#societyofamericanarchivists — Public Fediverse posts

Spanning H. G. Wells’s "The Time Machine" to Marvel’s Loki, this delightful book considers how science fiction stories portray archives and archivists while showing how archivists can leverage scifi to improve the public’s understanding of the discipline. https://alastore.ala.org/infiniteloop

#scifi #archives #archivists #sciencefiction #saa #societyofamericanarchivists #library #libraries #librarianship

In the January/February 2024 issue of #ArchivalOutlook (2/2):

The State Historical Society of Iowa's Labor Collection and the Value of Archival Labor

🔗 https://mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?m=30305&i=814779&p=12&ver=html5

#ArchivalLabor #ArchivalWorkers #SocietyOfAmericanArchivists #SAA #IowasLaborCollection #BowdoinCollege

In the January/February 2024 issue of #ArchivalOutlook (1/2):

Organizing Archivists: Archives and Libraries in the Labor Movement

🔗 https://mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?m=30305&i=814779&p=10&ver=html5

#ArchivalLabor #ArchivalWorkers #ArchivalUnions #SocietyOfAmericanArchivists #SAA #LibraryLabor #LibraryWorkers #LibraryUnions

#SAA will host a virtual webinar on October 30 titled "Navigating Barriers to Ethical Labor Practices," which will discuss issues related to emotional labor, precarity, and inequitable workload

#SocietyOfAmericanArchivists #KaetrenaDavisKendrick #ChrisTanguay #SheridanSayles #ArchivalLabor #ArchivalWorkers #LISPrecarity

🔗 https://mysaa.archivists.org/NC__Event?id=a0l5a00000GKFxqAAH

The SAA Committee on Ethics and Professional Conduct annual meeting on July 13 will feature guest speakers from the Term Labor Best Practices Working Group, who will discuss the development and recommendations of their white paper (free and open to all)

#SAA #SocietyOfAmericanArchivists #TermLabor #LISPrecarity #ArchivalLabor #ArchivalWorkers #archives

🔗 https://connect.archivists.org/events/event-description?CalendarEventKey=ffae775b-dcf6-46d0-a790-01877b58a100

On the agenda for the February 1/3 #SocietyofAmericanArchivists Council Meeting (https://www2.archivists.org/groups/saa-council/february-1-3-2023-council-meeting-agenda):

"Developing Organizational Support for Archival Workers Labor Needs," which proposes a task force to explore which labor issues #SAA could provide support for, funding methods, resource distribution, et al.

#ArchivalWorkers #ArchivalLabor #Archives #AWEFund #CritArch #AWC

🔗 https://www2.archivists.org/sites/all/files/0223-V-A-ArchLaborSupport.pdf

On the agenda for the February 1/3 #SocietyofAmericanArchivists Council Meeting (https://www2.archivists.org/groups/saa-council/february-1-3-2023-council-meeting-agenda):

"Developing Organizational Support for Archival Workers Labor Needs," which proposes a task force to explore which labor issues #SAA could provide support for, funding methods, resource distribution, et al.

#ArchivalWorkers #ArchivalLabor #Archives #AWEFund #CritArch #AWC

🔗 https://www2.archivists.org/sites/all/files/0223-V-A-ArchLaborSupport.pdf

On the agenda for the February 1/3 #SocietyofAmericanArchivists Council Meeting (https://www2.archivists.org/groups/saa-council/february-1-3-2023-council-meeting-agenda):

"Developing Organizational Support for Archival Workers Labor Needs," which proposes a task force to explore which labor issues #SAA could provide support for, funding methods, resource distribution, et al.

#ArchivalWorkers #ArchivalLabor #Archives #AWEFund #CritArch #AWC

🔗 https://www2.archivists.org/sites/all/files/0223-V-A-ArchLaborSupport.pdf

On the agenda for the February 1/3 #SocietyofAmericanArchivists Council Meeting (https://www2.archivists.org/groups/saa-council/february-1-3-2023-council-meeting-agenda):

"Developing Organizational Support for Archival Workers Labor Needs," which proposes a task force to explore which labor issues #SAA could provide support for, funding methods, resource distribution, et al.

#ArchivalWorkers #ArchivalLabor #Archives #AWEFund #CritArch #AWC

🔗 https://www2.archivists.org/sites/all/files/0223-V-A-ArchLaborSupport.pdf

On the agenda for the February 1/3 #SocietyofAmericanArchivists Council Meeting (https://www2.archivists.org/groups/saa-council/february-1-3-2023-council-meeting-agenda):

"Developing Organizational Support for Archival Workers Labor Needs," which proposes a task force to explore which labor issues #SAA could provide support for, funding methods, resource distribution, et al.

#ArchivalWorkers #ArchivalLabor #Archives #AWEFund #CritArch #AWC

🔗 https://www2.archivists.org/sites/all/files/0223-V-A-ArchLaborSupport.pdf

The SAA Committee on Ethics and Professional Conduct annual meeting on July 13 will feature guest speakers from the Term Labor Best Practices Working Group, who will discuss the development and recommendations of their white paper (free and open to all)

#SAA #SocietyOfAmericanArchivists #TermLabor #LISPrecarity #ArchivalLabor #ArchivalWorkers #archives

🔗 https://connect.archivists.org/events/event-description?CalendarEventKey=ffae775b-dcf6-46d0-a790-01877b58a100

The SAA Committee on Ethics and Professional Conduct annual meeting on July 13 will feature guest speakers from the Term Labor Best Practices Working Group, who will discuss the development and recommendations of their white paper (free and open to all)

#SAA #SocietyOfAmericanArchivists #TermLabor #LISPrecarity #ArchivalLabor #ArchivalWorkers #archives

🔗 https://connect.archivists.org/events/event-description?CalendarEventKey=ffae775b-dcf6-46d0-a790-01877b58a100

The SAA Committee on Ethics and Professional Conduct annual meeting on July 13 will feature guest speakers from the Term Labor Best Practices Working Group, who will discuss the development and recommendations of their white paper (free and open to all)

#SAA #SocietyOfAmericanArchivists #TermLabor #LISPrecarity #ArchivalLabor #ArchivalWorkers #archives

🔗 https://connect.archivists.org/events/event-description?CalendarEventKey=ffae775b-dcf6-46d0-a790-01877b58a100

The SAA Committee on Ethics and Professional Conduct annual meeting on July 13 will feature guest speakers from the Term Labor Best Practices Working Group, who will discuss the development and recommendations of their white paper (free and open to all)

#SAA #SocietyOfAmericanArchivists #TermLabor #LISPrecarity #ArchivalLabor #ArchivalWorkers #archives

🔗 https://connect.archivists.org/events/event-description?CalendarEventKey=ffae775b-dcf6-46d0-a790-01877b58a100

My guest is Kaetrena Davis Kendrick, whose work on low morale in libraries is lighting some dark corners in the LIS profession. Her data collection projects and the associated reports are available on her Renewals website, as well as information about her coaching, facilitating and speaking, and consulting services. In this episode, I also mention her appearance on the Skillset podcast. You can also connect with the community on Bluesky, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

An AI-generated and not completely error free transcript is available here. 

This podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube music and other various podcasting sites (let me know if you can’t find it on your preferred platform). Next week on episode 8, Snowden Becker.

https://hiringlibrarians.com/2024/01/30/hiring-librarians-podcast-s01-e07-kaetrena-davis-kendrick-part-two-of-two/

#Librarian #librarians #libraries #libraryCareers #libraryHiring #libraryInterview #libraryJobs #LISCareers #SocietyOfAmericanArchivists

My guest is Kaetrena Davis Kendrick, whose work on low morale in libraries is lighting some dark corners in the LIS profession. Her data collection projects and the associated reports are available on her Renewals website, as well as information about her coaching, facilitating and speaking, and consulting services. You can also connect with the community on Bluesky, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

An AI-generated and not completely error free transcript is available here. 

This podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube music and other various podcasting sites (let me know if you can’t find it on your preferred platform). Next week on episode 7, Part Two with Kaetrena Davis Kendrick.

https://hiringlibrarians.com/2024/01/23/hiring-librarians-podcast-s01-e06-kaetrena-davis-kendrick-part-one-of-two/

#Librarian #librarians #libraries #libraryCareers #libraryHiring #libraryInterview #libraryJobs #LISCareers #SocietyOfAmericanArchivists

My guest is Sophie Ziegler, who is a memory worker and library school instructor. We talk about leaving libraries and doing memory work outside of the institution. You can learn more about their work by visiting the Solidarity History Initiative, Mapping Trans Joy, or at slziegler.com. Pancake the dog is on Instagram.

This podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube music and other various podcasting sites (let me know if you can’t find it on your preferred platform). Next week on episode 6, I’ll talk with that Kaetrena Davis Kendrick (part one of two).

Transcript:

Note: This transcript is AI-generated, with minimal clean-up, and may contain some errors.

Emily Weak 0:08
This is the hiring librarians podcast. In it, we examine the landscape of hiring and job search in the library and information science fields. My name is Emily Weak. Over the last decade, I have surveyed the practices and opinions of more than 2000 workers on both sides of the hiring table. I have shared these interviews as well as the work of authors, researchers, career coaches, recruiters and other such folks on this site hiring librarians.com. I’m excited to expand this work to a new space here on the hiring librarians podcast. My name is Emily Weak, and I run hiring librarians, which is all about hiring and librarians and people who used to be librarians and are now doing other things. Which brings me to my guest, Sophia Ziegler. And their sidekick Pancake, the dog who is also here with us this audio podcast, I wish you could see pancake, because pancake is very cute. And Sophie is here to talk with me because something I hear a lot about from people is people who want to leave libraries or curious about the possibility of using libraries or want to know how many people have left libraries, and have they had any success. And Sophie has actually left libraries. So they have agreed to talk to us about the fun, fun process of leaving libraries and the tears that you might have joy or pain. So welcome, Sophie.

Sophie Ziegler 1:38
Thank you. Thank you, Emily, I’m so happy to be here. Pancake is so happy to be here too for anyone for everyone who cannot see pancakes. She is a white dog with brown spots. She is mostly a hound dog. She found me wandering around in adoption house and came home with me. And yeah, she’s the unofficial mascot of most of the classes I teach because she sits behind me when I do my Zoom meetings in my class meetings. And she patiently waits for snacks. So thank you for having both of us on. Sophie,

Emily Weak 2:13
will you tell us a little bit about your career before you left library? So when you are still a library person, perhaps?

Sophie Ziegler 2:19
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So my My academic background is in philosophy. So I did my undergraduate in philosophy at Louisiana State University and then stuck around for a Master’s of the same at the same institution. And Emily, as you can imagine, the job offers just sort of poured in for somebody with a bachelor’s in philosophy. So I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I followed my my then fiancee now now spouse to Philadelphia, where she was studying book arts and printmaking at the University of the Arts. I went up there and started the MLA s program. It went by different initials at the time, but I started the library school at Drexel University. Right when they were on the cusp, they were not primarily on blind program at the time. But I went up there since I was there, I started the program, librarianship was always something I sort of had in the back of my head as an option. On my spouse’s side, getting that degree made me the third generation librarian, her both her grandmother and mother and a shout out to Caroline Ziggler. Real fast, my spouse who was about to finish her own degree and be so our third generation of librarianship and the family is going to be super strong. So I went up there, and I did a program in library science specializing in archives and digital librarianship. At the time. This isn’t true if Drexel now but at the time, the archives track was actually held to Temple University with a with an educator up there by the name of William Marty love it, who would teach the program to the temple. So I did that. And then I did a bunch of short term grant funded archives positions, which I think is a pretty familiar story. I was luckier than a lot of people and that I was always able to swing from one to the other, but it is a very stressful way to start the field. So for the first five years or so, you know, it’s kind of hard to make plans financially in your life, as you sort of jump from one short term grant funded position to another. And then I ultimately ended up working full time at an institution in Philadelphia called the American Philosophical Society, where I stayed for nine years, I started as a manuscript processor. And then left as the head of digital scholarship. I founded the digital scholarship center there. And so almost all of my on the job training, almost all of my experience was at that one institution with a couple of internships early on. And then in 2018, I returned to Louisiana I came back to the Louisiana State University Libraries, to be the head of digital programs and services were among Another things I worked with the Louisiana Digital Library, which was our is our statewide digital library. So working with all the member institutions across the state, we did a lot of fun things like but what digitization labs and conference is in a lot of outreach in digital program related things there. And that that brings me up until 2022. Just a little bit over a year ago, when I stepped away from librarianship as a full time gig for the first time in Bordeaux. That had been about 13 years or so of librarianship. Yeah,

Emily Weak 5:29
a baker’s dozen of librarianship. Why did you stop? Why would you leave? Wonderful, I first I do have to say, I like that you jumped from the lucrative field of philosophy to the lucrative little library work. Yeah, but So 13 years, what happened? Were you were you just like, I hate this something new?

Sophie Ziegler 5:55
Well, let’s see No. So that’s really interesting. There’s always a million things, right. And then you sort of fix fix a certain narrative in your head, but there’s always a million small moving parts. So this would always be different for everybody. But looking back, I think it’s definitely true for me, and it’s so true for so many people I know. And we’re going to be sort of untangling this, I think in our personal narratives for the rest of our lives, a lot of us, but 2020 just broke me in a lot of ways. Yeah, I was, you know, especially early pandemic, with a lockdown. I’m home with two small children, Louisiana State University as a whole. And the library specifically, I think, did a very good job of not letting any of us go during this very tumultuous time. But it was also a time that I took and again, I know a lot of us, they didn’t really think about what it is that we wanted to be doing. I stepped away from librarianship as a full time gig and I normally phrase it that way. Because I wanted to take all the things that I liked about librarianship and all the things I liked about memory work, which is a term we could talk more about, and apply it differently than what any, any specific day job was going to look like. So even while I had librarianship as day jobs, I’ve always spent a lot of time working outside of institutions to apply those skills for different things. So early on, when I was still at Drexel, I was working with some friends and colleagues in Philadelphia, on community related archives, we were doing something called the radical archives of Philadelphia at the time, which was collecting and preserving records of organizers and organizations in the city working for social justice in different ways. In 2020, here in Baton Rouge, I started during the lockdown when we were all lonely and scared. I founded the Louisiana trans oral history project, which was exactly what it sounded like. So a lot of us were trans and gender nonconforming in Louisiana, we were holding interviews with each other, collecting oral histories with each other. And we were working with the tea, Harry Williams, or History Center here in Baton Rouge to document I mean to your donating them there for long term preservation and access. And we were doing a lot of events around a lot of virtual events around this and sort of sharing money that we were bringing in with grants. And eventually, I just wanted to change the order of things, right. So instead of having that day job, and then these community projects on the side, I wanted to figure out a way to do the community projects full time and have some bill paying gigs on the side. And that’s really what the impetus was, it was when we can definitely talk more about this. But it was a lot of spreadsheets about how much money I need per month, and how much money I could possibly take in doing different things. How to Replace the funds. You know, if it takes me 40 hours a week, for instance, to bring in this much money, how much can I bring in doing it only 20 hours that I could devote 20 hours to these other projects, and really trying to think this out in a very systematic way pancake, the dog eats a lot of food had, you know, kids are expensive. And so we had to you know, we worked all that out. And that was that was sort of the slow step to it. But yeah, let me pause there. Does that. Is that helpful? Literally? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Okay.

Emily Weak 9:11
One of the questions they ask on the job Hunter survey that I have out right now is where you job hunting? And one of the answers that it’s a multiple choice. And one of the answers is because I reassessed my priorities after COVID. And I think it’s just sort of it was a big, like, why am I doing this? Like, why am I for it? For me, I changed what I was doing during COVID. And it was just like, why am I killing myself doing this? You know, it felt like that, that strong. So I totally understand that impetus to just like, what what do I value and what do I want to spend my time doing and how can I rearrange what I’m actually doing so that reflects what my priorities actually are? Am I?

Sophie Ziegler 9:53
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And sort of a subset of that is to think about the amount of institutional And then personal friction that you’re willing to put up with, right? So how much energy are you going to spend trying to move your institution closer to what you want to do? Or your day job closer to what you want to do? versus how much can you get away with just ditching the whole day job so that more of what you do, where the energy that you spent is actually moving the world toward what you want it to be doing to begin with. So as a department head in a large academic library, for instance, you can spend a lot of time chipping away at institutional inertia, and try to make your job a little bit more in line with your values. Even at a large state school where things move slowly, you can do that. And a lot of people do that. Or you can try to figure out a way to just ditch that whole scene. And just spend your time moving at your own pace in your own environment. I

Emily Weak 10:49
think we have we’ve done sort of similar things, because I was also like, can I ditch my one full time job and do other stuff, but I just kind of did it and I cross my fingers. I don’t have children and dog dependents. So I have less. I feel like if you have kids, you’ve got to be more financially together, or hopefully more financially together than someone like me without kids who can be like, whatever. If I have to eat ramen, it’s just me, you know, versus to growing children. So if someone like you were to sit were to say, I would like to leave an institution and go out on my own. You talked about creating spreadsheets to sort of was financially viable. Do you want to talk us through some of that? Or just like, imagine if you’re giving advice to someone who were leaving? I’m not sure what what the best way to phrase that question is, but I think you

Sophie Ziegler 11:38
Yeah, definitely. So everyone’s situation will be different. And everyone’s tolerance for risk is different. Of course, I I’ll back up by just saying my original idea was to just go to a different institution. I thought, well, let me get out of the institution that oh, man, I won’t belabor the point. But there’s plenty of reasons to leave. And I spent a lot of time just sort of applying for positions, none of them really worked out. And it took me a little while to sort of figure out why that may have been. And I think it’s because I have a hard time presenting a single skill set narrative, because I do a lot of things for a lot of different causes. And that can just be confusing in a job market. And I didn’t really want to try to reduce my own image of myself to make myself fit smaller jobs. And because of that, I was making all sorts of friends with almost every interview that I did, I made a lot of friends that ended up hiring me foot who I stay in touch with for different financing and community with for different reasons. But what this looked like for us was the deciding, okay, like, there’s actually not a job out there, that’s gonna just be able to replace the job that I have and fulfill the needs that we have both financially and just ambitious, I don’t know, oh, know what you would say, in terms of just trying to use the skills that I have to make the world a better place to use the skills that I have for the causes that I care about. So we’re like, Okay, well, we’re gonna have to just make our own jobs. But in order to get started with that, it just what it looked like for me and for my family was just think very carefully about how much money we needed to live, right. And this sort of went by the spreadsheets, and how much we would need per month. If that varies, then, you know, take that into account. And then I started doing my first step away from the full time job was to start teaching more as an adjunct. So bring in bring in more money that way, and then started doing consulting, work, archives, and library technology consulting. So I would help institutions build websites, small libraries, generally, the Northeast has a lot of these. I’ve talked to people about this before, I don’t know that I have anything useful to tell other people. Because my ability to do all of that was very dependent on my own background. So I don’t really advertise but the people who come to me are people that I’ve worked with in various degrees over the years as a librarian, and then when they found out that I left my full time gig and that I was taking clients as she came, they would just come and ask if I if I would take on, you know, a project here and there for a couple of months. And so that was sort of laying the base work for being able financially to step away. And now I’m working are two main gigs where I’m doing technology assistance for a library in Philadelphia and I’m doing full time adjunct teaching for the Louisiana State University School of Information Science, School of Information Studies, excuse me, no science at LSU this well, you know, we’re just we’re studies now, you know, a study is and kind of like, I know, I think they call it some some heat for that, but I kind of like that, that name better. So those are the two big things and then I still have a couple of clients on the side. And it’s worked really well for me because most all sorts of reasons, but one is I’m not. I like I’ve just worked better sporadically. So I just work in blocks every now and then throughout the day and night. So I’ll just get up in the morning and we’re For a few hours, go walk the dog for a little while and you know, do some other things and then work around the house, do some laundry, or whatever, and then work for another few hours. So, and I can work from, you know, remotely, so I can just work from anywhere as I need to. And that’s the has just psychologically been, I think, a lot easier for me than trying to stay in an office for more than seven or eight hours or a week, which I think some people can do really well. But it’s always sort of, it’s always been about it. But that’s how that’s how it started. And so what stability looks like for us now is is those two main gigs, which is adjunct teaching, which I really, really like. And we’ll talk more about that. And then really taking the skills that I developed as a librarian and being able to figure out how to apply it in a non traditional institutional way, which for me, has been those tech skills for libraries that if you’ve ever worked for a smaller library, and you need to work with technology, Consultants is kind of a, it’s kind of a nuisance, right? Like, you’re always having to explain why it is that libraries do things differently. And the technology consultants are always trying to push you in one direction, you always got to push back against that. So basically, if you can do technology skills, and you’ve got a library background, and you’re okay with working with, you know, libraries, then that’s actually a really, people need us, I’ll just say that, like, it’s not necessarily super lucrative, but there’s a lot of benefits that come with it. And then for the health insurance, I’m lucky enough to be able to be on my spouse’s, which is always a big question. And

Emily Weak 16:24
that health insurance piece, if we could just not have to have health insurance or our jobs, like I think people would have a lot more freedom, but Hardegree

Sophie Ziegler 16:31
MLA, fix it?

Emily Weak 16:35
Not to be political. But I, there’s a couple of things in there. So maybe I’ll come back to a question about tech skills, but some of the things that I’m hearing in your story, and you can maybe tell me if I’m reflecting this, like, accurately or free like, No, that wasn’t what I was meaning. I’m remembering you saying at the beginning of your career, you had some precarity. So like you were doing gig jobs. So it was something where you sort of had done gig jobs already. And although maybe there were good jobs that were like full time, there was some there’s some tolerance for precarity in the way that you are, it sounds like you have a lot of creativity in how you think about the work that you do and how it might apply outside of the work that you do. It sounds like you had a period of time in which you were working gig work, but you also had your full time job. Is that correct? Oh, yeah. So like you tested it, like you had a scientific testing? Could this work? Do I like it? Can I make money at it? Before you took that leap? You talked about the idea that you are somebody who is able to build community is able to make strong connections with folks that you work with, and that those connections are very helpful to you in this sort of more gig work atmosphere that you find yourself in? Oh, yeah.

Sophie Ziegler 17:46
Now, that’s a good point. And I didn’t dwell on that. But we definitely could. There’s always that weird. Oh, no, and library school specifically. But I guess in any training program, there’s an emphasis on networking, which is always so creepy and weird, you know what I mean. And one thing that I’ve, I don’t know how consistently I do it, but I try to do it with a lot of the students that I work with who are in my classes is one of the things that I always try to stress. And the program that I teach is remote a synchronous, so it’s really difficult in that scenario, but one of the things that I tried to stress is that your colleagues that you know, and that you meet in your field are not competition. They’re rather one of the greatest assets, right? Like, of both personal fulfillment, personal support. And also, if you’re just not an ass, like, you just have, I don’t know how else to say, if you’re like us, you’re just not an ass, then like, you, community just sort of emerges from shared experience in so many different ways, and that we help each other. So sometimes it does happen, that we’re all up for the same job like that happens. Yeah, the unfortunate thing is that sometimes we fall into a trap of thinking that we’re in competition with each other, of course, comes from a long history of being pitted against each other students and all sorts of ways. And then this, this faux scarcity that we’re seeing right now in the field, but you know, if you can really get in the habit of understanding that have really been just being able to appreciate other people, maybe it’s the best way to say it, right, and really have a curiosity about other people, and just understand how it is that their lives overlap with your lives. I don’t want it to sound transactional, like you would only ever use that when you needed a job. You just build that community in that’s that’s what gets you through.

Emily Weak 19:37
I remember when I was much younger, and like maybe my early 20s, my brother in law works in career services for people and has for a long time and I remember him telling me, You’re talking to him about networking. And when I was in my early 20s I was like, just smarmy people, you know, it’s all fake. And the way that he approaches networking is sort of as as you’re describing it, where it’s ABS certainly not about a scarcity mindset, it’s about it and generosity mindset and your thinking, the ways in which you can help people connect with each other and the ways in which the work that you do can support other people’s work and and just celebrating other people’s wins. If you are going up for a job, and somebody else is also going up for the job, if you are not in this desperate scarce mindset, which like sometimes you can’t help but be in but if if you can avoid that and be generous with the other person, and somebody else gets it be like, hurray for you, and celebrate other people. It is helpful, I think, in building that community. Yeah,

Sophie Ziegler 20:36
I completely agree. And to that, I would add the same wind, you’re on either side of the hiring table. Yeah. So I love and I think I’m in the minority on this, I love applying for jobs. Like I think it’s a lot of fun. I just really liked meeting people. And I have this like, just like a delightful time. And, and like I said, I just sort of I’ve met a lot of wonderful people who were interviewing me for jobs I never got, right, and like we’re but we just made friends. If you just show up as a person, right, and you’re just you just do your best, and you sort of see if the job fits. And if it doesn’t, and like that’s totally fine, which I think is actually easier to be an applicant with that mindset than to be on the hiring committee, right? Because then you’re representing this big shadow institution, a few of us have training and how to actually do this without being weirdos. But you know, it also works the other way. So when you are on that side, I mean, if you just treat everybody like humans, you understand like, well, we’re not gonna be colleagues right now. Because you know, we’re actually gonna go with somebody else. But you’ve also then made a contact, that person might be wonderful for something else, you might be one day interviewing for a job that they’re at, you know, it’s just all the power dynamics are just so fluid. Like it doesn’t make any sense to overemphasize them at any one point. The

Emily Weak 21:53
field is a very small world. Yeah. I want to skip back really quick to you said something about the photo scarcity of jobs in the field. Do you remember saying that you want to save?

Sophie Ziegler 22:04
Sure. So not just the post scarcity of jobs, the jobs might be scarce. But the vote the foe scarcity just comes in from the funding. It comes in from the way that we train people, I think, which goes back to which program you got into right how well you did in that program, or how well that program and your performance in that program may or may not get you a job, what kind of job you’re at what your options for promotion would be at your job. So the idea being that there’s only so much you can do as a memory worker, is a false sense of scarcity. Because that’s always reinforced by this idea that you can’t be a memory worker, unless you’re in one of these institutions. And these institutions only have so many spots open. So what I’ve now spent a lot of my time doing is investigating how to do memory work. So how to do archives, how to do our history, how to community historians how to be movement historians how to do all of these things outside of established institutions, because those skills are desperately needed everywhere. But when we’re only shown those positions inside of established institutions, who only post jobs at certain times of the year, who have all these ridiculous loops, hoops, they have to jump through to get these jobs. That’s where the faux scarcity comes in, right? where everybody’s very, very nervous, like, Oh, my God, I won’t be able to use this degree unless I get unless I get a job like this. And that’s what I think is really hurting us right now. It

Emily Weak 23:43
sounds like you have an idea that you can make your own job that you don’t have to take a job that’s established, you can figure out, well, hopefully

Sophie Ziegler 23:50
you can, but what I would want to do is like move a little bit away from the you can make your own job today because what I wanted to talk about and what I was hoping to communicate with that was, it’s not necessarily that you’re making your own job, because that makes it sound like you’re getting paid to do something or another. But rather what I mean is you’re able to use the skills that you’re learning. As an archivist, there’s a library and you’re able to use those skills in situations that aren’t established institutions. And there’s a desperate need for that right now. And there always has been and it looks like there always will be. So the work that I’m doing with the solidarity history initiative is exploring exactly that. Right. So like, what does it look like to do memory work for the causes that you care about? So it’s now a good time to talk about that? Yeah, I

Emily Weak 24:41
was like this is sounds like a great segue to talk about this community segue.

Sophie Ziegler 24:47
So one of the one of the projects that I wanted to work on and was the impetus for stepping away from full time librarianship was is the solidarity history initiative. And so this is a project Surrounded by me and some really, really smart people who wanted to generalize a couple of other projects we were working on. So in my case, the Louisiana trans oral history project was looking at Louisiana and gender, nonconforming, trans Two Spirit, etc, all the assistance and the Louisiana border, right. And we started off with the sort of full story narratives, you know, like, where are you from? What was it like coming out? What does it look like to be trans in the early 21st century, where you live? Like, how are you finding community? How are you finding joy, all of this, we did this for a couple of years, the projects are to merge a little bit more with other things. So one of our last big projects was a documentation of anti trans bills in Louisiana being introduced in the 2021 22 and 23, legislative sessions, and all the wonderful trans and queer folks pushing back against that at the Statehouse. So we had this project, we were documenting that we have this wonderful podcast that came out about that. And then we’ve been asked, we saw just get asked to do all this wonderful things across the country, right. But they weren’t really necessarily trans related. They weren’t really necessarily Louisiana related. And it’s like, Emily’s, like right there on the name. So we felt silly, taking on other projects when we had that name. So what we wanted to do was just want to generalize it, right. So everything’s a trans issue, right? Because trans people are everything. So housing is a trans issue, voting is a transition. And we wanted to generalize beyond Louisiana, because right, these are all just made up borders. Anyway, we only started that because we happen to live here. So that’s how solidarity history initiative started, we wanted to think about like, Okay, well, we’re a bunch of memory workers. We’re, we’re archivists or historians, historians have in different ways, audio production experts, to varying degrees of training. And I happen to have, you know, the the official credentials, and some of us do, and some of us don’t, in whatever fields that we’re in, but we wanted to think about, like, what would it look like to do this work, to apply the skills to the causes that we care about whatever those causes are. So what that looks like now is that we work with institutions, organizations, mostly movement organizations, in different parts of the country, we help document their work alongside them. So they’re active, and they’re like, they like doing the stuff that they’re doing, right. So they’re not really thinking about, about documenting themselves. So that’s when we come in and try to work alongside them not get in their way. But also do interviews with them work to document them in different ways. And then we interface with cultural heritage institutions that are relevant, usually geographically relevant. And then you know, once you have that list, you find the least offensive cultural heritage institution. And we, we work with them to take in the materials that we create, for long term preservation and access. And then normally, we also do some sort of outward product, right, so like a podcast, or we help, or we find out what’s most useful for the organizations that we’re working with. Some of them just really need social media outreach, depending on whether you’re in any specific campaign or whether you’re on a specific issue. So we take all the interviews and other documentation that we’ve been doing, and we help them sort of chop it up into something useful, as well as donating it to the culture to a cultural heritage institution for future use. Because the idea is that we’re trying to document the contemporary civil rights movement that we’re in and create a record of what’s happening now. So that those records can be activated in the future, as they’re needed, by future organizers, and maybe by ourselves again, whereas these cycles continue to happen. So for instance, if we’re documenting people in Houston, who are fighting back against education, privatization, right, like, that’s not just a Houston issue, we’re gonna see that everywhere. So next time, next time somebody needs that those records will be available. So this is this is what we’re doing to that organization.

Emily Weak 28:48
That’s a really cool thing. I really like the name is what it is right? That it’s the solidarity institution, solidarity,

Sophie Ziegler 28:57
solidarity history Institute. Yeah.

Emily Weak 29:00
You’re making solidarity. That’s a really interesting what you were saying earlier about figuring out the way to do memory work outside of the institution. How do people find you and hire you? So?

Sophie Ziegler 29:14
Yeah, so you can’t hire us. But you can work with us right now. Right now. We only take on projects that we can find ourselves. Okay. But you can find us at solidarity history dot o RG? Uh huh. We’ve been growing slowly. Some, you know, the website has information, you can definitely contact us to that. But our next initiatives that we’re going to be launching our first cohort series will be bringing in three to four folks, early career memory work folks or people just transitioning to memory work, however that’s defined for them. And we’re going to try to fill a gap because working with students I see this and all the other educators I know also see that so we just see in so many different spheres is that we have a lot of people going through various types of history related trainings, who want to be able to put their skills to this. But you don’t really get a lot of that from any sort of traditional training, right? So we’re not going to cover that in MLS program. It’s it’s not malicious, we just don’t have that much time, right? Like, we got to get you your degree and you got to get a job. It’s just it’s just a different thing. So we’re trying to fill an education gap that way, we also have our podcasts on there, what is solidarity history on that you can find through that website, and through most podcast platforms, as well as that podcast that I mentioned about the Louisiana anti trans, the rise of the anti trans legislation, and the story of resistance is also on there. So yeah,

Emily Weak 30:36
check that out. Do you have your cohort already? Are you still looking for folks to join?

Sophie Ziegler 30:40
So we just secured the funding for it, which is, which is really exciting. So the the hope is that we’ll start we’ll start gathering cohort members since the very end of October now. So it might not be until January, you know, given how the end of the year is, but yeah, we it’s sort of a conversation aren’t going, but we did get them we did we do have the funding. So that’s super exciting.

Emily Weak 31:01
We might not release this till January, so Okay, yeah, maybe maybe what

Sophie Ziegler 31:05
I’ll do is if you’re up for first thing and touch about the schedule for this to come out with my we might have additional information. That’s

Emily Weak 31:11
great. Yeah. And I can always, you know, there will be some links. Somewhere. I’m the kind of person that feels like it’s gauche to ask about money, but I’m also the kind of person that’s interested in money. So yeah. Tell me about getting your funding for the cohort, what institution is funding in New York? Or? Emily, I

Sophie Ziegler 31:29
almost made a joke that a Support Foundation just to see how you’d react. But no, it’s um I got an award from press on, do you know, press on?

Emily Weak 31:40
No, I don’t, I don’t know anyone. Anything really. So press

Sophie Ziegler 31:43
on media. So they’re fantastic. This is a movement journalism collective. They do among a whole sorts of other wonderful things. They do the southern movement Media Award, which, which I got at the very beginning of last year, the southern movement media fun, which is the same website. And so I’m repurposing that for this. So I, we got, I think it was 7500. So that fund, and I was going to use it for all sorts of other stuff. But then recently, I was like, actually, let me just use it for this. So if I’m thinking about three, depending on what we need, I’ll get this will be supplemented. But the idea is, it will be three to four cohort members, and they’ll get to $1,000. Each, the cohort is likely to last about four to five months, we’ll have to sort of see how it all moves out. And it’ll include regular check ins remote expect people will be across the country. And then, but we’ll work on the schedule for how it is that you choose of movement organization to document how to map out that documentation to determine who to talk to and what maybe in what order and what schedule, and how to navigate all of that, and then interfacing with cultural heritage institutions. So well, as a group, we’ll just sort of walk through all of the process of this

Emily Weak 33:02
one a fantastic opportunity for early memory workers. I like that you use memory workers, rather than archivists,

Sophie Ziegler 33:09
the last episode that I did of what is solidarity history, we talked to Michelle Caswell from UCLA, who that was one of the topics that we that we dwell on, we, you know, comes up a lot, for sure. But she and I had a chance to talk more about the use of that word. So I’ll share a link with that as well, if you’d like.

Emily Weak 33:29
Yeah, totally the solidarity projects in the trans Oral History Project. Did you consider those to be like you’re trying to get them to pay for themselves? Or are you this is your community work? And you’re going to do other work to fund the community work? Or is there some overlap there?

Sophie Ziegler 33:44
Oh, we’ll see. So the Louisiana transfer history project, it has sunsetted earlier this year, so we’re out from under that, because we sunsetted, that one so that we could pay more attention to solidarity history, as well as another project, the mapping trans Joy project. And right now, both of those tend to be funded by gifts, as well as just money that I’m putting into it. And I like that I’m hesitating now. Because I guess not being changed. He does have a Patreon that’s helping us out with the website. But for solidarity history, right? So we made the decision I made the decision was actually really important to me, because we went back and forth about what the model would look like. And we were thinking that, you know, there’s an option to say, if you give us $6,000, we can help document your, the work that you do. And that might be a totally valid way for some people to do this. I didn’t want I didn’t want to do it that way. I didn’t want to be in a position where I was making a pitch for all sorts of all sorts of reasons and a lot of might just be personal, but I wanted so so rather what we’re doing is we’re saying we’re documenting the folks, we’re documenting at the scale that we can because we’re only two picking on people that we can fully afford to document. And right now that’s that’s been relatively inexpensive because we haven’t had to plan too much travel. But you know, where it’s looking like we’ll be working with people in Virginia pretty soon and maybe in North Carolina, so the travel might increase depending on sort of how we want to do it. So we’ll see how it grows. But right now, right now, what we’re trying to do is funded independently, well eventually become a 501. C three, and be able to take donations a little bit easier. I’ve just been putting that off because paperwork, you know, to me, a lot of

Emily Weak 35:31
what we’ve been talking about is how do you do what you love to do? Or what you the things that sort of feed your soul instead of the nine to five job? And then how when you started doing those things that feed your soul? How do you keep them from turning into the nine to five job? Keep them sort of juicy, you know? And then how do you do all of that in a real world where you have a hungry dog? Who needs regular kibble or whatever dogs eat? I’m happy that you’re doing this experiment, like it seems like it’s an experiment. And it’s something that so far has felt successful or right for you. Yeah, yeah. Good. felt nice.

Sophie Ziegler 36:05
It felt good. And you know, this, again, might be more about me, you mentioned my tolerance for precarity. Earlier, and I try to jot that down, because I thought that was really interesting. For clarity, I never expected to have any money, I think, I don’t know, I don’t know if I would necessarily promote that people do this. But if you can be raised very poor, it really gives you like, maybe a different perspective. And then if you make career choices, based on using your one chance for an education to study philosophy, it really like you’ve basically thrown away your whole future. So like you don’t think about whether or not you’re ever going to have because you’ve basically given up at that point. So any money that you then make, it just feels like absolute bonus. So you can donate it back to whatever crazy other ideas you want to do.

Emily Weak 36:59
basically given up.

Sophie Ziegler 37:03
I don’t know it might be too late for some of our listeners to reach, we can restructure their entire life this way. But something to consider if you had it to do again,

Emily Weak 37:11
when I was thinking about that, when I was saying it, one of the things that I was thinking about was the difference between myself and my sister who were raised in same family with the same amount of money. And my sister works as a professional actress, theater actress in the Bay Area. And I almost always had nine to five jobs with a steady paycheck. And I remember finishing my undergrad and coming back and being like, how do I do this and just getting I got a job in a grocery store because I didn’t know what to do or how to take care of myself. And then I just stayed and the things that were happening in my life. I wanted that steady paycheck, I would have felt scared if I hadn’t known where the next money was coming from. And I think like, you know, you might have that a different time. And now it’s now it’s okay, now I have more substantial nastic I have a partner that is contributing. So like it’s less scary, and I’m I have more of a safety net. And I’m like, Well, okay, what is it? Like if what is it like to not work a nine to five, what how does that feel? And so I think that’s where sort of where I was coming from with tolerance for precarity is like, you know, how much do you need that steady paycheck? How much do you need to know that like, Okay, I’m gonna get X amount every two weeks, and everything else is gravy. Yeah.

Sophie Ziegler 38:24
Yeah, no, I mean, that’s right. And it does change, as you say, changes changes based on all sorts of other scenarios. So I yeah, I was desperate to have more stability when I was starting off, right. And then I was also just desperate to be in a position where I wanted to stay because I’ve just never had that much stability in my life. So I just thinking about like, well, wouldn’t it be great if I just stayed at the same institution forever? And I could just retire from here. But I just I just think I’m too restless. Yeah, it turns out too much. To my surprise, can you imagine my surprise, it turned out to be restless for this. I’m just always looking around. And

Emily Weak 38:58
given up you thought you had gotten just the philosophy and just

Sophie Ziegler 39:04
I mean, by the time you’ve gotten a master’s in philosophy, like, like, what are you expecting? You know, like, what did you think was gonna

Emily Weak 39:12
happen? I feel like so by the time you get that much philosophy, education, do you think that nothing is real anyway? Or do you think?

Sophie Ziegler 39:19
Well, you know, it’s like pits and valleys. So like, you think that like your second, like, halfway through intros halfway through, you know, when you’re a freshman and undergrad, and you take your first philosophy class, oh, my god, nothing’s real, right? And then like, you kind of you kind of come down from that a little bit and, but by the time you finish your undergrad and philosophy, I think this is true of a lot of us. You’re pretty cynical. And then you do your masters and you’ve got to decide like, am I have I done enough so that I’m at least interesting to talk to in a dark bar, but I don’t want to keep going so far that this is all I can ever talk about. You know, a lot of us are at that, you know, we come to that crossroads and I was I had to do side if I wanted to, like, did I want to be an eccentric philosophy PhD? Or did I want to be an eccentric librarian? And I think I chose correctly, you know, like, you never one never knows for sure. But here we are.

Emily Weak 40:12
Well, you know, I’ve had a wonderful time chatting with you. And I think we should think about what are the things that we should have talked about already that we haven’t talked about yet? What did we miss? And?

Sophie Ziegler 40:26
Yeah, well, I mean, there’s plenty more to talk about. But I think I’d want to say that I’d want to say something to the listeners who are thinking about how to get out of libraries in what would you want to say? I don’t know, I’m trying to think. So. There’s a lot of us who love library since 2020. We found each other in various ways. And a lot of us, of course, haven’t. So I don’t I don’t know if there’s any, like hard numbers that we could ever get about this. But just a lot of us this was sort of rethinking things, or putting our lives back in order in a different order. And so much of it is just very personal, right? Like the track that I took was only possible and was only desirable, because of the choices that I made throughout my career and libraries. But it would be lovely. I think if there were some ways for people to be able to support each other, some of those are definitely emerging, right through discord channels, etc. In that those other projects that you mentioned, where people are thinking about transferable skills from librarianship, and thinking about transferable skills from librarianship, I’m just gonna go ahead and make the pitch that while we’re thinking about transferable skills, I encourage everyone to think about beyond jumping into the next paid gig necessarily, right. Because when we’re thinking about transferable skills, a lot of the times I’m thinking about what it means to create the types of records that you want. When I talk to people about this, it’s normally to queer folks, right? We’re at a spot right now we’re really, we’re kind of in a tough spot, right? We’re finally in a moment where we’re finding our own history at the very moment at which that’s being suppressed. In the in the maybe predictable backlash is happening right in our face. So we’re thinking about how it is that we want to create the types of records that we wish we had, and make them accessible to the people we were when we really needed them. And that’s going to look different for everybody. But I do encourage anyone thinking about what to do with the stuff you learned about how to be a librarian or an archivist or any other type of memory worker is to really think about the world that you want, and how it is that your skills are going to help us get there. Eating is important. And I fully expected when I first left it, I would pick up a gig, a couple of shifts at Costco or something or Whole Foods, right. And I fully expected that I was going to make the money part work, even if it was completely outside the field because I wanted to experiment with this, these other ways of doing memory work. And again, everyone’s financial situation is different. But I just wanted to add that while we’re thinking about transferable skills to really think about how it is that we can affect the world with the the memory worker skills that we have, maybe just take, to the extent possible a step back from the scarcity concept that we discussed before, where there’s some fear that if we’re not in the field, quote, unquote, working at an institution, that we’re not contributing to this at all, when really that’s often such a thin shadow of, of what it means to contribute.

Emily Weak 43:27
Yeah. And I would argue, perhaps you can contribute much more effectively if you make your own solidarity history Institute, or whatever it is to you. 

Sophie Ziegler 43:37
Yeah, that’s right. So reach out. We’ll chat.

Emily Weak 43:40
So thank you so much. And thank you for wrapping it so beautifully, saying such a beautifully inspirational thing. I feel like that’s a good place to wrap the podcast. Is there anything else that you want to plug before I hit the end recording button?

Sophie Ziegler 43:54
Yes, check out mapping trans joy while you’re on the interwebs looking at solidarity history initiative. That’s the other big project that we’re doing. We’ve got a lot of fun stuff on the horizon for that. So take a look. And then lastly, you can find pancake the dog on Instagram.

Emily Weak 44:16
Oh, Pancake’s on Instagram! I’m on Instagram…

Sophie Ziegler 44:17
Yes. If you’re on Instagram, I tell her it’s a waste of time, but she’s really into it. Um, she doesn’t post as much as she used to, but she’s there. Follow along with the adventures. Thank you, Emily so much for having me.

Emily Weak 44:29
Thank you so much.

This has been the hiring librarians podcast. Thanks for listening. Our website is hiringlibrarians.com Today’s episode was hosted by yours truly Emily Weak. My guest was Sofie Ziegler. Their website is slziegler.com. That’s slziegler.com. And if you head over there you can find links to the solidarity history initiative, and mapping trans joy. Audio editing was graciously provided by AJ summers. The theme tune was written and performed by Matthew Travers, and you can see more of his work on MatthewTraversmusic.com. Finally, this podcast and the hiring librarians project are and will remain free. However, we do appreciate support. If you’d like to help head over to patreon.com/hiringlibrarians

https://hiringlibrarians.com/2024/01/16/hiring-librarians-podcast-s01-e05-sophie-ziegler/

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#SAA will host a virtual webinar on October 30 titled "Navigating Barriers to Ethical Labor Practices," which will discuss issues related to emotional labor, precarity, and inequitable workload

#SocietyOfAmericanArchivists #KaetrenaDavisKendrick #ChrisTanguay #SheridanSayles #ArchivalLabor #ArchivalWorkers #LISPrecarity

🔗 https://mysaa.archivists.org/NC__Event?id=a0l5a00000GKFxqAAH

#SAA will host a virtual webinar on October 30 titled "Navigating Barriers to Ethical Labor Practices," which will discuss issues related to emotional labor, precarity, and inequitable workload

#SocietyOfAmericanArchivists #KaetrenaDavisKendrick #ChrisTanguay #SheridanSayles #ArchivalLabor #ArchivalWorkers #LISPrecarity

🔗 https://mysaa.archivists.org/NC__Event?id=a0l5a00000GKFxqAAH

#SAA will host a virtual webinar on October 30 titled "Navigating Barriers to Ethical Labor Practices," which will discuss issues related to emotional labor, precarity, and inequitable workload

#SocietyOfAmericanArchivists #KaetrenaDavisKendrick #ChrisTanguay #SheridanSayles #ArchivalLabor #ArchivalWorkers #LISPrecarity

🔗 https://mysaa.archivists.org/NC__Event?id=a0l5a00000GKFxqAAH