 Welcome everyone to today's MARA guest lecture and our presenter today is one of our favorite people because she's a MARA graduate. Amber Crumweed has been in the records management profession for over 10 years and she's active in the Puget Sound chapter of our International. Always a good thing to be active in your professional organization. And she's a certified records manager and also a certified paralysal. Her professional work has been in the private sector where she's developed and supplemented records programs which manage several dozen record types across multiple lines of business in various office locations and Amber is going to speak to us today about her career path, how I got here, the career path of a corporate records manager. So right now I'll turn the mic over to Amber. Thank you Pat and I would also like to welcome everyone who's attending this presentation today and those of you who will be listening to this recording. I'd like to thank SJSU's Cliftonium for the opportunity to share my career path experience and hope it might provide some insight into one of the many avenues a records manager might take. I've hopefully left enough time at the end to fill any questions you might have. So either put them in the chat box or we can, you know, raise your hand and we can address them as we go through the presentation. So it's a pretty basic agenda. We're just going to do an introduction and then I'm just going to run through my education background, the work experience I've had in the records management field, then my MARA experience and close out with some professional development areas that I've been afforded because of my involvement in MARA and in with our men international too. So, so I've done the welcome again. Welcome everyone, I hope you find this interesting. So I hold an undergraduate degree. My BA is in organizational management. It's a basic baseline business degree because at that time I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to be when I grew up and I hold the Masters in Archives Administration from San Jose, I was ready last May. I'm also a certified records manager and a certified paralegal. The CRM designation came in 2005 and the paralegal certification came in 2008. The BA that I earned was through an accelerated degree program that had been designed at that time for working adults and at the time of my entrance I was three years younger than the minimum age requirement to be accepted but through a combination of many college credits over the earned and the two years prior to my admission, I also had to put together a professional declaration essay and had to secure multiple recommendations from professors and other business owners to support my application process and because of that I was admitted into the program. So it was my first experience with an alternate degree program. It was not as technically advanced as the MARA program. The Warner degree was not your typical bachelor's as it was geared towards working adults and classes were only at night and on Saturdays. And since the classes were held in satellite locations, the only time I was ever actually on that campus was when I graduated which is very similar to my MARA experience as the first time I was on that campus was when I also graduated last May. So it's been interesting that my educational career has not been the typical brick and mortar structure, no dorms, that sort of thing. So finding MARA was fit right into what I had done in the past. So that is so my work experience as the bio-estated my entire career has been in the private sector, my cousin was in the Navy and we had moved out here to Washington State where we live currently still in the late 1990s. And the transfer came, we moved from Florida to Washington State before I had completely finished all of the elective credits so I had a few more credits to complete. So when I moved out here I accepted a part-time temporary position with a timber management company and my position was as the assistant to the land records manager for the company. And I believe that it's what truly put records management in my brain as even a job direction. And it also gave me the desire to seek out more formal education in the industry. I've heard many of my colleagues state that most of us came into this profession by accident. I don't think anyone that I know of has actually set out and when they began their career path this is what they wanted to be. This is usually a secondary position that you're in and you become interested in and have a desire and an ability to comprehend it so then you move into those positions. So I kind of think I have to credit my third grade teacher though for laying the foundation for my organizational instincts as she would keep me after school many times to teach me structure and classification and I believe that this was probably so that all of my homework assignments would be returned in the correct order and in one piece that she could grade them. I think what it did is gave me a foundation of being able to categorize, criminalize, and to group pieces of information because since then it's a little bit OCD here at my house. So being a Navy wife, I got a lot of opportunities to exercise these records management skills that I didn't know that I had by helping fellow sailors pack when they were transferred to other boats. And it kind of became known around my husband's boat that if you wanted to make sure that all of your stuff made it in the single moving truck that you had rented then you needed to invite James and his wife and the split of labor was that James was the workhorse and I just got to stand on a truck and tell people what to do which is always fun. So I'm not suggesting that packing moving trucks is a prerequisite for becoming record managers but what I think it reinforces the ability to visualize how items can be grouped and how they relate to other items or big tetris game. Seeing these kind of connections has helped me to design classification systems, classification systems, no. And across reference items which aid users in finding related content without having to reorganize or physically move items. When I perform research now within my organization, I kind of feel like Hansel and Gretel a little bit as I follow little cross reference breadcrumbs to discover necessary files and bits of information that users need to perform their business functions. Someone has a word that they're looking for and you wrap onto that and then it leads you down the south of what a wrap called and eventually you find the needle in the haystacks that people need so that it's always fun to do that but my time with the land manager back at the timber company it started out as a simple it was a part-time temporary position to just do data entry into a land contract database that had been built by him to manage all of the real property, tree farm property contacts that they owned and managed. He was very eager I think because he was getting tired of maintaining it himself but he was very eager and supportive of me learning not only how the system was designed or what its initial purpose was for but encouraged me to further investigate how to make it better to improve on the structure so it was very nice to be able to have someone that says here's a framework and this kind of works but if you see a way to make it better then go for it and do it so when I finished the extra elective credits for my bachelor's they offered me a full-time position at the timber company and the land manager he was just absolutely wonderful. He even threw me a mini graduation seeing as the college campus was in Florida he drew me a graduation with cap down, cake, everything in the office so it was really, really nice. He was also one that encouraged me to join ARMA and to pursue the Certified Records Manager designation when at that time as I was being asked to perform under his you know his tutelage and his direction functions from a records program I began to realize that I probably needed to try to find some formal educational resource or program to supplement and support what it is I was ending up and doing for the company. And at that time the programs that I found were either focused on heavily on the archives or on a librarian focus which wasn't what I was doing in my day-to-day management with the land records program at the timber company. He eventually transferred his ARMA membership into my name once again I think because he was getting tired of participating. So it wasn't really until I started getting involved in ARMA that I had received some of that formal official training on records management principles. So at that time I also was learning another set of skills at the timber company and that was in the paralegal realm. And those are regarding the land transactions that the timber company was involved in. So once again I was performing certain corporate duties and functions and I really felt that I needed to have some kind of an educational basis on which I was performing these works. And so at the same time of finding resources for records management training I also was looking for paralegal support and training and education there too. And I've like I moved through both of those cycles early on I was very excited to find that some of the skills and knowledge that I was gaining were transferable between the records management functions and then the paralegal functions that I was performing. The biggest thing that I found was the ability as my legal training was developing. It gave me a better insight and ability to read laws and regulations which can be circular in themselves and cryptic and so that gave me a skill to be able to read those laws, regulations to come up with appropriate retention periods for records content. Yes, compliance, I mean those laws are, you almost need, you needed almost to need an interpreter sometimes. So having that other skill was then something I didn't have to push down more to our legal team which made the company happy because I got paid a lot less than the legal team did. So being able to show that value has also been, has been fun. So in 2004 the land records manager passed away and that was just, it was a huge blow but so I assumed his duties completely at that point and became also the key contact for all land transactions. So it was a loss of a mentor and then a benefit that at such a young age I guess I was now responsible for such a large and you know intricate program. So between the bachelor's degree and the now total responsibility for the records program, it gave me the necessary requirements to sit for the ICRM's certified records manager exam as there's an education and experience, you know, levels that you have to meet to be able to take that exam. So I got that pretty quickly, it was, you know, trial by fire so I had to retake part one a couple of times and it made me upset but I finally made it through it and got that designation. But it was kind of sad as the one person that had set me on and encouraged and supported that, that designation wasn't there to see me finish the journey. I can't tell you how great his support even to this, you know, this day I still can hear him in my head sometimes and I just think that having a professional mentor is a gift that not many records professionals receive and if you do have one or find one, it will greatly enrich your professional career so I really miss his training and guidance. But so at the end I spent about seven years at the Timber Company and in 2006 after spending time focusing on both records management and the paralegal functions I thought I needed to, you know, master, you know, jack of all trades, the master of none was kind of what my world at the Timber Company was becoming and I really wanted to focus. So I had put out the good vibes into the world on both of those lines of professional interest and it just so happened that a real estate investment firm here in Sumner, I live in Bonnie Lake so Sumner is just to skip down the hill for me, had just created a new corporate records management position and they were more than willing to take a chance on a very vocal young recently certified records manager so they didn't know what they were getting into and I didn't know what I was getting into so it was a perfect relationship but unlike the Timber Company that had a program that was functioning and it was basic yes but it still had, the skeleton was already there, coming into this new firm there was pretty much nothing and so it's allowed me to gain the experience of designing, building, maintaining a records program from the ground up and has been a truly learning experience and it's been, I think it's been a great relationship for the company and myself. They didn't know what they didn't need and they now have what they have and I've learned a lot through the process so. So, as the corporate records manager I am responsible for maintaining our company's entire filing structure everything, I'm slowly being tasked with electronic files as well and email management but in the beginning it was everything, physical paper, maps, disks, product binders just a varied array of information and when I took over the position the way that they had been managing their content was through the use of Word Files and they had one Word Files for every entity that they owned, managed property investments for which now is about 225 so and they were all like bullet point lists and it was just file names. There was nothing, nothing else besides the name of a file so it was course on in 2003. So, I, one of my very first duties there was to get the, that file structure out of Word Files and actually into a database so I took the experience of database design and management that I had gained at the Timber Company and I had actually created records management file database for the company and I did it that way because one I had never gone out and evaluated software before and creating databases was something that I was very comfortable with but I think it also helps the users and the company see the benefit of a formal records software, piece of software because they saw the improvement of information and access from the Word Files to the database that I had built and were happy with that enough to give me the, the budget and the ability to go out and find a, you know, a formal out-of-the-box kind of records management product so after many months of searching and doing demos and having user testing forums which, once again, I learned a lot of things and getting user input is very important. I have learned over the years that now you need to be very specific in what you want your users to report back on otherwise there's just this flood of, I don't like it but I don't know why, don't ask me, unusable feedback so it has been a, that was an interesting process as well as learning how to communicate what an end user would be seeing now and how to get them to see that from a demo when I myself hadn't seen it work either but we decided on a program and we've had this program up and running since 2007 and it's called FileTrail and it's a software for physical files and it was totally configurable to meet our needs because as I said we have several hundreds and I think we're now at 225 plus or minus active entities that we manage information for and the nature of our business is such that at the end of the day there's about 200 different record series of information that can be created because we just have that many different lines of business within our organization. So being able to configure a system to meet that flexibility was very important. At this position I'm also responsible for training, for continuing education, for database troubleshooting, doing some, a lot of the, when new users are brought on the RIT department adds them to the active directory and company networks but then once they get into FileTrail, I'm the one that's in the back end managing the permissions and the access and who can see what went in and how. So that has also been fun learning too. So being a department of one for this large company, large small company has allowed me the opportunity to gain lots of experience, a lot of hands-on experience managing all facets of a records management program. One of the interesting ones that I inherited when I started was their, the company's archives and what they had and still, what we still have is just an inactive storage protocol for management of information that no longer has any day-to-day needs or functions but that we need to maintain for legal or fiscal or even some of them is just a company historical thing but it's not an archive. I've tried over the years to get people to stop calling it the archives but I've kind of given up that ghost in favor of them understanding other records management functions better. So picking my battles but when I started, there was about 1,100 boxes and they were in on, they were on, you know, records under shelving in a warehouse that was attached to our main office location and originally all of the boxes were organized alphabetically by the name of the entity that owns them. Going back, we have 225 plus entities. So everything was in alphabetic order which made it easy early on and they, A, were a smaller company and didn't have as many entities and weren't creating as many records to maintain and having them alphabetically actually was helpful for the company to be able to access the information because there doesn't need, there didn't need to be any other system or key or reference point in order for individuals to locate what they were looking for. Users would simply just go to the area in the space in the warehouse where that entity's boxes were located and they would read a few minutes on the box labels to find their box. However, on the maintenance side as the company grew and more content was being created was just very, very tedious for me to have to maintain. Since all of the boxes were in an alphabetical order, whenever something new was added, it required the entire volume of records or boxes to sometimes be completely shifted and moved to, in order to keep all of the boxes together. And I very quickly grew tired of moving boxes. So with the help of some Armour International resources and speaking with vendor representatives, I developed what I call at this, the office is an addressing system which allowed boxes to be added or shelved in any open space within the warehouse and without regard to does this fit alphabetically and the way I would, you know, explain it to people that everyone, you know, your house has an address, this box now has an address so that you can find it later. The upside was that I didn't have to move a lot of boxes all the time, but the downside was that users now had, you have that intermediary reference resource to be able to access their information no longer could they just go to an alphabetic area and find their boxes. They now had to look to the list and then find the address. And it took a while for some of the longer term employees of the company to get used to the new system, but eventually users actually came to like the process better. Since the reference system that was created through FileTrail, it gave the user more information about the box itself. So now they didn't have to go and pull and read 10, 12 different box labels. They could search the system and find the box that most closely fit what they were looking for and that reduced, you know, their time to access that information. So eventually they, a lot of them liked it. I mean people still complain with that, you know, that could be what it is. But as our company continued to grow, we needed that warehouse space for other business functions. And so we had relocated the record center, what I had renamed from the archives to the record center and moved it to another owned off-site warehouse location. I was still the primary person of managing that system. I still was in charge of having to go and help people pull files and pull boxes and then the, you know, the annual shelving of information. So it was quickly becoming a lot of my, much of my workload managing the record center. So I had started to suggest that there are better ways to do this, like hiring a third party vendor to do this management for us. And it wasn't until Thanksgiving 2010 that I actually got some meat behind my suggestion. And that was because our, the space that was being used was a mixed use building. So it had a living space above the warehouse. And that Thanksgiving, the water pipes of the household unit above froze and burst. And so I, when I was called to come to the record center, I walked in and saw an indoor swimming pool around my paper and boxes. So I was standing in two inches of water and listening to the sound of rain as the ceiling, you know, leaked water all over the record center. So the good thing was is that it was snowing then too. So the cold water actually helped in our favor as it helped to mitigate any additional, like damage from mold or deterioration. But there was a lot of wet, wet boxes. So I called them the, the other, I called them some professionals. They were from Monter's. I think they're now called Polygon. And they are document restoration professionals. And I think after about 10 hours of working with six crewmen from my company and two from Monter's, about a third of the boxes were loaded to be taken to Chicago for restoration. Another third were loaded into a rented U-Haul truck and taken to another dry storage location. And then the last third were covered with tarps inside the damaged record center. So the BC plan, Lisa, that was, that was pretty much it. I just called Monter's. This goes back to being new in the position. That wasn't even one of the, the things that had entered my thinking. I didn't like the fact that there was a living unit above it. I knew that that cost could be something, but I never put any official thing into plan. So thankfully after that they were more than happy to sign off on the transfer of all those boxes to a third, you know, an offsite vendor because that, the total cost of that incident for us was about over $75,000 at the end when everything was said and done and 75% of that was in restoring the boxes that were sent away. So I've had a lot of on-the-job stuff. So more recent and drier work project being brought in on is the development of our company's SharePoint team site. And I'm trying to tap into my knowledge of the organizational system for our physical files to develop how the content on our SharePoint sites will be managed and maintained and created, that sort of thing. Our physical files are pretty much, I would say I'm pretty confident that our physical file system could withstand any kind of legal, regulatory, industry litigation audit and you'd be able to find what you needed, when you needed it and it'd be current, accurate information. And that has a lot to do with that. The makers of the files and the user of the files are typically close together. So if we have an open file plan system, that means that any employee that needs access to the information doesn't have to request access, everyone just knows where things are stored. But the nature of how our offices have been set up, pretty much those who are responsible for the content are usually the only ones that really have easy access to the information. So just by location, our physical files are pretty accurate and reliable. Unfortunately, you know, electronic files, they don't work the same way unless you restrict access to file folders or parts of your shared work environment. And so the users are not as confident that an electronic version of a file is as reliable as being able to go and pick up that physical one, just by the nature that more people can access the electronic version. So that's been kind of a challenge in getting people to stop hoarding their own electronic versions of information and become more comfortable with collaboration and understanding the track changes and that's still to be able to pull it up and know that what you're seeing is an accurate and correct version. So trying to get people comfortable and create those systems and policies to not let just that there's actually a purpose for changing electronic files. Some people understand that this is, you know, an accurate version. So financial audits still require everything in hard copy. Yes, anyway, this is in the case of not, we're not replacing our hard files. We are just trying to reduce the amount of duplication that happens with the electronic versions of our hard copy files so that we have a lot more control over where information, that we know that when we say, yeah, we've searched all of our hard drives and this is the only versions we have, I can be confident and say that. So right now, I don't have that confidence that I could tell you that, yes, I've searched all my file, you know, our company and these are the only electronic versions of something. So that's what my focus is right now is not a replacement of our physical files but just a more streamlined and reliable use of those files. So that makes any sense. Any other questions on that? Oh, integrity, yes, maintain the integrity because the integrity of the physical files is sound. I'm bragging a little bit but I think it's really good but I don't think the integrity of our electronic files is there yet. So that's what we're hoping we can improve upon with the SharePoint development. So any other questions? Then I'm going to move on to my Mara's very first question there. So it was around 2009 and I began to seek out some more educational opportunities. I had spent, at that point, it was about eight, nine years. You know, in the profession but still never having a regal records management. Oh, I'm sorry, Kate, you had a question? Courage, if you had experience with SharePoint prior to current job, no, no, it's been interesting. The whole SharePoint conversion, it started off as being an IT project and once the multiple and variously detailed switches in the back end were all initiated, then it was time to go out and say what do you want the SharePoint site to do? And it was at that point that I was brought in because then it had more of a content usage focus and not a permission, yes, no, turning something on, having the right software hardware that the IT team, that's their knowledge. And so it's been interesting because I've had to learn how SharePoint calls things. So once again, we're learning a new vocabulary and trying to bring those terms into what employees would be able to relate to easier but still trying to say, okay, this is a new verbiage that's not completely ignore it and not try to learn it but still trying to make it understandable for across the site. I think SharePoint can do a lot of things. It seems to do some of it out of the box pretty easily once you learn what things are called and what their main purpose is for. But it's just so, it's such a blank canvas that it's been difficult going to our departments and saying, well, what do you want on a shared space when they've never had any kind of a collaborative software or any kind of an interface like this before and saying, well, what do you want? Their next question to us is, well, what do you have? So, and then we go back, we can have whatever you want but what do you have? And so, it's just this circular question of it can do a lot of stuff but it's not, there isn't a lot of examples because it really can do different things for different people. So, I've tried to, as I'm learning more about the configurability of SharePoint, I've been trying to say to individuals is what kind of usage do you want? And then from there, building them a temporary or a basic site structure so that they can see what it would look like. And then going from there and making changes and modifications as users start actually using the system because we all know that what people want and what they do are two different things sometimes. So, but at least we'll get it started. So, the cultural shift occurred, yes, and that was something I didn't find out until a couple of years into the position that it wasn't, I guess, the cultural shift wasn't necessarily that they all were trying to embrace it. It was more of from a top management disposition will be created and you will work with her and you will like her and that's it. So, unfortunately, I came in as a very eager person to learn and coming in with the expectation that everyone was just thrilled to have me in their workspace and just could not wait for the, you know, the wonderful things and butterflies that I could bring them and that wasn't really the case. A lot of people were very suspicious of me, I found out later, that they thought maybe I was coming in to reduce staffing because a lot of the questions that I was asking is what do you do, how do you do it, who do you work with. And because I was looking at from business process standpoint, so I could figure out how to build a system, who talks to who and why. And that wasn't, they were looking at it from a completely different direction. So, unfortunately, that was just something that age, I just didn't have that experience to be able to know that ahead of time. So, yes, some questions do make people defensive is why do you want to know how I do it? I do it very well, thank you. So, but it's been a learning experience and I've grown a lot that way as well. I'm still enthusiastic about it, but people don't cringe when I walk into a room now. So, that's always nice, but it took about four years to get there, so anyhow. So, my large experience, it was in 2009, I was trying to find some more actual educational programs and everything that I was finding just didn't seem to fit and I'm not sure if I ran into Pat at an Army International Conference or I had seen the website first. But either way, when I began to investigate it and I was just very, it was probably simultaneously, something like that, but it was just, it was like light from heaven or something and it just was a nice perspective because at that time, I had also considered making the switch from records management to archives because I kind of like history and I like the, you know, the investigation and preservation of information and just artifacts and stuff like that. So, finding the MARA program that provided a dual focus was just, it just was exactly what I was looking for and I believe that this is the program gave a very good balance between the two facets of information management. I also really enjoy being part of the second cohort to participate in the program as it possibly, you know, my input could change, you know, an educational program that would influence generations to come. So, that was also very, a little bonus caveat too. The confidence to take on the new projects that I am at work has come from my interactions with MARA being in and having been in the industry for many years before getting formal education. Coming in tomorrow, I was really kind of hoping that I was doing stuff right and so the program really gave me a lot of validation of what I had thought I knew. It was, it was right and it was lovely to see that I had learned something in the trenches. So, that was just, it was just very, very, very, very fulfilling being part of the MARA program. I loved the online learning environment. It became very, very key as shortly after being accepted and started the program, I had a pretty major life changing event and I had to physically go to a campus or meet someone else's school timeline having to travel somewhere. I would have had to resign from the program because I just, it just was not going to be possible that time. So, I really enjoyed my internship. I was able to work with Cisco Systems in San Jose. At first, I was hesitant. I had never done a internship before and thought it was for people who didn't have any or little job experience which wasn't my case. So, going into it, I was kind of, I'm not sure what this is like, but it really gave me the ability to see someone else's records program from the inside that I was able to take and put pieces and upgrade my company's month program. So, and then, of course, you know, graduation, I love this. This is a cohort, fellow cohort of mine. She posted these on her Facebook page and so I just had to include those as well for all of those of you who are starting or not quite done yet. You too can have one of these someday. So, I look like I'm running out of time. I'm going to quickly go through just the professional development. I've been doing a lot in studying member of Arma Nation since about 2000 and it was a key to being able to interact with other professionals as sometimes training can be a bit technical and theoretical. The ability to then discuss those concepts with people who are actually trying to implement them was something you couldn't just, you just really can't get in most, you know, sessions or not in our training or in our educational session. So, that involvement has been invaluable to me. I have continued my involvement at the local level. I've been held many chapter positions from treasurer to president and back to treasurer and I'm currently the chairman of the board and programs chair. I see Susan's logged in and she's on, she's our webmaster for mistress for our chapter. So, we're just, you just got to be involved. That's where you make your, you know, your connections. So, but it also gave me the presentation, presentation skills and gave me the opportunity to present and share my knowledge at regional and local levels. I was able to be part of the project lead for an international, our international guideline about evaluating and mitigating records and information management risks and I was able to work with a individual who I had read previous articles and books from and was able to co-author a chapter in a international textbook with her. So, I wouldn't have been able to do that had I not had the international contact. So, it's given me the ability to develop presentation and leadership skills but being a department one, you don't get the opportunity to help manage a lot of people. Of course, it's, you know, just the small groups that you get to interact with when managing their systems but on the whole it's just, it's just me. So, I have enjoyed my time also with ARMA. So, that's, that's all, that's about it. That's my life so far. Thank you everyone for listening and for purchase, you know, allowing me to present this. If you haven't had a question, be happy to take them now and if you're listening to the recording, I have put my contact information here and you feel free to email me or give me a call if you have any further questions. So, thank you for joining us tonight. Thank you Amber, that was terrific.