Mentoring

Thing 11 looks at mentors, defined as someone who takes an active interest in your career either by sharing advice and knowledge or by facilitating professional opportunities. 

I have an official mentor, someone I contacted to ask if they would support my Registration Scheme application. I’ve failed to meet up with them yet, despite being well past the half way point with preparing my portfolio. This is partly due to my reluctance to bother them, and partly due to my being accustomed to working alone, particularly towards goals which only benefit myself. I would like to overcome both these tendencies, which can leave me professionally isolated, and it is foolish not to make the most of help that is freely offered. During my Archives Administration diploma, which I took part in via distance learning, I had the minimum contact it was possible to have with the department at Aberystwyth and with my fellow intake. I think I would have benefitted from getting more involved at that stage, especially in developing a network of peers working in archives, something I feel I lack at present.

I was very fortunate to have an unofficial mentor when I was an undergraduate. A lecturer, she counselled me in both a personal and professional capacity throughout a major turning point in my final year. She provided academic guidance which helped me attain a first class degree, arranged professional references which resulted in the offer of a postgraduate scholarship, and provided priceless work experience which led to my being selected from 200 applicants for the library job which began my career. I would not be where I am now without her. I was fortunate to attend a University where lecturers were not so preoccupied with RAE and REF and whatever other hoops they have to jump through to support their students when they needed it most. I knew I could knock on her door any time, and I think that this academic and pastoral support is sadly lacking for many students today.

Tales of an accidental archivist

Thing 10 covers routes into the profession - traineeships, master’s degrees and accreditation. I’m a (accidentally) trained Archivist rather than Librarian, but the route was identical, so I figure it’s worth sharing. I may catalogue archives rather than books, but when I'm not doing this I work with extensive book collections. I care and repair books, make them accessible, I teach using them, and create exhibitions and web resources from the collections. When work for small respository, you need to be able to turn your hand to anything!

Like many in the library sector, I’m an English Literature graduate. My secondary school was... best forgotten, and I did not reach anything near my potential. Leaving, thank heavens, finally, in 1999, I managed to get a place at Anglia Polytechnic University. Founded by, and since 2005, named after John Ruskin, it was a highly liberal, nurturing and creative environment, in which I finally flourished. I left after three years with a first class honours degree and an AHRC scholarship to study a Masters in Modernism, at Queen Mary, University of London. I accepted this without much thought to a long-term career plan, and had a wonderful year of complete financial and intellectual freedom in the capital. On graduation, a friend at Cardiff University urged me to move there to take up a PhD in Critical Theory, which was a discipline I had dabbled with under Jacqueline Rose while at Queen Mary. I applied unsuccessfully for an AHRC scholarship, and again, without thought to long-term goals, moved to Cardiff anyway and began a PhD. I had a succession of dreadful bar and supermarket jobs to support myself while I studied, before successfully obtaining an evening and weekend library assistant job in the University’s Arts and Social Studies Library. This was August 2003 – and I’m still here!

I loved everything about the library. I loved the work and I loved the people, who were almost without exception, at every level, kind, thoughtful and intelligent. I loved working with the students, and I loved the changing seasons of the academic year – the lull of summer, the giddy new students in autumn, the tears and tempers around essay submission dates and the hum of tension during exam revision. After 18 months I made the decision to withdraw from my PhD, for a whole host of reasons, but a major factor was the feeling that I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I put all my efforts into a library career. 

In 2005 I moved into a post which had become vacant, working afternoons rather than evenings and weekends. This gave me more hours and experience of working in peak time, very different to evenings and weekends. I’m glad I had the experience of working these ‘insightful’ shifts however – many daytime staff don’t appreciate how much harder the work is in terms of customer service. All the problem customers would come out of the woodwork after hours, hoping to take advantage of a largely untrained, unsupervised skeleton staff. 

I took advantage of my free mornings to work on a distance learning Library and Information Studies MSc offered by Aberystwyth University. I was one module in, but then suddenly everything changed at work. I had taken part in a 6 week ‘job-swap’ scheme, and had been paired with the University’s Archives Assistant, Gemma. She had only been in post for a few months, and was finding the work unsuitable. She came to work on the issue desk, and loved its chaotic bustle. I went to work in the archives, and loved the scholarly quiet and the variety of work there was to do. Special Collections and Archives had only been founded six months previously, and there was plenty of work on offer. After the six weeks were up I felt like I’d had ten different jobs (in a good way), and was sad about leaving them unfinished. Fortunately, Gemma felt the same way, and we were permitted to continue our ‘swap’ for the foreseeable future. I will never forget my gratitude to senior management for their flexible attitude toward what was quite an unorthodox set up. Gemma was on a higher grade than me, and full-time rather than part-time, so we didn’t make it easy for anyone. 

I contacted Aberystwyth and asked to move from the LIS degree to a degree in Archives Administration. I couldn’t transfer any credit, but having abandoned half a PhD, losing 20 credits didn’t feel like the end of the world. The transfer was done with a minimum of fuss, and I found myself training to be an archivist. 

In 2006, Gemma obtained a library post at the Welsh Assembly. Her Archives Assistant post became vacant, and I applied for it successfully. Now I was full-time and working at a higher grade, I was almost there! The next bit is pretty boring, it basically involves me spending two years doing coursework every weekend and working very hard at my new job. 

In 2008, I completed my archives qualification to Postgraduate Diploma level, since I had already completed a dissertation at Master’s level. I had also ran out of academic steam (and money) by this point. I started being allowed to take part in more professional activities – cataloguing, researching and organising exhibitions, project management. 

In 2009 I took a route within my organisation known as re-grading, where you fill out a questionnaire describing your typical work. This in entered onto an HR computer programme and ‘scored’ to tell you what you should be being paid. (This is also checked by a panel of real people, I should point out.) A ‘questionnaire’ makes it sound easy – this was a 50 page document in which I ultimately wrote 10,000 words. On what I do at work. It took me around six months to complete it satisfactorily, but it was worth it. In 2010 my role was re-graded up two grades. This was in line with what the ARA recommends should be a newly-qualified archivist’s salary, and my job title was changed from Archives Assistant to Assistant Archivist – which means nothing to anyone but me!

Lately I’ve been putting things together for Registration (Chartership for Archivists), and I’m maybe halfway there. It’s been a long and rather random journey between 2003 and now, but I hope this gives new professionals hope that you never know what opportunities may be around the corner!

Getting organised

Things 8 and 9 are Google Calendar and Evernote. I’ve found both to be useful for the same reason – they allow content to be shared between my work PC, which I can only access during office hours, and my smartphone, which I can access any time except office hours. These two devices contain all my important information, but I never have access to them simultaneously, so the ability to sync them is very important. 

I don’t use Google calendar much, though it is very useful on the occasions when I do. I love that it syncs friends’ birthdays from Facebook, and gives you a week’s notice of them, and I also note down various personal appointments along with alarms to remind me. I waited three years for an NHS dentist and now they have recently warned patients that a missed appointment will result in being dropped from their books, so forgetfulness is not an option! 

I don’t tend to use Google Calendar for work, though it would be a good habit to get into. Since we lost a member of staff around a year ago who won’t be replaced, my manager and I share responsibility for keeping a service point open, and it is essential that one of us be available at any one time. As we can’t attend meetings together anymore, my manager attends all meetings relating to our work, so I never have anywhere else I need to be, and am therefore not in the habit of using Google Calendar at work. It has occurred to me that it would be useful to note down my manager’s commitments in Google Calendar, as well as my paper work diary, so that I have them with me on my phone, allowing me to book things like medical appointments at times when he will be available to cover me. But these occasions are so rare that I just haven’t got into the habit. 

I haven’t come across Evernote before, but I’m now using it on a daily basis. With my life split between phone and PC, I usually check Twitter on my phone morning and evening before and after work. I use Twitter solely for keeping in touch with professional networks, so I don’t want to spend hours on it in my downtime. Scanning Twitter can be done quite quickly – checking out the links takes longer, especially on a 4 inch screen. Quite often someone will share a link which requires a heavy pdf download, or won’t display well on a mobile screen, or maybe I want to send it to someone in my work address book. Now, when I come across things like this, I ‘bookmark’ them in Evernote, and check them out when I next have access to my PC. I say bookmark, as that is really all there is to it, but I’ve never really found a bookmarking service which syncs as nicely as Evernote. There seems to be lots of other things I can do with Evernote – screengrabs and photos which sound handy, but for now, grabbing urls to follow up later is absurdly useful compared to emailing them to myself.

'Real' networks

As opposed to online networks (thing 6), thing 7 is about the real thing – real people meeting in real places. Ironically, the ‘real life’ meet up we held this week at Milgi’s yurt in Cardiff (below) couldn’t possibly have been arranged without blogs and Twitter, so don’t throw away the modem just yet!

I met up with colleagues from Cardiff University, as well as librarians from three other institutions in the city – UWIC, University of Glamorgan, and the National Museum of Wales, and even one very brave soul who made it all the way from the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth! I was surprised that we managed to round up so many librarians working locally, most of whom I had not met before. It was lots of fun and very eye-opening, not all about CPD23(!), and it’s something I would certainly want to repeat in future.

Thing 7 also covers professional networks such as CILIP and ARA. I’ve been a member of ARA (Archives and Records Association) since I was an archives student in 2006. I like reading their magazine, which is informative and professionally presented, and also the journal, which is more academic in tone. I attended the annual conference once as a day delegate; I don’t think I got as much out of it as I would now that I ‘know’ several archivists on Twitter. None of the names on the delegate list were familiar to me and many seemed to have been sent en masse from the same organisation. This makes it tricky to break into a group and introduce yourself. I would go again, but lately the themes haven’t been relevant enough to convince the University to fund me. The vast majority of archivists working in the UK work for county record offices, and their concerns are sometimes very different to mine. 

I wouldn’t say that I benefit from ARA training events either. Due to the relatively small numbers of UK archivists – compared to librarians, for example – training events, when they are held at all, tend to be centred in London. With the exception of the ARA Wales regional meeting, not one event or training session has been held in Wales this year. Fortunately my employer provides very good general management and IT courses, but as the only archivist, my needs are specialist and can’t be provided for institutionally. I was enrolled on an upcoming EAD course, organised by Archives Hub, but I have just heard it has been cancelled as only four were enrolled. If I really felt training were necessary, I would need to fund it privately, and this seems to be the way things are going. Once I have completed Registration, for which I need to have been a continuous member, I will sadly need to consider spending the membership money on funding myself to attend remote conferences and training. 

ARA have, in line with CILIP, set up the social network ARA Community. While over 700 have joined, there is very little activity taking place (with the exception of spammers). Professional communities are in danger of reinventing the wheel, as there are many existing social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, which people are already using as part of their daily routine. Aside from social network fatigue, who can remember all the passwords?!