Articulating My Professional Path

When I applied to the MLIS program here at the University of Alabama, I didn’t really

think that I would get in. I had just turned 39, was working part time as media coordinator for the

Cherokee language program at Western Carolina University and trying to learn how to use

Collective Access on a hand-me-down iMac on a tiny desk in my ex-professor turned boss’

office. To top it off, I was also working part time at a clinical laboratory taking in Covid-19

samples, accessioning them, and preparing them for travel to another lab. When I read my

acceptance email I actually squeed out loud and scared my coworkers. There may have been

some dancing too.

Thinking back to the beginning of this first semester, my expectations coming into this

program were more like “oh, another year of college. This will be a cake walk.” Looking back at

it now, I was so very wrong. More than anything, this semester, I have suffered anxiety due to

(maybe unfounded) Imposter Syndrome. I have listened as my classmates discuss their jobs at

libraries, their work in archival locations and here I am, the one who stood at a scanner for a year

with 15 boxes of documents. I hadn’t felt I had accomplished anything to be among all these

people with bright futures.

My husband came home for a visit at the beginning of October and we were discussing

my feelings about being here in graduate school and what I had done with my life up to this

point. Suddenly it hit me, everything that I had been doing; scanning everything down to the last

document in those heavy bank boxes, slowly picking through gigabytes of files for ones that

were just right, learning how to upload and tag each file with all the information needed

including Library of Congress identifiers, was important.

 Hearing all the guest speakers this class has offered has given me a great deal of insight

into many of the different paths that this program could offer. I knew that prison libraries were

something that existed but I was not aware there were business libraries at all. Frankly, until the

job assignment, I had not considered that companies had their own internal archives they would

manage. To me it was a room of files with no rhyme or reason, just data they had to maintain for

so many years before disposal to satisfy some government official.

While the story here may not be important to this paper, it seems that it may be important

to the path I would like to take professionally. I came to this program to learn more about digital

archiving and how to accomplish what I was already working towards the right way or at least

get pointed in the right direction to become a part of a field that I could learn these skills from.

Since the Archival path was a large part of the program I expected more classes to be offered on

the subject every semester instead of the normal spring/fall rotations that restrict other programs.

Regardless, I still feel that I can learn what is needed to graduate on the path I set for myself.

My goal of becoming a digital archivist has not changed. However, after reading the

chapter titled Digital Humanities by Miriam Posner and Mining Large Datasets for the

Humanities by Peter Leonard, I have changed my professional goals somewhat. Since I have not

seen programming languages offered as classes in the Archiving path (so far), I will be taking

some of my financial aid and putting it towards continuing education classes in some basic

programming languages that are being used in digital archiving fields currently. Many of these

languages were mentioned in job postings I skimmed through during the job analysis assignment.

Programming languages like SQL, Python, C++, and XML seem to be the most requested ones

at this time. I feel learning these computer languages will make me not only more marketable but

will allow me to make a bigger impact in the current archival landscape.

 With my dabbling in one of the open source archival programs on the market, I feel that I

have a very small understanding of what is needed to work in a digital archival environment. I

would like the opportunity to have more hands-on experience with other, more popular programs

that are used in larger institutions; such as ArchiveSpace, AtoM, DSpace, and Hydra. I believe

that, if given the opportunity, I would like to take the time to learn from an established digital

archive what the industry standards are, what I should be taking away from my classes when it

comes to managing archives in the long term, and where I should be focusing my attention for

future growth.

My passion still lies with using what I am learning here to help with language

revitalization. I have seen first hand what is at stake when there are less than a hundred native

speakers of a language left and not enough fluent learners to replace them. It is truly

heartbreaking. Even more so when you have spent time learning from their elders seeing the pain

in their eyes when they talk about how much the loss means to them. When I leave here, I will

take all that I have learned, all that I plan to keep learning, and apply it to help save as many

languages as I can through archival practices.

Philosophy of Practice

At this moment, as a professional, I am a student. Five years from now, as a professional, I will

still be a student. “Why?” you may ask. You see, I am a firm believer that mistakes and change

are two of the greatest teachers. We can choose to become stagnant in our environments, in

which change has a tendency to come in and teach us something new, or we can choose to

constantly learn and grow where we are. I would like my main professional goal to be always

growing and changing with everything that I continue to learn within my field and during the

path that my professional life may take.

As I continue to explore the world of Archival Studies, I want to explore every voice that

is presented to me and do my best to maintain cultural empathy regardless of the situation. I want

to strive to be impartial to history so that I may present all the voices that were present instead of

just the popular representation of events. I want to make sure that everyone is represented with a

voice because everyone DESERVES a voice for the record, no matter what the record is for. I

want to make sure that a culture does not die out because there was no one there to listen, record,

or preserve something important. These are lofty goals but I will strive to make them happen.

Professionally, I would like to work with the Indigenous communities as those are where

the cultures are being lost right now. I could jokingly say this is what happens when you give an

anthropologist a Master’s in LIS but it's not really a joke anymore. Here I am. I want to

document and archive the cultures, voices, communities, and world around me so nothing is lost

to the generations beyond us. Truthfully though, I would like to work with underrepresented

communities that are at risk for losing their heritage for lack of documentation or those that were

lost to history because they were underrepresented and therefore their voices were never heard.
 In the end, I want to contribute to archival studies in new ways and if I can’t do that I

want to be the person that created so many archives for so many under voiced groups of people.

Lofty goals again, but I want a group of people to say “Our stories are there for our great-

grandchildren. It would never have been possible without this archive of our

histories/folktales/recipes/language.” I want to be able to create archives for Travellers so they

can record their weddings and upload them to an archive for later viewing and see how other

Traveller families designed and celebrated their weddings. Maybe even make an archive so that

the modern Romany can take pictures of their vardos and campers so there will be a record of

their living so they can see a side by side comparison to what their ancestors lived in. A

generational view of a way of life. Ethnographic Archiving in a way.