rambling discourse on my profession

[kivrin]

The bullet on my job that I offer upon meeting people after church is that I'm an archivist, and what I do is read old papers and write about them. The first question I get after that - if I get a question after that, which isn't always - is usually 'how old?' So far, I haven't been responsible for anything earlier than 1650 or so, and the bulk of my experience is probably with what you might call the Greater Bellum Period, or the middle of the nineteenth century. (There are good reasons for always splitting American history at the Civil War, but there are also good reasons to look at the nineteenth century as a whole.)

In my current position I work on collections of family papers. These collections often include business records, but the unifying principle for each collection is the family that created them. My favorite parts of the collections are the personal documents, the diaries, the scrapbooks, the letters among family members. The social history kind of stuff. The gossip. ;)

What I do, anyway, is to read through a collection to figure out what's there and who these people were, arrange it in some vaugely logical structure, and then write a finding aid, which is a document that lists and describes what's in the collection and gives it a little context. In technical archivist language this suite of activities is called arranging and describing manuscripts. (If I were dealing with records of organizations rather than individuals, it would be called arranging and describing archives - but that's a distinction not often observed, so don't worry too much about it.)

Theodicy asked How o how do I gets this job or one like it?

Short answer - you beg your way into some experience doing it, and then you hope and pray real hard for a position to open up somewhere you could be. You hope extra hard for a position that's not term-limited. And if, after getting a little hands-on experience, you feel confident that this is really for you, you might go get yourself an MLS with a concentration in archives, or an MA in history with an archives certificate. It's quite possible to get hired with a strong humanities background and a good writing portfolio, especially if you have some experience, and double-especially if you have some experience and some expertise in subjects covered by collections in the institution.

My trajectory into the field was that I was always interested in librarianship, and I was pretty much always a history geek who loved primary sources and mostly got headaches from theory. I had a crisis of confidence the summer before my senior year of college when I realized that reference librarians have to spend a lot more time explaining that no, the fact that you pay taxes does NOT entitle you to take the OPAC terminal home than they do answering questions like "Did Leonardo Da Vinci really invent the helicopter?" After graduation I spent a year as assistant to the director of a small library, doing a little work in the tiny archives in the afternoons, and during that time I discovered that there was a profession I could pursue in which I'd get to play with the primary sources all day long and never have to worry about whether or not Nancy Cott had already made the argument I was pondering. And then I discovered that there was a program in which I could prepare myself for that profession by doing a MLS and an MA in history simultaneously.

So I applied, and I got in, and though I received no funding I got an hourly job in the university special collections department (on the strength of my experience) which let directly to being offered an assistantship in the department that gave me tuition remission for almost all the time I was in the program. (It would have covered the entire program but after my cousin's suicide I lost an aggregate academic year to mental non-functionality, and so overstayed the life of my funding.) And then there was a timely vacancy in a grant-funded position at an historical institution in a city I wanted to live in, and I was fortunate enough to meet with the approval of the interviewing authorities, and that, as they say, was that.

Comments

[theodicy.livejournal.com]

Milles mercis! I will read at length when I have finished feeding my ravenous preggo-face making dinner.

[kivrin.livejournal.com]

Mmm, dinner. :) You're very welcome!

[headrush100.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's fascinating. I want to be an archivist now! :-)

reference librarians have to spend a lot more time explaining that no, the fact that you pay taxes does NOT entitle you to take the OPAC terminal home than they do answering questions like "Did Leonardo Da Vinci really invent the helicopter?"

LOL!! Yes indeed. *sigh* Or explaining that that funny looking thing over there is a photocopier, and you do actually need to put money in it before it will work. And no, we have no more coloring pictures because your last coloring session denuded three quarters of the world's paper supplies and the loggers in Brazil can't keep up with your coloring needs. /snarky children's librarian's lament ;-)

[kivrin.livejournal.com]

your last coloring session denuded three quarters of the world's paper supplies and the loggers in Brazil can't keep up with your coloring needs

LOL!

And oh, I feel your pain about the copier woes...