The first thing to grab my attention was the “Part-Time/Adjunct” status, which seems out of place for a position described as “responsible to develop and maintain the College Archive for Tacoma Community College… collect, process, promote, and provide access to the College’s archival resources… for reference and instructional services related to the Archive.” I know many community colleges rely upon adjunct faculty, but I haven’t encountered many job descriptions for adjunct professional staff.

The responsibilities listed in full:

• Collect and process archival material.
• Implement archives management software tool.
• Write DACS-compliant finding aids using EAD authoring software.
• Design and supervise digitization project for selected photographs, documents, and audio-visual material.
• Coordinate upload and maintenance of digital collections.
• Train and supervise work study student in work including processing, data entry, and scanning.
• Promote the Archive and develop the collections through outreach to college community, exhibit design, and social media.
• Offer information sessions to library faculty and staff on archives reference services.
• Work with faculty to develop class assignments using archival resources.
• Teach instructional sessions on archival research to students.
• Coordinate special projects or initiatives such as the College’s 50th anniversary celebration in 2015.
• Assume responsibility for Archive Advisory Committee and its activities.

Preferred skills included:

•  Thorough knowledge of archival best practices for appraisal, preservation, arrangement, description, and outreach.
•  Understanding of descriptive systems and principles, national standards, archival ethics, and digitization methodologies and metadata standards.
• Ability to offer instruction in archival research to faculty, staff and students.
•  Ability to plan and coordinate work of volunteers, work study students, and interns.
•  Ability to be innovative, creative and user-oriented in developing an academic archives program.

Minimum qualifications are a bachelor’s degree and one (1) year of archival experience, with MLS preferred but not required. This seemed odd to me since the duties outlined above (instruction, supervision, collection development, digitization, policy creation, appraisal, outreach) clearly fall into what I would consider the professional realm. And golly gee, it sure looks like a lot of responsibility for one person working part time!

Another detail which struck me is the position’s responsibility for coordinating “special projects or initiatives such as the College’s 50th anniversary celebration”. I recently assisted with a major anniversary celebration as part of a three person archives team, so I have a small understanding of the work involved (in short: never ending). The final red flag comes from the initial description, which seems to indicate that the future Archivist may be working with a relatively (or completely?) unprocessed set of collections.

I’m new to this game, so my first thought was not that I had found a terrible job posting but that I must be mistaken in my analysis. I dug deeper.

A link to the official job posting  reveals the following gems:

“Part-Time/Adjunct” status is now listed as “Temporary”, a roughly equivalent but significant change, since adjunct in my state gives the impression that one’s contract may be renewed as needed. Also, adjuncts are sometimes eligible for benefits if they meet a sufficient threshold of hours. I’m not sure how this works out in Washington specifically.

Terms of Employment reads, “This is an hourly position scheduled to work varied hours up to 18 hours per week. The pay rate is $ 20.00 per hour. Some flexibility in scheduling is required to meet the needs of the department. A collective bargaining agreement exists and membership in the Washington Federation of State Employees or payment of a service fee may be required.” (Emphasis is my own, insert indignation here.)

Benefits “not applicable”.

But wait! There’s more! A June 2012 job posting  for a Project Archivist at Tacoma Community College provides some telling insights into the work environment. The Project Archivist, eligible to work “varied hours up to 17 hours per week” at a rate of $16 per hour with no benefits, originally called for “archives management or library school graduate students”.

Responsibilities included “creating a college archives”, “identify materials well-suited to support the College’s 50th anniversary celebration in 2015″, deliver “a physical collection, cataloged and indexed; a digital repository of selected materials; and a set of visually-dynamic, publicly accessible webpages”, “develop a budget proposal”, and “provide guidance in design of a collection development policy”.

So to recap, the lucky employee who is hired for the November 2012 Archivist position will be inheriting a college archives which has been assembled from scratch by a lone graduate student working 17 hours per month for about three months. I don’t mean to disparage graduate students in anyway (I am one of them), but this seems like barely enough time to inventory 50 years of unprocessed institutional records much less process, digitize, and make sense of them in time for a major anniversary event. Maybe the previous incumbent accomplished amazing things in this tiny amount of time, I don’t know.

It seems to me that the 50th Anniversary is central to this whole debacle. I’ve seen it happen: a big milestone is on the horizon. Everybody starts to envision grandiose ceremonies, world-class exhibits, waterfalls of alumni donations. Suddenly, the institution realizes it has never invested any time or resources into preserving its own lofty history. At first, one might see a few over-eager volunteers (alumni, retired faculty, student workers), but eventually they will fall victim to the tedious slog of sorting through mountains of carelessly assembled papers and ephemera. In some cases, the institution might take an enlightened approach and recruit a full time archivist (more often than not, a fresh-faced MLS graduate). Or, if its particularly budget conscious, the institution might seek out the cheapest available consultant to do all the dirty work as quickly as possible.

Tacoma Community College has apparently combined the less admirable strategies of both approaches: give the candidate a pitifully inadequate time frame in which to handle a ridiculous workload, pay them next to nothing (seriously, this position would leave you eligible for about $200 a month in food stamps in Washington State), and offer no benefits. As a bonus, they can continue to undermine the professional aspirations and diminish the advanced skills of MLS graduates by seeking candidates who are barely qualified for most paraprofessional archives jobs. Yay!

On the plus side, I did realize how fortunate I am in my paraprofessional position (benefits, full-time permanent status, slightly higher annual pay, reasonable workload, and institutional support). Thoughts? Insights? Anyone moving to Tacoma?

P.S. The position closes Wednesday, November 28, so you’d better jump on it!

You see, I’ve left one field already. For a number of years I was pursuing a career in archaeology. But after years of experience, and many thousands of dollars in undergraduate and graduate student loans, I started to reevaluate my prospects. What I saw was a field where it would be incredibly difficult to achieve a stable long term career, with such luxuries as a retirement savings and health insurance. So I changed gears, took those elements that I love most about archaeology (connecting people today with those of the past through the stuff they left behind) and found an alternate career path in archives. But as it turns out, just as in archaeology, lots of people are passionate about archives and want to be involved, and are willing to do so for free. Some of these people are students seeking the experience to get their foot in the door; some are retired from an unrelated career and finally have the free time to pursue their passion; some are eccentric billionaires slumming it with us common folk (who knows?), and likely a hundred other motivations. That, in and of itself, is not a problem. In most cases there is a way to match the talents and passions of everyone who wants to be involved with projects and tasks that improve archives’ mission. A problem arises when people mistake the willingness of volunteers to generously give their time with the absolute necessity to allocate adequate resources to fairly compensate professionals with the expertise to manage archives. Just because our job seems fun from the outside doesn’t mean anyone can do it. And it doesn’t mean that those with the knowledge and skills to do that job shouldn’t be well paid to perform it. It seems silly to have to say it, but let me give you another example.

Once on a tour of Bells Brewery in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I met a guy who was a professional beer taster, a sommelier, who performed quality assurance on the various products they produced. I thought to myself, “Man, now that’s a job. Sit around and drink beer all day? I’d do that for free!” But as he explained his job, about all of the sensory aspects he evaluates, from sight, to smell, to taste, to mouth feel. And about how subtle differences in each of these could indicate one problem or another. And the distinct ranges of acceptability set by the brewery for health, quality, and consistency standards. As he explained all that, I realized this man had a developed set of skills making him uniquely qualified to perform this job. And while I shared with him the same enthusiasm for the product, I didn’t even realize you could evaluate beer so precisely in all of those ways, much less possess the knowledge or skills to do so.  And that’s the reason Bells pays him, and not me. And more generally that’s why this man is a professional, not some lucky schmo who’s duped the brewery into paying him to swill beer all day.

And dear reader, perhaps you’ve already taken the bait I’ve laid out to you in that completely true anecdote, but if not, come along let’s bring this home. That set of knowledge and skills which makes M. Sommelier a professional, well we archivists have that too. That’s not news to any of us, or to the volunteers who work alongside us. Unfortunately this knowledge is not as widespread outside the reading rooms, processing tables, sub-basements and obscure corners where we spend our days. Among those who control our budgets, legislatures that appropriate our funding, the media which publicize yet another discovery in some dusty repository, and the various publics which we serve.To some of those people we look like fortunate fools who’ve managed to find a way to get paid to root around in old stuff all day. And when time comes to make hard financial choices, it’s easy for them to see a replacement of professional archivists with volunteers as a legitimate option.

But here’s the thing, this failure to see us as professionals, that’s not their fault. It’s ours. We need to be out there advocating for our profession, talking to those that hold the purse strings about the value we provide, the skills we have, and what we are uniquely positioned to provide in terms of stewardship that the lady off the street cannot. If we want our profession to thrive to meet the challenges of the future, we need to fight for it, individually, as institutions, and with our regional and national professional organizations. We are the only ones that can make our case, and until we do, this false perception will only persist. And if we as a profession fail, then we will continue to see our jobs be the first to go, as economic downturn settles into ‘the new normal’. As for me, if we can’t pull this off, then I may end up looking into bungholes.  You think that’s a union gig?

“It is in the nature of archives to have backlogs—sometimes huge backlogs. And it is an unfortunate reality that archives are often understaffed. At a time when the volume of archival records created is increasing monumentally, it is common in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world for budgets to be cut and paid staff to be reduced.”

So…what’s the question? Perhaps something about the need to advocate for funding for archives? Maybe something about More Product Less Process, or efficient archival processing? Or something about prioritization when you don’t have the funding to do everything you’d like?

Well, if you guessed any of those, you’d be wrong. The right answer, for some definitions of the word right, is: “Why have volunteers in archives?”

On Wednesday, SAA released a new publication titled Resources for Volunteer Programs in Archives. I was super excited when I saw the announcement, because the line between ethical and unethical volunteer programs is a fuzzy one, and we as a profession could use some guidance in this area.

Having read the thing, I would describe it more as a set of examples than a set of guidelines. The 90-page document contains 82 pages of volunteer project descriptions and sample forms and training manuals used in real-life archives volunteer projects. NARA uses volunteers to assist with research and reference. The Shelburne Museum has a volunteer who appraises photographs. The Indiana Historical Society volunteers find new homes for deaccessioned materials. Many, many institutions train their volunteers to process collections.

Readers may notice that a lot of these projects are not all that different from the kinds of work that entry-level archivists–when they can find work–typically do.

In answering the question, “What are some of the special challenges for volunteer programs at archives?” the volunteer guide dismisses the concerns of archivists who are wary of these programs:

“Not all employees at archives are supportive of volunteers in archives. There is a feeling among some staff, including supervisors and managers, that volunteers diminish the status of the archival profession. Some staff fear that volunteers will replace them and take away their jobs.”

If volunteers are doing the work of professionals in your archives, you should absolutely fear for your job. Why should your institution pay you to process collections or answer reference questions when someone else is willing to do it for free?

And why is my professional association endorsing this devaluation of archival work? I’m honestly at a loss here. Isn’t it in the best interest of SAA, which is supported by dues paid by professional archivists, to promote paid employment in the field?

In September, SAA President Jackie Dooley wrote a letter to the governor of Georgia in protest of the closure of the Georgia Archives to the public. Exactly the kind of response I’d hope for from our professional organization. But a few days later, when SAA cited this article on the effort to keep the archives open, they failed to address some important misconceptions about the role of professional archivists:

“Although Clayton State University, which is located next to the Georgia Archives, offers a master’s degree program in archival studies, Kemp said using student interns to keep the facility open is not a viable option. It would mean the secretary of state’s office would still have to pay security and janitorial staff to work.”

Archivist Jeremy Floyd, quoted on ArchivesNext, explains it best:

“So the Georgia secretary of state says professional archivists can’t be replaced by unpaid interns, not because they lack the training or expertise necessary, or that it would be exploitative of those students, but because ‘oh yeah we’re also firing the janitors and security guards that allow the building to stay open’. Maybe they can get unpaid janitorial and security interns, problem solved. Seriously, we need to eliminate the perception that budget shortfalls can made up for with volunteers and interns performing essential functions. Its not good for the interns, its not good for the archives, and its not good for the profession.”

It’s obvious to those of us working in the archives profession that you can’t have archives without professional archivists. But that news article out of Georgia shows the the danger of assuming that people outside the profession share this view. If you advocate for archives without advocating for archivists, you’re sending a message that the value of archives comes from the stuff, rather than the services.

I expect better from my professional association, and I think you should too.

Due to the nature of this post, we’re going to be more heavy-handed with the comment moderating. Feel free to post whatever you want on your own blog; here’s what can’t go here.

• The author left all the names out of this post on purpose. Any comments that attempt to “out” the people and institutions described will be deleted.
• No victim-blaming. This goes for the author and other commenters.
• No personal attacks on the author or other commenters.
• General suggestions for handling sexual harassment in the workplace, as well as sharing your own experiences with sexual harassment and reporting, are welcome. The author is not soliciting opinions on how she should have handled her own situation–it’s over and done with. Patronizing comments to this effect will be deleted.

I’m moving next week, and a couple of weeks ago I started going through some boxes to see what I could get rid of. When I got to the boxes of papers, there was one particular document I was looking for as I planned out this blog post. I couldn’t remember if I’d saved it, and I didn’t remember exactly what it said, and I almost hoped it wouldn’t be there…and then, at the bottom of the last box, I found it. I read through it more carefully than I had when I first received it. It was worse than I remembered. It was one of the few times in my life where I personally felt the power of records, and in that moment, that power made me break down and cry. I like my neighborhood, but one of the reasons why I’m moving away is that I have to pass by my old workplace twice a day during my commute. Just hearing the automated voice on the subway call out the name of the stop is really hard for me, and seeing that document again brought back all the reasons why.

I used to work in an archives with a work environment often described as “ridiculous.” We were productive, but we also had a lot of fun. Everyone censors themselves at work a little, but of all the jobs I’ve had, this is the one where I felt most comfortable being myself. During the time I worked there, I covered a family photo with a ‘shopped image of my boss shaking hands with a certain former president he’d never shake hands with, hung paper fruits from his ceiling when he used the phrase “low-hanging fruit” one too many times, and plastered the walls with as many Hello Kitty stickers as I could find. My boss, for his part, tended to center his pranks around Rick Astley, to the point that I refused to open any shortened URLs he sent me. And just about every intern we had ended up on a mysterious “records pickup” that led to a surprise lunch. My boss and I were the only permanent staff, and this is the tone we set for ourselves, and for the hordes of interns and student workers who rotated in and out.

My boyfriend, who I met while he was interning in my archives, asked me out the day after his internship ended. Unexpectedly, a couple of months later, my boss asked him to come back and intern again. It was good work experience, and paid, so how could he say no?

I wrestled for a long time with whether I should report the relationship before the internship started. Up to this point, my boss knew nothing about my dating life, which was exactly the way I wanted things. The internship was only temporary, very few people knew about our relationship, and we could probably keep my boss from finding out. And if he knew, there was always the risk that he could decide not to let my boyfriend work there. On the other hand, getting caught in a secret relationship was potentially more dangerous–and far more embarrassing. And even if my boss didn’t mind, his higher-ups might.

Finally, a couple of days before the internship started, I told my boss. “[Boyfriend] and I, we’ve started, um…” I couldn’t even finish the sentence. My boss looked surprised–was I pranking him?–and then suddenly gleeful. I knew exactly where his mind was going. “Do with this information what you want,” I said, wondering what I’d find in my inbox or taped to my office walls.

The prank went down without me, but my boss proudly showed off his fruits of his labor afterwards. He’d convinced my boyfriend that he needed to sign an “Employee Sexual Activity Disclosure Form,” which didn’t look terribly official and became more ridiculous as you read down, ending with a space for my boyfriend to fill in how many times a week he planned to have sex with me. (I, apparently, had no say in the matter.) It was only later on, reading that form many months later in my apartment, that I noticed the saddest part: it specified that this relationship would be “mostly consensual.” In my mind, my boss had entertained the idea of someone engaging in sexual activity with me against my will, and he found it funny. I didn’t want to believe it–I saved that piece of paper precisely because it was so unbelievable–and yet I was holding the proof in my hands. I felt sick with shame and anger.

At the time? I just laughed. What a ridiculous prank! When you’re a humorist–when your entire professional reputation is based on the perception that you are both funny and provocative–it is very difficult to step back and say, “Hey now, that you joke you just made? That’s. Not. Funny.” And hadn’t I said, just a day or two earlier, “Do whatever you want”? If you’d asked me back then whether I was offended, I would have said no, and I wouldn’t have been lying. But it absolutely affected me. I don’t think my work performance suffered–I didn’t receive any complaints from my boss or from patrons–but I definitely became more withdrawn. I didn’t really make jokes anymore. I avoided conversations that were even remotely personal. Work was no longer a place where I felt comfortable being myself.

Could I have reported the sexual harassment? I guess so. But I didn’t really see a situation where it would end well for me–or for my boyfriend, whose employment status was far less secure. HR might just say “You two shouldn’t have been working together anyway” and force him out. They might leave my boss as my supervisor, which would be awkward. They might fire him, in which case all my co-workers would hate me. And since this was my only archives experience, I would need to use my boss as a reference to get another job in the field. As I saw it, I had only two options: do nothing, or give up entirely on being an archivist. In the archives field, where jobs are scarce, small staff sizes are the norm, and you can wait months or years for a job to open up in a particular city, saying “I can’t work with this person anymore” doesn’t leave you with a lot of options.

I had hoped to stay at this archives indefinitely, but the disclosure form made me realize that that wasn’t possible if I wanted to have a life outside of work. Sometimes, whether you like it or not, you need to talk to your boss about your personal life. If you are the victim of stalking or harassment, and you are worried that the offender may show up at your workplace, you need to be able to talk to your boss about it. If you need time off from work to get married, or have a baby, or take care of a relative, you need to be able to talk to your boss about it. How can you have a serious conversation about any of those things with someone who jokes about you being sexually assaulted?

I ended up leaving this particular archives for unrelated reasons–I was offered a better job somewhere else–but the harassment I experienced there still affects me. I’m now a manager, and I spend far more time supervising than being supervised. When talking to my employees, I’m very hesitant to ask any remotely personal questions, because I don’t want them to feel uncomfortable around their boss. The downside, of course, is coming across as unfriendly, or seeming like I don’t care about them, and running the risk of making them uncomfortable in an entirely different way. But coming from a workplace where the friend/employee boundary was clearly out of whack, I’d rather err on the side of drawing that distinction too sharply.

So that’s my story. But this post is for everyone out there who has experienced sexual harassment. Most of them have the good sense not to post about it on the internet. (There were many archivists who helped me out by reviewing this post prior to publication, and none of them even wanted to be thanked by name.) I’ve been talking about writing a post like this for a while, and have heard from multiple archivists who have their own stories, but are afraid to share them publicly, or even to report the sexual harassment they’ve experienced. I don’t blame them. I fully believe that if I’d reported my boss, I would have ruined my archives career. And I worry that writing about sexual harassment in a public place will have the same effect–if I didn’t already have a job that I love and hope to stay in a while, there’s no way I’d publish a post like this. But I think it’s important to talk about sexual harassment, to remind our colleagues that yes, it really does happen in archives, and when it does, it’s incredibly damaging.

First, it’s worth pointing out that sexual harassment isn’t something that happens only to women. My boss made his (male) intern describe his sex life and promise not to rape his girlfriend more than a little. If that’s not harassment, I don’t know what is. It’s also not something that only men do–I found out later that a former (female) intern helped my boss write the disclosure form. So don’t assume that, because of your gender, you could never possibly be a victim or perpetrator of sexual harassment.

Second, I don’t think it’s possible to completely prevent sexual harassment, but I do think that many of the sorts of reforms we talk about on this blog would make it so that archivists could get out of harassing situations without destroying their careers. Certainly, a better job market would help. Clarifying the employment status of interns, volunteers, and temporary workers, and ensuring that they have access to institutional HR staff, would at least give these employees the option to report SH. SH certainly isn’t something that happens only in archives, but the way archives are structured, combined with the high number of temporary and unpaid staff, means that there’s a large contingent of archives employees who are both vulnerable to SH and without recourse if it happens to them.

Third, if you do experience sexual harassment in the workplace, you have options. (Readers, if you have any experience with reporting SH, in any type of workplace, PLEASE comment and improve upon my advice here.) If you feel safe talking to the person, let them know that their actions made you uncomfortable. Best case scenario, this person had no idea that they upset you and they stop doing whatever they were doing. If that fails, you can talk to the person’s supervisor, or your institution’s HR department. If you’re a volunteer or intern, this gets trickier–the HR department, or even people higher up than your boss, might not know that you work there if you aren’t getting paid. If you’re interning for credit and a professor is supervising you, you can talk to your professor. All this being said, in some situations it may seem like there are no good options. I wish I could tell you that reporting is always a good option, but it definitely wasn’t for me.

Fourth, any healthy relationship–between colleagues, between friends, or between lovers–has boundaries. Ideally, you establish those boundaries before they get crossed. And in the workplace, the boundaries differ depending on reporting relationships and the work environment. When we think about these boundaries, I think the tendency is to think of negative boundaries (the things you shouldn’t say or do), and that’s what this post is mostly about. But for me, a truly healthy work environment is one where you can establish positive boundaries–the things you really like, that make your workplace a safe and welcoming place to be. Where you can not only say “Please don’t ask my boyfriend about our sex life,” but also “Thanks for asking how my mom is doing, it means a lot to me that you care,” or “I love being able to debate archival theory with you” or “I’ve been really stressed lately, thanks for listening to me vent.” Preventing sexual harassment is just one small part of creating a work environment that works for everyone.

Today I’m going to talk about things I’ve noticed about being an archives worker.

I speak from my position as an interested participant-observer. There are people who are experts in these kinds of labor issues, and while I’m conversant in them, I’m not a scholar. Like Tom mentioned, I earned my degree in 2008 and I’ve been working as an archivist since then. At the University of Michigan, I did graduate coursework on gender and labor and did a directed reading course about librarians and labor. I’m also part of the group blog called “you ought to be ashamed”. I think that some of my fellow contributors may be in the room today, which is awesome. I’ve learned a lot from all of you.

Our blog posts tend to critique exploitative job advertisements and talk about the larger labor challenges that young professionals face. In the past, contributors have talked about the casualization of professional labor, the casualization of academic labor, the pitfalls of performing beyond one’s stated job duties without the formal structures to support and reward that work, how to sniff out whether an institution’s organizational culture is broken, negotiation, supply and demand in the labor market, and gender and technology. By the way, if you’re interested in writing for the blog, everyone is welcome.

I think that for me, the real power behind the blog is not that we’re going to critique anyone into changing. It’s that we’re building solidarity. We’re helping each other create a sense of what is appropriate and reasonable in our relations with our employers. And yes, people will sometimes still be forced to take jobs where they aren’t supported and don’t have the resources to do all of the work that’s expected of them (which is a disservice to both the collections under their care and, more importantly, the researchers they serve), but at least, hopefully, they won’t think that this is the way it has to be. And when they’re in a position of power, where they can be more thoughtful about resource allocation than the people who came before them, they can make different decisions.

The list of topics that I mentioned above could keep us here all day (which would be okay with me – I would love to talk about any of these things at the reception), so I’m going to narrow my comments to the topic of gender and money. I’ll explore the data that overwhelmingly demonstrates that a pay equity problem persists, even in our profession, and that we should pause and check the data when we start congratulating ourselves for making progress. I’ll talk about some of the research that I’ve encountered that addresses what workers can do to gain leverage on this situation. I’ll also discuss what institutions can do to cease being complicit in a system that doesn’t reward workers for their labor fairly.

By the way, the research that I’ve seen and that I’m focusing on talks about women and pay equity, but there’s good reason to believe that this is a problem for all kinds of people — people who are the first in their families to graduate from college, for instance, or people of color or non-US country of origin.

Gender, Archives, and Money

Some really great work has been done by the SAA women archivists roundtable and the folks behind A*Census to figure out where we are with compensation issues. Buuuut, if you look at the literature, the most substantive interpretive work about gender, labor and archives was done in the 1970s and 1980s, [5] and I’m not aware of a recent treatment of this issue that comes from a place that understands that systematic pay inequality is real, pernicious, insidious and is based on choices that decision-makers often don’t realize that they’re making.

Please bear with me while I talk through some numbers. My data comes from the United States Department of Labor, the ALA Committee on Pay Equity, the National Committee on Pay Equity, the A*Census, and the Association of Research Libraries. I’ll be posting my talk on our blog, with footnotes, if you would like to learn more.

According to the National Committee on Pay Equity, the wage gap remains at a standstill with women earning 77¢ for every dollar a man earns. The U.S. Census from 2003 reports that the average salary of men with master’s degrees was $75,950 (median $61,634), while women earned only $46,961 (median $41,185)—a difference of almost $29,000 (62 percent). [1] Pay inequity also exists within librarianship. The Association of Research Libraries, in its Annual Salary Survey 2005-6, reported that the average salary for male academic librarians in member libraries was $63,984, while the average for female academic librarians was $61,083. [2]

Library Journal reported that new library school graduates finally crossed the $40,000 mark as an average salary, but the gender split had women below that point with $39,587 and men at $42,143. [3]

In 1982, in his survey of the archival profession, David Bearman [4] calculated the spread between men’s and women’s salaries and found that men were making an average of 25% more than women in 1982; in 2003, twenty years later, the A*Census discovered that that differential was still at 15%. [6]

The writers of the A*Census go on to say that “the gender equity trend is heading in the right direction based on when respondents entered the field. Among those starting their first archival jobs within the last 5 years, men reported earning only 2% more than women”. [6] Unfortunately, I think that the authors of this report may be over-interpreting what the data is showing them. It may be true that the pay differential for entry-level jobs between men and women is low, but it is also a well-understood sociological phenomenon that men in women-dominated professions are promoted far more quickly than their peers in proportion to their performance and abilities, that men receive greater pay bumps when they are promoted, and are systematically given greater access to mentoring and networking opportunities. The phenomenon is called the “glass escalator” and was first documented by the sociologist Christine Williams, [7] although this phenomenon has been studied by others.

And let’s be clear — as she explains, this isn’t because some fat cat at the top of the organization is twirling his mustache and saying that he must have men in power. If sexism were this overt, it would have been much easier to neutralize by now. Instead, there’s a subtle and complex interplay of implicit expectations that men are natural leaders, that all else being equal men are better suited for responsibility, and a situation where people in power tend to mentor younger professionals who remind them of themselves, which perpetuates patterns of power that already exist. [13]

Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever talk about a related phenomenon — the fact that men are far more likely to ask for things in their jobs than women are. In one study, eight times as many men as women graduating with master’s degrees from Carnegie Mellon negotiated their salaries. The men who negotiated were able to increase their starting salaries by an average of 7.4 percent, or about $4,000. In the same study, men’s starting salaries were about $4,000 higher than the women’s on average, suggesting that the gender gap between men and women might have been closed if more of the women had negotiated their starting salaries. [8]

Studies also show that by not negotiating a first salary, an individual stands to lose more than $500,000 by age 60—and men are more than four times as likely as women to negotiate a first salary.

Now, I’m not suggesting that women are to blame for this gap, or that institutions shouldn’t be doing more to normalize this kind of discrepancy. But if we’re looking for things that individuals can do to ameliorate a systematic problem, this is one thing. You can negotiate. You must negotiate. Like the studies cited above suggested, this will dramatically increase your lifetime earning potential. But also, I think that it’s important to negotiate because this is what professionals do, and it’s important to get folks in the profession used to the idea that specialized labor requires professional compensation. One of the reasons that unpaid internships are so toxic for the profession, beyond the fact that it privileges folks who can somehow afford to work for no money, is that it sends the message to the people who allocate resources in our institutions that our labor isn’t very valuable. So, having the conversation about the value of your labor is important, because it’s an opportunity to articulate your skills, your strengths, and what you’re working on.

Babcock and Laschever talk about how this asking/negotiating phenomenon follows workers throughout their careers — that men are more likely to ask for promotions, ask to be participants in exciting projects, ask for networking and mentoring opportunities, and ask for other perks. They suggest that often, when a role needs to be filled, a supervisor is far likelier to give it to the person who asks for it than to evaluate who would actually be best for the job. Over the course of a career, this kind of asking can really add up. [9]

Now, let’s be real. The fear that women have of negotiating their salaries and asking for opportunities is rational; studies report that negotiation tactics that men commonly use are not deemed acceptable when used by women. [10] [11] But obviously, we have to do the best we can in the context in which we live. “Women can ask for what they want in ways that feel comfortable to them and that society will accept. By not seeming overly aggressive, women can actually remain tough on the issues they’re negotiating—they just need to be gentle with the people involved.” [9] Of course, I would prefer that everyone just took a moment and stopped applying a double standard to men and women, but in the meantime, being aware of these obstacles and performing in a socially-sanctioned way, even if scary, can make a huge difference in an individual’s career.

There’s a role for the organization in this, too. Managers need to realize the impact of the different rates at which men and women ask for rewards and opportunities. They can then mentor women in their organizations about the importance of letting their supervisors know what they want and what would help them do their jobs better. When a man asks for something, they can stop to consider whether a woman in the organization might be equally interested in that opportunity and possibly more qualified to make the most of it. They can also attempt to change their organizational culture to make it more acceptable for women to assert their professional goals and ask for what they want. If organizations were interested in addressing this divide, they could track men and women in an organization and make managers accountable for women’s advancement—make the progress of the women they supervise part of their own performance evaluations. This can create a powerful incentive for managers to correct the inequities over which they preside.

I’m going to conclude by sharing an anecdote that was posted to our blog. A young woman coming out of a very good archives program with very good experience was offered a job with an archives across the country. The pay they mentioned was $32,000 per year, which she knew wasn’t enough money to move across the country for, but they had mentioned that the details were negotiable. Let me finish with her words:

In a far less articulate way than planned, I manage to convey I was actually hoping for more, which is inline with the market, my skills, blah, blah.  Supervisor says she needs to check and will get back to me.  She calls me back, can’t do it, $35k’s the max.  I think about it, decide it’s close enough to what I wanted and that I’ll accept, but that I am going to use the tip from that workshop to see if I can get that extra $1,000 in relocation or a trip to SAA.  I ask for that, supervisor tells me she has to check and will call me back.  Finally, she calls back and let’s me know that based on my high concern for salary I’m probably not the candidate they wanted and that they are rescinding the job offer.  Bam, ask for a trip to SAA and lose a job.

Moral of the story: Archives are not like normal institutions and may feel threatened when you try to act like a professional, but you probably don’t want to work there anyway.  Also, the career services people who put on the negotiation workshop assured me I am the only person they have ever heard of having an offer rescinded.  So you shouldn’t read this and think that it’s a bad idea to negotiate salary – you should just read this and understand that archives sometimes don’t work the same way as everywhere else.  This is why we work to set expectations of professionalism; if you’re in charge of hiring, do a better job than the people who hired you.

This story, and stories like it, are why I find the blog so powerful and useful. If you’re interested in contributing, we would love to share your stories too.

Thank you very much.

U.S. Census Bureau, “Educational Attainment in the United States: 2004,” http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/education/
cps2004.html

Association of Research Libraries. Annual Salary Survey 2005–2006, http://www.arl.org/stats/annualsurveys/salary/sal0506.shtml.

Maatta, Stephanie. “Placements & Salaries 2006: What’s an MLIS Worth? A picture of overall growth is marred by fissures in job outlook.” Library Journal (10/15/2007) http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6490671.html

Bearman, David. “1982 Survey of The Archival Profession.” American Archivist 46, no. 2 (April 1, 1983): 233–241.

“Society of American Archivists: Women Archivists’ Roundtable”, n.d. http://www.archivists.org/saagroups/women/resources.asp.

“A*CENSUS: Archival Census & Education Needs Survey in the United States | Society of American Archivists”, n.d. http://www2.archivists.org/initiatives/acensus-archival-census-education-needs-survey-in-the-united-states.

Williams, C. L. “The Glass Escalator: Hidden Advantages for Men in the‘ Female’ Professions.” Social Problems (1992): 253–267.

“Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide”, n.d. http://www.womendontask.com/stats.html.

Babcock, Linda, and Sara Laschever. Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Costrich, Norma, Joan Feinstein, Louise Kidder, Jeanne Marecek, and Linda Pascale. “When Stereotypes Hurt: Three Studies of Penalties for Sex-role Reversals.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 11, no. 6 (November 1975): 520–530.

Burgoon, Michael, James P Dillard, Noel E Ooran, Michael Burgoon, James P Dillard, and Noel E Ooran. “Friendly or Unfriendly Persuasion: The Effects of Violations of Expectations by Males and Females.” Human Communication Research, Human Communication Research 10, 10, no. 2, 2 (December 1, 1983): 283–294.

Crosby, Faye. “The Denial of Personal Discrimination.” American Behavioral Scientist 27, no. 3 (January 1, 1984): 371–386.

http://ala-apa.org/files/2010/07/toolkit.pdf

Perhaps some discussion of my career trajectory thus far can serve as a jumping-off point for discussion of the value of the MLS. I came to the archives field the way a lot of archivists end up finding their way here—I had been planning to pursue a Ph.D. in History, but was fortunate enough to learn from my undergraduate advisor about the dismal prospects in History academia BEFORE I spent the 6+ years working on a dissertation which would be read by 4 people, and so decided to change course a bit. Another person might have been left adrift, but I was fortunate to be working at about the same time at an archival internship at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, and even more fortunate to discover that I enjoyed the work immensely (seeing it as “basically history without the pesky “writing about what you’re researching” bit). I applied to a few archives programs, got into the University of Maryland History/Library Science dual degree program, and 3 years later had the great fortune of getting an archives/RM job that I actually like straight out of school. So there’s me, from High School to Archivist in 7 years. Not too shabby!

Now, backing up a bit into the library school experience itself, here’s a few thoughts about the value of the MLS from my own perspective as a straight-from-undergrad archivist (which, according to A*CENSUS, is a path less than 40% of archivists take to their first professional position):

• I supplemented my formal archives education with a LOT of practical experience. Maryland’s program, at the time I attended, included a practicum component in the Intro to Archives class (there was also the option to write a paper if you didn’t have time for a 50-hour practicum), but beyond that I supplemented my income and experience with a number of jobs in archives and libraries around the DC area. Even after I got my teaching assistantship with the UMD History Department, I worked full-time during summers in archives/records management settings and tried to work at least a few hours a week in archives during the year so I would continue to develop professional experience. I am reasonably certain that the amount and quality of these opportunities was a major factor in my relatively quick employment after graduation. So there is certainly an argument to be made for positions performing more basic archives work early on.
• I learned as much or more about archives from my work as I did from my classes. (Maybe.) For a while, I held as an article of faith the idea that my practical work was more useful than my library school coursework in terms of giving me the skills I needed to do the work of a professional archivist (I learned more about implementing MARC cataloging and performing records surveys during fieldwork than I ever did in the related classes, e.g.) Even with the benefit of hindsight, I think at least a few of the courses I took in library school were wastes of my time, and probably most people could name some courses about which they felt the same way. This too would seem to argue in favor of the more practical approach towards archival training. However, my view on this has changed somewhat since I have had to supervise students of my own as a professional. Some students we get are brand new to the archives field and require a lot of hand-holding to get their work to where it needs to be; students who are further along in the program are often more sophisticated in their thinking about issues of arrangement, description, lateral thinking about reference questions, etc., and so require less supervision. To be sure, some of these students have had experience elsewhere to draw upon, but I am still less certain than I was even 4 years ago that practicum vincit omnia. (Please excuse my Dog Latin.) Particularly in light of the next thing that I’ve noticed:

• My student work, particularly my early student work, was laughably bad. There are still some finding aids I wrote as an undergraduate available for perusal online; I won’t provide the link because I’m pretty embarrassed about their quality. Yes, these were written 8 years ago, but I had no real idea what I was doing and it shows—there’s little integration with the overall description system, my appraisal of what is and is not important is just awful, and I emphasize all the wrong things in my scope/content note and other narrative description data. I wouldn’t expect any more from a fledgling archivist, and certainly a lot of these problems would fix themselves through experience, but the theoretical basis I obtained in my archives course has helped me to be more efficient and effective in a way that just dealing with the idiosyncrasies of particular institutions would not. And remember, my embarrassment is just at the relatively simple task of processing a collection; I shudder to think of the struggles I would have had had I been dropped into a situation where I had to do program or strategic planning.

So, do these ramblings have a point? Surprisingly, yes!  I see my archival education experience as a sort of apprenticeship—I worked for little pay and for long hours on projects of limited scope—describing collections, say, or helping to create a database of photographs taken by campus photographic services—while at the same time getting at least some of the kind of theoretical knowledge I would need to take my skills to the next level and look holistically at an Archives program (figuring out how to set priorities, select and implement standards, develop outreach plans, etc.). At the end of said apprenticeship, I even get to call myself a Master!

(IMPORTANT NOTE: If your significant other is ABD and you try to insist upon this terminology, he/she will laugh at you. At some length. Trust me on this one.)

My guess is that a lot of the work that archives currently give to volunteers or students in MLIS programs probably could fit into the kind of graduated professional structure that Terry describes. Come to that, a lot of project archivist positions, where people are working on a particular collection or laying the groundwork for a specific program such as a CMS, would probably also fit into this niche. So I do think that Terry’s alternative plan of experience plus certification is a very viable one—provided that the experience is extensive enough, and the certification process is robust enough (though he does address both of those points).

As soon as you start to do the kind of broad-based, management-level work you find in posts like the one I wrote about last time, though, you really should have—and employers should require—an MLIS or equivalent. Sure, the degree can be, and often is, used as a gatekeeper requirement for a position, but ideally it is evidence that you have committed to the profession and to learning more about higher levels of administering that profession, and are capable of the kinds of responsibilities that you would expect to find at Master-level work. When you put someone with just a BA into a position like that, you devalue the professional degree, you run the very real risk of overwhelming your new employee, and you waste a lot of time, money, and energy on bringing said employee up to speed on the skills and theory he/she needs to not just do the job, but to do the job well.

Don’t just take my word for it, though. Here’s Arlene in the comments of my last post:

The reason you demand a masters degree in archival studies for an entry level position including those without a management component is so that you get pre-prepared employees who have already read the major texts in the field. So you don’t have to spend time explaining things like appraisal theory. And, if they’ve come out of a good school, they already have some hands-on experience through practicums or internships. I know of no bachelor’s degree that is offering archival education at a level that would suffice. I’d much rather spend my time training the new employee to do things my way than to have them spend three months reading Posner, Boles, Danielson, etc, just to get the concepts.

So, yeah, she just said in 100 words what took me 1400. Apparently just because I have an MLS doesn’t mean that I have a handle on the whole “Brevity” thing.

The conversation that got this started centered on a Drexel University job post for an archives technician. The announcement’s requirements looked like Drexel was trying to hire an archivist on the cheap. Whether or not that’s the case, the larger question here was articulated by Brad Houston (@herdotusjr for the twiterati): “As noted, I don’t think not having a Masters-level degree should DISQUALIFY you, but having the degree shd mean something”.

True enough. And we’ll get back to that question, kids. But first let’s imagine a different path to becoming an archivist. A path that was once available to youngsters back in the fog of history (like when yours truly was misguided youth).

Say a young, starry-eyed high school graduate gets into a nice university. We won’t name name names here — no need stirring up rivalries — but our unamed youngster wants to be a historian (and didn’t bother to read Larry Cebula’s stark “Open Letter to my students: no you cannot be a professor”).

While slogging through an undergraduate program (one that will cost an average of $60K and leave said undergrad nearly $25k in debt if they are one of the lucky 38% to finish in four years) our little history Candide gets a job or an internship or something in a local archives and gets hooked. Upon graduation, with a freshly pressed BA in hand, our aspiring archivist starts looking for a job.

This is where a little suspension of disbelief is in order, gentle readers. No one in 2011 looks for an archives job with a BA. While some might be available, the competition with MLIS’s (over 50,000 awarded from 2000-2008) and other masters degree holders is pretty steep.

But consider an alternative pathway for our 22 year old beamish graduate. Suppose that rather than taking on an additional two years of college (and another pile of debt), there was a “beginning archivist” career path. Leave the naming of such a job to human resources — just consider it a position that allows an educated person to perform basic archives functions, with training and under supervision, at a lower salary than an archivist with a graduate education.

Suppose further that the Academy of Certified Archivists revamped its requirements for certification by strengthening the exam and allowing anyone who had either five years experience at the “beginning archivist” level or had a masters degree and some short period of experience to sit for it. This would allow motivated beginning archivists to use continuing education and on the job training to become “real” archivists through a different pathway than graduate education. This would let our hypothetical high school student start an archival career at age 28, ten years after leaving high school.

Now I’m not dogging the MLIS. It’s a benefit to programs to have the deeper theoretical understanding and broader professional knowledge that a graduate degree provides. But is it really the only way for  person to become an archivist? There are other issues at play here — graduate education in general, value related to debt, ratio of graduates to available jobs, diversity and economics, reduced institutional budgets and equitable compensation — but this is supposed to be a conversation between me and Brad. So I’d like to come back to his tweet as a launching space for his initial salvo: “As noted, I don’t think not having a Masters-level degree should DISQUALIFY you, but having the degree shd mean something”

OK, Brad. What does having the degree mean? What should it mean? What could it mean?

Today’s doozy of a job posting is brought to you by Drexel University. Let’s take a look, shall we:

Title: Archives Technician
Employer: Drexel University Libraries
Location(s):
Philadelphia, PA — USA

Hours: Full-time
Salary: Commensurate with experience

Duties:
The Archives Technician supports the work of the University Archives and Special Collections by providing patron assistance; accessioning, arranging, describing and preserving print and electronic collections; and coordinating outreach efforts.

- Provide patron assistance to onsite and remote patrons, including maintaining the reference database, performing research, providing and scheduling reading room service
- Accession, arrange and describe archival collections, including creating finding aids
- Maintain the Archives’ desc-riptive tools, including its website, finding aids, style-sheets, web archive, and digital collections. Add content to iDEA, Drexel’s institutional repository.
- Plan and promote exhibitions, open houses, and other educational outreach events. Coordinate these outreach efforts and Archives’ social media (Web 2.0) activities with the Libraries’ Marketing & Events Associate
- Assist the Records Management Archivist in acquiring and accessioning electronic and print records generated by University offices and scholarly work created by faculty and students
- Train and supervise scanning technicians
- Other duties as assigned

Qualifications:
- Bachelor’s degree required
- Familiarity with the functions of an archives, library or information organization
- Superior organizational and communication skills and demonstrated service orientation
- Eager engagement in an environment of organizational change with a commitment to growth in skills and responsibilities
- Experience working in a collaborative environment, including working with people with diverse backgrounds.
- Sound judgment and the ability to handle responsibilities with both discretion and independence.
- Demonstrated appropriate initiative with the highest degree of integrity.

Ahh, the infamous “Archives Technician” position title. Back when I was a wee archivling, still in Library School but at the point where I began to think “Oh hay, I should start looking for that ‘job’ thing”, I would see “Archives Technician” positions all the time on USAJobs and other similar, bureaucracy-based job sites. I quickly learned that “archives technician” was code for “We don’t have to pay you as much money as we would if we called you an archivist, even though we’re going to make you do as much work as an archivist.” The above posting doesn’t disappoint on that front! It is a full-time job, for which the archives technician is expected to perform all of the traditional archivist duties: not just collections management and processing, but outreach and digital assets management, including responsibility for management of the archives’ web presence. (Is this full responsibility? Partial responsibility, e.g. for their particular unit? The ad doesn’t say.)  But I digress; expecting a technician to do an archivist’s work is so common it’s almost routine at this point.

No, the sticking point in my craw for this particular ad is the following:

Qualifications:

-Bachelor’s degree required

Sorry, I think I read that wrong. WHAT kind of degree?

-Bachelor’s degree required

Oh, for the love of Buddha.

So, let me qualify my impending rant thusly: I do not think that the MLS ipso facto qualifies or disqualifies any particular person for any particular position. It is to a certain extent a “gatekeeper” qualification– you want to be able to see, at a glance, that your applicant has put in the time and training for a professional position– but its absence does not necessarily mean that the person is unqualified for the job (think of the library paraprofessionals who are more familiar with database searching than the “full” librarians). So I really am not trying to be elitist here.

Having said that.

It is incredible to me that this position only requires a B.A. as its educational qualification. The job description is, as noted, a description that would fit a “regular” archivist for all but a few job duties (mostly administrative in nature), and most institutions would want their candidates to have a M.L.S. Come to that, Drexel may also want their “ideal” candidate to have a M.L.S. But by making the B.A. the minimum qualification, the hiring authorities there have cleverly set themselves up for one of the two following scenarios:

a) The position is filled by someone without an M.L.S. Because the candidate does not have “full” qualifications as an archivist, it is deemed “reasonable” to pay them less than they would be paid in a comparable position elsewhere.

b) The position is filled by someone WITH an M.L.S. Because the minimum qualification for this job is a B.A., it is deemed “reasonable” to pay them less than they would be paid in a comparable position elsewhere, because they are “overqualified”– nobody made them get that graduate degree. They will probably be paid more than person a), but not much more.

Now, I admit that this is just one institution that is shortchanging one archives position. Hell, on the Records Management side, the M.L.S. is USUALLY seen as an added bonus, rather than as a requirement for the job. The thing is…I paid a lot of money for my M.L.S. (Probably too much money, but that’s another story.) The M.L.S.’s return on investment is not wonderful to begin with, but the one expectation that one DOES have from this degree is that it qualifies one to do the kind of archival management jobs that pay a wage you can at least live on. The message being sent by this ad is that “we don’t value the M.L.S. as an indicator of professional training and experience.” And the more institutions that post jobs like this, the less that the degree is going to be worth. What’s more, this is from an institution WITH an archives program–you would expect the institutional archives to work to INCREASE the value of a degree from said program.

Yes, this is an entry-level position, and so you don’t expect to see “Ph.D. and 15 years of experience” and all of that stuff. But it would be nice of them to at least pretend that you need to have at least a minimal professional training qualification before you can jump right in to a professional-level position.

Talking about past employers is always a risky proposition, so I want to start out by saying I spent three productive and rewarding years at my last job. It was my first real job ever. If I had it to do over, I would still take that job again. And yet…I have some real regrets. There were things I wish I’d done differently. There were things I wish my employer had done differently. And I hope this post sparks discussions not about what we did wrong, but about how we (and you!) can do the right things in the future.

One of my proudest accomplishments at my old job was starting a regular outreach program. In the 3 years I was there, we went from putting together an exhibit once in a while to four exhibits a year, multiple open houses, and other outreach events. Unfortunately, new programs like these don’t mean new funding. Our budget for receptions where we expected 50+ attendees was $50 or less—not nearly enough for professional catering.

“I will bake cookies,” I said.

And somehow, what I thought would be a stopgap measure until we had funding for a real caterer turned into my boss asking me to bake things for every event we held. There were days when I would put in my eight hours in the archives, and then spend the next eight hours buying ingredients, baking cookies, and cleaning my kitchen afterwards. (I did get reimbursed for whatever ingredients I had receipts for. And after about six months of this, my boss agreed to comp time. It worked out to about 3 hours off work for 8 hours spent baking.)

I gave up activities I loved so I could devote my evenings to baking. I turned down invitations to hang out after work because I knew that I still had many hours of kitchen work waiting for me. I ignored the concerns of my friends and colleagues. I truly believed that if I worked hard enough, whether in the archives or in the kitchen, my employer would promote me from archives technician to archivist.

The whole baking thing was problematic in so many ways. It violated my parent institution’s rules about unpaid overtime and approved catering vendors. Rather than making me an indispensable employee, all that hard work could have gotten me fired. When I started getting comp time (also against the rules for hourly workers like me), it sent a message that my time was better spent baking cookies than answering reference questions or creating digital exhibits. And how would baking cookies prove that I was a good archivist?

And despite all that–I loved it. Not the actual baking part, which was stressful and exhausting, but the day afterwards, when everyone who came to our events told me how delicious my cookies were. I didn’t get a lot of praise for my archives work, and the baking allowed me to finally feel appreciated. If my boss had done the right thing and said, “You can’t bake for our events anymore,” I would have been angry. My feelings would have been hurt. I might well have reacted badly. It would have been hard for both of us.

In the three years I spent in that archives, my boss was mostly very nice to me. He granted all my requests for vacation days. He regularly gave me work time to attend professional events. He listened to all my wild ideas for ways to improve the archives. And so when I said, “I will bake things for our events,” it was no surprise that he said yes.

My eagerness to please eventually became my own undoing. When my boss asked me to help write a proposal to fund a new archivist position, I jumped at the chance. The justification I wrote must have been pretty good, because we got funding for a full-time, permanent position. And because the proposal said that my responsibilities should be transferred to the new position, I had assumed that I would be promoted into it. That didn’t happen, and I was very fortunate to find a new position at another institution and avoid the indignity of a demotion.

During my last week at work, my boss said to me, “You need to know that you could not have worked any harder.” And what I heard was, No matter how hard you worked, it would never have been good enough for us. And it was true. They valued my skills, but they still didn’t consider me a professional. And even when I announced that I had a job offer and was going to leave, that didn’t change.

In spite of having a new job that pays well and provides a good work environment, I find it difficult not to be bitter about the way I was treated. My hard work did earn me merit raises totaling 81 cents an hour, and I gained experience that has served me well since I left. But when I think about what I could have accomplished, personally and professionally, with all the hours I spent making cookies, it makes me want to cry. I am overwhelmed not by anger, but by shame and regret. Why didn’t I stand up for myself?

It took over a year, but I finally did it. I marched into my boss’s office and said, not at all politely, “I’m not baking for events anymore.” That was that. I didn’t get fired. The world didn’t end. And I didn’t bake cookies anymore.

I’m now in the position of supervising other people, and it’s forced me to think about the ways I was treated as an employee, both good and bad, and how I want employers to treat me. In the abstract, my goals are pretty simple. If my employees are happy in their jobs, I hope to help them stay productive and fulfilled in those jobs for as long as possible. If they want to move on, up, or out, I’d like to create a work environment that helps them do that (without demanding work well above their pay grade). I want them to have lives outside of work. I never want them to be afraid to tell me I screwed up.

I’m not going to pretend I have this whole manager thing figured out, but I think my most basic responsibility is to make sure that my department accomplishes things that are proportionate to the number of hours my employees and I work and to our job classifications. If we’re spending four hours a day watching cat videos, we probably aren’t accomplishing as much as we could, and that’s a management failure. But if I set our goals so high that we can’t accomplish them without unpaid overtime, or if we go home at the end of each day stressed out about all the things we didn’t have time to do, I would also consider that a failure. And I think libraries and archives get this wrong. A lot. I’m all for efficiency, but not at the expense of our health, sanity, and personal lives. It’s okay if you don’t fully process all of your collections. It’s okay to fill a reception table with cookies you bought at Wawa. How are you going to argue for funding to do things you’re already doing? Why should your employer pay you more to do the work you already do?

I’ve argued before that the archives profession is not sustainable if there are no jobs for entry-level archivists. But I would also go further to say that the profession is not sustainable if the jobs that do exist are not sustainable on an individual level. No matter how many hours you work, how many collections you process, how many reference questions you answer, or how many cookies you bake, you will never be able to do all the things that need to be done at your archives. That’s the nature of our work, and you’ll burn out if you try. And you can’t take care of the archives if you can’t take care of yourself.

Edited 11/14: Today one of my staff brought in delicious cupcakes to share! And before I went home for the day, we had a little chat.

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to–I would never ask you to–at my last job my boss asked me to bake things…”

“When I bake, it’s because I want to.”

“…awesome! That is exactly how it should be.”

Awkward? Oh hells yes. Worthwhile? Absolutely.

Hunting for a job is all about smoke and mirrors: isn’t that what all this job searching crap teaches you, anyway? Play the game the employers want you to: we’re all a bunch of multi-tasking team players who also work well independently, right?

I’m re-posting something I wrote long before I was invited to contribute to this collective blog. It’s still relevant:  after half a decade of scanning job ads, composing cover letters and reconfiguring resumes, I’m feeling a whole lot of righteous anger whenever a ridiculous job posting appears on a job board or listserv.

The original post can be found here, but I’m re-posting in its entirety, so no need to aggravate any pre-existing repetitive stress injuries you may have developed by endless clicking, clicking, clicking….

Originally posted on Thursday, April 14, 2011:

It’s spring, so it’s time for a shitload of employers to post their Young Canada Works jobs: jobs that are partially funded by the government for students between the ages of 15 and 30. The employer pays half, the government pays half, and a student gets a job that is related to his or her career goals. The pay varies wildly, depending on how much money the institution has.

I recently heard a random statistic on the radio that a living wage in Vancouver is determined to be around the $18/hr mark. That’s $10 more an hour than the current minimum wage in British Columbia, and $8 more than what the minimum wage will be around this time next year. A living wage is what you need to cover basic expenses. The average hourly wage in BC is $23.16.

Here is one full-time position, posted to a listserv. They are paying $13 an hour.

Job Posting: Archive Digitizaion Assistant/Library Assistant
Vancouver

Position: Archive Digitization Assistant/Library Assistant
Duration: 14 weeks, 35 hours per week, Monday-Friday 9AM-5PM, $13/hr
Eligibility: Full-time post-secondary student returning to full-time studies in the Fall, aged 15-30
Start date: To be arranged no later than May 30th, 2011

http://www.musiccentre.ca/apps/index.cfm?fuseaction=news.FA_dsp_details&newsid=1575

And here is another full-time position, for $23.96 an hour:

That second job posting? It pays more than my current job. I make less than the average hourly wage in BC. I’m also throwing 63% of what I earn towards rent right now — financial experts say you shouldn’t be paying more than 30-35% of your income towards rent/mortgage.

My current job requires a graduate degree in library and/or archives studies. That job listed above — no graduate degree necessary, but they still pay $1.00 + more an hour than what I am getting right now, with my fancy degrees. The City of Vancouver is currently advertising a position for a Parking Enforcement Officer: $23.96 per hour, and a high school diploma is the only educational requirement.

In 2005/06, I had a student job at McGill University that paid $9/hr.

The job wasn’t bad and at times it was really awesome, but the pay was terrible. I was 31 years old (too old to apply for any Young Canada Works jobs) and making $9 an hour, which was 50 cents more an hour than I had made 12 years previous, just out of high school, working in a chocolate store.

But I figured it was all temporary. $9 was a terrible wage, considering my education and skills, but it was in the field I wanted to be in, and hey! It’s just a student job! I’ll be making craploads in no time! [by "craploads" I figured I would be in the $45,000 to $55,000 range by year 5 of my life as an archivist -- entry level positions at Library and Archives Canada were being offered at $50,000 in 2006.] I will get a good job and pay back those loans, go on regular vacations, have a social life … I certainly didn’t anticipate developing an electrifying case of burnout during my first job out of grad school, or my brother-in-law killing himself and thereby shattering my family, or what all of the aforementioned would do to my world-view.

I have a job right now, and I am very, very grateful for it. But sometimes, I wish I could go back in time and make a different decision, one that didn’t include grad school. If I had stayed at the convenience store I was working at when I decided I needed to get more education, I would be earning more than what I am earning now (good union).

Or I would be in jail, because that job made me want to kill people. Or….. it doesn’t matter. I don’t have the money to get the supplies to build the time machine. But when my contract is done at the end of the summer, I’ll probably have the time to pursue a little physics research. We’ll see.