Monthly Archives: November 2011

One of my favorite blog posts by AOTUS David S. Ferriero is “Developing a hockey mindset.”   David quoted Wayne Gretzky, who once said, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

Yesterday two news stories caught my eye.  The National Hockey League Washington Capitals named former player Dale Hunter to be their new coach.  And President Barack Obama launched a major initiative aimed at improving electronic records management in the executive branch.   A nice juxtaposition, given Ferriero’s forward thinking approach to the mission of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).  Skating where the puck will be, not where it has been!  Kudos both to the President and Ferriero for launching this long overdue effort.  I especially like the fact that the White House emphasized input from a wide array of stakeholders.  That sounds very Ferriero NARA, too, come to think of it!

Hunter?  I remember seeing him play for Washington in the old Cap Centre in Landover, Maryland.   I was a big hockey fan in my younger days (and I still follow the Caps now).  The photo of me in my sister’s apartment was taken in 1988, the year Hunter scored a spectacular breakaway goal in overtime in Game 7 against the Philadelphia Flyers in the first round of the playoffs.  The Caps acquired him in a trade with the Quebec Nordiques in 1987.   I don’t remember what my good friend, archivist Tim Mulligan, and I were examining so closely.  We definitely look like the NARA historian-archivists we both were then, don’t we?  I mean the two beers, of course!

The two photos I took at games at Cap Centre also date to the late 1980s. 

Not everyone brings the same attributes to the game that a star such as Gretzky was able to during his playing days.   I was a fan of Dale Hunter’s, yeah, absolutely.  He was a pretty popular player in Quebec as well as in Washington.  But he definitely wasn’t a Gretzky.  Hunter racked up 1,000 points during his playing career–but also accumulated 3,000 penalty minutes!  When the Caps retired his jersey (#32) in 2000, he was presented with one of the penalty boxes from the by then defunct Cap Centre.  Heheheh, I like that gesture.

Hunter also holds the record for one of the longest suspensions in the league (21 games) for a hit on Pierre Turgeon after he had scored a goal.  Turgeon suffered a separated shoulder.   There are two views of the hit below, with the clearest at the 2:36 mark.

Hunter later reportedly told a Canadian journalist that he had gone too far.  You know what?  I like that he did that.  But admitting error is so not Washington!   Saving face, clinging to facades?  Very much so.  Lots of late hits in Washington and it’s so easy to be blindsided.  Result?  Evasion and risk aversion.  As much as I applaud the records management initiative, I have to wonder how the required agency and departmental self-prepared analyses will play out.   NARA lacks the resources to deploy its own experts to do in-depth site visits at all the executive branch agencies and departments.  

I’m predicting the submissions will be uneven.  Much depends on who is named to do the analysis and how well they understand the complicated factors that affect record keeping and corporate memory.  And how candid they feel they can be in reporting to NARA.

Any number of elements can affect the analysis.   You see some of those elements at play in the records management listserv.   Very little discussion of the use made of records, even within the creating organizations.  A lot of talk about process and technical issues.  Not much about content.  When there is discussion of corporate memory, more often than not it is as a negative (legal discovery and litigation).  The listserv reflects a very insular, siloed world, with few agency historians joining the convo.  (I did try for a while.)

The news reports about the presidential memorandum reflect the challenges NARA faces.   Rather than discuss advocacy groups such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) in Washington, I’ll point to a realistic and (fair warning!) tough-minded post (“Mother NARA’s Family Friends“) I put up on April 28, 2010 at my anonymous blog.  (I expanded on it in the comments, as well.)  Although I appreciate the group’s good intentions, I laughed then at some of CREW’s expectations and lack of understanding of what life is like within the agencies and departments.

Hmmm, I kinda miss writing in so flippant and challenging a style, one that came across as so in the know that some readers thought I was a male appraisal archivist at NARA.   I often wrote at Archivesmatter(s) about records management issues, as in a post (“RM:  Can We Talk?”)  about niche blogging.  I took a look at early efforts at the  AOTUS and Records Express blogs and what more was needed in the records management area.  (I’ll discuss the need for a more holistic approach by NARA when I resume my series about its web and social media content.)

In another post, I pointed out that NARA has some pretty big vulnerabilities because it hasn’t figured out how to reach out to the Shelly Davis types in the agencies and departments.  (It hasn’t always skated to where the puck is going to be.)   That’s not to say every agency has IRS style dramaz.  But NARA’s siloed approach to agency contacts definitely has the potential to undermine the current initiative.  Truth be told, some insiders at the National Archives  do understand those vulnerabilities.  For example, they know the extent to which agencies sometimes improperly purge records before sending them to NARA although they are supposed to send them over “as is.”  Whether National Archives’ officials can build then act on the fragmentary glimpses of real world Fedland they now have, I don’t know.

The President’s initiative will be interesting to observe because it involves NARA, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Department of Justice (DOJ).  In the past, NARA and DOJ have been involved in litigation over the destruction of records.  (AOTUS John W. Carlin’s 1998 statement provides an interesting overview of such a situation involving Public Citizen.)   So, stovepiping aside, I have to wonder how candid the self-analyses submitted to NARA will be.  I think it will come down to how each reporting official assesses risk and how sophisticated and nuanced the internal examination is.

While I worked at NARA’s Nixon Presidential Materials Project, we observed that rarely did a news story get every fact it reported about our work right.  Archival and records issues and concepts can be complicated for laypeople to sort through.  (I’d have the same problem with technical issues in professions other than mine, I’m the first to admit.)  And sometimes simple errors occur.   Even getting a headline right is tricky. 

The online version of today’s story in the Washington Post by Ed O’Keefe reads “Obama ordering agencies to keep better digital  records.”  No, I didn’t read that to mean the President has been able to remove some of the toxic, fear inducing elements from Washington that can inhibit first creating, then keeping, good records.  Would love it if he could.  Realistic enough to know he can’t.   So what the intiative really involves is better managing those recorded thoughts that people choose to write in electronic records, as opposed to taking convos off network and resorting to oral decisionmaking.

O’Keefe writes today that

“During recent visits to his dozen regional offices, Ferriero said workers feared that the agency isn’t enhancing their skills to meet 21st-century demands.

For some people, the ongoing push to digitize ‘is a breath of fresh air,’ he said, ‘ad for other people, it’s an issue of dealing with change.’

NARA is looking to use a broad array of communications mechanisms internally and externally, including social media.   And it is pushing to scan more and more of its paper holdings so as to make them available online for the public to use.  (Ferriero wants to get “every stinking” item in NARA’s holdings online.  I love that!) But O’Keefe’s earlier use of the actual quote from David points to the agency’s transformation effort, not to digitization, as a cause for turmoil.

“In each of his visits, he’s heard complaints about insularity and a lack of sufficient technology at the agency. He said his reorganization addresses those concerns.

‘And it has caused, as you might expect, a fair amount of churn in the organization,” he said. “For some people, it is a breath of fresh air, and for other people it’s an issue of dealing with change. So we’re trying to help them out along those lines also.”

And if workers complain that the reorganization isn’t going well, Ferriero vowed to make course corrections. “We’re going to listen to the staff and make those changes, without waiting 10 years,” he said. “This is very much a work in progress.”

I wonder how many readers of the print edition of today’s WaPo will read O’Keefe’s story on page A19, and wonder why something many of them do themselves (scanning records) could be causing such turmoil at the National Archives?  Join the club, David, we saw many such misinterpretations in articles about our work!  Just comes with the territory, of course.  Keep skating where the puck is going to be and hey, win the Stanley Cup while you’re at it!

Peace!  It feels wonderful.   I’ve been blogging here for almost a year now.  For many reasons, I’m feeling better, much more at peace, this weekend than I have at any time since 1989.  That was the year when my archival cohort turned into “dead archivists walking” due to our efforts to comply with a statutory requirement to release records covering “abuse of governmental power.”  Just how dead, I wouldn’t find out until 1992, when I was knifed.  But it turns out, I’m still alive.  Very much so!

I feel I have so much for which to be thankful, especially in my loved ones and my friends, I’m not putting up a song from the 80s.  Going back much further, to 1967 when I was in high school.    Don’t have a good picture from that year that fits my sunny mood so I’m putting up two from 1970, instead.   I’m in the aqua blue hat.  (Yeah, favorite color even back then.)  My twin sister must have been wearing higher heels than me, because I actually was an inch taller than Eva.

I mostly listened to classical music during the 1960s and 1970s (as I still do now).  Didn’t even own a transistor radio as a teenager.  (I was a very square kid, totally!)   But some of my friends did.  And I heard some of the hits of the day that way.  Bought some singles and albums from time to time, too.    “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” from 1967 was a big fav of mine.  (Here’s the Wikipedia link.) Yeah, it would be–you can really hear Bach’s influence.

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I’m partial to the original, which really takes me back to 1967.  But the orchestration for the live performance in 2006 captures the haunting melody beautifully, with full classical force.   And visually, what a reminder that the young and hip grow old, too.  Poignant, actually.

There’s a line in the song, “She said there is no reason, but the truth is plain to see.”  Sometimes, yeah.  Often, no, not.  It’s when you cling to a truth you insist is there and that others must see just as you do that trouble often follows.

I sometimes laugh and say my errors and flaws play out here at my blog in living color.  Not all of them, of course.  But some.  When I’ve erred, here and at my earlier blog, Archivesmatter(s), I haven’t taken down or concealed the posts where I made mistakes.  I’ve left them up.  Part of my history!   Sometimes I’ve apologized, as I did to AOTUS David S. Ferriero this summer.  Totally ok with that, too.   Why shouldn’t I?  I had erred and the Big Dude deserved an apology.  David isn’t the only one.  I’ve apologized publicly to former Nixon Foundation director John H. Taylor here at my blog, too.  Hey, it’s how I roll with my friends.

One reason I stopped posting on the Records Management listserv was because I already have to wear masks in so many of my relationships, especially at work, I didn’t want to have to do that, there.  I didn’t see a way to fit in unless I conformed to that community.  I could have but it wasn’t worth the potential payoff for me.  So I walked.

There’s nothing more liberating than finding trust zones where you can be yourself, can stumble, can fall, can make mistakes, and get called out on your errors, nod and acknowledge them, or feel safe in saying, ” no, there’s another way to look at that.”  Where you don’t have to pretend to be perfect.  I’m grateful for those who give me such trust zones.  Wonderful gift.

As I’ve been thinking about that yesterday and today, it occurred to me that it is the lack of liberation that makes the relationship of presidential families with federal archivists so challenging.   Not just in issues such as the Watergate exhibit and the Nixon Foundation’s relationship with former NARA Nixon Presidential Library director Tim Naftali.  But in every calculation that has to be made.    I’ve always thought of the relationship of former presidents and their associates and families in terms of a power imbalance.  I would, wouldn’t I?  I had to face so many powerful forces alone during the G. H. W. Bush administration, when I testified in Kutler v. Wilson. 

But today, as I give thanks for the many good people in my life, I find myself thinking something else.  How tough it must be, to live in a world where you always have to worry about saving face and controlling the narrative.  Or clinging to what you call truths instead of accepting differing interpretations.   That is the biggest difference between presidential families and associates, many of them walking wounded, and the rest of us.   I’m lucky.  I know how wonderful it feels, to live in a world where you don’t have to control the narrative or insist  on being right, much less pretend to be perfect.

So maybe the power imbalance goes the other way, after all, whether former presidents and their associates beat people such as I in some battles, or not.   For it is I who can look around at the age of 60 and say, “I am free!”

As a former employee and a current customer of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), I’m enjoying my weeklong look at the agency’s blogs.  I generally watch the National Archives closely, have been since I left its employ in 1990. I’m a big supporter of its mission. Because I used to work there and still have many friends who do, I’m very interested in what it does, how it does it, and why.   At year’s end, I decided to spell out some of what I’ve been thinking about NARA, its blogs, and the transformation effort.

In case anyone is wondering, the Big Dude, aka AOTUS David S. Ferriero, and I still are friendly.  Yep.  Still speaking to each other despite my candid analysis of his AOTUS blog.   Totally.  Things couldn’t be better.  I mean, c’mon.  David means it, really means it, when he says he wants people to engage on NARA issues.  I’ve been doing that at my blog for nearly a year now.  Sometimes, very often, I praise what Ferriero is doing.   Sometimes, as in my year-end overview, I raise questions.  Look.  I’m a fan, not a fangirl.  And this I know.  David has enormous capacity, more than anyone I’ve ever seen in his position, not just at NARA but anywhere in Fedland.

Longtime blog readers know that while I initially was a bit skeptical of Ferriero, I became a big fan of David  this spring.  After he reached out to me on May 12, 2011, and I got to know him, I came to realize David is the real deal and that he really is his own best salesman.   He has a wonderful sense of humor and can be quite whimsical.  Early on, when he sent me a message and signed it David rather than as the Big Dude, I asked why.  He shot back a one liner, “multiple personalities!”  Too funny. 

Some time ago, I laughingly told Ferriero, “integrate your multiple personalities.”  So he now uses David but let me assure you, he totally is the Big Dude.  A very impressive executive.  And, as former NARA Nixon Presidential Library director Tim Naftali said in an interview, a good man.   And, as a friend who works at NARA has observed, under the right circumstances, Ferriero can be fun. 

But what most impresses me about the way AOTUS rolls is his strength and robustness.  I just submitted a comment late on Friday under David’s last blog post  about use of social media at NARA.  Nope, didn’t go all fangirl.  I meant it when I said in a recent post that it’s a mistake to try to get on David’s good side by acting as a sycophant or cheerleading only what you think he is most interested in.  That just leaves him vulnerable to being blindsided and he deserves better.  Much better.  So respect him in a meaningful way!

Sure, Ferriero doesn’t head my reporting chain.   And yeah, I can’t be prescriptive about communications.   I’m outside.  I’m not protecting turf.  Everyone has to figure those things out on a situational basis, absolutely.  But I feel that David really believes in lifelong learning and continuous improvement.  So I asked in my submission about the digital divide in the agency.  The moderator should release my comment Monday.  If I thought the transformation effort was as fragile as such Fedland initiatives often prove to be, I wouldn’t have done that.

That Ferriero has mad skillz doesn’t mean he can do it all by himself.  He needs a good team around him.  So it’s time to look at the other NARA blogs, as well.

In his first blog post at AOTUS blog, David wrote on April 7, 2010, that

“. . . we intend to vastly improve our online capabilities in order to foster the public’s use of our records. Included in this effort will be a redesign of Archives.gov, with streamlined search capabilities for the research section of our website. Further, we intend to explore ways to develop our current catalog into a social catalog that allows our online users to contribute information to descriptions of our records. And although we have developed a number of successful social media projects in the last year, we now need to develop a comprehensive social media strategy for the agency, which will include internal and external communication efforts using new media tools. In these efforts lie the seeds of change that will alter the course of our agency.

I expect the principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration to change the way we do things, the way we think about things, and the way we deliver services to the public.”

NARA is well along the way to meeting many of these goals on the technical level.   Although I see some tactical weaknesses in how the agency sometimes handles communications, it has developed a strong social media strategy. The number of blogs has increased since Ferriero launched AOTUS:  Collector in Chief, so much so that some of the older NARA blogs haven’t kept up on their blogrolls.  One of the newer blogs is the one for the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS).  Gotta tell you, The FOIA Ombudsman is a very impressive blog.  Take a look!  Some great posts which explain clearly and cogently how the National Archives handles issues such as Mandatory Review of national security classified records.  I especially recommend the one on demystifying declassification.

I  worked over the summer and in the early fall this year with William (Jay) Bosanko, whom David named in March to be Executive for Agency Services.  Jay heads the mega unit, Agency Services, of which OGIS is a part.   The Information Security Oversight Office (which Jay once headed), the National Declassification Center (NDC), and records management policy also are parts of his portfolio.  Jay is awesome.  I’m a big fan.  (Disclaimer for newer readers.  Jay and I are old friends.  The photo shows us at an office party at my house in 1995.) 

Many things set Jay apart from executives with whom I’ve worked over 38 years in Fedland.  One is the clear, concise way he can explain the disparate elements and moving parts in a complicated situation.  As we sought to resolve a work related situation this past summer and fall, Jay walked me through some complex Fedland issues effortlessly in some of our phone convos.   While juggling a “million” other issues and often on the run between meetings.  Dude never let me down! 

So I’m pleased that OGIS, a unit under Jay’s purview, echoes some of that same type of clarity in its blog posts.  Added bonus, there’s some whimsy thrown in.  I mean, when you can tell Fed folks their jobs include “therapist” and “mind reader”you are keeping it real.  Srsly, check out FOIA Ombudsman, it’s one of the best NARA blogs around.  Not surprising, given the facilitative nature of OGIS.

Ferriero is committed to building bridges and breaking down siloes at NARA.  I like the fact that although there also is a blog for NDC, OGIS recently included a post about declassification at its blog.  The NDC blog comes across as a bit uneven to me.  Some posts are good, some need improvement.  It hasn’t lived up to its potential although there is a lot of talent in the NDC. 

Might as well admit an impairment here, as they say in the world of auditing.  My late sister, Eva, used to be a supervisory archivist in NARA’s Declassification unit.  Yeah, the picture shows what people do to a boss when they are comfortable in the supervisory relationship!  The tall man on the right is Chuck Hughes, on whose white shirt I got lipstick on July 14, 2011.  Happens when you are just under 5′ 4″ as I am.  That led Ferriero to send me a tip on how to get such stains out of laundry.  As you can see on the photo at her house, Eva, my twin, also was short.  About an inch shorter than me, actually.

I still have a lot of friends who work in NDC.  I used to work with national security classified records myself when I worked for the National Archives’ Nixon Presidential Materials Project.  Sometimes, the more you know. . . . Well, you know how it is.  I called the unit on one post at the NDC blog this year because I spotted some errors, albeit largely although not completely of a non-material nature.  Yeah, they got fixed.  Becaue I am pushing for the National Declassification Center’s blog to live up to its potential I’m giving it a grade of “incomplete.”  I’m not sure anyone in the unit has much time to read other blogs, such as OGIS blog.  In fairness, I should point out that blogging is not the number one priority for NARA’s mission unit officials.  They have work to do!  And NDC especially is up against a statutory deadline. 

Whoa, I’ve only covered two blogs in addition to AOTUS blog.  Looks like this series is going to continue into the next week, then.  I’ll get into topics such as cross cutting mission issues and NARA’s use of social media tomorrow or later next week.  Hey, I’m having fun.  My favorite hobby–NARA watching!