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Published byHendra Iskandar Modified over 6 years ago
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“Not My Job”: A Manifesto on Macro-Preservation and Archival Ethics
Rachel Searcy Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives New York University SOCIETY OF AMERICAN ARCHIVISTS ANNUAL MEETING NEW ORLEANS, 13 AUGUST 2013
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MACRO-PRESERVATION ARCHIVES FACILITIES JANITORIAL
Disclaimer: not talking about pure research, but more of innovative practice by shifting the way we were thinking about what we were doing What do I mean when I talk about macro-preservation, and what I want to talk about is the most boring, granular aspect of it Explanation of what we set out to do and why
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Brief explanation of what we did and what we found
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Collections Care and Maintenance
Cleaning Throwing Things Away Collections Care and Maintenance In the act of doing these things and as a result of the efforts, this task and project became much more than just cleaning up and led to more broad and holistic ideas about how we care for our collections and what our responsibilities are
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You have more than you think
Both good and bad You have more than you think
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Pick your battles You can’t make everything perfect
You don’t need to throw away everything – just the things that are not unusable or are contributing to a negative environment
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Space is finite and valuable
Storage space for archives is limited and extremely valuable Don’t waste it on storing things you don’t need Poor space management practices are contagious If you’re using your limited space on storing crap, you’re not using that on your collections
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Constraints and limitations
Don’t reinforce negative stereotypes about archives and archivists as hoarders or the place with all of the old stuff Detrimental in so many ways – potential donors, upper administration, researchers
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Create and maintain best possible environment
The most obvious: it is our obligation as archivists to preserve and safeguard the materials within our possession and creating and maintaining optimal environments is part of that
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Ethics shift What I’ve said is nothing new or groundbreaking
The issue is more that these things are not a high priority because they are not articulated or conceived as being part of our ethical obligation SAA Code of Ethics The way we think about ethics is weighted too heavily toward individual case studies which imply that “ethics” is something we only deal with at individual moments Also weighted too heavily toward situations or instances that we rarely encounter Trend is emerging discussing ethics related to ongoing activities (providing access, processing collections) What is needed is a greater paradigm shift in our understanding of archival ethics away from the dramatic but unlikely to the mundane but ubiquitous.
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