Presentation at the New England Archivists conference held in Portsmouth, NH on March 21, 2014 regarding the role of project archivists in innovation initiatives
First disclaimer: All ideas and opinions are my own and do not reflect those of my employer the MITRE corporation. Second disclaimer: I will be talking about myself. When preparing I thought “How can I give a this presentation without just getting up here and talking myself?” But I’m not sure I can talk about the skills I had to learn on the job without talking about the jobs themselves. So it feels terribly self-indulgent but hopefully it gives the students and new professionals in the audience some sense of a what kind of career path is out there. And hopefully those in the audience that know me well can forgive me for prattering on about myself – again.
I have held not one, not two, but three project archivist positions. I’m going to talk briefly about those to provide some context. Because as archivists we love context. I’m also going to talk about some of the skills I had the opportunity to learn on the job. And my point here is not that you learn things on the job – because of course you learn on the job, that’s why they call it experience. I’m also not really talking about the new skills that are required of archivists in the digital age and what should or shouldn’t be taught in graduate school. Rather, My overall thesis is that there are times when people are hired on for specific projects and those projects are often at the cross roads of new directions and innovation
As I said on that last slide, Upon graduating from Library School I had three consecutive project archivists jobs that involved three very different things. They were all term jobs, with time limits, and most were grant funded positions. I think this was positive for me because I was able to get a variety of experiences and learn about many different types of archives. It gave me a well rounded sense of practices in some very different places.
But the more we are different the more we are the same. What I learned is that there can be different types of collections, but most archives have the same problems. They have a back log,
There are usually some vestiges of some unorthodox ways of organizing something done by some, very well meaning individual, in the past, which has become, unsustainable and abandoned and this plagues the archivists as they strive for perfection
And lastly, they have limited staff (at least for the things they want to do). And this goes for everyone whether you are a lone arranger or have a permanent staff of 40. There are so many things that we are already doing just to keep up. And this is why they hire project staff. It gives them extra hope of getting ahead and maybe even a chance to innovate.
But why do we hire project people and is it sustainable? I propose that there are two main reasons project archivist are hired. They are hired to innovate or address a specific problem. Or they are hired to catalog a large collection or a high profile collection that is deemed more special then the other special collections. In what I’m calling “very special”. Whether it is innovation or a very special collection it takes extra time to do it right
I’m going to start with the most recent project job and move backwards in time. And I’m going to start by talking about one reason project archivists are hired and that it is to work with large collections or very high profile collections. At Harvard’s Houghton library, I was able to provide item level access to a collection of autograph letters in the Theatre collection. In addition, I helped manage the cataloging of a large accession of over 700 linear feet. Through hiring a project archivist they are now able to provide access to cool things like this Kathrine Hepburn letter.
And this letter from the Bunker brothers – the original siamese twins. They are items that needed the extra man power and time to be described. What’s interesting about these collection centric project jobs is that they are innovative in their own way. Because there is a person dedicated to the task of a specific collection they can often go into more detail and this can lead to new or expanded procedures to the typical collection work. In addition, collection project jobs can also be innovative, especially in outreach. There is suddenly time to do things like write a blog, do presentations, or make a website to draw people to the collection. Of course this can lead to a new set of expectations to those working with the archives and suddenly everyone wants their own website or readers start to wonder why only this collection has such wonderful description.
The next project job I’m going to discuss, was an innovation project. The Tufts Digital Collections and Archives undertook a three-year National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) electronic records Program Expansion Project grant to support the Tufts Accessioning Program for Electronic Records or better known asthe(TAPER) project. During the project the DCA designed, developed, and implemented machine-readable submission agreements and creator records. The DCA has fully implemented the machine-readable submission agreements to document accessions and is producing creator records encoded in EAC-CPF as part of its normal descriptive practices.I would like to think that is in part to my efforts as the project archivist that these tools have been fully implemented. And There is a forthcoming article in the Journal of Archival Organization about the EAC-CPF part of the project. I’m going to focus on the tool.
The idea was to create some pieces of the puzzle to make the accessioning of electronic records more scalable. The submission agreement builder tool was to help with one small aspect of this Open Archival Information system which you may have seen before.
Specifically the tool dealtwith just this small area here. Where the submission information package meets the producer. Basically instead of just going back and forth in email with the producer we sought to formalize the transfer arrangements and in the process solicit an agreement from the person producing the records.
To make this tool I met with developers. What we primarily discussed were the use cases and requirements. What I learned was that the tool will only be as good as the requirements we gave them. (comic) We went back and forth about every aspect of the tool. They even gave me command line access to code on the backend so I could change some the field names, etc. There are so many questions when you are creating a tool or even a website. What should we call the fields? What should we expect the producer to fill out. How do we track the records producers? What kind of information do we need about the producers? How can we make this easy for them? What color should the navigation bar be? How can we make this sustainable?
This last question about sustainability I want to talk about. Because it involves imbedding what you are doing on a project basis into the normal workflow and procedures. This requires serious buy in from everyone. And this goes for innovative projects and very special collection projects. In both instances, sustainability doesn’t really become an issue until the project archivist leaves. Once the staffing returns to its pre-project levels you are left with procedures, practices or a product and the trick is trying to integrate that once innovative project into the every day workflow. More often then not, it is abandoned. The special exhibit website dies with the next java upgrade or the procedures implemented during a project are just too time consuming to be continued on a routine basis. It becomes another one of those well meaning, past things, that have become, unsustainable and abandoned and plagues the archivists as they strive for perfection.So the key is to get buy in while the project is still around.
Well how do you get answers and buy in? That gets to the second important lesson when managing a project. And that is that you need to be a helpful but persistent pest. And I mean that in the most positive way. Use whatever word you want: Determined, dogged, opportunistic, nagging, tenacious. As I discussed in a project there are a ton a of questions to be answered. And as the project person you are the one responsible for making the project happened and, paradoxically, you are not the one to answer questions. It takes meetings, phone calls, conversations and dogged persistence so you can get the right information to the developers. And you need to document the decisions and I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to document why something was done the way it was done. Another universal observation I’ve made about archives is that there tends NOT to be many hard and fast deadlines. However, projects unlike many problems in a archive are for a limited time and stuff has to get done.
So I’ve been hired to do both work on a large collection and innovate. The last project I’m going to talk about was one I worked on when I was first out of grad school. I managed a project called A New Nation Votes. The project was to create a database of election returns or vote tallies from the signing of the American constitution to the presidential election of 1824. But really the project centers around one man and his life’s work. In what historian Jill Lepore called, “the most heroic tale in americanhistorical research” Philip Lampi transcribed the election returns from archives and state libraries all over the country. Here is an example of one of his transcriptions. See since the states are responsible for their own elections they did not systematically keep the data about the vote totals. In some state, I’m looking at you Florida and Ohio, they still don’t keep the returns systematically
When Phil was in high school as an orphan at a boys home he became very interested in politics and started looking up historic state returns in the world almanac but they only went back to 1824 because that is when the book was first published. He knew elections went back further and that is when he started looking up old newspapers from before 1824 on microfilm at the public library in Fitchburg, Mass. And when he finished looking at all they had he kept going. Travelling the country trying to fill in the gaps and copying every return he could find – on his own dime, sleeping in his car and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He never went to college but his research was recognized by the top historians in the early republic. Phil ended up at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass because they have the largest collection of early american newspapers in the country and those are the goldmine of election data. And AAS partnered with Tufts University to create a database of his collated returns at the urging of historians. Here’s Phil giving a talk at Oxford university
And Here’s Phil getting his honorary doctorate at Tufts in 2012.
So this job had a lot going on. It was funded and continues to be funded by the NEH. There was the building of the database and like I said the project lead needs to get the requirements right and get answers from everyone and this was a little harder in this project because I needed answers from the folks in Worcester at AAS, the folks at Tufts and the historians that were so interested in using the data. Here was the database we came up with and we worked with programmers and designers to come up with
The election information was to be encoded in XML. Election data is very hierarchical making XML the perfect thing. In addition the emphasis on capturing the content only and not the design aspects made XML a sustainable and attractive solution. The XML schema was developed at Tufts just for election data. I was heavily involved in editing the schema as it was developed. I managed and trained the folks doing data entry in XML and there was no graphic user interface. They encoded, validated and checked the file into subversion. Subversion is a way of tracking versions of code. I managed the versions on the command line, resolving any conflicts and double checking the XML. What I discovered is that training on XML is easy but teaching American civics is much harder. And I think that goes with most technical things, they come and go. I didn’t learn how to use subversion on the command line in library school, I didn’t learn how to change the field names in the java script either. What I did learn in library school was the basics of information organization, the importance of pursuing the right answer and the eye for sustainability.
There are certain things that make librarians and archivists so ideal for innovation in information discovery and for project management. Specifically, we know how to organize things so they can be found. This is not trivial. Also skills such as project management are highly valued in a corporate setting. And this is something that archivists are doing all the time. We are constantly working on projects to make things better and more accessible but we don’t often call it project management. I don’t know if you know that there is whole employment field for just project management complete with a special certificate called a PMP – or the pimp. And people with those skills get paid! And are actively sought by recruiters. I think in many ways that our skills are undervalued and I’m not sure if this is a problem of out reach or because it was historically a pink collar profession. Maybe I’m biased but I think that there ought to be massive hiring of archivists everywhere. The scope of what every archive does is massive and if project archivists are hired every moment of the project you should be asking is this sustainable and how can we demonstrate that we need the additional staff to make it sustainable.
Speaking of hiring, I did a little micro look at archives jobs that were posted on through archives gig in the past month and this is what I found. Most of the jobs are permanent. 41 jobs, 10 are term. 10 are for internships some of which focus on cataloging a very special collection. 8 were project jobs to work on one very special collection. You could combine those two as 18 jobs that deal with very special collections. 8 were digital. 2 were project jobs that had to do with innovative projects and 6 had to do with records management. What I find interesting is the trend at hiring permanent digital archivists. I think when I got out of library school many of these innovative digital initiatives were part of projects but this is just anecdotal. But then, at what point, do we all become digital archivists. Archiving digital started as an innovative task assigned to a project and it is more main stream now but it is still given special status in our job descriptions. I think archives would rather hire permanently if they could but the reality is that it’s not always possible. So I would urge anyone looking to hire a project archivist to take a deep look at why they are doing it, what innovations can be sustained in their archival program and how can they advocate for more staff to keep it going. And for anyone working as a project archivist, congratulations and may all your efforts be sustained.
