Dear Alice,

I recently read your article "The Delicate Art of Dealing with Your Archivist," published in the Journal of Higher Education." I didn't recognize these people you were writing about, having spent over ten years now as part of the archives community and watching these folks doing the many aspects of their work (in addition to just reference), collecting, preserving, making accessible, and performing a lot of emotional labor helping us all to think critically about our documentary heritage. These are the folks spending their professional lives advocating for transparency among elected officials, amplifying voices of under-documented folks in the archival record, and developing practices for holding and providing access to peoples' stories in ethical ways - all for pretty pitiful salaries. In a time when we are having discussions about how our work is frequently made invisible by researchers and writers, you chose to boil us down to a few demeaning stereotypes, almost none of which acknowledge our intellectual contributions, and all of which describe our work as a service industry profession. (Incidentally, I spent many years in the service industry, working to pay my way through my graduate education that enabled me to become an archivist, and there's no shame in that work either). There's so much I could say, so I'll attempt to distill it down to a few points.