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Re: Article in Chronicle of Higher Ed



This is just another testimony to our profession's ineffectiveness.  Her only qualification for the position of curator of photographs seems to be her Pile Higher & Deeper degree in American Studies (please don't yell at me--I would love to have a PhD but I would need to clone myself to do it).  If she had other qualifications, she didn't mention them.  I would have thought that the minimum qualifications for her position would have been a grounding in library and archives theory, access and cataloging principles and training, and education in the care of photographs.  That she was hired is an indication of the ignorance and incompetence of her supervisors.  If she was hired with the understanding that she would be given this exposure and training, she seems to have been short-changed or failed to follow up on her own.

It's obvious that the message of our profession--that professionally trained and educated archivists are needed to perform professional tasks--is not even getting across to our own colleagues in academic settings.

I am the first to recognize the necessity of the outreach efforts she seems to have undertaken and carried out so well and I applaud her efforts; these types of activities are absolutely vital to any archival program.  However, was she expected to process and catalog a certain number of photographs or collections?  How did she do it with no experience or training?  If she doesn't think this is important, how does she suppose that she finds books and other research materials when she visits libraries and archives or looks for them online?

I would love to hear the other side of the story.

Rebecca Fitzgerald, CA
Mt. St. Mary's Archives & Dept. of Special Collections
Mt. St. Mary's College & Seminary
Emmitsburg, MD
301/447-5397
301/447-6868 (fax)
rfitzger@msmary.edu 

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