Laura Millar - Archives and Writing

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It is exciting times for Archives & Manuscripts as we determine the future of the publication. Working behind the scenes to bring you fascinating articles and insightful reviews is the Editorial Board. Each with their own unique archival story to tell, A&M Assistant Editor, Hannah Hibbert, decided to start chatting with the members and asking them to share their writing and archival journeys.

Starting with Laura Millar – records and archives consultant and independent scholar for over 30 years. Laura is an active member of the archival community around the world. She has consulted with governments, universities, colleges, professional associations, non-profit organizations and other agencies in Canada and internationally, from Bermuda to Trinidad and Tobago, Ghana to Malawi, Sri Lanka to Botswana and Fiji to Hong Kong.

Laura served on the editorial board of Archivaria, the Association of Canadian Archivists’ journal, for ten years, and she has been a member of the Archives & Manuscripts editorial board since 2012. She is also a member of the Programme Commission for the International Council on Archives, where she is very much involved with the New Professionals Programme, and she is the Communications Coordinator for ACARM: the Association of Commonwealth Archivists and Records Managers.

Laura is a prolific writer and has won awards for her work including the Society of American Archivists’ Waldo Leland Gifford Award for the first edition of Archives: Principles and Practices (second edition published June 2017), and the Association of Canadian Archivists’ W. Kaye Lamb prize twice, for articles published in the Canadian archival journal Archivaria in 2003 and again in 2015. Laura’s next writing project is a book for the general public on the value of records and archives in a ‘post-truth’ age.

Laura lives in the community of Roberts Creek, on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, where she and her husband dig in the garden and chase bears out of the vegetable patch when they are not travelling the world.

How did you get into writing about archival matters?

Before I began my graduate studies in archives at the University of British Columbia, I worked as a freelance editor for various academic and mainstream publishing companies in Canada and internationally. My father, who was a child psychiatrist, was also a successful writer, even being nominated for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour – a highly prestigious award in Canada – for his comic novel Who’s Afraid of Sigmund Freud?. He used to encourage me to write, and he served as a role model, as he wrote dozens of academic papers along with plays, novels, and non-fiction books. You could say that writing was in my genes.

What are your areas of interest, archivally speaking?

I have been very fortunate that, because I have worked independently for almost all of my 30+ years as a records and archives management professional, I can pursue just about any area of interest I want when doing my own research and writing. One area of particular interest to me relates to the ways in which arrangement and description have changed over the years. I am fascinated by the ways in which archivists feel we have to ‘control’ records and archives by imposing external frameworks, which we define with concepts such as ‘fonds’ or ‘group’ or ‘series.’ But the records themselves do not often fit easily within these artificial boundaries, do they? It is rather like my efforts to control my garden: the weeds will take over eventually, no matter how hard I try to eliminate them. Perhaps I need to stop thinking of them as weeds and instead accept them as a different kind of flower? And perhaps archivists need to think about evidence more broadly, not constraining ourselves by requirements that records take a particular form or contain particular documentary elements in order to be useful as evidence.

As a consultant, I also spend a lot of time travelling to different parts of the world, and I am fascinated by how concepts of ‘records,’ ‘evidence,’ and ‘archives’ are interpreted in various cultural contexts. What is considered core documentary evidence in one society might be dismissed as inauthentic in another. And what might be perceived as highly personal or sensitive in one environment might be seen as ‘no big deal’ in another. My international travels have helped me in my desire to recognise and respect cultural differences while still staying true to my own belief that the role of the recordkeeping professional is to help protect whatever that society defines as evidence with its evidential value intact, for the benefit of that society now and in the future.

Do you have any advice for potential writers out there?

When I ask people for advice about writing, the answer I get most often is that the best way to be a writer is to write. I agree: it is not enough to want to be a writer if one is not attaching themselves to their keyboard at regular intervals and doing more than checking email or searching for recipes for Chicken Paprikash. But I also believe that enormous amount of writing happens in the head. I spend a lot of time in my garden, and that is where I do the best writing. Sometimes, for instance, I will not actually start writing a speech until a couple of weeks before I am scheduled to deliver it, even though I've known about the deadline for months. But I will have been reading and thinking about the topic, keeping notes, and coming up with ideas as I travel to meetings or sit in the garden pulling weeds. Much of the speech has been written in my head weeks before I actually start typing words into the computer.

While I do not want to suggest that someone avoid writing until the very last minute, only to find themselves panicking in the face of an impossible deadline, I also think that when the ideas are ready to come out, they will come out. For me, when I’ve done enough thinking, the words just flow.

The other best advice I can offer anyone wanting to write is advice my father gave me when I was 15. In fact, it wasn’t advice: it was an order. He insisted that I learn how to type, and type well. Remember, when I was a teenager, there were no computers and there were still jobs for secretaries and office assistants. When I objected, with all the wisdom of a 15-year-old, that I had no need to type because I was going to be an executive, and executives don't have to type, my father said, no, when you are out in the world, it will be a world filled with computers, and everyone will have to know how to type. And he was so right. I benefit every day from the basic skill of being able to type quickly and accurately, which means that I can easily pursue a craft I enjoy so much. When I sit at the keyboard, I have mastered the basic skill of making that keyboard work, and that frees me up for the more important task of getting my thoughts out of my head and into written form. Of course, as technology keeps changing, who knows if keyboarding or two-thumb texting will be the writing skill of the future?

Do you have a favourite archival moment?

When I had my first job, at the age of 23, in the community archives in the town where I went to high school, I took my work as archivist very seriously. I was consumed with the importance of white gloves, acid-free folders, and Hollinger boxes. I revelled in the control that I believed was necessary in order to manage the precious historical documents in my care.

One day, I came across a photograph of a group of people from the same high school I went to, a photo that had been taken some 50 years before. I carried the photograph over to the volunteers in the lunch room, cradling it gently in my white-gloved hands, and I held it up to them, asking if anyone could identify the people in the image. The next thing I knew, my archival treasure had been snatched out of my hands, and the volunteers were all huddled over the photograph, laughing, reminiscing, identifying people, but – horror of horrors – actually touching the photograph. My photograph!

Within a minute or two, I had a real ‘lightbulb’ moment. I saw for perhaps the first time in my still-new archival career that the job of archives was not only or even mostly about protecting archives but was, rather, about making sources of documentary evidence available so that people could share stories, remember events, and foster their sense of themselves and their communities. It was not long after that episode that I changed the way I arranged and described photographs in that community archives. I stopped putting originals in paper envelopes and writing short descriptions and instead I engaged a group of volunteers to make copies of images and put those copies in binders, with brief descriptions included, so that people could view the images all they wanted without damaging the originals.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a short story drawing on my experience with ‘my’ volunteers in this community archives thirty years before. My story received an honourable mention in the Society of American Archivists’ short story competition in 2015. (You can see my story and the winning entry at https://www2.archivists.org/news/2015/winner-of-the-archives-short-fiction-contest.) That story only took me a couple of hours to write, because I had been ‘writing’ it in my head for thirty years.

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