Date:         Tue, 16 May 2006 09:28:44 -0400
Reply-To:     Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
              <[log in to unmask]>
Sender:       Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
              <[log in to unmask]>
From:         Tom Fine <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:      Re: National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) Study
Comments: To: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
              reply-type=original

If an institution can afford it, the right mix might be to have a couple of MLS types to be in 
charge of organizing and making accessible the material. Have the rest of the archive staff be 
experts on the topics, but get them to learn how to properly describe and document stuff so the MLS 
people can organize it and make it accessible. You might find you only need one MLS type to keep a 
protocol and do the accessibility thinking but you need a database expert to build the accessibility 
and cataloging in today's digi-world.

I'm still not sure if it's a better model to have large/many-interest archives with big budgets to 
pay a staff of specialists, or if the only way to really assure an archive of a specific topic is 
properly understood and maintained is to do it on the smaller scale but perhaps with less uniformity 
and fewer resources for preservation and cataloging. It's a real conundrum, particularly since 
resources for this kind of thing seem very limited.

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Karl Miller" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2006 9:12 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] National Recording Preservation Board (NRPB) Study


> On Mon, 15 May 2006, steven c wrote:
>
>> What I'm trying to sell is (are?) my skills and abilities in
>> maintaining such an archive...which runs into the present-day
>> challenge of "You say you know this? Okeh, show me a valid
>> and properly endorsed graduate-school-level DEGREE
>
> Which is something of my point...from my perspective, there is no degree
> which provides the necessary training to oversee a recordings archive.
> Yet, Universities being in the business of selling degrees... well it is a
> bit like having a Toyota dealer driving around in a different brand of
> car.
>
> Adding to, what seems to me, the contradictory nature of it all...library
> school education places little to no value on knowledge of anything other
> than librarianship. Using my own "institution" as an example,
> I can think of only two librarians with graduate degrees in the subjects
> areas they oversee. Most of them have some general undergraduate degree in
> the humanities and a graduate degree in librarianship. While I have
> no statistical information to support it, (only informal
> conversations with other librarians) subject specific
> education, and/or experience is usually valued only at the best of
> institutions.
>
> Karl