Proof of both worthy aims, they say, is the increasing amount of their archives' unique documents that have been digitally scanned and then put online for all the world to freely see.
Without the need for anymore ozone-destroying air trips halfway around the world to hand-examine the increasingly fragile physical originals.
'But we are of course severely limited by the amount of money our external funders provide for this valuable work', they always hasten to add.
But is this true ?
Or are they really limited by their own half-unconscious self interest ?
The Problem :
Because in fact, very, very, very little has been put online.
So, in the real world, researchers must still first find some considerable free time (good luck young parents !).
Must still apply for public or foundation money to expensively travel half way around the world and then stay in expensive hotels and eat in expensive restaurants --- just to examine what they should be able to see freely online - at home, between diaper changes - in a more enviromentally perfect archival world.
Once inside the archives themselves, the researcher must still engage the services of seemingly armies of archival assistants.
First these assistants are needed to help the researcher locate the documents among the finding aids while still other assistants get the fragile originals off distant shelves and out of dusty boxes.
After the researcher has mishandled the fragile originals enough to be able to read them thoroughly, more assistants take away the now-more-fragile-than-ever remains and carefully repack them and put them correctly away --- till the next researchers' clumsy hands mangles them yet further.
None of this constant packing and repacking, shelving and re-shelving, all for just one viewer, would make any sense in any industry --- least of all for an industry whose product is unique one-time items that really need to be never packed, touched and re-packed again.
It all continues to happen, I argue, because archivists unconsciously still think their primary business model is to hand-sell, first and foremost, to the few (relatively well-educated/relatively well-to-do) clients who can afford to visit the archives in person.
Clients a lot like themselves, if truth be known : people who really appreciate all the work they do.
I was in the bookseller business once and understand the self-satisfaction found in a low level, low-paying job where book-lovers use their special knowledge all day long, helping fellow book-lovers find the books they really need.
Not like the mass of the great unwashed, allowed to view the documents, without their expert nurturing help !, if they were posted online.
The Solution :
Archives need to simply close their doors, with no public visiting hours at all.
No more devoting most of their efforts to the visiting-in-person public, instead a move to dedicating all their existing public-serving-staff's time to scanning documents to place online for the wider general public.
As someone who tries to be as frugal with the public tax dollars as I am with Nature's bounty, it appalls me each and every time I visit the very nice folks (intellectual friends of mine in fact) in our archives.
I generally try to visit distant archives and research libraries merely as part of another trip made for pressing matters of my family.
My single 'research only' trip was to Washington DC because very little there in the National Archives's huge collection devoted to wartime penicillin seemed to have ever been published, on line or in other historians' work.
I might yet have to go to London's Royal Society archives for similar reasons.
If Donald Trump's aim is to destroy the environment in his own lifetime, my jetting to and from London will have helped do its own little bit.
Thanks, archivists....
No comments:
Post a Comment