The End of June and Everything After

Poster that Welcomed Tom Hyry Back to Yale (30 June 2008)
The Great Dane Pub & Brewing Company, Dane County Regional Airport, Madison, Wisconsin

A sidetrip to West Lima, Wisconsin, has kept me in Wisconsin for a few days longer than everyone else who participated in the Archives Leadership Institute, but the effects of the institute continue. Tom Hyry sent me his greetings, along with the sign above that greeted him on his return to work. The now onymous commenter Erik Nordberg also sent word. Rosemary Pleva Flynn noted that I switched two people's names around in the caption of one of the photos I posted, so I will correct that soon. Donna McCrea sent me a couple of emails from Montana, supported my idea for the third word of our leadership institute "motto." (I'm tentatively going with "Extensibility Nimbility Intertwingularity.") And Jane Pearlmutter informed all of us that she has set up an online space for us in Learn@UW, her university's online courseware.

That last bit is most important, but so are all the connections we've made. As a group, we have felt a responsibility to make something more out of this opportunity. Our ultimate goal is not ourselves individually but all of us collectively, the profession as a whole. We have no set plans, but we need to continue our thinking together and figure out what of value we as a concentrated group of archivists might do for the profession. We do this not because we see ourselves as a chosen people, but because we have been privileged by this opportunity and this privilege requires a giving back. We seem, at least, to believe that together, even though our ideas do not always move in one unified direction. As our process of considering what we can valuably do carries forward, I'll make some notes about that progress, though I'll also keep in mind the needs we might have to consider ideas in private until we believe we've refined them sufficiently for a wider public. It may certainly be that we never do anything flashy, that we merely codify ways in which we as individuals can give a little back to the profession.

And now that I post my motto for this blog, I wonder if "archivity" might need to be part of our motto.

archivity furthers

Archives Leadership Institute, Day Eight

Dreamtime Village, West Lima, Wisconsin

Day 8: 28 June 2008

This is the last day.

Managing Change

Peter Gottlieb opened with a discussion of change. He identified two kinds of change: incremental and crisis. Then he discussed his own crisis of change, having to do with a simultaneous change in the culture of the Wisconsin Historical Society along with a huge fiscal crisis, which together created a perfect storm of crisis change. The details he gave of the story highlighted how difficult managing change can be. One important point he made was that he made sure to inform people about what was going on throughout this crisis. He noted that sharing information always helps organizations, even thought it reduces one’s choices for action.

He described the roles of a leader regarding change as to increase staff’s capacity to adapt to change and to give hope and inspiration to staff. He then quoted from the film, The Shawshank Redemption: “Hope is a good think, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” He ended by urging us to make time and space for grieving and to encourage the heart to deal with change.

Change Management

Next up was Fynnette Eaton, talking about change management. She discussed dealing with resistance to change, the obstacles to change management and its goals, and the hallmarks of effective change—but I want to focus on what she opened with: the phases of transition. She claimed these phases were ending (which is often seen as a loss and a goodbye), followed by the neutral zone (a chaotic time where no-one knows quite what is going on, and ending with a beginning (the new chapter). She noted, as I will now, that the beginning is the last part, which I found a valuable point to stress.

An Ending

Today was a short day, which was a relief, as everyone was tired. We had worn ourselves out by now, and we needed not a rest but a bit of coasting. We spent our last session evaluating the institute and suggesting changes for next year, and we wish those who follow us much luck.

Lunch

A few of our classmates had to leave before lunch, but most of us stayed, leaving piecemeal from this last meal together. As each of us left, we waved and hugged and said goodbye and noted that we’d be together again sometime. And so we might. Only time—and we know this—will tell.

We have plans for those of us who will be there to meet at SAA in San Francisco this August, and we will soon be working on a little change management project of our own, as we band together to move forward with our plans for ourselves and the profession.

Sometime this week I hope to post a few ending thoughts on the institute, not by recounting what happened during our week together but by considering it and evaluating it.

A Final View of Lake Mendota, Madison, Wisconsin (28 Jun 2008)
Thought for the Day

An old saying of mine appropriate for the day: Change is good, but folding money is better.

archivity furthers

Archives Leadership Institute, Day Seven

Dreamtime Village, West Lima, Wisconsin

Day 7: 27 June 2008

Waking up has become not difficult but labored this morning, after so many days of so little sleep, and others are feeling tired, too. This has been an exhausting week. Yet we move through the days well enough.

Mentoring and Teaming

The morning opened with Christine Weideman talking to us about mentoring, and we spent some time defining what a mentor is and the skills of a mentor. This was followed by a talk about team building, led by Fynnette Eaton.

The most interesting part of the morning was the small mentoring session we held. We were presented with seven students of the library school, each of whom had described their interests and their needs, and we divided ourselves (quite evenly) among those. Rosemary Pleva Flynn, Sammie Morris, Fynnette Eaton, and I talked to a young woman who was interested in electronic records and records management. We asked her questions about what she was doing and gave her plenty of advice and direction. Most of all, though, we made sure she retained the passion she had for this line of work. I slipped into my speech about how we need to work on electronic records even if we end up failing, because the challenge of electronic records is providing us with a chance to be great. I even came up with a new saying: “Dealing with electronic records is not smooth sailing, but like sailing over rocks.” During my discussion of records management, I used another one of my sayings, which Rosemary and Fynnette asked me to post here: “Records management is only tangentially about the management of people; it is primarily concerned with the management of people.” For my collection of such sayings, check here.

Can a Professional Association Diversify a Profession?

Most of our class waiting the whole week to find out what the diversity case study was going to be. In our handouts for the institute, there was simply a question (provided as the heading to this section) without the normal apparatus of a case study. Those of us not on Team 5 had little or not information on this case study, and there was acute curiosity about the reason for this lack of information. So when we faced Team 5 after lunch, the case study we found was expectedly unexpected.

With much grace, Tom opened the session by noting that this topic might make people a bit uncomfortable, and he asked everyone to be respectful. He then noted the question that faced his team (“Can a professional association diversify a profession?”) before noting, dramatically, that his team decided the answer was, “NO.” He noted that the question we had to answer was, “What can a professional association do to diversity a profession?” He gave a history of their work on this case study, which included discussions with Karen Jefferson, Nancy Beaumont, and Peter Gottlieb. He noted that discussing the issue of race can be difficult as he showed us a picture of an elephant and noted that race is the “elephant in the room.”

Taronda Spencer followed with a history of the slow progress of the Society of American Archivists’ diversity efforts. Neil Dahlstrom continued this story, noting that SAA had made diversity one of its three priorities in its 2006/2007 strategic plan. He explained the outcomes envisioned by this plan (which are available on SAA’s website) and SAA President Elizabeth Adkin’s speech on diversity, which outlined strategies to highlight and stress the issue. He noted that reports on the issue of diversity were due to SAA Council today (June 27th).

Amy Cooper Cary spoke to us next, opening with “Let’s take the elephant out of the room, but it still stalks among us. She said that her team focused on diversity in terms of race and ethnicity, and she noted that it can be difficult to have a true cross-cultural dialog. She explained that her team had decided to use the term “minorities” to discuss those people not represented by the white anglo majority.

Sammie Morries opened up with a long list of opportunities we had to address diversity. She ended with the idea of developing a toolkit that archivists could use to encourage diverse candidates to join the profession. I noted that it would be better to teach people how to use this toolkit to support their efforts, since human contact is what we will need to make a diversity initiative work and since people will learn better from flesh-and-blood humans who are talking to them.

Gina Vergara-Buatista then pushed us farther into the conversation, asking us about diversity initiatives in regional archival associations. After a strange pause from the audience, I answered the question in terms of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference, and we were off. There were many ideas handed out, and I was a frequent contributor to this conversation (having somehow lived a life that gave me plenty of ideas on this topic). We discussed hiring practices, cultivating minority archivists, looking for personal opportunities to make a change, and encouraging interest in the profession via impassioned training on the subject of archives.

Neil closed the session by saying that the team hoped to heighten our awareness and keep us engaged. He noted, “We’re all facilitators, and we’re all advocates.”

This session was the big session of the day, and maybe of the entire institute. The team did a great job presenting the material and facilitating the discussion, and we were aglow with a sense of some accomplishment by the end of it all.

Archives Leadership Institute Team 5: Neil Dahlstrom, Tom Hyry, Amy Cooper Cary, Taronda Spencer, Sammie Morris, and Gina Vergara-Bautista, Madison, Wisconsin (27 Jun 2008)

Professional Associations

Nancy Beaumont, the executive director of SAA (and a weeklong observer of the institute) gave a presentation and guided a discussion on professional associations for archivists. She noted that only a small percentage of people (10 to 20%) volunteer to work in professional and other associations, and we even discussed the most common Myers-Briggs results for archivists. We spent much of our time, however, talking about specific issues related to SAA and about the issue of responding to archivists who volunteered for roles in their professional associations.

The Tom Hyry Chronicles

Tom Hyry Holding Water (27 Jun 2008)
The seventh day of our institute marked the last time I took a picture of Tom Hyry holding up a beverage in salute to all of us. It’s hard not to appreciate someone who can participate in such a funny activity so many times in one week.

Nighttime

We ended our day together. All of us—including Nancy Beaumont, Lucy Barber (of the NHPRC), and Lydia Reid (the project evaluator for the Institute)—went out to dinner at Gino’s. I couldn’t stay at my table at all, but had to move from table to table to talk to everyone and to ask them to help me come up with the third word. Here was my issue: I decided to try to design a T-shirt for the institute, since the T-shirt we received was simply a generic archives T-shirt some of us already owned. I decided that it would make sense to add to the back of the T-shirt, as some kind of motto, a few words of significance to this institute: intertwingularity (a word I introduced everyone to) and nimbility (a group neologism designed to fit with intertwingularity, but I had no third word. People came up with many many possibilities

(
community
cohortivity [community translated into a word to go with intertwingularity]
bone folder [a joke about one of our classmate’s ignorance of this term]
fetchers and keepers [the two kinds of archivists in one repository we were told about]
Madibility [Madison (Wisc.) + ability]
passionist [feeding off mine and others’ frequent calls for passion as a moving force]
mingularity [mingling + intertwingularity]
passionista [working off of passionist
jumpsuit [a joke about the power of identical jumpsuits to bring teams of people together]
passionivity [and attempt to turn passionist into an –ity word]
teamability
possibility
fetchability
keepability
consensibility [consensus + ability]
)

but none seemed quite right. The most votes went to passionista (11), followed by five for cohortivity, and one to three for five other words.

At some point, I decided that we needed to leave the restaurant (primarily because I was antsy), so I encouraged us all out of the restaurant and onto the street. One better than half of us (14) walked to the capitol then took a bar crawl all the way down State Street and ending at Kollege Klub, which sits kitty-corner from our hotel. We visited eight bars in all, and I had at least half a glass of beer in each bar, quite an accomplishment for someone who never drinks beer. (I believe that I’ve drunk more beer at this institute than the rest of my life combined.) The beer had absolutely no effect on me, which I found interesting, and almost unnerving. But we had a great time. Each bar was radically different from the one before it. Moving to a new bar was like visiting a new planet. We generally had terrible lagers (like Pabst Blue Ribbon), but we talked constantly, we hit cut nails into a stump with a sledge hammer at one bar, we sat out on the Terrace, we texted joke messages to a big video screen at another bar, we lost Scott Goodine at the last bar, we failed miserably (time and time again) to coordinate beer purchases and ended up buying more beer than we really needed, and we had a great time. We came to this place as strangers and became friends, tied together by our experiences here and in our professional life beforehand.

Peter Gottlieb’s advice that we spend time together at bars paid dividends after all.

Thought for the Day

Remember: If you don’t write the strategic plan and put it on the shelf, the shelf will be empty.

archivity furthers

Delaying Two Days

My apologies for those keeping up with my recounting of the Archives Leadership Institute, but seven nights of staying up until two in the morning have had their effect on me, and I keep discovering that I am asleep at the keyboard, so I'll finish off this review of the week's activities once I have a good long night's sleep.

archivity furthers

Delayed: Archives Leadership Institute, Day Seven

A late night has delayed the recounting of the seventh day of the Archives Leadership Institute. Come back later for the story.

archivity furthers

Photographs a Day or More Late

The Lowell Inn and Conference Center, Room 501, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin

This small posting merely provides photographic evidence for previous days' entries. For the posting on the events of June 26th, see just below this posting.

Two of these photographs are of the teams that presented case studies on Monday and Tuesday respectively, and the third photograph is a surprise.

Archives Leadership Institute Team 1: Rosemary Pleva Flynn, Janet Carleton, Claudia Holguin, Jeff Kintop, and Bill Carpenter, Madison, Wisconsin (26 Jun 2008)

Archives Leadership Institute Team 2: Erik Nordberg, Erika Castaño, Heather Lawton, Tanya Zanish-Belcher, and Geof Huth, Madison, Wisconsin (26 Jun 2008)
(photo by Jill Severn

Tom Hyry's Calves, Langdon Street, Madison, Wisconsin (26 Jun 2008)

archivity furthers

Archives Leadership Institute, Day Six

The Lowell Inn and Conference Center, Room 501, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin

In the interests of sleep, I’ll try to keep this posting brief.

Twenty-Four-Hour Relief

We opened the meeting by discussing the “24-hour exercise” we discussed in our teams yesterday. In the scenario, a poorly managed private historical site documenting a famous architect was deciding whether to sell off pieces of the collection to make money to float the institution. Our scenario assumed that the archivist had just 24 hours to begin the process to solve this problem. One representative from each team sat at the front of the room and gave short presentations on what they would do, which included contacted sympathetic members of the board and other supporters, bringing this story to the media, and various ways of risking one’s job in order to protect these records.

The Coalition of the Collaborators

Next up were Ellsworth Brown and Kathy Pletcher, who spoke about ways to ensure good collaborations. Brown discussed a number of pertinent issues in collaborations: size (how disparate sizes of collaborators might affect the relationship), missions (which will guide how an organization acts), trust (an essential element), leadership (a necessary component especially if cultures need changing), communication (both informal and formal), open books (so the two parties can check each others’ finances), candor (to include good communication), vision (to direct the collaboration), mutual credit (being sure that each collaborator receives equal billing), and courage (since collaboration is not natural to many people). Kathy Pletcher building on what Brown said, noting that collaborations require a strong leader (with credibility, knowledge and connections) to move projects along and a good governance structure. One sentence Brown said in a sentence resonated with me: A concentrated vision statement “is not dumbing down the statement, but reaching common ground.”

The Art of Grants

Lucy Barber, of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, gave a presentation about grants writing, with particular attention paid to grant applications to the NHPRC itself.

Case Study # 3: Papers from the Teachers’ Union of Ten Gallon, Texas

Archives Leadership Institute Team 4
Jane Rosario, Mary Caldera, Tara Laver, Sara Holmes, and Scott Goodine, Madison, Wisconsin (26 Jun 2008)
This case study concerned the records of a teachers’ union held by a university. A reporter had legally gained access to information used to embarrass the union, which became upset and talked to the university about the release of this information. This issue involved the adequacy of policies, privacy issues, and contractual issues. A good quotation from Erik Nordberg: Sensitive is only sensitive when it’s been used to hurt you.” We carried on a good conversation about this issue and covered a large number of issues in a short time.

Wisconsin Historical

We ended the official part of the day at the Wisconsin Historical Society, where we held a few brief discussions with various staff. Jacqie [sic] Ferry talked to us about a study she has been conducting on the value of the Society’s finding aids to its users. This talk gave us some valuable ideas on how user studies might be carried out (theirs included an observation of users using the finding aids, a followup discussion with a focus group consisting of most of these users, and an online survey). Harry Miller explained the interesting details of the Society’s Area Research Network, a system of thirteen cooperating repositories and which provide care and access to the Society’s records across the state. The system also includes the interesting feature of the equivalent of inter-library loan for records in the system. I can’t say how well this system works, but I can report that this system is the favorite of my father, who is a dedicated and expert genealogist who carries out research across the country. Michael Edmonds explained to us that the Society is both a state agency and a membership group, he described the Society’s various divisions (which cover the gamut of cultural-historical activities), and he gave details about some of the Society’s digital projects.

Fear the Duck

And then it was baseball. Only six of us attended tonight’s baseball game at the Mallard, where the Madison Mallards handily beat the Brainerd (Minnesota) Blue Thunder 10 to 2. For ten dollars apiece, we watched some fun baseball, just a smidge below minor league, received two hotdogs and two cups of beer (Miller Lite). We supported the home team, tried to win any of the prizes being flung at us, whooped when we had to whoop, and had great fun.

Erik Nordberg Showing His Mallard Pride, The Mallard, Madison, Wisconsin (26 Jun 2008)
Top Row: Erik Nordberg and Scott Goodine; Bottom Row: Jeff Kintop, Rosemary Pleva Flynn, and Tanya Zanish-Belcher; The Mallard, Madison, Wisconsin (26 Jun 2008)
A Mallards Baseball Game, The Mallard, Madison, Wisconsin (26 Jun 2008)

In Case You Were Worried

Tom Hyry and a Glass of Water, Madison, Wisconsin (26 Jun 2008)
In case you were worried that I’d forget the day’s picture of Tom Hyry with a beverage raised in salute, don’t be. Here’s Tom, enjoying a glass of water at the restaurant Kabul, where he lunched with Erika Castaño and me.

archivity furthers

Archives Leadership Institute, Day Five

The Lowell Inn and Conference Center, Room 501, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin

Funding Archives

We began the morning listening to Don Moynihan present “The Politics of Budgeting and Finance.” He opened noting that the country is not officially in a recession but that state agencies are already affected as if there is already a recession. He explained that states responded to the 1990 recession primarily with revenue enhancements (increased taxes and fees), that states responded to the 2001 recession primarily with budget cuts, and that budget cuts appear to be the most likely solution for this coming recession and that they will probably last for at least three years. One chart he presented showed the shortfalls this year between what states estimated for revenue while putting together their budgets and what they now believe they will collect in revenues. As an example, New York State is expected to be $4.9 billion below projections.

Moynihan then turned the discussion to us, asking us how we fight for our budgets in a tight budget environment. I answered with a slightly drawn-out story about the steps my Archives took to deal with two significant budget issues: insufficient funds to fund our current state agency services program (including the records center) and insufficient storage in the records center for the records of all state agencies. I explained that we developed a business plan that laid out all of our costs, including the costs of managing the annual costs of paying back a bond for an expansion to the records center, and that we proved that our solution would be the cheapest one for the state as a whole. This two-year argument to our budget office ended with our winning permission to raise our fee for records storage for the first time in twenty years and for us to gain permission to construct a $12.85 million addition to the records center, one which will effectively double the storage capacity of the building.

During our discussions about budget matters, I was amazed to realize that the issues always returned to people and relationships. Everything is about people, probably especially when it is about money.

24 Hours to Exercise

After our budget discussion, we broke into our official teams, read over a case study concerning a seriously mismanaged historical site that also included related archives, and we talked about solutions the archivist could put in place to address this crisis within twenty-four hours. Today, our team was on, even more than we were for our case study, and we quickly developed a number of ideas, discarded a few, and prepared a fairly good presentation for tomorrow. Eric Nordberg will be our voice tomorrow, and it should go pretty well.

What $32 Million Can Buy

When we returned in the afternoon, Karen Jefferson talked to us about the acquisition of the Martin Luther King, Jr., papers—that subset of them that had been held by the family for decades. The story of their purchase by the City of Atlanta for $32 million, the transportation of the thirty-two boxes to Atlanta, the transfer of the records to Morehouse College, the press frenzy about all of this, and the management of the records by the Atlanta University Center, is an interesting one indeed. We discussed this quite a bit and learned some interesting things. Karen Jefferson is now seeing more people who want to sell their records to her archives, which has no money for acquisitions. Some supporters do want to provide financial support to the library, but they want their money to go only to help the King papers. No-one can use these records now, not until they have been fully processed. And fundraising for the final portion of the $32 million is ongoing.

Norman Mailer’s Mistress

Jane Pearlmutter, who set up this institute, met with us today and we carried out a brief exercise wherein we discussed the acquisition by Harvard of the papers of Norman Mailer’s mistress, Carole Mallory. With the tiny bit of information available, Jane noted that many people had asked her if Harvard even knew if this woman was Mailer’s mistress—and the records authentic. I noted that the papers might include correspondence from Mailer that might authenticate the relationship and, secondarily, the records. And the big point to me was totally different: Were these records—a few letters and some writings by Mallory about her sex life with Mailer—actually valuable enough to acquire by purchase?

Case Study 3: ChoicePoint

Archives Leadership Institute Team 3: Heather Briston, Donna McCrea, Pamela Wright, Jill Severn, Charles Greifenstein, Jennifer Davis McDaid, Madison, Wisconsin (25 Jun 2008)
Team 3 did a remarkably great job with their case study, which concerned the unauthorized release of sensitive data and the selling of inaccurate data that led to people not being hired for jobs. Team 3 set up the case study with a very brief, but more than adequate, introduction to the story, then they divided us up into categories of people involved in the case and had each of us discuss the case from our point of view and then report.

Archives Leadership Institute Team 3’s Notes from Their Case Study, Madison, Wisconsin (25 Jun 2008)
(Note the dog and sad face added by Jennifer Davis McDaid to her extremely neat notes.)
Everyone seemed to have a great time with this exercise, we learned quite a bit from each other, and we had massive amounts of fun. I was on a team with Tom Hyry and Rosemary Pleva Flynn, and we had great fun in our role of victims of this large corporation. There was much laughter during the presentations and the discussion afterwards led to the parallels between ChoicePoint’s situation and that that exists, at least potentially, in an archives. Mary Caldera noted that “Archives are most like ChoicePoint in how they use data,” which was a sky-cracking revelation: that archives hold and manage sensitive data, provide it to others, and sometimes do not have perfect controls in place for doing so. Scott Goodine ended the discussion with a great closing, and a point I’ve made often enough: “Ultimately, it’s about risk, and archivists aren’t comfortable with risk, but they have to get over it.”

I Bet He Knows What Mellon-Funded Metadata Harvesting Is

Fourteen of us went out to dinner together and had a raucous time filled with laughter that doubled Taronda Spencer and Erika Castaño over for a couple of minutes. We made jokes about the name for a group of archivists. Top candidates: “a straggle of archivists” (yes, straggle), and “an intertwingle of archivists.” During all of this, we continued to talk about work, including HIPAA and bone folders (which shows that we covered quite a range of topics). Tom Hyry, unfortunately for him, hadn’t heard of the term “bone folder” again, which led to much teasing. Someone, though I can’t recall whom, said “He spelled ‘Yale’ with a 6” (a reference to both the place of Tom’s employment and The Simpsons). And Erik Nordberg made the statement of the night when he said of Tom, “I bet he knows what Mellon-funded metadata harvesting is.” It was hard to keep drinks from squirting out our noses during all of our frivolity.

We also discussed a number of unusual team names: The Fighting Okra, The Model Towners, The Hurley Midgets. And this made us suggest names for ourselves: The Betas, The Bone Folders, and ***** (a secret name, and this series of asterisks is a reference to another secret name).

Imbibing CiderBeer

After dinner, our group split into two, one going back to the hotel and one going to a couple of bars to talk (though three of us generally avoided the beer). At the last bar, we had a few great discussions about films, and I was quite pleased that Jeff Kintop was there to recall the film Vanishing Point much better than I had. Thinking about Vanishing Point reminded me of my review of Tom Beckett’s long chapbook of poetry Vanishing Points of Resemblance and of my review of that book, which merged a discussion of the poems in the book with the movie of a similar name and a number of other seemingly unrelated thoughts. But they all came together in that review because they belonged there, because they were (as I explained to my friends) intertwingled. And I decided that little piece of intertwingularity in the form of a review of poetry might be a good example of that concept in action for us.

Finally, What the People Want

Tom Hyry, Madison, Wisconsin (25 Jun 2008)
Yes, another picture of Tom Hyry, holding yet another beverage. Stay tuned tomorrow for more Tom Hyry photos. I have recently come into possession a few pictures of Tom’s calves, but I am not sure I should loose these onto the world.

archivity furthers