Reflections on the MLA Annual Meeting by MLA Annual Meeting Scholarship Winner Rachel Lerener
Hello NASHL Nation!
I want to thank everyone for the opportunity to attend MLA this year, which would not have been possible without support from the NAHSL MLA scholarship fund. This year’s MLA/SLA felt like a true return to in-person conferencing – exchanging ideas with colleagues in-person is a valuable way to stay current and engaged, and I have missed it quite a bit. The annual MLA conference has always been a bit mysterious to my spouse – the juxtaposition of scholarly and technical discussions with energetic socializing in various aquaria around the country has confused him greatly for many years. This year, however, I came home enthusiastically raving about a lecture on the history of filing cabinets, signed book in tow, and I think he has entirely given up on trying to understand.
Yet, I cannot get Craig Robinson’s lecture on the history of filing cabinets out of my brain. He was able to touch on equity, sexism, graphic design, the shift in focus of special and medical librarians from books to information, patents, capitalism, filing systems on computers, and SIRI. I was riveted the entire time.
At one point in the lecture, Robinson used the graphic design of early file cabinet advertisements to examine the anxiety that male executives felt from women entering the workplace. He went on to display a contemporaneous advertisement of disembodied female hands using a filing cabinet as an illustration of the idea that, as women entered the white-collar workforce, information work began to be treated as unskilled labor; disembodied hands insinuated that filing was a mindless activity. Gender was not the sole focus of the lecture. Robinson also discussed how the filing cabinet still informs how we relate to information. Even filing terminology and its organizing principles – files, folders, tabs, trash – remain the same while technologies and media have changed.
I am halfway through the physical book, and while it can be a bit dry at times (it is still a book on the history of filing cabinets!) I highly recommend it. For those that could not attend either MLA or the lecture in person, a similar version is on YouTube.
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