Monthly Archives: November 2012

I’ve always thought that records matter, matter a lot.  I’m a historian and a former National Archives archivist.  Of course, I do.  Moreover, I work in the federal environment.  I follow issues related to the life cycle of records keenly.  I depend on their preservation.  And the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) depends on people such as I who care about records.

There’s a well-known saying that when you start a new job, it’s important to figure out the unwritten rules and to learn about the workplace culture.   There are no templates, of course.  At the top, some Presidents of the United States read more history than others.  When they do, it’s not so much to look for precedents (history never exactly repeats itself) but to get a sense of how their predecessors faced challenges.

Press releases don’t really tell you much about what a president reads, although it is customary to release lists of a president’s purported favorite books, music, etc.  Rather, as with all leaders, you hear the extent to which they read books in their conversation.  In how they answer questions during interviews.  And when they read prepared remarks, in the extent to which they sound as if they really are relating to the concepts they mention.  People at the top are tremendously busy.  But if there is such a pattern, a lifetime of reading, of thinking about what you read, comes through to the discerning eye and ear.  So, too, of course, a lack of such a pattern.

Perhaps because my work as a NARA employee involved disclosure review of the Nixon tapes, I tend to think in terms of how human are the people who create records.  I’m interested in the challenges they face, how they handle them, what they do in the face of ambiguity, adversity.  How they handle lack of certitude or conflicting data or advice.  And for those in government, how they handle a world that has elements of both the grown up world and the schoolyard.  And even how they view and react to those who enable the culture in which they operate.  In other words, in how they differ from us but also how they are “just like us.”

The phrase that public sector officials use (“accountable to the American people”) doesn’t always resonate in the business environment.  Studying records managers’ forums has left me with the impression that private sector lawyers think in terms of liability and look to reduce exposure.  Corporate records management appears to focus on destruction of records that could come back to bite a business if kept longer than business needs or regulations require.

An examination of Recmgmt-L shows very little discussion of corporate memory as an element in learning, history or accountability.  Does that mean records managers never talk about such issues?  Not necessarily.  It just shows the vibe on that particular listserv.  One thoughtful subscriber, Chris Flynn, observed there in 2005 that “perspective is not considered a healthy trait.”  He gave his take on archivists, too.  Undaunted, I tried for some time to keep lines of communications open there, because I’m a bridge builder by temperament and because I value cross disciplinary learning.

In what appears to be a series of posts at the blog for the Students and New Archives Professionals Roundtable, Mark Greene recently gave his assessment of the Archives and Archivists Listserv and quoted a young archivist who said,”I get the distinct impression that established Archivists aren’t particularly interested in fostering new archivists into the field.” 

Greene, a former President of the Society of American Archivists, did not push back against the generalization (“established Archivists”) by saying some may, some may not.  Not surprisingly, one of the people commenting under his post picked up on the theme.  She described mentoring her husband has received in another field and observed, “senior archivists do not feel this sense of responsibility toward the new generation.”  In her view, “many senior archivists are terrified of a young person ‘growing’ enough to take their job.”

I see some of this differently, in part because I believe in continual learning.  I’ve never seen anyone “grow” to take someone else’s job.  At least in the federal government, advancement comes from establishing a track record, demonstrating value to the organization, and applying for supervisory, managerial, and executive jobs as slots open up through departures and retirements.  Demonstrating value is ongoing for people at all ranks.  It’s not as if you reach a certain grade level and coast or stagnate, although there are people who handle their jobs that way.

As to senior professionals in the archives field not feeling a sense of responsibility, that seems too impressionistic and sweeping an assessment to me.  Part of the problem lies in the fact that a lot of mentoring and assistance (financial, psychological, technical, professional) goes on behind the scenes, out of public view and unrecorded in public forums.  Some people help each other via DM on Twitter, through email, telephone conversations, over lunch.  And feel no need to blow their own trumpets or claim merit badges for doing so.  The record, as it turns out, doesn’t always capture everything that is going on.

Greene decided in his post to address the question of the Archives & Archivists Listserv, which is administered by the Society of American Archivists (SAA) but does not reflect its views as an organization.   He quoted from a subscriber to the SNAP Listserv who wrote, “I read the A&A listserv, and frankly, I get the distinct impression that established Archivists aren’t particularly interested in fostering new archivists into the field, nor do they particularly like the new crop of professionals.  Indeed, A&A would be the last place I’d ever consider going for career advice, I can get abuse for free online.”

I remember a discussion of A&A on SNAP but I didn’t jump in to it fully, despite having views to share, although I subscribe to both Listservs.  I only caught the conversation towards the end, when the Roundtable’s founder, Rebecca Goldman, asked subscribers to drop discussion of A&A and return to discussing SAA’s strategic priorities.

I’ve mentioned on both listservs that AOTUS David Ferriero once sent me a message using the A&A web interface.  Wouldn’t surprise me if he reached out to others, too.  (Haven’t asked David, don’t plan to do so.)

Greene’s reaction to A&A?  He wrote in his post at the SNAP blog this week,

“the amount of vitriol on the list is exceeded, perhaps, only by the amount of incorrect information passing as wisdom.  Please be extremely cautious when approaching the list; indeed it would be my advice that, if you are an SAA member, post questions instead to the discussion lists of the roundtables and/or sections to which you belong long before posting the A&A list.”

Too many sweeping generalizations there for me.  But what he wrote fits a meme that has developed over time.  Me, I hinted at my views when I linked to his post on (ahem) A&A yesterday.

That’s just him, I’m just me. We’re all in different places (“Together yet apart”).

This listserv has its limitations, sure, won’t argue that it doesn’t have some, but it still represents a central meeting place in a Web 1.0 format. I’ve seen no Web 2.0 venue that has the same town square feeling.“

I added,

“Tend to think trying out different forums is good preparation for working in often chaotic workplaces where you can’t control everything around you, ha. And where you’ll have to collaborate, work for, or supervise people with differing Myers Briggs Type Indicators, personalities, temperament, and styles of communications. In other, prepare for frustration, LOL.”

Is there misinformation on the List?  Sure, sometimes.  But there also are subscribers who clearly know what they are doing (audio expert Richard Hess comes to mind), are up on the skills and competencies their jobs require, and know how to share information and advice in a professional manner.  Although Greene advises people to turn to individual Roundtables, none replace what the A&A List once provided in its heyday, broad exposure on a wide range of topics to people who may change jobs within the archival field and start learning new lessons in acculturation.  I’ve spent my entire career in federal service (I will reach 40 years in civil service next year).  I’ve learned a lot about academic archives and libraries from A&A, including the need to factor in how much I don’t know!

Is there wisdom?  Despite what the former SAA president says, I still find some there from time to time.  Like any crowd sourcing endeavor, it depends on participants engaging, offering alternatives, taking part.  To me, A&A is no more #thatdarnlist than the SNAP List is #thatdelightfullist, as Rebecca christened her Roundtable’s discussion group when it opened for business.

But I tend to think discussions of A&A have reached a tipping point.  Perhaps it has something to do with perceptions of rewarded behavior.  You won’t see anyone boasting on Twitter, “I just picked up the “Discuss A&A Badge’ on the Listserv.”  Perhaps looking at it or thinking about how to make it better or how to create a community square elsewhere has come to be perceived as a way to be unpopular and to not fit in.  If so, then there still are lessons to be learned from A&A, aren’t there?

As archival noobs and veterans debated a new publication on resources for volunteers in archives, at the History News Network David Walsh was reporting on a conference on “Recasting Presidential History.” I’ll have to blog that separately as I am a student of government at the highest levels.  Moreover, Walsh mentioned in his post a federal historians event that I and other officials attended recently in Washington.

My perspective differs from that of the attendees at the Recasting Presidential History event, to some extent.  That’s fine, I’m comfortable examining how and why.  So more to come soon.

Also this week, ProPublica reported on how missing Defense Department records (including e-records) affected claims by veterans.  Of the three, the record keeping article held the fewest surprises for me.    It also is the one where the Society of American Archivists (SAA) is least likely to be of help to some of us in Fedland.

As I noted in January (“Together yet alone”), both SAA and the primary records management association have punted on some issues, including electronic records.  As a former archivist and a historian, do I care?  Sure.  Do I feel a sense of entitlement as regards help owed me?  Of course not, neither SAA nor ARMA owes me anything.  Do I blame them for leaving me in the lurch on some issues that matter to me, matter greatly?  No.  A lot has happened since January, but I’m still where I was then.

“As a historian, I keep issues of cause, criteria, conditions and effect very much in mind when I think about archives and records management.   Neither SAA nor the primary records management association, ARMA, offers much support to someone such as I in Fedland   Both are at the same time too diverse but too conformist, too conservative, too low in their aims, and most importantly, unable for many reasons to tackle the toughest issues that confront records creators in the 21st century.

. . . . That this occurs is due to the leadership, rewarded behavior, and the diversity of both groups.  Approaches and values that lead to success in the private sector can undermine someone working in the public sector and vice versa.  That this is so appears difficult to point out, even among those who have seen or felt the impact themselves.   To some extent, I understand avoidance or glossing over of some tough issues.  An unacknowledged goal when people gather in the physical or virtual world often is keeping up group morale.”

Given my focus on the beginning of the life cycle of records, I was thinking primarily of ARMA.  But I also had in mind that SAA had found it challenging to help some of those caught up in the “Nixon wars.”  I don’t know why but have assumed it may have been because officials within the government themselves held differing views on some of the issues over the last few decades.  The issues are incredibly arcane and require discernment and a high degree of situational awareness to unravel.

The disputes that erupted last week over the release of a SAA publication on volunteer resources in archives offer opportunities to air out some issues and to show who people are.   There are a number of factors that affect how workplaces use volunteers.  That the authors of the publication referred to fears about loss of jobs or denial of opportunities seemed like an acknowledgement of what people have discussed in various venues.  Others took the statements as dismissive.  Some readers criticized SAA for not offering advice on how to counter situations where such fears may arise.

I knew from Twitter that Rebecca had what she called a Howl in the works.  (This is what I tweeted to her Thursday evening as she was writing it.)   I assumed Rebecca would post it at the Derangement and Description blog, not at the more narrowly focused You Ought to Be Ashamed (YOTBA) group blog.   The former had been the site for posting her earlier “Howls.”   Mistaken assumption on my part.

Friday morning I saw her ask for Justice League members to comment on her post before it went live for public viewing.  I’m not a member so I couldn’t.  Would have been happy to DM or email chat Thursday evening after sending off my tweet.  Was energized after a beautiful evening at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on Thursday.  I stayed up late but saw no follow up.  Did instinctively put up a post in anticipation of what I thought would be a Howl at Derangement and Description.

Full disclosure:  I used to discuss archival employment issues on the Archives & Archivists Listserv.  In 2010, I actually was asked if I wanted to become a member of the Justice League or guest blog at YOTBA but declined because I was wary of social media still.  If you think that was a silly reaction, that’s ok, I don’t mind.  The reasons for my being leery of social media then were complicated.  I’ve touched on them and I won’t waste time explaining them again.  Events forced my hand (only a couple of people know what I mean at the fullest, there) and I started Nixonara in December 2010.

When Rebecca’s post went up Friday morning, I initially didn’t think I would comment although I do have deep immersion in issues related to the National Archives and Records Administration.  NARA provided input in to the SAA publication on volunteers.  I wasn’t surprised.   It fits the Obama’s administration’s Open Government vibe.

These exchanges on Twitter Friday morning and at midday (which I sat out) led me both to hesitate to get involved and finally to join in.   Those who know me can tell what the tipping point was.   I went from feeling I was being told pre-emptively to STFU before I said anything in response to the post to feeling I owed a diverse archival community my views on the matter.  Shorter version of what I’ve said?  It’s complicated, the elements and conditions differ a lot depending on where you work, and there’s stuff you may want to dig into before you make up your minds.   Manicheanism not the best way to go, binary thinking too limiting, there is no right or wrong because conditions vary so greatly.

Since then, I’ve blogged here about the volunteer resources publication.  And I’ve posted in two forums about the use of federal retirees as volunteers by the National Archives and Records Administration.   One situation involved a subject matter expert and highly skilled specialist who had retired after three decades of employment at NARA.  The other involved retired members of the intelligence community whom the National Archives praised for their volunteer work on records in 1998.

In neither case was the volunteer work of such a nature that new hires could have done it.  You don’t hire an expert German language speaker and PhD subject matter scholar or aging intelligence community retirees with specific specialities to perform work of a limited duration.  You use the few slots available to you to hire generalists whom you can train to do a wide array of tasks.  Volunteers represented the perfect solution to helping out on tasks that permanent NARA staff could not do.  And which might have remained undone or done less expertly without the volunteers.

Is is safe for me to quote what NARA said of the intelligence community retirees in 1998?  Of course.

“We are truly proud of the work done by our volunteers. They have given freely and generously of their time so that others may research these highly important records and may learn of America’s first national intelligence agency and its special operations in World War II. We want to honor them all for their unselfish service.”

So what should SAA have done?  Advocate for greater use of volunteers in some places, less in others, and for no use in still others?  Of course not.  Providing examples of what different organizations were doing probably seemed like a sensible solution to the problem of limited funding when the publication was in the planning stages.

Should the publication have gone out for comment prior to publication?  No, I don’t think so.  Why?  Because it represents workplace vignettes that those who are employed by the various organizations know better than anyone else.  You can’t crowdsource specific sections of a publication that depend on a high degree of situational familiarity.

Could SAA have explored expectations in the broad archival community (including among students, new archivists, and veterans) regarding what they were looking for from a publication on volunteers? Yeah, maybe.   But keep in mind, both SAA and NARA are working to become more open, to improve engagement, to look outwards more than they have in past decades.  A work in progress for both.

And, if we’re brave enough to admit it, engagement is a work in progress for all of us in Archivesland.  I don’t see anyone among the Twitter and blog debaters with the moral high ground here on issues of engagement and communications.  No need for anyone on any side of the issues to retreat into the dug in, defensive postures you often see in the partisan political world.  I liked the  thoughtful observations on that by Matt Taibbi after the Gabbi Giffords shooting.

“In politics, you don’t need to treat everyone with decency and humanity, just 51% of the crowd. Actually, given that half or less than half of all people don’t vote, the percentage of people who require basic decency and indulgence is probably even lower than that, maybe 20-25% of the population. There’s plenty of power and money to be won by skillfully stimulating public anger against some or all of the rest, and there are few rewards for restraint.”

Pundits and advocates have choices in how they handle fairness and restraint.  Often, the models point against it.

“. . . . not only is there no incentive for restraint, there’s actually a huge disincentive for restraint, because for many of us in the punditry world, our livelihoods depend upon cultivating audiences who come to expect a certain emotional payoff for tuning in. If you’ve trained them to expect to have their prejudices validated and their sense of Superiority Over the Other stroked every time they turn on your program, they’re not going to like it when the show comes on and the editorial storyline is completely opposite. . . .

So when you the pundit start admitting to being wrong, and forgiving your enemies, and questioning yourself, and making your message that even people with views different from your own are thinking, feeling human beings who deserve your respect — well, none of those things tend to help you keep your market share. What does win market share is bashing the living f*** out of people your audiences love to hate (and most of the time, it’s you who’ve trained them to hate those people). That’s just a fact, and anyone in this business who’s honest with himself knows that.”

Not my style.  Made that clear on January 12, 2011 in a post called “Neediness and the Price of Civic Ignorance.”  In politics, in archivesland, everywhere we gather, we’re just different people holding varying views from whatever informs our perspectives.  I’d like to see a 360 convo on the employment and workforce issues, one that includes managers, administrators, line employees, and volunteers.  Even so, I recognize there are limitations on what people of all ranks can say about workplace conditions.  Yes, that applies to the senior ranks as well as the junior.

And while I’m at it, let me point out that some of us have track records.  Take Terry Baxter.  The post he put up about “Hanging Together” was written in classic @terryx666 style.   I read it as such.  Messaging and metamessaging.  Terry called me out once years ago.  I was taken aback.  I don’t remember if it was on or offline so I won’t share the context.  I thought about it, shook off the sting of the rebuke, and realized I had some thinking to do about how I came across.  A growth opportunity, as we say in Fedland.  Terry and I are still friends in the virtual world.

Easy for me to maintain that relationship.  I’ve taken into account the entirety of Terry the cool dude who has done a lot of good stuff and whose heart is in the right place.  That he once smacked me in writing doesn’t represent the whole of who he is or who I am.  Moreover, I don’t give others the power to define me.  But that doesn’t mean I shrug off what they say about how I come across.  I don’t just live in my own head, wouldn’t want to do so!

Hiding isn’t the safest place to be.  Me, I’m not going to tell anyone to STFU.  And you won’t catch me throwing any of those white gloves from my youth in a challenge to a duel, either.  Because the key phrase in this scene from my favorite opera is the one Eugene Onegin sings.  As he loses a friendship (to be followed by his killing his longtime friend in a duel) he protests, “This is stupid!”  And indeed it is.