 Okay, great. 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 of the United States is a hard act to follow. My name is Sophia Bacerralicha. 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, sorry, give 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 up by partisan 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, 50th 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 were 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, you know, 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 out 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 year, sorry, the hollow states or the hollow nations and saw the hanging 50 made out of window cards. Those were 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 prioritized 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, DC 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 and 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 of 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 to sort of fill in some gaps. While we were doing those big things we were also thinking of ways to organically again stoke interest and have the archives be seen as a trusted repository and a trusted partner. 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 Kenson Archives and we most recently actually did a archives takeover on Instagram for Ask an Archivist day 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, the Kennedy Center, sorry, the Kennedy White House and then various designers to make sure that all of the technology would work. And so I'm just gonna 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 gonna walk through each of the components. All right so that gives you a little bit of a feel of what you walk into. But next I wanna 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 and 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 DeCunning 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 oratorical 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 in listening to him speak and 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 session, 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 listened 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, like 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 Kennedy Center archives timeline of when our content started exploding on social media and in general it's when we finished the 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 everything, 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, it's 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. Well, but I think we need it for Zoom. Yeah, we need it for Zoom, okay. Do you wanna just come up and use my mic? Do you wanna come in? Then I'll bring it right back. Okay, so first kind of the big professional activist question, does the Kennedy Center have a, 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 for 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 wanna 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 off in 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 like 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 want to be super, super, super clear about that. And 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 this under there, in terms of props or other ephemera or other design things that you have for shows and performances, are you able to preserve any of those? I'm just curious, you know, set design and so forth. What is art, is that a part of your collection? Priority, yeah. 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. I'm gonna sit down so I'm not looming over you. The broadcasts that are done, like the Kennedy Awards Honors, I should say, the Kennedy Center 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? No. I was just giving it back to over to you. Ha ha ha. All right, well, thank you very much. Thank you Sophia, this was great and that concludes our first of the afternoon sessions.