As a currently job-seeking archivist, I have during this past year become ever more increasingly aware of the gap between archivists who have MLIS degrees and those with M..A. degrees in public history or archival studies. This is not a new issue, nor one that most of you readers probably would be taken surprise by; yet it is an issue that is putting young professionals in a quandary and sitting on the outskirts of the job market. After attending a prominent archives conference in the Midwest this year, it became abundantly clear that those with MLIS degrees often are much better at cataloguing and access-related issues for archives, than they are at actual understanding of the historical subject matters in the materials they deal with on a daily basis.
Many MLIS archivists I encountered in workshops would be asking simple questions such as "how do you describe XYZ" in archival databases or encoded schema (such as ContentDM or EAD), and those leading the workshops often simply responded that you enter the description in the "Description" field or under the collection abstract. Some of the most basic archival procedures or descriptive standards often appear as complicated codices, needing precise slots to fill information in or else the archivist is lost. Now, I truly realize this to be a great generalization, and I mean no insult or questioning of the skills of those MLIS degrees whom have led the way in the archival profession. On the other hand, from my perspective as both a researcher and a young archivist, I believe much of the archival community has missed the mark in their field. What I mean is that, while many groups and organizations cannot afford to high a full-time qualified archivist, other institutions hiring archivists zero in on only the MLIS candidates; frequently this is due to their being a library within a university setting.
What we find is a large number of unemployed individuals with M.A.s in Public History or Archival Studies who cannot get work in the field, while those institutions seeking only an MLIS candidate are taking longer and longer to find archivists to fill their positions. A number of states with some of the best archival institutions in the nation also have few, MLIS archives programs: the state of Ohio, for example, only has one ALA-accredited school in Kent State University, making it hard for many interested in the archival profession to gain the "accepted degree" for archivists (though the state of Ohio also has some of the best history and public history programs in the country, many of these students still have to earn a MLIS from an institution to get in the field). What would an institution rather have: someone who does not have as much library experience but has a solid background in history, historical research, and practical experience processing and preserving archival collections, or an MLIS candidate who frequently only has a couple of archival classes and volunteer experience in a library archives setting? An example of the struggle many wanting to get a professional degree in archival studies are having was discussed a few years ago in an online forum at the Chronicle of Higher Education's website: http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php?topic=32957.0
The fact of the matter is that archival materials, though they may contain items that are frequently encountered in library collections (i.e. audio recordings, books, etc.), are historical records, and the current prevailing trend of librarians falling library guidelines for processing historical collections makes it very difficult for historians to do research in a historiographical manner. Archival materials often do not follow logical historical categorizations unless the MLIS archivist has an extensive history background. Personally, I would prefer going to an archives for research and encountering a historian working as an archivist, with all the necessary archivist training, than an MLIS archivist. I feel that the disconnect between MLIS and M.A. professionals has and is creating a lost repository of records: as archivists fight over electronic descriptive standards and HTML/XML codings of finding aids, many users don't even understand the searching tools or division of materials used in these "archival online databases." Some of the findings aids I've encountered would take an actual archivist to understand. The result is a lot of unprocessed and undescribed archival materials sitting in backrooms where researchers don't even really know what's there, all the while archives are worried about keeping up with the current generation through Facebook and Twitter (though they have not yet solved how to save the information created for these online social networks).
I realize this again is very general. Archivists are not to blame for everything that is troubling archival materials in the United States. Budget cuts, board of directors' push for new programs, lack of supplies, and other such devices that distract archivists from their work have caused a lot of problems. Too much to do, too little time is the oft-cited mantra. But we need to buckle down and deal with what we have in our collections. The best outreach and donor relations are processed collections. This brings us back to the issue at the heart of this post: MLIS vs. M.A. Those archivists with history degrees bring professional connections to an archival repository that many MLIS professionals lack, and the more connection an archives has to professional historical organizations the more need for one's collections will be brought to the institution. Yes, online is the demand of the time; but even more so than instantaneous access should be the issue of general access. Archivists, we need to unite, regardless of the degree, to work together. As long as there continues to be a bias in favor of MLIS professionals in the archival community, the nation's records will continue to suffer.
-Matthew, the Eclectic Archivist
P.S. As a post script, since the initial writing of this post, I have gone to the darkside and am now in a MLIS program so I can compete better for an archives job. My one professor, who has worked in archives, made a very interesting statement to the class about cataloging. He said that cataloging archives is a whole other ballpark from standard AACR2R and MARC cataloging approaches, mainly because most archival collections are not an individual item themselves, unlike books or audio recordings. It takes a different mindset to process archives. You know I agree with him, which is the biggest reason I, as a historian, don't agree with this MLIS bias in archives. It's improving, and more institutions are recognizing the M.A. public history programs, but if you have the experience and training, that should be what matters in locating archival jobs.
