On November 20th, an episode of The Big Bang Theory aired and one of the story lines made my eye twitch a little. The show has a full team of physicists, engineers and biologists that work with the writers in order to make the character's dialogue scientifically accurate. But apparently they don't care about university archivists.
The episode follows three different stories. One is about an older professor passing away and what happens to his research and academic belongings. The story goes that Raj, Howard, and Leonard, who are other scientists working at the university, have been tasked by the Science department with cleaning out the dead professor's office. They are going through his papers, notebooks, files, etc. and throwing what they deem unimportant in a huge recycling bin. They even comment on how it's strange that someone's lifework just gets thrown into the trash once they die....yeah, well it probably wouldn't if you guys went through the proper records management procedure and called an archivist!!! One can only imagine how much my eye was twitching.
I am sure that most viewers have no idea what a university archivist is or what they do, but every university has one, and they would be the ones tasked with going through a professor's papers, not fellow scientists who knew the guy. It seems that Big Bang cares a lot about being scientifically accurate but doesn't have any concern with accuracy in other fields.
Even before I enrolled in this program it would have bothered me, but now it bothers me even more! I guess those writers never utilized their own university archives when they were in school, or maybe they would have thought the plot line strange. Oh well!
I've talked to some of my friends who went to Wright State, or are current students or staff, and many of them have no idea that there is a Special Collections & Archives on campus, much less what is contained there. University archivists definitely need to get the word out about the fact that they exist and what exactly they do.
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