events are the result of an airline in serious financial trouble, I’m here to tell you that improving your customer relations can assist in improving the bottom line. I’ve been traveling a fair amount the last year—not weekly or daily, but on average a flight a month—and no other trip has been as bad as this. This experience certainly ensured that I will do my utmost to avoid any either directly booked or code-share flights that involve American in future. It had been years since I’ve traveled on American Airlines. Based on this experience, I’m hoping it will again be years before I need to do so again. I suspect a few of my fellow passengers—in both directions—are making similar comments.Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-25793458171798655222012-04-01T15:35:00.000-07:002012-04-06T22:22:50.055-07:00Archives and the futureThere's this battle, see. It's a battle over scarce resources. And it's a battle that a lot of archivists have entered kind of late. And it's the whole justifying our existence thing. Not us as people, per se, but why an institution should have archivists and archival collections. I'm going to narrow that focus to academic institutions.
<br />
<br />
What I realized a few years ago was that while it was self-evident to me why archives are important in an academic institution, it wasn't self-evident to a lot of people at my institution. Because we weren't really serving our students, our faculty. And while the program was supported, some thought was being given to pulling it. That the service we were providing outside the academy wasn't sufficient to justify our cost.
<br />
<br />
NOT what any archivist wants to hear, but the correct response, of course, is a combination of outreach to those user groups and education for those around us to understand how we can support teaching and research at our institutions.
<br />
<br />
So when I was asked recently to do a presentation for an academic group on where the future of archives/special collections lay and what such collections can offer teaching and learning, I had to put into words everything I've been trying to achieve for the last several years and that for which I continue to aim. I've redacted and modified the following considerably to anonymize it, but I think there's broader applicability here anyhow.
<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The first topic of the day is my vision for [Archives and Special Collections (A&SC)]. This is almost always a
dangerous thing. If I say, A&SC can and should be the shining
jewel of the Library, I’m probably going to offend everybody in the room that
isn’t within A&SC. If I say anything that doesn’t
completely correlate with your consultancy report, I take the risk of
that getting back to the author and since he’s a good friend and writes support letters when I need them, I need to keep on
his good side there. And if I present an image too at odds with the existing status
of A&SC, it could be perceived that I’m failing
to recognize the incredible work being done currently. I could solve that all by being too vague, but that’s not good for
any of us.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">So here it goes, that dangerous thing.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
There’s a theme in the Library world and in writing about libraries
these days. It’s popped up in a number of discussions about the future of
academic libraries. As more and more library resources go electronic and more
and more can be accessed at a distance, does the library really need to remain
a physical place? I think the answer to
that is already shaking itself out in academia and clearly as libraries
reposition themselves. The physical library collections
will never go away entirely, but more and more space will be devoted to the
library as the knowledge commons, the place to study, the place to get work
done.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
But I don’t know if you’ve spotted one of the undercurrents to that
theme. I’ve been aware of it for some time but I missed seeing the significance
to it until just recently. Last year
some time, one of my Facebook librarian friends posted a link to a <a href="http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/communityopinion/887165-274/editorial_sold_on_a_graying.html.csp" target="_blank">blog entry on Library Journal’s site</a>. It was about the greying of the profession
and how all these library jobs would be opening up soon, except it wasn't happening. I keep hearing the bit about the greying.
I’ve been hearing it since I started looking for an archives job in 1993. It
goes something like: the profession is filled with all these older people who
are going to retire and everybody will move up a step and there will be tons of
jobs suddenly open at entry level. It’s like trickle-down economics for the job
market. So I was responding with my usual internal monologue of “those people
never retire. And even if they do, those positions aren’t necessarily getting
filled”--which, to be fair, was the exact argument the author was making--when I spotted the line of advice to new librarians that made me flare.
The posting advised grad students and new librarians to go after one of the
“hot specialties like archives.” And that was enough to get a written response
out of me—partly because I wasn’t thinking of the size of the audience that
Library Journal might command. And shortly one of the editors called up and
asked if they could <a href="http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/community/opinion/887665-274/feedback_letters_to_lj_december.html.csp" target="_blank">reprint an excerpt from my response</a>. Which
was, in short, that it was ridiculous to suggest to librarians that they seek
employment in an allied profession that has approximately 10%, if that, of the
population base of their own profession and already has specialized degree
programs of its own.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
But what I missed was what this portends. Perhaps this groundswell,
this push toward entering the profession that at the moment means one of the
most dismal job markets I’ve seen in the 20 years since I began looking for my
first archives position, is an indicator of things to come. That perhaps the
future does lie in A&SC. Specialized content, unique to the institution, often at little or
no cost to the acquisition budget, these departments can continue to provide a
role for the library collections in the library’s future as a location, but
they also can be a focus for the library, the materials we can hold up to prove
that we’re special, we’re different, we’re not just the same as any other
academic library.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
And what might that future hold? In looking at that, I’d like to switch
focus to the second portion of the question.
What makes an academic library an academic library? Support for
teaching, learning, and research. Else why would the university administration
dedicate any of the budget to the library? I’d like to start by focusing on
research, though those three are tightly interwoven from my perspective. What
is the qualities that make research that matters? Originality. Uniqueness. The
ability to bring in grant funds, or barring that, not being overly expensive.
The marketability and perhaps patentability of the end product. The
publishability of the end product. Primary and unique resources held in A&SC afford academic researchers access to raw data, unique
data, very often specialized data very often in non-synthesized form and you
don’t have to go through the Institutional Review Board to read those documents
and books.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
It’s not just historians and literature professors. The users of
archives—if they ever were primarily those two groups—are more diverse now than
they ever have been. Vulcanologists seeking <a href="http://vilda.alaska.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/cdmg13&CISOPTR=6183&REC=3" target="_blank">images of Aleutian volcanoes</a>—usually taken by servicemen—to document the growth of those
mountains and what might possibly happen with them in future. Climatologists
using <a href="http://www.nps.gov/glba/naturescience/upload/Molnia_etal2007_HistoricalPhotography.pdf" target="_blank">tourist photos of popular glaciers</a> to
create a composite and animated view of climate change on a micro-scale.
Anthropologists tracing provenance of cultural materials in order to return <a href="http://vilda.alaska.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/cdmg13&CISOPTR=7846&REC=13" target="_blank">museum-held objects of significance</a> back to the groups that so desperately want them back—and those anthropologists are providing more than just the documentation
of the items themselves, but replacing lost memories of how those materials
were used within the culture. <a href="http://www.scottgavorsky.org/digital.html" target="_blank">Digital humanities specialists</a> using historical
maps, photographs, published diaries, and objects to create visual and
interactive displays of a place and time . Biologists using
anthropological field notes, trading post, and<a href="http://nwda-db.orbiscascade.org/nwda-search/fstyle.aspx?doc=XOE0026apa.xml&t=k&q=alaska+packers+association" target="_blank"> cannery records</a> to track the harvesting of wildlife to establish historical
population estimates. Economists using
the same to estimate possible future harvests in order to establish industry
quotas. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
A few weeks ago I was in a room with two professors, one a civil
engineer, one a climatologist, waiting for a meeting to start. We
were discussing the weather. It’s been a rough winter in SouthCentral Alaska and Valdez, which commonly gets 220+ inches of snow in winter,
had already hit that level in December, with at least three months of snowfall
yet to come. The civil engineer mentioned that in a heavy snowfall winter a few
years back, he’d consulted for a commercial facility there because they were in danger of the roofs on the buildings collapsing because of snow load. That when those facilities were
built in the 1970s, they didn’t have more than a few years worth of
climatological data to estimate what the load capacity needed to be.
As it turned out, the load bearing ability was lower than it needed to be. And the climatologist was nodding along,
agreeing, when I said “What? Of course they had those numbers!” A bit of
discussion ensued. And my argument was that just because it wasn’t in the official
files of NOAA, that didn't mean the information didn't exist. In diaries. In
correspondence from miners home to family in the lower 48. In tourist photographs
showing<a href="http://vilda.alaska.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/cdmg13&CISOPTR=293&REC=24" target="_blank"> city streets buried in snow</a>.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
In the holdings of your A&SC, in the decisions
made every day about what to collect, what to bring in, what to preserve, what
and how to make it accessible, is the raw material that can allow
researchers—whether faculty or students—to shine. To discover and analyze and
synthesize information that can be found nowhere else. That can have lasting
impact in every field of research at this institution.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
The same holds true for teaching and learning here. What better way to
get a student in an ethics class to fundamentally understand—to have it made
real to them—the importance of what they’re studying than to have them sit down
with a legislator’s bill files and read the behind-the-scenes memos on
redistricting that never make it into the official record? How better to get a
history or communications student to understand how the format and delivery
method of a document can define the message than by looking at the carbon
copies out of a reading file system showing the dates elapsed between
communication? You end up having to explain what a carbon copy is, but it’s a
visceral understanding of the transfer of information and communication that
can be obtained in no other way—not even by looking at a digital surrogate. The
importance of pedagogical methods becomes far more clear to the education student
when they watch video from the early telecomm distance delivery courses. Why not test the skills of advanced language students by handing
them a handwritten diary—bad spelling, uneven cursive, and all—to see if they
can still translate it? Or an old and rare book in that language that may have
archaic forms and fonts? The journalism or public policy students: how about using university records to document the history of a topic of daily interest to
them, like, say, the constant complaints about parking on campus.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
And don't forget about plagiarism. Want to reduce the amount of plagiarism happening on campus? Assign research in
materials from the unique or rare materials in A&SC—the chances
that the student will be able to find something existing written about that exact
document or topic is unlikely.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
I’d like to give you an actual example of how you can bring A&SC materials into the classroom in unique and creative ways, expanding
the learning opportunities for students. In September of 2008, I mentioned to
one of my archivists that we should really consider doing something for
Archives month in October. She said: an exhibit! I said, no. Exhibits are a
huge amount of work, doing the selection, writing the interpretation, we simply
didn’t have the time to do that nor did we have the funding to create the
photographic surrogates of the original material. But I got to thinking about
how we might do an exhibit without doing all the work. And the answer to that,
of course, is to get somebody else or more than one somebody else to do the
work for you.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
About the same time, I’d been staring at one of the older photographs
in our holdings. It was a <a href="http://vilda.alaska.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/cdmg13&CISOPTR=88&REC=8" target="_blank">family portrait of some early inhabitants of Juneau.</a>
The man in the photograph is Richard Tighe Harris who in partnership with Joe
Juneau, are considered the founders of Juneau. The photo is, and as near as I
can tell always has been, labeled “Richard Tighe Harris and family.” And this
caption does, and always has, irritated me. The group consists of Richard and
his wife Kitty, who happened to be a Tlingit from Hoonah, two of their sons,
and Kitty’s sister. This is not Richard Harris’s family as not every one in the
photograph is directly related to him, this is Kitty Harris’s family. (Yes, I
did my undergraduate history senior thesis on a women’s history topic.) And as I
sat and looked at this image, I thought about all the things that could be read
from it and decided it was perfect for an exhibit.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
I tend to come up with
titles first, and the obvious one for an exhibit asking different individuals
to interpret a photograph from their own disciplinary background was, of
course, <a href="http://consortiumlibrary.org/archives/Exhibits/EOTB1.html" target="_blank">Eye of the Beholder</a>. So we had a title, we had an image, and we sent
out the call. We sent out several calls, in fact. We targeted a number of
faculty in disciplines we thought might add to the conversation. I took
handouts advertising the exhibit—with the deadline for submissions—to the
committees on which I was serving along with many promises to
write wonderful thank yous for review files. I forced my employees, even the
temps, to write something. I strongarmed one of my best friends, a history
professor specializing in Native history, to write something. While not a
faculty member, our <a href="http://consortiumlibrary.org/archives/Exhibits/EOTB1a.html" target="_blank">Risk Manager’s response</a> was one of my favorite submissions
and judging by the response of viewers, was one of the ones to really get them
thinking about how they could really put a subject angle on what seemed such an
simple request to tell us what they saw in the image.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
We’ve continued to do this once a year for October. It’s not growing
terribly fast, but we are getting some repeats from several professors. The
three regulars are the history professor, a public health professor, and
a photography professor. The photography professor is a particularly
interesting sample of what can happen: her submission to the original exhibit
was a collage. Every year she’s encouraged her students to take part in it and
has managed to convince a few to do so. This past year, one of her former
students who is out of college now dropped by in September just to find out if
we were doing it again and he created an entry for it again. But our photography
prof is not only encouraging working with historic photographs in the
classroom, she’s used other images from us for other collages which have been
accepted into juried photography exhibits and count toward the creative
component of her tripartite workload.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
But back to the history professor. This fall she was scheduled
to teach the historiography and methods course. It’s been more historiography
and less methods, but she wanted to balance that more evenly. One of the learning outcomes she wanted for the students in this class
was for them to have a better understanding of how images can be used for
historical research. So among other archival projects, she decided to do a classroom variant of the Eye of the
Beholder exhibit. I picked a few photographs, <a href="http://vilda.alaska.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/cdmg13&CISOPTR=8251&REC=4" target="_blank">she selected one</a>, and she
assigned it to her students for interpretation. I brought some of the previous
exhibits to the class and we went through them in one session.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
In the assignment,
the professor took it a step further and incorporated it not only into the
research portion of the class, but also made the students demonstrate their
understanding of the historiography curriculum. She didn’t ask them to
interpret the image from their own perspective, but as major individual
historians or groups representing major trends in historiographic perspective
might have interpreted it. They had to choose at least three. In general, the
students approached the project with a level of interest much above that of the
other assignments they had.
Through this research interpretation project, the professor was able to tell if
the students really understood the historiographic trends. One of the most
common interpretations used, of course, was cliometrics, the intersection of
math, statistics, and history. The students who didn’t really understand
cliometrics, just counted the number of people in the image. The students who
did understand provided an interpretation or context for those numbers.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
This one little project—the one that takes about 40-60 hours of my time
a year and was born out of frustration and need and nearly no time—has had a
cumulative and progressive effect upon the teaching, learning, and research
missions of my institution.
This is exactly how unique and rare materials, the materials held by
A&SC, relate to the teaching, learning, and research mission of
the university. The resources can be
brought into all levels of that mission, from undergrad to faculty work. And
not just the collections, but the people working in these units. The teaching
expertise and potential of the individuals working in these units is
significant for research
methodologies. As hard as it can be for students and faculty to find what
they’re looking for in the library collections? There’s often even a greater
division between those people and the unique collections.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
But A&SC now—and hopefully always will—have a greater mandate, a larger
audience than just the academy. The people working reference in those
departments are working with the community users who can include k-12 students
doing History Day projects. Or somebody who googled into a finding aid and
discovered some reference to a distant family member. Or explaining to a
journalist as to why they may not have access to that collection or those
records due to HIPAA or FERPA. This user experience, of working with quite possibly
the most diverse audience that any information professional might, translates
well into the classroom and into the teaching of research methodologies.
They’ve already learned instruction is always more effective when tailored to
the topic. They understand how foreign this kind of research is to most
students and often faculty as well. They can present solutions, research
methods that can get people over the worst of that hump. And even more, because
they’re so attuned to working with non-synthesized information, they often come
up with creative approaches to research.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
In the perfect world of the future, the information about A&SC materials is fully and seamlessly accessible through all of the
library search engines, meaning that those seeking information resources in the
library don’t have to go to several pages or into several databases or catalogs
to find that information, even assuming they know to do so. At my institution,
our finding aids are being indexed by Serials Solution so that any student
using the <a href="http://uaa.summon.serialssolutions.com/" target="_blank">QuickSearch</a>—the library google—on the main library webpage is not
only accessing the library catalog and a significant number of our subscription
databases, they’re also accessing our full-text finding aids. And this was at
no added cost to our Summon subscription, since those subscriptions usually
allow for a number of local information databanks to be added to the system.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
In a perfect world, there’s not only no question that A&SC resources are necessary to the functioning of the academy, there’s shock at the
thought that someone once might have thought any other way. In a perfect world,
perhaps all library materials, databases, monographs, gov docs, A&SC resources are all seamlessly integrated in reference. In a perfect world, the
Institutional Repository includes not just the publications and datasets of
faculty, graduate theses, but the university publications, finding aids, and
digital materials provided by A&SC.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
This is the vision, encapsulated (and I should point out, much of this
is already happening at many institutions): The collections of A&SC are incorporated
widely in curriculum. The expertise
provided by the librarians and archivists working in A&SC is regularly called
upon. A&SC is a magnet for donors both fiscal and for
collections. Where the track record of A&SC in meeting and
exceeding the goals of their grant applications expedites the ability to bring
in more grant funding. Where grant funding is coming from a wide array of
granting agencies, both public and private. Where decisions are access driven. Where
collaboration is happening with other institutions' A&SC units with
collection overlap. Where it’s a safe place to take chances, just to see what
the results will be. Where the community—academic and non-academic alike--feels
an investment in the collections and provides support.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
But here’s the thing. Visions are nice. But the theoretical only goes
so far with me, especially since it’s often hard to tell what will work and
what won’t, what is needed and what isn’t, until you are at the institution for
a while. The vision is only as good as the steps you take to get there, if there’s
a commitment of resources, the support, the time, personnel, funding, to get
there. If you have a path designed. But a flexible one: that recognizes that
roadblocks and emergencies happen and occasionally detours are a good thing. Where
you’re attending to the daily work but making sure that feeds into the
progress.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;"><br />
Here's what I think are some of the considerations that we need to have in both designing a
vision and designing the strategic plan that allows you to reach the goals of
the vision.<br />
</span><br />
<ul><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">
<li>Flexibility. Sometimes things just don’t work they way
they’re supposed to work. Sometimes the vision and goals change. Sometimes the
support resources disappear. Usually things take longer than you want them to
take. You have to deal with all of that. It’s not only strategic planning, it’s
contingency planning.</li>
<li>Change. I
know the phrase “change is inevitable” is trite, but it’s true. If there’s no
difference between where we are and where we want to be, than we can stop
working on all of this. Sometimes you have to let go of functions and duties
that may seem central to the work now to make room for the new work.</li>
<li>Commitment
to the vision and goals from existing stakeholders. There’s nothing more
impossible to do than effect change in an institution without the support of
those involved.</li>
<li>Assessment.
It doesn’t always have to be formal, but it needs to be done. And it needs to
be done constantly and it can be worked into the daily workload—it doesn’t
always have to require a huge commitment of time. Who are your users? How do
they use your materials? If I had to pick the single best library quote for the
last decade, my choice would be the one about if you’re having to train people
to use your tools, your tools are broken. If nothing else, assessment allows
you to demonstrate the effects of the work you’re doing by providing use data.</li>
<li>Daydreaming.
You need to plan for who your users and stakeholders might be as well as who
they are. An occasional brainstorming session, or a troll through the
university catalog or faculty directory can create some wonderful results. I’ve
been able to build new user relationships through my membership as one of the
faculty on the graduate curriculum review board. I hear what people are
proposing for curriculum and I can figure out how we fit into it.</li>
<li>Transparency.
Let people know what you’re doing and why. Don’t cover up the failures. Learn
from them and move on. And share the lessons learned. Related to that:</li>
<li>Document,
document, document. Write down the processes. Write down the procedures. That’s
true for everything from reference requests to shelving procedures to
descriptive standards to collection policies to outreach methods. And to save
you even more time, put that information up on your site on a wiki so others who
want can see it for themselves or that if it needs to be amended, it can be
done easily.</li>
<li>The boss
wins. If the people in charge don't like it, it doesn’t happen.
That’s not to say that I don’t advocate for my position, that I don’t try to
change their mind, but I learn when no means no. And I figure out a substitute
or an alternative path.</li>
<li>Remember the
why. Sometimes when you’re knee-deep in legacy finding aids that need to be
transformed into a standardized form or in a basement full of old boxes covered
with spiderwebs and bat droppings and you’d rather be out having cocktail
parties with potential donors, you need to remember that it’s only 10:00 am and
it would be unseemly. The drudgery is not always fun but you can’t always fob
it off on students and volunteers. Yet the work still needs to be done and you
need to dedicate some of your time to doing it so you can finish that piece of
it eventually. Doing that work can also help inform the process: the easiest
way to find the quickest method of doing a repetitive task is to hate what
you’re doing: often the solutions and shortcuts become more obvious more
quickly.</li>
<li>Balance tact
with necessity. One of my donors came in a few months ago
prior to cleaning out her office and asked me if I wanted all her
plaques. The answer to that, of course, is no. We don’t. Nobody wants plaques.
They’re heavy and take up tons of space and create preservation concerns and
nobody ever asks to see them. (I generalize, of course). And we have some serious space concerns. But this is a very important donor who has
brought in many other collections and some serious
funding to our library and to our university. She’s also a wickedly smart woman and as she asked the question was
watching me quite closely to read some of the thoughts that I thought I’d been
hiding behind a fairly well-developed poker face. And before I could even open
my mouth, she started laughing and said: “I know what the answer is going to
be, I just want to hear how you phrase it.” And tactfully, carefully, I
explained that since we are an archives within a research institution, one of
the things we have to be very aware of while collecting is how those collections
support the mission of the university. And while plaques do indeed provide some
evidence of who she is, how important she is, and how she is regarded, they
were of limited research utility. She turned to one of my archivists who was
standing right next to her, elbowed her, and said “And that’s how you do it.” I also told her I’d be happy to photograph the
plaques and keep those digital images with the collection. And it turns out that she's all right with that.</li>
<li>Advocacy.
Support can come from the most unexpected places. Researchers can become
donors. Donors can become researchers. Former colleagues may become volunteers
in retirement. Stay attuned to the needs of your stakeholder groups and meet those
needs when it’s appropriate. Keep advocacy toward the top of whatever you may
be juggling at the time, and try and look at things through the lens of
advocacy. </li>
<li>Staying
open. You never know. This is true for anything from discovering talents and
skills in your colleagues to donor work. I’d like to give you a very recent for
example, donor specific. Last night, I went down to the hotel lobby a little
early because I wanted to be sure I’d be there when my ride arrived. And the
very personable hotel clerk asked me what I was doing, why I was in town, what I did, and among other things, turns out he grew up in Alaska. And when I
came back through the lobby door later in the evening, we continued the conversation. Well that conversation wound around again to what
I do and as I was describing to him the types of collections found in an
archives he suddenly got really interested and said, you know, we have a bunch
of those big plastic tubs just full of my dad’s log books from the time when
he was a captain in the commercial fishing fleet. Would that be
something you want? And I said yes, we would very much like to provide a
research home for your dad’s papers.</li>
<li>Focus. You
can’t be all things to all people. Remain open, but when something won’t work,
don’t take it on. I get regular requests for subject or event-focused exhibits. I often say no because of time and financial constraints, but in the
spirit of tactfulness and advocacy, I often suggest that if they’d like to take
it on themselves, here’s an estimate of the time and funding it would take for
them to complete it. Occasionally they’re willing to take that on and do, and
we end up with yet another exhibit or resource to share. The work that went
into developing and populating our <a href="http://picturinguaa.consortiumlibrary.org/" target="_blank">picturingUAA database</a> of historic images was
almost completely funded by an offshoot of our development office that wanted
us to provide them with historic images for the university.</li>
<li>Stay
user-centric. Why collect if it’s not going to be used? Why spend time
reorganizing or writing description that end-users don’t care about or won’t
see? If you almost always see researchers at 4 pm on Friday and never at 10 am
on Tuesday, maybe it’s time to reconsider the desk hours. Tracking user
statistics can be really useful when you’re about out of space and have to
consider what may need to be moved into offsite storage or even what could be
weeded as outside the collection scope.</li>
</span></ul>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #274e13; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">And that, I think, is how you begin to craft the future of archives and special collections and of academic libraries, together.</span>Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-58861202432272881702012-03-28T23:04:00.000-07:002012-03-28T23:05:22.499-07:00ADR-4a: Live homework helpOops, make that 4b as well.<br />
<br />
1. Using Student Center, get real time help from a tutor with one question from one of these articles...<br />
<br />
Mostly this made me curious about tutor.com and how they deal with pretty basic factual questions--do they walk you through finding the answer? Or how do they approach this? I'm procrastinating working on this project because I really don't want to download the software to my laptop (does this bug anybody else?--this isn't specific to this particular project, just anything web-based that makes me download something I don't immediately recognize or know who wrote it...) So this will wait for the Anchorage gathering on Saturday.<br />
<br />
2. Using the Job Center, upload your resume or a recent cover letter for review and feedback. Remember to remove personal info from your document. (You should not share any personal information with your tutors, including your email address, full name, phone number, or anything else that could be used to identify you.) Or: Using the Proof Point Writing Center upload a recent report or essay for proofreading and feedback. Remember to remove personal info from your document. (You should not share any personal information with your tutors, including your email address, full name, phone number, or anything else that could be used to identify you.)
<br />
<br />
I'm waiting on this one, too. My current curriculum vitae is about 13 pages and since I haven't applied for any jobs that request resumes of late, I don't have a shorter version of it. Plus to remove info that would identify me would be an extended process. Same too for anything I've written over the past few years--it would impossible to redact identifying information out of it. So I'm hoping for Saturday on this one, too. I have to admit, I was tempted--for all of a half-second--to upload a cover letter submitted to a recent search committee on which I served, but ethics preclude.<br />
<br />
So on to 4b, instead.<br />
1. Conduct an advanced search in the <strong>Teacher Reference Center</strong> to find articles about “Technology Education” and “Alaska”. How many results were returned? From the results limit your search to full text and published after 2008. Look the list (it should be less than 10 articles).Select and article from the results, using the EBSCO citation feature, copy and paste the APA citation from the article you chose into your blog post for this lesson.<br />
<br />
46 returned. 7 results for full text and 2009-2011. (it wouldn't give me 2012 as an option.)<br />
Manzo, K. (2009). Former Apple Executive to Lead U.S. Ed-Tech Office. <i>Education Week, 29</i>(11), 15-20. [by the way, I didn't copy/paste that because of the 200 lines of html coding it brought with. I retyped it because I forgot that I could copy the text into the html view of Blogger and it wouldn't carry all that code with. Also, I'm too lazy to look, but is the 29 for the volume of the journal really supposed to be italicized in APA?)<br />
<br />
TRC looked really fun, especially after I discovered I could have articles read to me in an American accent, a Brit accent, or an Aussie accent. Turns out the Aussie accent was a woman's voice so maybe not quite as fun as I'd hoped. And apparently the reading is a computer generated amalgam of individual words and letters so all three accents sounded a bit not-too-bright, readers who were reading via phonics and no comprehension. I'd been having some vision issues today so listening to the article appeared to be a great option, but I soon tired of the lack of vocal inflection and got to wondering how desperate I'd have to be to listen to this. I'd much rather pay Sadie with her New Zealand accent to read it to me. (You reading this Sadie? You up for it? I'll buy you a pastry on Saturday in exchange.)<br />
<br />
2. Next search ERIC for “Technology Education” and “Alaska”, how many results were returned? Refine your results to full text and published after 2008. How many results are returned? Look for a title in the results list that does not have a PDF or HTML full text link.<br />
<br />
297 returned. 10 for 2009-2011. Clicked on the title to one that didn't have the PDF/HTML full text links. Perused on down the record til I found the link to the ERIC-hosted instance. Waited about 2 minutes for that pdf to fully load.<br />
<br />
Since I was in a meeting today where we were talking a lot about full text and citation matchers and discovery tools and databases and such, I had to wonder. Why didn't the item have a pdf link if, in fact, it had a pdf link? Very bizarre. Sometimes I wonder about the unnecessary persistence we (global we, or possibly not we at all, but the smart guys who program these databases) expect of our users...<br />
<br />
3. Now search Professional Development to find articles about “Technology Education” and “Alaska”. How many results were returned? From the results limit your search to full text and published after 2008. Looking at the results list are some of the titles familiar? Was there overlap from your earlier searches?
<br />
<br />
57 results, 8 for 2009-2011. I'll have to confess to not reading most of the titles in the ERIC list, but the TRC and PD database results had a lot of the same results.<br />
<br />
4. From the EBSCO interface, click New Search (in the upper left corner) and click on choose databases, check ERIC, Professional Development and Teacher Reference Center. Conduct one last search for “Technology Education” and “Alaska”, how many results were returned? Refine your results to full text and published after 2008. How many results are returned? On your blog post for this lesson, share your thoughts about the value of searching an individual educational resource compared to searching all three databases simultaneously.<br />
<br />
384, refined to 18. What I found fascinating was that of the 18 results, EBSCO listed them as being either from ERIC or PD. Not a one was listed as sourcing from TRC--though obviously many of the PD ones were available through that source, as well. I think for the advanced user, who knows a lot about what they want in their answers, drilling down to one database as a starting point might be helpful. It certainly reduces the number of hits you have to navigate. But for more generalized researchers, ones who might not even be sure of the search terms they're using, I'd tend to advise going with the more generalized searches. If nothing else, the volume of results may serve as a teaching moment to discover the importance of well-chosen search terms.<br />
<br />
Oh, and by the way, I continue to have to log into all the EBSCO databases from my home connect (despite, yes, having an AK IP.) And I had to log into both TRC and ERIC and PD with the library-provided credentials despite there being a lag time of exactly 5 seconds between using TRC and going back out to the Digital Pipeline and clicking on the ERIC link and same for ERIC and PD. Why?<br />
<br />
I wondered if it might have to do with cookies and my browser, so I conducted the same test on the Consortium Library site. I went through databases A-Z, pulled up TRC, logged in using my UAA credentials, then closed the window. Opened a new window, went back in and pulled up ERIC, and got taken right in to the EBSCO host database. So I'm beginning to think it's not entirely me.Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-28827516020344420912012-03-26T12:03:00.000-07:002012-03-28T23:10:36.059-07:00ADR-3: Reader's advisoryThis week it's NoveList and NoveList k-8.<br />
<br />
I've been using NoveList regularly for a few years: mostly to find that title of the book where I remember the plot and a couple of the characters, but am blanking on author and title. The other significant use I've made of it is in relation to an ongoing research project: I did my MA thesis on archives and archivists and how they're portrayed in fiction. Unfortunately last time I checked they're not using that as a controlled vocabulary term (what's wrong with LCSH that they don't cater to me?) so I often have to use broader terms or just archiv* and that messes me up when the review is written by an archivist...<br />
<br />
But I haven't used it--at all--to get suggestions for others I might like. So this use was new.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"><b>1</b></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;">: Use the Read-Alike features in NoveList or NoveList K-8 to find several new authors or titles that you might like to read based on your favorite books. How accurate do you think these recommendations are? How about the Series recommendations?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;">I started with Terry Pratchett, one of the finest writers today. And the first three read-alikes were Paul Di Filippo, Patricia Wrede, and Neil Gaiman. I've not read the first two, will admit, but I was taken aback by the Gaiman suggestion. He and Pratchett co-wrote one of the best fantasy novels I've ever read (my original introduction to Pratchett, in fact) but I wouldn't at all call him comparable. Much darker, a good writer, and I have tons of friends who love his work, but it really doesn't speak to me. I wouldn't consider them similar authors at all. Of the 9 authors suggested, I'd read Gaiman, Spider Robinson, Douglas Adams, Piers Anthony, and T. H. White. A few of whom I liked, a few I disliked, a few I went back and forth on, but none would be that comparable for me except in the broad category (for a few of them) as "humorous sf/f writer." I probably shouldn't have chosen an author that was so sui generis for me. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;">So I switched over to a much more mainstream author: J. D. Robb (better known as Nora Roberts.) And mostly got a smattering of romance authors (including Julie Garwood? Really?) with Tami Hoag thrown into the mix who started as a romance author but quickly segued into the darker suspense novels. Weirdly enough, I like the Robb novels, not so much her Roberts novels (I can't explain but I'm convinced it's a different author) but that may be because I also like mystery novels and enjoy the touch of police procedurals and the more character-driven plots of the Robb books. I guess there's no more character-driven plot than a romance novel, but I was surprised not to find any of the lighter mystery authors not included. I also noted that the first book listed under Robb was listed as forthcoming though it's been out well over a month, so whatever is flipping that switch in the database is a little behind. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;">I couldn't find anything that looked like a series recommendation, so I clicked off to the help screen, typed in series recommendations and a few clicks and new windows later, I found the EBSCO help instructions for finding series recommendations. In a Word doc though? Why wasn't this a webpage instead of a download? So back to the main screen with J D Robb, click the series button, and looked at what I got. First was Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake series which I would decidedly NOT consider comparable. Very different genre and significantly more NSFW status, that one. However some of the others in the remaining 9 leaned more toward the romantic suspense end of things, so might be considered somewhat comparable. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"><b>2:</b> Save several of those selections to your folder.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;">Did. Did so by clicking on the folder icon since I wasn't sure what the save icon would do. (I'm curious: the save icon is traditionally a 3.5 floppy. Anybody else wondering if that will change since hardly any of the youngsters know what a 3.5 floppy is anymore?)</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"><b>3:</b> Often librarians are asked about books in series order. Use NoveList or NoveList K-8 to find a series in series order. (hint: search on the author and use the Series tab at the top of the results list)</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;">I switched over to Nalini Singh on this one, because I was curious as to how the results list would get ordered with the novellas published in anthologies, to see if they'd be in initial date publishing order. (Robb has those too, but with as many as there were in that series, it would take me forever to find them). As it turned out, 2 of the three were in the list in story-line-based chronological order. The third was listed at the end, decidedly in no order at all: neither story-based nor publication-based. So that confused me a little. But it wouldn't necessarily have affected the reader that much--there were only a few clues in one of the regular novels to indicate that this particular novella immediately preceded it. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"><b>4</b>: Check out the Resources section – <b>Readers Advisory Toolbox</b> – on NoveList or the <b>How To Use NoveList</b> support center. What parts of the NoveList website do you thing will be most useful to your patrons?</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;">I'd already briefly looked at the How To Use in my attempt to figure out instructions for the series recommendations. I don't work with patrons in this realm, so it's a little hard to assess the rest of that question. What I'd say is that the suggested authors would probably prove useful as well as the general searching for a book when you can't remember the exact details. The other benefit over other book searches is the ability to sort in order without getting every single reprint and new cover messing up the list--one of Amazon's greatest failures/lacks, IMO, where they rely on users to provide those lists and only give searchers the sort by publication date option. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;">Because I have to...</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;">I worked at Waldenbooks many years ago while I was in college and for a few years after. One day this girl in her late teens/early 20s walks in and comes up to the desk. She says something to the effect of "I can't remember what the book is called but for some reason I think of rabbits." I said (with nary a pause): "The Necromonicon?" She says: "YES!" We walk back to the appropriate shelf, I pull it for her, I ring it up, she pays, she walks out, very happy. I look over at my boss who had watched this whole exchange and who is sitting there sputtering "what the, what the, what the... How did you DO that?" To which, even now, I still have no answer. Had never read the book in question, the girl was dressed preppy, and I have no idea how rabbits enter into the question. Now THAT'S reader's advisory. </span>Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-84046695239322034482012-03-14T19:37:00.002-07:002012-03-14T19:37:35.648-07:00Just realized: ADRThose of you here to read my stuff for the Alaska's Digital Resources class probably don't want to wade through the off-topic postings since this is still my regular blog too and I don't want that to go on hiatus for 3 months. So if you look to the right-hand column part-way down you'll see the calendar of postings and can click on whichever ADR one you want. And you're welcome to read my other stuff, but you certainly don't have to do that.Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-47975821967899473632012-03-14T14:11:00.001-07:002012-03-14T14:17:40.883-07:00The Strumpet ManifestoA friend used the word strumpet the other day in reference to a "tea and strumpets" party which she usually attends. And it got me to thinking.<br />
<br />
There's a lot being said right now about the word slut, which, no matter how you try to ennoble it, just doesn't seem to get there. I originally thought I'd like to do a call to arms: Strumpets Unite! I think, though, that part of the problem here is when people start thinking about other people as groups, instead of individuals, it becomes easier to place labels and stereotype and not to think about them as individuals. Words like slut become easier to throw around without thinking. Just like the classic and much more ubiquitous and insidious: What do women want? What do women want? Who knows? Who cares? The only reason to ask such a question would be in hopes that the answer will allow you to stop thinking about the woman in front of you as a individual with her own wishes, desires, interests. It's a shortcut. Is that such a good idea? (Hear the resounding and echoing NO! in the distance?)<br />
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I looked up strumpet in the Oxford Dictionary of English. Among other things, it defined strumpet as "a promiscuous woman." (1) So I looked up promiscuous and the etymology of that word said it was based on miscere, which is the Latin for "to mix." I quote: "The early sense was 'consisting of elements mixed together'" (2) which for me, pretty much confirms it. Except the woman part. I think guys can and should be strumpets too.<br />
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So this is my Strumpet Manifesto. If it works for you? Great. If not? Write your own. Nobody said we had to be in lockstep. In fact, maybe we'll be doing the world an educational favor if we each--no matter our gender or whatever label is being applied--insist on being treated as a sole person, not to be stereotyped, not to have assumptions made about us. There may be strength in numbers, but sometimes, just sometimes, there's strength in one.<br />
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But hey, I'm an archivist. Unique is my raison d'être. I might borrow, adapt, refine, alter, and frequently do. The end result, though, is me. And if this strumpet stands alone? So be it. As long as I'm recognized as an individual, that works for me. And this list is in progress. I just wanted to get what I could down while I was thinking about it. I may add to it at times. Twelve seemed a good starting point.<br />
<ul>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #93c47d;">I will respect the knowledge and experience of people who have knowledge and experience I don't.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #93c47d;">There's always something to learn.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #93c47d;">I want to remain open to differing perspectives. That doesn't mean I have to approve of all of them.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #93c47d;">I don't need to tell people absolutely everything I know.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #93c47d;">I respect people's choices to be called what they wish to be called and to be defined by what they wish to be defined.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #93c47d;">I do not respect those names and definitions when applied by anyone else without the consent of those who are being labeled.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #93c47d;">Damage to people around me may be inevitable, but I can try and limit the amount of damage I do and apologize when I find out I've done it. </span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #93c47d;">Conversations and discussions are better than lectures, but occasionally lectures have their uses.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #93c47d;">I have many friends who I cherish and no two of them are alike.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #93c47d;">It's <b>FUN</b> to have diversity in my life.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #93c47d;">My life is a work in progress.</span></li>
<li><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #93c47d;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: #93c47d;">The price of admission into my life? Is respect.</span></span></li>
</ul>
And now that I've been thinking about it? Please write your own. Share the link to it below. Steal from mine if you want, if it applies. Or don't. Whatever works for you.<br />
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1."strumpet;" <i style="font-style: italic;">noun. </i><i style="font-style: italic;">Oxford Dictionary of English</i>. Edited by Angus Stevenson. Oxford University Press, 2010.<i style="font-style: italic;">Oxford Reference Online</i>. Oxford University Press. University of Alaska Anchorage - State Wide. 14 March 2012; http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t140.e0822070><br />
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2."promiscuous;" <i style="font-style: italic;">adjective. </i><i style="font-style: italic;">Oxford Dictionary of English</i>. Edited by Angus Stevenson. Oxford University Press, 2010.<i style="font-style: italic;"> Oxford Reference Online</i>. Oxford University Press. University of Alaska Anchorage - State Wide. 14 March 2012; http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t140.e0665860>Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1733621480847572638.post-74605508004771655962012-03-11T16:01:00.002-07:002012-03-11T16:15:49.483-07:00ADR-2: Genealogical Resources.Question 1: [summarized] using the various resources in HeritageQuest, search for a grandparent.<br />
Okay, I did it, knowing darn well I wasn't going to get anywhere with my family. My mom's folks emigrated to the US in the early-mid 1920s and wound up in Detroit by 1930 but since that census year isn't indexed for MI yet, no such luck and I'm not about to read all of the Detroit returns to see if I can find them. My dad emigrated to the States in the 1950s, and so nothing in the US census for them, either. I did search on my dad's last name and found 2 people listed with it: Gottleib Schmuland in WI in the 1900 and 1920 (listed as 30 in 1900 and 55 in 1920 and not found in the 1910) and a Julia Schmuland in Spokane WA (curiously enough where my folks have retired to now) in 1910.<br />
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I spent 2 years of my undergrad working on encoding the 1900 ID census for computer processing for the Idaho Population Project (IPOP) back in the day when computers didn't crunch words so well, so I know for myself what a challenge it can be to read handwritten censuses and transcribe them well. I use the census--occasionally--to try and track down snippets of information on Alaskans in villages (usually easier to read through those short schedules) so this is one of the online resources I consider myself familiar with. So I skipped the second exercise, since I've done it a bunch of times in past, and even played with printouts a little.<br />
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Zero hits on my mother's or father's surnames on the rest of the resources, as anticipated. With the exception of the US Serials Set on which I got this response:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QNox7j5O3Yc/T10jIKVzCtI/AAAAAAAAAKQ/oEMZkNtQGfo/s1600/genie1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="104" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QNox7j5O3Yc/T10jIKVzCtI/AAAAAAAAAKQ/oEMZkNtQGfo/s320/genie1.png" width="320" /></a></div>
Which since you probably can't read that small, tells me that due to licensing restrictions, academic institutions do not have access to this area of HeritageQuest Online. So much for speeding things up by using my work connect.<br />
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As the ADR-Anchorage group was talking on Saturday, somebody, I don't recall who, mentioned that as an archivist I probably dealt with genealogists all the time. It surprised more than one of them when I said "not so much." Our archives has a lot of organizational records and materials created/collected by Alaskan individuals and families, but unless we have the papers of your family or friends of your family, chances are we won't have a lot of material of interest to most genealogists or family historians. Or maybe not that we don't have it, what we do have is scattered, our materials for the most part aren't item-level named indexed, and so somebody doing more general research is unlikely to find the time/result ratio in their favor--best chance is that they'll find scattered and occasional items after having had to go through box after box after box of material, even assuming they were to find collections in our holdings with some sort of connect to the individual for whom they were searching and get it narrowed that far, at least. A lot of the types of documents of broad genealogical value: birth/death/marriage records are either governmental or church documented, and the governmental stuff is in governmental archives and church documents in church hands or similar. The Russian Orthodox Alaska Diocese vital records index is held by the Library of Congress and is available on microfilm in many large libraries in Alaska.<br />
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But when I worked for the Utah State Archives and taught sessions on the types of records that people interested in doing Utah-related genealogy might find at the state archives there, even then I didn't see a lot of genealogists. This was due to two things: the huge presence just down the street of the LDS main Family History Library which held microfilm copies of many of the records we had plus international ones as well, and that a lot of Utah genealogists were doing the research not so much for finding the stories of ancestors, but tracking the family trees. And a lot of the marriage/death/cemetery/birth/probate records we had were indexed with dates and names so that was about as far as many of the genealogists we saw got into our records: just confirming dates and names.<br />
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What I found interesting in the Alaska-specific documents shared in this week's material was the mention of how few court records were included. Or vital stats. A few years back I called up the state's Vital Records office and attempted to inquire as to when the state/territory started keeping birth/death certificates. And was basically told it was none of my business unless I was looking up an ancestor. Which shocked me! I still think maybe the receptionist I got didn't know the answer and didn't entirely understand why I was asking the question if I wasn't looking up a family member, but I'll admit to not having pursued it further. Does anybody know the answer to this? When did Alaska's government start tracking births & deaths?<br />
<br />
Because in other states/territories, governmental tracking of births/deaths mostly started round about 1895-1905. I read a really fascinating book a few years back (title/author escapes me now) and one of the small side points to it was the explanation that it was really the Populist movement of that time frame that got governments to start doing birth/death certificates/registers. Because at the heart of it was public health. If you're interested in infant mortality rates (for example), you need to document the deaths of infants. And in order to document the deaths of infants, you kind of have to document the birth of infants. I realize this is a gross overgeneralization of the causal relationship here, but this is exactly why birth and death certificates--in most places--were handled by the state or local departments of health, and still are in many places. That's why the quantity of genealogical information in these documents may vary in quantity from place to place: the department of health wasn't necessarily thinking that someday these records would be useful to genealogists, but they were thinking in terms of immediate statistical and epidemiological needs. That they've ended up being so useful to genealogists is just serendipity.<br />
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Related to that (since I'm on my birth/death certificate soapbox now) I used to have to point out to researchers that you couldn't entirely trust the genealogical information appearing on death certificates, especially. Because generally it was filled out by a grieving family member who may or may not have been emotionally capable of dealing with the questions at the time. Or if it was filled out by a more distant relative or friend, would they necessarily know the accurate ancestry details? Speaking of family without a clue, my mom just found out in the last couple of years that her mother, Helen Ulm Milchner, who has been gone since the 1980s, wasn't named Helen (and that's probably one of the reasons I've never found her in the Ellis Island database) her birth name was Magdalena. We believe it was switched to Helena when she immigrated to the US and then eventually shortened to Helen which is what she went by most of her adult life. You can imagine the family confusion after my grandfather's death in 2005 when one of my aunts found an insurance policy made out to Magdalena Milchner. Everybody wondered who was this woman my grandfather had named a beneficiary in the 1930s! I'll note I haven't found her under Magdalena either in the Ellis Island database, but I did find my dad's dad & siblings who apparently on their way from Russia via Liverpool to Saskatchewan crossed Ellis Island and show up in one of the ship manifests there. <br />
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But back to court records, naturalization records are phenomenal for genealogical information, especially for those of us who are first, second, or third generation Americans! You can often find the where/when in census and from there find the courts that would have handled the process. This is <a href="http://archives.utah.gov/research/guides/naturalizations.htm" target="_blank">a guide</a> we used when I worked at the Utah State Archives regarding the how-tos and whys of using naturalization records for genealogical purposes. It's Utah-based, of course, but since naturalizations were largely handled the same way nation-wide, there's a ton of excellent information in there on how these records were kept, when they were kept, and how you might go about finding them (Utah or otherwise) AND what types of information you might expect to see in them.<br />
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Toward the end of our ADR-Anchorage meeting on Saturday, we got to talking and foreseeing things about week 2's lesson. We all had a lot of fun comparing not so much our genealogies as all the stories of genealogy gone wrong. Like when somebody was interviewing my paternal grandfather and he somehow managed to add an extra son to his list of children including a date of birth, which is now in a print book somewhere. My grandmother, who knew darn well there was no extra John in the family on any date, just sat and didn't correct him while my grandfather misinformed the nice man doing all the hard interview work. One of the other librarians shared that in her family, all the women were named some variant of Sarah but never went by the variant by which they were named and used a different one, which could probably get a genealogist trying to track this down years later to tear out his or her hair! Or the fact that the banks all use our mother's maiden names and places of birth as their security questions except that whoever had the bright idea to use that apparently never thought about genealogists and the fact that they tend to share that information widely: does this make us more likely to get our accounts hacked? <br />
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But that's [more than] enough from me, once again. I'm going to go read the articles and call it done for this week. Elapsed time? A LOT less than last week! I'm really sorry I'm going to miss next Saturday's meet-up since I'll be out of town: I suspect the conversation will be really lively again! By the way, if you're going to be in Anchorage one of these Saturdays and want to join us, it's open to all. Keep an eye on the <a href="http://facebook.com/adranchorage" target="_blank">Facebook page</a> for the group. We're not currently planning to move the date or time, but just in case.Arlene Schmulandhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06949308066696274097noreply@blogger.com4