When I attended the SAA annual meeting in 2014, something seemed off. The attendees were very nice. In many ways, they felt like kindred souls. Despite how kind they were, I couldn't shake the feeling that their needs and goals were counter to mine. After some time, I figured out that things were amiss because I didn't buy into academia. They loved a system that never worked for me.
When I graduated I felt relieved. I said to myself "I'll never need to write dry reports again." This was a mistake. As time wore on, I realized the archival profession was 10% doing work and 90% writing stale academic publications. The processing, conservation, and hands-on work with collections were all carried out by unpaid volunteers/interns/students. When I did my field placement the ASC director originally thought I was an undergrad. The reliance on unpaid, student labor should have broadcasted the unsustainability of a career in the APRM field. Despite applying for every available fit I could find, repositories had no interest in hiring me. Since then, I moved on.
The experience taught me a lot about how things work. Universities care more about publications than the hands-on work their employees do. We always talked about backlog in our classes. If institutions paid their APRM employees to actually do the work, they wouldn't have a high volume of unprocessed materials. The hypocrisy of the higher-ups in the profession was astounding. I find myself eking out an existence in another field with a degree that I'll never use. It was a painful pill to swallow but I'm glad I resolved things.
- Andy out
