“Show? To Who?”

Courtney Chartier delivered her presidential address at the hybrid annual meeting of the Society of Annual Archivists in Boston in August 2022. Chartier is the director of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University. She previously worked as the head of Research Services at the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library at Emory University and at the Archives Research Center of the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library. Her speech was published in the Spring/Summer 2023 issue of the American Archivist.

If I had to sum up Chartier’s presidential address in one word, it would be grace. Needless to say, an SAA presidency that spanned 2021-2022 was wildly complicated, given the ongoing global pandemic and the work lives of archivists still upended. Nevertheless, she bookended her term by focusing on grace in both her opening remarks and her presidential address. Rather than embracing the pervasive woe-is-me attitude or longing for a return to “normal,” Chartier challenged us to learn “how to fit better into our own lives as they change” and recognized that “I must choose grace for myself, so that I am able to show it to others” (8). She goes on to contend that we can show grace to ourselves by exerting power on our own behalf. The primary question in the self-grace workplace arsenal should be, “Does this work for me?”(9) She challenged us to tap into our curiosity and motivation to understand the systems that define our work. Chartier concluded that the future of the archives must be interconnected with a practice of care — both for ourselves and our communities. For a profession that focuses so much on value — be that in the appraisal sense or other ways — the Toni Morrison story that provides the title and beginning to this address offers a valuable challenge for us to evaluate and hold to our own value, both in our individual lives and in the workplace.

“Radical Welcome in the Archives”

Rachel Vagts delivered her presidential address at the 2021 virtual annual meeting. Since 2019, she has served as the Manager of Special Collections and Digital Archives at the Denver Public Library. Her archival career also includes stints as head of Special Collections and Archives in Hutchins Library at Berea College and College Archivist at Luther College. Her speech was published in the Spring/Summer 2022 issue of the American Archvist.

The full title of Vagts’ speech was “Radical Welcome in the Archives: What Does It Really Mean to Say ‘You’re Welcome Here’?” She approached this question from both the perspective of the customer/researcher/visitor as well as that of an employee/archivist. She chose to focus on the adjective definition of radical as “far-reaching or thorough” (7). From the perspective of researchers, the pervasive use of lockers to keep personal belongings out of the search room, forms to separate “serious researchers” from others, rules about conduct, and security cameras to watch patrons create a less than welcoming environment to the uninitiated. Vagts suggested even requiring identification for entrance could be construed as a barrier, as might the framed faces of white men looking down on researchers in many reading rooms. She challenged archivists to remember the joy that can be sparked for new visitors when they can see a favorite author’s handwritten manuscript or find a map of their home neighborhood or glimpse a photograph of a relative.

In a section that hearkened back to Jackie Dooley’s 2013 speech, Vagts proposed mentorship as a means of making the archival profession more welcoming to new archivists. She also pointed a finger at inflated tuition costs for graduate programs and unpaid internships as barriers to creating a more inclusive workforce. She suggested apprenticeship could be a means of training a more diverse profession and providing necessary training without the interruption (and cost) of several years of coursework.

In the end, the part that rang most true for me – and that has applications even beyond those provided in this short speech – was a summation of the lesson she learned from working in a public library during a global pandemic: “We had to find new ways of doing old things” (13). This is advice we can all probably apply in our lives in far-reaching ways.

A life well lived

I’ve written before about the importance of mentoring, but I didn’t name names. After the recent death of Dr. Richard Hill, I feel compelled to identify him as my first professional mentor and explain more specifically about his influence on my life.

I only had the privilege of teaching with Dr. Hill at Riverside High School for 5 years before his retirement, but these were the first years of my teaching career, and he was a foundation for me. Early on in my first year, he and his wife had me over to their house for dinner, along with the student teacher with whom he was working that semester. Although he mentored scores of teachers during his long and productive career, this simple gesture underscored that he valued me as an individual as well as a new colleague and that he was willing to invest his time in me. During that first year, the school was so overcrowded that I didn’t have my own classroom and had to teach in a different room every period, so a job that is always trying for first-year teachers was even more unsettled for me. But Dr. Hill was a source of stability amongst the turmoil. Through formal observations and informal conversations, he made it clear that he believed in me, all the while making certain I understood that my success did not depend on my trying to replicate his teaching style. Admittedly, I would have been hard-pressed to do so, because in addition to his huge intellect, he had a booming voice and a tall stature that could command the attention of a high school classroom in ways that I never could. Plus he had a smile that could envelop a room and diffuse many tense situations. But knowing that a seasoned veteran believed in me gave me strength when things seemed bleak. We definitely shared a love of the intricacies and patterns of history, and he patiently helped me think through the strategies that could work for me as a teacher. As I made my first steps of professional advancement and became chair of the social studies department, he offered his advice from having previously filled that position himself. Not to mention that any time I had concerns about whether or not I was correctly pronouncing a place or name, I knew that I could count on him to set me straight.

Dr. Hill also taught me a lesson that has been formative for life, not just for teaching. He had enjoyed a successful career at another Durham high school before moving to Riverside when it opened. But even with all his experience — or perhaps because of it — he recognized that not every day or every lesson would go as planned. So on the whiteboard in his classroom, one word could always be found written in all capital letters: RESILIENCE. Understanding the need for resilience has been a valuable lesson for all parts of my life.

2001 retirement party at Riverside High School

I know at the time of his retirement many colleagues and former students and parents of students crowded the lobby to wish him a fond farewell. In addition to our love of history, Dr. Hill and I shared a love of music, so I had opportunities to continue our friendship after his retirement when we saw each other at concerts and other social events. I hope in the ensuing years enough people continued echoing the message that his was a life well lived, impacting countless lives around him. Now that we no longer have his grace and wisdom to enrich our lives, the best we can do to honor his legacy is to embrace resiliency and to be willing mentors to those around us.

A fond adieu

The last week brought the announcement of the pending retirement of David Ferriero as Archivist of the United States (AOTUS). I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Ferriero speak at numerous events over the years, from Duke alumni gatherings to SAA panels to a museum installation opening for the State Archives of North Carolina. I have always been struck by his breadth of knowledge and his clear communication style — not to mention his voracious reading appetite.

Ferriero’s tenure has certainly left its mark on the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), including:

• Capstone approach to email management
• transition to electronic records for Federal agencies
• Electronic Records Archive system
• Open Government Plan
• new National Archives Catalog
• Founders Online portal
• Citizen Archivist program

The Biden administration has its work cut out for it in choosing who will become the eleventh Archivist of the United States. (For the history of the prior office holders, see my previous post.) While the pandemic has certainly caused some soul-searching for archivists about relevance in the midst of quarantines and shutdowns, surely the last few months have demonstrated indisputably the vital role NARA and the AOTUS play in documenting the work of the federal government. Someone will have big shoes to fill.

A void of gratitude

Archivists have taken to identifying voids in their collections that can be addressed with better description or improved donor relations. But what if the void exists because the materials were never created?

A combination of recent factors have caused me to reflect on gratitude.

• A few months into the COVID state of emergency, a friend challenged me to start keeping a gratitude journal.
• For a while, various cities applauded health care workers on a nightly basis.
• With the overall decline of traditional written correspondence, thank you notes have definitely fallen off the list of required politenesses. And social media seems to thrive on vitriol rather than kindness.
• While conducting oral history interviews of people involved with my state’s COVID response, I heard numerous accolades for the people leading our response, and I hoped these affirmations were also being shared with the targets of their appreciation rather than being offered only in response to an interviewer’s prompt.
• As I have informed work acquaintances of my plan to transition to a new job, it has created a stream of gratitude for the assistance that I’ve provided over the years.

Unfortunately, it seems that our culture has a relatively short attention span when it comes to expressing our thanks. Are health care workers any less deserving of our praise now than they were in April 2020? Do flight attendants and service workers deserve ire instead of gratitude from customers? Should teachers worry about being accosted over mask mandates rather than accepting thanks for making education work during the unsettled conditions of the last 20 months? In my ongoing review of classic television, I recently watched the Northern Exposure 4th season episode entitled “Duets” (first aired January 1993). A long-term plot line of the series dealt with Ed Chigliak’s desire to find his birth parents and the guidance provided to him by One-Who-Waits. In this episode, One-Who-Waits identifies Ed’s father, but Ed hesitates to make his identity known to his father. In challenging Ed to act, One-Who-Waits says,

“There are those who believe that time is a wheel turning forever, which would mean that your moment will surely come. Then there are those who believe that time is a river, which, if that’s true, it’s possible your moment has already flowed by.”

On this day of Thanksgiving, I want to take a stand for making gratitude a regular parts of our lives. Much as Pascal decided it was better to wager on the existence of God, I think it’s better to assume time is a river. If it’s a true premise, then we’ll make sure not to miss our opportunities to express our thanks to the people around us when it matters most. And if time is a wheel, then the worse that could happen is that we spread a little more joy along our paths. And who knows — maybe the researchers of the future will also have some additional materials to peruse as they attempt to learn about our society.

Shifting linguistic sands

American English is not immutable. Sometimes I find this to be unsettling, such as when grammar standards are changed to reflect common usage. On the other hand, language is intended to facilitate communication, and it’s unreasonable to assume there will not be changes to meanings or context over time or that new words won’t be developed.

Since March 2020, we’ve found ourselves in need of new words and phrases to describe living through a global pandemic. In the first few months of this ordeal, many of the commonly-heard words reflected the fact the world was in unknown territory, without a clear playbook. Here in the United States, we frequently heard medical professionals and well as politicians telling us the situation was “fluid” — which had less to do with the fact that COVID-19 is spread through respiratory droplets and more to do with the fact decisions were being made based on the best evidence to date, but the available evidence was accumulating minute-by-minute and often overrode previous assumptions. For those of us privileged enough to have this option, we were encouraged to “shelter in place” — although it has frequently been used interchangeably with “quarantine,” which has a medical connotation, shelter in place is actually an emergency management term used to indicate that the best course is to remain in place until an all clear is issued rather than trying to evacuate to another location. All these early efforts were with the goal of trying to “flatten the curve” — in retrospect, probably too math-based a language to be comprehended by most, but then again, most of us were glued to the TV while we were sheltering in place, so we did get to see a lot of graphs on rising case counts depicted on a daily basis.

Merriam Webster usually publishes several times a year lists of new words (or definitions of words) that have been added to their dictionary. Here are some examples that relate to the COVID pandemic:

• April 2020: community spread, contactless, contact tracing, COVID-19, forehead thermometer, herd immunity, intensivist, physical distancing, PPE, self-isolate, social distancing, WFH
• January 2021: bubble, long hauler, pod, wet market
• October 2021: breakthrough, long COVID, super-spreader, vaccine passport

What these lists overlook are the more humorous terms that emerged like “Blursday” and “zoombombing.” Needless to say, some of these terms that incorporate existing words have somewhat fuzzy meanings and may still be in flux. And in some cases, like physical distancing, it seems that words can quickly fall out of favor — social distancing certainly seems to have been the more common term as time went on. In other cases, like contact tracing, the media latched on to a term to describe a method of public health surveillance that had actually been practiced in the communicable disease field for decades.

An April 2020 article in The Conversation suggested embracing adaptations to language allows humans to feel more connected and can be an important coping mechanism in the midst of a crisis. Only time will tell which of these linguistic developments has staying power. More significantly, we’re yet to see what practices like work-from-home and contactless services will persist once we’re no longer living through a pandemic.

Memory Box: Echoes of 9/11

On the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks in New York City, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, a feature documentary titled Memory Box: Echoes of 9/11 premiered. The premise is simple — it weaves together testimonies that were recorded by eyewitnesses in 2002-2003 with present-day recordings by the same people. A few themes stood out: perseverance, fear, hope, struggle, and resilience.

The “memory box” was the brainchild of Ruth Sergel, who created a homemade recording box that would allow people a literal space in which they could tell their own stories. Over 500 testimonies were recorded in the wake of 9/11 and are available at https://hereisnewyorkv911.org/. On the one hand, it can sometimes be useful to have prompts for such recordings so that responses are gathered to similar questions, but in this situation, with a diversity of people who were survivors, witnesses, family, first responders, medical personnel, young people, and those who worked at Ground Zero in the aftermath, it is helpful that the participants were able to shape their own stories and emphasize the elements that most impacted them.

The idea of longitudinal oral histories is, I think, a powerful one, however difficult it might be to do in many cases. If you have the opportunity to watch the documentary, I encourage you to consider whether you think you would have the same attitudes of forgiveness and compassion evidenced in these memories.

“WE Are SAA”

At the end of her second year as SAA President, Meredith Evans delivered her presidential address at the 2020 virtual annual meeting. Her archival career has included a number of positions, including Research Room Assistant/Photo Researcher at the Atlanta History Center (1999–2000), Curator of Printed Materials at the Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center (2005–2008), Director of the Special Collections Research Center at George Washington University (2008–2012), Associate University Librarian for Special Collections & Digital Programs at UNC Charlotte (2012–2014), and currently Director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library & Museum (since 2015). She’s also had teaching stints at NC Central University (2002–2003), Clark Atlanta University (2003), San José State University (2006–2008), and Wayne State University (2008–2011). Her speech was published in the Spring/Summer 2021 issue of the American Archivist.

In her introduction, Evans incorporated a powerful paraphrasing of an article James Baldwin wrote in 1965:

“History . . . is not just something to be read.  And it does not just refer to the past.  On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, and are unconsciously controlled by it.  History is present in all that we do.  It frames our references, our identities, and our aspirations.  History causes people to battle with the creation of history itself” (8).

Evans explained she devoted much of her time as president to thinking about the future of the archival profession, which she broke down into three sections: practice, people, and organization.

1. Evans asserted we need to interrogate our archival practices because “we determine the value of materials” (8).  We have a focus toward the future and what may be needed by researchers, but what we are collecting at this point in time will determine the future histories that can be written.  This means not only that we need to make sure we are collecting from diverse sources but also that we need to take all the practical steps to preserve these materials so they can be accessible in the future.
2. Evans shared her insight that “we reconcile differences and situations through our own worldview” (9).  Therefore, the archival realm needs to incorporate the traces of a variety of voices and communities as we strive for equity and diversity.
3. Evans highlighted a number of accomplishments of the Society of American Archivists during her tenure as president, including raising funds for members enduring financial stress, launching a management training program, beginning the Committee on Research Data and Assessment (CORDA), and live streaming annual meetings.

As professionals who help to facilitate the creation of history, it behooves us to follow Evans’ lead and consider who we are and how our practices tacitly shape these yet-to-be-written stories.

Just the facts, ma’am

The police procedural Dragnet began as a radio program in the 1940s and then had two runs on television in the 1950s and 1960s. Jack Webb was involved in all these productions and starred as Sergeant Joe Friday. Yet he never uttered the most famous phrase associated with this franchise. “Just the facts, ma’am” was said by Dan Akroyd’s version of Friday in the 1987 movie. Does it matter that most people have conflated this statement with the most famous face of Dragnet rather than attributing it to the actor who actually said it?

The Society of American Archivists chose for its 2020/2021 One Book, One Profession title Laura Millar’s book, A Matter of Facts: The Value of Evidence in an Information Age. She is obviously concerned with facts, and more precisely how facts are documented. She wrote this book not for a professional audience but for the general public (which begs the question why this less than 200-page book was priced at nearly $50, but I guess that’s a question for the marketers).

In the coming weeks, I’ll delve into the book itself, but in the meantime, you can watch the March 25th panel discussion that included Millar, Geoffrey Yeo, Valencia L. Johnson, and Louis Jones. Millar’s comments will be incorporated into my review of the book, but Yeo made some statements that are worth highlighting.

• Information managers often don’t have the historical context that is desired by archivists.
• Self-interest often impacts record making.
• All people need to embrace the importance of opposing falsehoods.
• An effective use of evidence requires reasoning skills.

As for Dragnet? The fields of history and entertainment are rife with apocryphal stories that sound good but may play fast and loose with “the truth.” I suppose that’s where our reasoning skills come in — distinguishing fact from confabulation.

Duty to document

The InterPARES Trust and the Canadian Centre for Information and Privacy Studies combined forces to parse a 2015 scandal in British Columbia known as the “Triple Delete” scandal. A government staffer was charged with willfully making false statements to mislead (or attempt to mislead) under the province’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. This resulted from the deletion of emails related to a freedom of information request relating to the so-called Highway of Tears, an area notorious for cases of missing and murdered women. In order to circumvent the email backup systems that are ubiquitous in most government and private organizations today, these emails had to be thrice deleted:

• once by moving the emails into the Deleted folder
• twice by deleting the emails from the Deleted folder
• and finally by manually overriding a backup, which would have allowed these deleted items to be recovered for up to 14 days

As egregious as this violation of the public trust may sound, the conclusion of this project is that this action was born of a government culture where the tendency is towards secrecy. In order to avoid scrutiny of the decision-making process, government has moved to an oral culture where important decisions are simply not documented. Yet the project asserted scandals that have arisen in the province of British Columbia have come from what the public was not told rather than from blow-back to information that was shared.

On April 16, 2021, the documentary Duty to Document premiered along with an expert panel discussion and Q&A session, which can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcFp9HCnU7g. The session included:

• Luciana Duranti, Professor, Archival Studies, School of Information, University of British Columbia
• Mike Larsen, President, BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association; Co-author of Brokering Access: Power, Politics, and Freedom of Information Process in Canada
• Victoria Lemieux, Associate Professor, Archival Studies, School of Information, University of B.C.; Lead, Blockchain research cluster, Blockchain@UBC
• Andrew MacLeod, Legislative Bureau Chief, The Tyee magazine

They briefly discussed the benefits that can come from proactive disclosure of information but concluded these actions usually aren’t incentivized. Ultimately, these thought leaders concluded that the duty to document should be prescribed in law. More information about this project can be found at https://www.infoandprivacy.ca/duty-to-document/, on the website of the Canadian Centre for Information and Privacy Studies.

On this side of the 49th parallel, I’m afraid we have our own failure to document encouraged by a culture that discourages the creation of records you don’t want to be called on to produce. Personally, the historian side of me likes to point to the 1974 U.S. v. Nixon case, where the U.S. Supreme Court compelled President Nixon to produce recordings from the Oval Office, as the birth of the mistrust of records. But I also recognize that’s too simplistic an explanation.

Perhaps we are starting to figure out part of the incentivizing piece. In North Carolina, the Public Records Act specifies that government agencies that proactively make records available online are then exempt from answering specific individual requests for these records:

(a1) A public agency or custodian may satisfy the requirements in subsection (a) of this section by making public records available online in a format that allows a person to view the public record and print or save the public record to obtain a copy. If the public agency or custodian maintains public records online in a format that allows a person to view and print or save the public records to obtain a copy, the public agency or custodian is not required to provide copies to these public records in any other way.  (NC Gen. Stat. 132-6 (a1))

Therefore, agencies can identify records that are frequently requested and preemptively make them available online. Now if we can just eradicate the fear that the records we produce are going to be used against us. I want to believe there’s a way to balance the needs of constituents to understand the actions of their government with the desire by government leaders to protect the recipe for the secret sauce.