This Mission Does Not Exist

Perhaps this is you. Your boss (or other important resource allocator) demands that you go out and collect an important batch of papers that you KNOW have been promised to another institution. Sure, you could say "no" and hope your professional ethics can protect you, but then again, who wants to really test THAT safety net? You have no choice but to appear in the enemy's territory and stealthily contact the donor, hoping that your Ryder truck won't attract any more attention on campus than a batch of freshmen playing "humans and zombies." You load up the boxes, get a signature on the deed of gift, and hie yourself off to your own repository and unload the loot.

Archives are not supposed to be a competitive business. Like Rodney King, we should all plaintively shout "Can't we all just get along?" when it is time to shake the bushes for new material. But sometimes bagging a trophy collection that your boss may want requires tossing the collection development policy to the wind, and a willingness to engage in covert donor contact. Be very careful, and burn this entry after reading.

The Doomsday eBook

In their never ending attempt to straddle the divide between electronic information access and books, Biblioposers know no shame. We have previously exposed their annual advocacy of the phony "Banned Books Week," but now we find an entirely new ritual they intend to promote. Read an eBook Day is a "celebration of modern storytelling" that encourages people to eschew print for a virtual reading experience on a computing device. The official website for this snake oil sale features a parade of glowing personal testimonials (although few contributors seem able to actually name a title they have read on their Kindles). Instead we find arguments that tout the convenience of the devices for readers whose hand arthritis prevents them from comfortably holding a real book. (Break from sarcasm: if these things help the disabled, they can indeed be considered a boon to mankind.)

Aside from physically challenged reader use (and the use by physically fit people who use them on their treadmill machines) we wonder if the widespread acceptance of eBooks is a good thing. There are a number of studies that question the true comprehension and retention of information gathered from a glowing screen. There may also be another, more evil, agenda at work here. Besides the built-in distraction features that allow shortened attention spans to skip from title to title (or even to break off to check email or cat videos) eBooks seem almost made to order for the excuses the Information Scientists need to justify their continuing disposal of print. Australian journalists have caught on to this doomsday scenario, and here at True Archives, we applaud their insightful warnings!

Bit by Bitmap They Are Building A Madhouse

The Information Scientists want us to make our material "accessible" by emulating their obsessive love affair with the internet. Claiming our carefully crafted finding aids do not go far enough in revealing the existence of documents, they demand we describe individual documents with all the care and exacting attention to detail as librarians of yore put into the cataloging of books. Unfortunately, the analogy is faulty, because the demands of the Information Scientist are more akin to the effort it would have taken Charles A. Cutter to catalog the individual pages of a given volume rather than a summation of its contents. And for what purpose, we may ask? To give the illusion of discovery to an end user? This Sisyphean task is more than just futile, it is maddening, and here at True Archives we sympathize with our brethren pushed to the brink of insanity because they are charged with dumbing down the process of historical investigation.