today i found an example of why i am committed to keeping my feet firmly planted in the information and archival studies discipline, and well as over here on the other side in cultural studies. i’m marking essays for an archival studies class, and have been reading the class forums to get an idea of what’s been said/covered/directed. and i came across this question:
If it is not already happening how long before we as librarians are forbidden to digitise and make available online anything related to “secret women’s business” or any material that by todays standards are considered as racist, homophobic, sexist, or whatever.
And if we are not allowed to make this material available online to the public, then how do we ask the public to fund the digitisation and preservation of this material?
they go on to reiterate the question about the public funding access to material they can’t subsequently access. at times like this i wish i was in a classroom, having an open discussion and throwing more examples back at them (why does ‘the public’ fund cancer treatment when not everyone will use it? perhaps) and seeing what others in the class think. asking questions about who this ‘public’ is, and what type of state they imagine we live in. challenging their ideas about who makes the decisions about what gets preserved, why, and who decides that one form of preservation (digitisation) is better than another (oral knowledge). and coming on from reading i’ve been doing today about the postmodern ethnographer, throwing in some thoughts about derrida’s critique of the text (on grammatology).
but alas, these are undergrads doing a distance ed professional qualification, and i am the hired help.
