PODCASTS!

Ever since the Bancroft Library moved into their new building and I was often placed in the cold, lonely stacks to work by myself, I have listened to them. I first bought a refurbished iPod to combat the loneliness and creepiness (you try being in an aisle of cartons in a room off to the side with no windows because it’s underground and it’s cold and anyone could turn off the lights at any moment and who knows what’s in that exhaust fan??), but after two days or so I was so sick of my music I knew it was a mistake to buy the iPod at all. And then my super cool Dad asked, “Have you heard of This American Life?” The rest is history?

I first listened to the TAL collection, Stories of Hope and Fear, and loved it; I’ve been hooked since then. I went on to discover short stories from the New Yorker, The Moth, Stuff You Missed in History Class, Stuff Mom Never Told You, random “Learn Spanish!” or “Learn Russian!” podcasts, and more that I have since forgotten because I stopped listening to a long time ago. My current favourites are Marketplace, Planet Money, This American Life, 99% Invisible, Radiolab (which has beat out TAL as my #1), Third Coast International Audio Festival (re:Sound), Snap Judgment, and StoryCorps.

I always look forward to listening to them. I pretty much hate being interrupted on my way to or from class because it is prime listening time for me. I just think they are so full of life, and so interesting, and I have come to realize that the true reason I am so deeply invested and in love with archives is the stories they tell. Podcasts tell stories, just in sound instead of through letters or papers. Archives like oral histories, for the most part. Why have these two things not come together?

Well, that doesn’t have to be asked anymore, because with lots of support from my professor and great input from friends, it’s finally happened: I recorded a podcast session tonight!

I was nervous all day and made sure our “recording studio” (my study) was perfectly set up with my fairly cheap microphone and its very own stand — our laundry basket. I set up three chairs around said laundry basket, plugged in the microphone, downloaded Audacity (which was recommended to me by my longtime friend, Jorge over at the Experience Points podcast, who also used to work with me at the Bancroft Library during the golden years! Thank you Jorge for the help!), played with that, tried to go over my notes but found myself too frazzled, and then brought out the wine bottles. Laura and Prairie came over and confessed they were pretty nervous too! We knew it was just going to be the three of us but still, everything we say … recorded? This is new.

I purposefully want this podcast to be about archives, but in an informal, accessible sort of way. It’s not only meant to be a sort of marketing to the public but I do want anyone in the public to find it interesting too. I also want people in the field to find it interesting, obviously. The three of us are getting more of a post-modern, theory based education in archives now, so we might be ruffling some feathers, but I hope if we do, it’s in a constructive way. I see us interviewing archivists all over the country about their collections and telling funny little anecdotes. I see us talking to folks working with indigenous peoples about how to archive non-textual formats. I see us having a good time, but at the same time being a spokes-place for human rights and social justice in the archives.

We recorded for nearly 40 minutes. There’s only a little editing for me to do. I’ve learned how to “cut” already! Derek wrote us a song for it which I will be posting on our Facebook page soon, so I will also have to get a good recording of that and learn to edit the two together. We also want to have a logo contest for the website and for the Facebook page (please contact me if interested!). And, I need to work on the website. There’s a lot to do, but I’m excited for it. It’s already nearly 1am and I’ve been editing for a while when I should’ve been working on an outline for a paper. (Don’t tell, will you?)

So with that, I invite you to keep watch over us, and go Like us over at the Sound of the Archives Facebook page. We’ll keep you updated! I hope you are as enthusiastic as I am. :)

Sound of the Archives, first recording !

When Derek and I drove across the country to get to Madison, I purposefully looked for a non-wifi Bed & Breakfast off the beaten path (and oh boy, did we find it in the middle of Nowhere, Wyoming). When I studied abroad in London in even 2007, I already loved how my phone plan was too expensive to text or call often, so I just left it in our flat. I felt not only free from this pull to remark on things I saw to a friend through a text (“omg! a man is selling roasted chestnuts in front of the British Museum!”) but I loved that without it I didn’t have a clock at all either. It felt like a very, very quiet and timid jab at the modern world, ever so scripted and scheduled.

On Pinterest, I find myself pinning images that exude quiet and contemplation, simplicity and thoughtfulness. Friends planning weddings (or most often not) love to pin farm-like ones, with rustic barns and a simple spread on a wooden table under a tree. Fascination with good cooking is partly a fascination with being not distracted while you focus directly on the beautiful, tasty meal YOU are going to create with your own hands — your own hands! Is this getting too Marxist, a desperate desire for us to be shaping the world around us through the materials we shape?

So there’s these trends, for the wholesome and pure. Just bread. Just olive oil. Just wine. A lot of my 25 Before 26 goals and then general changes to my life I wanted to make had to do with being more selective, to slow down, to focus. I’m pretty sure part of my new lust for living in Maine mostly comes from just this idea of it in my head, that it would be slower there (maybe because everyone is frozen …).

These trends are a backlash to the information overload idea, the idea that so many books are being written about these days. We do more at our jobs because budgets are crunched, we do more in school because the competition is so fierce. Even relaxation has competition: do I watch a movie or TV show on Netflix, do I play with the Wii, do I play a game on my computer, do I listen to music, do I listen to a podcast, do I read blogs, do I read The New Yorker, do I read a book that’s not related to school, do I partake in some arts ‘n crafts, do I explore my new town more, do I go out to dinner with my boyfriend or friends, do I go to a bar, do I go to a cafe, do I repeatedly cycle through Twitter Facebook Pinterest LinkedIn Gmail WiscMail Yahoo!Mail … Boredom is not an option. Distraction is the way of life.

Is there even a point to a vacation from it? I went to the middle of Nowhere, Wyoming, where we barely had cell phone reception and no Internet. But then we went to bed, got up, and drove back into town. Our brains didn’t feel magically refreshed. They wouldn’t have after a week either — I am almost always more tired after a week of “vacation,” mostly because 1) I know I have to face a lot of work and 2) I usually feel like I should use the vacation time wisely by either cleaning up after a mess or preparing the deluge to come.

I don’t think I can sustain this lifestyle without going crazy and I don’t think a vacation would work. So a lifestyle change, then?

Here’s the crux for me: if you remove yourself from having an online presence, it is suspect these days. I used to work at the Career Counseling Library and we gave workshops to staff members of UC Berkeley about job searching. Social networking was, of course, hounded into them. If you don’t create a presence for yourself, perhaps you’re not fit for the organization. And they notice if you created a LinkedIn profile on the fly that took 5 minutes and then never checked it again. Everyone wants you to be engaged and dynamic. Presence “proves” this.

In library school, there’s constant suggestions for an active professional Twitter account, a blog (hi there!), or other social media networks (a new one devoted to LIS students just opened or perhaps Mendeley is right for you). Librarians and archivists have to embrace social networking just as much as other businesses to advocate for their services — they have to do so to be heard above the others. And we as students are expected to juggle the classes with hundreds of pages of reading per week plus papers/projects to boot, at the very least one internship (but most likely two or more jobs and some other volunteering), student groups for organizations like ALA or SAA, and be on the look out for interesting articles/tweets/status updates related to our field. Even better if you can talk about it eloquently.

It’s a bit of a catch 22. Activity is good because supposedly, it shows you are engaged with the profession. But is that true? If you’re always posting, when are you doing? “Don’t confuse passion with competence.”

Maybe I can’t do an abrupt lifestyle change — as much as I say just living in a small farmhouse in rural Maine with a raspberry patch sounds nice, I would probably go crazy after a week — but I can do other things to combat it. I’ve been slowly downsizing the amount of people I connect with on Facebook, moving acquaintances into that category, unsubscribing from acquaintances’ statuses, asking for just “important life updates.” Some of the people or organizations I felt obligated to follow on Twitter? I realized that’s frankly whack — I am not obligated. I am not obligated to follow all of the library/archive bloggers; everything is a suggestion. I’ve been slowly unsubscribing from more. The articles that are truly interesting, I want to give my full attention to. If I share an article on any platform, it has to be one that isn’t a passing interest — a headline that looks good and relevant to my field — but one that resonates with me on a deeper level, that is written well, and so on. I read recently that most websites are only visited for 10 seconds. I’m in that statistic; with how much I felt like I needed to read or look at or watch out for, I would try to zoom through websites. It’s a bit like skimming an article too quickly though just in case the professor asks a question: after class, I will never remember that article, and what’s the use in that?

I can’t see myself anytime soon breaking off to go live in rural Japan without any cell phone reception, Internet, or other means of communication. But I can see myself focusing in on what really interests me. If all goes as planned, the extra noise I contribute to the Internet will be more like a well written melody.

When I first started using Pinterest, I wanted to suggest to my SAA Student Chapter that we try to incorporate the site somehow. At all of our archival jobs, we find the neatest things — couldn’t we share that? Couldn’t we find a way to share a quick image and get people to see the wonderful things involved in these papers? But there’s copyright, working with institutions most of us are only working for less than 10 hours a week, digitization & scanning, the metadata, so much involved. I let the idea drop — it wouldn’t work for us, not now.

But I’ve been very happy to see in just the last few days that Pinterest is really picking up with museums and other repositories! I really think there is a wealth of possibility here. There is the problem that if you put the identifying information relating to your institution underneath the image, someone else can easily change it. However, when you “repin” a picture, the link to the picture is automatically still traced. Ideally, you can pin a fantastically surreal image of some little girl of the 1840s that everyone will be taken with, and will repin over 400 times — but the link will always go back to your website.

I leave you with four posts I recently read about this new tool:

• ArchivesInfo: Pinterest for Cultural Heritage
• burnsscotland: Pinterest
• Museum Diary: Museums and Pinterest, an Introduction
• Best of 3: Pinterest and Museums

I’m all for theory. I love theory. I love not believing in someone’s theory and feeling superior for it. Just as I love practicing: being on the job, working with patrons, being able to say that I have learned this software program or that program.

Rather, this is a quick, hard jab at high-falutin’ talk around and about theory.

Write simply. Say it simply. It is more beautiful that way.

Three students in the UW Madison program created this wonderful project centered around art inspired within libraries called Library as Incubator, and it has thrived since originally launched. It’s really quite imaginative and inspiring on its own. Because Bookless was so focused on art within the library, I actually thought the idea came from this project. However, according to their blog, the idea came from the Gallery Coordinator Trent Miller of the library as a fundraiser. And as far as I can tell, not only was the fundraiser a smashing success, the marketing of libraries was one too!

The first great idea that I loved from this event: it wasn’t targeted to only children & families or adults (and hipsters, haha). From 10am to 2pm, families were highly encouraged to come check out the fun. I didn’t attend then but I heard from classmates who volunteered that it was extremely fun to see the kids so excited to paint on walls and do other fun art projects! Then Bookless opened again at 7pm with a bar for us adults. Lots of people were still drawing on the walls. There was a section devoted to stamps and old stickers (I put one of my face, Rainbow Brite style). There was a fantastic photo booth. Downstairs in the basement, music boomed and a trippy video played to it. Ghostlike, creepy figures hung from the walls. Art installations hugged the walls and were placed between the frames of the old stacks. The lockers of the “Lower Staxx!” workers were on display.  The pneumatic tubes were used by the Oracle. Upstairs, the old fiction room was used as a stage for various bands through the night. And, of course, more art was on display!

Everyone I saw seemed to be having fun. Unfortunately for me, it was a little too hot and smokey, so I went home feeling a little faint and overheated. Water and sleep helped me immensely. Other than that, and sometimes too-low lighting, there is nothing bad I can say about the Bookless event. Huge, huge kudos to the Madison Public Library!

Some of my photos were also used for this post from the Society of American Archivists UW Madison Student Chapter. It’s a definitive end to the Archives Month blog for 2011. I encourage you to go read that too! I am still working out logistics with Ron, featured in the post, about coming back to Clinton to help out with some manuscripts.

I have half of my reading done, another half to go, and a problem with the school’s online system/blackboard. I have all of the articles downloaded or Zotero-d for the semester. I am not really ready to say goodbye to pleasure reading for a while, but it has to be done. And I’m in a good place for the semester to start. Let’s hope, of course, it stays this way.

When I got home from running errands today, I took off my headband and put it where I usually do — on a tiny towel rack above the toilet — and it did what it usually does: promptly fell.  Momentarily too frustrated to continue to do ANYTHING else, I grabbed some newspaper from our recycle bin and a glass jar, and made what I will call a headband carousel. It worked SWIMMINGLY so then to make it slightly prettier, I got some construction paper out and made it again, but better!

This was practically free; the jars were given to me by a friend for a Fund Drive of a food bank and the paper I have had around my house for years. Most of the DIY headband solutions I’ve seen involve sewing. This is a nearly free, no sew, easy, FAST solution.

So here, dear readers with a headband problem, is how I did it:

Step 1: get paper of your choice of color and tear into strips.

You could also use pretty rocks, marbles, or stones.

Step 2: Crinkle up the paper and stuff it into the jar.

Step 3: Gather all of your headbands and start fitting one end into the jar. The decorative piece, if it exists, should go on the outside of the jar.

Step 4: Behold!

Lastly, I put the jar on top of my dresser. I can now always gaze upon the pretty, big flowers and bows!

I recently read a post by a new writer at Hack Library School, Joanna June. She wrote about the idea of “the horizon” and how we tend to hope for a time in the future, on the horizon, when we’ll finally have time to sit down or get out and do everything on our to do list. She wrote something that, as I read it, felt like I wrote it, or had at least been thinking it for a long time now:

My issue is neither starting nor finishing right now. My problem is creating the head space to concentrate on anything longer than the next three minutes or think about that which is past today. … I’ve felt anxious and scattered in waves while trying to concentrate on my project and deal with whatever is most screaming for attention. Not ideal productivity conditions. [emphasis hers]

It’s very easy to say something about the hectic life we lead, and I could laugh to you about how I make lists about the list I need to make. But, really, what I’ve come to realize is it isn’t about realizing I’m busy now, it’s realizing I’m going to be busy for a very long time. I will always have the horizon, I will always hope for a time I can sit down to think, I will always pin pretty examples of good organization to virtual boards. And that, frankly, is a problem for many reasons — one being that I am finding myself much more often walking through my apartment, knowing what I wanted to find/write down/remember when I began at Point  A and then forgetting entirely by the time I reach Point B.

I’m nearly constantly watching something, listening to a podcast, talking to someone, listening to music, reading, or playing a game. Is my brain just too full? Should I eat breakfast in silence and stillness, and not pick up a New Yorker? Oh, but then I will constantly feel behind on the times!

There are solutions for this, of course, and I’m not going to lay them out since I don’t feel qualified to. Elsie Larson over at A Beautiful Mess some tips for Prolific Living which are a good start. However, I feel happy that I’m solidly choosing a lifestyle of “prolific living.” I’ve realized that I can’t just sit around, I need to produce (not babies yet!!). I need to feel part of the community.

One of the things I grappled with, when I chose archiving and libraries for my future path, was that it didn’t seem as world-changing as going to work for a nonprofit in policy or to become an environmental law lawyer or to become a teacher in a low-income, under-resourced school. But it’s not true. We aren’t those things, but we don’t have to be; we are not only important venues and keepers of culture but my peers are caring folks who also want to help. That’s a good community to be in, and I’m glad I’ve chosen to be a prolific component of it.

I leave you with this thought: live intentionally, but don’t map it out.

In the meantime, I have to ever-prepare. I need a system. I also especially want a good system for research in grad school — I had my own in undergrad, but writing a history paper is just different from writing an archives paper. And here I ask you! Before I set out to form an organization system, do you have any advice? How do you organize your research to ease the process of paper writing?

The snow storm wasn’t bad, either. I didn’t find it that windy or cold. It was only slightly annoying that as I walked, snow got in my eyes. I also find it strange that I basically have to get dressed again on top of my clothes when I leave work to go back out into the snow.

The first day of the storm, the snow as it fell was mostly a nuisance and the wind blew it around on the ground like it was dust. My coworker said it looked like an awfully cold sandstorm. It was difficult to focus on checking in the periodicals we receive at the Wisconsin Historical Society, because I kept looking out at the window to see the way the snow and wind played together on the roof tops!

When I got home, I opened the door and shouted to Derek, my boyfriend, to come play. He hastily put on his boots and jacket, and we kicked around the powder for a long time. We dragged our feet in it. We watched a dog in the dog park below (we live on a ridge) play in the snow. Then we decided to walk down to the lake to see if it froze. On the ridge I live on, there’s steps leading down to the street — these were completely covered so we had to gingerly find our way, laughing the entire time. On the way back up them later, I fell smack down into the steps! The snow caught my fall, though. :)

The lake was not completely frozen over; the parts along the man-made “shore” were still only mere slush. It was so cool to see the snow on top of the frozen lake. We threw a lot of sticks to see if we could break any of the ice. Then we drew in the snow like it was sand on a beach (of course the words “Derek” “loves” “Dana” were written — what else do people write when they are given a stick and landscape?).

The most magical part was when I looked down at my hands, which were in dark gloves, and saw it: a SNOWFLAKE! I have been in snow before, but very rarely, and I honestly can’t remember ever looking down closely. I don’t know why it took me so long. They are so beautiful and sparkly and … majestic. Derek and I, in our excitement, kept pointing out snowflakes on each other, like we were monkeys picking at nits.

I was also transfixed by the sound of cars on the un-shoveled roads. They sound like they are in padded rooms, and they roll along so much more slowly and quietly than usual. Everything felt quieter and calmer. I missed my signal to walk across the street because I couldn’t stop staring and listening.

The snow has become bigger today — it is much easier to see the large flakes, and they don’t dance like sand. The cold isn’t too bad. It wasn’t too hard for Derek to dig our car out of the snow; it was about 5-6″. Maybe living in snow won’t be so bad …?