VALUES

Vita

What is your ideal archivist's path?  Where do you want to go with this work?

Lex

It'll be fun if I can listen to this in five years or 10 years. There's kind of the version that's like the version where I do things that make me enough money to live comfortably. Which is maybe not exactly the same as the actual vision for it. But again, we live in a society so yeah. But I think I'm interested in a couple of different community archives. 

I'm also working on some individual archives with a professor at City College who's like a mentor of mine. That's for an archive of a Black church in Harlem that's been around for a long time. And that's interesting right now because, like, what I'm trying to say about what I'm interested in right now is like I just want to learn lots of different types of things and be in lots of different types of archives. And work with different types of materials. So I can just learn a bunch of stuff about how to do things and build up a little bit more confidence in my ability to tell people like hey, I can handle this or like, I can take care of this for you. Or I can organize this for you or whatever. So that's kind of the phase that I'm in right now.

Vita

How do you approach the people that you are communicating with about their archives? Put another way, what are some of the values that inform your perspective and what informs what the process of working with you is like?You were describing the disconnect between you and your peers at school. Can you elaborate?

Lex

I think I'm figuring that out to be honest. I don't know if I'm in that place yet where I'm necessarily approaching people being like, here's what I can do or here's what I can provide. 

I think one thing this is making me think of a little bit is I feel like in in library school, or in like the intro, archival classes that I've been in, there's this idea that, like, the role of the archivists is to like prepare the archive for the researcher and the researcher is like the one that's really going to be like, interested in what's actually there. 

For me the purpose of archiving someone's materials is to honor them and to honor their work.I want to honor the people who made those choices. 

I care about the things that are in the archive, just as much if not, maybe more than a researcher. I don't know. There is a weird binary between the archivists and the researchers. Like I don't love that. I think it's very, like overly professionalized and also like, this idea that this is only going to become important once someone writes something, probably academic, about it, that someone has to come and find it. And like, before that point, it's not really that important or like, the way they were teaching it in classes about like, here's how you process materials and you like, do it as quickly as possible. I understand efficiency, because there's just a lot of material sometimes, but it's like, I want to read, I want to look at the stuff, you know, and there's kind of this assumption that the archivist doesn't really want to look at this stuff. 

Vita

Yea the disconnect between what we learn in MLIS and how we chose to practice this work feels pretty drastic. I think this is a good place to stop for now. I feel so connected to the work you are doing. Thank you for having this conversation. To be continued. 

Lex

Yes, to be continued forever.