It’s been about eight months since I took the leap to self-employment and building my business. In reality, the transition started much earlier, because it took months of planning and laying the groundwork to follow through on such a major decision. With the end of the year coming up, and today as the anniversary of my LLC registration, I’m reflecting a lot on the major behind the scenes work it took to take the leap.
When I was knee deep in navigating my career transition, I was (and remain) constantly hungry for stories of how people made their own major career shifts. Over the last couple years I’ve received more advice and wisdom from strangers, acquaintances, and friends than I could ever possibly pay back, so I want to share a little bit here about how it went (and is still going) for me. Life is too short to stay in a job that’s making you miserable, but sometimes when you’re in the middle of the misery it’s difficult to even see an exit strategy.
In order to take the leap, I had to talk to a lot of people, and then I had to listen. A lot. And I also had to start listening to sources of information I had never really listened to before.
Over the last two years as I knew I needed a change, I talked to people who had left academic libraries altogether. I talked to interviewers during job interviews for new roles. I talked to people who had moved back and forth between employee and freelancer roles. I talked to friends who were laid off from salaried roles who unexpectedly became self-employed and loved it. I talked to friends who voluntarily left salaried roles to deliberately become self-employed and loved it. I talked to formerly self-employed people who decided it wasn’t for them and went back to salaried roles. I talked to retired people. I talked to people in my network who ended up becoming some of my first clients. I talked to self-employed librarians/archivists/museum people who had been doing it a long time who helped me see what the day to day would look like (and every single good, bad, and ugly thing they told me about all happened within the first six months I went out on my own).
I talked to my friends in group chats. I talked to my friends over phone calls. I talked to my friends over beers. I talked to my friends over ice cream. I talked to my friends so much I got to a point where I felt sheepish about continuing to talk about it. I talked to my parents (my dad told me that one of the best jobs he’d ever had had started out as a part-time consulting gig when he was between jobs). I talked to my cousin, who is like my sister. I talked to a therapist. I talked to a career coach. I (silently) talked to God every Sunday morning at 10:00 AM at my Quaker meeting. I talked to a clearness committee at my Quaker meeting. I talked to my financial advisor. I talked to my husband so incessantly that at one point he bought me a shirt on Valentines Day that said QUIT YOUR JOB.
I had to talk to a lot of people because my brain had to see that it was possible, that I was not trapped, that I wouldn’t be ruining my life forever if I left a tenured and unionized faculty librarian role for something else, and that I not only could but maybe should try something new. I had to listen to the stories of tons of other people, see where their paths could inform or inspire or caution my own. I talked, and asked, and then I listened, over and over. But then I also had to talk with myself, and I had to listen to not just my head but ultimately to my body and my gut and my heart in a way I was not used to doing.
I’ve mentioned before that teaching the CalRBS seminar on Archives and Climate Change was a real turning point for me. But part of how I knew intrinsically – almost immediately – that it was a turning point and not a fluke was because of how I physically felt during and after teaching the seminar. I knew this was exactly how I was supposed to feel, by doing the work I am supposed to be doing, and that I needed to figure out how to shift my working life towards that as much as possible. There were some days my face began to feel sore because I was smiling so much, because it was so powerful and it felt so right to be in community with other librarians and archivists who cared about this issue just as much as myself. Nothing in my previous job made me feel that way – in fact, often the opposite.
For the last couple of years in my previous role, I had often tried to describe how I was feeling with a series of pretty grim metaphors – like I was dropped into a forest with no map, or that I was running a marathon where the route kept changing, or that I was on the Titanic and I was the only one who could see the iceberg ahead. But when I started figuring out how to make a business work and how to chart my exit strategy, the metaphor that came to me was that it felt like doing a giant jigsaw puzzle (I like jigsaw puzzles, though I don’t do them as often as I’d like). There are multiple paths to putting together something big and unwieldy, and it can be a lot of fun along the way.
The other physical signal that really confirmed for me that I had made the right choice was that when I gave notice at my prior role, my long-term sleep issues immediately improved. I recently read that our bodies often start preparing for major transitions long before our brain/rational mind catches up. Looking back on this, I think when I finally gave notice, it must have been such a flood of relief for the rest of my being to finally feel heard and respected and honored for the things it had been trying to tell me for a very long time. Since leaving academia, I have increasingly learned to rely on my gut and the way things make me feel in terms of business decision making.
When you are in the middle of making a transition and talking to a million people about how they did it, there can be a point where you cross the threshold from information gathering to reassurance seeking. Ultimately, a lot of people can open the doors for you, but only you can walk through. The single best piece of advice I got from everyone I talked to was my cousin. She said something to the effect of, “Would you rather bet on an institution that is making you miserable, or would you rather bet on yourself?”
I’m about to embark on a major new professional transition: working full-time for my new business, Memory Rising. Memory Rising provides research, consulting, and archival services for cultural and humanities institutions and other organizations, with expertise on climate change, environmental and labor movements, and Ohio Valley regional history.
Memory Rising will offer services such as:
Conducting research on archives, public policy, and environmental issues
Working with cultural heritage institutions on climate change action and adaptation
Providing archival services to environmental, labor, and Ohio Valley organizations that need the guidance of a professional archivist to steward their own archives and historical memory
You can find more on the Memory Rising website and also sign up for a periodic newsletter.
My major professional goal for some time has been to shift climate change to the primary focus of my career in archives and libraries. Until now, it has mainly existed on the margins of my job as an archivist/records manager in academic libraries. Teaching the California Rare Books School seminar and writing A Green New Deal for Archives (coming out soon!) became major turning points in giving me a glimpse of a working life focused on climate change, and I felt an increasing sense of urgency to find a way to make this shift.
I started building Memory Rising a few months ago, as I received more consulting and teaching requests related to climate change. I also have a deep commitment to environmental and labor movements, and my home of Cincinnati/the Ohio River watershed, which is why Memory Rising will also serve those communities with the skills I’ve honed as a working archivist for the last 15 years. I’m thrilled that enough behind the scenes activity has come together to make my professional goals a reality. I am leaving my current role at the University of Cincinnati at the end of April to fully dedicate myself to the work that brings me the most meaning and purpose.
In the coming months, I’ll share more about Memory Rising’s work, and will remain a very active presence within archives and libraries communities, as well as branching out into new communities (I recently joined the American Society of Adaptation Professionals, and have learned a ton!). At some point, I’ll also share my story of what it’s been like to transition from working in academic libraries to starting my own business.
I talked to so many people over the last year as I figured out how to make this leap. I am enormously grateful to the kindness and wisdom of old friends, generous colleagues, and new acquaintances who helped me chart out a way to scale up the work that is so necessary for the continuity of archives and cultural memory in the face of climate change. I’m beyond excited about making this new change. Also, if I’m being completely honest as a risk-averse person, I’m slightly terrified of this leap, but the time is right to do it. Climate change remains as urgent an issue as ever, and our profession needs as much help making the transition as quickly as possible. I hope that my path will cross with yours soon as we build a better world that all of us deserve.
This month marks the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Life on the left in 2003 was often an experience of being in the wilderness and yet it was also a much more populated place than any of the war propagandists from that time period ever would admit. I know because I was a teenage anti-war protester who protested the invasion of Iraq on a weekly basis in Cincinnati with a small group every Friday afternoon on my college campus, and because I went to DC at least once (maybe twice?) to protest the war.
I joined a group called Coalition to Prevent War with Iraq, and after the invasion we changed our name to Coalition for Peace with Iraq. For a time, I was so scared that the government would bring back the draft and that it would apply to women that I compiled a folder with my notes from the meetings I attended, articles, flyers, and news clippings so I could document my commitment to being anti-war and receive conscientious objector status.
In retrospect, it was an intensely archival act carried out long before I had any inkling of what an archivist was. I held on to that folder even as my fears of being drafted ebbed, but I have only recently returned to looking through it. It now serves as evidence of my own witness against the collective gaslighting invocation of “weapons of mass destruction,” built upon a tapestry of lies that resulted in the deaths, injuries, and permanent trauma to countless Iraqis and thousands of military service members.
One of the protests in DC required fundraising to hire the bus to drive from Cincinnati to the capital. I got up in my west side church and gave a little speech asking for donations so our group could ride to DC and protest the coming war in Iraq. Today I am a Quaker, but back then I was raised in a different denomination, and I wasn’t exactly sure of the reception I’d receive. And while several people donated, what I remember most clearly was the middle aged guy who accosted me before coffee hour to tell me that I was wrong, and that the Iraqis would welcome our liberation. And then I went to this big protest in DC, it was so big that the streets were filled for blocks, and I came home and looked for any coverage in the national newspapers at our local library branch and there was nothing. Or maybe there was a small clip on page six, I don’t remember. But I knew I was part of an immense crowd people protesting the war in the nation’s capital, and yet everyone in power pretended that everyone else was just fine with the coming war. And this weekend, when the 20th anniversary is upon us, once again I can barely find any examination or retrospectives in popular media of what was committed in America’s name.
When I sat down to write some of my reflections about how the seeds planted during my anti-war teenage experiences have shaped my politics and work on climate change, what came out was raw and incandescent with fury and grief, to the point where I’m not sure if and how to share it publicly. Perhaps one day I will. For now, I want to share more from my files to show that a lot of us tried very hard 20 years ago to resist the war.
Comments Off on Resisting weapons of mass deception
Like 2021, 2022 was also a tough and weird year. I didn’t finish as many books as I would have liked. Maybe 2023 will be better.
Also, 2022 will be the last year that I track what I read in WorldCat. Now that it doesn’t log the date you add an item to a list, its usefulness for me is much diminished. I’m currently giving a friend’s deployment of BookWyrm a try, and I might just need to stop overthinking things and log what I read in Excel.
Previous highlights posts (also, I’ve been doing this for five years???):
Warmth (book, Daniel Sherrell) – Sherrell’s memoir of being a climate organizer and navigating his own climate emotions is the generational cry (quite literally) in the climate change wilderness I’ve been waiting for. This book was such a gift for processing my own climate rage and grief, something that I long ago accepted will never go away but that I need to handle with care and attention like an old injury.
Grapes of Wrath (book, John Steinbeck) – I somehow managed to get through my whole life without reading Grapes of Wrath or watching the movie. Last summer was finally the right time to read it since I was writing A Green New Deal for Archives and preparing for a trip to California. I knew the general contours of the novel, but I didn’t quite appreciate just how deep the environmental and labor themes ran. The structure of Grapes, with chapters that step away from the main narrative to go down a little historical side trail and back, remind me of Moby-Dick, one of my favorite books. I came down with a severe case of COVID towards the end of reading this, and sobbed my way through the final chapters while I was in the middle of a feverish insomniac spell.
Glimpses of the future
Parable of the Sower (book, Octavia Butler) – I had put off reading this for years, mostly because I was too scared it’d give me a panic attack. The ways in which the world falls apart through civil society breakdown, the election of a demagogue, and climate apocalypse was uncomfortably plausible, and now I understand why so many people consider Octavia Butler to be a prophetic voice. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t stoke my inner prepper a little bit (and I did get my ham radio license a few months after reading it). Parable definitely made me think about what I’d need to do to survive the unthinkable.
New York 2140 (book, Kim Stanley Robinson) – This is the first KSR novel I’ve ever read (I’m about halfway through his Ministry for the Future), and I found it ultimately quite optimistic. Much of New York City may be flooded, but it still exists, which is a profoundly reassuring prospect. What KSR lacks in character development, he more than makes up for in painting an incredibly vivid urban geography. And what I appreciated the most about New York 2140 was just how… whimsical it was. There is so much devastation, but people still have cranky committee meetings, they still drink wine, they still have music. Life goes on.
How we spend our time
Daily Rituals: Women at work (book, Mason Currey) – This book was a sequel (I read the first in 2021), and it made up for the lack of women in the first book. I am a very ritual and habit oriented person, and I really enjoy reading about how other people approach the same.
Four Thousand Weeks (book, Oliver Burkeman) – This was an approachable philosophical book about time and chilling out about the amount we have left. I think if you enjoy Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing you’d probably like this one too.
I’m in the final stretch of writing A Green New Deal for Archives, an upcoming publication in the Council on Library and Information Resources Pocket Burgundy series. The anticipated publication date is spring 2023.
The purpose of this publication is to articulate two major threats to US archives: climate change and a destabilized workforce. I review the historical precedent for major public support for archival work, and sketch out the beginnings of public policy for archives to ensure their future viability and relevance in our uncertain future. Archives are a public good, and this publication will argue that therefore archives need significant public investment for their continuity and survival.
I’m sharing a preview of Section 1 below. I’ll be joining the DLF Climate Justice group on Tuesday, November 15 at 10:30 EST to discuss my work so far and get some preliminary feedback. I hope you can join! If you need the Zoom link, or if you can’t make it but want to share thoughts anyway, please feel free to contact me.
Last week I taught “Archives and Climate Change” for California Rare Book School. I was very excited to teach the course, and it wildly exceeded all of my expectations for the week. I was profoundly lucky to have an incredible group of thirteen students who came to the course from various professional and personal experiences. The success of the week is very much to their credit, thanks to their enthusiasm for active participation, eagerness to share with each other, and openness to learning from each other. I’ll share in a later post what a transformative experience it was for me, especially at this point in my career, but I want to spend this post reflecting on the actual teaching logistics of the course.
This was my first time teaching anything for more than a couple hours, and I knew it would be additionally challenging given the online format. I am glad that the course was offered online, since I felt this would widen the possible pool of students and allow people to participate who may not be able to take the time or expense to leave home for a week. And of course, given my own concern about the emissions levels of professional development, teaching a course online was an obvious choice.
CalRBS asked me to finish the syllabus a month before the course began, and I was glad to start prepping it much earlier than that, since it helped me organize my thinking around the main subject areas of the course early on. It was super important to me that participants had a solid foundation of the science and policy of climate change. It was equally important that they learn about climate emotions and climate grief: based on my own personal experience, you cannot do climate work for the long haul unless you recognize and care for your own emotions. I front-loaded the course with these two areas (spread across two days), so that by the time we moved into talking about the impact of climate change on cultural heritage generally and archives specifically, everyone had both the foundational science and emotional tools to fully engage with the content.
Developing the syllabus was helpful for organizing the basic thematic structure of the class, but I still had to figure out how to organize each particular day. Given that folks have spent 2.5 years on Zoom, and given that I had 20 contact hours for the course, I did not want a course that felt like it dragged. There were a few topics I knew I wanted to cover that would be primarily lecture-based. However, I know that I personally do not learn best from lectures, and neither do many others. I reached out to some of my instructional librarian colleagues at UC for advice, and spent a lot of time reading about classroom assessment techniques and active learning. I also drew on activities I’ve used in various social justice settings, especially those focused on facilitating discussions and building relationships within small groups. Several years ago I attended a climate grief workshop at a Quaker conference that was based on the work of Joanna Macy, and her co-authored book Active Hope was an enormously helpful resource for the week.
Some things I did in the service of setting expectations up front:
I deliberately chose not to record class sessions (except for one super technical afternoon of demonstrating ArcGIS online). I posted PowerPoint decks and course materials (Google Jamboards, Zoom chat logs) at the end of each day in our course folder. I strongly believe recording things by default without a strong pedagogical reason for doing so is a form of surveillance, and that unrecorded spaces allow people to share more freely and with greater candor (especially important given the course’s emphasis on group discussions and sharing).
To that end, I also created a pretty stringent privacy policy for the course, which you can read about in the syllabus.
I asked people to generally turn their cameras on for any group discussions. I assumed that if a camera was turned off, someone had stepped away or needed some offline time to gather themselves.
I held office hours before/after each day, and regularly invited all students to attend for any concerns they had.
I left the Zoom room open during the 90-minute lunch period for anyone who wanted to chat with each other. I usually took this time to make some adjustments to the afternoon portion of the course. Most of these lunch periods were fairly quiet, but towards the end of the week some people would come back from lunch a few minutes early to chat with each other.
What I lack in pedagogical training, I (hope) I make up for in abundant enthusiasm and doing my best to read the room so I can tweak things on the fly based on what it seems like people are resonating with. As a result, I built in a lot of activities and group discussions to keep the energy levels going, and allow the students to bond with and learn from each other. Sometimes this took the form of sending students off into “pair and share” discussions, other times it was in small group (3-4 people) breakout rooms. One of the interesting things about CalRBS is that students apply for the course(s) they want to take with their CV and an application statement. The instructors make the admissions decisions, so I knew there would be students coming in with a wide variety of knowledge and experience I simply don’t have. It was important to me to make an environment rich for learning from everyone, rather than an outdated model in which the instructor is assumed to contain all the knowledge. At a certain point in the week, I thought “I feel more like a facilitator helping the students learn as much from each other as they learn from me, the instructor.” This was a really good feeling!
Maybe my first sign that the course would go well was that I was mildly surprised the first day (which was the most lecture heavy) there was so much chatting going on in the Zoom chat box – to the point where there was a request to download and save the chat to our course’s folder with all the other course materials since there were so many resources/links being shared by students. I happily did so that day (and the rest of the week) after putting it to a vote to make sure everyone was okay with it. When my husband (who facilitates a lot of online groups through his volunteer work) asked about the first day and I mentioned how active the chat was, he said “Oh that’s a very good sign!”
The syllabus is embedded below, but since it doesn’t really convey the depth of what each particular day looked like, this is a very brief sample of some of the activities we did:
Every morning we did a round robin of reactions to the day’s readings. This took about 30-40 minutes, but it was well worth the time. It often signaled to me what might be worth adjusting or cultivating more attention to in the afternoon part of the course. The students often built on what someone else said, or helped draw out new connections.
I really like Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s Climate Action Venn Diagram exercise. On Day 2, we watched the video on her website. Each student then had 10 minutes to fill out their Venn Diagram. Then I sent pairs of students into their own breakout room where they had 20 minutes to interview each other about their Venn Diagram (I sent out an alert message at 10 minutes reminding them to switch turns).
We used breakout rooms and Google Jamboards pretty regularly throughout the week. On Day 4, we had a “choose your own adventure” breakout room/Jamboard activity. Before lunch, students nominated which topics they wanted to discuss with each other (our focus was on what archival practices could be made more environmentally sustainable). In the afternoon, they selected whichever breakout room they wanted and each room created its own Jamboard. Afterwards, we came back to discuss and review the Jamboards in the group.
On Day 5, I expanded the final portion based on student feedback to be something akin to a show and tell/talent show/barn raising as a way to close out the week. Each student had 8 minutes, and could share their ArcGIS StoryMap, their climate venn diagram, or any other project they had been working on/were contemplating in the future.
Here’s the syllabus. Feel free to contact me with any questions! I hope to teach the course again in the future.
Hello friends! I’m honored to teach a course on Archives and Climate Change this summer via California Rare Book School. I would love to see a wide variety of applicants for the course. California Rare Book School is offering scholarships for course applicants, and the scholarship deadline is May 1.
Here are all the details, as well as a preview of the syllabus! Contact me with any questions, especially if you would like more details about what we’re covering each day.
Dates and Times: Monday August 1-Friday August 5, 2022. Synchronous lectures/class discussions/workshops will take place between 10 AM and 3:30 PM Eastern, with asynchronous readings/activities to be completed before/after each day’s live session.
Scholarships:Scholarship deadline is May 1. Tuition is $1200, and a scholarship award provides a tuition waiver for one CalRBS course. Scholarship information: https://www.calrbs.org/scholarships/
Description: Climate change is one of the greatest contemporary threats to archives. Increasingly severe disasters like hurricanes, floods, storms, and wildfires pose immediate dangers. Longer-term trends such as migration and rising sea levels may necessitate decisions concerning the geographic relocation of archives. Archivists and cultural heritage professionals, regardless of where they are located, should understand the threats related to climate change and how it impacts our work and cultural heritage institutions. Participants in this course will:
Learn about the basic science behind climate change
Explore political governance challenges related to mitigation and adaptation
Develop personalized strategies for addressing climate grief and anxiety
Assess how climate change impacts their local region and institutions
Explore how climate change impacts archives and cultural heritage institutions, both in the short and long-term
Develop skills in using simple climate change data visualization and mapping tools
Syllabus Preview
Privacy and Sharing Policy
Climate change can be an overwhelming topic to grapple with, and has the capacity to surface a variety of intense emotions. In order to cultivate a safe community during our week together, participants will be expected to uphold the privacy rights of all participants within the course.
Do not share any written or spoken material by any classmates.
Do not post any screen captures of asynchronous or synchronous portions of this course.
If you choose to share publicly about the course experience (for example, on social media, a blog, or another public forum), keep the focus on your own personal experience and what you learned, rather than discussing the contributions and backgrounds of other participants. The libraries/archives/cultural heritage sector is a small world, and even attempts to anonymize discussion of class participation may compromise privacy.
This is okay: “During the course, I learned how to assess sea-level rise. Using the visualization tool, I realized how many archives on the Gulf Coast, where I lived until I went to college, are in danger.”
This is not okay: “A student from Oregon shared that her public library employer lost a collection of community scrapbooks following a wildfire a couple years ago.”
Week Overview
Day
Subject
Note
Monday, 8/1
Climate Change 101
Tuesday, 8/2
Climate Emotions
Wednesday, 8/3
Climate Visualization/Mapping
Guest lecture: Itza Carbajal
Thursday, 8/4
Short-Term Challenges
Friday, 8/5
Long-Term Challenges
Course Expectations
Each day has a set of pre-readings/resources (which are sometimes websites to explore or videos to watch), and preparations. You should ensure all pre-readings and preparations are completed prior to the first meeting of that day (e.g., ensure you have completed Day 3’s pre-readings and preparations no later than Wednesday morning). I highly recommend spending your late afternoon or evening preparing for the next day so you are not scrambling at the last minute to complete any activities.
Pre-Course Requirement
Prior to the first day of the course, you will write a very brief (1-3 paragraphs) environmental and cultural history of wherever you call home to share with everyone as part of the first day introductions. The definition of “home” is up to you – it may be your current place of residence, a place you used to live in but no longer do, a place with which you have ancestral ties, or any other construction that is meaningful to you.
Wherever it is, your home should be a place you can spatially locate on a map of the Earth – it doesn’t need a street address, but it needs some kind of center point (i.e., latitude and longitude). You will be strongly encouraged to make your home’s location the basis of some of our mapping projects later in the week.
A fundamental part of re-orienting ourselves as stewards of the planet is to unlearn harmful ideas of people vs. nature. Many of us operate without much understanding of the environmental history and characteristics of where we live, making climate change seem like a faraway or abstract problem, instead of something already impacting wherever it is that we call home.
Consider trying to answer some of the following questions in your introduction:
I read fewer books, listened to fewer podcasts, and watched fewer movies than I wanted to in 2021. I doomscroll too much and when I’m not doomscrolling I play entirely too much Two Dots.
Oh well. I’m still here and so is almost everyone I adore. Which is all that matters. I’m taking a break from goals for 2022 – my only aim is to cultivate humility. Truly.
Here’s what stood out in 2021 (past years: 2020, 2019, 2018).
Comforting Stuff
I knew 2021 was going to be tough for a lot of reasons. These helped me get through some rough patches.
Wintering (book, Katherine May) – A book of seasonal meditations on winter and its parallels to the wintry periods of our life. If you are feeling a general ambiance of chilly sadness, pick this up.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (book, C.S. Lewis) – One of my childhood favorites that I came back to re-read for the first time in ages. I’m glad I re-read it, and I’m even more glad it still moves me as much as it did when I was a kid.
The Inner Life of Cats (book, Thomas McNamee) – My cat Clem died early in 2021 and the grief I carried leading up to his death was unlike anything I had ever experienced. This sweet book about cats (with many stories about the author’s own cat) was very therapeutic.
Memoirs
The Diary of a Bookseller (book, Shaun Bythell) – The ups and downs (and weirdos) of running a secondhand bookstore in Scotland. It also made me realize how much I love diary format books, which led to this question on Ask MetaFilter.
The Barbizon: the Hotel That Set Women Free (book, Paulina Bren) – Can you have a memoir of a building? Because that’s kinda what this was. The Barbizon Hotel was a hotel where lots of young professional women stayed in New York back before it was normal for young women to travel freely and stay wherever they want. I found out while having dinner with my in-laws that one of their friends (at the dinner!) had stayed at the Barbizon.
A New Kind of Country (book, Dorothy Gilman) – One of the AskMe book recommendations I got for “diary-style” books. I wasn’t familiar with Gilman’s other work, but basically it’s her memoir of retiring to the coast of Nova Scotia. I loved the description of windy nights!
An Onion in My Pocket (book, Deborah Madison) – Most people know Deborah Madison from her vegetarian cookbooks. I’ve never really cooked from Deborah Madison’s cookbooks, even though I have stuck to a mostly vegetarian diet for most of my life. But after reading her memoir of going from cooking for a Zen monastery to opening a restaurant, I feel like I’m a bit more familiar with her legacy.
When Women Were Birds (book, Terry Tempest Williams) – Whenever I need deep catharsis by way of crying in a fetal position, I reach for Terry Tempest Williams. I think it helps if you’ve already read Refuge since there are a lot of references to the women in her family (thanks to my friend Sam for sending me Refuge many years ago).
Climate Change
Disposable City: Miami’s Future on the Shores of Climate Catastrophe (book, Mario Alejandro Ariza) – I don’t know why this book hasn’t gotten more press. The only reason I found it is because we spent a ton of time in Miami on a trip to visit my in-laws in south Florida, and all I could think of the vast enormous new construction everywhere was “how much of this is going to be under water in 20 years?” So I started looking for books on Miami and climate change and found this. It’s totally engrossing, thanks in large part to Ariza’s perspective as a millennial first-generation Floridian. It made me understand the completely surreal world of south Florida’s culture, urban planning, and real estate much better.
“Living at the End of Our World” (podcast episode, Know Your Enemy) – I’ve talked about Know Your Enemy before, which is easily one of the best leftist podcasts around. This was a very different episode than what they normally tackle, but I loved it because the hosts and their guests talked out loud about things related to climate change, that I often only process privately (stuff like – grappling with how to communicate to children what’s coming, what we’d trade about what’s better now in order to have a livable future, what older people whose existential crisis centered on the Cold War nuclear arms race don’t understand about climate change, leftist aversion to deep emotion as an organizing strategy, etc).
How we spend our days
Laziness Does Not Exist (book, Devon Price) – My friend Ruth recommended this, and it was hands down the best book I read in 2021. I want you to read it as well. If you need a book to help you understand and talk back to some of your deeply seated internalized capitalism, this is the one. I came away with a lot more compassion for myself and some concrete ways of understanding the ways in which all of late stage capitalism depends on gaslighting everyone into buying into the myth of laziness. I rarely re-read books, but I loved this so much I’m thinking about reading it again pretty soon.
The Wisdom of Stability (book, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove) – I picked this book up a few years ago during a Quaker conference, and packed it with me to read at Pendle Hill (a Quaker retreat center). The author is a pastor who writes (from a very faith-based perspective) about what it means to stay put, even though our culture valorizes hypermobility.
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (book, Mason Currey) – I mostly read non-fiction, and love books with very short essays (mostly because I go through long stretches where the only reading I manage to do is five minutes before bed before conking out). Currey’s book profiles various writers and artists and composers. There’s a lot of “Famous White Guy would have his wife prepare him lunch every day, he’d go for a walk and then come back and work for two hours before having friends over for cocktails” but if you can get past those, there are a lot of gems in this book (and Currey put out a sequel featuring all women, which is great!). The thing I remember most from this book was about Marina Abramović’s ritual while she was performing The Artist is Present – that she peed four times before she began each sitting. Perhaps the most relatable thing I’ve read in a long, long time.
CHANI (app, Chani Nicholas + collaborators) – Close friends know that I’m very into astrology. This app is like an extension of Chani Nicholas’s book You Were Born For This. Normally I am not a “yearly subscription to an app” kinda person, but I make an exception for CHANI. I find Chani Nicholas’s voice for the weekly readings to be so soothing I often listen to them multiple times a week on my commute for the calming effect.
As archivists enter our second summer of online conferencing, and the pandemic has gone from “getting under control” with the vaccine rollout to “?????? who knows???” with the variants, people are naturally wondering what conferencing in the future will look like if, and when, it is safe to travel again. We should not go back to the pre-pandemic conference model. We should retain the best of both online and in-person conferencing, and not squander the incredible opportunity we have to rethink how we conference.
One of the blessings and the curses of the archives profession is how incredibly decentralized it is. Many, if not most, archivists belong to multiple location and specialty-based associations. For example, an archivist could belong to a local (Greater New Orleans Archivists), state (Society of California Archivists), regional (Midwest Archives Conference), national (Society of American Archivists), and/or specialist organization (Association of Moving Image Archivists). As a result, it is not unusual for archivists – particularly those with financial privilege or institutional support – to maintain memberships in multiple archival associations. But all of these organizations are independent of one another – which also means all of their annual meetings are coordinated independently of one another.
This is not sustainable, on multiple levels. It’s certainly not sustainable on a carbon emissions level, and given the limited travel budgets of most archivists (many in our profession have to pay entirely on their own dime), archivists have always had to choose which conferences to attend and which to skip (I have no evidence to support this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if attendance at regionals increases in the years that SAA is farthest away from that region). Even for those of us with institutional travel support, it is likely that our travel budgets will take a hit in the future, or certainly will not keep up with costs.
After attending a number of online conferences this year that were traditionally held online, I have been hearing the following comments about the future of conferencing:
“For years I could not attend this conference due to caregiving obligations/disability concerns, and now that it’s online I can finally participate.”
“I like the ease of conferencing from my desk but I also get interrupted by work all the time because I’m still at the office instead of in a conference hotel.”
“I can actually afford to attend as a low-income archivist because I don’t have to pay for a flight and hotel.”
“I enjoy the online sessions but I miss the in-person contact with colleagues from other institutions who are a major part of my professional support network”
All of these concerns are important and valid. We have to take them seriously and not pit them against each other. Presenting the future of conferencing as in-person vs. online is a false choice, because there is a hybrid model we can begin preparing the groundwork for today if we are serious about creating an equitable and sustainable profession.
Learning from the Nearly Carbon Neutral and Distributed Models
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, a conference model called the Nearly Carbon Neutral (NCN) approach started circulating in humanities academic subdisciplines. The genesis for the first NCN conference in 2016 arose out of the recognition that academics who take long-haul flights even just a couple times a year for conferences incur significant carbon footprints.
The original Nearly Carbon Neutral approach is very much based on a primarily online model of pre-recorded lectures with interactive Q&A, but subsequent iterations of the NCN model developed a local node distributed system: “sites of collective, face-to-face engagement with the virtual conference.” This was used for the 2018 conference of the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA). In their fascinating and comprehensive post-conference reflections post, the SCA organizers noted that their traditional biennial conference typically drew 200 mostly US attendees, but the distributed approach brought in over 1,300 people from 40 countries with 50 local gathering nodes. Due to the international level of participation, the conference organizers had to figure out how to schedule the sessions across time zone differences and create a web presence that could sustain 24/7 access needs.
The SCA organizers ran some back of the envelope math about how much energy was saved from their 2018 experiment:
[A] conservative estimate of the environmental benefit of this experiment is about 425 tons of emissions saved. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, that’s about the same as 100 cars driven for a year. It’s like taking 11,500 cars off the road for the duration of the three-day conference. Go anthropologists!
A proposal for HACS: Hybrid Archives Conference Strategy
Archivists are already highly networked through existing local/state/regional groups, which provides us with fertile ground to experiment with a distributed/hybrid/decentralized conference model. While the local/state/regionals are independent from the Society of American Archivists, there have been efforts in recent years to develop some coordination among these organizations, most notably through the Regional Archival Associations Consortium (RAAC):
The Regional Archival Associations Consortium (RAAC) provides a mechanism to connect the leadership of regional, multistate, state, and local archival organizations with each other and to the Society of American Archivists (SAA). RAAC seeks to facilitate information exchange and foster collaboration among these organizations. It offers formal channels to coordinate efforts intra-state, interstate, and with SAA which facilitate streamlining actions, reducing costs, and increasing services.
The regionals are a natural way to site nodes for a distributed and decentralized hybrid conference model. Let’s take a look at what the map of our regionals looks like right now. This is a little confusing, because some states are part of more than one regional organization, especially in the Conference of Inter-mountain Archivists and Society of Southwest Archivists (for example, New Mexico and Arizona are both part of SSA and CIMA), as well as the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference and Delaware Valley Archivists Group regions. But the tl;dr is that if a state in this map is colored in, it is part of one of the following 8 regional organizations:
Conference of Inter-Mountain Archivists
Midwest Archives Conference
New England Archivists
Society of Southwest Archivists
Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference
Northwest Archivists
Society of Rocky Mountain Archivists
Delaware Valley Archivists Group
For our pilot conference model, let’s pick 10 node cities:
Miami
Boston
Washington DC
Chicago
Dallas
Salt Lake City
Los Angeles
Portland
Atlanta
Albuquerque
…if you draw a buffer of 350 miles out from every city, you can see how much of the country is covered.
If you want to noodle around with these maps, you can access a public version to play around with them. Note that not all of these nodes are within an existing regional organization, but every state that is not in a regional has its own state-level association. So for example, Miami, Atlanta, and Los Angeles would be respectively covered by the Society of Florida Archivists, Society of Georgia Archivists, and Society of California Archivists (again, for the non-archivists out there, even though all of these names sound suspiciously similar to “Society of American Archivists” they are all independent autonomous groups with no official subordinate relationship to the SAA).
Any good pilot project deserves an acronym, so how about HACS: the Hybrid Archives Conference Strategy. It already sounds a lot like another acronym we’re already familiar with. There are infinite iterations you could come up with for a hybrid schedule, and the following is just one example. In our example, SAA and the regionals essentially combine forces into a 3-day hybrid conference.
My extremely half-baked ideas on some guiding principles:
Ideally, all nodes are roughly equivalent in terms of anticipated audience, registration costs, and programming offerings, though one may need to serve as the “command center” for technology purposes and hosting things where SAA staff may need to be on-site (e.g. Council meetings and the annual business meeting). This may need to be Chicago given that its where the SAA offices are headquartered. Care should be taken so that the command center doesn’t simply default to being the conference location everyone wants to go to and defeating the point of a distributed model.
Nodes should be located in cities that support multi-modal transportation, including rail.
All nodes should offer on-site childcare. For more about the importance of childcare provision at archives conferences, please see “The Cost of Care and the Impact on the Archives Profession” by Braun Marks, Dreyer, Johnson and Sweetser.
Roughly half of the overall programming would be overseen by SAA (“national”) and half would be overseen by the state/regional organizations (“local”). A roughly equal mix of nationally-selected and locally-selected programming would be offered at each node.
Presentation proposals could be sent to either the national or a local program committee for consideration. Topics of a broad national interest should be sent to the national program committee, while institutional case studies or highly localized topics should be sent to a local program committee.
One challenge may be that a panel accepted by the national committee is more likely to have presenters from disparate regions. In this case, they may be encouraged to deliver their panel from the node closest to the majority of panelists or in special circumstances the panel itself may require hybrid delivery (half of the panelists in one location and half in another) orit may be a panel that is simply pre-recorded if the logistical concerns about getting everyone together are difficult to resolve.
Any content from official nodes should default to streaming & recording online with interactive Q&A at the end to accommodate remote viewers unless there are good reasons to keep it offline (for example, confidentiality concerns, workshops with significant hands-on work meant for small in-person groups, etc)
All conference registration will happen via nodes. Conference registration fees should be roughly similar at all nodes to incentivize minimal travel. In other words, you don’t want LA to be $400 and Albuquerque to be $50, because then more people might go to Albuquerque, thus defeating the point of a distributed model. This may require use of alternative non-hotel venues in some cities.
All nodes would have at least some rooms dedicated to streaming in panels from other nodes.
Anyone can register as a fully-remote viewer that enables access to all recorded sessions. Access to all recorded sessions will be automatically included in anyone who plans to attend via a node.
People may set up unofficial nodes outside of the official nodes for the purposes of increasing viewership and accessibility by using their remote viewer registration (notice in the second map that there are major parts of the Plains states that are not well-served by the hypothetical set of nodes). However if the unofficial node hosts more than a couple viewers, they will be strongly encouraged to make an additional donation to the closest node to them to support the technology investment required for content delivery.
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Early AM: Local workshops and local governance meetings (for example, MAC’s business meeting)
Early AM: Conference sessions (50% selected by local program committees, 50% by national program committee)
Early AM: Conference sessions (100% selected by national program committee)
Late AM: Local workshops and local governance meetings (for example, MAC’s business meeting)
Late AM: SAA Plenary
Late AM: SAA committee and section meetings
Early PM: Conference sessions (100% selected by local program committees)
Early PM: SAA committee and section meetings
Early PM: SAA annual business meeting
Late PM: Conference sessions (100% selected by local program committees)
Late PM: Conference sessions (50% selected by local program committees, 50% by national program committee
Late PM: Conference sessions (100% selected by national program committee)
Some Concluding Thoughts
I know that inevitably some people will consider this and immediately ask “OK sounds cool but what about….?” I’m sure there are plenty of contingencies I haven’t considered. But I hope that all the reasons I’ve laid out for why we should try this are compelling enough to give it a try.
One very obvious challenge of putting together something like this is that there is less time for stuff, and inevitably a lot of things will get cut that normally wouldn’t happen in the status quo environment of more conference time (4ish days for SAA, 2-3 days for regionals). And honestly, after serving on numerous governance and programming committees, this should be thought of as a good thing. Not only do I think that our conferencing model is unsustainable, I also think the vast array of committees and sections and working groups that exist across our national and regional organizations are unsustainable.
We archivists are very good at starting things, but we are very bad at letting things go. We can try to keep all of our conferences and organizations going at the same pace while finding fewer and fewer people each year who are willing to volunteer for new governance and conference planning roles. Worst case scenario, the institutions we work at will make that decision for us as our travel budgets are cut and our profession shrinks by attrition. Or we can avoid both of these less than ideal scenarios by preparing new ground to transform into something better than what we’ve always known. It is time to say goodbye to our old conferencing model, and begin preparing the ground for a much healthier, networked, and accessible conference culture.
Many thanks to Jenny Latessa in UC Libraries Research and Data Services for her explanation of how ArcGIS handles color-coding symbology.
Perhaps the only thing that worked out well in the hell year of 2020 was that I met my personal reading goal – no doubt aided by insomnia induced by world events as well as spending more time at home.
Keeping up with the past practice (2019, 2018) of identifying the various themes in my favorite media picks, here are some of the highlights.
Women’s Memoirs
I read several of these books at the height of my pandemic-induced stress insomnia around 3-4 AM. Margaret Renkl and Sue Hubbell’s books soothed me the most.
Trick mirror (book, Jia Tolentino) – A wonderful book of essays by one of the most talented millennials currently writing for the New Yorker.
Thick (book, Tressie McMillan Cottom) – I hope that one day I can construct a sentence, let alone a paragraph, like Tressie McMillan Cottom. Another moving book of essays.
Late Migrations (book, Margaret Renkl) – I first noticed Margaret Renkl when she wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about possums. Stories about nature and family in the South.
A Country Year: Living the Questions (book, Sue Hubbell) – Sue Hubbell was an academic librarian who moved to the Ozarks with her husband. Their marriage dissolved but she became a beekeeper. I love her description of the seasonal work and descriptions of her working on her barn, her pets, and working with hives.
Deep Creek (book, Pam Houston) – A memoir of Houston’s life, surviving childhood abuse, and living on a ranch. I stayed up late one night reading the chapter in which she fled a wildfire that nearly wiped out the ranch and it was one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever read.
Public Policy
If you constantly wonder why the US can’t have nice things, eventually you need to read some books about public policy.
Cadillac desert: the American West and its disappearing water (book, Marc Reisner) – Read this if you want to develop some really strong feelings about water infrastructure!!
The triumph of injustice : how the rich dodge taxes and how to make them pay (book, Emmanuel Saez; Gabriel Zucman) – Read this if you want to know how we can finally have nice things and feel justified in your hatred for the 1%!!!
Are Prisons Obsolete? (book, Angela Y Davis) – Read this if you want to learn more about prison abolition but need someone to break it down for you!!
Neither snow nor rain: a history of the United States Postal Service (book, Devin Leonard) – Read this if you love sending and receiving mail as much as I do!!! The US Political Service is arguably one of the greatest things the United States has ever created and we must protect it!!!
Portraits of political leaders/movements
Maybe it’s an age thing but I find that the older I get, the more I enjoy reading biographies – sometimes as inspiration, and frequently as cautionary tales or warnings.
The woman behind the New Deal : the life of Frances Perkins, FDR’s Secretary of Labor and his moral conscience (book, Kirstin Downey) – Frances Perkins was one of the few people in FDR’s Cabinet who was there for his entire tenure, and we still benefit from her legacy through things like Social Security and workplace safety protections. Frances Perkins witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and it deeply shaped her policy work. She died as a broke adjunct who had been housemates with Paul Wolfowitz (seriously). I was powerfully moved by the opening chapter in which FDR asked her to become the first woman in a President’s Cabinet and the decisions she had to wrestle with to say yes.
Ella Baker and the Black freedom movement: a radical democratic vision (book, Barbara Ransby) – I think the whole concept of bibliotherapy is a little cheesy, but this book was both an intensely soothing restorative balm for my anguish about leftist sectarianism and also an inspirational look at how to organize and build power. If your main lens for understanding the Civil Rights movement is through charismatic leaders like Martin Luther King, you must read this book to expand your understanding of the period. Ella Baker is one of my non-sectarian leftist heroines – intensely practical, process-oriented, and no time for bullshit. I think this book might have the most marginalia of any book in my personal library – I was underlining and writing things like YES or OMG or !!!! in the margins of nearly every other page. After I finished it I sent Barbara Ransby an email thanking her for writing such an immensely transformative book that put my own political experiences into perspective.
Before the Storm (book, Rick Perlstein) – I kept describing Rick Perlstein’s book as a biography about Barry Goldwater but then my smarter friends who’ve also read the book pushed back on that description: in their opinion, it was more of a chronology of a political movement. They’re absolutely right. I had been under the impression that the Southern strategy was more of a Nixon-era thing, but Perlstein’s book really helped me understand how much of the current right-wing ideology has its roots in the Barry Goldwater movement. I’m currently reading Perlstein’s Nixonland which is also good, but Before the Storm is masterful on another level.
With Babies and Banners (documentary) – Many know about the 1936-1937 Flint Sit-Down Strike organized by the UAW at General Motors, but fewer know about the incredible role that women played in it. This is a wonderful documentary that has both extremely 1970s/80s labor historian vibes AND big second-wave feminist oral history vibes (i.e. pretty much genetically engineered to be relevant to my interests).
