Blurring Professional Lines

A while back a friend of mine asked how archivists could maintain core professional values while always collaborating with other professions.  It's an intriguing question, which had not occurred to me at the time.  Last year I wrote about  the differences between various branches of the information science world.   My main point was that the walls between us are largely of our own making.  There is a great deal of politics in the making of professions and sometimes that gets in the way of good ideas.

Yet we must consider the opposite point of view.  There are reasons libraries and archives do things differently.  Standards of description and access have evolved the way they did not just because people can't get along, but to meet the real world needs of practitioners.   In other words a certain amount of separation from allied professions is necessary to effectively do one's job.

But that's not really the point.  Not all collaboration is made equal and some partnerships are one sided.  Librarians, for example, vastly outnumber all other types of information professionals.  We've been around longer and our standards are more developed.  So "collaboration" between us and say archivists can easily look like the library is assimilating the archives.  It is worth pointing out that many university archives are already contained within libraries. So there is always the risk that in seeking to collaborate with our allies librarians may end up swallowing them.

I am not arguing for the very silos which now exist.  In an ever changing digital world, the boundaries between what belongs in a library and what should be in an archive is definitely blurring. A certain amount of collaboration is needed in order to operate effectively in the digital world.  So within the relatively safe confines of our offices, we absolutely should be reaching out to those across the hall and lend a hand on projects where our expertise could be of value.

My fear is that too much blurring of professional lines may render some information professionals invisible to the wider world.  If everyone who manages information looks like a librarian then we're all liable to be lumped together within the same organizational unit and forced to compete for the same money.   The same principle holds true for advocacy both within and outside our organizations. Archives probably face this problem more.  Many people don't really understand the difference between what an archivist does and what a librarian does.  If we blur the lines between us too much we risk creating confusion.  Worse, it could make archivists look redundant to cabinet level staff who do not understand the very real differences between information science professionals. The less clear those boundaries become, the harder it is to justify attending expensive conferences or asking for money for new personnel.

Ultimately what works within the processing room, may not in the board room.   Institutional politics have a very real impact on funding and staffing levels.  So while we should be working together to ensure the long term preservation of our cultural heritage, the never ending competition for dollars is more adversarial.  The library and the archives need to remain separate enough to be able to justify their continued existence but not so much so that we don't talk to each other.  It's a delicate balance. However my feeling is that those who are up and coming can walk the line.  We understand the values of collaboration well enough.   We also understand that there are bigger fish to fry.  Because while information science professionals debate what silo they belong in, Google continues its endless march towards being the only source of information people will ever want.

A Point of Intersection: GIS

At first glance, Geospatial Information Systems seem to have no relevance to the information science world whatsoever.  This is the sort of stuff used by the military, law enforcement, the census bureau, or scientists needing to analyze geographic data.  Libraries and archives don't really fit those.  Much of our research is qualitative and that which is not typically does not have a geographic component. There does not seem to be much room for GIS, although the challenges of preserving those data sets is a worthy topic in and of itself.

But that may not actually be the full story.  There are types of analysis which can be performed using GIS which may be of interest to the information science world.  For example, if a library wishes to create a new branch it is possible to specify certain criteria and use that as the basis of a location study.  In fact that would, literally, be a textbook use case for GIS.   Spatial analysis might also yield unexpected insights.  For example studying the demographics of neighborhoods in which library branches are located has the potential to uncover new insights into why collections are used in a particular way or why certain materials are popular.  Budgets and collecting can then be adjusted accordingly.

Another candidate for use of GIS is historical data.   Often information collected in the past is represented only in paper form.  Even if said information has been put into a chart or a map, modern data analysis tools can produce more flexible and detailed outputs.  So an archive containing census records, for example, can put those from decades past into a database, use them to produce maps for exhibits, and then make the data set freely available in the same fashion as modern records.  Such efforts generally fall under the heading of Digital Humanities.  There are probably more interesting examples, but none come to mind.

Infrastructure too can benefit from GIS.  One possibility is to geolocate one's collections and feed GPS coordinates to patrons or staff searching for materials.  While the effort would be significant, organizations with large collections could see increased access to their holdings.  Those institutions with high density storage might also benefit since robots can receive such location data as well as humans.

As with all technology the key is in how you use it.  Geospatial Information Systems have many applicable uses.  We are all spatial creatures and so any way in which information can be displayed or analyzed based on location calls for GIS.  And such efforts might enable collaboration between organizations which might otherwise see themselves as separate.   Thus technology itself can help bind different branches of the information science profession together in new and novel ways,

What Keeps Us Apart?

When thinking of information silos one eventually must consider their origin.  And of course there are many factors.  But a lot of it comes down to history.  When professions evolve separately they tend to stay that way.  Different philosophies, standards, and practices develop.  People become embedded in their own ways.  There's probably an element of human nature here.  We seem to be programmed to only trust people we consider part of our "tribe".

That logic could probably be applied to many aspects of life, but we're talking about the information science world.  And in that world there are several branches.  There are libraries (and many kinds at that). There are the data science folks.  Most people put archives in there too.  More on that in a minute.  And one must not forget those information science professors which taught most of us.  Those aren't necessarily neat divisions. A lot of universities have a "special collections" which lumps together rare book collections and archives, for example. There also are hybrid organizations like the Digital Public Library of America.

The commonality which holds those parts together is information.  The definition of that word could fill a whole book.  In fact it fills more than half a million of them according to Amazon.   It's been too long since I've really considered the question (my professors must be cringing) so let's stick to the following from Dictionary.com: "knowledge gained through study, communication, research, instruction, etc".   Looked at from that perspective librarians, archivists, data scientists, and others all deal with the same stuff.  The exact types of information, how we gather it, and what we do with it vary immensely.  But books, journals, data sets, and manuscripts all serve as mediums for people to gather information.

Yet that is a very library-centric view.  Each of those professions are very different.  For example Danna Bell-Russell, in her final presidential address at this year's Society of American Archivists Conference emphasized that archives are about the stories they allow people to tell.  That's an equally valid view. Archives are literally the stuff of history after all. The same logic can be applied to data science or even digital asset management for that matter.  They each have their own methods, standards, and technologies. Perhaps librarians are like the Borg, constantly trying to assimilate any profession which involves conscious thought.

Ultimately all these divisions are artificial.  The archivist could just as easily fit in the museum world as the information science one just as the data scientist can be at home in the IT department.  Or perhaps even those professions belong in the information science world too. It has been said that there's a lot of politics in the creation of standards.  The same holds true, perhaps even more so, in the making of professions.

Which brings me to my final point.  We live in the information age, the era of big data and cloud computing. As the world changes at an ever faster rate libraries and archivists alike need to be careful.  The new actors in the digital age, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc, have little to do with the old.  This arguably affects libraries more so, but any profession which deals with the management and conveying of information is in the same boat.   The challenge for those of us in professions born of the analog era is to define ourselves in a way which preserves our role in society.