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[ { "speaker": "MS. JESSIE KRATZ", "text": "All right. Well, let me get the metadata started for this. My name is Jessie Kratz. I am the Historian of the National Archives and today I’m interviewing Margaret “Peggy” Adams in the Washington Room of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC. Today is Monday, January 29, 2018. And Peggy, thank you for joining me today. We are just going to start by talking about your career and your education before you came to the National Archives. Could you talk a little bit about that?" }, { "speaker": "MS. PEGGY ADAMS", "text": "Okay. Well, I’m just thinking. You said January 29. I believe that’s my anniversary date of coming to NARA in 1987." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Wow." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Yes. There was a snowstorm and so I started later than I was supposed to, but I think it was January 29th. If not, just right around there. And that was '87, so that would be 31 years ago, right?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes, 31 years ago." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "31 years ago I came to NARA. ]Now before that, well before that, I had done a master’s degree in history at the University of Wisconsin (UW) and taught world history for a year at a small college outside of Chicago, Rosary—it was then Rosary College. It’s now Dominican University. Then I got married and moved back to Madison and had to find a job. I interviewed for a variety of things and ended up being hired as the founding data librarian/archivist for the UW Social Science Data and Program Library Service, DPLS. DPLS was established in 1966 by the University of Wisconsin as both an archives and a library for the social science machine-readable data that were being generated by faculty and students at the University of Wisconsin so it could be preserved and reused. [DPLS was also created to serve as the campus repository for the data that the university acquired as a benefit of its membership in the national Inter-University Consortium for Political Research (ICPR, now the Inter- University Consortium for Political and Social Research, ICPSR), and of its membership in the International Survey Library Association of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. DPLS was positioned within the UW College of Letters and Science, funded by the UW Graduate School and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and reported to a faculty board of directors. Gerry Ham, then head of the Wisconsin State Historical Society and a highly-respected archivist and historian, served on this board, as did History Professor Jerome Clubb, who was one of the pioneers of quantitative history.] So, I sort of fell into the full area of data archives. Just lucky because I was hired [to be the founding data archivist] because I had had graduate work at Wisconsin and knew the research process. That's kind of what I was told. [DPLS was a unique organization;] there weren't these kinds of organizations anywhere else. And that was in 1966. [The DPLS holdings were primarily stored on computer-readable punch cards, with a small proportion of the data files stored on computer magnetic tape.] So, I was there for three years and then my husband, Tom, had a Fulbright and we went to France [for a year. Before we left, DPLS sponsored, with support from the UW and the National Science Foundation, a national Workshop on the Management of a Data and Program Library. While we were in France, I edited the proceedings from the workshop. When we] came back I did some part-time work associated with DPLS. But then we moved on to Kansas and we had small children, and I wasn’t [professionally] employed for about six years, although I did some part-time teaching in there, some secondary teaching and some college. [I also took a few graduate courses in Political Science.] And then we moved to Kentucky, and I had a position in what was called Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Kentucky where I managed an online numeric database system on the state’s economy; [I also edited a quarterly journal and participated in] a variety of related research activities. And that took me to the end of the 80s. So, I had done all of that [before coming to the National Archives]. In the course of the work at Kentucky—and I was just talking with Nancy Melley, [now Director of Technology Initiatives at NHPRC] about this. I was a consultant on a NHPRC-funded electronic records project for the State of Kentucky, basically hired because of the work I was doing at the university, and I was familiar [with the commonwealth's computerized records]. So, I did [that project] as part of my job at the University of Kentucky and then we moved to the DC area after I had gotten the position with the National Archives and my husband got a position at NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities]. So, we were both in the same place at the same time, which we hadn't been because of the history of the job market at that point." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "What made you apply for the job at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, what made me apply really was Lew Bellardo had originally been in charge of the electronic records project at Kentucky and I talked with him shortly before he was leaving Kentucky for a position he took in Georgia and it seemed to me at the time that the position he was taking in Georgia was taking him away from electronic records and so I asked him something to that effect and he told me no, \"I turned down a position at the National Archives in the machine-readable project, the machine- readable branch.\" And so, ding-ding, my husband and I were looking to be able to move to the same place, to the same city and have professional jobs. Obviously, data work is a fairly small little universe and when Lew mentioned the National Archives was looking to rebuild their machine-readable branch, it seemed an obvious thing for me to contact them. And I had some contacts from my days in Wisconsin at the Census Bureau and I called that person and talked with her for some time, and she then got in touch with somebody at NARA. And I got called and the rest in history." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay. And that was in 1987 you started?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I started in 1987 but all of those conversations took place in 1986." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And then what was your impression of the National Archives when you came here?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, I had an interview with Trudy Peterson [then head of the Office of the National Archives], and Bill Cunliffe [then director of the Special Archives Division], in Trudy’s office which had a nice big Wang computer [terminal]. They sold me on being part of the rebuilding of the machine- readable branch. When I arrived and was assigned to my office on the 21st floor, or 21st stack level, I had a wooden desk that didn’t have any drawers and I was given an old upright typewriter as my personal piece of equipment. I was coming from Kentucky, right? So [think of] all of your stereotypes, but I had had my own PC for several years. There was an IBM plant in Kentucky, and they made sure the university was well supplied. And to be given a manual typewriter as my personal piece of equipment to help rebuild the machine-readable records program was quite a shock. And what I got introduced to was how under-resourced the National Archives really was. And that comes out in the articles of some of my colleagues in the 30 years book 1 : how under-resourced NARA was. And so that was a major shock." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So, what was your first order of business then if you’re sitting there with a typewriter trying to—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] I wrote a memo. [Laughing]" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "What did your memo say?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Something to the effect that I don’t believe this." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Give me a computer [laughing]." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I don't believe that I'm expected to help rebuild the machine-readable records program and have as my personal equipment a manual typewriter. There was a dial up computer [terminal]. It was a DECwriter, which accessed the [mainframe] computer at the NIH which the staff commonly used. [The NIH computer center was then a data center for several federal agencies.] Then there was also a Wang system [terminal], like I had seen in Trudy’s office. I therefore had been blindsided to the fact that this [equipment was only] in a few offices including in the machine-readable records branch. There was one [NCR terminal] and it was only used there, well, it was primarily used there, for accounting purposes for the Trust Fund’s system for handling reproductions of records and the cost recovery for that. So effectively the staff did not have equipment and the staff at that point, as part of the rebuilding, was being trained in using this DECwriter to communicate with the NIH computer and was learning to do some forms of programming that were then sort of the default processes at the NIH Computing Center, which [the branch] was using for our data services. [All of this was reminiscent of my 1960s experiences at DPLS, but this was 1987, at the U.S. National Archives.]" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And who were your colleagues when you first started at the machine-readable branch?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "The head of the branch at that point was Edie Hedlin. And Tom Brown was down in an office that was off of Trudy Peterson’s—he was on her staff. And I had actually known him through other professional activities from when I was in Kentucky. In fact, it was he who my contact at Census called when I was looking for a job. So, he was a colleague, but he was not in the machine-readable branch at that time. Others [archivists] in the machine-readable branch then were Ross Cameron (who has just recently retired), Mario Lopez-Gomez, Don Harrison, Bruce Ambacher, Chauncey Jessup, Mike Meier, Fynnette Eaton, and Nancy McGovern had just been brought in from other offices. What Edie was doing generally was trying to build up the staff by getting people detailed from other places. I was an outside hire but most of the others were building up from inside. _Thirty Years of Electronic Records._ Edited by Bruce I. Ambacher. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2003." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And in those very early years, what was a typical day like?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, very shortly after I came on—well Mario Lopez-Gomez (who left the Archives about ‘89 or ‘90 and went to Justice) was very much involved in the reference program. [He was handling its technical aspects.] And shortly after I came on, I got assigned, basically, to manage the [rest of the] reference program. So, my work started trying to get a handle on what the holdings of the branch were at that point, how the National Archives was making those records available, and how it was making known that it had those records." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And what were the electronic records in—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] Well, the records that were in most demand and that to some extent still are, are the casualty records from Vietnam and Korea. So, I found myself, after having been at the University of Wisconsin during the Vietnam War and active in the anti-war movement, coming to the National Archives 20 years later and dealing with reference questions from veterans about that war. Initially I found that quite a shock because if the people that I had worked with in the anti-war movement had been more successful, those guys would never have been there. And it occurred to me not long into the whole thing, when you hear the stories and all the rest of that, that well, the least I could do is provide" }, { "speaker": "service to them. And that really drove that reference program for a very long time", "text": "the casualty records from the Vietnam and Korean Wars, which came to the National Archives in the early 1980s. And then other [digital] records that were here at that time were records from the Securities and Exchange Commission and from the former Civil Aeronautics Board. Well, I’d have to look at the list now to remember when that was what. But the Vietnam collection was very definitely [dominant] and it was also the most unique kind of thing. It was a collection that, or a series of records, that none of the academic data services had. That wasn’t the kind of data they had. And so not only was I not familiar with it but it was the only place in the country you could get those records. And for the Vietnam and Korean casualty records, the reference service was to provide as much record-level response as possible. But for all of the other [machine-readable] holdings, copies of [complete data] files [on magnetic tape] were made available." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Can you walk through the process that a researcher would go through to access the Vietnam records?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "It would be a veteran calling and saying I need—among other things—I need to document that I was exposed to a stressing event and the buddies that I served with died. Can I have their casualty records? So, we would be working with them to try and pinpoint sufficient information to try and get down—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] And you would actually go find—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] Right." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "They couldn’t access the—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] They couldn’t directly access. We had full printouts of those records and one practice that the Department of Defense had started even before they transferred the records to the National Archives, was to create state lists of casualties which are extracts from the whole database which organized casualties by their state of home of record. Those were very much in demand for memorializing purposes. In addition to the individual veterans who were seeking records of buddies in order to document their post-traumatic or their stressing event, you had all of the people trying to memorialize. And that was also during the period where there was a lot of emphasis on the people who were at that point still considered to be missing or prisoners, well, not prisoners of war but missing in action—which really were the people whose bodies had never been recovered." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Can you talk about as time progressed and your career with the archives, the kinds of things you were involved in and how your career changed?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, let me just get back to the Vietnam casualties just very briefly." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[The casualty records dominated, yet] the collection was continually growing, and the big goal was to make known the existence of these files. But in the course of that, I had only been here a couple of years when one day I got a call from a veteran who said he had been at the wall [the Vietnam Veterans Memorial] the night before talking to the ranger, and he said to me “I lost my legs but not my life and the ranger said you could help me.” So, I started going through [the printouts of] the casualty records and it was at that point that we were becoming aware of the fact that there were a lot of errors in the data, especially in the data from the Army. [The Army casualty records covered both wounded and deceased and were worldwide in scope. The DOD casualty records, in contrast, were records, from all the military services, of the deceased, missing, or prisoners of war from the defined Southeast Asian combat area.] The folks who built the Wall had used as many sources as they could find for information to honor casualties [from the Southeast Asian combat area.] Since there were errors in the data, they picked up errors in some of the names that they put on the Wall. [As I recall], it turns out there were 13 people whose names were on the Wall who were in fact living and this gentleman was one of them. And so we worked with him to find that his record [of his nonfatal casualty] was erroneously coded in the Army database [as fatal] and that’s how his name got up on the Wall. But we were able to find that and also provide sufficient information that that was corrected in [subsequent transfers] in the databases by the creating agencies. So, news of that kind of support clearly traveled among veterans’ organizations and there was a fair amount of publicity about that particular incident and we then started getting a lot of requests, like from a veterans’ group someplace in Chicago. [One of their members came to NARA several times] with all kinds of information. He had been asked by his veterans' group, [and sometimes funded by them], to come down to DC and see what he could find out about all the different people that all of these people had served with. So, it [our reference services] sort of morphed that way. Among the other Vietnam era records are the records of all the air sorties. And so among other things we were in contact with a reporter, a CBS reporter, who was doing a story on the unknown soldier from Vietnam. And we were able to work with him not only to find—he had enough information about somebody he thought was the unknown. And we were able to find that gentleman's casualty record that conformed to what the family had known. But [using a volunteer- developed prototype system for searching records], we were able to find the air sortie record which then convinced the military that he was no longer unknown, that they had identified this person. So that was working with the media. So, it [the early 1990s reference program] was Vietnam driven but took on many ramifications. At the same time the holdings themselves were growing substantially, I mean, because every agency in the federal government had data that undergirds their systems and those were beginning to be transferred to NARA. So we were expanding in terms of getting on top of—we had something that we called the Title List of Holdings of these files that we kept maintaining and made available. [It replaced an earlier data catalog.] We did it through the NIH computer, so once BitNet, [a computer network] came about we were able to make it available through BitNet, [subsequently using the communication tool] FTP. So, we were putting a lot of emphasis into description as well as in service to the extent—I mean, but limiting the individualized service to the Vietnam [and Korean] casualty records because you could never—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Do it for all agencies." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "No, I mean, there’s just no staff to do that." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right. And about how big was the staff?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, when I started out, I was doing that work and there was, I said Mario Lopez-Gomez who was handling all of the reproductions of records and all the sort of building the databases and helped us increase the Title List and so forth. And then we had a technician and then we hired another technician not too long later. And then gradually a professional. But it never was more than three or four people. And even now [2018] the reference staff, electronic records, is only, I would say five or six people. But a lot more material is available online now." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "But like with anything technological, you evolve and you provide new services and those new services generate demand for even more services. So, but still very understaffed. And it was an era when machine-readable records, or electronic records as they became, as their next identity, for all intents and purposes still meant digital data. The whole business of all of the office automation records and email, and all the rest of that didn’t come until later." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah. So, I was going to ask, how did the advent of the Internet change your work processes or was it something that came like much later? Because agencies weren’t transferring their emails until—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] I don’t understand that." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah, exactly." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I mean, I am removed from the program for the last five years, [so my comments don't reflect recent developments]. But the focus on email of course came with the White House email. I would say it was a slower evolution, when it, I mean, we had BitNet before we had the Internet and BitNet was just in universities and government agencies. But that provided a mechanism for people to get information and having FTP, file transfer protocol, meant that people could download like the Title List and so forth. So, at each stage, technology enhanced the services that could be provided, and we tried to keep up as much as we could, or that resources, etc. [allowed]. But we had a presence on the \"web\" in a sense before the push of the Internet." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "In like the early 90s?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Mm-hm, mm-hm. Right. And unfortunately, [beginning in 1993], the PROFS 2 case ate up most of NARA’s resources for electronic records, handling the demands of that litigation. So, although the branch, by then it was the Center for Electronic Records, had developed a computerized capability to validate the data files that agencies were transferring, which created metadata which, the intent from the very beginning was that that metadata could be used to make records available and assist researchers. Because of the PROFS case, all development on that ceased until the PROFS case was basically done with and so we had a long period — and that’s covered in the 30 years book. We were doing what we could to continue, I mean, the reference program was pretty isolated from the PROFS case—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Okay, I was wondering if you were involved at all." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "No, not directly, no. And Ken Thibodeau, [the Center director], was very prescient in doing that so that the [archival electronic records] program could at least still survive. I mean it was certainly being taxed very heavily to have so much of its resources handling that case. But what we could do didn't involve a sort of building on what had gone before with the intention of it affecting reference and access until the late 1990s, which is when NARA was finally in a position to let the contract that led to the development of the Access to Archival Databases." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "The AAD." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Which is still up." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the development of the AAD and your role in that." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, I was very directly involved in that. We worked with contractors, using the metadata that is produced as a result of processing to then develop a capability for a selection of the holdings, those which really lend themselves to individual record level access to be available for search and retrieval on an individual record level. So those would be records that identify specific persons, places, institutions. A large proportion of the holdings which are research files that agencies produce are not appropriate for record level access. So AAD only deals with files that are appropriate for record level access and we use the metadata from the processing to then have the metadata that could be displayed as the codes and values for the data that is record level accessible, and that’s where AAD shines. And I’d like to see it get some expansion." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "For those who are listening who don’t really know about AAD, could you kind of describe a 2 A lawsuit (Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President, 1 F.3d 1274 [DC Cir 1993]) filed by Scott Armstrong, American Historical Association, the American Library Association, the Center for National Security, and others, relating to access to and the disposition of email records. The case takes its name from the IBM PROFS (Professional Office System) email system used in the White House. little bit about what kind of researcher would use that?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, now the holdings of AAD have not only casualty records but the [immigrant] passenger lists that are computerized and donated to the National Archives in electronic form. There are World War II records of Army enlistees which the Army had digitized, I mean, not digitized, had created on punched cards during the war and then those were migrated to tape. So, the World War II enlistees, there’s about nine million of those records. There are similar records for all the internees of the War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps where the WRA had also captured that information on punched cards originally which were later migrated to tape. So those are the kinds of records that have individual personal meaning to people. If you sort of think of researchers as those who are seeking information from records and people who are seeking information to create new knowledge, the folks who are looking for information from individual records are the kinds of folks who would best use AAD, whereas those who are looking to analyze data get copies. Now, they get copies [of files] through downloading them. But for the longest time, and continuing to this day, [software-independent copies of files] could be made available on removable media on a cost recovery basis. And that, although people who were unfamiliar with the phenomenon find that a very backward way of providing access to records, is the type of access that analysts want. The fact that they can now download the whole file is obviously better than having to get it on removable media. But they’re still looking for the whole file, so they have the whole file [of records] to analyze. Whereas people who are looking for information from that one record want to use something like AAD to retrieve it. And it’s [AAD] on the Archives’ website going in through the research page and so forth and there are a whole bunch of different categories of records. I just named some of the obvious ones." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So, were you in the same unit the entire time you were here?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Yes, I was. The unit itself changed to many different identities but yes. That’s what I came to the Archives to do. That’s what, I mean, I had had this opportunity that was really very unique and, you know, my work with the University of Wisconsin and then at Kentucky doesn’t fit any kind of real career path nor, even now, is there really training for that kind of career path. So, I very deliberately was coming to the National Archives to be a part of what was then called the machine-readable branch and which now is the electronic records division." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah. So, did the Archives offer additional training opportunities for you?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, yes. I took a bunch of courses at NIH, well, so it was NIH, I mean the government sponsored them. But that's primarily what I did. And then of course from time to time there would be a variety of management courses and that kind of thing. [I also had immersed myself in archival literature when I was working on that NHPRC-sponsored project for the Kentucky State Archives. I also had opportunities throughout my career for the kind of training that comes from participating in professional associations and meetings, and NARA was very supportive in this regard. I published a number of articles and also taught some workshops, and you always learn a lot through that kind of activity. And, I had an opportunity for a several month detail at OMB, which was highly informative]." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And did the change in the Archivist and Acting Archivist and the new Archivist change your work at all? Did they implement any changes or ask you to make changes or did you basically have a constant mission the entire time and didn’t really deviate—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] Me personally?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Well, I guess you personally and then also the machine-readable/electronic records programs." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I think that mission has stayed pretty much the same. Has it been understood by the rest of the agency? Not always. And any time you have new people who have no previous experience with [data], then you’ve got a big learning curve for them to have an understanding of how this [digital data records] fits into the rest of NARA. Given that the digital universe now represents to such a large extent office automation and social media and all the rest of that, that's very known to people because it's something that they've had experience. So, the challenge always is you—people’s understanding of what electronic records are depends upon where in their lifetime they first started interacting with them. So, the challenge [for the electronic records] staff always is to meet people wherever that is and then try to bring them forward to an understanding of how this kind of documentary material, primary source material, fits into a traditional archives. In many countries, especially in Europe, the way research is funded in those nations leads to the creation of national data services or national data archives in a way that is different in the United States. Or, the centralization of statistical production in many countries does not exist in the United States. We have a very disaggregated statistical system where you’ve got many, many different agencies." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And they’re not—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] And it’s not one central place. So that diffusion means that there’s also not one obvious federal agency other than the Archives, which does have a government-wide responsibility, to be the host for that kind of service. So, it’s very—I mean, as the 30 years [book] shows, in Meyer Fishbein's work and others at the time and since, using the computer or before, basic machines, was an expansion of the way in which primary source documentation is created. So, the Archives is responsible for all primary source documentation that has long-term value that the government produces, [including digital data]. But it's still always kind of a stepchild." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes. [Laughing] Well, I do want to go back to the beginning when you mentioned you didn’t have a computer. When did you get your first computer?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I couldn’t put a date on that. There was a point at which—and the [electronic records] reference staff moved down to the 18th tier. I mean, obviously it’s not—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] Yeah, where you [were] originally?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "On the 20th or 21 st tier, I’m not sure. The machine-readable branch was on 20 and then there were a few people who had offices up on 21; that’s just a stack entry. And then there was a biggish room on 18 which was opened up for the reference staff of machine-readable. And I know we were in there when we got the PCs but I couldn’t tell you for sure when we moved down there. But we moved out to College Park in the 1990s, let’s see. Clinton was elected in...?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "‘92." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "1992. So, the PROFS case began in—so he became President in ‘93 and that’s when all hell broke loose in 1993. So, my guess is it must have been 1994 that the machine-readable branch, by then the Center for Electronic Records, moved to College Park. Before that there had also been expansion when Ken Thibodeau came on as director of the Center. His office was down on the 5th or 6th tier, someplace else." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And it doesn’t exist probably." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "No. I’m sure none of this exists anymore. But all of this was better than the stories I always heard from the folks who were—see Trudy Peterson’s article in the 30 years book—when they were down on 14th Street in some offices on 14th Street when 14th Street was not where anybody wanted to be." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So, then you moved to College Park in 1994." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "And so it was sometime before that that we got computers. Probably at least two years before that so it—but I mean it was a goodly while, I mean, we got pretty adept at using the Wang and there was also the NCR machine for the Trust Fund. and Wang to do a little bit of word-processing. And then the DECwriter interactive terminal, typing terminals. That’s what we used for interaction with NIH and the maintenance of the Title List such as it was that we had then." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So, when you moved to College Park, were you provided new equipment?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And how did things change with that move?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I don’t think a whole lot (as we continued to use BitNet and were already using office automation]. But, you know, you forget an awful lot. It’s like with any kind of pain [laughing], you forget it. I mean, compared to the facility, the kind of physical environment, it was really nice being downtown but the physical environment was really lacking. And those of us on the 18th tier actually had nice digs. So many of our colleagues in the then-expanded Center for Electronic Records, were in space that was just unbelievable. So, it was very positive change that way." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And you were all brought together into one office space?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "One—yes, yes, one large office space. Well, two large office spaces but they were just across the corridor from each other." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Were they on the sixth floor?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Fifth. And then at some point we also moved down to the fourth floor." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay. And then you continued to work in reference." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "While you were—well, I guess your whole career?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Right. And after Tom Brown retired as the head of the Archival Services branch of the Center, I took his responsibilities and eventually was hired into that position. So, for the last six years or so of my career, I was managing the Archival Services program more generally, but up until that point I was doing the reference part of it [although I also had other responsibilities like the review of records schedules and appraisals]." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And did you—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] I [had been] assistant branch chief [since shortly before we moved to College Park] and my primary responsibility was the reference program until I became the chief of archival services." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And how did you enjoy that, being the branch chief?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, it was just a lot more work, with, you know, that kind of thing is always an opportunity to try out things that you thought about for some time. But I had worked very closely with Tom for about a decade so it was not that much of a change really. Except that I had a larger workload." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "What other sorts of projects did you work on?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I mean, all the various developments to make known the holdings, which as I said started out as the Title List and then that graduated, morphed into, I mean, when the staff started putting things [descriptive records] into the Archival Research Catalog. But that didn’t occur until the early 2000s. So, all that time we were developing our own ways of getting in touch with researchers and informing them—writing informal reference papers, focusing on things about which we were getting a fair demand. So, trying to capture something in a brief leaflet. Not a formal RIP but just a casual two pager or so. And then AAD was a full other range and then what we started doing was—and I did not do a lot of this work myself but I directed it—[some very talented staff did it]—the work to making the records available online for download. And that’s a whole additional process of getting the documentation so that it can be in shape to be scanned, so that it can be downloaded, because you can’t use the data without the documentation. And most of the documentation that we received, at least up until the era of the internet, was all print on paper. So that all had to be—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I can imagine. That’s a lot of paper." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Right. Getting it scanned so that it can be downloaded. And we were involved. I mean, obviously we were involved in the planning and implementation of the original ERA [Electronic Records Archive], but since there was a separate program for that, our division, although we had a fair amount of input, had its regular work to do and, you know, our reference demand was continually growing. What we were doing [in lieu of online access] was moving from providing the removable media on which we provided copies of files —analytical researchers wanted copies of files. Initially we were providing copies on tape and then as the various kinds of tape, the densities of those tapes increased and so we had to keep up with the changes in the media, then making files available on diskettes, then making them available on CD-ROM, so I mean, there was a lot of evolution and all that’s before we made records available online. It’s all very evolutionary really." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "But it was more than a full-time job." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Oh, sure. Yes, the new media comes out. It’s almost like, awe, another one. So, can you talk about some of the awards you received for your work?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I’ve been fortunate to receive some recognition both from the Society of American Archivists, being named a Fellow, and from IASSIST, the International Association of Social Science Information Service and Technology, which has sort of been my home professional organization since, well, it didn’t exist when I was in Wisconsin, but since I was in Kentucky. And so that’s a small organization. IASSIST named me a, what do they call it, a lifetime achievement award or something like that. You could look up [their website, www.iassistdata.org]. It’s an organization of people like ourselves whose primary job is to identify, preserve, and make available social science data. Most of the National Archives' holdings in electronic form are archival records which can be used for social science research. [Other awards included Fynnette Eaton's] guest-edited issue of _The American Archivist_ in which I had an article on the history of punch card [records] and how they are the predecessor to electronic records. Tom Brown had an article, Linda Henry had an article, Bruce Ambacher had an article. I mean many of the people had authorship in the—" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "[Interposing] the 30 years book" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "30 years book. And that _American Archivist_ issue received an award." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "I know you said you do reference but are there certain aspects of reference you really enjoy doing?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Oh, I mean, it's always fun to work with people who think they have found something that nobody else has found. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes NARA will have preserved some record for a very long time that no researcher has really ever exploited and for a researcher to find those records is always very exciting, as is helping them do that. But I would say helping the guy who said, “I lost my legs but not my life,” helping the media find and identify the unknown soldier, those are real high points. But having the rest of the world understand that the United States is committed to preserving its digital data has always been a high point too. So, all my opportunities to participate in various professional associations were... I could carry that message." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Can you talk about some of the challenges that you faced while here?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, yes, the major challenge I would say is the stepchild role. The fact that because the first electronic records were only data. And most people don’t grow up knowing anything about data like you do about words or other documents. They don’t grow up analyzing data and the numerical quality or the quantitative quality of data makes data kind of off-putting to a lot of people. And it’s not something that many people think of as a primary source that they should use. I have an old friend, a historian whom I used to badger because he wasn’t exploiting data sources for his subject and he would say to me, well, you make it easy to use and then I’ll use it. Well, I guess, I mean, the Archives certainly has a role to play in making its holdings as accessible as possible but learning how to analyze data I think goes beyond that. So, for that kind of user, the development of AAD seemed an answer. The other kind of thing that you come to realize is that the documentation that accompanies data files, which is essential for the use of the data files is also primary source documentation in and of itself. As an example, and I have this in an article, the Army kept very extensive records of casualties during the Korean War. Among the things that they coded [for each casualty], was country of casualty, another was cause of casualty. I think there were a couple of different kinds of cause of casualty codes. In the place of casualty, there were codes for almost, and you can look at it, I don't remember exactly, but for many East Asian countries. Obviously, no [casualty record has any country code] except Korea. But whoever put that documentation together at the outset of the Korean War apparently thought that there might be [other countries where casualties would occur]. So that’s some of the mentalities view that you don’t [anticipate]—I don't know if it’s documented anywhere else. The cause of casualty codes, and there were many different kinds: they included chemical warfare, and they included gas, they included something else like that. None of those codes show up in any of the records. But again, somebody thought that they had to prepare for that. Likewise, and this you would find I’m sure also in census records of the period, you had race for the Army casualties. Coded Caucasian and Negroid and Malayan and something else. But then you had Puerto Rican-Negro and Puerto Rican-White. So, you begin to get a glimpse of the mentality of the time documented sufficiently to say hey, the Army had these—and in the case of the race, people are coded all those various races. Things [like] that are very different as we've evolved, our understanding has evolved. So, the electronic records need to be understood in their totality not just the digital bits and bytes but everything that goes with them and the programs from which they came. And that’s where I think there’s a lot of work to be done in educating everybody. The other kind of thing you learn is the way in which our society—there has been tremendous evolution in the concepts of privacy and confidentiality. There’s been change in the law and regulations but there’s also been a personal change. That has happened very significantly now with social media. But social media is just the current stage of a long evolution. So, it used to be that the military used the social security number as the military ID. And that meant that people who were deceased and whose records were therefore very open, their socials were available too, because that was their serial number. Well, for the longest period of time, that was not a problem. But then as various governmental programs of various kinds came to use those numbers, then the deceased person’s privacy was no longer obscured, yet parts of their records may affect the living and you need to think of that. So, I think a consciousness—and there I think technology has played a very real role because getting at individual records like people expect to do from digital records, was a fairly remote activity prior to the computerization of information. And so there’s just been this evolution. Another area where we’ve evolved is for the longest time we worked hard to apply the concepts, the regulations, the everything else that evolved during an analog era to the digital as part of the discussion of it being, the digital being accepted as primary documentation. But there’s a downside to that. And that is, we wouldn’t necessarily come to all the same decisions if we were starting afresh. So, you see, I mean, all of the discussions now about the abuses of social media certainly highlight [all of these issues] and we’re still working off of mentalities and consciousness, regulations, law, you know, everything that was developed for an analog era. Does it all apply? I think that’s still to be determined. So those are the kinds of things you learn [ i.e. challenges you face] in the course of doing this kind of work." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right. And can you talk a little bit about your decision to leave the Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Oh, I was getting on [laughing]. I worked until I was 70. So, I think that was time for me to move on. New people could do it and I needed to just step back." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And that was in 2013?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Do you miss it?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I don’t miss the commute." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Where did you live?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I live in DC, upper northwest." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Oh, yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "I don’t miss the commute and I think the day-to-day grind after a while, [one] just gets tired. It was time to move on. I did not want to do contract work in this field partially because I think the government should employ more people directly. But of course, I miss it. I mean, it’s been a part of my [professional] life always. And I try to keep up online with as much as I can in terms of evolution, things that are important in SAA and I’ve done some writing and I did edit a volume of articles for IASSIST after I retired. I have an article that theoretically was supposed to be out some time ago that I was asked to do a year or so ago." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "So, you’re still active?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Still a little bit, yeah. And I do other volunteer work." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Okay. Well, I know I said it would be an hour and we’re about 10 minutes over but I was wondering, is there anything else you want to share?" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "No, not really. You know, I keep talking about the stepchild. When I \"retired\" for the first time in the early 1970s because we had children and we moved someplace else, I really thought we were at the cusp where digital data, as we call it now, would be mainstreamed [in libraries and archives]. You wouldn’t have to, I mean [make the case for accessioning and preserving them]—they would just be a part, accepted as a primary source resource just like all other primary resources. After all, I had trained as an historian and primary source documentation is the key to that. When I came back to professional data work at the end of the 1970s, I found that libraries had computerized their catalogs. There had been an adaptation to technology but data (electronic records and/or digital data) were still not mainstreamed. Even as we talk about the era of big data, I don’t believe that the electronic records program here is yet really mainstreamed. And so I used to say I was going to work until I was 85 or we win. And the \"we win\" was that we were going to get to that point. Well, I was disappointed in the 1970s and I guess, you know, after a certain point I think a lot has been accomplished and there’s a very, very important volume of electronic records that have been preserved and are available and will live. I would like to see them more understood and I would like to see the [dedicated] people who work with them more resourced. But the National Archives’ pie keeps getting cut up into many, many pieces so there’s a constant competition for resources, and then of course the National Archives has got to deal with the universe of federal government records, [and tremendous pressures to digitize its analog holdings]." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right. But we’re all moving towards electronic—I mean, eventually that’s the business we’ll be in." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Yes, but what kind of electronic business are you going to be in?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Can you see, I mean, you worked here, do you think the Archives is—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] You see, my soft spot is still with the data, right?" }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yes." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Okay. Will the Archives as a whole really—I mean, do the research reference staff here in this building as well as the ones at Archives II think of digital data as a primary source when they’re working with people? They do if they know about a particular file or they know—I mean, I think there’s a fair amount of use of resources that are on AAD. But, does primary source documentation to them incorporate that kind of resource? I mean, it’s not unlike, you probably would find some people challenged by thinking of photographs, still photos, digital photos now. Well, the historical record is very word based. Data is not word based. So yes, I think we’re going electronic and I think [digital] data are going to continue to be created because that’s what runs agencies." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And that’s what’s really—I mean, I think the data, because you can study and you can find trends and you can point out things that are wrong—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] Right. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Especially since the agencies don’t talk to each other, we really need to keep that information." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Right." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "And make it available." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Right, and make it available and preserve—well, have to identify first what’s valuable and then, I mean, for the longest time, and I don’t know what the policy is right now, but for the longest time the policy of the National Archives was only to accept digital data that was in a software independent format. Now I know that’s gone by the by but the logic behind that was that it was through having software-independent records that you could preserve them long term and retain the ability to use those records with whatever software and hardware gets developed down the road because we know this is never going to end. And it’s never going to be the case that something happens out there that’s going to solve the problem and you’re not going to have to keep migrating or whatever it is we’re now doing. I think an understanding of technological innovation says that that’s not going to happen. So, I would just like to see us move a little bit more to, you know, integration of mentalities about the value of digital data as a primary source." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Well, thank you so much—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] Well, you’re welcome." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "—for sharing with me. This was great." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "But, I mean, it was an exciting opportunity to have a chance to work on [and talk about] this, all those years and from the punch card era to the online." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Yeah. That’s quite a change when you think about punch cards to, I mean, you probably, I probably, couldn’t even envision the internet. I don’t know, it must have been a huge technological advancement while working with these electronic records, having this created and—" }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "[Interposing] Oh, yeah, it was marvelous. I mean, you know, you could see how technology was going to take us down the road. The advantage I had by starting with punch cards is I also could visualize what it is to store bits and bytes and so I had a mental picture. So, I’m not unlike what I’m critiquing here, saying that people are only going to go with what they understand, I mean, so I could understand how information was being stored and so when we migrated to tape, it was still organized the same way but I could understand it in a way that somebody who didn’t have that opportunity had to learn it differently." }, { "speaker": "MS. KRATZ", "text": "Right. That’s great. Thank you so much." }, { "speaker": "MS. ADAMS", "text": "Well, you’re welcome. It’s always fun to talk about what you do. [Revised and embellished by Margaret O. Adams, August 2023]" } ]

[ { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "This is Rebecca Brenner and Emily Niekrasz, and we are at Archives I about to conduct an oral history of Sam Anthony, in room Mezzanine 110. Today’s date is July 7, 2015. Sam, will you please provide a brief overview of your career time frame at the National Archives?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Sure, I’ll do that, and for the record, my name is Sam Anthony. I started working here in August of 1991. I began as a young recent college graduate working in the research room here at Archives I. The unit initials were NNRS, and that was many re-organizations ago. The old timers would know it. My job was as a GS-4 technician, soon to be GS-5, and I worked in our textual research room and our microfilm research room. And back in the day, we also had a motion picture and still picture research room. I had the great pleasure of kind of bouncing between all four of those over the years. I did that for about three years. And in 1994, we were in the midst of constructing Archives II, the “Glass Palace” as I call it. I saw an opportunity where we were doing different things because this was a unique circumstance with this move. I had a wonderful opportunity to work in the detail in the library to help manage the move, essentially to see the Mayflower company contractor movers to make sure the books were being loaded up properly in the right order before being sent. I did that, and then I was able to transfer to the library in 1994. That was a great moment for me, and I enjoyed that. And as a result, I started working between Archives I and Archives II, which was fun. I did that for about four years. In 1998, because my career has never been clear or planned or defined, I started working in another detail while I was in the library, working in the public programs office. I started hosting author lecture programs and genealogy workshops. I did that from 1998 until 2005. From 2005" }, { "speaker": "to the present I have been Special Assistant to the Archivist", "text": "first Allen Weinstein, and then for Acting Archivist Adrienne Thomas, and now for David Ferriero, ten years on, so." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "How did your education influence your decision to begin work at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "I knew that in college that history interested me because it was the stories that" }, { "speaker": "a few of the professors that I had were telling me. Let me clarify that", "text": "there was a Medieval History professor named Frederick Behrends at the University of North Carolina, who could just sit there without referring to notes, and talking like a televangelist, it was the gospel of medieval history, the fief, the vassals, Ostrogoths and I was transfixed. It was fascinating. And then, I took two courses from a professor named Alan Downs, who taught a course on American Military History. One was from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, and the other one was from the Civil War to the present. And again, he would tell facts and such about this battle and that, but then he would get into the stories about a sniper hitting a famous general from 800 yards, or this, and it was just intriguing. I thought there was more of a history than what I remembered from my high school days which to me seemed rather boring, plotting, and pedantic. So, I knew that somehow, history, the storytelling, sharing information, was there. I didn’t know exactly how but I just knew it was there." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "When you first arrived here, what were your original impressions of NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Intimidating. Professional. Serious. I felt like I was out of my league. I felt very young. I also had the sense of looking at the building while it was a beautiful building. There were some other parts—inside the lighting was somewhat dim. And it was very easy to get that impression: what a drab place. And that wasn’t helped or that drab sense was confirmed in the early 1990’s by some of my colleagues, who I will not name, who really hadn’t upgraded their wardrobe. And they seemed to be wearing their clothes that they still had from the ‘70s. And so, oh geez, I said what the hell have I gotten myself into? There were a lot of very nice and helpful people here, but there was also this sense that this place was a little shopworn, a little stale, that kind of thing." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Did you have any mentors early on?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Oh ya, oh ya. My career has been moved and enhanced because of mentors: Ken Heger, who at that time, oh boy: “I’m dating myself!” But back then in the research rooms, not only did you have technicians, you actually had archivists of a professional grade who served as daytime and nighttime supervisor. Because, another thing you should add here, the research room, then, used to be open Monday through Friday until 10pm. Or was it 9pm? That shows you how old I am. It was late. It was 9pm because the museum was open even later until 10pm. There were just these long hours, so with research rooms being open from 8:45am to 9pm, you had a lot of time to cover—archivists, Ken Heger was the afternoon and evening" }, { "speaker": "supervisor. He taught me a lot about research", "text": "how to do research, how State Department records were set up, how to use the Congressional Serial Sets—the nuts and bolts of what was important. Another mentor was the daytime supervisor Connie Potter. She was a genealogist by trade but Connie was kind-hearted, and she showed me the lessons of how to interact with people, how to get along, and how to figure things out around here. I looked at both of their examples. They were very different people, doing the same job with some overlap, and I saw how they both got along together and I thought I could learn something from these guys. So, those two helped early on. In the library there was my colleague Jeff Hartley who at the time was a senior reference librarian—he became the Chief Librarian, and was a good personal friend. But I also liked his cool, calm demeanor when it came to deadlines of research. People would come in and could say: I need this. And they could come into the research rooms or the library in a variety of ways." }, { "speaker": "They could say", "text": "“oh, Jeff, I need this.” Or they could say: “I need this tomorrow.” He was always confident in his ability. He wouldn’t let them see him sweat. And I liked his command of knowing where to look. If he didn’t know the answer, he knew how to find it. And so that was kind of a buildup from what I learned earlier. After that, I transferred from the library into the public programs office. I felt like I was learning a lot on my own. So, as far as my mentors for that, I didn’t have anyone that, shall we say, guided me, but Edith James, who is the division director who brought me on board, the unit was called NWE, and she was basically a good boss who said: “look, be creative, I’m going to rein you in because you’re young and a little impetuous, but go.” In a way, having that hands-off management style was very, for a buck like me, to go where I wanted to and did, but on occasion she would correct me and get me back in line. And it was Allen Weinstein—he was the ninth Archivist, came aboard in February of 2005. I had known him by doing the lecture programs. Behind me are all those books by him, about six of them, and involved him. Wow that was time. February 2005. I think it was February 15, 2005. He came on board as Archivist, and it was that spring he wrote me a very nice letter because, again, in my previous job in the author lecture program I had met him. And when he came on board, I remember him and his secretary both said: “we don’t know anyone here at the Archives except you, personally. We know these people professionally, but we know you personally. It’s a great comfort to know you.” Then that spring he wrote me a very nice letter, saying: “I want you to work for me. You have a choice, but I’d like you to work for me.” And he was the kind of, I would say, father figure where I didn’t know the first thing about being a special assistant. We were figuring it out as we were going along. And there was another time when David Brown, who was on board as well in the office as a special assistant—I found out Weinstein, we figured things out: what were my strengths, what were his strengths, and we tried to figure out, okay, what could I learn and grow and improve to help support him. What were things that I could do to enhance what I already knew to be a better special assistant, but he had a very long slow fuse, and he barely lost his temper, and I think that made a big difference with me because I could screw up plenty of times and still get away with it and learn from my mistakes." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What were your strengths and his needs?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "His needs were—he was very much aware of, I would call him a historian activist. Not only was he passionate about history, but he also wanted to help make a difference, and so it was one thing to be interested in history to be kind of a passive observer witness. But Weinstein was the kind of guy where he would bring, because of his previous job, he was very well aware of the international scene, and he would bring people here to visit the Archives—former leaders of, say, Czechoslovakia and Poland, former leaders, former movers and shakers involved in, you know, nationally and internationally, and so as a result I realized I always felt that I was good at entertaining. That’s been told by many a mentor that we’ve listed. And I realized that I had a bit of a confidence and comfort in dealing with ceremonial events, so whether it was my experience in doing public programs, literally having a stage, speaking, planning things. How will things appear to the audience, how will things move, you know, how will things appear and look professional and skilled. Here at the National Archives, I’ve learned always early on, and ever since: we have to do things on a shoestring budget, so there is a bit of a feat of leger de main to make something look quite polished when we’re doing it with very little in the way of material, manpower, money. And so, I found that we had this beautiful building, we had these great documents, but we had these people who work here who know stuff, and some of them were rather passionate and willing to share, and I figured there’s got to be a combo, and I saw all that, and I found that was one of my strengths was pulling this all together. With a shoestring budget, or with no budget at all, how do we make this place great, and how do we make it inviting to people whether you’re head of state or a school kid or won an award, and get them in here and then see the Archives through their eyes. Show them the records, allow them to shake hands with the Archivist, and then they go, and so, I think one of my skills was event planning, protocol, public programs, and someone once called me a uniter." }, { "speaker": "That was an interesting thing", "text": "bringing groups together and bringing people together and different people. It’s something that I like doing." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Did Allen Weinstein create your position for you, or was there already a special assistant to the Archivist?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "There was already one on board named David Brown. The special assistants, as I learned early on, were new. They had been around for a long—previous Archivist years before, and for those of you who can’t see, I’m gesturing here back in time because I’m that kind of person—way back then with my left hand, but I found that those with specialist titles knew, and" }, { "speaker": "it was viewed by some people in the Archives with suspicion because they were going", "text": "“who the hell are these people?” Because here’s how Allen Weinstein brought me on the staff, and the" }, { "speaker": "staff was very small at first. It was", "text": "The Archivist, it was Donna Gold, his secretary who he brought over from his previous job who was his executive assistant. There was David Brown, who was very familiar with records management and archival processes and procedures, and there was me. And it kind of quickly came on that I would work the ceremonial things, public programs, and David would work with substantive things like records management and other issues. But David Brown liked to say that my job was a one off, and at first, I was insulted by that, but I thought: “wait a minute, it’s not how you drive; it’s how you arrive. I’m here; I have the title of special assistant. I’m doing a job I like. I can make a difference. So, what, how it was created, I’m here. I’m a member of this team. I’m a contributing member. Let’s go for it!” So yes," }, { "speaker": "I have a feeling that Weinstein said", "text": "“Sam, let’s do it. Let’s make him special.”" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Well, you mentioned a few questions ago that the hours of the researched room and the exhibits changed. Why has it changed, and how has that changed influenced the—" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "[interposing] Budget." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Oh, okay. And how has that affected the goings on here?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Sure. The early 1990’s saw the economy change, and this was right as Bush was leaving office and Clinton was coming in. And the economy was kind of on the [insert spitting noise]. The late ‘90s saw a great improvement, and we can actually see that through the Archives’ budget. But I would wager, and you all can check the records but the budget of the National Archives in 1987 was 117 million dollars, which is nothing, but it grew over time, but still I had heard that there were RIFs, reduction in forces, or other problems in the early 1980s, so I was aware that the Archives was always a small budgeted agency. But I find it interesting, whereas a GS-4 technician when I was working in the research room with the researchers and up until 9:00 at night." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Can you clarify: what does GS-4 mean again?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "There was a pay scale, a General Services pay scale, scaling from Level 1 to Level 15. Within each level are ten steps, and that’s a way that you can get promotions, your time-in-grade, you can get promotions for your years in service for your particular job. So, I was, shall I say, getting paid very little. And for the record, in 1991 and 1992, the paycheck for a GS-4 after taxes for me came to be $495 in Washington, DC, which was the exact amount for my rent. So, you know, one paycheck went to rent. The other went for everything else. So, I found it interesting that the research rooms were open for that late and I remembered that the technicians who were more senior to me were in charge of getting us to sign up for overtime. And they were begging us, so I remember how, back when we had paper, a technician would come up to me and look at the schedule and say: “fill in a day or two here,” and I’d put in one and go: “Come on Sam, you can do more.” I want to go out; I want to have a life. But so, in essence, I worked from 8:45AM to 9PM at night, with breaks in between, but the overtime helped, and that’s the reason I did it. But I know that the research rooms were reduced because" }, { "speaker": "archivists at the time like Ken Heger were noticing our budget officers saying", "text": "Why do we need to keep it open? It costs us money. We have to pay technicians, staff, the whole thing—we’re facing a budget crunch overall in government, and they realized that it was costing more to stay open to fewer researchers at 8:00 at night or 9:00 at night. When they changed it, it used to be open only three days a week. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays we would be open until 8:00 or 9:00 at night. But I remember in 2006 we had a rescission to our budget. And eight million dollars was taken out of our budget. In fact, we had to close on time, even on Saturdays, so research was only open 9:00 to 5:00. And it was a dramatic change. It shows you how just a few million dollars can adversely affect. We had research rooms. How they are now—I can’t recall." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Going back to your overall time here, what would you say are the successes that you have achieved?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "That I didn’t get fired. That’s a big success. I think there are about seven times that I could have been fired over the past twenty-four years, with cause. Definitely with cause. Falling asleep on the job —" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Can we dwell on that for a second? What were the ways that you almost got fired?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "No one ever came up to me and said: “You’re this close!” Nothing like that. I remember once I was really tired, and I was working as a technician in the research room, up in the microfilm research room. And in the microfilm research room there was this thing called a cage. It was kind of a stack area in the back which had access for the researchers to look at microfilm and it was a small location area where only we could go. And I would bring a pillow, so I would take a nap. And once I overslept. And I remember looking and there was Dee Cartwright. She was a lead technician, and she was just kind of standing there. And I just thought: I’m gone. I’m toast. There were other times …" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "That’s really priceless, but back to the successes. Thank you." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "For me, I would say, going to the library was a success because I was able to go from working in the research room to working in the library. I saw the value of the primary sources and using secondary sources, using books to help complement and supplement your research. And from that, I then said: “I’m going to be a librarian.” I got my Master’s in Library Science, but that to me was a success. I tried something new and made something to work from it. But the one I’m most proud of is working with the author lecture program. In my office we have two book cases which have books from some of the couple hundred lectures and book signings we have done in my ten years from 1998 to 2005. Each one tells a story, and, you know what, I can look at one and be like: “That was a packed house that day. That one, C-Span came to it. That one only twelve people showed up, but boy they enjoyed themselves. That one there was a thunderstorm, and the turnout was horrible, but those who turned up came in soaking wet, and the author, just, they had a wonderful time.” It was very impromptu. To me, these were the successes because these were a way of bringing history to life. It tied in my skills, Rebecca, that I have, the early ideas, my interest in the ceremonial, of the performance idea, educating and entertaining—started to come together. So, I view those as big successes. But for me, now, over the past ten years, every day I can walk away from the job or the Archivist, whoever he or she is, can say: Sam, thanks, that helped. To me, it’s just, okay, writing the speech, or getting an answer, or getting something. If I can help the head of the agency do these jobs, then I’m doing mine. That, to me, is a success, so I’ve learned to check my ego at the door because here, my ego means nothing. There are people more important than me here, but to be able to help them, and to see it." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What—you may have answered this a little bit already, but—" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "[interposing] Yes, I did." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What aspects of your current position do you most enjoy?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "I enjoy being able to thrive in chaos, being able to channel all of my experiences from the past twenty-four years, and be prepared to answer anything. Just before we started," }, { "speaker": "the Archivist said", "text": "“Find me an example of the earliest records of the U.S. Secret Service, for the event that we are going to do tonight.” And I’m just thinking, you know, I remembered working with an archivist where he took me to a stack and showed me some records of the Treasury Department from the Civil War. There was this ledger of Pinkerton’s agents, who became Secret Service. This was their payroll. So, I’m just thinking, you know, I remember this from the past, I remember the archivist, I remember the staff, and I can apply it. So, I guess the greatest thrill for me is being able to apply everything, whether it’s professional or hobbies, what have you, to this job, and make it work, because I feel like I’m flying without a net. I don’t think there was a formal training for this job. I don’t think there is a formal training for this job." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "That’s why I skipped that question." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Okay. Well, now you bring it up." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "No, continue. I was just joking." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "I would like to create formal training. I think a manual could be created for a special assistant. I think it could be done." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Out of curiosity, what are those Pinkerton records?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Sure. The Pinkerton records were, I think, from the Treasury, from the Department of the Treasury, and it was from the Civil War. I can’t remember exactly what year. But what I remembered was in a stack area, mid-level, on the west side of this building. Rick Peuser, Richard Peuser, who now works up at College Park, great guy, very helpful, and I’ll put him down as kind of a one-off mentor. Rick Peuser had an enthusiasm about his job, and it affected me, kind of like Connie Potter and Ken Heger, they all were passionate about their job, but Rick had this outgoing style that appealed to me, that I could relate to, and we were also close in age, so I felt like we had more in common. But Rick showed me this record. It was a grey Hollinger box, and he opened it up, and it was this listing of names of people from the Pinkerton Agency, which was a private company doing security and what have you, and it was their payroll for that particular month, and they were getting paid for working for the Federal government. And, as I’ve learned over the years, that eventually became what we now know as the Secret Service. For some people it might not be anything but right now it means the world to my boss, so I have to find a way to find it." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Can you describe a typical day in your unit?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "No, but I will try. My typical day does not begin when I get here. It begins before. I’m holding up my iPhone, just so we can see what the future holds—so outdated. But before, it was a Blackberry. But I keep this on me all the time because I never know if a call might come. An email might come through from the Archivist, or Deputy Archivist, or chief of staff, and special assistant, or anyone, saying: “Sam, I need some help, or answers.” I’ve found that those calls can come any time, any day. So, it starts when I wake up and I look and see what’s waiting for me, and I come into work. There is a schedule, and usually my day will go according to the Archivist’s schedule, kind of balance it off of that: what is he doing today, and how can I support him. Or, how can I keep out of the way. From that, then, I determine how I’m going to go about my day, how I’m going to prioritize—and all the various parts that I’m doing on my own, things I’m doing for the Archivist directly, and I plan. You can have a rule book, but you need to know how to throw that rule book away. And an example of that is when the" }, { "speaker": "Archivist comes around the corner and says", "text": "“I need something, or can you get, or Sam, help me with whatever.” I know I’m going to pay complete attention, and I’m going to do what I can and see if I can get that as fast as I can. So, my days are unpredictable, and I love it that way. I do find that there are times when I can catch up on other things. But like laundry, there is always some more to do, and I’ve learned not to stress about that. If you’re not careful, you’ll start working 12 to 14-hour days, and there will always be something else. You just kind of have to let go." }, { "speaker": "MS. NIEKRASZ", "text": "I’m curious about—so, you’ve worked for three Archivists of the United States." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Yes, I have." }, { "speaker": "MS. NIEKRASZ", "text": "So, how does that go—the transition from one Archivist to another? I know one was acting." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "You know, it’s been, I would call it peaceful and professional. When Weinstein, Professor Weinstein, left, Adrienne Thomas was his Deputy Archivist, so it was pretty matter of fact that she would just kind of take over for a bit. There is always, I think, anxiety, amongst the immediate staff, and then it trickles, so you see it through the senior staff, the various senior level people executives, like office heads, and we’re all kind of wondering: “what does it mean to them?” I think it’s very easy to fall into the trap of perceiving that people are trying to jock you from a position, when really, I think people just don’t know what to expect, and so, I found that when Weinstein left, it was somewhat easy because Thomas said: “I want you to stay on board.” And during Weinstein’s time we had increased our staff and we had an executive assistant, and she had an assistant to help her. David Brown and I were special assistants to begin with, and then we had a third special assistant: Jackie Budell. We had people working on detail with us. We had a woman named Sandy Collins who worked with us as a special assistant, and Michael Hussey was on detail, Rick Blondo and some others, so our office was growing, and so Deb Wall came aboard, and the senior special assistant—so our office was getting somewhat large, but when Weinstein left, we shrunk down to Adrienne Thomas, her personal secretary, Mary, and me. Everyone else was sent off to different various jobs." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "What are some challenges and issues that you have experienced here at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "I found that a lot of staff feel, and rightly so, that they’re overwhelmed, that they’re undermanned. If you look at it from the amount of records we have, that’s obvious. I mean, we have barely a brigade worth of people—3,000 people around our agency. We’re dealing with 12,000,000,000 textual records we estimate, millions of photographs, motion pictures, electronic records are going faster on the geometric scale. So, as far as knowing everything that is there, we make do more with less. I found that the budget is also big, that our budget grew over time in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, and now it is shrinking. And we’re having to really make our shots count, and one way that’s manifesting itself is I don’t think we’re able to hire more people or promote people as much as I think they should be promoted. So, I think some of the challenges we face are—we have so many people coming into the research area from the Archives, so many people coming in from museums, so many people wanting. And we have so few staff having to deal with the records and the research and the museum goers and what have you. It could wear on you. It could be a source of stress. I think a challenge is also technology. I wish there was a way to like Star Trek or something—that we could find a way to immediately digitally scan stuff, not only scan it, but organize the records so they can be retrieved. You know, it is one thing to say scan everything but as I’ve learned from library science you’ve got to find a way to index it, so you can receive the data quickly. I just wish we could somehow jump a hundred years into the future, get pieces of technology, bring it back, and then apply it because then I think people’s jobs might be easier. So, the challenges, I think, are we’re outnumbered, outgunned so to speak. And we don’t have enough money. I don’t think Congress and the President are allocating enough money to this agency so we can really do the job that they want us to do. I think we’re getting by—I think we’re getting by a lot on the backs of hard-working people like Rick Peuser and others who, again, have a passion for this agency—Trevor Plante, any reference archivist, project archivist, and the number of technicians, who are just going above and beyond, who make my job easier." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "How has the relationship between NARA and other Federal agencies been?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "That’s a great question. I think that it’s improving. I think that there has been a lack of understanding of what we do in other government agencies. I’ve heard enough stories of archivists or records managers from the National Archives who would go out and meet with government agencies and they might be like “Oh really? You all are, you know, we deal with y’all? They [records] go to y’all eventually … ” It’s like holy cow, did you not know? So, I’ve kind of viewed, early on, Rebecca, that my goal in life has been in this agency to help make people more aware of what we do. There have been enough times in my job over the years, whether it was family and friends innocently saying: “oh, you work at the Library of Congress?” because the Library of Congress or Smithsonian is more familiar to people than the National Archives. When you think of tourists, people are like: Smithsonian, Air & Space Museum, or you know, Library of Congress, but now the National Archives is not quite there yet. And so, I had enough people, friends and family, say: “oh, you work at the Library of Congress.” “No, I don’t, asshole.” Or, I even had a publisher, when I was in the author lecture program, when I was trying to arrange for an author to come speak here, I had an email—I wish I could find it again. But the publisher said: “could you tell me the command structure of how the National Archives fits in with the Library of Congress?” I was like: “F you, it does not. We are an independent agency. No, if your author is going to speak at the Library of Congress, they can also come speak at the National Archives. So, go to hell.” You know, so, enough of that happened. Enough stories from colleagues saying that people from NASA or the Department of Energy or whoever were not sure about our role with them. I thought, let’s see what I can do. And whether it’s giving tours, whether it’s telling stories, or whether it’s just showing off this agency, to kind of reinforce it to people: “we are here, here’s what we have, here’s what we do, remember.” So, I think that things are getting better. However, I just had a thing last night where I went to Allen Weinstein—had passed away, the ninth Archivist, he passed away on June 19, and his widow invited me over to their house last night, and there were about thirty or forty other people there, and I recognized some faces, and there was a colleague, a friend named Tim Naftali, who used to be head of the Nixon Presidential Library. He has since left, and he is working at New York University, but he is somehow—he finds that he is up there in a university setting, and a lot of archivists and librarians are in that sector, maybe the university sector, or others, don’t like the National Archives. They think that we—he says that they think that we operate at a different standard, that we don’t really take into account them, or whatever. I was just kind of sitting there with my glass of wine thinking about my former boss, who you know, he was telling me this, and I thought: “wow, there must be more behind this. So, there must be a story back there.” So, I’ve got to figure it out and talk to Tim Naftali. What the heck does this mean that archivists don’t like or don’t trust the National Archives, or why? What’s the founding of that, or is that just an isolated thing that Tim is hearing, or is it more widespread, I don’t know." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "About a minute ago, you mentioned the tours that you do. Could you speak to that?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Yes. In this office my primary responsibility when it comes to tours is giving what I call VIP tours, or tours for special guests of the Archivist. He just gave me a request to talk to a gentleman who works for the United States Court of Appeals. Who is a special guest of the Archivist? Anyone he says, whether it’s a head of state, we actually have the Archivist from Tanzania coming here later in the month. I will figure out who that person is, what they want to see, what their expectations are, what resources we have available, and then tailor it toward to make it worth their while. And again, we talked about earlier, my job and all, I feel like it’s just a culmination of all my experiences. I really believe we are the sum of our experiences, and it’s wise to apply all of it. When I played kickball in third grade, playing soccer, and little league, doing community theatre as an adult, playing piano throughout my life, all that kind of factors in somehow, and so, it’s kind of like how can we put on a good show? I don’t say that as far as being trite or anything, but how can I make that special guest feel welcome, how can we make it feel like their time has been well-spent, and how can they walk away again, understanding who we are, what we do, and what we have, and to me the biggest trick of all, when we give a tour, is whether it be for Prince Charles, or the President of Afghanistan, or former Vice President Dick Cheney. How do you make him walk away hungry for more? How do you make him say—how do you hopefully give a tour that makes him want to come back and learn more, say: “I want to do that again. Jeez that was great, they were nice.” How do you walk away with a good feeling and that they want to come back? To me, that’s how you build allies and build relationships. That’s how you build stakeholders, or that’s how you make people know who the heck the National Archives is." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Could you also speak to your boot camp program, as well as any other programs that you may have initiated?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Boot camp, boot camp is a personal thing. It started when, back in my second-to-last surgery, in 2012 I had surgery for cancer. It was the fourth one at the time, and I realized that I was really tired. I was worn out, and I said, “you know, Sam, you’re not getting younger. See what you can do to get in better shape.” And an interesting course of events I started picking up a sport that my daughter had been doing in high school: crew, rowing. I found that was a great way to get healthy. I also started taking some classes being offered here at the Archives. There had been a yoga class offered by some contractors in our gym, and they were also offering boot camps, and I found they were wonderful. They were wonderful, it was beating me up, was great. I was learning a lot, and they were great for me. But it was making me a better worker because I was getting fit, and my energy level … my whole mood was. And I was getting to meet people in the gym, who I might not normally see. And all of these—I always liked going to the gym, but they made me more conscientious and structured: go, go, go, go. And then with our budget cuts at that time, which occurred in 2013, that contracting staff in the gym left. The contract ended. And I saw how popular the program was, but I feel like I learned some things. I’m an entertainer and an educator like I’d like to be, and can try this. Let me try this, and see if others can help me, and let’s make this kind of a group thing. And so, we started calling them staff-driven boot camps. And, you know, it was fun. We averaged four, five, six, seven, eight people. We show up at a certain time and do it. So, who wants to try this next time, and we do things with our backs and arms. It made me force myself to learn more about different forms of exercise, better ways of stretching, diet, mixing it all together. So, it’s a great way to meet people, including you. Thanks for coming in." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Absolutely!" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Like I said, I’m feeling very sore today, so, as a result of all this." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Yes, and just a comment that I might add, one of the things I loved about your boot camp was how you talked to us about lots of interesting things throughout it. It was like we got to listen to music and you are our personal radio. It was so much fun." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Thank you. That’s nice of you to say, Rebecca, because I found that if I could exercise and talk at the same time, first of all it might improve—I know what kind of pace we should be going at, and there’s one level of exercise that you’re going that you can have a conversation, and then there’s one where you’re going passed that threshold of being able to breathe, and where you’re not taking enough oxygen, where you’re actually burning and forming your lactic acids actually, so I’ve found you have to gauge the people you’re with, and if you start seeing them turn purple, you know, let’s back it off—when you socialize, you can all learn." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Over the course of your time at NARA, what changes have you witnessed in the agency?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Technology, I think, has been the biggest. I remember talking to Don Wilson, who was the Archivist when I came on board, and actually, I’m sorry, he became Archivist while I was here. Let me get my facts straight here. Don Wilson was Archivist back in 1987, and he stayed on until Bush 41 left. So, when I came on board, he was here. And then, when he left, Trudy Peterson became the Acting Archivist from ’93 to ‘95, and then there was John Carlin. But what I remember Don Wilson telling me was when he was Archivist for a while, there was one fax machine in this building, and it was in his office, and through my studies of library science and working here, I knew about MARC records—machine readable format, and computerized records were here, you know, staff, protect, take care of, preserve, but it seemed kind of new to everyone. It was unfamiliar. But now we’re at a time where I remember being at Archives II, when it was opened up, and we were all getting these accounts, these computer accounts, and we were getting these email addresses, which were like 58,000 characters long, and it was all new. It was fascinating, so to see how our life has changed since the printed memo, or paper with a routing slip which you could check off and sign and move around, which you can see in our old records, to now having emails and telephones, but just the iPhone, and just how I can access my calendar on my iPhone, I can read the emails, I can communicate with anyone pretty much anywhere with this, it’s just a total change from what it used to be. I remember answering machines were a big change back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. You didn’t have to be by your rotary dial phone—and then you had your push button phone, but now you actually have this, so the technology with communicating is staving information, and being able to drag documents into your email and send out a whole bunch of stuff is big. But also, being able to digitally scan records, to me, digitization is huge, and it’s changing the whole ball game. I think it’s making some things complex and more complicated, but I think it’s an opportunity, and we have to seize it, and there are some people in this agency who are resistant to change. Okay, that’s fine. But there are others who aren’t. Have them bring everyone around to it because digital records and computerized records are going to be part of our future." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "I am actually writing a research paper on this, and it seems like your timeline here has been roughly the timeline of what I call the technological transformation of the past twenty years." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "I am glad that I am part of history. Thank you." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "You truly are, in my opinion." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "I’m living history! Fossil and everything! Yes!" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Can you possibly condense the key turn points in the technological transformation?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Sure. I think that the personal computer was big. From the late ‘70s through the early ‘80s, to make a computer small and affordable that means instead of taking up a whole room at NASA you could have it on a person’s desk, soon to have it on every government worker’s desk. From that, you start looking at the applications of the computer: communications, storing information. For a long time, computers were like fancy typewriters, but as a result, word processing. So, I think going from computers being small, the portable computer, the PC, to then having the smartphone, and Blackberry, being able to have your cell phone, your portable communications device, and how that’s enhanced over time, so you can now store information on it. You can record like you are doing now; you can really make this a tool for your job. It would be curious to see, ten, twenty years from now, how this tool or something similar would be used by the staff, or used by the Archivist. Will you be able to do really high-level scanning with something like this? Will a technician be able to go into a stack area and say, here’s a nineteenth century record from the provost marshal, which we were just talking about, from the 1860’s—can I used this to make a scan, which today we have to use a flatbed scanner, something the size of like a notebook, something the size of, you know, this briefcase, but could be something that is handheld. How will that change the nature of our jobs? Technology does change your job. It can change your job. The PC, the smart phone, and the digital scanner being affordable, heaven knows what it’ll be like if 3D printing could be used. I mean, I’m not sure we have those at the Archives yet, but it would be curious to see if it could be." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Any specific anecdotes on how any of these devices that you’ve mentioned have affected your work or the activities of the agency?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Digital scanning allows us to make copies of records and then we can use records, as I call it, as currency, as gifts. When we talk about these VIP’s come in here, to be able to say: “thank you for coming to the National Archives, you know, I’m sorry we only have an hour here, but I’m going to give you something to walk away with”—and to do that, you have to say: “ah, this guest is a big fan of tennis; let’s make a scan from a patent of a tennis racket in 1904.” Small things, because I say it small in that it’s kind of an offhand courteous gesture, but because it is easier to make now, that I had seen over the years that it’s quicker for the staff to make it more high quality, and to make something more affordable, where it doesn’t take as much time or money to me to digitize or not to say we’d go on a tour or to say, “Rebecca, you saw this record, you saw this record, here, I’m going to send you some more scans by email later,” or I’ll text them to you or something. To me digitizing the records and having a method to transport them either by smart phone or by computer, is a wonderful thing. So, it makes my job easier." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "And in the age of emails and text messages, can you speak to the future of the ERA, the Electronic Records Administration, is that what it’s called?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "The Electronic Records Archives." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Archives, and how will it change the nature of research, specifically of things like government department records?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Sure. I think that government department agencies are creating more and more electronic records. We are going to work with them to get those records to us quicker, we’re hopefully going to find a way to use technology and along with a human element, to make sure those records are organized and retrievable—that way it will be easier for people. A challenge I think we have to face is storing it all and making it safe, so that you can access it, but someone cannot come in and hack it or manipulate it, or change it. But to me the biggest challenge is going to be storage, as the data gets larger and larger, and then also retrievability—how can you come up with the right algorithm, so if you type up Elvis Presley, you know, terabytes of information, petabytes of information, how can you make sure you get five records of one, instead of the five million hits, how can you make sure you get exactly which one in an intuitive way? We are seeing on google and other databases, some are better than others, when you type in the search. You say, “okay, I was trying to limit the search. Okay, how can you make that part quicker, easier? How can maybe the computer start anticipating what you want and start saying, well, how about if we do this, but still giving you choice?” We don’t want the machines to start rising up because that is every science fiction nightmare, but I really think that the idea of the ERA can help. And I think it’s inevitable because science fiction writers have a great way of guessing the future and they can be quite accurate. Think about Star Trek with the communicator device. We have our phone, but others like Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, and others—some of that stuff has already come true. And, you know, we don’t have our own little air-cars yet, you know, flying cars, but you’ve got to be able to have computerized databases, databanks, whatever they’re called. And you’ve got to be able to access the records because you can’t transport twelve billion paper records with you. But there’s got to be a way you can access them on the moon when you are five thousand feet up in an airplane, or whether you are in Arkansas, and the records are here in DC. There has got to be a way, through the computer, or whatever the future iteration is." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "You mentioned some resistance, and you mentioned a lot of benefits, but for you, what is the overall impact of the technological transformation at NARA?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "It’s helping. It’s helping me. It’s helping my job, and I think it’s going to help the researcher eventually." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Can you describe your involvements with other professional organizations, such as SAA, or OAH?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "I don’t, I’m not a member of any of them. They come here to the Archives because we have various leaders who meet with them—so I see them as I’m preparing the Archivist for a meeting. I know they have a benefit and a purpose." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Emily, do you have any questions before we conclude?" }, { "speaker": "MS. NIEKRASZ", "text": "I’m okay." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Is there anything you would like to add to the interview such as anecdotes or words of wisdom?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Yes, I think that the strength of this agency, well, what I like to promote about it are the records and the people. It’s the people, and I think that some of the hardest working people are the reference archivists, the staff who deal with the general public, with their research questions, who become familiar with the records. I wish we could find a way to increase them fivefold. They are great. I just think about the years here, and you know, look outside my window, and here I am with an office on the mezzanine level of what we used to call mahogany row, and I get to see Pennsylvania Avenue—I think: jeez, I’m sitting here, and you’re actually asking me questions. I’m humbled by it." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "We are humbled by the opportunity to ask you questions." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "You may be my boss one day, who knows, because I realized, you know, time is changing, and I was your age once. I am 46 years old, I could retire in eleven years—I could retire from the Federal government in eleven years, and by then, I will have had 35 years in government. Me, I don’t feel old, well, I do, I physically feel old, but I still feel like a kid in a candy store. I feel like there’s always something new to learn." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory—isn’t the National Archives kind of like it?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Okay, you know what? That movie scared me as a kid. The oompa loompas scared me. As a child, they scared me. And you know what else scared me? Sesame Street had these characters, where there were like these shaman priests, and they were very wise, and they would sit there. And first of all, the Count, I liked him with his bats, I thought they were creepy. I didn’t like how he talked to them, but they would never talk back. But there were these, one characters, who sit there, and they just scared me because they have these big eyebrows, and they would sit there and puppets, and so the Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory movie scared me because I remember one kid fell into the chocolate, and he got really plump, and yeah, that scared me, so to heck with your Willy Wonka?" }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Back to the kid in the candy shop?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "I can deal with that—the kid in the candy store, unlike Willy Wonka. And I thought Willy Wonka was weird. This place, there’s hope, it’s given me a career. I’ve learned something new every day, and it’s really through these mentors I was telling you about—it’s really, I was talking about Rick Peuser, but Gary Morgan, who was an assistant branch chief in the textual research room, taught me how to weather the storm here, but Allen Weinstein, Adrienne Thomas, David Ferriero, Deb Wall, David Brown, they were all—I’ve really had a lot of people who gave me a break, but then people like Rick Peuser and other archivists, who shared with me what they found: “hey Sam, I was in the stack area, I found this.” It totally helps me out because then I think about that author lecture program and the stuff that the authors have found in our holdings, or what they come across—I learn something every day, and I have no regrets. But I have made some great screw-ups in my time, I mean some fine ones, oh yeah." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Do we want to return to those for entertainment value, and/or learning from them?" }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "1850s’s census for Day County Georgia, in the very northwestern corner, I remember in the research room I had a researcher named Charles Bibb, and Charles Bibb came up, and he started giggling. He showed me on the microfilm that the third-to-last page of the census for that county for 1850—there was a group of four women, and their occupation was “fucking!” For 1850, it’s a historic record, so we can put it in here, and as a young 22 or 23-year-old I was tickled pink, and I was like: “wow, how cool, a whole new world at the Archives here, gee whiz!” And so, I remembered that. So, whenever I would tell stories, about work, you know, I would always include that. And people went: “wow, that’s an interesting place where you work.” And then they’d get into a debate the word “fucking” was around back then? Well, it was an 1850 census, so you tell me. And I once gave a tour to some people from the Department of Justice, and I showed them that, the fucking document, and of course they were all like: “wow!” And one of the women who" }, { "speaker": "were there at the Department of Justice afterward said", "text": "“thank you very much for the tour, and I wonder if you could show that to my husband one day.” And I realized that her husband’s name was Gene Weingarten, who was a humor columnist for the _Washington Post_ , and I remember that my bosses were very unhappy. Because he was contacting them, saying: “I want to see the “fucking” document. I want to see other documents, so I can write a humor story about the holdings.” I just remember they were very unhappy with me. They thought that this was going to put the Archives in a bad light. I did save the article that he wrote for the _Washington Post_ Magazine, and it includes some other interesting things. I just remember how my boss and my boss’s boss were just, and I think that was one of those moments where if they weren’t going to fire me, they were going to find a way to push me out or something, make my life hell. But ya, I remember that." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Then there was the pillow in the cage." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "The pillow in the cage. Yes, makes me sound like a zoo animal. I also remember, up the street now, which was the Old Post Office Pavilion, which Trump is trying to make into a hotel. But that used to be a large area where you could—the Post Office Pavilion had a lot of restaurants that you could go to. And as a technician who didn’t have a lot of money, very tired of eating his own bagged lunches, I knew that there was a place up there called Enrico’s Pizza. In the early to mid-1990’s, in the Post Office Pavilion, there was Enrico’s Pizza, where for a mere pittance you could get a slice or two of big greasy cheese pizza with pepperoni, but if you bought one of their 24 ounce plastic cups, you can get a coke in that, but whenever you came back with it, they would fill it up for half price. So, what was a young guy to do? I’d go buy my two slices of pizza, get my 24 ounces of beer at lunch, right? I would come back, get another one, at half price, and back then it was seven bucks—I could get all this food and drink. Well, a few of us would come back at lunch, and in the research rooms, we had lunch either 11:30 to 12:30 or 12:30 to 1:30 or 1:30 to 2:30. Coming back from lunch we smelled maybe like a brewery and we thought maybe but then when the buzz wore off, you’d kind of be in the research rooms getting a little sleepy—we were a little rambunctious. So, there were probably moments then when I was almost, I was this close, but you learn to maintain your buzz." }, { "speaker": "MS. BRENNER", "text": "Well, thank you so much for your time." }, { "speaker": "MR. ANTHONY", "text": "Yes, make sure that gets put in the records. Thank you very much. You’re very good at interviewing. It was a pleasure to do this. #### NATIONAL ## AR **CHIVES** National Archives History Office 700 Pennsylvania Av e. NW Washington DC 20408" } ]

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[{"speaker":"Jessie","text":"Great, thanks. And I know you did an [interview](https://www.archives.g(...TRUNCATED)

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[{"speaker":"MS. KRATZ","text":"Today is January 24, 2017. I am Jessie Kratz, Historian of the Natio(...TRUNCATED)

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