Measuring Archival Impact

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for this webinar with Margot Note. My name is Bradley, and I will be your moderator for this webinar titled Measuring Archival Impact.

Before we start, I would like to provide some information about our company and introduce today’s presenter. Lucidea is a software developing company specialized in museum and archival collections management solutions, as well as knowledge management and library automation systems. Our brands include Sydney, Presto, Argus, ArchivEra, Eloquent, and CuadraSTAR.

Now I would like to take a moment to introduce today’s presenter, Margo Note. Margo Note is an author, archivist, and records manager, helping individuals and organizations harness their history. As a principal of Margo Note Consulting LLC, she facilitates the understanding of the importance of unique collections, suggesting ways to manage them and use them to tell stories to connect with people. She’s also a popular guest author for Lucidea’s Think Clearly blog and has provided us with many great webinars that are listed on our website, so please feel free to check those out after today’s session. Take it away, Margo.

Thank you so much.

So I’m excited today to this is kind of the last of the series that I’ve been doing on, advocating internally for your organization as an archivist.

And, it’s really talking about, you know, measuring impact and and looking at data and using it kind of as your friend.

So we can say as archivists that archives are valuable. I mean, they’re historically valuable. A lot of times, they’re fiscally valuable.

But people, a lot of times, are decision makers, sometimes they’re community members, people that we work with. For example, if we work at, an organizational archives, they don’t really get it.

Or, I mean, obviously, we’re biased because we see this valuable because we’ve dedicated our careers or education to it, and we wanna stay employed, etcetera, etcetera. So I think it’s helpful to have something outside of ourselves, something objective like data.

And data, of course, can be manipulated, but data at least gives kind of a third party kind of verification of what we’re saying. So we wanna make sure that data supports our value proposition of the archives. So we’re looking at methodologies, metrics, and narratives that we can bring to the table to kind of make our case and to advocate internally, for the archives department.

So we were thinking about impact both tangible impact and intangible. And I think the thing about archives is that there’s a lot of intangible value.

Right? There’s it’s hard to put your get a sense of the intangible.

What is fascinating, and this is kind of a little bit of a, veering off the path a little bit, is that I’ve been getting more and more into, book and manuscript appraisal.

And that’s really interesting to figure out, okay, you have so many linear feet of archives. What’s its what’s its tangible value?

And there’s a whole methodology about how to go about that. But it’s it’s interesting that there’s this kind of intangible value or impact the archives, has that we’re it’s kind of hard to it’s hard to kind of figure out how to to show that value or that impact is what I’m trying to say.

So let’s talk about tangible impact. So things like quantifiable metrics. So thinking about, you know, you’ve had this many people download something, this many people look at your website, this many people use your reading room, this many people ask for reference services, this amount of linear feet of materials being processed, this amount of projects getting finding aids, etcetera, etcetera. So there are ways that we can build into our kind of daily workflows of kind of capturing this information over a period of time to let us know kind of the impact that we’re having with tangible hard numbers.

We’re looking at things like increased usage, for example, but also things like reduced retrieval time. So really be creative about, you know, in the past, if it took you a day to get the materials for, a researcher, maybe it takes you, or, like, to get it from off-site storage. Maybe there’s a way that you can reduce those retrieval times, for example. And I think that’s the that’s the I think it’s thinking about increased metrics, but also reduced match metrics too that are just as valuable. I found in an old, archives position that I had that one of the first real impacts I had was this reduced retrieval time. So the archives office was kind of this black box that people basically gave their stuff when they, like, left their left their position.

There was no real organization or arrangement or anything, and it was and I remember people asking me for stuff, and it would take me about a twenty four hour turnaround to find, you know, this these images or this I remember looking for CDs of things for people. And I remember once I started getting those once I started processing things and getting databases and workflows, I was able to reduce that retrieval time to about, one minute because I knew exactly where it was. And that was, I think, to me, I saw in the eyes of people that that I worked with, my colleagues, that they were kind of, amazed by that and were more willing to give me their stuff because I could get it for them very easily.

And that’s just one way that that’s something you don’t really even think about. I was more thinking about, you know, I my organizational mind was like, this is a mess. This is driving me crazy. I need to control this and organize this for my own mental health and clarity.

And I had this I had this fantastic results, by by doing that. That actually helped me even more. It was kind of a, it had multiple benefits.

So intangible impact is thinking about kind of the broader influence on culture, decision making, and stakeholder engagement.

I have a past client that reached out to me, and I was helping them. And I’m, you know, I’m purposely being really vague here. They had a really interesting they had really interesting archives, that were highly sensitive, and there is some legal legal stuff related to these archives.

And they were, really trying to think about how can we, how can because these because these archives are kind of sequestered and they’re they need some vetting and we can’t just have anyone just rummage through these files. What can we do? They wanted me to kinda figure out how a pricing model model or, like, a cost model to digitize things and what that would look like and kind of just envisioning what what that process of getting some of these materials online. And it was really cool to see.

They reached out to me a couple weeks ago. This is something I worked with them maybe one or two years ago, and they had created the website and had the materials, and we’re asking people for review. And so that that intangible impact of having those legal documents online, I think, is gonna be, historically very very valuable, for researchers.

And that’s that’s more of kind of the intangible impact. And it was also a way to fundraise, to raise awareness about the organization. It was just a fantastic project, and it was so nice to see, Ben get to that level.

So we need data gathering tools, things like research, decision making processes, feedback, and user testimonials.

Those are good for kind of getting a sense of where we can improve, how how can we have more impact, what are what are the things that we’re doing as archivist that people really like that we kinda take for granted. Again, going back to my, example of the reduced retrieval time, I didn’t think that was that big of deal at all, but, obviously, that had a huge impact. And sometimes what I think is fantastic, like, I was able to process a backlog. I was a loan arranger. I processed a three year backlog in a couple maybe in six or nine months. I thought that was an amazing achievement. No one really cared.

But there was other things that I did for the organization that people cared about, and it’s all basically unfortunately or fortunately, it’s all about perception. So if people think as an archivist, if you’re helpful, you are helpful.

And you don’t really have to understand their reasoning, but you have to meet them where they’re at. And I think they they do appreciate it, and you do benefit from that.

Some other data gathering techniques are cause and effect analysis, collection analysis, looking at, you know, what’s being used in your collection, what could maybe be the hidden gems that need more promotion, direct observation, focus groups, interviews, surveys.

I think really it it’s interesting. I was reading this book called I think it was called Free Time, and it was talking about entrepreneurs, like, what you can do to free up your time in your business. And she made a really good point that I think archivists can and I know that I could have benefited from in past positions where just having a little bit more leeway or time or, like, not being able to do things like direct observations and being mindful about what the what exactly is happening here, and how can I improve versus just continuously to do a to do list that that never ends?

So cause and effect analysis is really thinking about identifying the potential causes and effects, and you can use something called Ishikawa diagram or a fishbone, which is basically, you can see it online. It’s it basically looks like a fishbone where you can kind of talk about what are the cause and effect analysis that you see with a certain process or, how users interact with the archives.

You can do things like collection analysis, so you’re gathering data from existing sources.

Sometimes, it’s helpful when their direct collection is impractical.

We could also think about, time, cost, and accessibility constraints that happen. So trying to get get a sense of what’s going on, given given your situation and your constructions.

There’s direct observations, again, looking at behaviors or groups of individuals with no manipulation, just seeing how people, let’s say, interact with your archives website. How do they find information?

How do you is it intuitive how to find things on a finding aid, for example, or, like, to find things in your collections? I think sometimes and and sometimes this is the problem with if you’re working with particular databases or, whatever you’re you like, sometimes what’s obvious to us is archivist isn’t direct isn’t necessarily obvious to the user. And some part has to do with kind of even naming conventions of what’s happening in the database.

And then this is another tangent where I’m working with a client and we’re, installing a database.

And there’s something it was funny. It was, like, called references, and it really was tagging. I don’t know why why they called it, but, you know, as we customize this database, I’m trying to think about okay. And this is a policy repository for, like, academic policies.

What you know, the way that the the database company is calling these things, it it comes more from a medical field, is not the same as how it’s gonna be perceived in an academic institution. So trying to and a lot of that was kind of talking talking and having meetings with, people that would be the users or the super users of the database. But, like, just getting a sense of, like, even when we talk to particular departments and we saw them use the software and they’re kind of talking out loud, we got a sense of where they were confused or things that didn’t make sense. And that was helpful for us because we were so much in the system that we, you know, we start not to see things, but someone with fresh eyes would kind of begin a beginner mind to a database or to the archives or to a finding aid can give you a lot of information.

This was actually really helpful when I was, kind of taking a break from it, but I was teaching graduate school with women’s history students, and so they were engaging with archives and finding aids for the first time. And it was really helpful for me as an archivist who’s kind of used to how maze like, some of some archival things are to see it from the perspective of a curious intellectually curious newbie that was engaging with the archives, pretty coming from a kind of a born digital perspective of the age of these students. Like, how did they interact with these materials? What what confused them?

What was kind of strange about finding information. And it was really helpful for me as an archivist just to see how they encountered things, and it helped me bet be better at explaining archives and explaining kind of how to find things and do research methods within archives.

Focus groups are helpful too, and this is kinda going back to what I said about those meetings that I’ve been having with the departments about the policy database.

I you can do very kind of moderated focus groups that are very structured, or you can do what I think is sometimes even better is to have a little bit of an agenda in the back of your head, but have a conversation about whatever issue that you’re dealing with with the archives or how people interact with getting things from off-site storage or their first encounters with the with their website or how you order archival boxes, etcetera, etcetera. And you can kind of get a sense of how people are, people can kind of start to open up a little bit, especially if you’re really interested and have open ears and want to hear that feedback so you can improve and to help make their lives easier. And I think that’s just you know, helps helps get them, more on your side.

Interviews are especially important. This is kind of similar to focus groups, but structured or unstructured, unstructured discussions, provides in-depth information, and you can kinda get into people’s thoughts, experiences, and beliefs. And that’s, I think, the important thing. Like, what is their what are their beliefs? What are their what’s the story that they’re telling themselves?

And I think that’s helpful to understand where they’re coming from and how you can, work to get the materials that you have into their hands to have it be a better experience, a faster experience.

And you can, you know, advocate for archives in that way as well.

Surveys are nice too because they can be anonymous. You can have open ended or closed ended questions. It could be online, over the phone, or in person. I’ve seen this kind of the most To me, this seems like the kind of the most, one of the most low effort ways to get information and widely used. I know when I’ve used to work at, like, academic libraries, there would always be kind of the end of year survey that went out to students. It It was anonymous.

You know, they could get feedback. They could get a sense. And, you know, you you look through and you see, are there trends that you’re seeing? You know, are people are are you seeing that there’s definitely, like, a problem? Is it maybe a one off issue that’s happening with one particular person?

What are people really excited about or wanna learn more about that you haven’t really thought about? It’s a really nice way to get information that doesn’t that I think when people are anonymous, they can be a lot more honest, which is good or bad. But, I mean, I think in that situation, you do want people to be honest because you can fix your you can fix things, even though sometimes it stings a little bit.

And you wanna think about kind of your impact across the enterprise. So how do archives, really help with all of these things? So I was kinda thinking about how, you know, how could archives help them? What what’s the data or the metrics that we can get?

So things like executive management. So whether you have a president, the c suite, board of directors, if it’s maybe you’re a small shopper, maybe it’s just executive director. Maybe you have board members that are super involved or not so involved. Maybe you work at a business, a big corporation, a small business, a family owned business, family archives.

I mean, there’s all different ways that executive management is kind of thinking about kind of the leadership, the decision makers. We are also thinking things about finance and accounting, because archives do take money. So sometimes, you know, we wanna make sure that these people are you know, we’re satisfying these people.

Human resources is important. Legal and compliance. I think legal legal and compliance and archives are, really allies that sometimes we don’t necessarily integrate with so much, but I think we’re we’re kind of best buddies, and we can really help each other. Marketing and communications, again, another great ally where a lot of organizations look to their archives to tell their stories, and marketing and communications are always looking for something to talk about.

Operations and facilities.

I have found operations and facilities are especially important, I would say, in places that are, especially campus based because those, the the people in those crews are your eyes and ears. I had a a past client that was talking about she worked at a campus, and the facilities guys were, like, the best. And because they’re being called, you know, clear out a classroom or clear out an office, and they knew by looking at the stuff, oh, the archives would would want this stuff. They knew to have that call rather than just throw things away, or they kind of saw old kind of college campus stuff that they were like, oh, this is this is kind of an interesting artifact to to bring to the archives.

And they really were the kind of the eyes and ears for the archivists on campus, and they really had a close bond and really helping because it was I mean, it was easy for facilities just to schlep everything over to the archives versus, you know, getting one eight hundred junk or where wherever they were gonna dispose of everything.

Public relations and media, again, kind of going back to marketing and communications, those are very similar. And then strategic planning and development, again, this is something that’s kind of executive management a bit.

But there are ways, especially, like, in business archives or corporate archives where you can use you can use the archives to tell kind of the story of the organization.

And you can use it, I think, for strategic planning to see what happened in the past to help you figure out what’s gonna happen in the future.

So executive management and I’ll go through all of these little, departments, in more detail now. So executive management, so it’s helping assisting executive decision making by providing historical data that you can give people.

It can offer insight into the organization’s trajectory and milestones.

So I think this is important especially for people that are leaders within an organization. They are future focused, maybe present focused, but really future focused. But I think it’s important for them to have some context about what’s happened in the past, and it can help them kind of tell that story and get immersed.

And I found, it’s really interesting. And a lot of times, people at those positions can have a lot of, institutional knowledge. And, unfortunately, when they leave, when they go to another position or they retire or whatever happens to them, a lot of that information kind of leaves with them. So sometimes it is important to build relationships with people and maybe get some moral histories or to get some sense of their story as well and their history.

And but I’ve also found that people coming new into these positions of power, sometimes they’re really future focused. They’re they’re really thinking about getting, you know, that impact.

And so I think it’s good to present them at least initially with some information about the archives, kind of initially.

So I found that they’re not necessarily interested in it right away, but you kind of plant those seeds, and then they start to come back to you with questions about stuff.

But, yeah, if you inundate them with too much information when they first come on, I mean, they’re thinking about cleaning house and what the future is gonna hold and making their impact. And then later on, they have more perspective of kind of after that those that first ninety days.

Finance and accounting, you can help with assisting with audits by maintaining historical financial records.

You can offer budgeting and financial planning data for analysis.

I find that sometimes with the archives are good in an organization to digitize files for finance, to organize stuff for finance, to have it ready for them, and to be, be someone that they can that kind of assist them with, like, filing and that type of data information.

Human resources, maintaining personal records for compliance and reference, supports onboarding programs and organizational context. This is a big the onboarding and offboarding is something that I’m working currently with a client that they’re creating a knowledge they did hire a knowledge management knowledge manager for the organization. And so one of the big things that they’re working with with human resources is getting a better onboarding and offboarding process so that people that come on to the info come on to the organization get a sense of the the organization’s legacy.

And this organization I wanna say, the its founder, if you’re a person of a certain age such as myself, this the founder was kind of has a little bit of a negative context.

And I think a newer like, a younger person wouldn’t necessarily understand the impact of this person, but, obviously, this, this organization has had tremendous impact and tremendous positive impact. And I think telling that story and getting in front of employees, I think, is really important.

And, also, off I should say, also helping with offboarding too. So capturing that knowledge as people leave. You can work with human resources to do that as well to capture some of that data.

Legal and compliance.

So legal compliance and records management are, you know, hand in hand. And so sometimes depending on your organization, the arc sometimes the archives also does records management.

Not all archivists wants to do records management, which I totally get. I’m kind of on the other where I just think it’s all super fun.

And a continuum, like, I think doing records management well makes a job as an archivist so much easier.

But records retention is, like, not not the most fun or interesting, but it is important. So helping with legal compliance with any type of records retention or document management is is is helpful. It helps build your case for how you help the organization.

You can help, with some retrieval of electronic records when e-discovery is needed.

I think helping with helping legal compliance and the organization, this is more kind of operational about file naming and, folder formats and good kind of data, hygiene practices, and making sure the shared folders are all organized. Like, that I think that’s helpful too. That has that has an impact later on, let’s say, when there’s a big potentially pending litigation that people need to go through a bunch of files.

Marketing key communications.

The archives can help supply past, marketing materials and campaigns for inspiration.

They can help with messaging information for brand have a kind of consistent brand.

And I found that archives and communications, especially, like, social media is really helpful from the archives. There’s a lot of really cool stuff that the organization has probably done, and there is records of it somewhere, and they just have to get them online. And, I mean, I’ve talked about this a bit before, but, at a past position when I was an archivist, I also and this is, like, the start of Instagram. I was, like, like, the old days of Instagram, and really getting their fabulous photography of what the organization had done, and getting those images out on social media was really helpful. And part of that was we got a huge grant to digitize a lot of our images, and that helped with the website, with social media, with marketing campaigns, with the annual reports, all that good stuff.

Operations of facilities, so that it’s helpful for, you know, where your housing materials, are you housing materials off-site, on-site, maintenance or renovation projects? You know, sometimes, it’s it’s it’s interesting. It was a it was a church that I was wound up there’s a whole bunch of stuff that happened, but I had a potential client that was a very well known historical church, and they and I was gonna help them organize their materials or get a sense of how much that they had. It was and it was a a really fascinating, site visit because I was, like, crawling all over the places, like, all the places in this massive cathedral where they stored records.

But one of the major things that they were dealing with was that it was a very old building, with lots of old pipes and heating as you can imagine, And facilities, like, had to fix all these old pipes. There’s and so they had massive amounts of plans and, renovations that the the cathedral had done. And so they needed someone to help organize, like, those blueprints and get them organized because facilities was still looking back to see what what was done in the past because this was, like, a massive complicated, you know, decades, you know, I don’t know how more than a hundred years old, this massive cathedral.

So that was kind of interesting that, you know, you don’t really think about necessarily, like, four massive buildings that these archival plans are really interesting and and helpful today. Something that was created, you know, a hundred years ago can have a huge impact today when you have to crawl around and and figure out the piping and the heating, and it’s pretty interesting. That was, like, one of my favorite even though I didn’t get, I didn’t get that project or it never really went anywhere, that was, like, one of my favorite site visits of many fascinating, site visits that one day I’ll one day I’ll write a book about the, adventures of being a consultant archivist, because I have stories to tell that would knock your socks off.

So public relations and media, so thinking about past press releases, media coverage, PR campaigns, again, assist in crisis management too.

I think in as an archivist, you can keep track of all that old, all the old marketing materials that I’ve put in the past. I I have found it really helpful.

So a lot of times, what I what I particularly like about old press releases, old, like, PR campaigns, old newsletters is you get kind of a snapshot of what happened at that time with kind of and that’s the final kind of draft of what happened or how they’re communicating externally.

And I think that’s really helpful for when you’re kind of telling the story of an organization. You can look back at those snapshots. It’s almost like, the Internet archive. Where it looks at a website and has those particular snapshots. You can get a sense of what the organization has done, and it gives you really interesting information. And I found this helpful, when I digitized and organized, like, decades worth of newsletters and annual reports and all this stuff that was sent out for this organization.

And the president was asking, you know, who she wanted to know, like, who she met in London for lunch in nineteen eighty two. Like, it was, like, the most random question that she asked. And I was able to look through those new newsletters and because it was a significant person. I I don’t know I don’t remember who it was at this point. But it was mentioned. It was a high profile meeting.

We knew the date. We knew where they met. We knew what it was about. So it was it was really cool to be able to have something that was in someone’s just something that was in the back of an executive’s mind, and I was able to figure that out because we had we had all that available.

Strategic planning, strategic planning and development.

So, and this is kind of more of the intangible, I think kind of harder to show, but archives does do this, that, archives can offer data and reports to inform strategic planning initiatives, provides insight to past strategy successes and, challenges.

I think this is really helpful, but I think you also have to keep in mind, like, people need to let you know, like, what they’re working on. Sometimes I found depending on what your position is as the archivist within an organization, sometimes there’s stuff happening at that top level that you have no idea what’s you could really help them. If they only had asked you, you could really help them with stuff. But if they don’t let you know, you can’t help them. But sometimes you can get kind of a whiff of what they’re working on and say, you know, oh, I saw that you’re looking at, you know, revisiting this this or that, and you can give some information. It’s just a nice way to to help support what the organization is doing by giving information from, the past.

So effective measurement, you know, really depends on benchmarks.

You’re looking at kind of your own benchmarks as an archives department. Sometimes it’s helpful to see, what are, like, peer institutions doing, what are who you see as your peers, who are your colleagues in other organizations, and, that’s helpful to get that kind of benchmark as well. You know, if you can say, our our archives department is not doing x y z, but all these other ones are doing this. Like, I think we really should. It it’s a nice way to advocate for whatever project that you wanna do.

You wanna make sure that your measurement aligns with goals. So, obviously, whatever the focus is, you wanna make sure you’re aligning that way that you’re, you know, you’re help supporting the vision and the goals of the organization.

You can benchmark against past performance.

So I think this is especially helpful helpful to improve the case. You know? Because we’ve hired, an assistant, archivist this year, we were able to increase our processing from this percentage to that percentage. Like, you can use I mean, data data can be manipulated, so manipulate the data in your favor.

So think about there’s ways, you know, we got this grant. What were we able to do this grant this year that we weren’t able to do it last year? We got an increase in operational funds in this particular area. What was the impact of that?

You know, you wanna make the case that, like, this kind of the return on investment. Like, you we got this amount of funding, and we were able to do that compared to last year. We are able to do this. Like, this is baseline.

This is benchmark, but then we could do so much more with this little bit of funding or this, you know, intern or this, you know, part time assistant archivist or this full, digitization technician, etcetera, etcetera.

And it demonstrates progress over time. So you always wanna be kind of continuously improving, obviously, and doing things better and quicker and easier, and with more impact.

So tracking engagement, you can use analytics tools to monitor traffic and interactions.

I a lot of this is not like, I’m trying to think about ways that you can kind of be creative about automating a lot of these metrics, like, not necessarily, like, counting every you know, manually counting every reference visit you get or, or inquiry. Like, you know, are there ways that you can automatically get this information?

So looking at collections, like, you can see, okay, this collection is having a lot of impact.

Maybe we should digitize more of it, have it be more available, process it at a deeper level, or maybe there’s you know, people are really asking us about, people aren’t aware of this really awesome collection. What can we do to get to to that level that people are aware of it? And engagement is also, you know, based on user preferences and needs. So it is seemed like what are people drawn to, and how can you do how can you do more of that?

Influencing decisions. So, we we wanna track instances where insights influence decisions, and we want to bridge gap between archival program and organizational strategy. So thinking about how the archives can help with better decision making. That’s where I try to, like, advocate for archives is that you have the information.

The archives are doing particular things because it’s helping and supporting all aspects of the organization, and it’s helping with that decision making because you’re giving people information, you’re giving people context, you’re giving people, some history or some milestones that they can that it can help with their decision making.

Efficiency. So I think this is a great way to use data to to advocate for yourself is really thinking about, for example, demonstrating cost savings through digitization projects and quantifying the time and resources saved. So thinking about what are we doing now or as an archive that’s more efficient, that we can make things easier?

How can we I think because archives spend money, we also should think about how we save money. No one really cares about saving money. It’s not that people care about spending money. People don’t care about saving money, but I think that has such an impact on an organization, and you don’t see it. But I think archives definitely make organizations more efficient, in a variety of ways. And so but you have to think about how are you being efficient for the organization, and how can you capture that in data and show that and and, like, shot it through to, from the rooftops.

So crafting narratives, using storytelling to convey impact, contextualization with stories, and it humanizes statistics.

So I think a big impact of archives is kind of the storytelling element.

And I think sometimes when we use archives or archives material, honestly, we think people think of old, dusty stuff, or things in the very old past, you know, nineteenth century, not interesting. You know, it’s not now. It’s not current. But I think we can also I think it’s helpful to think about archives as storytelling.

I feel like people are more engaged with that, especially if they’re not necessarily history people. I think people love I mean, as humans, we tells we have survived because we tell stories. That’s how we figure things out.

You know, when we were like, you know, grabbing herbs and grabbing a bark off a tree, we realized, oh, this, the bark of the willow tree, you know, like, somehow the pain in my leg went away when I chewed on this bark. Like, there’s all these narratives that we as humans, we love stories. It’s kept us alive for millennium. So so how could we use archives, to tell kind of better stories for our organization?

We’re thinking about continuous improvement. So thinking about being very strategic about what projects you choose, making sure it aligns with what the organization is doing.

Sometimes people depending on the person and their power and influence, the past people just suggest projects that aren’t the best that you still have to go with. But I think if you should try to influence what you’re working on, you know, helps you revisit metrics and methodologies.

You’re making sure that you’re aligning with goals with all the projects that you do.

And you wanna have flexibility in measurement strategies to respond to priorities. So you have to be kind of flexible as an archivist and be able to kinda go with the flow, and thinking about how you can improve and and build the archives. And I think and maybe people are aware. I’m, like, a big project management person because I feel like projects are really projects versus operations.

No one really cares about archival operations. If you run an archives really well, unfortunately, no one really cares. Like, no one really see like, if you run something operationally very well, no no matter what it is, archives or anything, No one sees it, and no one cares. It’s only when there’s a problem that people see it versus a project is where you can start to change things.

It’s doing something different. It’s temporary. It’s something that you can put on your resume, something that can help you grow as an archivist.

So I think it’s measuring making sure you’re doing the right projects, but also making sure you’re doing kind of the what you need to do in the operations and and being very and in previous, webinars, I’ve talked about kind of starting and stopping and what you can should continue doing. So really think about operationally with this continuous improvement.

What what should you start doing? What should you continue doing? What you should maybe change what you’re doing, and what you should stop doing. The stop doing is really important, and I think that’s it’s really freeing to say I’m I will stop doing this or that. I know for me, with my business, I was on Twitter and I was on Facebook, and I was, doing all this I was writing for all these websites and etcetera etcetera, and I just got to a point where I was like, this is not really this is just using a lot of my energy, and I was, you know, having meetings with anybody and anyone and, yeah, pick my brain and all that. And I got to a point where I think I was like, you have to for your mental health, you have to say, I’m no longer doing these things anymore, or, you know, you have to really be you really have to curate what you’re doing.

And it reminds me this is such a weird tangent, but, I visited I visited the Edward Gorey House Museum, in the Cape Cod area. And Edward Gorey is, like, a really interesting illustrator, kind of really gothic, like, creepy, like and he did a lot of children’s things. He did the mystery opening for PBS for many years. So he def definitely has a particular look, and he definitely lived a particular lifestyle, and it was very it seemed to be very curated. Like, he only like, he apparently went to the when he was in New York City, he went to the ballet every night. And there are certain things that he did a lot of, but it was kind of this container.

And and I I had such a great experience at that house museum, just getting to know him as a person, and I realized, like, yeah, that’s really once I started doing that as an archivist, and I started doing that as a consultant, really saying, like, this is this is only what I’m doing, and I’m doing it really well. And the rest of this stuff, like replying to some cold email or some RFP from god knows whatever or, you know, all this other, time wasters, that was really helpful for me. And it it made me a better it helped me be a better consultant, especially because I was not burnt out all the time. I think that’s the other thing, and I will stop my rant after this, is that I think there’s a lot of, burnout with archives and archivists because we’re we’re really doing a lot with so little. And so I think it’s really helpful to say you know, to kind of put your foot down and say what you’re doing and what you’re not doing because you don’t have to do it all.

So working and that leads right really well into this next slide about working on the right thing. So not working on all the things, not being and I love LBJ where he said do all the things and you will win, which I get it, but that I mean, he was in terrible health and had heart issues and pretty fascinating guy.

I love him as a historical figure, but I disagree with LBJ on that. You should not be doing all the things. You should be doing the right things.

And yeah. So stop and this is great. Stop or minimize low value activities. Low value to your users, so the your colleagues and the people that you work with that don’t care.

It it it’s unfortunate, but it’s, like, it really is the perception of the decision makers.

Like, what I was saying, like, they did not care about the backlog. They had no idea, didn’t care. I cared about it. The added benefit was that I could reduce the retrieval time for them. But so stop or minimize low value activities, things that really do not make an impact that no one would really care if you stop doing. It’s only things that say a legacy that you’ve done.

It reminds me of a project that I did or a consulting project where just working with a local history room at a public library, and there was kind of a shift in staffing a major shift in staffing. And there was all this stuff that made sense when the archives or this local history room was first like, the person that founded this local history room did an amazing job with what she was given. She really built this thing, but it was not based on archival best practices, and it became a huge problem later on. Like, she just started something that had a million problems.

And when this new group of people came on and really wanted to think about what they should be doing, one of the major things we talked about is what they should stop doing.

So I had my idea of what they should stop doing, but I wanted them to brainstorm and and have permission to say we are no longer doing this. So there was this one project that really got out of control that made no sense, that was sucking up so much time of this past staff member that they decided we are no longer doing this thing, and no one cared.

It was a huge time suck. No one cared, and there was no consequences, and all this time and effort and resources was freed up to do all the millions of other things that had a tremendous impact.

But they needed the permission to say we are no longer doing this, and they and they got the executive director on board. She agreed that, like, there’s all this stuff that they were doing previously that made them sense, and they stopped doing it to do all the other things that they really shouldn’t be doing.

So allocate time and attention to existing high value activities, and identify and pursue new opportunities. So really thinking about slicing and dicing that the work that you do, to, again, to add to that value proposition and to have impact, and not just do it just to do it. You know?

Doing things right. So exploring new strategies to enhance quality and implementing new techniques and tools to increase efficiency.

This is another thing, and I know I’ve been guilty of this myself, is that I have a particular way of doing something.

A I I’m thinking of a past position I had where it was very laborious, but it was one way to do it. And I really should’ve taken the time to sit back and think about how can I make this more efficient, but I was so in the in the, mind space of, like, I have to do all of this? Like, no one else is gonna do it. You know?

Like, I really should have taken that step back and be like, okay. What can be more efficient? So if you have a workflow, I find it helpful, like, as a team to sit down and think about these are the things that we do that that is a pain to, like, map it out on a whiteboard. Like, this is our workflow.

How can we how can we make this ten step workflow four steps?

Or how can we, like what like, looking at what’s being done, what is what makes sense, and how what can we agree that we can let go and try something new and just make something more efficient?

But it does take again, it takes some time to step back and to really think about, you know, do I wanna do this? Like, how can we do it differently? And it takes a certain amount of bravery to do that too in self reflection.

So, again, we wanna demonstrate our value through relational assets, archival assets, virtue, and momentum, and I’ll talk about that in a second.

So relational assets is kind of reputation and reach. How well are you known within the organization?

And you want to work on external and internal relationship development. So how are you helping the organization? How are you helping people outside of the organization? There’s a value in that kind of relational, assets that you have.

So, obviously, it’s archival assets, the collections, environments, and services that you have that are tangible, that are touchable, but also the organizational and individual worth of the archives, the institutional knowledge that you has you have as an archivist, the the value that these materials hold, and what’s lost if they’re not preserved right.

Something that’s kind of interesting is kind of this idea of virtue, so kind of social capital beyond the archives department. So how can you contribute to the research learning and other common goods within the organization? And I think the archives are so interesting because they have a unique perspective of being kind of apart from all the other departments, had their little tentacles in all these other departments, and then also had this interesting, timeline because you’re looking at the future, you’re looking at the present, and you’re looking at the past. So I think there’s a lot of value and the the virtue that the archives can do to help the organization that I think has to be that might be already happening, but has to be, like, advocating and making making it more clear and obvious.

And momentum, thinking about the resources gained or saved and archival services and collections. So, again, talking about everyone cares about spending money. No one cares about saving money or efficiency, and I think that’s where the archives can really help an organization by talking about the resources that they saved or gained through their services and their collections.

So I can think about, a kind of a changing perspective. So I see archivists as change agents. They have that kind of, like a Buddhist or, like, a mindful, like, a mindful disengagement with kind of what what’s happening. Like, they can see the changes within the organization, how things have changed over time within organization, and they can help make changes happen within the organization.

Archivists can integrate insights into decision making, and, obviously, the continuous improvement as an archives department can demonstrate relevance of their contributions.

And, again, this is something that I think archivists just do. We’re not the most we’re not the most show off y people.

Maybe there’s some archivists that are really big show offs or tooting their own horn all the time. I think we tend to be very intellectual, a bit modest, a bit humble, but we really are helping organizations, and we have an incredible amount of impact, that I think we have to make seen and make heard.

So, again, measuring impact is thinking about, archivists, emerging as indispensable contribute contributors to the organization. Excuse me. It helps enrich the present and also informs the future.

Thank you, Margo, for the wonderful presentation. And to our audience, if you’d like to learn more about our archival collections management system called ArcivEra, please feel free to visit our website or reach out to us at sales at lucidea.com, and we’d be happy to have a chat with you.

And we would also like to announce that you available now on our website is Margo’s latest book with Preserve, Promote, Persevere, Archivist’s Guide to Internal Advocacy. So please feel free to visit our website to get a copy of that.

And if you have any more questions on any of our software or our company, our contact details are on the screen. Please stay tuned for more webinars and content related to the series.

On behalf of the Lucidea team, I thank you all for attending today, and until next time. Thank you.