If records are created by people, and people create records when they do something, then how do you define the things they do? While looking for a list of things people do at any University this question has been front and center in my mind. The question becomes even more complicated when I think about what I have done today. Today, I wrote email, attended a meeting, wrote a memo about the meeting and right now I am writing this blog entry. But none of this tells you why I do what I do? And maybe this is the real question at hand. It's a question of human behavior that is implicit in any discussion of Business processes or business functions. The International Standard for Describing Functions published by the International Council on Archives defines a function as:

Any high level purpose, responsibility, or task assigned to to the accountability agenda of a corporate body by legislation, policy or mandate. Functions may be decomposed into sets of co-ordinated operations such as subfunctions, business processes, activities, tasks or transactions.

So somewhere between my job title, department, education and desires lies the reason for what I do and my function. I work in an archive. So how does one define the functions of an archive? Archives (and I may be forgetting some here):

• manage records
• manage information
• raise funds
• conduct outreach (alumni relations)
• preserve records of enduring value
• provide information
• internal research
• historical analysis
• business analysis
• scan
• maintain electronic files in a persistent and trustworthy way
• Project management
• risk analysis
• conservation
• exhibit and event planning

I (as an project archivist for TAPER) do:

• project management
• internal research
• historical analysis
• business analysis

Functional analysis certainly gives a greater sense of the context for the records created while doing what it is you do. But in some ways, categorizing people into business functions feels restrictive because you loose the fleeting interpersonal functions of an employee that often go unrecorded. Maybe there should be additional job titles that start to get at these functions like:

• Office mother
• clown
• confidant
• moral supporter
• knower of random information
• word doc formatting professional
• listener
• skeptic
• baker

Maybe then, we would get to know the real person behind the records.

Before images can be put into the Tufts Digital Library they must be described. Without a title, a date, and lots of other metadata, images would not be usable or retrievable. There are at least 14,000 images in the TDL. Each of them has been described by someone like me who has the assigned task of image cataloging. This could sound like a great way to spend your work day or like some exotic form of torture depending on your disposition. I would not be very well suited to my job if I did not fit into the former category. Other than the joys inherent in assigning metadata (which are many, I assure you), image cataloging is fun because you get to see a lot of cool pictures. Which brings me to the real point of this post.

While cataloging images for Robert Wilkinson's Londina illustrata (c. 1825) I started noticing amusing details in the large engravings in this book of "graphic and historic memorials." For example, this engraving of St. Peter on Cornhill seems plain enough.

Until you take a closer look at the gravediggers in the church yard. If they are in fact digging a grave, why are there two skulls? If they are graverobbers, should they really be doing that while a woman and child walk by?

Or how about this image of the London Street Dockhead.

On closer examination I am worried about the people who are hanging out at the docks. I'll say no more.

Archival reference isn’t always about searching for the sparse facts that cleanly define an event or person in three sentences or less. It offers a microcosmic view of the interconnectedness of life and history - a question leads from one person to another, to an organization, to a piece of artwork and back to a person and then maybe three…on down the line until it relates to something I saw on television last week. Biographical research in particular allows me to study, if only for a brief time, a person long forgotten. But for the hour I spend, they come alive again - at least to me. The vocations and avocations of one individual - their choices and desires are illuminated - and I recall Mary Oliver’s words, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

One such person, whose life seems to have been both wild and precious, was Tufts professor Charles Ernest Fay. The bare bones of his story are that he was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1846 and graduated from Tuft in 1868. Young Charles showed an aptitude for languages and was promptly employed by Tufts as a professor of modern languages, a post he would hold for 60 years. Of course, that’s the kind of information we find everyday - I’m getting to the internationally renowned part…

Fay’s life offers a bewilderingly wide array of organizational involvement. He was one of the founders of the Modern Language Association (MLA); a life member of the American Philological Association; president of the New England Modern Language Association; and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Fay was also a member of the Boston and Cambridge Shakespeare Clubs; the Boston Browning Society; the American Folk Lore Society; the Metropolitan Improvement League of Boston; and the Massachusetts Forestry Association.

But what might be the most bizarre, and to my mind interesting, aspect of Fay’s life is his international reputation as an alpinist. A dedicated lover of the outdoors since his youth, Fay, prior to the age of 50, had already climbed the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Adirondacks, the Rockies, and the Sierra Madre. He had made 19 visits to the Selkirk Range of the Canadian Rockies by 1921, and was still climbing there at the age of 76. He climbed with and/or led many international groups, especially throughout the Canadian Rockies. Fay made two ascents of the peak known as "No. 1" in a chain known as the "Ten Peaks" of the Bow Range near Alberta. This peak, at 10,612 ft, was the second highest of the Ten Peaks and was named Mount Fay in 1904, in Fay's honor. At more than 80 years of age, Fay attended the camp of the Canadian Alpine Club - he hiked the 14 miles from the railway station to the camp and still had energy left over to attend the evening’s festivities. Fay's ascents often involved snowy peaks and treacherous ice fields, however, during his years as a mountain climber the only injury he sustained was a sprained ankle - a testament to his skill.

Fay was a charter member of the Appalachian Mountain Club and served as its president four times, and editing its journal “Appalachia” for 44 years. He remained heavily involved with the American Alpine Club (he was one of the founders), serving as president and journal editor. Fay was also in demand as a lecturer, including a series given in Washington DC and sponsored by National Geographic. He was also a prolific writer - the author of hundreds of articles. His activities brought him numerous honors, including membership in the English, French, and Italian Mountain Clubs, as well as Centro Excursionista de Catalune in Spain. While serving as a delegate to the International Congress of Alpine Clubs in 1920, Fay was knighted and made an officer of the Order of St. Charles by Prince Albert of Monaco. Fay completed his final climb just 6 months before his death in 1931 at the age of 84.

There’s more information to be found about Charles Fay and all the other remarkable, yet sometimes unknown, Tufts people at the Digital Collections and Archives.

One fine day this summer, I was at the beach with my family. Relaxing after a good swim, I had settled down on the beach with Meg Cabot's Big Boned, perfect reading for a sunny New England afternoon. But when I glanced over at family member lying next to me, he was reading Dan Dennett's Consciousness Explained. Now how can you get better than that for beach reading?

After all, we are talking about a book about which the New York Times said:

Of course this only made me sad that I didn't have a laptop and WiFi at the beach, because it made me want to spend some time with the open access collection of Dan Dennett's papers we have here at the Tufts Digital Library. After all, then we would have been able to have a conversation comparing the ideas in 1991's Consciousness Explained with 2006's "Two Steps Closer on Consciousness" or compare the discussion of qualia in the book with that alluded to in 2001's "The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of of an Intuition?".

...The best part of all this is that I am only half-kidding. We really did end up spending a fair amount of our beach afternoon discussing Dan Dennett's theories of consciousness, and it really did give me enough background to start understanding some of the papers in that open access collection. It was a fabulous way to spend a summer day.