Elizabeth Skene

Oh I really, really [really] want to go to this:
Preserving the Memory of the World International Symposium

Inspired by UNESCO’s Memory of the World Program, the Association of Canadian Archivists UBC Student Chapter is organizing a seminar and conference aimed to opening an interdisciplinary dialogue among the custodians of the world documentary heritage—librarians, archivists, documentalists and museum curators—and the users of such heritage.

Even though any travel is completely out of our budget, I checked flights & they’re about $500. I sent an email to the SI Student Affairs office asking if there were travel grants to attend a conference, but not present [there wasn't a call for papers, otherwise I'd happily send off my archives/cultural genocide one]. While it’s all very unlikely, it doesn’t hurt to try.

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I’ve been working on an interesting project at work. Last week I was given the contents of a drawer from the herbarium, containing the work of a researcher & told “find out what’s in here.” Since a typical archivist task is to describe & arrange offices/drawers/papers, I was excited for my first “real” chance to practice my profession.

It’s a collection of field journals & various photographs from Stephen White, [who I was unable to locate in Google] who collected primarily between 1939 & 1942 in Texas, Mexico & Central America. When he passed away, the University herbarium was the recipient of the  journals & photos he had taken during that time. Within the collection are various pieces of ephemera [postcards, fliers, library materials]. Today, a researcher is studying the same areas as White did 70 years ago & any information we have in White’s collection about the plant life will be helpful. And so, I was given the drawer of materials & got to work. It has been one of my favorite projects to date.

The not-so-fun part of this project involved standing at a copy machine for about 4 hours making duplicates of the journals. On the bright side, I was able to listen to a lot of podcasts, specically a few TED talks & Radiolabs.

If you’ve never listened to Radiolab, I highly recommend that you give it a try. The episode I listened to today is a good start. It’s called Yellow Fluff and Other Curious Encounters & in it you’ll hear Oliver Sacks convince you that the periodic table of elements is beautiful, about fields of yellow fluff under the ice near Greenland & about a man who had a botfly larva growing in his scalp & the affection he felt for it. It’s all fascinating.

What are your favorite podcasts??

I love podcasts. I work at the herbarium, doing a variety of things, but 98% percent of it is done alone, somewhere in this large, windowless warehouse. To pass the time, I listen to a lot of podcasts. I commonly listen to This American Life, You Look Nice Today, the Moth, and Radiolab. They’re all wonderful for different reasons, but the reason I love Radiolab is because I learn so much and it helps me to grow and understand things differently.

In search of similarly illuminating content, I searched for TEDtalks on iTunes today – short presentations on Technology, Entertainment and Design [TED], given at an annual conference dedicated to “ideas worth spreading.” Although it’s an invitation only conference, the videos of the presentations are available online & I suspected they also had the audio-only podcast version available as well. They did! So I downloaded 20 of them! [To start with.]

This morning I listened to on of these presentations by Howard Rheingold, the author of Smart Mobs, the book I just ordered yesterday. He gives a history of collective mobilization and collaboration and cooperation, which benefits us personally, economically and in many other ways. You can listen/watch here. It’s just 19 minutes and will give you a lot to think about. He mentioned grid computing as an example of this new type of collaboration – a project I recently joined.

I love learning and thinking about new ways to expand and improve collaboration and I’m especially interested in what role archives and records can play in this. I think it’s a new, but important, role. I can’t wait to tackle these new problems and wrestle out new solutions that can improve our lives. [I dream big!]

I love this quote and it’s so relevant for me [& many I know] right now:

When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it. – W. Clement Stone