 Welcome, everyone, to today's Mars guest lecture series. This presentation is an archivist tale. Our two presenters, Jeff Huth and Karen Truvet, are with us. Jeff, as you can see, is a Chief Records Officer and Chief Law Librarian for the New York State Unified Court System. With over 30 years of experience in the field, Jeff is an authority on best practices and records management and government. He serves as a Chief Records Officer of the New York State Unified Court System, as you see there. In this position, he oversees the management of the records of the court system, including the records of the 1,500 courts in the system. And as Chief Law Librarian for the Unified Court System, he is responsible for ensuring courts have the legal information they need to conduct their work. He previously served for a quarter of a century in various capacities at the New York State Archives, ending his career there as the Director of Government Records Services. He speaks frequently around the country and the state on records management archives and archives. And I have to add that Jeff is also a dedicated member of our MARA Program Advisory Board. So I want to thank him for all of his sharing of his expertise with us. Now Karen is an Associate Professor, Head of Special Collections and College Archives Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY. And she's the first incumbent to hold this position. And she's served in this role since 2008. Karen holds an MLS with a concentration in Archives and Records Management from the University at Albany in New York and a BA in Art History from UNC Chapel Hill. She served the Archivist Roundtable of Metropolitan New York Incorporated as President from 2017 to 2018 and has presented at many conferences, most recently in Oslo, Norway in June of 2019. Karen co-wrote a chapter for the fashion forecasters 2018 and edited fashion plates 150 years of style 2015. Since February 2018, Karen has co-hosted the weekly podcast with Jeff, an archivist tale. She serves SAA as steering committee member, regional archival associations, consortium representing art, steering committee member, college and university, archive section, and board member, archivist, American Archivist Editorial Board. There's just so much that both of them are doing that. I'm just really pleased that they're able to fit us into the schedule. So right now I'm going to stop sharing and Karen is going to take over. So thank you for that wonderful introduction. I hope you have some breath left. We are so happy to be here. And I just want to say hello, everyone. I'm Karen Trivitt and I'm an archivist. And it is a delight to be speaking with you today. Well, I don't want to add any more to my bio. I usually give my one line bio. So I must have given Pat too much information. Do not worry. We are much more interesting than our biographies, especially me. Transbiography was pretty good. As you see on the slide, our purposes to capture, preserve, make accessible the diversity of voices in the archives profession, as well as those professions that support the work of archivists. But it's not just archivists, as this slide tells you. It's also records managers, knowledge managers, data managers, and so on. So let me tell you something about the podcast so that you understand it. What we are are two people. We are married. That may not have come out in our biographies. Who have decided we're going to run this podcast so that we can collect the voices of archivists in particular, but other people working in the records field. And the reason for this was because archivists don't always collect themselves. They don't always document themselves. So when we bring a single archivist or sometimes a pair of archivists together for a podcast, what we're trying to do is create an oral history of those people so that we can know something about them so that we can know something about the practice of archives at this point in time and how it changes. We for a while sort of percolated the idea. And I have to give credit to Jeff because he was influenced by his daughter, which has a podcast. And he, again, thought it would just be a great idea to capture these stories and preserve them for the future. So we began doing the work in February of 2018. And it did not start without a struggle. We had some time where we were challenged to come up with a title because what do you call such an endeavor? And at the end of the day, we settled on an archivist tale because that's exactly what we're capturing. Well, we settled on it, but Karen came up with the title. But it's pretty good because it seems like a reference to the Canterbury Tales by Jeffrey Chaucer. And since I'm named after Chaucer, that makes sense for me. And so think about this. I forgot to tell you this earlier, but here is our official description of our purpose. When we started out, we decided we're going to be a business. We're going to have a business plan, which is lose as much money as possible. And we're going to figure out what it is that we want to do. So this is our description. Archivists in conversation with archivists discussing their work and passions and how they care for the historical record and present the story past. Because this is really about stories. It's about stories about the archives and from the archives. And it's about stories of archivists themselves. Yes. So initially, we had just the idea and a title, but we had to follow up with things like equipment. So we purchased, based on solid reviews, the microphones we needed, the microphone stands, the microphone covers, the recorder, which is a Zoom recorder, and very minimal. So we always had in the back of our minds that we wanted as little equipment as was practicable, but could be taken on the road. And the other thing we did was try to find people to talk to. And it's not really that hard to do, but except for one thing. We are a weekly show. Yes. And we don't have gaps. We don't have vacations. We're not like Bill Maher who takes vacations. We do it all the time. And so we have to work in our networks. Yes. And those would include what you see on the screen. On the local or regional area scope would be the Archivist Roundtable of Metropolitan New York Incorporated. And the next one is one that I'm very much associated with, have been for decades. But I'm members of all of these organizations. America is the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. And it's one of the largest regionals in the country. Smaller than the Midwest Archives Conference. But when we go to these conferences, we often interview people. Right. And that includes the Society of American Archivists, which is a national in scope in terms of its membership. And then further afield would be the International Council on Archives. And we have leveraged the means of communicating with that membership quite well to initiate interviews with an international scope of interviewees. More on that a little bit later. So here are what we call our passions, which is primarily people. As I like to say, people is always the most important. And so we focus on that. But we also are focusing on different kinds of people, people doing different kinds of work. We focus on trying to get voices from different parts of the country and different parts of the world. And we try to get people who are doing work that's different. So we try to say, if here's one kind of archival practice that's very uncommon, we want to find somebody and we want to talk to them. And we want our listeners to learn from these interviews as well as be entertained by them because each interview is about an hour long, which is long format for podcasts. So we want to make the experience from start to finish well worth the investment of the time. So there's our product. Our product is podcasts. That's all that it is. You can see the length of them there. Notice that one is an hour and five minutes. But I have to say that Tamara did a great job. She was there, episode 102, talking about what's the name of it again. The traffic transport in London. Transport London, yeah. Transport for London, right. And so amazing stories. You would not believe the records they have. And you would not believe the reach of transport for London, which most people think is just the tube, the subway system for London, but is all kinds of transportation, even sidewalks. And so it's just amazing what you learn by talking to people. So this slide is actually slightly dated because we are up to 106 episodes at this point. We aim to keep four or so in a queue so that we can at least breathe out a little bit between the airing of episodes. And as Jeff said, we are weekly. And our time slot is Saturday at 10 AM Eastern time. And we're very industrious. We've met this goal every Saturday since the beginning of February 2018. By the way, if you want to have a second job, make sure it takes up a lot of your time and you don't get paid for it. And you have to spend a lot of your money to do it. But OK, maybe that's not good advice. But here's our procedure. Our procedure is Karen asks these two fixed questions. So I can't say them because I never do. Karen will have to say them. OK. I will say them as I always do, which is, what is your archivist origin story? How did you become an archivist? Of course, this wording shifts a little bit, depending on the individual and that individual's role as it relates to the profession of archives management. It comes immediately after the opening and initial introductions. We also ask our interviewees to introduce themselves. And that can be as short as just their name or it can include their title, their organization, and any additional detail they want to offer. But that introduction, along with this origin story question, really kicks off essentially the conversation. We don't have a script. We basically have just a lovely organic conversation. And it usually yields a wonderful give and take of information. About 40 minutes in to the conversation, I'll ask the second question that you see on the screen. What keeps you passionate about the work you do? Because we want people to feel a little infested by the stories we're offering. And the passion, I think, is a common denominator in our field. And let me tell you one thing. This was these questions, though they were slightly differently phrased, were in our work plan. We're in our business plan. We decided we wanted to learn certain things about archivists. And you'll notice that the focus is really on the archivist. It is on the human. Because records are evidence of humans existing in the world and they tell you something about us. Nothing is important unless it's human. And everything is human on the Earth because we're in control. Well, sort of. Here's the other thing. Here is the other thing to keep in mind. We have lots of other questions. Once in the big, fat middle of the story, we usually talk about all sorts of things, different kinds of projects people have worked on, different struggles that they've had, interesting records and stories that they have. So they're telling their stories. It's sort of like a living with serve. If you go into the entries, which we use Spreaker as software to capture and distribute the content, you'll see that while I'm asking these questions and we're getting answers from the interviewees, Jeff is typically quite busy writing down metadata tags and key phrases from which we can choose a title. Because we give every episode what is hopefully a fun and factual title. I'm not sure about factual. It is. It is because it comes straight from the interviewee. OK, somebody said it. Yes, somebody said it. It's true. And it's also worth noting, out of the 106 episodes, at every 25th episode, Jeff and I basically interview each other because as Professor Pat told you, we are busy folks. And there's something to catch up on. So we've indulged to talk to each other every 25th episode. We should check to see if anybody listens to those episodes. Yes, we should. And how do we do that, Jeff? Well, we can actually look at our data in various ways. And the interesting thing is I rarely do it in any detailed way. So the way that a podcast works is you have somebody who's your provider. And that's where you're hosting everything. But all these podcast aggregators take them. And then they skew them out for you. And you try to get connected to as many of them as possible. And you especially want to be on Apple Podcasts because they're heavily listened to. And so if I went to Apple Podcasts, I could tell you how often people left at the 32-minute mark on a certain episode if I wanted to. But usually what we're doing is we're basing it on downloads, which is do we see certain rises all of a sudden? Which we did in the very recent past, which is when we did two very interesting episodes in London and one at the National Archives of the UK, we saw a dramatic jump. And the other person was from Archives Portal Europe, which is essentially a giant catalog of all the archival materials in Europe, or at least all that have been put into it. And they have something over 500,000 records. It might be 500 million. I can't remember. It's a huge number. But there are other ways to count. And so we count in this way. Because we are archivists and because we are data people, we track everything in a database. The entire progress, our ideas for who to write to and convince to come on the show, and the people who talk, and everything gets put into this database. So we know where every episode was, when it was recorded, when it went up, how long it took, picture the person, everything. But we count. And so here is one of the things. So in about two years, what we've done is we've conducted podcasts in 14 states, in nine countries. We've interviewed people from 15 countries. And our number of downloads per week averages, not averages, ranges from 350 to 600 a week, which seems good to us for a fairly niche podcast. So what are our future plans? Again, we don't sit still for very long. So we do have plans for the near future. Initially, we have in April of this year, we're going to do our first live interview. And that's going to be with Kelly Wooten at Merak, which is in Harrisonburg, Virginia. And Kelly is the librarian at the Sally Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University. Now, we spoke with Kelly earlier in November of 2019. But she agreed to come back on the podcast to discuss with us matters specifically dealing with donor relations. So we're really excited to continue that conversation with her and narrow it down just a bit. So also, we're traveling more this year. And so we have to go see friends who used to live in Germany but moved to Spain. And so while we're there, we're going to be pretty close to Gibraltar, a place that Karen's never been to. So I've been there because I used to live across the, whatever you call it, the Mediterranean from it. But Karen hasn't. And while we were at the National Archives of the UK, we actually discovered that there is a National Archives of Gibraltar as if Gibraltar is a nation. So we are thinking of maybe actually going to Gibraltar and then telling our friends, well, we can't talk to you for about an hour and going to do a little interview at that archives. But we haven't worked that out. That's a possibility. What is on the books, so to speak, is a trip to Abu Dhabi, which will be the host site for the International Council on Archives Congress, which happens every four years. So it's like a conference on steroids. And it reaches, again, internationally in terms of attendees. That's in November. I think it's the 16th or the 19th of 2020. And we're very happy to be meeting with the NYU in Abu Dhabi archivist Brad Bauer. So that's, again, in November of 2020. In between June and November, we're going to be attending SAA in Chicago. And we're hoping to set up multiple interviews there, which we've done in the past. And it's been very fruitful for us. And there's one thing that I want to say about Abu Dhabi is it doesn't have a Hilton. And I'm Hilton's honors member. So I'm rethinking the whole idea. But when we're in Abu Dhabi, more importantly, we know we're even going to see some people that we've seen before. We're going to see Brad Bauer. But we're also going to see some of our friends from that we made in Iceland when we were there last year doing interviews. And so we can keep these conversations going. And we can allow people to hear all kinds of voices. And I should tell you, there are people out there in the world who are archivists, who are speaking fluent English. And then afterwards, they say, oh, I'm so sorry. My accent's so heavy. And here I'm like, man, you speak perfect English. Lucky for us. You have a slight accent. We're used to that. English speakers are used to that. It will be great because we don't want voices to be lost because somebody doesn't like an accent. It doesn't make any sense to us. I mean, listen to Karen. She has an accent. I don't hold it against her just because she has a beautiful voice. Oh, thank you. Another plan, which isn't on the slide, includes we want to identify appropriate technology to conduct interviews remotely. We have not embarked on that yet. Again, this is a self-funded endeavor. And we're just taking baby steps. But that is definitely a plan for the near future. Yeah, I'm sometimes wondering how it's taken us so long to do that. Though I did find a place in the city where we could do this. But I said, I'm not sure we want to pay $200 an hour. Oh, boy. So I decided against that idea. Agreed, agreed. So here is our practice. And the major part of our practice is constantly planned, constantly planned. As a matter of fact, I feel a little unplanned because I think we only have, I know we have only three or four episodes out there. And so we only have that many in the hopper. And we're going to need more because, big news, my daughter's pregnant. She's going to give birth sometime this month. And as soon as she gives birth, I'm leaving the city. We're leaving here. Well, we're headed to LA. We're heading to LA, and we're not going to stop. So we have to plan constantly to make sure that we can set things up, meet archivists where they live, meet archivists when they come to see us, find archivists in the city, do all of these things. And it's quite interesting. And I'll just tell you, since I do the metadata, is that it's, I think, let's just see if I told you everything. So in order to determine the nationality of people or the nations we're in, I've set up the database so it automatically counts if we have a new country. And it counts all the people that we have on because sometimes we have two people and sometimes we have only one. And this month, we're supposed to have one with three, which will be a first. And so we keep track of everything, including, and this is the most important piece of metadata you could ever collect, the color might cover the guests' shoes. They have the three primary colors in green. And so it's interesting to watch people choose and then tell you why they chose in order to justify the choice. That's what we call trivia, ladies and gentlemen, listening in. And part of our activity is constant promotion. We want people to listen. We want people to learn. And again, we want people to be entertained. It's not a small investment to spend an hour of your valuable time listening to information that doesn't give you value for your investment. And that's truly what we want to have happen. Even just yesterday, I found myself, we have business cards for the podcast and we hand them out when it's appropriate. And yesterday, I was visited here at FIT by representatives from Google Arts and Culture. And they seemed incredibly interested in the work I do. And so a colleague who was with me on that visit mentioned the podcast and they were very interested in that as well. So we're just keeping, again, our own conversation going to promote the podcast. Did you ask them if they could fund our travel? Not yet. OK. And so the other thing is this. We preserve our content. And our content is pretty narrow. But it's a little broader than you think because what our content is is all of our episodes. But the original versions and the final versions, we don't edit our podcasts very much at all unless somebody has a coughing fit or something went wrong and we have to edit things back together, stuff like that. Because it's just otherwise. It's just an oral history. But we have those. And they're not quite yet at the University at Albany. But they will be there very soon. And the University at Albany, however, has our other records, which are kind of interesting. It's the notebook that I keep the notes for the episodes in. And it's our business cards, which we bring out a new one every year. And so who knows what it will be next year. But this year, it's nice and soft and velvet. We're very proud of it. And there it is. Yeah, there it is on the screen, at least the front of it. So that's our story. We'd love to field your questions at this point. We've come full circle. We want you to be inquisitive and maybe even recommend some interviewees. We're always open to suggestions. And if there anything else you want to write to us about, you can write us individually or together. Archivist's Tale, of course, is us together. Yes. And you also see the URL to connect to the content there at the bottom of the slide. Thank you very much, both of you. This was excellent. Now I'm hoping we get some questions. Feel free to put your question in the chat area if you do have one, or to just unmute your mic. I see we have a very good group of us today. Any of you wondering anything about the archivists they might have interviewed or even about Karen's work at FIT? I see a couple of questions there. One from Leah. Do the edits conflict with preserving the authenticity of the recording? We edit incredibly minimally, as Jeff alluded. It's very much in the vein of oral history recordings. So we want it to be as if people are with us when we actually execute the recording. And just so you know, no matter what gets edited out, it's also saved. We never get rid of the original file. So the original version is saved. And it's very slight. So I mean, if you really want it, I can send you Joe Cohen's coughing, because I've got about two minutes up. I don't think we want to hear that. I do before we do anything else. Karen, can you move to your final slide again and just bring that up on the screen? Someone would like to be able to grab that. Can you see it? Yeah. We lost it when we were trying to find the chat. That happens. Which we haven't found. Oh, here it is. Oh, you got it. Do either of you have a dream interviewee? You haven't had a chance to talk to. Wendy asks. Karen. Yes. I would love to interview Dr. Sada Skander. He is the former director of the Iraq National Archives and the Iraq National Library. And he was in charge of that pair of institutions when we went to war in 2003. And Dr. Skander and I had developed a dialogue, even talked about the possibility of my visiting to help preserve some of his assets that has been too dangerous a part of the world for me to act on that dream. But I fully intend to at least keep in contact with him and maybe see to fruition an interview. Well, in my case, luckily, we've already interviewed the person because I am a large Velvet Underground and Lou Reed fan. And so when I noticed that the archivist who had done most of the processing for that had received an award at the Society of American Archivists last year, I reached out to New York Public Library, to contact her, and we had her on the show. And it was really great because we could talk a lot about the archival process in a very interesting collection that was that had almost no textual information, but tons and tons of audio recordings. And we also had an archivist who knew as much about Lou Reed as I did. So it was quite interesting and quite fun. In a bad way, it's the people who take care of the Bruce Springsteen archives have not gotten back to caring you. Yes, that would also be a dream, to talk to the archivist in charge of the center that holds the Bruce Springsteen archives. Pat, should we just go down the list here? Yes, please do. OK. The favorite part of the podcasting process for me is I am exhibit aid of a lifelong learner. And I encounter problems to solve every day I come to work and I get to talk to a wider and wider network of people who can help me solve those problems. Either they discuss them directly in an interview exchange or it just furthers that network of people and professionals that I can rely on to help me. So I like to talk. So the talking is fun. And it's not I like to talk because I like to listen to myself. It's because I like to hear ideas bouncing between people's minds. And I like to consider something and then understand it and then reform it. And that's what this is about. But at the same, that's what the whole podcast is about. It's about talking to people and learning something. And the other thing is sometimes a podcast are amazingly revealing. You find just remarkable things about people in their past. You find out remarkable things about the power of archives to actually have an effect on the world. And you even find just very personal stories that sometimes come out. And it's a beautiful thing because what it gives you is that human being, you have their essence. You have their essence through their voice because through their voice, they can tell you what they feel by the tone of their voice and by their words. And so that's what I love. And we see a question about how do we advertise or do we advertise our podcast in any way? And we are so lucky to work with Abigail Christian at the Society of American Archivists who distributes the in the loop newsletter every other week from SAA. And she has been so gracious to include plugs for our podcast every two weeks. So it reaches thousands of potential listeners. Yeah, that's about the only way we advertise if you can really call it that. Well, we advertise, we do actually advertise other ways. So we do have a Twitter account and we- Oh, well, social network, yeah, yeah, yeah. It goes out onto our Twitter account and it goes out onto our Facebook page automatically. It's set up to do that automatically. So that goes up. If something, our Twitter account also used to have daily archives quotes, but it got a little tiring doing it, doing 365 of those a day. So they're pretty sporadic now. But if something else happens in our life, we're putting it up there as well. And so it's all sorts of ways. I mean, as Christina has noted, we did an interview with the people who run ArchivesAware in order, which is a blog of the Society of American Archivists in order to tell people about our podcast when we were getting started. Karen has been interviewed on the Society of American Archivists podcast. When we get new business cards, I send them out so that people can see them and think about them. And we tell people where we're going. So if we're going, if we're starting a trip, we say an archivist tale is heading to DC or something like that. That is true. And then we try to make sure about that. The other thing is you run into people, you talk to people, you carry your cards. And I don't tell everybody about the podcast because one of my major interests is beer and beer and archives don't mesh that often. So, but you find the people who you think might want to know something about this and might want to listen. Oh, how do we prepare for each interview is the question from Laura. Thank you, Laura. Well, you know, sometimes interviewees in advance of the conversation will send us their CV and we look at it. It's not rigorously academic. I'll call the preparation. But it's just enough to get a grounding of the person and what they do so that we can feed into the conversation if it starts to low. And a lot of people that we interview are people whose work we know or people whom we know too. And part of what we do is we're documenting parts of our lives at the same, not just only when we're talking, but for instance, I have been, Karen doesn't go to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives conference all the time, but I usually do. And I'm trying to capture those voices so I can capture the voices of that group of archivists, many of whom never go to a national conference. And we have both been in the Archives Leadership Institute, which is a continuing program to try to build leaders for the archival profession. And we make a special effort to try to interview people who have been in the Archives Leadership Institute. So we do focus that way as well. And so because of that, we know some of the things to ask them. We know the experiences, what kind of experiences they should have. And we can start digging in there and we can also compare and contrast them to our separate experiences. I guess it's also worth saying that we mentioned in an earlier slide how we leverage our networks through professional organizations. And again, it gives us a nice sort of framework for inviting people because we already have an association or a relationship with them. For example, as Pat mentioned earlier, I was president of the Archivist Roundtable of Metropolitan New York, Incorporated. From in the, I think it was 2017 and 2018. And now because of the continuity of officers, I'm able to go back and ask people whom I served with as well as who came after me and ask them about their service experience in the role they hold for Archivist Roundtable. And I should tell you that we know people, listen, because today, a friend of mine, Dario Lubinsky, she wrote to me and she said, listening to episode 106, you've obviously never worked at a public library. The ASPAB or ASVAB, I can't remember, practice book is one of the most stolen of all library books. And so I did tell her that I absolutely have never worked at a public library. By the way, that is some sort of practice book to figure out what skills you might have for what jobs the military uses. But I don't know anything about it. Me either. And Daniels asks, have you had guests approach you about doing an interview? I wanna say maybe once or twice, but it's very, very rare. It is interestingly rare. And once we reached out to the person and then they didn't get back to us. So... We've also had a couple of examples where the institution where archivist work would not release the archivist to talk to us because we were, I think, mistakenly seen as media people. I guess maybe technically you could say that's true, but our audience is niche, our approach is niche. It's like not meant for the masses. It is not, but we have told Facebook that we are a media company because we have to define our company when we set up the Facebook page. So we are the media. We just might not be muckraking journalists. Truly. And there's one part of an episode that I wanna mention before we go to the next question, which is in our first episode, we hadn't done this at all yet. And Karen, we asked each other the questions, okay? And when Karen phrased the second question to me, I just gasped and I said, I can't remember how she phrased it. I said, that's making me think about this in a totally different way. So even a question can change your experience and change how you view the world. So, Laura, you're welcome. Do you have any recommendations for us if we want to embark on a podcast series? It's a good question. I think Know Your Limitations is a good bit of advice. I think it's been helpful for us to really be very stringent in defining our scope, whether it be who we interview or who we want to attract as listeners. Again, we've understood what our mission really is and that it does reach internationally. So when we travel with part of the itinerary being an interview, we have our equipment with us and it is not burdensome. So there was a lot of thought put in to how we began the whole process. So what I would add is do what we did, which is define, and that's what Karen's talking about here, define exactly what you want to do. What is it that you want to present to the world? What kinds of voices, what kinds of stories? The other thing is, and this is also working off of Karen's, is figure out how often you want to do this. Occasionally, I think maybe weekly was a little crazy. It's a little ambitious. But we keep on making it. I'm a little worried this month, but we keep on making it. We have enough to get us through March 21st. And so just make sure, but keep in mind, you don't want to be too irregular. So if you come out every three to eight weeks or something, people won't necessarily know about it. You might fall down in people's podcast queue and they might lose track of you. And so your podcast app on your phone might stop, downloading the episodes to the phone. And so make sure that you do something that's at least fairly regular. And I'd say it'd be great. Certainly don't try not to do it less than once a month if you really want to keep visitors. So I have to tell you, I do have a tiny little podcast on a very specialized thing that is occasionally not monthly. But my advice would be not to do that. So what is Laura's podcast going to be about? That's what I want to know. Laura, do you have any ideas? I work at a archives with the university archives and I think it'd be fun to find stories from the university archives that maybe our students would want to listen to. Absolutely. To kind of expose the archives in different ways. On that topic, do you have any podcast that you're fans of besides your own maybe? I'll let Jeff answer that question. Well, he's more involved with it than I am. Karen doesn't listen to podcasts. She doesn't listen to ours. I do. Actually, I don't listen to ours either because we've already done them. I mean, I listen to her. But in terms of archives podcasts, I haven't listened to many though. They're usually on my phone. So I couldn't recommend them. The kitchen sisters are very famous and very professional. And so they do a podcast that talks about people they call Keepers. And so Keeper could be somebody who's a museum curator or an archivist, somebody who's a librarian. It could be any sort of person who's trying to save intellectual information for various formats in order to use it into the future. And so that would be one that would probably make the most sense. I should probably make a plug for the Society of American Archivists podcast, Archives and Context, which has an advantage that ours doesn't. It's two advantages. One, it is very brief. They are... 20 minutes. I think 20 minutes, yeah. So it's extremely brief. And they edit them. So they say, well, we're gonna take out the parts that aren't quite as interesting. And so those would be the two that I was just going to. After that, obviously my favorite one would be the, what is it called? The one, the New York Times one where the argument I think it's called where they're just arguing different political views and all the rest are political, you know? So I don't wanna recommend those right now. Thank you, Laura. And by the way, a great idea for promotion in case I forgot to say that. I think that's great. Yeah. Any other questions? You might have also already addressed this, but in terms of the time it takes to do this, in addition to the interview itself, what sort of time does it take for each podcast? Good question. Very good question. You wanna start? Well, to set up the equipment takes about 15 minutes, not long. Again, it's minimal. And the podcast itself lasts about 60 minutes, give or take. And then Jeff rolls up his sleeves and I'll let him explain. Okay, I'll explain. But we're missing the hard part. What happens then is it's not too hard, but it's time consuming. I have to process the episodes. So I'm recording it as a high quality a high quality wave file. So it takes up a lot of space, et cetera. Also, these are not the greatest pieces of equipment in the world. So I run them through an engine to just clean up all the sound and make sure everything's clean. And then I have to take that file that's produced and I have to run it to make a file small enough that I can put up on the podcast. And so that if I counted all the waiting time, I mean, it could easily be 25 minutes to 30 minutes per podcast, especially since I have to transcribe all of my metadata into the database, write up a description and then transfer this to the podcast site so they can spin it out into the world. But that's not the hard part. The hard part is finding people. And that takes up more time than probably all the time we're talking to people. Yeah, it's impossible to quantify. It's like I might be brushing my teeth and having Karen tell me some ideas and then we might be reaching out to the person and then the person might not get back to us and we'll have to try again. And then we'll say, well, what happened to this person? And so finding those people is something. Very time-consuming. I need a piece of paper to write down these podcasts. Yeah, how about here? Okay. So let's see. Elle Daniels asks, have you ever thought about expanding your scope from just archival voices? Well, we sort of already done that in a way because of these adjacent professions to archives management. We've interviewed digitization vendors, for example. As we said earlier, records managers. So it still has that sort of gravitational pull towards archives. Did you have something in mind in particular? Because we're open to ideas. It is interesting to think about interviewing researchers sometimes. Yeah, those who use archives. Yeah, that's an interesting. And donors, I think, would be a good category as well. And we try to be very, very broad. I know I'm expanding on it just a little bit in terms of the information profession. We don't really do IT professionals, but we get pretty close. We definitely interview records managers. I'm a records manager. We interview knowledge managers. We interview people who call them database managers, things like that. Oh, it's a great idea from Laura to interview MLIS students. Because, I mean, they're the future of the profession. And we shouldn't be capturing only the past. Yeah, and Mara, we have tried to get Pat on the show, by the way. But she says, Florida's too interesting and otherwise places that we aren't are more interesting. As soon as you could do it remotely, I'm ready. All right. I've already sent you an email about something that Robert Smallwood uses for his remote podcast that turned out really well. Oh, OK. Excellent. Thank you. That'll be good, because we have somebody in Ecuador we need to interview. I just did an interview with him, and it came out really well. And then the other thing is, if that doesn't work, I'm hoping to meet you in Abu Dhabi. We'll see. Oh, perfect. We're going to see everybody in Abu Dhabi. Yay. I don't know why you're going there. It doesn't have a Hilton. Oh, no. OK. That's right. And yeah, donors working in the field. You know, it'd be pretty interesting. Maybe I should, I keep proposing this one talk to the Society of American Archivists to talk about archivists who have donated their materials. For instance, my life's work, my writing, my artwork, and everything has been donated to the University of Albany as well. I mean, lots of enormous amounts of stuff. And I wanted to get other people talking about giving away their archives who were archivists. And so, hey, if nobody's going to make it a session, maybe we can make it a podcast. So that might be an idea. You guys are giving us lots of ideas. Thank you. And donors, yeah, really interesting. Because how do they perceive what's going on? Right. It's going to be an interesting look. I like these people, Pat. Aren't they great? And I was going to say, the sum working in the field refers back to the students. Oh. Right, right. I knew that. Yeah. A lot of our students who's working in state archives. So there's a pool there, too, if you ever want to send out a call for interest. Very good. All right, do we have any other questions? Our time is just about up. So what I'd like to do is recommend to everyone that they copy down those email addresses. Be sure to get in touch with Jeff, Karen, or directly to the Archivist tail. You'll get both of them. And visit the site and listen to some of those interviews because they're just fascinating. And think about your own way to produce podcasts. We haven't talked about that in quite some time. And this is becoming very popular right now. Right. I mean, if you want to listen to an episode, listen to 105 from the UK National Archives. The guy is a medievalist. But what he talks about in how they can use genetic material in parchment to understand more about the records in the time, it's amazing. So he's very medievalist. But he's very technical at the same time. It's an interesting look. Also a funny guy, even though he doesn't smile for pictures. But you don't have to watch him when you're doing a podcast. Right. Right. Well, that's a wonderful place to start. So I want to thank you again. And I'm going to stop our recording right now.