Tuesday, June 19, 2007

It's Alive, a.k.a. Oh my goodness, am I actually writing a post?

I've been caught up in spring term madness, a presentation at NW Archivists, and my studies for the Certified Archivists Exam, but I couldn't resist taking a moment to comment on this one...

I was intrigued by the title of this post: Can a "boring" collection have high research value?, but found that the discussion here of "subjectivity" is one that intrigues me even more. In our quest to be fair (what does that mean?) when we decide which materials to include/exclude, which collections to describe/resign to the forever backlog, which reference inquiries to excel/decel on, we are often reluctant to admit how subjective this all is!

So if, really, we're doing all this archival work for the present & future users, how often do we ask them if what we're doing works for them? How do we know what they want? And if we are actually mixing measured subjectivity with our professional, educated objectivity, shouldn't we be spending a whole lot of time figuring this out and a lot less time thinking about what we want them to want?

I'm quite taken by user studies, but no matter how many times I've read "listen to your users" in my readings for this exam, I tend to hit a bit of a wall... Often, the wall is "all users are different," or "all repositories are different," or "you have to fill out 3,501 forms to ask anyone anything if you intend to share the information anywhere."

No grand point here, just a thought.