When it came time for the last talk of the last panel of the Simmons GSLIS 2nd Annual Graduate Symposium, presenter Eva Rios-Alvarado took a moment to acknowledge her presence: “It’s hard to be a librarian in a roomful of archivists,” she quipped. The statement served to lighten the late-afternoon mood and also set the tone for the talk that followed.
I was not in the room when this happened. I was 3,000 miles away in my San Francisco apartment, watching the Symposium via livestream as part of my ongoing efforts as an online student to remain connected to a campus that happens to be on the other side of the country.
As I have been processing my thoughts about and reactions to the Symposium over the past week, this particular moment stands out to me for several reasons: Rios-Alvarado’s spontaneous remark encapsulates a number of themes that emerged from the panels; it pinpoints what I understand to be a complicated distinction in LIS programs between different types of students, and it at once confuses and clarifies my own experience as someone new to these fields who interacts with them from a distance.
These thoughts can be expressed with a single question:?what does it mean to be in the same room together??For several of the panelists, this question might take different forms: for Elizabeth McGorty, these means building bridges between the archival and performing arts communities, whereas for Jessica Bennett, it could be the potential opportunities in exploring new ways to cultivate the public’s engagement with art. Astrid Drew’s talk on cultural identity among the Swedish-American community in Rhode Island outlined the particular contours of an in-between territory in which the distinctions are blurred between subject and scholarship. Kristen Schuster extended this idea of the “third space” to the architectural history of public libraries, explaining how the spatial orientation of libraries has evolved relative to librarians’ relationships with patrons as well as changing practices and priorities of information organization.
The conversation took a more theoretical turn with the final panel of the day. Genna Duplisea challenged fellow archivists to think critically about the idea of activism–to identify their own positionality and recognize that the archival process never occurs in a neutral space. Rios-Alvarado and colleague?Ren?e Elizabeth Neely sought to move the conversation beyond activism, focusing on the complex dynamic between memory, history, and archives.
As these panelists demonstrated (and I should note here that I’ve only highlighted a portion of the day’s talks–my West Cost time zone got in the way of my participation in the first half of the Symposium), it certainly does mean something to be in the “same room,” although what this means is constantly in flux and contingent on local conditions. What remains the same, however, is the idea that both archivists and librarians are always operating within and among a community–or communities. We must understand the shapes that these communities take, the inherent promises and challenges the contain, and the unique but overlapping?responsibilities?of each person in the room. From my room in San Francisco, I thought about my own space and my own role and about the memory and positionality I will bring with me as I make the transition from a student into what comes next.
Review the Symposium program here.
Panel broadcasts are available here.