An Archivist's Tale

Karen Trivette and Geof Huth, hosts of An Archivist's Tale, tell their own tales of their archivist lives at this moment and their plans for future writing and podcasting.

Sheila Almond, the Records Management Officer for the Orange-Ulster BOCES, tells us how microfilming led her into records management, how records storage areas do not always hold the most pleasant of creatures, and how she and her staff have helped transform the management of archives and records in many local governments in southeastern New York State.

Steve Goodfellow of Access Systems tells us the harrowing story he told his wife during their honeymoon, how he went from selling recordkeeping systems to designing them, and how Abraham Lincoln shows up in the most unexpected places.

Bill Saffady, an independent consultant and researcher, tells the story of his movements from history to libraries to archives to records management, his peripatetic life teaching records management to a generation, and something about what drives him to work and teach and write. Caution: Laughter.

Valerie Komor, the Director of Corporate Archives at the Associated Press, tells the stories of how she became an archivist, of archival stories in her family and her work from around the world, and of the similarities between archivists and journalists.

Lauren Brown, the MARAC (Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference) Historian and longtime MARAC Archivist, recounts how he knows he was born an archivist, his travels from the west to the east coasts of the US, his work with the AFL-CIO and Spiro Agnew at the University of Maryland, and many deep stories about the history of MARAC.

Robert Parnica, Senior Reference Archivist at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, tells us why archivists need to be active in society, why archivists are always needed even in online environments, how curated collections of digital surrogates can be their own natural archives, and how he helps researchers use his archives' rich collection of records relating to communism and human rights.

Örs Lehel Tari, Archivist at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives, discusses how a cartoon led him to archives, how he trained as an archivist at work, how he studied archives remotely through the University of Dundee, and what it's like being a processing archivist with a multi-lingual backlog.

Nina Gostenčnik, Deputy Director of the Regional Archives of Maribor, Slovenia, explains her work at her archives (which acquires government, personal, and organizational records), the problem of reunifying records in the nations that formerly made up Yugoslavia, and how the seven archives of Slovenia operate.

Hrvoje Stančić, Chair of Archival and Documentation Sciences at the University of Zagreb, discusses his work on the international multi-year InterPARES project investigating the means to achieve trustworthiness, his teaching schedule, his dictionary of archival terms in Croatian, and how we often only authenticate the fakeness of a record.