SAA 2009: Government Records Section meeting

Austin's Congress Street Bridge, which spans Lady Bird Lake, is home to the nation's largest urban bat colony. During the summer months, up to 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats live in the crevices under the bridge. At dusk, the bats fly out in waves and search for food; each night, they eat between 10,000-20,000 pounds of insects.

After a brief business meeting, SAA members who attended the Government Records Section got to hear two great speakers address freedom of information issues at the state federal and local level.

David Mengel of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Special Access/FOIA Staff unit, which handles Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests concerning archival materials created by executive branch agencies, discussed recent changes in the federal government’s handling of FOIA requests and recent trends affecting the National Archives.

Immediately after taking office, President Obama issued statements pledging his commitment to transparency, openness, and collaboration within government and instructing agencies that records should be reviewed with a presumption of openness. Shortly afterward, the U.S. Attorney General issued a memo instructing agencies to review FOIA requests with a presumption of openness and issued comprehensive guidelines relating to each FOIA exemption.

Mengel emphasized that these developments constitute a significant shift in the federal government’s commitment to openness. However, this shift also complicates NARA’s work in ways that ought to be increasingly familiar to other government archivists:

• NARA gets a lot of FOIA requests for open records, in part because people don’t know that records are open and in part because they want NARA to do their research for them. The volume of requests covering very large quantities of records is steadily increasing.

• NARA is also trying to figure out how to review large quantities of e-mail and other electronic textual documents. For example, it has yet to find any workable search strategy for locating Social Security Numbers within State Department cables, which have been kept electronically since 1973. NARA ended up sampling the records and discovered that SSNs were typically bundled with dates and places of birth; however, the abbreviations associated with these elements of information have changed over time.

• Federal agencies are running out of storage space, so NARA is getting records that are more recent -- and thus have more privacy issues and other problems (e.g., proprietary information) than older records. It doesn’t help that agencies don’t always identify these issues prior to transfer. In an effort to [identify problems,] Mengel’s unit is trying to get more involved in the appraisal process and looking at records as they come in. However, NARA’s need to review newer records may lead the public to conclude that it’s hiding information.

Mengel concluded by noting that although his unit is trying to improve its handling of FOIA requests, it’s being overwhelmed; there simply aren’t enough people to do the work. Moreover, future developments that NARA views as positive will likely bring new challenges: it looks as if President will soon establish a National Declassification Center under the supervision of the Archivist of the United States, and NARA’s workload may increase dramatically as a result.

Sean Malone, the Records Service Manager of Travis County, Texas, then discussed openness and transparency issues from a local government perspective. He emphasized that in some respects, the situation in Texas is better than that at the federal level: Texas has a strong tradition of openness and transparency, and the Attorney General determines statewide procedures for reviewing and disclosing records. However, local governments in Texas face persistent and worsening fiscal constraints; when times are bad, it’s especially hard to make the case for spending money on records and archives instead of aid to needy families or other essential services.

Malone also highlighted two records issues that pose particular problems for him and for other records managers:

• Resolving conflicts between employees’ First Amendment rights and the public’s right to access government information. Information created on BlackBerries, etc., is a particular problem: people are deeply resistant to the idea that the personal e-mails and text messages on their employer-supplied devices are public records and that work files on their home computers must be turned over.

• The need for better ways to search electronic records and identify materials requested by researchers. Unfortunately, the technology is not forthcoming. For example, Novell’s GroupWise e-mail application, which the county uses, does not have the market share needed to spur development of good e-mail management solutions. Managing e-mail is thus a real problem for the county, and there is a real tension between what the state says it should be doing and what it can do given its fiscal situation.

Malone closed by discussing e-mail issues at the state government level: Governor Rick Perry has ordered that his staff’s e-mail be purged after seven days, and staffers are responsible for printing out records that have longer retention periods. Owing to the sheer volume of e-mail that users receive and the complexity of the state’s records schedules, gubernatorial staffers automatically forward all messages to their personal accounts so that they can retrieve it later if necessary. However, happens to this e-mail when people no longer work for the state?

Great presenters, great presentations, lots to think about.

SAA 2009: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Electronic Records Preservation (Session 203)

Texas State Capitol, as seen from the middle of Congress Street, 13 August 2009.

This session highlighted how two state archives and one state university system have tackled electronic records management and preservation issues and as moderator Nancy Kunde promised at the outset, it emphasized the importance of building partnerships and relationships, remaining actively engaged in electronic records issues, and taking advantages of opportunities that come one’s way.

Roger Christman asserted that the characteristics needed to sustain any relationship -- trust, patience, collaboration, persistence -- can be applied to electronic records and then explained how the Library of Virginia (LVA) cultivated a solid relationship with the Governor’s Office. It built upon its past efforts to schedule gubernatorial records and acquire archival records at the end of each governor’s term of office, Governor Mark Warner’s technology background and desire to avoid the sort of records-centered scandal that engulfed his immediate predecessor, the positive LVA internship experience of Governor Timothy Caine’s records officer, and the LVA’s ongoing effort to make records management and archival transfer as painless as possible. As a result of this ongoing relationship, Governor Caine personally signed a letter of support for the LVA’s recent NHPRC electronic records grant application, and the LVA has survived lean times with its budget largely intact.

Patricia Michaelis detailed how the Kansas Historical Society has dealt with electronic records, which in her view require a blend of faith and guts: we need to believe that we will one day “figure things out” and keep in mind that the risk associated with failure is great but the risk associated with doing nothing is even greater. The Kansas Historical Society has taken an inventive, project-driven, and at times zig-zagging approach to electronic records, which has allowed it to establish contact with state IT people, make the case for electronic records management and preservation, and build staff expertise in the absence of a full-fledged program. Its was able to use its grant project experiences to secure funding for a permanent electronic records archivist position, create a cross-agency electronic records committee, establish ongoing dialogue between key government stakeholders, and start a pilot digital repository project. It’s also turned challenges into opportunities; for example, in response to legislation that allowed state agencies to cease producing paper publications, it worked with the Kansas State Library to create a DSpace repository for electronic government publications. A lot of information about the Kansas Historical Society's electronic records work is available online; I think any state government electronic records archivist would benefit from looking at it.

Joanne Kaczmarek of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana focused on the concept of the slipstream, which is an area of reduced pressure or forward suction caused by the forward movement of an object through air or water. Migrating birds that fly in formation and Lance Armstrong and other members of his cycling team take advantage of slipstreams, and Kaczmarek asserted that, for electronic records archivists, collaboration is the slipstream. She traced the history of collaborative efforts focusing on electronic college and university records, and then outlined how she is pulling together stakeholders in the University of Illinois system. Owing to her efforts, there are now university-wide task forces looking at digital imaging, records management, and other electronic records issues. She asserted that each of us needs to find our own slipstream; that’s sometimes easier said than done, but it’s deeply sound advice nonetheless.

The discussion portion of the session brought to light several interesting issues:

• Dealing with records creators who are reluctant to work with archivists. Figuring out how to provide a needed service to the creator and flattery (which works especially well with elected officials) are possible approaches. Using the stick of the law may also be appropriate, but caution is in order; taking a hard line with someone who wants to do the right thing can be profoundly counterproductive.

• The importance of educating people about their recordkeeping responsibilities and doing so in a way they understand. For example, IT people tend to be project-oriented, and archivists generally aren’t. We need to speak other people’s languages, not expect them to understand ours.

• State records laws need to be revised to include complex information systems – a monumental task but one that cannot be ceded to IT -- and we may need to revise our appraisal processes in order to deal with systems of this sort.

• Training should be geared to creators’ needs. For example, Governor’s Office staff might need one-on-one training but that agency personnel, many of whom have lengthy careers in state government, might be satisfied with workshops and publications. Moreover, the process of creating guidelines and other training materials is a great way for staff to educate themselves.

SAA 2009: Building, Managing, and Participating in Online Communities (Session 101)

El Sol y La Luna, 600 East 6th Street, Austin, Texas, 13 August 2009. Reasonably priced and delicious Central and Latin American cuisine with an American granola/hippie touch. I particularly recommend Anna's Tofu Salad with tomato vinaigrette dressing.

I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to attend this session, which focused on using Web 2.0 tools to make archival materials more accessible to users. All of the speakers emphasized the need for archivists to meet their users where they are and to accept that content placed on the Web will be repurposed in various ways.

Camille Cloutier of San Jose State University discussed a pilot Wikipedia project designed to enhance access to Calisphere, a California Digital Library (CDL) resource that provides access to over 180,000 digitized materials held by repositories throughout California. Calisphere’s content is indexed by Google, but in an effort to reach more users, Cloutier began incorporating Calisphere content into Wikipedia; studies indicate that Wikipedia is heavily used by younger and college-educated users and that only two percent of student searches begin on a college or university library site. Cloutier initially wanted to add external links to the references sections of articles, but Wikipedia sometimes regards libraries’ and archives’ efforts to do so as self-promotion. As a result, Cloutier identified Calisphere content of likely interest to Wikipedia users, created a user account and made, and made 33 edits to existing Wikipedia articles and uploaded a substantial number of relevant images. She also found 66 existing links to Calisphere content, which gives some indication as to the user community’s interests. In the future, CDL staff will see whether Cloutier's edits are modified and encourage subject specialists to monitor articles relevant to their work.

Deborah Wyethe of the Brooklyn Museum detailed how her repository is using Flickr and Flickr Commons to enhance access to its photographic holdings. It began using Flickr to document current activities in 2006 and joined the Flickr Commons in 2008. It learned that it was important to monitor Flickr users’ comments, respond to the very large number of reference inquiries conveyed via Flickr, incorporate user tags into its own online catalog, accept that users will use, combine, and rework ways that staff never imagined. Although this work can be extremely time-consuming, Flickr makes cross-collection access possible, and makes it easier for users to find images. Images on the museum’s Web site get 10-30 hits, but images on Flickr get 1,000, 10,000, or more. Repository Web sites are ideal for archives that want a small community of scholarly users, but the museum wanted a large and diverse user community. Flickr makes this goal possible.

Mark Matienzo (whose views are not necessarily those of his employer) emphasized the need to embrace users' mashups and enhancements of the materials we place online. His discussion of the reuse of materials that the New York Public Library (NYPL) has placed online highlighted the value that such reuse has for other users and NYPL itself:

• New York Then And Now: an Australian user took NYPL images, ran them through Google Maps’ API, and added geocoding data that enhanced NYPL's metadata.

• Reaching for the Out of Reach: uses digitized stereoscope cards and merged them so that online users see the images in 3D. (Be warned: this project is cool, but might not be appropriate for those prone to motion sickness)
  

• NYPL Digital Gallery on Wikimedia Commons: NYPL found that a user had found a way to download the high-resolution versions of its images on Wikimedia Commons. NYPL contacted him and encouraged him to download a specific collection. NYPL can make images available via Wikimedia Commons more quickly than it can on its own site.

Moderator Jeanne Kramer-Smyth (Discovery Communications) then noted that she would post to the Web a chart summarizing the essential characteristics of Wikipedia, Flickr and other online communities: community feel, potential user base, copyright, user interface, learning curve for participation, third-party applications, and methods of adding content. It’s a pretty cool chart.

The discussion session offered a lot of additional food for thought:

• Online community projects should be viewed as experiments; you will learn as you go, and things are changing so quickly that waiting to participate really isn’t an option.

• Participating in online communities as an individual is excellent preparation for institutional participation. There are social norms even on the Web, and archivists need to learn about them.

• If you join one of these communities, you become a member. You can’t just jump in and jump back out. It requires an ongoing commitment. The history of digital library projects is “put something out and leave it there.” However, we have an obligation to figure out how users engage with our materials and interact with our users.

• Having an institutional employee participate in an online community is a great way of making your institution seem engaged and human, and letting volunteers participate in online communities is a great way to engage them and allow them to contribute to your institution.

• Employees who participate in online communities must be enthusiastic and committed; simply assigning it to someone who doesn’t want to do it is a recipe for failure. If staffers aren’t interested, consider recruiting volunteers.

SAA 2009: Security Roundtable meeting

Late afternoon thunderstorm, as seen from the 19th floor, Hilton Austin Downtown, 12 August 2009.

After the joint Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable/Women's Collections Roundtable panel presentation, I rushed to the Security Roundtable's annual meeting. I ended up missing a substantial chunk of the roundtable's panel discussion, which featured:

• Maria Holden and Prudence Backman, who discussed how the New York State Archives responded to a recent internal theft.

• Paul Brachfeld and Kelly Maltagliati, who discussed how the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's Office of the Inspector General recovers stolen federal records, identifies materials that have been stolen, and educates dealers, collectors, and the public.

I nonetheless picked up a wealth of valuable information:

• Archives now face a new type of security challenge: a lot of recent thefts at the National Archives involve personal information sought by identity thieves. Archivists and law enforcement need to figure out how to protect personal information, much of which is in electronic form, and investigate its theft.
  

• Archivists are generally oriented toward helping people and are loath to confront suspected thieves. However, many security guards at the National Archives, who get a cash reward each time they discover a document on its way out the door, also want to think the best of people and don't always follow reporting protocols. However, this sort of misplaced trust makes serial theft possible.

• Archives need to identify who has access to specific areas within a facility and impose appropriate limits.

• Management should identify all staff members' collecting areas; staffers who don't work with collections at the present time may do so in the future.

• Staff should be empowered and expected to question people who are in areas where they shouldn’t be or are carrying materials that they shouldn’t have.

• If possible, make sure that no one staff person has access to all of your information systems; doing so will make it more difficult for a dishonest staffer to destroy evidence of records' existence.

• If you suspect internal theft, inform upper management and get law enforcement involved. Act quietly; gossip will spread like wildfire. Every situation is different, but you do need to ensure that you don’t compromise the investigation and tip off the thief. You need to have a plan in place before any incidents come to the fore. Establish good relations with law enforcement ahead of time really helps.

• Be as careful with vendors as you are with your own staff, and outline your expectations clearly. Museums have well-developed protocols for loaning materials and outsourcing preservation and conservation, but the archival community has not. We need to devote more attention to doing so.

• One thief who stole from the National Archives put stars in his research notes that indicated which items that he stole, which helped to make up for lack of item-level control over the materials; other thieves may exhibit similar behavior. Researcher photocopies can also help to document provenance.

• The Office of the Inspector General does a lot of outreach work and has prepared a brochure that explains how to identify federal government records. It has also established a presence at shows frequented by dealers of Civil War, etc., ephemera. The dealers were initially cold, but have started warming up now that they know that their materials generally won't be seized. Dealers will sometimes turn each other in, and some dealers are starting to contact the Office of the Inspector General before they buy questionable documents.

SAA 2009: LAGAR Annual Meeting

Jim Cartwright, my fellow co-chair, brought this beautiful lei made of orchids all the way from Hawaii and gave it to me immediately before the meeting started. I was and am deeply touched by this gesture, and for now I'm keeping the lei in the hotel room minibar. Does anyone have any advice on lei preservation?

The Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable met this afternoon. My tenure as co-chair ended when the business meeting concluded, and full details of the meeting will be reported in the official annual report that will go to SAA Council shortly. I'm just going to outline what I saw as the high points:

• Heidi Marshall (Columbia College Chicago) was elected to serve as co-chair for the 2009-2011 term. Congratulations, Heidi!

• Tom Hyry, our Council liaison, discussed Council's February 2009 revision of SAA's Equal Opportunity/Non-Discrimination Policy, which now explicitly includes both sexual orientation and gender identity/expression.
  

• LAGAR will convene a subcommittee to look at LAGAR's bylaws and leadership structure. Our current leadership structure, which involves having one male and one female co-chair serving staggered terms of office, made a lot of sense when LAGAR was created 21 years ago. However, it doesn't explicitly allow transpeople to serve as co-chairs, and it certainly freezes out genderqueer people who don't identify as either male or female. The committee will also look at ways LAGAR can make use of new technologies such as electronic voting. Any changes to the bylaws will be voted upon at the 2010 annual meeting.

• Paula Jabloner is looking for people to write short statements on Privacy and Confidentiality and Arrangement and Description for the Information for Community Archives manual and for someone to assume responsibility for the manual's ongoing editing, which requires periodic updating (revising the Electronic Records section is my first post-co-chair assignment). We also discussed the possiblity of working in tandem with other SAA groups to produce a general guide for all kinds of community archives.

• LAGAR is coming to Facebook! Keep your eyes peeled . . . .

After a brief break, we joined with the Women's Collections Roundtable for a panel discussion featuring Austin archivists and scholars who work with LGBT archival materials:

• Nikki Lynn Thomas of the Women and Gender Project at the University of Texas at San Antonio discussed the history of the collection and her repository's efforts to document women, gender expression, and sexual identity in South Texas.

• Kelly Kerbow-Hudson of the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin highlighted three collections documenting the lives of LGBT Latino people: the Yolanda Alaniz Papers, the National Latino/a Lesbian and Gay Organization (LLEGÓ) Records, and the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers. Anzaldúa's papers are the Benson Collection's most heavily used archival collection.

• Lisa Moore of the University of Texas at Austin's Department of English discussed her search for evidence of queerness in the lives of 18th century English women and noted that the archival evidence can be fugitive: the only public records that document same-sex relationships during this era concern criminal prosecutions, and lovers and relatives often destroyed private papers after creators' deaths. Moreover, even today there is a presumption of heterosexuality; scholars who uncover evidence of queerness are often accused of reading too much into their sources. As a result, researchers interested in locating a usable past of queerness might want to to publicize their archival finds without offering any detailed analysis of them.
  

During the question-and-answer session that followed, an interesting discussion of the meaning of the word "archive" took place: for many scholars, an "archive" is something assembled through research, while for archivists the term often refers to a corpus of materials produced by an organization as it carries out its functions and duties. There wasn't any resolution to this discussion, but it certainly highlighted the fact that we archivists don't have a monopoly on the word "archive."

SAA 2009: Leadership Orientation and Forum for SAA Section, Roundtable, and Committee Officers

View from the 19th floor, Hilton Austin Downtown, late morning, 12 August 2009.

Even though my term as co-chair of the Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable ended a few hours afterward, I attended this morning’s leadership orientation session. I’m glad I did.

Owing to the time-sensitive nature of some of the information conveyed, I’ll start this post by focusing on the last section of the meeting, which concerned on the work of the Government Affairs Working Group (GAWG -- yes, GAWG) and its draft advocacy agenda. Bob Sink indicated that advocating for archives is a huge task. Now that the advocacy agenda is almost complete, GAWG will focus its energies upon developing resources that archivists can use when speaking with local, state, and federal legislators and other policy-makers.

Kathleen Roe then spoke about the Partnership for the American Historical Record (PAHR) federal legislative initiative, which if passed will dramatically increase the amount of federal funding for archives. She noted that PAHR will come up for a vote in the House of Representatives during the fall session and that the next two weeks are really crucial: PAHR supporters need to write or arrange to meet with their representatives within the next two weeks. (Background info, your representative’s contact info, and sample letters are available here.) Moreover, PAHR still lacks Senate sponsorship, so people really need to reach out to their senators as well.

Kathleen noted that her daily drive to work takes her past a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute sign that asks, “Why not change the world?” and asserted that if 19 and 20 year-old techies can dream of changing the world, we can certainly dream of improving funding for archives!

The middle portion of the meeting focused on the draft Strategic Priority Goals and Outcomes FY 2010- FY 1013 document that Council has drafted. The discussion ranged from the very specific to the very broad, but there was a strong consensus that a) many sections and roundtables want to work collaboratively and that such collaboration should be supported and that b) efforts to ensure that the historical record reflects the diversity of American society should include outreach to and support of repositories that grow out of the communities they seek to document. I hope Council takes these suggestions to heart.

The first segment of the meeting was devoted to discussion of section and roundtable leadership, and three current and former leaders discussed their experiences and lessons that they had learned during their tenure:

• Danna Bell-Russell of the Reference, Access, and Outreach Section (RAO) outlined RAO’s efforts to support National History Day (NHD), which grew out of Council’s decision to endorse NHD. In 2007, RAO established a subcommittee that created a survey instrument that assessed the extent to which SAA members participated in NHD events and a Web page that pointed to appropriate resources and documented members’ involvement in NHD. It also reached out to teachers and learned that they wanted online guides to using archives, finding repositories and materials of interest, locating the person who is best able to help students, subject lists, and special guides to visual materials. It has issued a final report outlining possible next steps for both RAO and SAA and is thinking about creating an online tutorial, working with SHRABs to develop online lists, and collaborating with other sections and roundtables.

• Russell James of the Records Management Roundtable detailed how he ensured that his roundtable worked effectively: he made sure that its Steering Committee was 10-15 strong, and he made it plain that he expected a substantial time commitment (average of 2 hours/week) from each member, he was open to input from members, and kept track of everyone and everything via e-mail. He also discussed a couple of projects that the roundtable has undertaken. In keeping with one of its core goals -- promoting records management within SAA -- the roundtable contacted the former heads of sections and roundtables and asked them whether they had any materials in their possession. As a result, 13 roundtables and 7 sections now have complete records in the SAA Archives at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. It has also undertaken a diversity initiative; pamphlets focusing on working with archivists with physical disabilities will go up on its Web site soon.

• Rebecca Johnson Melvin, the former co-chair of the Congressional Papers Roundtable, outlined a number of large projects that her roundtable has completed, including a full-fledged documentation strategy; a full chronology and select publications are available on the roundtable’s Web site. The roundtable’s current project, which is supported by the NHPRC and SAA itself, focuses on production of guidelines on the ethics of acquiring and managing Congressional papers; determining that these guidelines would focus on best practices took a lot of painful but necessary internal discussion and debate -- which Melvin learned is sometimes necessary -- but the final document focuses on best practices.

All good stuff, and an auspicious start to SAA 2009.

LAGAR annual meeting, August 12, 4:15-6:30 PM

Littlefield Fountain, University of Texas at Austin, 8 October 2005.

The Society of American Archivists' Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable will meet on Wednesday, August 12 at the conference hotel. The business meeting will start at 4:15 PM, *ONE HOUR LATER* than the time listed in the SAA Annual Meeting program, and will wrap up at 5:15 PM. From 5:30-6:30 PM, we'll join the Women's Collections Roundtable for a joint panel discussion featuring scholars who work with women's and LGBT collections at local repositories.

At the business meeting, we'll elect a new male co-chair, add some new folks to the Steering Committee, talk about LAGAR's newsletter, and discuss ongoing projects such as our Information for Community Archives guide and new projects being planned for 2009-2010. We'll also recap some of the highlights of the past year.

See you in Austin!