When David Ferriero began recounting his experience in convincing Nicholson Baker to give his archival newspaper collection to Duke (when Ferriero was at Duke), I was suddenly reminded of Baker’s visit to Utah in 2001. Barbara Quint was not at all happy with his view of librarians and wrote a fantastic editorial called Don’t Burn Books! Burn Librarians! Baker was somewhat astounded when I handed him a copy of the editorial — along with the cartoon of him that accompanied it. And the whole thing was caught on C-Span! I was very interested to hear how Ferriero convinced Baker that storing old newspapers in a barn with no climate control and open windows wasn’t really an archivally good idea!
Tag Archives | David Ferriero
Quiet? Libraries?
U.S. Archivist David Ferriero, will be interviewed this morning by Paul Holdengraber (New York Public Library). Wonder if they’ll mention this New York Times article about libraries and quiet? Opinions seem to differ on whether libraries should be quiet places for study and reflection or whether introducing a little noise isn’t all that bad an idea
Miriam Drake interviews David Ferriero for Information Today
Information Today
This month’s free article in Information Today is an interview with David Ferriero, the 10th (and current) Archivist of the U.S. Among other questiosn, Miriam asked him:
- How are we progressing in digitizing legacy collections, paper, photos, and others?
- What is the status of Electronic Records Archive (ERA)? What is its purpose? How much progress has been made in its implementation?
- How is NARA keeping up with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests? Is it true that FOIA requests governmentwide are backed up?
Read his answers to these and other questions at INTERVIEW with David Ferriero: A New Mission for the Librarian Archivist at NARA.
Collector in Chief Won’t Shush Us
Tuesday’s keynote speaker, David Ferriero, the 10th archivist of the US, was profiled in a recent New York Times article, titled “Collector in Chief Hoards Nation’s Irreplaceable Stuff.” Not a bad article, if you ignore the sentence maligning librarians as a “stereotypical library scold shushing people in a reading room.” Ferriero is, in fact, a librarian by education (his MLS is from Simmons) who seems genuinely excited by his archivist job. I’m looking forward to hearing him speak at CIL about information ecology, libraries, digitization, and whatever else strikes his fancy (and that of his interviewer for the session, the ever-entertaining Paul Holdengraber).
