Elaina Granse
Elaina Granse
In the fall of 2024, I took my Advanced Archival Management course, and in this course, I spent time in the Minneapolis Central Library working on my professional practice project. For this project I was put to work on several boxes of photographs from a defunct local weekly newspaper, The City Pages. The objective was to ensure the physical copies held in the library’s archive were documented with as much detail as possible regarding details such as the subject, photographer, date taken, and finally the location of the photograph’s new home in the archives. By the end of the project, several hundred previously uncatalogued photographs from The City Pages had been sorted, documented, and moved to an archivally safe home.
There was typically little to no documentation attached with the photographs. When present, it was typically in the form of handwritten notes on the back of the photograph and occasionally an additional page containing overall information of a set of photographs. Using that information as a starting point, I could proceed by examining the photographs for other identifying information such as landmarks or street. I cross referenced this with online sources and other databases held at the Hennepin County Library (particularly the digitized issues of The City Pages) to obtain as much information as possible about the subject of each photograph. I learned how to retrieve, evaluate, and synthesize information from different sources to attempt a complete understanding of a photograph which often had no context or information besides the subject matter (BI-c).
I had completed my required time on this project for my class, but had only made a small dent in the stacks that had sat untouched since COVID originally halted the project. I asked permission from the library to keep coming back as a regular volunteer, eventually spending approximately 100 hours in total on the project before it was complete (BI-f).
My expectations prior to starting on this project were that I would be working in a very structured and well-defined environment. My learning progression in this program has dealt with research, but mostly from the perspective of how a librarian or archivist enables research. I was somewhat unprepared for the level of research that I needed to do on my own to enable others to research. Looking back, this is obvious, but before starting this project my mental model of the work involved organizing information that was already available rather than having to track down and discover information in order to organize it. (BI-g)
I started this project with only theoretical knowledge on the handling and preservation of photographs as I learned in my LIS 7130 Preservation Management the previous year and I walked away with experience handling and documenting photographs, negatives, slides, film, and a job offer (BI-g).
In my 7750 class Introduction to Archives and Special Collections, we spent the semester gaining experience by working together as a class on the Hope Community archives. The goals of this project were to survey and inventory historical materials that the Hope Community would like to archive so that they could have this history available to their community members, and someday the public too. The Hope Community has been in place for decades to support their community and provide an alternative to gentrification that would force many residents out. I had understood that improvement of an area by its residents could result in those same residents being driven out by gentrification, but the Hope Community was the first time I have encountered an alternative. By working with the community and what they need and want, Hope Community raised the funds to build a critical mass of housing, which in turn encourage neighborhood ownership and mixed affordable housing (BI-a).
This project was exploratory and so experimental in many ways, but we worked and engaged with our contacts in the community on this project to ensure that at the end of the semester we would be able to transfer all of our work in digitizing and documentation, as well as our thoughts and ideas of the future to the Hope Community in a useful manner (BI-d). I learned how to start the process of digitization with only a cellphone and laptop, taking photos of everything, while keeping them in their original folders and boxes, while creating new digital folders with a new system of organization, as well as a creating a spreadsheet to keep track of everything we were finding and where it was, both physically and digitally.
Over the course of this program, I have encountered many times the question of what should be preserved? What should we invest in for the unknown future needs of those long after us? This is a question that for a very long time was mired in the prejudices and biases of the past where unconsciously or not preference for preservation was given not on merit but out of bias. It is impossible to keep everything preserved for the future so choices need to be made, but so many voices of history have been silenced because the color of their skin or where they were from or how they identified meant they were erased as a byproduct of casual disregard (BI-b).
Coming into this course, my capabilities in research were something I felt confident in as I have been doing research for papers and projects for a decade. But despite my confidence that I was established in this field, this course was still able to teach me things. In my 7010 Introduction to Library and information Science, I had to take on a new format of presentation, an infographic on Eliza Gleason which was assigned to give me an opportunity to gain experience in a detailed account of a LIS hero (BI-d). From there I continued to learn not just ways to improve my research and present my findings but also how research can be fallible.
In my Management of Libraries and Information Centers I took on case studies. Before, I had learned to tell if I was looking at a trustworthy source or if it was too heavily biased, but I had only touched on the dangers of how easily a study can be misled in a one semester psychology class in high school. For these case studies, this was a subject I had to more carefully consider as they honed both my problem solving and my ability to think and reason (BI-e). I had to learn how to identify the distinct aspects of the cases and how choices made by the people involved could have influenced or altered the findings, and how the desired outcomes might bias the people involved (BI-a).
In my 7530 Web Design and Accessibility course I took on the challenge of learning HTML and CSS to build a website (BI-a). This was not the first website I had built, but it was the first from the ground up approach of coding items into existence rather that drag and dropping elements onto a page, and so there were many aspects that felt far more important to do right by. The use of technology in the LIS field was regarded by me as nothing more notable or exceptional than a cheeseburger having cheese, the world (especially post COVID) is deeply intertwined with technology existing at every level so in LIS it did not seem much note. This project however changed that, as it made me ask questions I had not previously. I had known my website should be accessible, but the levels of what that meant did not become apparent until this project was underway. This project was my cumulative understanding not only of technical skills in HTML and CSS but also broader understanding and application of information architecture of information design, usability and universal design and more importantly accessible web design and application (BI-e). How can I make my website accessible for a reader? How do I make sure that assistive devices can work with what I made? (BI-d). Trying to make something I could be proud of, for the first time made me consider without provocation the realities of the prevalent usages of technology. It is a tool that can greatly increase accessibility, but all those steps can be pointless without forethought.
It is something I am once again revisiting as I write this website in HTML, trying to improve on what I had done before, both aesthetically and technically.
The necessary distinction between disinformation and misinformation has become even more important I feel in the past few years but, being able to distinguish them from each other and actual information I have found to become increasingly difficult. In my 7750 class, Introduction to Archives and Special Collections, I created a presentation on the debate of protesters defacing artworks in their protests, and in the research of this topic, it became readily apparent that despite the number of news sources reporting on these events, most would not be useful for my project, or were too blatantly biased to use comfortably. (BI-f).
I encountered a similar issue in my introductory course creating my presentation on The Loss of School Librarians and the Rise of Censorship , where a number of sources I found were pushing disinformation that had no basis in reality, but supported certain groups agendas and so were repeated ad nauseam, so that where disinformation ended and misinformation began was impossible to tell as they all spoke with conviction in their beliefs and outright dismissal of anything that might sway or change that (BI-d). Misinformation can be corrected, information can be shared, but disinformation is a parasite that can only be starved, by correcting misinformation and making sure that information is not just available, but identifiable to all who come looking (BI-e).
One of the largest projects I have undertaken in this program was the aptly named Semester Long Project from my 8810 Advanced Archival Management, and in many ways this project was as much of a showcase of what I had learned in this program as this website. In this project, I created a fictional archive and created plans on how it would be run, its location, and outreach activities in the community, before summing everything into a class presentation at the end of the semester. I learned how to plan out every aspect of this fictional archive, who would be needed to run the facility, how the facility would be maintained with public and private funding, events that would be held, everything (BI-b). I created a section on outreach, where I learned how to organize a fundraising event including when, where, how, and with who this institute would be engaging with (BI-d). I did not have the means to create a real budget, so I looked to the institutes that inspired my project to see how they handled funding and created an event with the guidelines I made. Lastly, I created a comprehensive paper on the different sections of this project before giving a class presentation with PowerPoint where I was able to answer questions from my classmates about the choices I made in this project (BI-a).
This portfolio of my work presents the evidence of my growth for each student learning outcome, and with it I can see so much growth in not only my understanding of the profession itself, but of where I fit into the profession as a librarian and archivist and where I see myself fitting in the future.
I know I am entering the profession with a solid foundation built by each and every course I have taken, and the curiosity and understanding to continue learning from the people around me about the issues that matter to me and on topics I do not yet know anything about.
When I began my application for the library studies course at St Catherine’s, it was with the grasping claws of the uprooted looking for something to hold onto. I had started my degree in English at St Thomas with confidence and a five-year plan carefully laid out that I stuck to like glue. Until I couldn’t anymore. COVID struck in the middle of my degree and was the first of many dominoes to fall, disrupting when or even if classes would be available, my five-year plan to graduate with a masters in English evaporated like smoke on the breeze, along with my planned-out career in publishing.
I took a semester to study communications, paying out of pocket and was miserable. I looked for a library program and found one at St Kate’s. In the month of December, I finished my classes, and applied to the Master’s program, taking the required placement tests, and reaching out to previous professors over their winter break hoping someone would see their email and be willing to write a letter of recommendation for me.
I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t even know much about the different paths of archives, public, academic, that I could pursue, but through my coursework I have found a happiness and contentment in work I did not know was possible.