Steve Thomas: Lynne and Katie, welcome to the podcast.
Lynne Thomas: Thank you so much for having us.
Steve Thomas: So before we get into the book, I often ask this of guests, how did you get into the field in the first place in archives, librarianship? What drew you to the field?
Lynne Thomas: So I got recruited when I was in college. As a work study student my sophomore year at Smith, I landed a job as a student assistant in what was then the Mortimer Rare Book Room. And that’s how I got started. I was vacuuming books for a major shift in the collection. I fell in love and was recruited by my senior year by the then -curator Michelle Cloonan, who is now emeritus at Simmons University, where she ended up as the dean there, but for like one year, she was the curator my senior year at Smith. And Karen Kukil, who was the assistant curator there was the one that initially hired me, and between the two of them, I was just like, I wanna be you when I grow up. And that’s basically how I ended up a librarian was they were the ones that explained to me that this was a profession I could enter. So that’s the very short version. I vacuumed rare books as a sophomore.
Katy Rawdon: Yeah. And I grew up with libraries as a really central part of my life because my mother went back to library school at Simmons when I was in elementary school, and she volunteered in my elementary school library, which was deeply embarrassing. One of my earliest memories is actually walking with her through the Simmons Library School area, and I just never really thought about it as an option, as a profession, even though I clearly could see that it was.
And then I also went to Smith. Fun fact. Although we didn’t know each other, we were there at the same time, but we didn’t know each other, and I have this really core memory of doing a class assignment in the college archives and looking around and thinking, this would be such a cool place to work, and then I didn’t think about it again ’cause I was determined to get a PhD in art history for some reason which was never gonna happen.
After I graduated college, the only thing I was qualified to do, well, two things, was either be a secretary or shovel horse stalls ’cause I had worked in several barns, and my mom, very subtle of her, she handed me the Simmons Library School course catalog, and she was like, hey, you could consider this as a path forward. I went and spoke to the woman who was then the director of the archives program, and I decided I could go to library school and I could become an archivist if I liked it. Otherwise I could work in a public library. I actually did work in a public library while I was at Simmons, and it was the most rewarding and the hardest job I’ve ever had in my life, and they wanted to hire me after I graduated and I was like, I honestly don’t know if I could do this forever ’cause it’s so hard, so challenging. So instead I went into archives and I’ve been doing that for over 25 years now.
Steve Thomas: Very cool. And it’s good that your mom didn’t hand you a shovel and said, go to the barn!
Katy Rawdon: Yeah. That’s not a great way to make a living. I gotta be honest. It’s fun, but it’s really hard work.
Steve Thomas: You get to be around horses.
Katy Rawdon: Oh yeah. I love it. I still love horses.
Steve Thomas: So you missed each other at college, but then how did you all finally meet?
Lynne Thomas: We connected, and realized we’d been at college at the same time during an RBMS conference. So RBMS for those who aren’t aware, is the Rare Book and Manuscript Section of the Association for College and Research Library, subsection of the American Library Association. Boy, that’s a mouthful. So it’s the annual Rare Books Conference where rare books librarians from across the country get together and do our professional development as a group. At some point Katie and I had a conversation, realized we’d both gone to Smith, immediately made plans to have coffee, and then it was house on fire time. We just got on very well.
Katy Rawdon: Yeah, and we had some friends in common from Smith which is even weirder, like one of my really good friends around here is someone who went to Smith, who lived in my house and then lived in Lynn’s house at Smith. There’s a lot of archivists and rare book folks who went to Smith, which is really interesting. So we were like, oh, do you know this person? Do you know this person? And there just was like so many people in common, even though we had just never run into each other at college.
Steve Thomas: How did this book end up coming together of the two of you working together on this?
Lynne Thomas: I’ll let Katie answer that one ’cause it’s all her fault.
Katy Rawdon: It is my fault. So when SAA had announced this series that they were doing, Archival Futures, I was actually contacted and asked if I would want to submit a proposal. I have no idea why. I didn’t think I was like standing out in the field as someone who had really deep thoughts on things, but as soon as I read the explanation of what the series was, I was like, this actually sounds really great and really up my alley. And they had proposed all these different potential topics and I was like, I don’t really wanna write any of those, but could I write about archives and time? And I wasn’t really sure what about archives and time, I just have always been really interested in the intersections of actual time and concepts like time travel and archives specifically.
So I started putting together a proposal and I was like, I need some people to read this and give me some feedback. And of course Lynne was like person number one that I was like, well, she knows a lot about time travel and thinks a lot about this stuff so I sent her the proposal and she had the best idea for narrowing down the topic to pop culture and time travel stories and archives representation in them. And then she said, also, would you be interested in me writing this with you? And I was like, I could not believe my luck. I was like, obviously, yes, and we just kind of went from there.
Lynne Thomas: If I remember this was like mostly over Twitter DMs before Twitter turned into a cesspool and it was like this is a great idea. I’m happy to cheerlead, I’m happy to beta read, is this something you’d want me to write with you? Thinking to myself, like, I don’t wanna impose, but at the same time, this is so cool and it very much felt like the kind of book that literally brought together the two strains of my professional lives, because I have the archives and rare book side of life, and then I have my science fiction side of life so to be able to marry them in a single book to make it look like I meant to do this all along, and this was totally a planned trajectory, sounded fabulous.
Steve Thomas: And have you all both been interested in time travel for a long time? I mean, Lynne, I know Doctor Who, especially for you but just time travel, do you remember early on that being something in particular that tickled your fancy?
Lynne Thomas: I think I read a fair number of time travel things early on before I considered myself a proper fan of science fiction. That was one of the more accessible areas of entry point for me for science fiction because I was already someone who was happy to read historical. So time travel that has the historical vein was an easy entry point for me.
Katy Rawdon: I really didn’t grow up a sci-fi fan. I do like it, but I’m not like in the world of science fiction the way Lynne is, but I did grow up in a science fiction household in that both my father and brother are absolute diehard sci-fi fans. It’s almost the only thing that they read. And I grew up watching Doctor Who, like, one of my earliest memories is watching the Ark in Space, which is a delightful story from the old series. This is a really long time ago, and I really do think it was that show that got me interested in time travel to begin with because it was such like a real foundational experience of my life. We watched it every day, like the whole time I was growing up.
But because I wasn’t like a science fiction person, I found time travel stories in other ways, and so I’ve always loved reading any kind of time travel story, but I’m also just interested in the actual concept of time in terms of cultural understandings and also the physics and science of it, and so yeah, I would say I’ve always been interested in time travel both as a narrative and also as like a cultural and scientific fact.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And that’s one of the things that you all get to in your introduction of having to define what we’re talking about when we say time and even archives. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Lynne Thomas: Yeah. So a lot of the really crunchy stuff comes from Katie. I’m the pop culture nerd who brought a lot of the relatable examples to the table because Katie would explain a very complex, theoretical concept to me that I had not yet approached. And I’d be like, oh, you mean in like blah? And I would have like Doctor Who example and / or other time travel example. So for me defining terms when we’re dealing with anything that is as big and as small as time and archives because we’re talking about concepts that everybody thinks they know, but they have very broad definitions depending upon the context being brought to the table. So, we felt it was really important at the beginning of the book in the introduction to actually define our terms and say, this is the context we are bringing to this table because a lot of what follows won’t make any sense if you don’t have the context that we’re introducing to begin with.
Katy Rawdon: Yeah. And I would also say both of the concepts, archives and time, are things that people think that they know what they are, and in many cases they absolutely don’t know what they are. We find that with archives all the time where there’s such a misunderstanding of even what they are and what we as archivists do.
But the same is true of time and I did read a lot of very crunchy physics articles, which I loved. They were just so interesting because even in the scientific community, people do not, and have not agreed on what time is and how it works. So it’s not as straightforward as just like, well, time is this thing even within science itself, much less within cultural understandings of time, which are just all over the place. And what we take as fact is really in a large part, just something that’s sort of imposed on us by our culture. And so untangling what people think those concepts are and laying them out in terms of like, well, this is how we are going to present them in this one book, I thought was really important and also just really fun and satisfying.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, from the physics side of it, my son is 15 is like learning about all this stuff now and like that’s where it starts to break my brain and I can’t understand anymore.
Katy Rawdon: Yeah, and to be clear, like I am not a science person. I was very bad at science in school. I do not know anything about physics, but for whatever reason, scientific articles make sense in my brain, especially physics where I’m like, oh, this is just the explanation or an explanation of how this complicated thing works. I find that really really fun to read about.
Steve Thomas: You trust experts when you read their opinion?
Katy Rawdon: No, I don’t. Well, I mean, I trust their work and their opinion, but because they all disagree with each other, I don’t know if that’s a lack of trust, but it definitely makes things more interesting.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. Well, it’s a belief in the scientific process that, of course, they’re going against each other, but they’re trying to get to the quote unquote truth or whatever that might be.
Katy Rawdon: Yeah. There’s such sense of good faith within real science that I just find really, it’s so earnest, I just love it. It’s like, yeah, these people are just, they’re not trying to get to the truth per se, although I’m sure they would love that, but they’re just trying to figure things out in a way that makes a lot of logical sense and I really appreciate that. And yeah, obviously these people have years, if not decades of experience in doing that, and so if I need to know what time is, I’m gonna go ask the scientist.
Steve Thomas: And can you talk about some of the different cultural aspects of that as well of, like, what we’re thinking about, oh, there’s a timeline and then you start from now and there’s the future in the past and it just goes in one way. What are some ways that some non-western European white culture sees time?
Katy Rawdon: I think what we found is that, the idea of time as linear is a very specific cultural concept, and it is really specifically Western and Christian. And you know, neither of us are anthropologists. Neither of us are experts on cultural understandings of time. We just did the reading, but in a way I found it really liberating to then read about historically and in the present time how different cultures that aren’t the ones that we grew up sort of swimming in experience time.
So some of them see it as more circular. Some of them see it as more everything happening all at once. Some of them see that circularity as more metaphorical, and some of them see it as a really literal experience of time. Like any sort of cultural concept that we are steeped in, especially in the West, I think it’s really, really important to be able to break out of that and really understand that other people see the world differently than we do, and to me, that’s one of the most essential things that a person can understand. And I think this is a good starting point for people if maybe they haven’t really thought about that before because time is seen as such a concrete thing in our culture. It works this way and only this way, and in fact, as I said, the scientists don’t even agree on that and certainly cultures see it in a million different ways.
Steve Thomas: And that’s one of the things that leads into one of the things that you all mentioned that archives work in itself is not neutral, that you always wanna take various cultures into account, and you’ve even put a note in there that I love that it’s basically, if you think that they should be neutral, then this is not the book for you. Just close it and put it aside. Why did you wanna make sure that you emphasize that fact right up front?
Lynne Thomas: A lot of it is just an acknowledgement that we as 21st century professionals are part of a history within our collective professions of choices that were made previously that were based in white supremacy and racism, and as a result of that, it’s our job now that we know better, to do better. And we say that specifically in the book too.
There are tons and tons of examples in our professions of archival materials being not collected and / or tossed out and / or allowed to be destroyed because someone who was in our role determined them to be quote unquote not important, or to quote unquote not stand the test of time because they were not created by a member of the white Christian patriarchy.
Keeping that in mind, we feel very strongly that when you are functioning in a white supremacist system, because the archives in rare book field is built on a white supremacist system. This is a way of demonstrating that history is written by the quote unquote victors with physical evidence. That’s what archives and libraries do. So, we feel very strongly that it’s important to understand that history and to take that history into account when we make choices now as current professionals.
And Katie, I’ll step back and let you expound on that further but this was something that we were both adamantly clear about for ourselves.
Katy Rawdon: Yeah, and I would just say in the writing of this book, that note is really important because this is an argument that has been had in the profession for decades and is still going on, and we just didn’t wanna have that argument in this book. We had other things to address. We also had a really short word count. We couldn’t make our arguments and also try to back up and have that argument. Does this even exist? Are archives even neutral? We just didn’t wanna have it here. We wanted to move beyond it. And if people weren’t up for that, then they shouldn’t read this book because we are taking that as a starting point and as a fact and then we’re gonna move on from there and explore everything within that lens.
And as Lynn said, like, the entire archives profession, like our entire culture, is built on white supremacy and heteronormativity and all of those things. So when I teach class visits, which I do not that often, but every so often, groups of students at the university where I work will come to special collections and we do kind of an introduction to special collections and show and tell and all of that thing. I always try to bring this into the discussion, and I ask them to think about what they don’t see here and why that might be true and who might have been making these decisions 50, 60, 70 years ago about what was gonna be kept and what was gonna be thrown away and what was going to be described and cataloged and processed and what was gonna be put in the backlog and what was accessible and what was not. I always find it really interesting how students can come in thinking archives are objective, libraries are objective ’cause that’s kind of the story that we are raised with, and then by the time they leave, they have a lot of questions, a lot of questions about what we’re doing there, and I think that’s fantastic. We really just wanted to push that forward instead of just retreading this same old ground that I think we’re both tired of doing.
Steve Thomas: Do you think a lot of those tropes and stereotypes come from the kind of narratives that you’re talking about in the book here of how it is portrayed in movies and TV shows, ’cause a lot of times the archive is the big, I think y’all said, locked room of dusty boxes, basically. It’s that warehouse at the end of Raiders of Lost Ark. It’s just a big room full of stuff. Do you feel like that comes from pop culture, a lot of that?
Lynne Thomas: So I think this is where the idea of the infinite loop comes from, from the title, because this is sort of one of those self-reinforcing things. Culturally, we’re steeped in the idea that libraries and archives are neutral and that everything is objective and that all of the organization and intellectual description and other forms of archival and rare book labor are invisible and just magically happened by elves who are not paid a living wage. And then, that gets reflected in pop culture and then people reabsorb that narrative and you end up with this loop where it’s just self-reinforcing. So, I think that’s one of the things we were trying to break out of was that loop.
When I tell people that I’m a rare book librarian, I get the same questions every single time and they are very specific to what people think rare book libraries are and look like and what they think their experience would be if they visited one because they’ve never experienced it. A lot of my career and publication history is all about trying to explode some of those myths specifically in rare books. So for me that’s one of the reasons that this project was like catnip because it was a chance to explode some of those myths because people have very specific assumptions about what our daily lives and work and labor and intellectual out put look like. And those come from pop culture in many cases because they don’t have direct experience.
Katy Rawdon: Yeah, I mean, when I tell people I’m an archivist, the question I get is, what’s that? And then I can see them start to try to latch onto anything they might know about their profession, and it all comes from pop culture because that’s what we do. If we don’t know about something, we’re like, where have I seen this thing before? So all of the misinformation that we find embedded in pop culture is what they immediately latch onto and start asking me about, and that is harmful.
I don’t know if I can call it a failing of our profession, but it definitely points to a problem in our profession that all these people have not been to an archives or special collections and don’t have that direct experience and there’s just no reason for that. There’s something in different archives for everybody, but for whatever reason, like many people have gone into a public library, but people do not go into archives and special collections the same way, I think, because of our reputation.
And then of course it’s really harmful, going back to the white supremacy issue, when someone who is a member of a marginalized community does go into an archives or special collections and has been told that it’s objective and always has the answer and then they don’t see themselves represented because of past practices. What does that say about who you are and what your identity is and what your past is? Where do you belong if you’re not in this theoretically objective collection? And so like Lynne said, it really is an infinite loop where people aren’t gonna go somewhere they’re not represented, they don’t go, then they don’t know anything about it, and then they latch onto the pop culture references that are often incredibly misguided.
Steve Thomas: So what are some examples of a way in pop culture that they’ve been portrayed in a good way?
Lynne Thomas: The example that we found for archives that is laid out in the book that we thought was one of the better representations of how archives work is actually in the TV series, Loki from Marvel Studios because that is one where A, the archivist is present; B, the archivist is actively navigating and mediating the archival research process; and C, the system in which the archivist exists is one where there are insufficient resources and insufficient staffing and eventually the major sacrifice that is made (spoiler) by Loki at the end of the series is partially a function of that lack of resources, and it literally takes a demigod to be able to solve the problem because there’s not enough human bandwidth to go around to solve the problems at hand. That’s a very short explanation, but we did think it was one of the better demonstrations of what archival labor actually looks like.
Katy Rawdon: Yeah, for sure. And the thing I love about that portrayal, I mean, there’s a lot of things I love about it, I just love that show so much, is how mundane the archives is and also how embedded in that entire culture the archives is. Like the archivist is just another worker, right? Like this is her job. She’s just doing her job and she does it pretty well. But it’s not held up as like this incredibly special, rarefied almost magical profession, which, you know, that’s fine. Like it is very special and it is a really cool thing to do with your life. But I love that it’s so mundane and it’s just like, “You need information. This is what I can give you. This is what I can’t give you.”
The only thing I don’t like about it is that she’s like, not particularly friendly. I think most archivists and librarians in general are actually pretty friendly people because we have to deal with people in our jobs all the time. So why would we do it if we didn’t like people, with some notable exceptions. So that’s the only thing I don’t like really about that particular portrayal.
I would also say that there’s a lot of portrayals that are partially good. And the part that is usually not good is the attitude towards the profession and the archivist and the rare book librarian. So one of my favorite books is Possession by A. S. Byatt, like every other librarian in the world. It’s such a delightful skewering of all the different kinds of archives that exist, which I love about it. Like it really is satire all the way down. If you take it as a truthful or really straightforward portrayal of archives and archivists, it’s not great. Like we don’t look great. But if you take it as satire, the detail that’s given to the different types of archives is really, really nuanced and outstanding, and so that’s like a great portrayal up to a point. And then part of it is not so good, and I find that to be often true, where parts of the portrayal are really great and parts of it are either very misinformed or just kind of generally negative.
Steve Thomas: Were there any particular ones that were so bad that they stand out as being just particularly egregious that you would wanna mention?
Lynne Thomas: So my favorite egregious example is actually a nonfiction example. There’s a book called Dust. It’s a historical work about working in the archives by an eminent historian, and it’s in our bibliography, you can go look it up, and there is a particular scene where she sort of breathlessly describes her experience of going to this archive, I think in France, and she enters the archive and she finds herself in front of a bundle of archival materials that she is opening for the first time. No one has ever seen these things, and the archivist is nowhere to be found in a large archive, not even to open the front door at the open of business. And the fact that that particular sort of framework came from a literal historian, one of the major professions that works using archival materials, just rubbed me exceedingly wrong. It was like, really you’re going to erase the work of the archivists who made your research possible this hard? That was one of the more egregious examples that I came across, and that was not fictional. That was a historian very proudly telling on themselves really.
Katy Rawdon: Yeah, I would agree. I think the worst portrayals are generally in nonfiction, which is kind of wild, but especially in those like endless articles. There was just one recently where some noble historian has unearthed, “until-now undiscovered” archival materials and look how amazing they are and look how great this historian is, and then there’s like a passing mention of the archivist who cataloged these like 30 years ago. And you just see that over and over again and it’s just like a known kind of non-fiction trope in our profession.
But I think those are the worst ones that I know of and also the most damaging because there’s so many of them constantly that it’s like now taken as something that’s just fact that there’s all this undiscovered stuff in archives when the majority of that stuff has actually been like painstakingly reviewed, appraised, processed, cataloged by professionals who knew that stuff was there all along, and they’re the ones that connected that material with the researcher, who then takes all the credit. So to me, those are the worst.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, if it’s fiction, again, it’s just fiction. You can go, “Oh, well, the Jedi archivist or whatever, of course that’s not done right….”
Lynne Thomas: So fun fact that I learned working on this book, because I’m the person that did the first draft of the Jocasta Nu section specifically, is that if you look at the extended Star Wars universe, specifically the comics and some of the other tie in materials, she’s actually way, way cooler and specifically helps to save a vast amount of Jedi history that was going to be destroyed. If your only encounter with her is that terrible scene in Attack of the Clones, rest assured that is not all there is to Jocasta Nu. She’s actually way better than that.
Steve Thomas: Well, that’s very good to know. I’m sure people must be horrified at the last terrible Star Wars movie where Yoda decides to just destroy all the old Jedi stuff. It’s like, “Ah! Primary sources!” I don’t know.
Katy Rawdon: Yeah. I mean, he had his reasons. Star Wars has a lot to answer for.
Lynne Thomas: Yes they do. Don’t even get us started on their digital preservation program.
Katy Rawdon: So bad!
Lynne Thomas: So bad!
Katy Rawdon: So bad!
Lynne Thomas: So bad!
Katy Rawdon: Yeah. It like really kind of threw me out of, it was Rogue One. It threw me outta the movie for a minute and then I was like, well, we’ve been shown through all of these movies just how incompetent and held together by like a safety pin all these people are, like this entire system. So it kind of checked out and I would love to be able to ask someone if they even thought about that, if it was just like lack of understanding or if it was an in intentional choice ’cause I could see it being either way.
Steve Thomas: So we want to create this change in the way archives are put together, what are some of the obstacles in the way of achieving that change?
Katy Rawdon: There’s a lot of ’em. Like I said earlier, I think one of the main issues is that the general public don’t spend time in archives and special collections. That’s a hard thing to change, especially in a profession that is so underfunded, under-resourced, understaffed. There is such limited outreach that we can do, and I spoke about the classes that we do with our undergraduates at the university where I work. I can see the light dawning on every face every time they come in, but we can’t even reach all of the undergraduates at my university. Like there’s no way we can have all of them come to special collections as part of an organized class, much less the general public.
So I think one barrier is just the total lack of resources that we have to do that kind of work. I think that’s one of the biggest barriers right now, but even if we had all the resources in the world, changing general perception about something is so hard. I think it can be done, but it’s so hard. Maybe Lynne can talk about doing that in the world of fiction.
Lynne Thomas: Yeah. I think that’s actually one of the things that we sort of focused on and emphasized is that because so much of people’s general perceptions of archives and libraries, rare book libraries particularly, comes from fictional depictions that aren’t particularly accurate in lots of ways. One of the things that we provided in the book is actually a section for fiction authors saying, “If you’re gonna write about this stuff, here are some things to think about. Here are some ways in to get more accurate information to maybe make more accurate portrayals or tell a slightly different story.” Because if we can shift the stories that are being told fictionally, that’s going to shift the public perception of what archives and rare book libraries are like.
I had never been in a rare book library until I got that work study job as an undergraduate at Smith. I didn’t know they existed and the stories that culturally I had vaguely absorbed were all, “This is not for you, working class, first generation college student. This is for fancy rich people.” That narrative is very pervasive in rare books and it’s it’s one of the major challenges that particularly as public institutions and I work at a public institution, it’s one of the big challenges that we have is that the sort of common cultural perception of us is that we’re extra fancy. We’re not welcoming. Our whole goal is to be like dragons sitting on a hoard, and that’s absolutely not the way that we work or wish to work, but that’s the baseline assumption we’re trying to change. And one of the ways that can be changed is by putting more stories out there in the world that actually show us as the welcoming and friendly professionals that we are, who are interested in connecting folks with these materials, because that’s why we’re here.
Katy Rawdon: Yeah and just to add to that, I feel like if authors would ask even one archivist, they would find that out. Like little bit of a tangent. But the first fiction book that I ever wrote was a hockey romance, shout out to hockey romance, it’s having a moment, and like I obviously do not play in the NHL. I’m a fan, but I understand that being a fan or being interested in something is different from really understanding how it works as a profession. So when I wrote that book, I had questions about whether I was portraying things reasonably accurately within the context of a fictional book so I just like emailed all these NHL teams and was like, “Hey, can you answer some questions?” And they wrote back and they answered my questions and they were not what I would’ve expected the answers to be. So I was really glad I asked. But these are people who work for a hockey team like they were like, just the dude answering emails for a hockey team. This is not their job is to answer questions. If you ask an archivist or a rare book librarian a question about what they do, you are gonna get a lot of information because that’s our job. We will more than happily tell you anything you wanna know and probably a lot you didn’t really wanna know.
And then just by asking a couple questions, you would understand that the profession is not what you think it is. Like the lift for that is pretty low so what I always wonder, it’s hard for me to imagine, and maybe it’s ’cause I am an archivist and librarian, but why don’t authors think to do that? Is a question I have and maybe we need to go out and ask some authors that, because it is such a low lift and you’re gonna end up with a more interesting story if you get all of that background.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And Lynne, you’re very involved in the sci-fi community that hopefully it’s useful that they know who you are and what you do in your job, and they can ask you questions?
Lynne Thomas: So it’s a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. I have had the experience where writers have, as a librarian who’s a person that they personally know, have asked me questions and I have more than happily answered them. Whether or not that changed the trajectory of the story, I can’t be sure. I have done that sort of answering of questions of how this might work or what’s the right way to handle this or whatever. But I’ve also read stuff where I have very quietly contacted authors who I know personally and said, ” Yeah next time maybe ask me questions ’cause you got this really wrong. We don’t do it this way and you’re perpetuating something that isn’t great. Please ask me questions. It’s literally why I’m here.”
My job as the head of a rare book library is to administer all of the people who answer questions all day. That’s what we do. We are here specifically to connect people with these materials as often as possible and as easily as possible. So when folks who are writing a fictional scene set in a particular library that doesn’t reflect the practices of that particular library. It’s one thing if you’re making up your own library, like, okay, I’ll give you a slight pass, but when they’re depicting a real life library and they haven’t actually gotten far enough to even contact that library and ask a couple of basic questions, I find that frustrating. It’s sort of the red car thing as a fiction reader, in the same way that any science fiction author will tell you that if they handle in their fantasy and or science fiction worlds, horses or guns improperly, they get very strongly worded emails from fans because the fans know a lot about those things and they will call you on it if you get it wrong. I’m that for libraries.
Steve Thomas: The foreword was written by Connie Willis. For listeners who don’t know, this is probably a Lynne question, who is Connie Willis and how did you get her involved?
Lynne Thomas: So Connie is a 11 time Hugo Award-winning novelist, and we cover one of her major series, the Oxfordian time travel series in the book in depth because she’s literally writing about historians who are working with archival materials and trying to enhance archives, et cetera. Connie is an academic in her day job, so she also has that background and works in and around those areas. I know Connie through science fiction, because we have been at award ceremonies together and conventions together, so I knew Connie personally before we ever started this book.
So, when we were trying to figure out who to ask to write the foreward, Connie was very much at the top of our list because she’s a lovely human being, and she’s very funny too so we were hoping we would get a lovely foreward and we did, but part of it is just, I suspected she might be willing to do it. We really love her work, so that was another bonus. But yeah I’m that annoying person who just legit sent her an email and was like, “So, can I ask a favor?” And she was like, “Yeah, sure. Great.”
Steve Thomas: That’s great. You talk about, at the very end of the book, you have utopian futures, dystopian futures, kind of something in between. What are your hopes for the future of archives?
Lynne Thomas: Oh goodness. Obviously the utopian sounds great and that’s always what we’re aiming for, but I’m at heart a pragmatist. I’m not loving the timeline we’re currently on, so I’m hoping we’re gonna lean more in the direction of utopian, but I don’t think it will be a complete utopia by the time I retire.
Katy Rawdon: Yeah, I mean, my thoughts are obviously we have a lot of work to do. I don’t think everyone can do all of the work. I think we all need to pick what we’re most passionate about and best suited to working on, and then work on that. So I know some fantastic archivists who are working on changing basic practices in our profession to be more inclusive and more contemporary, less rooted in the past, ironically.
I am particularly passionate about labor rights and resourcing the profession. So I really work most in that area. I’m very involved in my university’s union that we belong to, the faculty union and also in advocating for better staffing. So I work in technical services, which means I work with like processing, cataloging, accessioning, things like that, which are unbelievably labor intensive things to work on, and I’m very interested in sort of gathering statistics and gathering information to sort of demonstrate in a concrete way that our current, business model is not working and is not serving our larger institutions. And so that’s work that I’m particularly committed to doing, but there’s like so many different areas. Doing that outreach to the public is another area. I know a lot of people work on that.
I’m also a pragmatist. I don’t know if we can get fully to the utopian vision, but I have hopes we can get pretty close. We just need everyone to really commit, on top of their actual jobs where they are under-resourced and doing a million things to pick the thing they’re passionate about and really try to press forward with that.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, it’s kinda like we can’t, with everything that we don’t like about the current world, you can’t fix the big problems yourself, but you can fix these little problems. And maybe if everybody’s fixing little problems, then it goes up…
Lynne Thomas: in the aggregate, that’s how it gets better. It’s really challenging sometimes because the amount of work that is out there that needs done is just literally overwhelming, and so a lot of it is making the space to sit down and think about what’s actually in your control, what you can actually contribute to, what is your personal lane? And it’s gonna be different for everybody. But you know, I am someone who tries to work from an ethical framework of “What have I done today to make the world suck slightly less?” I’m not setting a really high bar, I just need something to suck slightly less. But that is still incremental change and putting something incrementally better into the world. And that’s something that makes me feel better about my place in the world and about the work that I do, and it makes me feel empowered because I am able to actually contribute in a concrete way somehow.
Steve Thomas: Thank you both for coming on the podcast and for writing this book. I think that’s a good contribution toward that. The book getting published is another little piece there where you’ve contributed to helping make things better. It’s available now from ALA or from wherever you get your fine books. I’ve enjoyed it myself. Like I said, I work in a public library, but I got a lot of stuff out of it, so don’t think this is something that you have to work in archives and rare books to get anything out of. It’s very accessible and very inspirational in ways that you can work in whatever type of librarianship you work in.
So, thank you both again for coming on.
Lynne Thomas: Thank you so much for having us.
Katy Rawdon: Thank you so much.
Circulating Ideas 