fellow esteemed colleagues, members of the archival family, and friends. Good morning, and welcome to the 2023 Archives Fair sponsored by the National Archives Assembly here at the National Archives and Records Administration, in which we lovingly call A1 here in Washington, D.C. My name is Keith Owens, and I am this year's president of the National Archives Assembly. I am currently the core manager of Core Two at the National Personal Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, part of the Federal Records Center branch of the National Archives. After my detail is complete, I will return to my normal job as a preservation specialist team lead in the preservation and conservation programs in St. Louis. I have worked for NARA for 22 years. Now before I get started, I wish to thank some people who were instrumental in making this year's archive fair possible. John Laglonek, this year's vice president of the National Archives Assembly, organized and arranged everything you see here today. John, your contribution and work is so greatly appreciative and respected that I believe that it's only fitting to ask everyone here to show you our deepest appreciation. Thank you, John. So many people have helped John with these arrangements this year. Now I'm going to try and do this, Lee. Jelonella? Yes. Yes. Lee Jelonella from the Smithsonian, all of the presenters and vendors and exhibitors and audiovisual and media staff here at NARA have not to be forgotten the Office of Administrators and Office of the Archivist of the United States, Dr. Colleen Shogan, who will be welcoming us and sharing some thoughts with us immediately after lunch today. Now my dad used to say, if it can't be said in 20 minutes, it's probably not worth saying. So in the spirit of my father, and you can thank him later, my opening remarks will be less than 20 minutes. In July 2000, a request was sent to the National Personnel Record Center in St. Louis by a lady named Ingrid Patterson, who was looking for information about her biological father, John McLaren. Ingrid Patterson is considered a war babe, a child of an American soldier and whose mother was a German citizen. John was an enlisted army soldier who met Ingrid's mother while she was living in Salzburg, Austria after escaping Berlin as the Russian soldiers were occupying the city the last days of World War II. Ingrid's mother became pregnant and John was sent back to the States and promised to send for her after he got settled. But unfortunately they were not able to reconnect. But Ingrid's mother shared stories about her biological father and a single photo of him holding an Italian greyhound. Ingrid's mother married an American soldier who moved them to Yazoo City, Mississippi when she was 12 years old in the early 1960s, where she became an American citizen. As 40 years later in July of 2000 Ingrid had the courage to contact the National Personal Record Center to see if there was any information about her biological father. Within a week she received information about his last known whereabouts and contacted the local newspaper to see if they had anything in their archive about him. Suddenly she found out that John had passed away in the mid 1970s in North Carolina but had four surviving children. Ingrid found the address of one of the children and sent a letter with photos of herself, the only photo she had of John, the photo of her family, and eldest son's graduation photo from Baylor University majoring in church music. When John's children received the letter there were a lot of questions, but the one thing that solidified Ingrid's story to them was the photo of her eldest son, which was an exact replica of their father. None of the other grandchildren on that side of the family looked like John, only her son did. Unbeknownst to that young man, Ingrid's eldest son, 18 months later began working at the National Personal Record Center in St. Louis, and her eldest son was me.  As we go throughout today and to our day-to-day lives within the world of archives, it can sometimes be mundane and tedious, but in the big picture, we are making it possible to help millions of people like Ingrid Patterson. We are making it possible for artifacts to be able to be seen, explored, researched, interpreted for at least the next 500 years and hopefully longer. From a military record that is currently archived at the National Personal Record Center in St. Louis, to a bug that is displayed at a Natural History Museum, to oral histories of tribal elders in American Indian tribal archives, to an airplane at the Smithsonian, to a volume of books at the Library of Congress, to a metal banister in which Abraham Lincoln stood behind as he spoke to a crowd located in a small county historical society. We must all come back to the basics that what we are doing, it all matters. When I put my name or initials on a form in which explains something that I have done to an artifact, I am often humbled by the thought that someone 500 years from now will see my name and will have absolutely no idea who I am, but I hope that they will see my work and say whoever that Keith Owens guy was, he did a good job. Today I challenge you to glean one idea from a conversation, from a session, from an exhibit, from a vendor, from a representative at one of the booths, find that one idea and continue to build. Let's go forth and make it possible for one more story like my mom's to become a reality. Today let's steal, sharpen, steal. Today let's think about the future, the far future. Today let's think about the impact that we will have and let us continue the good work that we have already started. Thank you. John? Well, thank you Keith for those kind words and good morning everyone. Welcome to the National Archives in this great space and the 2023 Archives Fair, happy Archives Month. I'm so pleased that we're able to bring this event back in person and even more so to be able to hold it here in the Archives. In addition to currently serving as the Vice President for the National Archives Assembly, I currently work as an Archivist in the Electronic Records Reference Branch. For those of you who have been to previous Archives Fairs, you may remember me as serving as the Master of Ceremonies for these Archives Fairs. I guess I'd like to talk about Archives, the Assembly and well, me. I'd like to extend my thanks to my co-organizer, Lee Gianella from the Smithsonian Institution Archives and Special Collections Council who reached out to us at the National Archives Assembly to get the ball rolling on bringing back the Archives Fair. The National Archives is currently experiencing low COVID transmission rates and the face coverings are not required but individuals are welcome to wear masks if it makes you more comfortable. Please note that the DC Archives Fair is also committed to fostering an environment free from harassment and hate. Please notify the event organizers if you experience any unwanted negative behavior or harassment. So we have several great sessions lined up for today which will take place upstairs in the Jefferson Conference Room. So to get to that room you'll exit the theater, you'll go up to the second floor. So if you go out these doors you'll go down, there's an elevator at the end of the hall. You'll go up to the upper, to the second floor and the conference room will be just down the hall. You can also go up the stairs, two flights. If necessary there will be overflow viewing space in the Washington Conference Room. We'll be very excited if we need to use that overflow space and we're so happy that many of you have decided to join us here today. There are restrooms located just outside those conference rooms upstairs. So in addition to the great presentations that we're here today, several of our friends from local repositories have joined us in the theater lobby outside. They're looking forward to speaking with all of you today so I hope that everyone will take the opportunity to speak with our colleagues and hear about the great work that they are doing. Restrooms are located in the lobby hall and the elevator at the end of the hall will bring you to the upper level and the Jefferson Conference Room. After the morning sessions, the lunch will be on your own. We encourage you to visit any of the local restaurants within walking distance of the archives. They would love to serve you. They have missed having us downtown. After lunch, please come back to the theater when we will have the archivist of the United States. Dr. Colleen Chogan offer remarks to all of us. At the end of the day, please join Lee and myself in the Jefferson Conference Room for an informal feedback session so that you can let us know how we did and what we can do better next time. I hope that everyone has a wonderful Archives Fair and a great day.  Thank you all for coming. All right. Well, good morning, everyone, again, and welcome to the first session of the 2023 DC Archives Fair. I'm very proud to introduce my colleague from the Electronic Records Branch, the Electronic Records Division, Rebecca Baker, who's going to speak to us today about sharing NARA-developed tools on GitHub, which supports our accessioning of electronic records tools, the accessioning of electronic records. Rebecca is the accessioning branch chief for the Electronic Records Division, and she has developed a lot of great tools to help us with our work in the Electronic Records Division. I'm going to give it over to Rebecca. Thanks very much. Thank you, John. Can everyone hear me just fine? Me better? Okay. All right. Thank you. All right. That sounds good. Okay. So good morning, everyone. As John had said, my name is Rebecca Baker, and I am the chief of accessioning within the Electronic Records Division at the National Archives. I would like to discuss an effort that we've done essentially over the last decade, but the tools and resources that are available to the public. And in March of 2022, our Electronic Records Division worked with the Office of Innovation within NARA to launch a GitHub repo of accessioning support tools. And my presentation will review the tools that we've made available to the public, the impact of GitHub, and discuss how agencies, organizations, and individuals like yourself can use these tools and use those to document your Electronic Records and extract metadata and so forth. And I've made sure in my presentation slides, we have the URL for the GitHub repository. So next slide, please. There we go. Okay. The accessioning support tools GitHub shares tools that the National Archives has developed, and our whole goal was to help agencies prepare permanent electronic records and metadata for transfer to NARA. Currently, we have four tools with job aids available for download. And here is a list of the available tools, and I will go in the presentation in greater detail about what each tool does. So there are a variety of drivers of why I'm here today, why we've developed these tools, and why we've made them available to the public. So firstly, when NARA developed Bulletin 2014-04, the format guidance for the transfer of permanent electronic records, which was published in January 2014, the scope of file formats deemed acceptable and suitable for long-term preservation was expanded tenfold. And as a result of this expansion of the types of file formats that the Archives would expect to receive, the Electronic Records Division formed a tools research and development group to identify tools to support the processing and access needs in compliance with our NARA regulations and requirements. Afterwards, NARA Bulletin 2015-04 established metadata guidance for the transfer of permanent electronic records. And this defined a minimum set of metadata that must accompany all transfers of permanent electronic records. You can find these on these links on the Archives website, the nine different elements that NARA deems as mandatory. So, most recently, you've probably heard of the Joint Memorandums M1921 and M2307 that were issued by the National Archives and OMB. And these were both focused on a government-wide transition to electronic records. And as a result of this required transition for the end of transferring paper and the adoption of agencies have understandably requested that NARA provide resources and guidance to meet these requirements. And the following tools can assist these efforts. So each tool that has been made available on our GitHub was designed to perform very specific tasks with a simple interface. Our goal was to develop a simple graphical user interface, or GUI, and have about four buttons to select files, perform the task, and export the results. These tools were developed through a joint effort with the University of Maryland Baltimore County Computer Science students. And this was an opportunity for these students to gain experience programming, essentially production-level tools for the federal government, and for NARA to expand processing capabilities for the electronic records that we've been receiving. And then a little bit of technical about the tools. These tools can be pointed to file directories such as shared network drives, removable media. If your cloud-based storage platforms are configured to show directories within a file manager like File Explorer, then you can direct the tools to your SharePoint, Google Drive, Box, Dropbox, and more. But the key element is having that configuration where you can view the directories. So for the next four slides, I will cover each tool that we've made available. So the first tool that we added to our GitHub, and the one that agencies have been asking the most for, was something that could extract metadata. So File Lister was, understandably, the first tool that we added. It was designed to extract metadata from all folders, subfolders, and files in a user-specified directory. Metadata elements that are extracted include the file name, the byte count, the file extension, modification date, directory path, and a SHA-256 hash or checksum that acts like a digital fingerprint for the file. This tool is responsive to agency requests for support with NARA Bulletin 2015.04, the metadata requirements that NARA has made, and finding aid requirements. So NARA itself, our Electronic Records Division Archivist, run this File Lister tool on all the accessions that we receive from agencies to establish some sort of intellectual control over the accessions. We'll get a total file count, a byte count, an understanding of high-level file formats that we have. And then we can use tools like our digital preservation risk matrix and action plans, which are also on GitHub, and I highly recommend exploring, to understand what we want to retain as is, what have a higher preservation risk, so we would want to do any type of conversions or transformations and so forth. So for this specific tool, it would benefit agencies so they can, if they run the tool, they can understand what files they're transferring, they can have a log or a manifest of the records that they have transferred to NARA and retain that over time, and if the agency runs this tool and then NARA runs the tool, we can compare the SHA-256 hash check sums to ensure that there's been no modification, change, corruption, or anything like that over time. So that's one of the key elements and value adds for the agency running this tool as well. The next tool that I'd like to discuss is Junk File Finder, and this tool identifies and removes non-record material such as zero byte files, backup files, hidden folders, and empty folders. Again, users can specify an input directory, configure the find mode if they would like to find all of these, or if they're only looking for zero byte or hidden files, run the tool from the GUI, and then once the tool is finished running, users will see within the application window the results, and they can decide whether they would like to delete any of the files that meet these potentially non-record criteria, or they could just simply log the results. They could log the results, run it again, and delete later, so it's accommodating to whatever your workflow process would be for removal or culling of non-record material. And then one of the key factors, like, NARA runs these tools like Junk File Finder. Once we've ran File Lister and we understand what we have, if we have a number of zero byte files, this helps us log and then have a defensible deletion that we're showing we've logged it as such before we took any type of action to remove them. For the agencies, if having these files removed by the creating agency prior to accessioning helps filter out non-record material, helps them get a better understanding of what they're transferring to NARA, if they're exporting from a system it can help them understand and talk with their IT about the creation of hidden files or understanding their backup files. And once we receive accessions that have that material removed, it's more seamless for us to process them and preserve them in our repository. So the third tool that I would like to describe is called File Compare. And this notes the differences between two lists of file names. And this tool can expedite the process of ensuring that external metadata matches the files being prepared for transfer. Agencies could use this tool in comparing file list of accretions. So if they've sent us the initial transfer in a series and now they're going to do an annual follow up, they could compare their file list and make sure that they aren't sending us duplicative material. And that they're only sending what's unique. And this would again help the processing of these records. The final tool that I would like to discuss is a funny file name finder. And we added this to our get hub just about two months ago. And this allows users to identify invalid characters. So these are non-standard ASCII characters like symbols, punctuation marks. And the reason why it's important to identify these and do mitigation activity is you can have trouble whenever you're moving files from one directory or location to another or attempting to read files. If they're getting over that 255 character limit for the full path or if you have multiple periods, we've noticed especially in accessioning material from the 80s or 90s that we would have all sorts of file name conventions and would need to kind of clean them up or understand why a file isn't able to open in an application that we know should open the file. So now I'm going to transition to a bit of an overview of our get hub. So get hub in general is an online platform that's used to share code for open source software projects. And this is any type of project that a developer has chosen to make the code base available to anyone to review, enhance, or reuse for their own. These open source software are generally available to users at no cost, which is the case for our repo. It is entirely public, free. The only thing we don't guarantee is support. If you have trouble with it, we'll try to work with you. But these are essentially the tools that we've developed and we aren't intending to kind of further develop them much beyond that simple specified task. And the National Archives maintains a presence on get hub, which includes a number of open source projects that have been made available over the years. And you can access NARA's get hub profile at get hub.com slash US National Archives. That's where the digital preservation repos are, where our repo is. So I'd highly recommend looking at the tools that NARA has made available. And so now I'll go over a bit of the process of how we add tools to our get hub and this slide has a screenshot of what our repository looks like. So we had the Office of Innovation, which is behind the US National Archives catalog. So they manage the get hub and they helped us by making our accession and support tools repository. And they created a designated storage space for us. And this contains all of the files and documentation for each of our tools. And the tools can be downloaded and used by anyone. They are Java jar files. And the files themselves are in the bin folder. And the read me PDFs are in the documents folder. So you can navigate to either and on our homepage, we have a description of each of the tools. So NARA has raised awareness about these resources through a variety of methods. We have shared these in our bi-monthly records and information discussion group or bridge meetings. We have worked with agency services to issue AC memos, including one we posted last month. And we also do direct agency outreach. So my staff, NARA primarily receives electronic records through direct offers or an agency actually offering the records. We don't have it a kind of annual move, which is the typical way for paper records. So when an agency offers this, we tend to get into a back and forth conversation. And we discuss metadata, file formats, volume, rights, or any type of restrictions on the files. And that's when we encourage agencies typically to, if they can, use our tools. And I definitely would want to give a disclaimer to please acknowledge any IT workflows or approvals that you need in order to use the tools. These as Java jar files, they are not an EXE file that requires installation. So once you have approval, if you download the tool, you can essentially double click the dot jar file and it will open and run. So that's why I definitely, as a disclaimer, say, make sure your IT is OK with that. We've had agencies, when we tell them, they've told us they've gotten approval. It's been seamless and no issue. And we've worked, there are some agencies in the past year that have given us some really good feedback and adopted use of the tool and are now working with their records custodians and liaisons throughout their agency to adopt this. And that was from the Department of Education, the Coast Guard, the Office of Navajo and Hopi Indian Relocation, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just to name a few. And so here is my contact information. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or our general electronic records division email box, e-transfers at norah.gov. I would be happy to discuss any of these tools or if you'd like to learn more about anything else with the electronic records division. And I guess as a general update, we are working on new tools. We are currently testing updates to the open source tool Apache Tika. And Apache Tika is not something on the US National Archives repo, but it is on GitHub. And some of my staff, Greg LePore, has been working with Tim Allison, who was a data scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. And they were making some really significant updates to Tika to identify encrypted files, PDF portfolios, extract contents in work files or web records, password protections, and all sorts and getting these really robust CSV outputs that were then working on a Tika report generator GUI. So you could have essentially metadata spreadsheets for each record category within a mixed accession. And you could get metadata that's specific to each category of record. And this includes a pronom, identification, droids, so we get really into the weeds with Tika. And last month, we posted a part-time remote detail within the National Archives internal collaboration network. And we are currently working with individuals at NARA who can write code and develop applications in Java and Python. We are trying to evaluate the libraries that we use for these tools and make sure that we can keep them as up to date as possible, that we make sure the tools are as efficiently coded as possible so they can run better. And then we also evaluate if there are any exploits, like the log J4 exploit that impacted Java applications last year, we evaluated and ensured that all of our tools were not impacted by that and were safe to use. So I guess I'll open it up if anyone has any questions. That's a great question. And I do know that agency services within NARA has been extensively testing M365 and working with Microsoft. I take part in monthly meetings with them as a stakeholder to kind of understand these. I know they've been testing in a G5 instance. I guess as a disclaimer, the National Archives uses Google Suite. So we are a little removed from some of that. But it's something that agency services are policy and standards counterpart is extensively looking at. And because some of these tools, as you can see, the modification date that it's extracting could potentially, after that upload, be a false date. So well, then I would highly encourage using these tools now so you can run it on the network drive environment and have that pre-migration metadata and have that as an authority that this is what it actually was when it was created. And I know that our tools don't have an exhaustive list of all metadata elements. It's kind of just getting a starter. And then the records creators or custodians can kind of add that metadata, like creator or the rights or anything attached to it. But I totally acknowledge those legitimate concerns. Are there any other questions or anything? So there is the link for our GitHub repo again. And please don't hesitate to reach out if you'd like to talk about the tools or any questions that you have about them. Hope if you have any improvements to our documentation. But thank you all for your interest in this. I greatly appreciate the opportunity to speak here today too. So thank you. Thank you, Rebecca. I think ASL presenters are happy that this is over too. I think you gave them a workout with some of those acronyms. Apologies. And plain language act isn't always my strong suit. So we are at just around 10 o'clock. And our next session will be at 10.45. So that gives us a fair bit of time. There was a fair bit of time. All right, good morning, everybody. Welcome to session two. This is relocating non-traditional archives. And we're very excited to have a staff with us today from Gallaudet University here in Washington. On my left is Jim McCarthy. And on my right is Paige Watson and Jared Grill. They will be presenting to us on how they managed to relocate their archives at Gallaudet. And assisting us with us today. And I've already warned that they didn't want to do this, but I'm doing it anyway. With the ASL interpreters, again, on my left is Victoria. And here at the table are Cody and Cynthia. And they will be voicing the presentations of Jim, Jared, and Paige. And so at the end of the presentation, any questions that you people have, I will be walking around with the microphone so that we will be able to ask them questions.  So personally, I'm looking forward to this presentation for nothing else. I want to know what the ASL interpretation of archives is. So I want to know what that means. So Jim, take it away. Hi, good morning, everybody. So as was mentioned, I'm Jim from Gallaudet. I manage the archives there. We recently went through a pretty significant relocation project. And I just want to clarify when we say nontraditional, that's because we don't have typical archives at Gallaudet's University only. We also have a depository for deaf culture and history, specific things regarding the deaf community in the United States for the last 150 years. So we have sort of a parallel system where we have our own school and our own social organizations, newsletters, our own communications and history, all of those artifacts. So we've collected a lot of things from that system that also includes furniture, artwork, sculptures, video and film, all these various things. We're really closer to a museum collection than an archive collection in many ways. So this does present some challenges. So the first tip that I have here for you guys, I'll show that on the slides. Right? So it's important to keep this in mind when you're going through a project like ours. Don't. If you must, then obviously you'll have to. So this is what we've learned from our process and our relocation. So we're going to split this kind of into three different parts. The first section is preparing the collection for its transfer, identifying a new home, and then providing access for our patrons. So the first person to speak will be Jared Grill. He's our preservation specialist. So take it away, Jared. So I'll be giving a little bit of context about the Gallaudet University's archives and then how we went through the process of inventory and packing. So Gallaudet University was founded in 1967, our archives, and that was done by Lucille Pendel, who is the head librarian of Gallaudet University and who also used to work here at the National Archives in the 1950s. So they founded these archives for our institutional memory. And then years later, we added the repository of collections relating to deaf culture and language, and it really expanded from there. And then we moved it to the Merrill Learning Center, another facility or another building in 1980. So we had the archives in the basement. It was a mix of library and technical services for the building. Initially, we had two large storage rooms. And it was designed for temperature control, inventory, and shelving numbers, security. And our collection really grew and expanded past that. So we added another two rooms for storage. And those two rooms were not designed for archiving or for storage. They were not temperature controlled. We had several issues like leaks. There was actually some flooding. Some critters got in there. We also had a pretty serious mold or severe mold outbreak there that. So we faced these situations there at our library. And then Gallaudet University finally got a new head librarian who started the process of upgrading our library and our collection. We had an initial plan for renovation of that library area on the first floor and the basement. And we were not planning to renovate the archives. We just wanted to do that area. And a few other things came up unexpectedly. We had an archivist who retired, who was really just a walking encyclopedia of knowledge. We had COVID, of course, so the university was closed. And everybody was working and learning from home. And so Gallaudet University of the campus was kind of abandoned during COVID. We had a really severe rainstorm. And the drainage ended up getting backed up. So we had some flooding in the archive area that really triggered the decision to close that area and required us to move out of MLC of the Merrill Learning Center. So initially, we had to change the schedule, change the plans for the building. And we did not have a comprehensive inventory. We only had smaller partial inventories. So when I joined, there was no official comprehensive inventory. So we had to start that process. From March 2020 to November 2020, we were all working from home. So we were having Zoom meetings and conferences every week for how we would implement this inventory, what we should include, what we should not include. And at that moment, we really didn't have any experience with relocating our archives. We're just starting from scratch. So we went to SAA, the Society of American Archivists Conference. And there were two speakers there, one from Library of Congress and one from the University of Nebraska, who gave some presentations on how they relocated their collections. And those two presentations really helped us a lot. We learned a lot from them. They gave us a lot of resources to help with our move and our relocation. So through this process, we went through the discussion of what we should include, a session numbers, different collections, and all those sorts of things we discussed, shelf numbers, what we should include, what we shouldn't include. And to see what would be the most beneficial items to keep in the collection, what was not as beneficial. So in February 2021, Gallaudet was fairly restricted. They were not really allowing people to come on campus. So we reached an agreement. We were able to come on campus once a week just at the beginning. So we would rotate staff members because we only had three archivists at the time. So each of us would rotate week after week. And then the COVID limitations became a little more flexible. So we were able to work every day in a week. One staff member would be in one room. Another staff member would be in another room. So we could practice social distancing. And then in March 2021, our new director Jim joined us. And he really got the ball rolling, got things going a lot faster with that relocation process. So once we had completed the inventory, we'd added barcodes to each of the boxes and labels of the property of Gallaudet University and so on and so forth. So then we had to start prioritizing. We were moving things to three different locations. The first one was just an interim archives in another building that was still on campus. Another one was the warehouse. Jim will talk a little bit more about the warehouse location. And then the WRLC, the Washington Research Library Consortium, they have a shared collections facility. And we have already been a member of the consortium for about 30 years. It involves a lot of different research organizations and universities in the DC area and in Maryland. So we decided what was going to the interim room, what was going to the warehouse, and what was going to the SCF. And that was based on demand, how often people used those items in the collection. Some had already been digitized, so that could be moved to a different place. It was the sort of prioritization we went through. So then we started packing the boxes. And we used a strapping machine to keep the boxes closed and all tightly wrapped up. We placed items on pallets and created pallets out of these. And most of them were going on a shelf, so it was fairly easy to pack that. Sometimes as we went through our inventory, we would have to count each individual item because we had a lot of loose objects that were up there on the shelf. So we had to pack that up in a box and then get a new inventory count, wrap that up, and then pack it and palletize it. So this includes things like furniture. We ended up having almost 200 pallets. It took about a year to pack and move all of this. So luckily our staff of three expanded up to six at that time. So we had little rotations of two hours every day for how many months? Was it nine months? It was nine or 10, nine or 10 months of this packing. So it became kind of quite monotonous at times, but we really got to see a lot of objects that we maybe hadn't seen before. So it was an interesting process. And we also had objects, like as Jim mentioned, were almost more of a museum collection. So for example, a TTY, it's a teletype relay, teletype writer. So deaf individuals used that in the past. It was almost the size of a mailbox. We'll have a picture of that. There's a lot of things that were very heavy, some like furniture pieces, crafts and theater props, things like that. So packing those was somewhat of a challenge. We had to do it in a different way. Some had to be done entirely in bubble wrap and then labeled with their number and bar code on the outside of that wrap to keep track of the items. And all of the art as well, we have around 3,000 items relating to or from deaf artists. So getting those wrapped up in the bubble wrap, covered and protected, and then moved to a special palletization process. So there's about 15 pallets worth of art that were brought to the warehouse. And we had to pack that up in a specific way so that we could keep track of everything and track all of the pieces. So in short, what we learned is the comprehensive inventory is really important. It was very beneficial to get all of those pieces counted in that inventory. And this includes like donations. We'd have to identify each of these individual pieces. Previously, we'd have to identify each thing individually that was donated. We want to also prevent backlog because we do have a significant backlog. So we've learned that that when we receive new donations or new additions to the collection, we want to do a sort of pre-processing to reduce that workload. And then for packing as well, when we were packing, we saw a lot of duplicates. We saw some things that were not really valuable to research or valuable to our history that did not need packed. So we were able to downsize a little bit before palletizing. It's maybe around 10 pallets or so that we saved that way. So we learned from that to sort of update our policies and not become just sort of a garbage repository. We wanted to become more strict with our donations to get meaningful things into our collection. And so with our new director, we revisited those policies and how we make our acquisitions and accept donations. So obviously over this process, it took about two years. We became very familiar with our collection in a way that had never happened before at our institution. So to give some idea of the total volume, there's around 30,000 cubic feet or 15,000 square feet. Between 80,000 to 120,000 individual objects in our collection. So it's really out of proportion to the size of our institution. And that really gave some interesting challenges when we were relocating both to the interim and to the permanent space for our location choices. So we first had to find a new home for the collection. So the first law really is location. We were very fortunate that through our partners with WRLC, the Library Research Consortium, we were able to rent some additional space for our collection in their shared collection facility. And the shared collections facility is pretty enormous. It's nine universities collections. But still, we were able to only find space for half of our collection. So that was the first and easiest step. Second part was looking for a place that would still be accessible for the remaining 50% of the collection. So we tried to look on campus to identify locations for that. So a little bit of history. And from the 1940s through the 60s and 70s, there was an outbreak of German measles. And a typical result of that is that a person who was pregnant who contracted the disease, it would cause deafness in their child or in their infant. So there was also an outbreak of spinal meningitis around the same time. If a child caught that, one of the lasting effects was deafness. So from the 50s through the 80s, we experienced a quite significant increase in the number of deaf individuals who are seeking college degrees. So during that period, Gallaudet was just expanding wildly. We doubled the size of our campus. We had a lot of new dorms, new facilities that were being built. So we really just expanded the campus. So we could leverage that previous work in this case. The numbers for enrollment dropped off and they did not raise again. So we had a lot of space on campus that we thought, hey, this would be great. We could avail ourselves of this space that's already there for some of our storage needs to house the remaining 50% of our collection. But again, because of the age of the buildings and other factors, other financial issues, maintenance issues that did cause some issues for these buildings where they were not really suitable for that storage. In one case, there was space available that was shared with electric and data like infrastructure where temperature control was impossible. We would have had to replace the HVAC system for the entire building to make it work, which was just not financially feasible. Another space we identified, we thought it would be great. It was an old dorm. Most of the spaces were all vacant and we were gonna take over one floor of that, but it turns out the building was slated for demolishment. So we had to look for a space off campus. So you know, the DMV area is quite expensive and any available space is going to cost a lot of money. So the first thing that we had to make sure of for the space was that it would fit our budget. Luckily, we already had some funding available for us to use through the library, but it was intended for just basic renovations. So it was not a lot of money. So we had to look to see what we could find with that. And at the same time, we needed to make sure that the location was accessible to staff. My team and most of us live in Northwest DC. Montgomery County is kind of Northwest of DC, but Montgomery County is expensive. So there was that factor. And in addition to that, we needed space because we needed people to be able to work remotely from that area. So those were our priorities we had to juggle. And we were very lucky to find one space. It's in PG County. It's a great option there. If you don't mind the drive. Living in the DMV, we like the drive, right? The drive is awesome. So this warehouse is around 8,200 square feet. It's got 14 offices that we took down. We left four of them there and had the rest as open space. And it's several, near several large highways. And the best part is it's right next to WRLC's shared collection facility. So it's very easy to get between the two locations. One thing that we learned there in PG County and for most of the areas around DC is planning, zoning, and permits, and code enforcements means that takes about six months of paperwork for four weeks of construction. So that's important to keep in mind if you're planning out your schedule. Make sure it's flexible if it all depends on whether somebody's in the office that day or not, whether something will get done on time. So we started moving in March, 2023. And this photo here is part of our storage space. It's pretty nice open floor plan. You can see everything. We'll speak a little bit more about how this location has impacted our relationship with our collection and what that means for us in the future. I'll speak about that a little bit later. For now, we're gonna discuss some of the tough things that was actually Paige's job. So I'll turn it over to Paige. Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. My name is Paige Wilson and I'm the Collection Architects College at University. And when I got on campus, this process had already been initiated. So I actually jumped in at sort of the end part of the inventory process. So I was learning my job, learning this new project that was already underway and engaging with a new team. Next. We had about four sites, two on campus and two off that we had to take care of, including the shared facility. And so I had to integrate, again, learning their ways of archiving and records keeping and tracking and integrating that into our systems. So there was a lot of in-depth work that had to happen in terms of accessibility and making sure that the inventory was clear and aligned with what they expected before we even could initiate the move. Our use of campus space on campus, these two locations that were on campus were perhaps, I mean, not even a half or a fourth of the size of our needs, but we had to reassess sort of the processing of everything before it moved off campus and what we were keeping at the warehouse and the shared facility to keep it all organized and aligned. So this was the first piece that we did. Oh, sorry, let me jump back for just a moment. There's one other point I wanted to make. No, not that far, sorry. I did wanna show you this picture. This is the shared facility. I don't know if you've seen it before, but this is actually a true picture of where our records are and you can see how high it is. So it really does require a forklift to get all the way up to the top if you need to retrieve something or put something up there. So it's a pretty cool facility. Thanks, next. So initially, this is what we found when we came on, when I came on campus anyway, this is what I walked into. These were the resources that were available to me. And on campus we had these kinds of files. This is a reading room and you can see it's definitely not been inventoryed. I mean, there were just things kind of everywhere. There was no spreadsheet. When I came in and I opened a drawer, it was just really untouched for so long and there were paper filing systems and nothing was electronic. So it took quite a lot of work when we realized the scope of it. There were only two staff who were really processing any of this and so it was just insurmountable for them to kind of take care of the inventory alone. So we had to kind of divide and conquer some of the tasking so that we could make sure that we were able to modernize all of the inventory and we shared the workload. It was pretty interesting. So in the warehouse, we had to complete that inventory in those boxes before we moved it. We didn't want to have to re-inventory once we had everything there on those shelves. We wanted to know where it was going and make sure that the barcode was completely aligned. We didn't want to change the location or rework. So some of those files that we had there, we had file cabinets, we had artwork, which Jim and Gerard have already talked about and furniture, so the same kinds of things that we had to deal with in the warehouse. So the locations needed to be within the same space, perhaps four rows of shelving and file cabinets instead of four different rooms, which is what we had had at the original location we were moving from. So some of the choices that we made worked initially and some did not. We learned some lessons. Next. The second priority, going to the shared facility. This was really about, I think this was a little bit faster. There were a lot of complaints that we heard from stakeholders about not being able to access some of these resources and we really had to beg everyone's patience and understanding because we had to really be diligent with our process to make sure that we had everything documented properly. So we used Alma at the SCF and LMS.  They were already digitized. They were already there. That was perfect. But we could email a box back and forth, which was great. But emailing back and forth for five years, nobody really wants to do that. So all of the new barcodes that we created on the new boxes had to be put into Alma and we had to create several thousand bibliographic entries for all of these. And so that was just a minimum of, we had to get the title, the author and put all of these things in the barcodes. And it was just a very labor intensive process. But we wanted to make sure we had that all preserved and closed and no one could see all these things when they were completed. So we created a catalog for all of them and then we were able to close everything up and prepare it for movement. And the public view was like, it's impressed for now. And the public view had to be put on hold for now because we had to complete our inventory. So there were over 10,000 items that we had to account for. Some were, some of the largest parts of our collection had up to 450 boxes just in the one piece of the collection. So we had different barcodes and item labels for all of these artifacts. And when we created the spreadsheet and used Alma and API to transfer all of these records, we were able to upload the barcodes very quickly once we did that pre-work. And then it worked very quickly. The transfers were very seamless. But altogether it was about 10,000 records that we transferred and I think it took us a total of about four to five months to complete. And then once that piece was done, then we were ready to set up some circulation desks so that folks could have access again, which I do thank God that GW University was going through the same thing at the same time because they had a special collection there too and with their annual presentations. And when I watched their presentation of what they were going through, it really helped to give me a point of contact that I could reach out there so we could collaborate and kind of share some lessons learned with GW. So that was a real win for us and it was incredibly helpful to go through that with them. And once we made some changes to our process based on some things I learned from them, we were able to see that there were some specific materials in some boxes. If someone needed to make a request for a particular item that was on campus, we would give them a time limit of about two business days turnaround for those requests. And you can see here that this is two business days for the SCF as well. The warehouse, we could get things on campus, perhaps in one business day if we needed to but the turnaround time was typically two business days and people seemed very satisfied with that. So I think also I think the mindset was different during COVID anyway, so that was working to our favor. It's not like prior to COVID when people would be on campus and they would expect immediate access to the resources for their research and other needs. So we just continued that process and kind of leveraged that mindset so that we could get the expectations to that two business days. And I think people were more understanding during COVID anyway, perhaps. So we did get a lot of support from our stakeholders to implement that. And then we applied that to the archives pass. Or excuse me, archive space. And we uploaded our findings so that we could barcode everything and track everything there too so that it could be searchable. Any donations that we received or other collections go through that same cycle and that same process. And of course this process has not been smooth. It's not been without its challenges but I think definitely having the courier service supporting us, that was a big help. The design book between all members of the consortium has also been critical to our success. I think knowing what we need to put in the boxes, all the collaboration we've been able to leverage with others in the community and in the consortium. What's the maximum size for a box? What if we have to go pick something up and bring you back to campus? All of that back and forth engagement and dialogue, we've made a lot of adjustments as we've gone on and learned a lot. But honestly, still I think you're never gonna avoid some people complaining with the two business days. I mean that's just how people are, but we do the best we can. So patrons have mostly been understanding but they don't like to wait. So a total of five or six months worth of work and so far I have to say putting the resources that we have in the shared facility and the warehouse all together I think it's been almost a year for all of these elements so I'm really happy with the success we've enjoyed in this project. So that's my piece, turning over to Jim. Thank you. So how's it going now? Well obviously you can see we've had some challenges along the way, but we've tried to convert those challenges into opportunities, into how we operate and manage our collection. There's some pros and some cons to the current system. We can go to the next slide. So of course as Paige mentioned people who always complain but so far it's been a pretty good job of complaining or turning those complaints into positive changes for our institution and for the community. So we encourage that process as we are moving to this new home. And our community is very vocal and very supportive of our work as well so we've been pushing hard to make sure that we can get back on campus in a timely manner. This has also allowed us to develop a stronger relationship with the consortium with the WRLC. So for about 30 years now we've worked in collaboration with them and we have many members on committees relating to shared expertise. And continuing collections, that's CCS, right? I can't remember the acronym for it. It's an acronym of some kind. So we're very heavily involved with the consortium's activities and have been for a long time. But this is the first time that we've really been in their offices and had like weekly meetings and discussions with them. That's really been beneficial to us and to our future with the consortium. It's also changed how we operate in a few other ways. So as was mentioned, there's the two business day turnaround that trade off, that's what we call it. So yes, people don't really like that. In the past they could come in and say, hey, I wanna see this box of stuff. They could get it or go through it for the one specific thing and say, oh, it looks like there might be something interesting in this other box, could you get that one? And so we'd just say, okay, sure. And we'd retrieve the materials for them. So it was just kind of an impulsive type of spur of the moment thing. So we had lost that with the two business day turnaround time. But at the same time, that's helped our researchers become more efficient with their process because they have to plan everything in advance. So for example, we frequently get researchers from all over the world really. We've had researchers from the UK, from France, from China, Poland. From Poland, right. Yep. So all of this had already had to plan for their time in the US. They had a really strict itinerary and schedule that they were trying to follow. So now all of the researchers have that same experience and that's really caused researchers to become more motivated to do online work or remote virtual work and then to communicate with us before coming to campus. So overall that really has improved the experience for the researchers. In terms of the impact on staff, as I mentioned before, the commute is one negative. That's one downside. I think most everybody's become used to it now at this point, but some of the staff have different agreements or arrangements based on their work. If they don't need to be there on campus on specific days or times, they can do some work at our warehouse or telework. So that's really a better opportunity for everybody.  So in terms of the impact on our campus support services as well, Gallaudet has never had our archives off campus before. We've had our on-site campus locations and that's been it so far. So we have IT people building security and facilities operations that we've had to figure out now.  Who manages the custodial services, the cleaning? So we've gone through a lot of negotiations with that. And luckily our campus has also taken that as a learning opportunity. So it has been one thing we've been able to spin into a positive. It also has had a profound impact on our operations. We've become more focused on emerging technologies that will allow us to manage our collection better. So archive space has also allowed us to figure out how we can consolidate a lot of our management and archives and records in one place. Keep that all together. At the same time we're also developing new digital repositories that has a heavy focus on video and film. As you could assume we have got a lot of deaf individuals on campus at Gallaudet University. So the focus is really heavily on basic education both for English and ASL. So a lot of our historical documents are actually on video. So we're developing a new digital repository that's compatible with that format. And in all these different ways that we've prepared our collection for transfer has really improved our understanding of these things. So currently there is a donation backlog.  I'm like, I know, I know we're a number of years behind in that. So moving our collection has allowed us to take a look at it in a lot more detail and really think about what we're facing and how we can approach that. So the transfer of the archives really helped with that examination process and looking over our collection and thinking about how we can approach our collection in a way that's efficient and successful. And the end result is that some items have been donated several times over decades, but they're spaced out in time. So for example, maybe like personal papers of an individual. So we've got to think about how we're managing the collection in that way. We've got to think about deaccession as well and consolidation and that consolidation process. So there's a couple of additional things that we've had to really ask the hard questions about what do we do with these materials? Where can they live? Where should they go? And those sort of things. So we really have a broad collection policy that's been in place for about 40 years. So we really needed to do a deep dive and audits of our system to understand what sort of intellectual rights, we have over the items in this collection. And then looking at it also in the broader context of the institution. The Gallaudet, like many other institutions, it goes through cycles of reorganization and restructuring, moving and renovation. We'd had to move from a location before where all these files had been kept for 30 years and then just suddenly we had these 30 years worth of files and they said, oh, here, take it, we're out of space. For example, in the picture you see here, this is from our registrar's office. This is 160 years worth of student records in this collection, 789 boxes. And two weeks ago they were like, hey, can you please take this off our hands? Well, where can we put it, right? So it really allows us to take a look at how we plan for things and how we use our space. In terms of on-campus, we gotta think about what sort of space we want to work in. Off-campus in the warehouse space. We used to be spread out in a couple different rooms. It was easy to overlook things like mold growth, for example. Now we have one large space where we can see the entire collection. If any problems arise, we can immediately identify and address it. So we wanted to apply those principles to our new space on campus as well. So again, if you're thinking about moving your archives, don't, but if you have to, take these opportunities as they arise. All right, any questions? Yes, I've got a mic run out to you. Are you being donagued? Hey, question about, you're talking about donations and how you've trying to limit the amount of donations that are coming into your collection. A lot of people who wanna donate think that those items are precious because they're theirs, but may not have intrinsic value for the future. Probably need to go to the trash can instead of to a repository to you guys or whatever. What types of things did you do to change that and how do you share that with an individual who you say, no, we don't want that? So part of our approach has been a strict policy against unsolicited donations where people freely contact us and say, hey, I've got this stuff to donate. If they're free to do that, we're also free to say, no, thank you, we don't need that or it may be better off at this other place or another collection. So we do have a strict screening policy in place and our alumni, we love them, we had our homecoming last week, it was so much fun. A lot of people wanted to donate items to us. We have six copies of a full run of our yearbooks, for example, we don't need more. So we're trying to approach it that way with our community. And be as transparent as possible with it. Sometimes people don't know what we already have, we don't realize that we already have all these things in the collection and then when they realize that they'll say, oh, okay, well, that's fine. Some people accept that, with some people it's not so easy to accept that. So typically we'll just say, look, I can't throw these things away or the person who's donating that will say, I can't throw these things away, can you dispose of them for me? So we'll say, okay, I guess we'll do that. So I think the important thing is just really communication with the community, that's the key is just to have that open dialogue and communication. Any other questions? Yes. So if I understand correctly, there's a desire to once again have on campus storage How developed are plans on that? Well, there's an ongoing debates on campus in regards to that. We only have so much space available and there's several projects on campus that are on the to-do list. But we also need to think about funding as well. So the timing early is tough. This project took us two years to get to the point where we're actually off campus. So this is not something that we can just do spur of the moment or last minute. If somebody approaches us and says, okay, we're ready to break ground next month and everything can be moved back over, we can't just up and do that. So we have that risk of having to wait for the funding to come through for the university, getting a design, breaking ground on the facility and everything being prepared for us to move back back in. And contract terms are not always extendable or so. We're a little bit kind of, we're just waiting for the university to communicate some decisions to us for the on-campus building projects. Actually last week they did announce that we will be coming back on campus in 2025 and the current building will be renovated and we'll be moving back into it. So it seems like we will be moving back to campus and we really do want to be there. We love our community. We like people coming to speak with us and discuss our items with us. DC has a very large deaf community and many of the individuals here graduated from Gallaudet. Frederick, Maryland also has the state school for the deaf there and they're a very active community as well. So this really is the largest concentration of deaf population in the world. So we have a lot of visitors, a lot of people coming wanting to chat with us, a lot of historians and researchers. So we want to be close to our collection and close to our community as well. Does that make sense? Great, thank you. Yes, over here. Thank you. I have a question about your emergency management protocols. How have they changed from being in multiple locations to being in one open location, which can be a blessing and a curse when you have all of your items in a large room where everything can be affected? Can you talk a little bit about the differences and changes that you've made? Yes, sure. So we have had a disaster management in place since about 2010 and that's still our current plan but we are in the process of updating that to our current spaces. Gallaudet University as an institution as well is reevaluating their policies for how we respond to disasters and crises. We've got a team responsible for crisis and disaster management on campus as well. Jared and I went to the disaster management training at GW this summer through the consortium and we've learned a lot of good information about how you can manage a disaster scene, document everything and get that reported and recorded. So for that, we really wanna leave it to the professionals. We're really focused on a plan for arriving on the scene and documenting and doing that damage control as soon as possible and then allowing the professionals to take over from that point, whether that's the fire department, police or whoever, whatever emergency services and collection care services for example. We have a lot of vendors as well that we're in the process of reaching out to and negotiations with for that as well. Any other questions? Yes. Have you found that there is one particular collection or a couple collections or a particular type of item that boy you really wish you could have on campus because that's what people, whether it's researchers or students, you have to keep going to time and time again to get information. Yes, we've got several high contact collections in our archives. One thing people are typically surprised to find out. We're often used for genealogical research. So we have one collection of papers from schools for the deaf that's the entire history, like all of those papers that we have on record. That can be really important for people researching family history. So we often get requests for that, probably on a weekly, at least monthly basis. We have our photo collection as well that's a very high use item. People depend very heavily on our historical photos for a variety of reasons. And classes for research into deaf history and culture and such. Also, I would just add that things are, we're changing as campus is changing, so we're trying to keep our specific undergraduate catalog. That's been under revision constantly and we didn't expect that. We didn't really kind of plan for that kind of dynamic catalog there with the changes with undergraduate needs. So we're trying to be responsive to the changes on campus as well. And also we're working to mitigate that through digitization of our larger collections in that way. So a lot of things are available online now. That reduces the need for things to be kept on campus. So that's made our lives easier as well. Any other questions? All right, well thank you. All right, well yes, thank you very much. I really, I wanna thank them again. This was really a great presentation. I really enjoyed hearing from them. And so I would like to thank everybody for coming to this second session presentation. We are out for lunch at this point. Our next thing on the schedule will be, we will hear from the Archivist of the United States back downstairs in the McGowan Theater where we start our day. Dr. Shogun will address us at 1 p.m. 1.15 in the McGowan Theater. So the Charter's Cafe, which is also on the lower level is will be available for lunch. You can get yourself a bite to eat. And also, if you'd like, you can go outside to any of the restaurants in the area to get yourself something to eat for lunch. And so please go out and enjoy the local restaurants. They've missed us having us downtown. So please enjoy yourselves. And we will see you at 1.15 in the theater. Thanks very much. All right, well good afternoon everyone. Welcome to the afternoon portion of the 2023 Archive Spare. For those of you who are not here this morning, my name is John McCulloch. I'm the Vice President of the National Archives Assembly. I just wanted to give a brief introduction for the afternoon session. We're gonna have some brief remarks from the Archivist of the United States, Dr. Colleen Shogun. And following those remarks, we will have two, three session blocks in the afternoon. We'll have a session on a new exhibition at the Kennedy Center. And then there will be a session on social justice and engaging with marginalized communities at the University of District of Columbia. And then we will conclude our day's sessions with an informal feedback session with myself and my co-organizer of the Archives Fair, where we will listen to all of you and hear for what we did and what we could have done better for this year's Archives Fair. So, and without any further ado, I'm gonna introduce the President of the National Archives Assembly, Keith Owens, who will introduce the Archivist of the United States. Keith. We are really hoping that you are all watered and fed very well during lunch. And it is my honor and pleasure to introduce to you the 11th Archivist of the United States. Dr. Colleen Shogun became the 11th Archivist of the United States in May of 2023. On August 3rd of 2022, President Joe R. Biden nominated Dr. Colleen Shogun to be the Archivist of the United States. The U.S. Senate need to get this closer. Senate confirmed Dr. Shogun on May 10th of 2023 and she was sworn in as the 11th Archivist of the United States on May 17th, 2023. Most recently, Dr. Shogun served as Senior Vice President and Director of the David M. Rubenstein Center for the White House Historical Association. She previously worked in the United States Senate and as a Senior Executive at the Library of Congress. Dr. Shogun was the Vice Chairman of the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission and the Chair of the Board of Directors at the Women's Suffrage National Monument Foundation. She taught at Georgetown University in the Government Department and moderated seminars for the Aspen Institute. She is a previous President of the National Capital Area Political Science Association and served on the American Political Science Association Council, the governing body for this organization. Her research focuses on the American Presidency, Presidential Rhetoric, Women in Politics and Congress. A native of the Pittsburgh area, Dr. Shogun holds a BA in Political Science from Boston College and a PhD in American Politics from Yale University, where she was a National Science Foundational Graduate Fellow. She is a member of the Pi Beta Kappa, the Order of the Cross and Crown, and Washington DC Literary Society, not to mention the newest member of the National Archive Assembly. It is my great pleasure and honor to introduce to you all the 11th Archivist of the United States, Dr. Colleen Shogun. Dr. Shogun. Hi everyone, good afternoon. Thank you for that kind introduction and everyone happy American Archives Month. So I hope you're celebrating. Every October, of course, we take the month to celebrate archives and share knowledge with each other and talk about public awareness about the importance of archives and the people who preserve and work in archives every day and manage them. And the DC Archives Fair, as I understand it, although as Keith said, this is obviously my first time attending this event, brings together a whole wide range of archives professionals from around this larger DC region to be able to talk about and discuss what your institutions are doing, what you're accomplishing, what your challenges might be, and hopefully be able to learn about some best practices across organizations and institutions. So we're very happy to be able to host this archives fair here at the National Archives. And once again, as I understand it, this is the first one that we've been able to host in several years due to the pandemic. So it's a great accomplishment that we're even here in 2023 and we look forward to many more to come. So I do wanna recognize our organizers of today's fair. Of course, you just heard from Keith Owens, who is a preservation specialist at our National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis and also president of the National Archives Assembly. So thank you for everything that you do here to help organize this, but also for your work at NPRC, which helps serve our civilian employees and our nation's veterans, a really important component of our mission here at the National Archives. And John Ligloic, which you heard previously before, before Keith, an archivist in our Electronic Records Reference Branch, and also the vice president of the National Archives Assembly. And then also Lee Gelanella, is that right? Do you hear it, Lee? I'm sorry if I mispronounced your last name, a digital archivist with the Smithsonian American History Museum. She represents the Smithsonian Institution Archives and also the Special Collections Council. So thank you for everything that you do. Thank you particularly for Keith, we're flying in overnight and I understand you're flying back later today. So thank you for doing that. Here in DC, we are very, very lucky. We have such a wide array of cultural institutions that are rich with our archival collections just in the city in Washington DC. It really does make this fair possible. And that's not the case necessarily in every city that you go to across the United States, but we have that opportunity to do that here in Washington DC. And if I have a little bit of time after I speak here and chat with you, I'm gonna go out and look at some of the exhibits and booths that we have out there. Really, as I look at the list of the participating institutions, I'm very excited to see what you have to offer and what you have to share. I won't say that, you know, I've said this in many different venues but I repeat it over and over again that as the archivist of the United States, access is my top priority. And in all walks, access can mean obviously access in the conventional sense access to our collections in person. And thank goodness we're able to do that now after the pandemic to have that in-person connection with our collections. And we want to welcome at the National Archives as many people as possible to be able to connect with our collections in person. That might be coming into one of our research facilities to be able to view those aspects of our collection or records in our collection firsthand. But it also can be visiting this building and looking at our museum and visiting our museum so you can view a representation of the records, representative of course of American history. And then another aspect that we're gonna be working on is being able to access as many records online and digitally as possible. And we do this because it is an access issue. Whereas we open our doors and we would like to have as many Americans as possible come visit us here at the National Archives. We know that not everyone is able to do so. Not able to even travel here to Washington DC or any of our other 41 facilities across the nation. So we find that providing our records online at our catalog is a form of access digitally to be a way that we can reach millions of more of Americans. So we're very focused on that. We're also focused on, a lot of people ask me this, why? Why archives? And maybe not people from the archival profession itself. But people that I meet when I'm out and about or when I'm talking at dinners or other things that I attend, receptions. In Washington DC or out across the country. So why archives? Why do we have to have a physical location? Why isn't everything online? Or also, what's the purpose of an archive? And I think two things for me that really resonate is democracy and history. And those are two things that I like to talk about when I talk about the purpose of archives. As from my introduction, you know that I'm not an archivist by training. That's not my profession. I'm a political scientist by training. But that gives me a lot of confidence to be able to say that one of the big reasons, one of the reasons that I get up in the morning, I'm really excited about coming to work at the National Archives, is I view it as a keystone in our democracy and the continuing vitality of our democracy. One, if you read any political theorist or anybody who writes about democracies in general, not only in the United States but across the world, they will tell you that one of the key ingredients for the perpetuation of a democracy is accountability. And there is literally no way to have accountability in a democracy historically without having access to the nation's records. And the National Archives, of course, is the repository of our nation's records. So we are a key ingredient in this institution for the continuation and the vitality of democracy. And all of you who work in archival institutions and facilities related to cultural institutions and other fine organizations across Washington DC, that's the same with you as well. So I find this to be a really important point. It's kind of a simple point, but it's worth reiterating over and over again. And then secondly, of course, the importance of history, understanding the historical record, making sure that the historical record cannot be forgotten. And that's something that we do here at the Archives as well for, of course, professionals that come in for all kinds of reasons for scholarly research or maybe they're writing a play or something else in the creative realm. We want to serve them. We also have a responsibility, and I feel this very strongly, to provide an access to the best history education we can to our nation's children. And we know that the pandemic has been very hard in this regard to our nation's children because we've gotten the scores, unfortunately. And we know that the scores are down in areas of American history and in civics. And that's something here at the National Archives we can help with, but you can also help with across your institutions to be able to bolster that interest in American history and foster that amongst our nation's kids. So all of this work is worthy of recognition and of thanks. And that's part of what we do also in American archives this month to celebrate American archives. So this fair is a small way for us to champion what you do on a daily basis. And I hope you found it valuable to see what other institutions are doing and also being able to chat amongst each other, to learn from each other, and also sometimes not feel so alone because you might think, oh, you know, some of these, I know some of your organizations might be smaller than the National Archives and you may feel like, oh, nobody else has this problem, but coming together in a professional setting like this, coming together communally always enables you to find out that you're not alone. And there are other archivists at other organizations that maybe have solutions that they're willing to share with you that either were successful or maybe not successful. And I hope that you were able to do that today and be able to enjoy that for the rest of your day here at the National Archives. So I wanna go out and take a look at the fair, but I'm happy to answer some questions for a few minutes. If you have any for me, I'm happy to, you know, I've been in the job for a little over five months, I think five months in one week, exactly. But I'm happy to answer questions about our directions here at the National Archives, what I see as challenges or anything, or any feedback that you might have that's on your mind. Thank you. If you do ask a question, just if you could say what your name is and where you're from, yes. Yes, I am, yes. I am the first woman to be in this role permanently. There were women that served who were deputy archivists, including Deb Wall who's the deputy archivist right now, who we know served for an entire year as acting archivist. There were women that served in that capacity, but not a woman to serve permanently in the role and be presententially nominated and confirmed. Yes, it's incredibly important to me that I step into this role as the first woman. I take a great deal of pride in the fact that I'm the first woman. What I see a lot, whenever we had the Society for American Archivists SAA came here this summer because their conference was in Washington, DC this summer. We invited everybody that attended that conference to come here one late afternoon and opened up this building so people could come and see our exhibits. And I gave some short remarks and I had a real long line of archivists actually to get pictures with me and not everyone, but a large majority of those people in line were women. And what I heard time and time again when they came up to take a picture with me, a photo with me was that that really mattered to them. And I think that what you see in cultural institutions, whether it's archives or libraries or museums, historically, although things are definitely changing, what you see is that a lot of those professions that work in those institutions, sometimes they're called Glam, that work in those institutions are women, that are curators or archivists or librarians or museum experts, exhibits experts, historians. A lot of them, public historians are women, but traditionally and historically, the people that run those organizations who are the president's CEOs or whatnot are usually not women. So it's one of those interesting professions dominated by women, but unfortunately without a lot of leadership by women at the top of the echelon. And I've talked a lot with Carla Hayden about this, who was the first, I worked at the library when she came on board, first African-American to serve in that role and first woman. And she felt very strongly about both. But she said what really, what mattered a lot in the librarian profession was, in fact, that she was the first woman, since so many librarians across the country are women, but typically didn't see women in those top positions, whether it was a public library or a state library or a university library, whatever the case may be. And I suspect this is the same thing, very similar in the archives profession. So I take that to heart. I'm glad, I'm happy that I was, be able to serve as the first woman and I guarantee you I will not be the last. Yes. Okay. I mean, you can always reach out to my office. Our contact information is online. And if it was appropriate that if it was a tour, it might be arranged out of my office, the archivist office. It depends on what they're looking for, something more of a professional interaction concerning the archival practices and then we would reach out to what would be most relevant here at the National Archives and try to arrange that. But certainly we're happy in my office to be the conduit, at least for the initial inquiry. And then we would find the relevant component within the very large National Archives structure to which to work with on that matter. But absolutely, we're happy to do that. Yes. Right, yeah. So it's a good question because just to give you a sense of what we're dealing with at the National Archives, right now we have about 13 and a half billion records. I'm talking about paper or analog records, right? About 13 and a half billion is the number that I've been told to use that is, it's an approximation obviously, but we're pretty confident in that general number. And a little over, I think about 250 million are online in the catalog, okay? So it's a good, I mean that's a really impressive amount to be in our catalog online, but that's not 13.5 billion, okay? So we have to make choices. Some people say, oh, well, digitize it all. You get those questions all the time and you have to explain why that would be very challenging just to start from the beginning and just go all the way through. It's much better to make some prioritization choices as you go along. One thing that we have done at the National Archives is prioritize records that have, that are of great interest to previously underrepresented groups. And we work with some of those groups to help identify for us which records they would want to see digitized, which would be most helpful to them. I'm going to Seattle tomorrow. One of our National Archives facilities is in Seattle and that is the place where we house all of our Alaska native records, okay? Previously we're in Alaska, that facility closed and so those records physically moved to Seattle and now we are moving those records temporarily to College Park where we have a lot of higher speed digitization capabilities to digitize those records then they will go back to Seattle once they are digitized. But that's a good example of an underrepresented group that has identified records that will be very useful to them if they are available digitally. So that's one group. And then another group of records that we will, which would just sort of make sense that we would prioritize for digitization are high use records. So records that have wide interest to the American public, that can mean a lot of different things. You know, some of our presidential records at our presidential libraries obviously are of great interest, for example, and we would prioritize digitization of highly requested or highly used items so that more people can have access to them. Now there might be other criteria, but those are two groups, okay? So I'm not saying that's the only groups, but there's an example there. Yes. Hi. Yes, yeah. Yeah, I think it's through, and the National Archives actually does a really good job of this, but it's all about getting our primary documents, and in this case, the National Archives records, getting them online digitized and providing the right contextual information so that teachers find it very easy if they are teaching a unit on World War II that we have ready made records relevant to World War II. For example, the other day I saw the amazing aerial flight map of actually the Japanese fighters coming in to Pearl Harbor, and the person that was actually keeping track, wasn't done digitally back then, actually keeping track of the planes that were coming in, and then of course at a certain point of time realizing what had happened. But boy, you have a almost emotional reaction when you see that primary source document. You could study Pearl Harbor and read about it in the textbook and read about what happened that day as much as you want, but when you see that record, when you see that come to life, you really get a sense of what was happening that day in Hawaii and the instigation of course for US entry into World War II. So I think having interact, that was an in-person interaction, but you could have that document on that record online so it can be brought up in a classroom, hopefully the ability to be able to, for kids to see that on their think pads right in front of them, or have it in the front of a classroom that a teacher is able to refer to and tell that story. I think that's really important. I love like suffragists, I like the women's suffrage movement, but being able to tell the stories of those women, many of them who went to prison for considerable periods of time at a prison, not too far down the road, 25 miles down 95, located now 95, it wasn't there when they were there, but be able to tell the stories of what their backgrounds were and why they felt so strongly that women deserve the right to vote, that really will resonate with kids better than just saying, the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. Okay, yeah, that's factually correct, and it's not bad to have that factual information, but being able to tell those stories in an interesting way, to have that almost emotional connection to the background we'll get kids, I think, interested in history, and we do do that at the National Archives and we wanna do more of it. I think we do a terrific job with our substance, what we're trying to work on as much as possible is having the outreach to organizations like yours, so that we have, for example, social studies teachers, that when they're teaching a unit on a particular era, a particular moment in time in American history, they think, okay, let me look at the National Archives website and find out what they have available for me that I'm able to incorporate into my lesson plan as I go along. I have one more, okay. I will never be able to make thoroughly surgical, so, shouldn't this be a selection, making it a collection, it shouldn't take anything. Right, so we are a little bit different than some other, like for example, the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress, which, for example, the Library of Congress looks at books that come through copyright, okay, just for an example, and then they make selections for the books that are submitted for copyright about what will be part of its permanent collection at the Library of Congress, and they have librarians who are trained in subject matter expertise to be able to make selections, like this book, definitely we want for the National Collection, maybe this one, for certain reasons, maybe not, okay. But we are not that way because we take in all of the permanent records of the government of the United States. So we work with the agencies, okay, all the federal agencies across the United States government on record schedules, which will help determine for how long records will be temporary records and which records will be temporary and which will become accessioned in permanent part of the National Archives. So we do have a really good division that works on federal records and it's accessioning, and those record schedules which come up to me for final approval. So we are not making, it would say like choices about what we collect and what we don't because we are collecting all of the permanent records out of all the records that are made, created in the operations of the federal government, we take between one and 3% as a permanent record. So just to give you an idea, and most of those records, they should reflect a large representation of what happens in an agency, but a lot of them are focused on the decisions that are made to be able to operate that particular agency or program. Those are the ones we absolutely need to capture. So we have a little bit less discretion about what we accession and what we don't because our business is the records business and we take it in at that point in time when it is going to be a permanent record. So in favor of the website, please. Right. Oh yeah, I mean it doesn't, a record, the National Archives maintains a record is a record is a record and the format does not determine the validity of whether or not you accession a record. It's the substance, but there has to be changes in practice as the formats have changed over time. There's no doubt about that. So text messages, social media, right? These are very, very different types of accessioning than just taking in memos or pieces of paper or print photographs versus digital photographs, right? So all of those things change how they can be accessioned, but once again, a record is based upon the content of the record, not the media in which it was produced, okay? All right, well, I'm gonna go out and see all the tables. Thank you so much for joining us today and we look forward to seeing you next year. Thank you. All right, well, can everyone hear me okay? Great. Well, welcome. Thanks so much for sticking it out. I know post-lunch and post-archivist as the United States is a hard luck act to follow. My name is Sophia Bacera-Leachia. I am the lead archivist at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. And this afternoon, I am going to chat a little bit about what we've been up to both in establishing the archives at the Kennedy Center, as well as a new permanent exhibit that opened last September. Just out of curiosity, before you knew about the program, how many of you knew that there was an archives at the Kennedy Center? Okay, that's pretty good. You're my people. How many of you have been to the exhibit, if any? Excellent. Awesome. All right. So I always like to start with a little bit of context. I'll talk about some of the unique setting of the archives at the Kennedy Center, what we've been up to, and I'll walk through some of the thought process of the exhibit itself. So first, oh, are you giving me one second? Great. So as you may know, the Kennedy Center holds a dual role as both the Nation's Performing Arts Center as well as a living memorial to President Kennedy. As such, we are an incubator for the arts. We both present art on our stages, but we also commission, provide educational opportunities, and do so much more than just serve as the nation's stage. More historical context that I always like to give for the archives in particular is this timeline and basically three takeaways. One, which is that from the start, the Kennedy Center was a bipartisan effort. You may know that we opened in 1971. We're named for President Kennedy, but the planning for the Kennedy Center actually dates back to the Eisenhower administration in the late 50s, and it finally opened under President Nixon, and President Johnson actually broke ground and signed the Renaming Act. So that's point one I like to make here. The other is that if you look at 1971 to 2019, when the archives started, that's nearly 50 years of history to catch up on. And if you do the math, that's 2019, 15th anniversary in 2021. We all know what happened between 2019 and 2021, so you can get a sense of some of what we were up against and an anniversary deadline that doesn't change even for world events. The third point that I make here as well is that our Kennedy Center history also includes the history of our affiliates, the Washington National Opera and the National Symphony Orchestra, both of which predate the center. So it's a bit of a truck question. It's actually more than 50 years of history, and we have had our work cut out for us. So our mission in a nutshell as an archives is to create order out of chaos. I didn't pick the most chaotic photo on the left just because I figured you could use your imaginations, but we essentially take the piles on the left and make it look like the tidier piles on shelving instead of on the floor on the right. That is our overall goal in an actual. The archives was established in 2019 as part of a larger strategic initiative to rethink the role of the memorial and to do a better job of institutional storytelling. A lot of people think of the Kennedy Center as a place to come and see a performance, but they may not be entirely sure why it's named for President Kennedy, why there's that connection and why we have the role that we do. In terms of what we collect, and I do have a poster downstairs that has all of the highlights, so you don't necessarily have to take notes, you're welcome to take a photo, but we essentially collect at the Center's administrative and performance history, so programs, photos, some ephemera, some AV, lots and lots of playbills. The good news is a lot of people collected playbills. The bad news is a lot of people collected playbills, and so we actually have a pretty good run and it is something we're not actively collecting at this point, we're just trying to figure out what we have. So against that backdrop, a little bit about us, I'm here representing as a lead archivist. At this point, we have grown to a team of three full-time staff members and a part-time staff member, a processing archivist, an archives coordinator, and a part-time processing assistant who was primarily tasked with aforementioned playbills, which kept her very busy. In terms of our context and challenges, we inherited about 6,000 cubic feet of content and growing. We started off with, I think, materials in about 17 different locations across campus. We're down to, I think, around a dozen, which is an accomplishment, and we've also consolidated, so AV is with AV, photos are with photos, and we're thinking big and trying to consolidate even further. As is often the case, we didn't inherit very many inventories, and our office, if you know anything about the Kennedy Center, it is very tight on space, so our office is actually located off-site across the street in one of the Watergate buildings. So there's actually a staff walking challenge, my team won it, and most of those steps, they won by just fulfilling a reference request, doing processing, building, shelving, moving things around. We definitely get our exercise in. And then at the bottom of this slide, I've just picked out a range of the things that we have. Again, primarily photos and paper materials, but we also have, that's actually my hand, with the blue glove, some of the red carpet, if you've ever been to any of the main spaces, you'll recognize that particular shade of crimson. One of our more unique, tiny items is a little viewfinder. You click through slides, it's a virtual tour, but the analog version of it, you click through slides and it's shaped like a TV. Since President Kennedy was known as the TV president, we're assuming it was sold at the gift shop, but we haven't really found a lot more context on it, it's just a really fun, tiny, great item to take on the road. The middle image is the playbills, just a very small number of them. When we started, there had actually been a project where they had volunteers cataloging, literal card catalog on a typewriter. So we've been working on converting that to online. We have a sample of AV in the commemorative record for the opening night program. And then on the right is a sample of the many, many binders of photos, negatives, contact sheets, and compact discs, though since that photo was taken, we've actually processed that collection and I'll talk a little bit more about that later. So in terms of starting an archives or building a program or inheriting something from someone else, I often get asked, where do you start? In some ways, we had our work cut out for us because we knew the 50th anniversary was coming, but in other ways, we still had to really get down to the basics. So we really prioritized getting intellectual control. As you can see from the post, it might be a little bit faint, but it says save for archivist use, which is essentially a lot of the quality of the metadata that we inherited, so not super helpful. We had to amplify that a little bit. Thinking about systems and procedures, everything from how we got materials back and forth to how people would access them to defining our collecting scope and figuring how to staff and balance priorities, processing, and then of course the 50th anniversary. There were actually two exhibits around the 50th anniversary, and I'll get into them in a little bit more detail. One was a temporary campus takeover. If you went to the Kennedy Center and walked into either the grand four, sorry, the Hall of States or the Hall of Nations and saw the hanging 50 made out of window cards, those are actually all deaccession duplicates of window cards from the various decades. And that was up from 2021 to 2022. And then the new JFK gallery that opened as well. So two tall orders, a large backlog, multiple storage locations. But from the start, we really tried to prioritize storytelling and access and thinking incrementally and building a community. In my last job, I also established an archives and something that I thought a lot about there, even though the constraints were different was there's no use in building a technically perfect repository if there even is such a thing if you haven't brought people along with you. So you'll see a lot of sort of starts and stops and experiments, but ultimately what we were trying to do was get people excited and aware that we existed, especially on campus. So we prioritize for the 50th anniversary since we obviously couldn't process everything early records. So I've just included a couple of scans from what we've called your National Cultural Center Collection. If you're familiar with Kennedy Center history, you may recognize this image. This was actually the original design for the Kennedy Center, which if you know now it's rectangular, very angular, but this was designed by the same architect. Some people have described it as a spaceship. Some people have pointed out it looks very similar to the Watergate buildings that are right across the street. It was still a white marble building. It still included multiple performing spaces and multi-use spaces. Ultimately it just wasn't financially and logistically feasible. So that's one of the kinds of things that we have. We also have good coverage of the opening of the center. This is one of my favorite shots of the opening night standing ovation. We also have rehearsals, preview performances. The program, I actually have a copy of the commemorative bound record program with me if you'd like to see it. And we were also really lucky to inherit one of the theater managers' personal archives and that included an autographed copy of the opening night program and a ticket as well. And these are also featured in the JFK gallery as well, so you're getting a bit of a sneak peek. So once we had the 50th anniversary behind us, like I said, we took a multi-pronged approach and even as we were focusing on the 50th anniversary on getting intellectual control over materials, something else that was really important was tracking how materials were getting used, even from the very start, even if we weren't at first seeing a huge volume. And what we quickly realized was that performance history and photos were our top two areas of requests. So for this particular fiscal year, which we recently wrapped up, so I was still wrapping my brain around our stats and numbers and where we are. We focused on photos. We focused on the program collection. We focused on Board of Trustees, which actually get used a lot for institutional purposes. Kennedy Center Honors, public relations records that help tell the story of that award and that event and the American College Theater Festival records, which actually predate the center. You can see the photo on the left is actually a group of students touring the building while it's still under construction. You can see behind the roof isn't quite complete. So as I mentioned, we tried to do a lot of things at once. We're still doing a lot of things at once. The archives is located within the public relations department. And so from the start, we tried to think strategically of ways to start incorporating content once we had a sense of what we had. So the top set of images are from the 50th anniversary exhibit that I mentioned. This was a campus takeover that we had to think very creatively about because we were planning essentially in August of 2020 when we didn't really know what September of 2021 was going to look like. This was a great example of working with our sort of local experts, our international programming department, regularly puts on large scale festivals and does really creative exhibits. And so we were able to partner with them to essentially have a campus takeover. We featured photos for the three main halls on the grand foyer level and just blew up photos of highlights from each of the 50 years. We recorded a series of oral histories which are up online and we even commissioned a portrait contest. All of this is still up digitally on the website. It's called If These Halls Could Talk. And keep in mind that all of this happened with the archives being shut down for four months from April until August. So it's two exhibits in two years even though not necessarily all the work was on the archives end. The other is Art and Ideals which I'll talk about because it's a really interesting project that involved a lot of external partners and really thinking through who needed to be at the table to make sure that we were telling a story that was historically accurate but one that was also challenging because if you think about what I said at the beginning the Kennedy Center Archives focuses on the history of the center. The JFK gallery as I'll go into a little bit more detail is more the history of President Kennedy. So that is something that we had to look externally to sort of fill in some gaps.  So we started small. Archives is part of public relations. Public relations sends out weekly or bi-weekly emails of clips of Kennedy Center coverage. And so we thought what if we pick one of those days Archives Wednesday and we feature some archives content. Hopefully it also means that more people open that email because we do get a lot of emails. But from that we have gotten project requests. We actually heard from HR who said, oh, we actually have a newsletter too. Could you help us curate some content more focused on staff history as well. And actually one thing that's not on there yet is our friends volunteer program recently restarted their newsletter and we've been partnering with them as well. So again, thinking big, thinking small, thinking about what existing communications or structures or partnerships might make for a productive venture. And then of course, social media. We were very lucky to have a small but very dedicated social media team our hashtag is Kenston Archives. And we most recently actually did a archives takeover on Instagram for ask an archivist stay if you had a chance to check that out. And so we've done everything from on this day something interesting that we found to around the holidays last year recreating a holiday recipe from one of the fundraiser cookbooks. So it's just a way to show what we're up to what the archives can do. And again, it's something that's generated a lot of goodwill on campus even while we're still sorting and trying to consolidate and trying to get a handle on what we have. So next I am going to talk a little bit about the JFK exhibit. This was a multi-year project. If you've been up to the exhibit you know that the archives content is featured in one of the entrances in the section that focuses on how the Kennedy Center came to be. There were because it is immersive has a lot of multimedia and has a strong historical component. We made sure to bring in a panel of historians who could really make sure that there was a there there that if we were saying there is a connection between President Kennedy and the arts. You know, we had someone who could speak to diplomacy civil rights, arts and culture. Sorry, the Kennedy White House and then various designers to make sure that all of the technology would work. And so I'm just going to go over and play it's like a two minute video. I know when we did the test there was a bit of an issue with the sound. Don't worry about it. I think if you're on Zoom you won't be able to hear it. It's just some light instrumental music. The words on the screen are really all that you need. And then I'm going to walk through each of the components.  But next I want to talk a little bit about the thought process behind it. So we wanted to be able to answer the question why is the Kennedy Center named for JFK? We wanted to really connect visitors to how the current legacy and the activities of the Kennedy Center connect to his work. We know that the Kennedy Center attracts audiences and visitors from all over of all ages. We know that increasingly there are fewer people who knew of President Kennedy or were alive during his presidency. And we also wanted something that made good use of technology since obviously President Kennedy made use of the technology of his time but that wouldn't feel dated. And that would accommodate both a user that had 15 minutes was coming for the first time, someone who has subscription tickets and it's their 15th time. So it had to fulfill a lot of different uses. It's also an exhibit that is primarily, it consists of either duplicates or loans and really just a lot of creative storytelling. It's also if you've been up there kind of a thoroughfare and a long space. So the way that it's designed, you can enter from either way and the two entrances are more or less parallel. If you entered through one side, you start with the history of President Kennedy and particularly his love of literature and books that influenced him, his writings. If you enter from the other side and there's no right or wrong, I'm partial to the archive side but there's no right or wrong. You have a timeline of how the Kennedy Center came to be and you have duplicates from the archival collections. And then in the center, the heart, there are essentially four quadrants that focus on art and democracy, art and social change, art and culture, art in the White House. And then within those, it was also really important that those historical moments were connected to what the Kennedy Center is doing now. So there are also pillars, what we call the Kennedy Center today where each of those themes is connected to a current Kennedy Center program as well and that content will also get refreshed a little bit more regularly. So for instance, if there's content on Kennedy Center honors, we wanna make sure that that's not too far out of date. So these are the pillars, uplifting the artist, exporting the arts, et cetera, et cetera. Each of these sections also includes a couple of interactive. So I'm just gonna flip through to make sure that we're not taking too much time. So one of the interactives is what's called Dinner at the White House. It's part of the art and culture section. And here they took lists of guests who had attended Kennedy's White House dinners. So artists, scientists, big thinkers of the day. And then they tried to think who might be some contemporaries today. And the idea is that you can have multiple people. It's set up like a dining table. There are quotes around different themes. And so you can either explore on your own or if there are multiple people at the table, there are opportunities for spontaneous connections if multiple people from different disciplines hone in on different connections. So it's just a fun, reflective space that tries to tie again sort of history to the present day and to really think about a lot of what the Kennedy White House did in terms of arts diplomacy. Another and probably the more popular interactive is the opportunity, and of course with a social media component as well because you can get a selfie, to have, to take a photo and essentially choose a color palette, make some brush strokes and have your portrait done in the style of Elaine DeKooning who obviously did a really famous portrait of JFK for a while. Quite a few staff members actually had that as their Microsoft icon for email as well because it's a fun one. President Kennedy was known for his oratorial skills. So the power of words is a reflective wall where words from quotes of his are reflected and it works based on proximity. If you approach a word, the rest of the quote comes together and you hear his words. And you also literally are reflected in his words and have an opportunity to see yourself in him see yourself in the words and again another selfie moment because we are in the social media age. So this again is the sort of big view. You can see at the top, there are a lot of screens but surrounding the center part at the very top is what we've called the multimedia freeze. And this functions in different ways. Sometimes it acts as the headers for the four quadrants. Sometimes the lights go down and we have what are called takeover moments. So there are three or four Kennedy speeches. It's very important that you could hear his words and sort of feel like you are in the audience. So the lights will dim and he'll show up on the screens on either way and there will be crowd shots and it's kind of like you're immersed and listening to him speak. And then there are also some environmental shots. So on the top you have the center lit up for honors. You also have in the middle of the iconic chandeliers from the opera house. So there's a lot that happens there. So that's kind of a whirlwind of what we've been up to. Some of the challenges, this new exhibit. I am with my people among archivists and so I also would like to take a moment to think through lessons learned, where we go from here at what comes next. Not because I think that these are particularly unique but as was said in the previous sessions, sometimes the power of events like these is, oh, I'm not the only one thinking that particular thing or if you're somewhere small, sometimes there's also power in saying, hey, I went to a conference and another person said the exact same thing that I've been saying. You may be listening if I can say that two other people have said it, that's not just me. So when I think about things that have worked for us, things that I focus on are having a plan but being flexible. Obviously no one knew how 2020 was going to turn out, even under the best of circumstances. This is my second time starting up in archives. In both cases, I've had a plan. In both cases, that plan is not on according to plan for different reasons but really just having a sense of what is your institutional context, what is going to be most important and really just planning flexibly and incrementally but also planning time for reflection. The second one is really thinking about the relational part of it. I think as archivists we know that oftentimes archives and personal papers in particular can be really fraught with emotion. Often you're getting them at a time of transition, a retirement, someone passing away, in this case, an anniversary. But the reality is so much of what you're doing when you're building a new program is building trust and faith that what you bring to it as an archivist is going to be different than whatever has been hoarded for however many years and however many decades. When I first started, there would be weeks where I would say I haven't inventoried anything but I've talked to a lot of people. I've tried to make sure that I have a good sense of what's important to them, how we might partner and most importantly that I follow up. I think a lot about the role of trust and things coming in and being sure that people are clear on what that means, particularly for rules that might not be intuitive, like why things don't circulate. The third is me just being pragmatic because I've mostly worked in fairly small repositories which is not reinventing the wheel, really trying to think incrementally and within existing structures. I give the example of the public relations email clips and how that led to presentations and other opportunities but was particular to our institutional context. And while I said there are a lot of things that I would change, the one battle I am glad that I stuck to was really prioritizing intellectual control over everything else. If you look at the sort of Kennedy Center archives timeline of when our content started exploding on social media and in general it's when we finished a comprehensive collection survey because I knew from experience I wanted to make sure that if we were scanning things on demand or for requests I was going to be able to find the original, that I was going to be able to find the thing again that we weren't going to lose the context. So that is where I had to use some of that goodwill of no, no, no, I know what I'm doing. This is going to pay off, I promise. And it was true, it did actually pay off. So with that being said, I hope that this has piqued your interest either in coming to the exhibit and making use of the archives. The next slide that I'm going to show is I have my email, I have my business card. We also, among the many things we've been doing in the background have developed a service desk where you can contact us to request an appointment, to request information, even with a relatively soft launch. I'm really happy to see that people are finding us. Our users include everyone from K through 12 students and teachers, folks from higher ed, folks working in the media on documentaries, academic research, independent research, as well as patrons. Some of my favorite requests are, I was a child several decades ago. I think I went to this performance. Can you help me confirm some of the details? Or on a more touching level, we've actually had several folks with ties who said, I met my partner at the Kennedy Center or preparing eulogies or other things. And so we are here for use. It's what makes being in windowless, a dozen different windowless closets, making sense of things that were left behind at the end of the day. It's really all about use. And yes, this photo is from our survey. We did actually find a folder that said questions and answers. It was empty. So now I just use it as my ending slide. And I also have our hashtag on there. As I said, we partner with social media. So if you look up the Kennedy Center channel is particularly Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and even Medium. We've written quite a few blog posts and things and posts really regularly. And yeah, if you have any questions for me, thoughts for me, I see this as the start of a conversation, a collaboration, and I see you all as partners in helping us get out the word. Oh, and you already have a question, that's great. Does anybody have a question? Yeah, we actually have one. Yeah, yeah, no, he has one. Can you just speak loud? This is not a big one. Well, but I think we need it for Zoom. Yeah, we need it for Zoom. Do you want to just come up and use my mic? Do you want to come in? Okay, so first, kind of the big professional part of this question, does the Kennedy Center have any sort of institutional records management guidance? And if not, or if so, what relationship does your organization have with the records management? And the second really quick question, I'm just curious, do y'all get discounts to their shows? I'll take the second one first. We do, they tend to be last minute and a little bit unpredictable. So if there's something I know I want to go to, I will just buy the ticket. For records management, it's an interesting question. We do have draft schedules, but it's also an area where there hasn't been a full-time trained records manager. So we have worked closely with the role that's traditionally been assigned to that, but it's essentially been a quarter to half of another person's job. So we focused on the part of the schedules that indicate things coming to archives rather than the sort of compliance destruction part. But that, figuring out records management, figuring out electronic records management and digitization, I would say, are some of the things coming up next. That's a very good question. Thank you. So in regards to the loans and the donations that you receive for the exhibitions, as an archivist, loaning something out is like, makes my skin crawl. Without getting in the names of individuals as such, who loaned the objects or any institutions or was it JFK Library or any other collection from the family? What repository was willing to loan? Sure, in terms of loans, it's primarily one, I'm trying to think, there's one object. Most of what's in the exhibit, honestly, is reproductions and media, and they came from, I mean, it's a huge spreadsheet of repositories, Library of Congress, the National Archives, Alvin Ailey, the JFK Library, obviously. I mean, it's quite a lot of breadth. We do have a camera on loan that was used to video President Kennedy for a documentary, and that was worked out directly with the estate and with legal and just making sure that it is all very, very clear. As an archivist, I also wanna be super, super, super clear about that. So we made sure that we had something that everyone would be happy with. But yeah, I probably should have clarified. The vast majority are reproductions, which still brings its challenges in terms of rights and reproductions and promotional use. Anybody else? I have a question for you. So I'm wondering about, with the performances that you have, the center there, in terms of props or other ephemera, other design things that you have for shows and performances, are you able to preserve any of those? I'm just curious, set design and so forth. What is art, is that a part of your collection? Priority. It's a great question. It's largely out of scope for us. I know that the opera has a warehouse with costumes and there are other odds and ends, but on our end, we have our hands full just with the administrative and performance history, photos, programs, and a few things have, a few random props have survived, but we're not actively collecting in part because we still haven't figured out the space and consolidating and making sure that if we take something, we can responsibly preserve it, house it, and provide access to it. And I've got a follow-up question for you too, if I could. In terms of care of the props, they're out in the warehouse, sort of someone else has taken care of that at the opera house, is that correct? Yeah, they have an extensive setup. I haven't actually been out there, but I've seen video and it is very well cared for and very extensive. Anybody else? I do have one.  The broadcasts that are done like the Kennedy Awards Honors, I should say, Kennedy Senator Honors that happen every year, are those productions on video? Do you guys have the rights? Do you have those? Or is that the networks that have that and have it in their own archive? I forget the exact details. I do believe we have access to the recordings, but we can't necessarily release them independently. There's a whole process where, if we get the request it automatically goes to legal and they sort it out because they get it fairly regularly. That's a good question. Anybody else? Going once? John, I was giving it back to over to you. There you go. All right, well, thank you very much. Thank you, Sophia, this was great and that concludes our first of the afternoon sessions. A programming note, our next session for the afternoon is was supposed to have been put on by Professor Chris Anglam from the University of District of Columbia. We'll let her catch up for that one. But unfortunately, Chris was detained in New York as a result of the Merrick meeting. There was a mudslide on the Amtrak tracks and so he has been unavoidably detained. So you're gonna get me again. So I will be presenting his session, which is gonna be on social change, social justice and engaging with marginalized communities at the University of District of Columbia. And as soon as I figure out what that means, I will be able to tell you what that means and that will be at three o'clock. So we have still have some time. It is just 2.35 by my watch. So there's still some time. If you'd like to get downstairs, check in with our other repositories that have set up some tables downstairs. You can still get some coffee and grab some last of that Halloween candy that may be hanging out downstairs and we'll see you back up here at three o'clock. Thanks very much. And again, thank you very much, Sophia. So sadly it would seem that Chris has not gotten our message. So I will preface these remarks with, and Chris has said that he is saddened and sick, that he was unable to join us no more so than me. So I will say that so what Chris was going to speak on was the topic of social justice and engaging with marginalized communities at the University of the District of Columbia and a discussion of the rewards and challenges of archivists engaging in, with underrepresented and marginalized communities at a historically black college and university in Washington, DC. So that he said that most of his planned remarks were focused on the rewards section. The assignments originally started with a focus on student life and organization, including fraternities and sororities, which were always very popular and attracted a great deal of student interest. In the past four or five years, there has been much more student interest in student activism over the years, both in terms of issues involving the administrations, actions, and in terms of frequent budget cuts. There have also been several examples of political activism in UDC's history, including various protests involving national and international issues, and all of these have attracted student interest. So the University of the District of Columbia is a, as I said, a historically black college and university created from several predecessor institutions, including the minor school, the Wilson Teachers College, the DC Teachers College, and the Federal City College and the Washington Technical Institute. Marilla Minor formed the minor school in 1851. UDC is the only public university in the District of Columbia. It's the only land grant university in the District of Columbia. And since Marilla Minor formed UDC in 1851, the UDC has played a key role in the role of educating African Americans in DC. So HBCUs, before the Civil Rights Movement, they have offered African Americans one of the only pathways to a college degree. And today, HBCUs continue to provide an inclusive and supportive environment to African Americans to obtain higher education. So HBCUs tend to offer a welcoming and inclusive environment to all of those who attend there. It's one of the appealing features of HBCUs and all educational institutions is that they should be a welcoming environment for people of all backgrounds. I will insert here that I used to say that when I went to college, it was not reality.  So students aspire to be themselves and be part of an inclusive and welcoming culture. HBCUs have always provided a safe and affirming space for black students. And HBCUs instill cultural pride. They also shield students from having to navigate racism, unfortunately found at other types of institutions. And again, something that we've even seen recently with the incidences at Bowie State University and some of the instances recently outside of Baltimore. So why every student should learn how to use archives. This is something that, again, I will say, not just again, to step on what Chris is saying through the National History Day program even. We should be instilling in our students and through a strong internship program and things like that. Archives are not just places where documents or records are stored. They are witnesses to the African-American and American history. Using archival materials allows our students to engage directly with people and stories from the past. Students can hear about events directly from those who experienced them. A good archives also can have a good oral history program. If you have a good oral history program, that's a good way for students to interact with people who lived these stories. Again, parenthetically, using my own background, when I first came to Washington, I worked for the International Monetary Fund and I did some oral histories with people where I interviewed a man who was at the founding conference for the International Monetary Fund. And I sat there and I would listen to these stories that he would tell us about, that they would plan the international financial system for hours during the day, and then they would go down to the bar and they would plan their evening over bourbon and cigarettes, and I was like, this is how things worked in the 40s. But so students can relate their lives and experiences of primary source creators to their own lives and experiences. Archival records serve to strengthen collective memory and protect people's rights, property, and identity. So HBCUs have a longstanding tradition of developing collections that document the rich African American experience. With rare and unique materials, HBCUs have the potential to reach current narratives, to enrich current narratives with the history of American education, the scholarship, the activism of American education, the scholarship, activism, and publications of university presidents, faculty, students, and alumni. Despite their significance, many HBCU archives are not easily accessible. Much of this has to do with the historical underfunding of these archives. I mean, so there are many challenges that HBCUs face in serving their student populations. Many are first generation college students. Some are still not completely college ready when they started. Many have weak research skills. They have not, they don't have much of a familiarity or an understanding of history. They may have had learning difficulties or other disabilities in their previous school careers. Some are faced with pressing family needs. They are parents themselves or they need to support their families. They may have financial challenges or they're on serious financial aid or that they hinders their academic progress. They may be faced with issues of day to day needs. They have not had an opportunity to learn much about history or archives prior to coming to the university. They may not be familiar with archives or understand the relevance or usefulness of archives. They may not have any background in the use of archives. These are all things that we as archives professionals should instill and use upon them and impress upon them that as we heard so many times earlier today, we have a responsibility as archivists to protect history, to preserve history, to make sure that it goes forward. So to protect our heritage for another generation. So the rewards that we get from serving our students, we see the experience of history coming to life for our students through the use of primary resources. We see the stu