 Okay, welcome everyone to today's webinar. We're going to hear from three panelists. We have with us Matt Veach from State Archivist from the Kansas Historical Society, Kathy Popovich, Records Archivist from the Illinois State Archivist, and Chris Denson, Administrator from the Oregon Records Management Solution at the Oregon State Archives. The procedure today will be for each of the presenters to speak to you and then they're going to turn their mics over to the next presenter. We're going to hold all questions until the end. So right now I'm going to turn the presentation over to Matt. Thanks very much, Pat. Yeah, my name is Matt Veach. I am the State Archivist in Kansas. I actually work at the Kansas Historical Society. I've been involved with the Council of State Archivists for quite a number of years and in fact I was the president of the organization back in 2015. As you can see from my photo there, I do have a little gray hair and so I've been around quite some time in this field. I didn't put any dates on my career path, but just know that I've been at the Kansas Historical Society for 25 years. So I've been doing this for a long time. So a little bit about my education and training and my career path. I come up kind of a more traditional route. A lot of the folks that I'm hiring are now coming out of library science or information science programs, school of information programs. But I came up in the old days when just a master's degree in history was kind of the oftentimes the card, the piece of paper that you needed to get a job in archives, in state archives. I got on the job training. I became a certified archivist fairly early in my career. That is a certification program that is available to archivists and I felt like it was a valuable thing for me. I had a fairly straightforward career path. I started at a local or county historical society over in Independence, Missouri, worked half time. I made a grand total of $10,000 a year for one full year. That's all the time my wife allowed me to work half time. Unfortunately for me, the Missouri State Archives hired me right at that 12 month mark. I worked there for 18 months, came to the Kansas Historical Society in 1992, became the state archivist in 2006 and I am still here and plan to retire from the Kansas Historical Society. So that's just a little bit about my background and go ahead to the next slide. Now I'm just gonna, I wanna just set the scene for you, kind of set the stage for my two colleagues who will talk a little bit more about the day in and day out work of what it means to work in the state archives or in the government archives. But I'm gonna start with the very basics and that is what is the state archives? What are state archives? Most simply, most fundamentally, state archives are a repository, the repository for state government records that have enduring value, permanent value, permanent archival value. They need to be retained in our view of the things for the life of the Republic. State archives, historically speaking, emerged in the early 20th century. There were essentially repositories for government records, for state government records in many states but the official statutorily created state archives emerged early in the 1900s and by the middle part of the century, most every state had one. One important thing, one important point to make about a government archives, in particular, state government, federal archives is that we don't store, we don't house all of the records created by a government. So the general rule of thumb is we wanna take less than 5% of records that produced by the government, less than 5% of them are deemed to have enduring value and most fundamentally in the 21st century is that format absolutely does not matter. You'll see the photo that I took, the piece of art that one of my colleagues made with all of the old technology from mice to CDs to kindle devices. You can see that digital material is something that is kind of dominating our field right now. There's a fair amount of variation across states and territories with regard to the organization and the funding of their state archives. Administratively, in terms of where the state archives is located within the government itself, it varies quite a bit. Sometimes there are independent agencies, very often they're in Secretary of State's offices. So the State of California or the State of Missouri, for example, are both in Secretary of State's offices. Sometimes they're in a historical society, like in Kansas or Ohio or Minnesota. Cultural resources or cultural affairs agencies are also a likely place to find the state archives. And sometimes they're combined with a state library like they are in Kentucky or Texas or Florida. So it does vary quite a bit across the states. And there's also a fair amount of variation in terms of funding and staffing across states and territories. So you'll find state archives like in Kansas, relatively low population state like Kansas or Nebraska or the Dakotas. We get by with a very small number of staff in a relatively small budget. You go to some of the larger states, the North Carolinas and the New Yorks and the Californias of the world. And sometimes their staffs are quite a bit larger. Generally, the staffing will range from, I suppose as small as one, say a territory. I used to work with or talk to quite a bit the archivist for the Northern Mariana Islands. That's a territory for those of you who didn't know. And he was a one-person shop. But it varies from one to a few dozen people. Very few state archives are really, really large organizations. There's also variation in the sense that in some state archives, they have responsibility for records management. Meaning that they work with state and local government agencies to help them with the active management of records in their offices. And we've generally found that if records management programs and state archives programs are combined, you often get the best results. It's kind of a symbiotic relationship between those two things with records management kind of helping us identify those records that ultimately need to come to the archives and you identify it very early in the records life cycle. But it doesn't have to be that way. And there are some states that don't have records management as part of the state archives. And yet they still operate very, very fine programs. There's also variation in terms of responsibility for local government records. Many states have responsibility for or at least very active in providing records management and archives consulting services or providing advice and assistance to county governments or municipal governments or school districts or water districts, any kind of local government entity. And there are some states, 20 or so states that actively collect and store local government records with enduring value. And again, that just kind of varies across the states. Kind of depends on how they got founded and what their funding is like and what their staffing is like. And go to the next slide, please. So why would someone want to work in a state archives? And that's kind of one of the main thrusts of this presentation is to try and explain why it really is a meaningful and it's a diverse and meaningful place to work. I think sometimes we sell ourselves short and we tend to not have quite the level of panache that say a university setting would have special collections in a university. Often people like that academic environment. And I certainly understand that and appreciate what those kinds of programs bring. But I'm very partial to state archives, to government archives. And I really feel like some of the most important archival work in the country is taking place right in the state archives. And I think you would find if you would join a program like the one that I have here in Kansas or the one in Illinois or the one in Oregon or anywhere in the country that you would have a really diverse and meaningful experience. You get to do a lot of different things and you'll see that list there. I mean, and that can go on and on. I mean, you get to do all parts. You get to engage in all parts of the archival enterprise. Appraisal, I always like to talk about when I'm talking to people about what it's like and what it means to work in a state archives by talking about appraisal and emphasizing the, kind of the, my view that that's kind of the most important thing that government archivists do. Government archivists and records managers. And it's because of the fact that we don't bring everything in that's created by government. If we're going to eliminate 95% of the records created by a state government, then we better be very careful about deciding which 5% is worthy of making it to the archives. How do you make those decisions? And those are the kinds of things that in a government archives, in a state archives, you'll often get to participate in that process and make those really essential decisions for the future of the state and of the country. But you also get to do lots of the other, of the traditional archival activities like arrangement and description and reference and outreach and education. You might get to work on an exhibit. But increasingly, the focus of so much of our attention is on electronic records management, digital preservation, trying to make sure that the digital materials that are being created today by our state governments are being managed and preserved properly. So that's my pitch there in terms of why you as a young person or perhaps not so young person just coming out of school, why you might pursue work in a state archive is just from the archival perspective is that you really get to do diverse things and what you do makes a real difference. And that comes to the point of a state archives being a fundamental cornerstone of our form of government, of a Republican government. You can't have accountability or transparency without records of the activities of your government. We serve to preserve cultural memory. And one of the things that I think that I always like to emphasize is just the critical role that a state archives plays in securing rights, civil rights, property rights, whether we have land records or it could be employment records or medical records, environmental records. There's just a wide array of essential government records that serve as kind of the underpinnings for our democracy. So you can go forward. So who are we looking for? What kinds of people are we trying to hire in the state archives? We're looking for a few good archivists interested in changing the world. I'm very serious about that. I mean, it might sound kind of hokey, but I really do believe that what we're doing matters that some of the most interesting and important records to be managed are in state archives. And we're looking for good people to help us with this endeavor. Now, the challenges are immense. The staffing levels aren't what they should be. The funding levels aren't what they should be. But we're looking for people who are interested in doing work that really makes a difference in society. We're also looking for people who are lifelong learners who embrace change. This is not the kind of profession. I don't care where you are really in anywhere in archives, but particularly in state archives. You have to stay fresh. You have to stay current. You need to be devoted and committed to professional development without it. The world will pass you by very, very quickly. Just as an example, I mean, you saw that I have a master's degree in history. That's what I figured if I went into archives, I'd get to work with some of the archival materials that I became so familiar with in doing my master's work. And all of that was either paper-based or microfilm. And yet I've spent most of the last 25 years thinking about managing electronic records and preserving those digital records over time. That's not the kind of thing that I really thought I was gonna get involved in, but because I was very willing to learn the new skills and keep abreast of the new developments I was able to keep up. And it's really exciting to be part of this. We're also looking, as I've emphasized, electronic records or digital records an awful lot. I look for people who are either digital natives, particularly the younger people we're hiring today, but others who are at least very comfortable with technology. I don't think a state archives career is really a good place for someone who is not very comfortable with information technology. And then finally, we're looking for people who are dynamic outward facing people-people. I really try to dissuade people of the idea that archivists spend all of their time in the stacks, in quiet rooms, just sorting papers that you do have your quiet moments, but so much of what state archives are about right now are looking outside of our walls, providing training, providing consulting services, providing education to K through 12. There's so many opportunities and so much need for us to be outward looking, to be outgoing people and interested in interacting with others. Without that, we just cannot achieve our goals. All right, so the final slide. I just wanted, I asked one of my several of my staff members to kind of tell me why they thought it would be worthwhile, why they think it's worthwhile to work in the state archives. This is one of my most recent hires, my electronic records archivist, Megan Rolletter. She gave me permission to use that photo. She's looking inside a box very cautiously, transfer of records from our governor's office. We're in the process of working through identifying all of those records and making some sense out of them. But you can see her statement here that you get to handle some of the coolest materials that are invaluable to your state and its legacy. And in the time that she's been here, she's seen the state's constitution, a large collection of territorial Kansas records, records from the office of our state governor, countless photographs, maps and drawings. She's held letters by Abraham Lincoln and Aaron Burr and seen diaries written by Kerry Nation and Samuel Reeder. And this is my favorite part. She says, yes, you will get goosebumps. Yes, you may even get a little misty, but it makes it all worth it. So that's my Megan. I really, I love her passion. And I think if you chose to join a state archives, you would feel similarly. So thank you very much. Thank you very much. And now we have our second panelist for today, Kathy, I'll give the mic to you. My name is Kathy Popovich and I work at the Illinois State Archives. To start off my section of this talk, I wanna give a little bit of background about me first and my motivations for entering the archival field and how I ended up working in a government archive. And then I'll take you through what I do here and hopefully you'll find something in this talk that appeals to you and maybe you'll consider a career in state archives. So I have a bachelor's degree in history. I originally was an education major. I went through all of the internship hours and I got into, I think I was about two weeks into the student teaching and a light bulb went off and I realized that teaching just wasn't for me. I wasn't cut out for it. So much to my parents' dismay. I dropped the education component of my degree and really I had no idea what I was gonna do moving forward, which was a little bit terrifying, to be honest. But I knew I was still interested in finding a career in which I could facilitate learning and provide educational opportunities for others. I really loved the one-on-one interactions with my students, connecting with them and finding ways to teach to them and to connect them with their interests. So moving forward, I knew that would be a key aspect of any career that I would consider. Another thing I was looking for was variety. After college for a little while, I scored standardized writing tests. So for about 40 hours a week, I sat at a computer, read a sentence or two and punched in a score and quickly learned that that wasn't for me. Don't get me wrong, I sometimes appreciate hiding behind a computer all day, but I knew that I needed to go into a field that got me interacting with people and I guess just working different parts of my brain. And finally, I wanted a job where I would constantly be growing, learning new things and new skills. So I started volunteering at a public library actually. And in doing that, I saw the potential for a career in some form of information management field. So I decided to go back to school. I got my master's degree in library and information science from the University of Illinois and I specialized in special collections. After getting my master's, I worked for an engineering firm here in Springfield. I was the solo librarian for the firm in all of its branch offices. And towards the end of my time there, I also helped them start building their records management policies and procedures and kind of improving on those. So going into that job, I wasn't really sure that was the right job for me. So I guess this will be my first tip of the day. Don't be afraid to take a job that you're unsure about or that you think isn't 100% of what you're looking for. Being a solo librarian and doing basically everything, I learned a lot and gained some really valuable experience. And at the very least, I learned that I didn't really want to be a librarian. And I also learned, discovered that I didn't really want to work in the private sector, which is something I had never really thought about before. I found that I wanted to be able to help a more diverse group of people and feel like I was making an impact on my community and my state more directly. So kind of by word of mouth, I learned about the Illinois State Archives and their internship program. I applied, I went through the whole interview process and was hired in August of 2014. And the internship program, it's designed as a one-year internship where you spend time in each unit of the archives, kind of learning the ropes of that unit and how all of the different sections work together. So I interned for six months and then I was hired as a records archivist in March of 2015. Next slide please. Matt talked a lot about the variations across the state and territorial archives. So here's just a little overview about the archives in Illinois. We are a department under the Secretary of State. We were established initially as a division of the Illinois State Library. And then in 1957, Illinois passed the State Records Act. We became our own department underneath the Secretary of State. We hold government records for all three branches of state government and we only collect government records. In Illinois, the Lincoln Presidential Library, that's our state's historical library and they accept family papers, diaries, manuscripts, but we only take official state government records. Within the archives, we have seven different units. Administrative unit is our director, our personnel liaison, our fiscal officer, the operations and reference unit, they accession records into the archives and provide reference services. We also have a unit called the IRAD, which is the Illinois Regional Archives Depository. And they, at seven regional universities throughout the state, staff at the university and graduate student interns run a regional archive, which consists of local government records. I'll talk about the publications unit a little bit later because that's where I work. We also have a conservation lab. We have a records management unit that works with state and local agencies to set retention schedules. We also have a micrographics unit that microfilms and scans, documents, photos for the archives and for other state agencies. And so I'm showing you this to also demonstrate that there are a lot of different opportunities within state archives. So the chances are pretty high that your particular skills get and your interests can be put to good use in the state archives. Next slide, please. I currently work in the publications and finding a unit. It meets a lot of my criteria that I mentioned earlier in that I'm able to do a lot of different things, meet and work with a lot of different people. It provides opportunities for me to help people find what they're looking for or to learn something new. And I'm constantly learning new things about our state, about the archival field and developing new skills. We put out a newsletter three times a year. We usually highlight a document or collection which requires me to do some research. Some of our most recent articles we've done have been on the excavation of the Cahokia Mounds in Southern Illinois. We'll see the history of our penitentiary system, the expansion of highways in the 1920s. So again, constantly learning about things that I never really would have thought to learn about. We create and distribute document teaching packets on different subjects related to Illinois history. We have different flyers and brochures about the archives and doing research with our collections. But probably the most important work that our unit does is the processing, the arrangement and description, the operation section accessions the materials, but before they can be used or made available to the public, we have to do the arrangement and description to provide that intellectual access. So here's one very important way that the work we do really helps to advance government transparency and to aid our users, again, by providing that access point with our descriptions. I would say this is the part of the job that is a little bit more secluded. So if that kind of work appeals to you, there are definitely opportunities for positions that don't have quite as much public interaction. But as Matt mentioned earlier, it's very rare that you will have no interaction with others. Another duty I have is that I represent the state archives at history and genealogy conferences and symposia in the state. So in that way, I'm kind of our de facto outreach person. And again, this is another opportunity for me to meet a diverse group of people, talk with them about our collections and hopefully get them to the materials that will be useful to them. I am not really much of a talker, but I love hearing people's stories and going to these conferences provides a great opportunity for that. People love sharing their stories, their family histories, or the research that they're doing. And it's really invigorating to be around groups of people that are so passionate about their work and their interests. And getting to do these kinds of things, you really get to see how the work that the archives does really impacts the people and the community that you're working for. Next slide, please. So around here, we kind of joke about the ominous other duties as assigned responsibility in all of our official job descriptions. And this is the area that really brings a lot of variety to the work that I do. I serve as the deputy coordinator for the Illinois State Historical Records Advisory Board, or the ISHRAB. This is a statewide board, which serves as a review, excuse me, a review body for records grant proposals submitted to the NIH PRC, which is the grant-making agency affiliated with the National Archives. The ISHRAB runs its own grant program for smaller projects in the state and provides a lot of opportunities for archival professional development. And in working with this board, again, I get to work with archivists in a lot of different types of institutions. So board members themselves, we have members from university archives, business archives, genealogists, we have professors, and then also in kind of running the grant and scholarship programs, I get to connect with other archivists throughout the state and even people who are performing archival work, but who aren't archivists. So it's a great opportunity to really see what's going on throughout our state. I do a lot with grant management, whether that be writing grant proposals for projects at the archives or helping with the administrative side of grants that we've received. So if you're looking for another skill to gain, grant writing is a really good skill to have. I serve as our department's liaison to the Secretary of State's Communications Department. So anytime somebody needs business cards printed, forms updated or printed, that goes through me. And then I also give the occasional group or class tour of our building. If you're ever in Springfield, come visit us because it's a very beautiful building, lots of history there. And that pretty much sums up what I do. I feel very lucky to be where I am. It's definitely not all sunshine and rainbows. I mean, we do, after all, work for the government. So that sometimes means that we have to jump through a lot of hoops to get certain things accomplished. Really similar to probably any other archival institution, we're constantly having to advocate for ourselves and educate others on the importance of the work that we do. We have to deal with the growing idea or expectation rather that everything should be digital and available on the internet. Paper cuts are a daily threat. But it really is very meaningful and important work. Matt talked about some of this earlier, but state archives are looking for people who are adaptable to change, who are flexible, willing to learn, forward-thinking and creative. So if it sounds like you and you're passionate about government transparency and connecting people with their government and their history, I encourage you to consider a career in state or other government archives. And that's all I have today. Thank you. Thank you very much. That was very interesting. And now I'm going to turn the mic over to our third speaker for today, Chris. So my name's Chris Stenson. I am the administrator for the Oregon Records Management Solution for the Oregon State Archives, and I will explain what that is in just a second. I'm, you'll probably hear some of the same concepts you've heard from Matt and Kathy in my section here. And that's not because we all shared notes and said we were going to hammer the same tactics, same aspects, it's just that certain themes will tend to come up at the same time. So I'm going to call my little section. I'm going to give a little subtitle for it. I have a tendency to like cutesy little titles for things. I'm calling my talk here All Roads Lead From Robe. Of course, that's the opposite of the traditional phrase. Or how to be an ARM professional in a world that won't stop changing. So I'm going to use the term as a catch-all. So archives and records management professionals. You just by virtue of being in working on your MLISs or other variations of those degrees at the time you are right now, I'm sure you're aware of the rapidly changing terminology that is utilized surrounding the worlds of archives and records management, information management, information governments, all of those different concepts that are interlinked and interconnected. And if you put 12 people in a room, they will all disagree as to what they all exactly mean. I am notorious for running a foul of precise language on this because I tend to prefer looser, colloquial terms that actually mean something to people. So in this case, I've chosen to use ARM as a shorthand for all of the various aspects of work that surround, basically dealing with managing and preserving records for short-term, long-term and everything in between. So I've got some little images there. So we've got a succession of formats that we see here. This is something I often use without external outreach. So we've got a cuneiform tablet. So, and this also serves as a sort of demonstration of the longevity and the shrinking longevity of the sort of records we work with and the challenges we face. So cuneiform tablets, some of them are 6,000 years old or so, we can still read them. They're still around. Papyrus, similarly, had been around for millennia. Paper for not all that much less, still static. Then we get up to digital formats like a Word document which has been around. Well, a Word document hasn't necessarily, but Word processing documents have existed for a couple decades, two, three decades at most. And then we're already sort of moving into a world now where ever more folks are working in much more dynamic platforms. They're not dealing with static forms anymore. We're dealing with complex software systems that contain information in lots of different ways and the records may or may not exist as discrete forms anymore. And these are the sort of challenges that we're all looking at. Next slide, please. So a little bit about me. So as I mentioned, I am currently working for the Oregon State Archives, but I have a history going back to when I was an undergrad at Washington State University and I got an undergrad in history with an anthropology minor and then I got a master's in Roman history from the same institution. So clearly hence the Roman reference in the first slide there. Clearly that is not a degree that is replete with job opportunities. So those of you that have other liberal arts degrees and came to this, you may feel my pain in this and that what do you know, I have this degree because that's what I like to do, but it did not immediately turn into a bevy of job offers. So I kind of struggled after my master's sort of just did work, regular old work for a cell phone company for a number of years and reached the inevitable conclusion that I couldn't keep going on like this. I needed to find something else. Now I had in my time at Washington State worked at the University Archives for a time doing some processing of collections and things like that. And that was actually my first introduction to the existence of a degree known as an MLS. So the idea of a specific degree that was not a PhD that was for folks pursuing this area. So it was kind of new to me at that time. I went back to that thinking and decided it was high time for me to go on and do it. So I packed up all my stuff and with my new wife and we went off across the country to Indiana to go to Indiana University to pursue my master's in library science, I wanted to do something different and get out there and I don't regret that decision, but it was a long, long drive. So there I focused on an archives track. So I did of course the usual array of classes but focused specifically on our archives track and the head of the archives there was very much focused on the next generation of archival work which was electronic essentially. And so I got a tremendous amount of experience and drive from that in terms of understanding areas in which there was going to be a need in the field. So I did work and through that, and this is gonna be a little bit of a lesson that I'll loop back to later, but through that job working with the University Archivist, a man named Phil Banton who did some work for COSA as part of a large interstate survey of the state of electronic records in the United States had done some work and then heard about an opening at the Illinois State Archives. And when I just recently graduated with my MLS and so Illinois State Archives won state over and so that is how I heard about the job there about the introduction and was able to get the job as electronic records archivist for the Illinois State Archives. So actually Kathy and I were coworkers for about a year before I moved on. So in my role there, I can tell you right up the gates I showed up and was told, you're the expert, you tell us what to do with this electronic stuff. That is an intimidating thing, I will tell you that. It was exciting, it was something to be looked at as the expert was a little daunting but the reality is, and this is sort of open, the reality is this is still an area where there is a need for that sort of field. So there was a lot of expertise in more traditional aspects of archival work. There was not a lot of expertise at that institution at the time in the realm of electronic records. So I did a lot of outreach and education. I traveled the state, basically I did my preacher on a donkey routine where I just go to any government entity that wanted to talk and talk to them about how they were managing their electronic records. To this day, you'll note my title at the time was Archivist. So those that want to talk about a real strict definition between records management and archives, I don't really see it that way. And at the time I didn't either. The idea is that I blended areas of the thing I talked about digital preservation but I also talked about active records management. Both their sides are the same coin. So that's a lot of what I did there, traveled around a lot, helped draft new rules for the state, which was pretty exciting. So I helped draft rules that are still on the books there. So while my name might not be on them, I know I did that, so that's a pretty cool thing. From there, I was able to move on to my ancestral homeland, so to speak, where I grew up, which is the Pacific Northwest. And get back here to Oregon, there was an opportunity to lead, there's an opportunity to take charge of this really ambitious project called the Oregon Records Management Solution, which is a statewide initiative where we help facilitate electronic records management software for government agencies, large and small. When I got here, we had somewhere about 30 client agencies, 25, 30 client agencies. And it was kind of, we were needing to expand and do more work. I'm proud to say we're up to 57 now. We've grown tremendously in the last few years. And it's just been a very exciting project to be part of. But has very much also strained my expertise. So I've had to learn constantly. The sort of work I do is often not what you would consider archival work in a traditional sense. And as you've no doubt determined by now, I am also sort of a professional talker. This is often how I get my positions. So next slide, please. Thank you. So keyword here, and this is sort of one thing I have learned over time. The keyword is adaptability. And I mean that not only in your own willingness to take on new challenges and are exploring new venues of work or opportunities, but also to be adaptable in terms of the way you do your work. So first of all, what were my goals when I pursued this field? Well, first of all, steady employment. So having worked in a non-affiliate sector for a few years, sort of feeling my soul slowly being crushed week after week, I knew I wanted something, first of all, that would give me steady employment in the field. I wanted to be able to work. So I learned my lesson from my MA. I also wanted to do something that would drive the field forward. I wasn't interested in sort of just filling a place as people might have before. Show up at a job, do the job, and leave the job, and have no real movement in that. I'm not interested in being static. And my third goal is I wanted to have a proactive and positive impact on society. Now there's lots of ways you can go about doing this. I wasn't necessarily focused on a particular kind of institution or a particular kind of job, but I knew I wanted to have something that I would feel that I did something good for other people, for society at large. And so to do that, and this is something I always advise people, cast a very wide net. I will tell you point blank that those people, so when we graduated, I got my MLS still in the heavy parts of the recession. It was not a great time for job searching. It was a challenging time. And it was 2011. And I have a lot of friends and colleagues who struggled to find work for quite some time. It took me about six months to procure a full-time position at Archives, which was not too bad. But I knew others that struggled for longer. And that's not to sound negative. It's just that you, the ones that struggled the most, I think were the ones that were trying to pigeonhole themselves that were saying, I only want to work in this specific aspect of the field. I only want to work in this location. So casting a wide net, being open to new opportunities was the number one thing to give me an arch... I applied for all types of archival work because I didn't know what I'd be good at yet. And so that I say, so you don't know what you're good at until you try. So we all come out with our education. We've learned a wide variety of topics. Maybe we have some areas we really like and some that we're maybe less enthusiastic about, but we haven't really had extensive experience in applying those skills. So we really don't know what it is we're gonna excel at. And so I always say, you know, look for all the types of opportunities that might be out there. Be persistent, of course. And this is, you know, I won't belabor this, but people know I sent out dozens upon dozens of resumes and got very little response back. And that is pretty typical. There's a lot out there. I think it's probably better now than it was when I was searching. I hope it is, but it's always challenging and you can't get down on yourself. You have to just keep trying. Also perfect opportunities are rare. You're rarely gonna find something that checks all your boxes. So what you do is, and this I did this as well, I made a list of things that I was willing to try, things that I were hard to know, which I tried to keep a small list, things that were hard to know, whether it was a location or a type of work that I just didn't want one to do. And then I had others where I said, you know, that's good enough for ones that I really wanted, but there are always opportunities. So don't overlook the good enough one in, you know, hoping for a perfect one because the perfect ones really don't exist very often. It's very rare that you're gonna find yourself in that situation. Next slide, please. Okay, so it's good to be needed, right? So a lot of this is, I mean, there was a lot of discussion. I know when I was graduating a few years back about the, or when I was in school, was the graying of the field and that's not a pejorative term. It's simply saying that, you know, there was a large generation of archivists and records managers that were nearing the end of their careers. There were gonna be a lot of retirements imminent. Well, the recession kind of put a pause on that. So we saw a lot of folks that were going to retire, not retire, hold on for another five or six or seven years as their pensions, you know, had problems or whether they couldn't, you know, they couldn't make the numbers work. So that expertise in still, in large part is still around. We are starting to see a lot of those retirements and there is a need, but there are still a lot of those folks around. But what are they best at is often the more traditional aspects of the field. These are folks that are, they may be very gifted at managing manuscript collections at doing traditional appraisal work at creating a handcrafted filing, finding aids with great amounts of detail. The sort of work that quite frankly is not the future of it. They, and they need people, they need people that can help drive that next generation of skills into their institutions. State archives in particular, bear a huge responsibility for ensuring government transparency and access to information. So it's very important they need people with these next generation skills because they are, as Matt and Kathy alluded to, being, you know, we're getting the stuff. The stuff is coming to us, all manner of records from different types of agencies in whatever formats they may have been created in these days, overwhelmingly digital. And archives don't always have the tools in place and the expertise in place to handle that. So there is a great need for folks to step in and take that role. And they really need skills that are not necessarily part of the traditional ARM toolkit. Now I know, I've talked to Pat and I know the program at SJU has done a great job in really driving innovation in these next generation skills. So that is important. And so as the others have said, these next generation skills that are not traditionally considered part of it are critical. So it's a big opportunity for folks coming into the field right now of making a difference, of setting themselves apart. And can tell you right now, having been part of both being hired and also being on part of the process where we are looking to hire other people here at the archives. We brought on a few people in my time here that I've had a role in doing. And we are looking for people with these skills that will match a more so than experience in some cases. We're looking for folks in particular that have people skills. Now that's something that was not traditionally be considered. Also training and teaching experience. So any sort of outreach, the ability to talk to other people is an important thing. And I understand not everybody's a natural extrovert such as me and I know that. But it's still as important. You cannot hide in a room and have that be a viable profession anymore. It's just not a way because you in many cases will have to defend your field. You will have to advocate for yourself and for your institution regardless of where you're at. And if you can't express what you need in a way that other people can understand, you will find yourself short. Comfort with technology, of course, technical skills are critical. And I think we're aware of that point. And also a willingness to learn and adapt because if we're stuck on one thing, again, we're not gonna be able to keep up with pace. Next slide, please. So, and to this, this is something I like to say in a lot of my presentations in that the work is not the profession. So we are all members of or should certainly be members of this greater profession that we call archives and records management or information management or whatever we wanna call it these days. The goal of this profession is to ensure the preservation and access of records for the appropriate period of time. So that doesn't mean that everything's permanent. As Matt said, that's like 5% of records are permanent or less. But it also means that we help facilitate access to and preservation of records for whatever their lifespan may be. Because there are a whole bunch of records that live in the gray zone between 10 and 90 years. And that kind of whole big Wild West. And those of us that work more on the records management side of it, I have a major role to play in that to make sure those records are preserved for the appropriate period of time. So when I say the work is not the profession, I mean the work is just the task we perform to accomplish that goal. The goal is what we're aiming at. There is a tendency, especially when folks have done a job for a long time to mistake the tasks they perform for the goal in itself. So they have procedures they follow because that's the way things are done. And they don't always stop to question themselves and say, you know what? I think we're actually missing the great bigger picture here. So we always want to be asking, is this task actually serving our goals anymore? Or is this something we can move on? And this is not to say we're just gonna burn everything down and start over. Expertise built over years and the folks that work there have been doing this for decades have a lot of valuable knowledge that we need. I rely on that. I often say I don't know a lot about the stuff. What I do know is what we need to do to help bring the stuff forward. And so I need the people that understand the collections, that understand the things we're working with just as much as they need me to help express that externally. So for us to be able to outreach. But are the tasks actually serving our goals? I do not ever wanna be in a situation where we're saying that's just the way it's always been done. So that's critical. Don't hue to orthodoxy if it doesn't work. So I know some folks, and I remember this from school as well, some folks are big on this is the way things are done. These things are, this is the way it's written in the text. This is how it's supposed to be done. And that's great when you have the luxury of time and all the resources you need to do things perfectly. But what I love about government work to some extent is the fact that the very downside that we don't always have the resources we need that we don't have infinite resources in time means we have to be creative. We have to do fast and dirty sometimes. We have to do good enough work. It's MPLP at a massive scale. And it's kind of exciting that way because we have an opportunity to make things work even when we're not just handed everything. So that is, for me, that's an exciting thing. Maybe not everybody finds that exciting, but I find it rewarding. We do need to learn to speak the languages of the communities we're working with and respect their experience. So by this, I mean I'm frequently having to do outreach for lack of a better term and training for all manner of people at different government agencies that come from very different backgrounds. We have people that know nothing about records. We have IT people and administrators and HR folks, folks that do work that I don't even understand in the slightest. And I need to be able to convey the importance of aspects of records management to them in a way that means something to them. So it means learning their language. It means I speak half IT, I speak half admin, I speak half budget. Nowhere in there do I try to speak records management to them if they don't already understand it or grasp it because that is a turn off. So again, it's a challenge, it's a people problem. It's a way in which we have to interact with folks. So that's why I do a lot of things that are not considered archable or records management work. A very little of what I spend my day doing would be considered that. And yet the greater goal is ensuring that these records are preserved properly and get the treatment they need. One other thing I'd say before I move on to the last slide here, not last slide, the second last slide, is that best practices which exist and people love to point you are great, but you know who writes the best practices? People in our field, we write the best practices and you might be the part of the next group that writes that next best practice. So always look at that and go, is this still serving us? Is this still going to be the thing that we need? The beauty of this field is it's not that massive and so you will have a role to play if you want to have a role. They are always looking for it, whether you're at COSA or NIGARA, which is another government records archivist association I work with or any of the other associations related to different aspects of the field, SA of course. You have an opportunity to have a voice and really engage in that. And government in particularly, it's a very tight knit community. Next slide please. Okay, and so the beauty of the immaterial is what I call this. So I get asked sometimes, don't I miss the stuff because I barely work with the stuff. I don't touch records very much, but what I do is I joke, I work with the stuff of the future. So I am setting the table for the next generation of researchers. And so while I might not, people in my current genealogists may not see the work I do, for example, having a lot of value. And folks when I say I work for an archives, they immediately go, oh, you know, because they immediately go back to something on TV or whatever. That's not what I do, but I am going to do the same thing for the folks in the future. So this is a cool thing. I work at the system level, not the record level. So this is another opportunity for folks that it's, I'm dealing on information systems that manage records because when we start dealing with scale, especially with electronic records, if you start to look at the stuff itself, you're already lost. But impacts are magnified. So you make one change and it can affect millions of records. So if you don't want to get stuck doing the same thing for years, good news everyone, this is a good opportunity. There are, it's constantly changing. We're constantly happening to adapt. You get a chance to solve real problems that impact people every single day. And what's so, what's so exciting about this is that I talked to people that previously barely knew we existed that certainly didn't give our field respect. And I turned them into advocates for us. Next slide please. Final slide, I promise. Okay. So last little summation, state archives, opportunities to diversify your skills abound. So they're always looking for somebody to try something new. Hey, do you know how to do this? Cause we never have a specialist for everything. So you get to learn. So I've learned IT, I've learned legal aspects. I've learned how to deal with mobile devices. I've learned social media capture and transparency. I've learned how to handle us, you know, server infrastructure to some extent. Now, it doesn't mean I'm an expert on any of these things and please don't leave me in charge of all of them. But you get to dabble in a lot of things. You have a significant impact on society, even if they don't think you do. I personally have a hand in helping agencies provide proactive public access to records through web portals, which is cool. They can access their own records. They never were able to do that before. You get to unleash your creative problem solving, you know, so you have 90% of what you need to put it together, you have to come up with that remaining 10% and out of a whole cloth. And as I mentioned before, there's a great community of government, air and professionals. I have great friends and colleagues that I've known through work in this and participating in communities and things. I really love the people I work with, both internally and externally. So go stay. That's all I got. Thank you very much. Those were three fantastic presentations and what a wonderful opportunity for students considering what they're going to do after they graduate to learn more about different positions within the state archives. I'd like now to open the session to questions. If anyone in the audience has a question, unmute your mic and go ahead and feel free to ask. While they're thinking, I was wondering if you had any recommendations. I know you mentioned Kosa and Nagara, Chris. I wonder if any of you have other recommendations for membership and professional associations and how that might be beneficial to you in pursuing a career later on. There's lots of different organizations that kind of overlap. So you'll find, some of them, you just kind of find when you're in a field, the areas that you need to learn. So I have found a tremendous benefit from learning from, I'm not a member of, but learning from AIM, A-I-I-M. What's that, a social of image and information. Information and image and images. Thank you. They put out some great resources. They have classes available that have really, I took some information governance classes from them that were great. So they're kind of an affiliated community. There's ARMA for records management that is specific in that field, specific in that track. I'm currently working on my certified records management exam, a CRM, which is put out by ICRM, but they sort of exist as a licensing body, so to speak. Honestly, I've gotten the most out of COSA and Nagara because it is a community. So COSA, the council of state archivists, is a very tight community. And I've been part of their state electronic records initiative since almost since it's beginning, which is cool. They have a lot of subcommittees talking a lot about a lot of these issues. And then Nagara, which is a broader organization that covers all levels of government, federal and down the local and has great communities as well, and I've done a lot of work both of those. Any of you two have other ones you've worked with? Well, our national organization for archivists, generally the Society of American Archivists, well not devoted to or dedicated to government archives, certainly includes a lot of government archivists in it and addresses a lot of the issues related to government archives work. So I would always encourage young archivists or new archivists to join that organization. And there are regional organizations, the Midwest Archives Conference is the one that's in my region, but there are regional archival organizations across the country that are also very valuable. And you could also, Illinois doesn't have a statewide archives association, but we have the Chicago area archivists. Obviously that's a big population center for us. So even though I'm about three hours south of Chicago, I'm a member, just as they kind of connected with what's going on in the state and with the archives community in our state. And I think that's a good point. Sometimes it's difficult to travel to conferences that are national conferences, and you have a better opportunity of becoming involved when you look to the local or the regional associations to get started. So that's a good point. I know that you mentioned Ann, Chris, and they're working on standards now in California, having to do with the electronic records. So many of these associations do get involved in standards work. And I was wondering if any of the three of you have also been involved in standards work. Yeah, I got involved and have continued to be involved in something called the Kansas Electronic Recording Commission that established standards for the state of Kansas, for the electronic recording of land records, of, you know, mortgage records and things like that with register of deeds offices. It was one of those where it's a statutory body and the person writing the statute just happened to be someone who I'd come into contact with. So he added the state archivist to the commission. And it's been a really valuable tool for me really for contacts to network with people in the title industry, in the mortgage industry, in the banking industry, and people that I wouldn't ordinarily come into contact with. And it's an opportunity to kind of educate them about some of the archival issues that we encounter. And so a very good way to take advantage of the people that you meet in a good way in order to get back. Yeah, I think all three of us probably are pretty good at leveraging any conversation and turning it towards archives in one way or another. Which is just that outreach that Kathy had been talking about, right? Right. No, you go ahead. I was just saying, I too have been involved in, and certainly at a state level, crafting rules. So administrative rules, both here in Oregon and Illinois for electronic records guidance. And that's something I had the opportunity to do extensively in Illinois. I spent a lot of time working on them there and then also a little bit here in Oregon. So that's pretty neat. And also it's an easier way to start than, sometimes after a while you do a couple of those things. Next thing you know, somebody from NARA's calling you or people from some of the bigger interstate organizations call and ask if you'd be willing to participate in their white papers or in their standards and best practices. Exactly. And that's such a good way to elevate the image of the professions, the archives and records management profession. Now I'd like to know if anyone else in the audience has a question. Oh, if not, then what I'm going to do is thank the three of you very much for being here today and presenting for us. It was a fantastic afternoon.