>>JOHN PALFREY: It is such a pleasure to twice in one day sit next to David Ferriero.
I think those who have not followed his entire career, having been director at MIT and Duke
and the Mellon Director of the New York Public Library, and now leading our archives.
I think we as Americans are incredibly lucky and proud to have you doing this.
From the start of the DPLA, he was the number one supporter of this project, and all the
way along, I just have been so impressed and grateful.
Thank you for doing what you do as our archivist.
(Applause.)
>>DAVID FERRIERO: So, I really do need to do that, because I want to frame my comments
around what John is demanding of us all in this new book about creating a new nostalgia
to replace the way we used to do our work.
The reason I jumped up is I had to catch Micah before he left to remind him of a conversation
that we had six years ago about should I go to library school, and I said no.
So, let me just, in no particular order, talk about, especially that last session, about
my own passion for creating, my deep feeling that these institutions, and I'm talking about
libraries, archives and museums, are villages that require a certain set of competencies
and the credential for, in my humble opinion, isn't coming from the professional programs.
I think there are pockets of excellence that I can point to where there is some good work
going on, but we train librarians and we train archivists and we train museum professionals,
and there's no co mingling, there's no looking at the best practices in each one of those
programs to create the kind of program that I require as an employer, because each one
of these jobs in each one of these institutions requires the best of libraries, the best of
archives and the best of museum practice.
For me, even more disturbing is the recruitment process for these programs.
I don't think they're rigorous, I don't think that the right questions are being asked,
I don't think that you can expect to turn out folks who are going to thrive in this
environment unless you do a good job of screening at the very beginning.
John, this morning, in our conversation talking about the book, I was pushing him on, because
he doesn't, in the book, talk about, okay, so you make this case for new nostalgia, but
you kind of walk away from who's going to staff it and how we're going to train the
people, and he talked about the recruitment process at his institution, his high school.
John, what is the motto of the school?
>> SPEAKER: (Off mic.)
>> SPEAKER: Not for self, which gets translated into be nice, which resonated with me, because
in each of these institutions, what we want are people who can be nice, people who can
work with each other, but more importantly, work with the clientele to engage, inform
and entertain, another phrase in John's language.
The community dealing with either the library, the museum, or the archive.
So, I was particularly struck by Mike's comments about the administrative readiness for this
vision and the problems with the culture in some of our institutions, that this is threatening,
that this risk taking focus on the unknown, creating the future on the fly, is very threatening.
Traditional, I'm counting myself among them, traditional administrators are used to plans
that kind of lay out what the next five years, I remember when I was at Duke, being saddled
with a committee to look at academic computing for the next 25 years.
(Laughing.)
But we're trained as administrators to be prescriptive about a path for a specified
period of time, usually five years, and, so, the requirements of this vision of being much
more opportunistic, much more nimble, requires a very different set of, a very different
mindset on the part of the administrator, and it's not going to be successful until
that mindset exists.
You can, I can, let me just share a story about my first days at the national archives.
So, I started in November of 2009.
Within the first couple of months, I heard that there was a group meeting basically in
secret at the archives, a group of staff interested in social media, and they weren't authorized
to meet as a group, so I heard about this, found out about their schedule and walked
into one of their meetings, and it was like, oh my god, we're busted, you know, but it
was one of the best meetings I ever had in terms of ideas that folks had and their vision
of the future, and it also gave me a sense of this problem of restricting the creativity,
the innovation, the excitement of the staff at large.
So, we, this is how long ago it was, they were very interested in iPads and iPhones,
so I said let's get 25 of each and fool around with them and experiment, and, well, the next
morning, I got a call from the CIO saying, you know, we don't support iPhones and iPads,
and then I heard from the acquisitions department, I understand you want iPhones and iPads, well,
that will be about 13 months to get them in, and I'm like, you know, 13 months, that's
like two generations.
So, the culture thing is real, and it's huge, and it's not just the top, Mike, it exists
within the organization too of folks who have been around for awhile and feel that the innovative
folks are getting all of the attention and that we've lost our, you know, kind of vision
of the importance of the traditional roles, so it's very important from the management
side, the administrative side, the leadership side, to value, to pay as much attention to
those innovators, those creative staff, as to the folks who have been around for awhile,
as you do to the newer innovative staff, which leads me to question what kind of opportunities
are we doing for continuing education, professional development, whatever you call it, that bring
those people along, that values their contribution and then moves them into this new world where
they're actually engaged and excited about the work, and is it possible for the schools,
the professional programs, or the professional societies, or communities of practitioners
to provide professional development for those folks, or is this something that could be
contracted out, that it's a new industry, so that's a thought that I had.
So, I was very interested in Kim's asking the audience about skill set, because one
of the things that really gets me is that in my hundred years in the profession, it
wasn't until I went to a session in January at Simmons where anyone from a library school
or an archival program or a museum program ever asked me what I was looking for.
So, it gave me, it has given me, for some time, pause to think that how do these schools
create curriculum if they're not talking to the customer, and when I challenged this at
this meeting, I was told, well, the students are the customer, and I said garbage, I'm
the customer, I'm the one who's buying your product, why don't you ask me what I'm looking
for in terms of competencies.
So, Kim, thank you for opening that door, and I think we have a lot of work to do to
work with the existing programs to get them to the point where we want them to be.
Really resonated with passion projects, the 20 percent of the time, that that's something
across the board that we're trying to instill now in the national archives.
We have a new innovation program, innovation hub where staff from all across the country
can bring, either physically or virtually, issues, problems that they want to work on
and trying to figure out ways that we can free up 20 percent of peoples' time on a regular
basis to work on passion projects.
So, I guess that's it.
I encourage you to buy John's book and to buy multiple copies, because the audience
for this book, as important as it is for you to read it, it's more important for administrators,
trustees, and the folks who are making decisions about your budgets to read this book, because
it paints a very optimistic future of what's possible, but it's not going to work unless
we get the support that we need to do it.
So, thank you, John, for writing this book.
(Applause.)
>>MAURA MARx: What an awesome way to wrap up today.
Thank you so much, David.
That was really wonderful, and we appreciate you coming here.
We know how busy you are, and in closing, I really just want to thank each and every
one of you for coming and sharing.
These are hard work, these meetings.
You know, we come, and it's very dense, there's a lot of information here, there's a lot that
you share that helps us.
We're going to take it all and go back.
I don't know if you know this, but Ricky Urway and Christy Hill over here have been absorbing
everything, and they are going to produce a paper summarizing this meeting, you know,
pulling it all together.
Last year, we just published notes.
We thought we'd improve upon that, so we're really looking forward to that.
That'll be out in about a month?
A month ish, but in the meantime, we'll have the archived video on the website, we will
have the raw transcript, so if you want to look for anything in there, you'll be able
to do that.
We're going to pour over it, and as I said at the beginning of the day, you really help
us do our jobs.
You know, we rely on your expertise for everything we do.
When we make our awards, when we have you in for panels, and we really rely on you to
help us every year as we think about these shared priorities, so thank you.
Before I leave, there's just a couple of other people that I would like to thank, and you
know how, you know, a meeting of this size is a big thing to pull off, so we thanked
those who put the program together already, but I want to take a moment to thank Katie
Murray, who's hiding over there behind the pillar.
Katie, you know, runs the office of library services, really, at the institute of museum
and library services and coordinated every aspect of this, and many of you know her,
so can we just give her a big round of applause?
(Applause.)
And also, Capital Meeting Planning, Margaret, is she over there?
(Applause.)
>> SPEAKER: Thank you so, so much, and that's all I have for now.
We look forward to keeping the conversation going, and please keep tweeting on IMLS focus
if things come to you.
Look for our guidelines.
We will publish guidelines this summer, June or July, that will draw from what we've spoken
about today.
We have those two grant deadlines, September and February, so we're having a lot more flexibility
in our cycle, but we really, you know, we really look to you to help us move the ball
down the field.
So, thank you so much.
(Applause.)