Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (00:12)

The first couple of questions that I’m going to ask is about your time at UCL, and the skills or knowledge that you’ve gained while studying at UCL, and how you’ve applied it to your current profession.

Charles Farrugia (00:27)

Okay.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (00:28)

So the first question is just a general question. So what degree did you study at the Department of Information Studies at UCL?

Charles Farrugia (00:36)

So I was reading for the Master in Archives and Records Management. Originally, I enrolled for the Master, there were two masters at the time, the international stream and the home students stream. I registered for the international one, but then within the first few weeks, I was offered the opportunity to shift to the home students course. So I did that one.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (01:06)

Okay, and did you enjoy your experience studying at UCL?

Charles Farrugia (01:10)

Yes, it was, it was an amazing experience, both from the academic point of view and even from the social point of view, living in London for one year was quite an amazing experience.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (01:23)

And this was a full time course, right?

Charles Farrugia (01:25)

Yes, it was. Okay.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (01:27)

And so what did you enjoy mostly studying at the Department of Information Studies?

Charles Farrugia (01:35)

Well, in my case, I had already worked in archives for about 10 years. So I was an employee of the National Archives, and the course came at a time when we were literally moving archives from an old palace, and there was a whole reform going on. So basically, for me, it was not like you’re going for an academic course and then you see whether you can apply it, but I was already experiencing the challenges of archives management. So one of the big advantages was that after 10 years, I had the opportunity to sort of stop from the hands on approach, study in London for one year, and there were two main positive things about that. First of all, there was the fact that we had quite a number of very established persons in the field of Archives and Records Management teaching on the course. And, apart from that, also the component of visits and links with established archives, like the TNA [The National Archives], the Wellcome Trust, and all those other institutions.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (02:56)

So, you mentioned that you worked at the National Archives of Malta. So were there any differences in archival practices between Malta and here in the United Kingdom?

Charles Farrugia (03:08)

Well, there were similarities and differences. When it comes to similarities, the fact that due to our colonial past, the system of the registry, the system of record keeping is basically the British system. However, then on the side of professional approach towards the upkeep of records, it was quite new to us. So the National Archives at the time consisted simply of three persons, I was one of those three. So I literally came to the UK at a time when we were literally trying to learn how to manage archives in a professional manner.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (03:51)

Okay, and so, your time at UCL what were the new archival practices or concepts that you learnt?

Charles Farrugia (03:59)

It was all new, in the sense that academically I was already a graduate at bachelor’s and master’s level from Malta, but that was in history, and we had no archival training whatsoever in Malta, and we were running the National Archives partially from a hands-on approach sorts of, you learn on the job. And to some extent, we were also applying some of the archival practices that we inherited or borrowed or learned from the Italian system. Most of the ecclesiastical archives in Malta are run by archivists who study in Italy in the Archivio di Stato or at the Vatican school. So basically, our approach was a mix of hands-on approach and what we learned from those schools. So basically, for me, it was all new, when it comes to literally sitting down and studying archives. It was all new, both for me and both for the Maltese sector basically.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (05:06)

Yeah. So how much do you think that UCL and studying the course at UCL helped you in gaining the right skills and knowledge on being an archivist?

Charles Farrugia (05:20)

Well, it was basically responsible for almost all my, my introduction to the archival world academically, from an academic point of view. Sort of, let’s say one topic that I do remember we did cover with, with Helen Forde, the lecturer on preservation, was the migration of archives. Now, I came to UCL at a time when I had already experienced the whole migration of our National Archives, but I had the opportunity then at UCL not to do the job, but actually to study migration planning, in a professional way. And the same holds to all the other aspects, cataloguing and, outreach, and all the other topics.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (06:12)

So you could say that most of the stuff that you did learn is relatable to your current profession right now.

Charles Farrugia (06:21)

Me, yeah, throughout, throughout it was both the academic aspect and even the building of contacts, sort of, that probably was as beneficial as the learning because the learning, if I hadn’t been at UCL, I could have… nowadays there are a lot of distance learning courses I could have done, but some of the contacts that I made at UCL with personnel from the school, from the British Library, from the TNA, from the Society of Archivists in the UK, those contacts were quite unique, it was a unique opportunity for me to build those contacts, which contacts I’m using still to the present day.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (07:07)

Okay. And you mentioned that before you enrolled to UCL to study that degree, you were already working at the National Archives. And so did UCL change your opinion or idea on what an archivist or record keeper does or and their role in society?

Charles Farrugia (07:30)

Yes, I think, to a large extent. First of all, it’s the realization that there is a whole community out there and one of the drawbacks we have in Malta is because of the small size of the country, we’re talking about a country of 400,000 people, and of just 27 kilometers by 16 kilometres. So we’re talking about a small place where you don’t have other archivists at that time, especially because this was almost 20 years ago. So at that time, I was probably, I was the first person from Malta to study archives in a UK institution, and, as I said, there were some very few, four or five other persons who had studied archives abroad, but in Rome. And again, the Italian system is a bit different from the British system. So basically, all that I learned there was quite new, and quite innovative, not only for me, but for the whole archive sector model.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (08:42)

Okay. And now, I’m gonna ask you questions on the role of an archivist today, the key issues faced by archivists in their jobs, and the impact of their roles in society. So my first question in regards to that is: What do you think is the current role of an archivist today? And how much and what impacts do archives and archivists have in society?

Charles Farrugia (09:11)

Well, I think the role has not changed much. Basically, the traditional roles in what you read in the big thinkers, in Schellenberg, in Jenkinson, in all the others, sort of the preservation of the collective memory in our records remains the same. Obviously, what has changed a lot is what makes that collective memory, sort of, there’s a big move from simply focusing on public records to a much wider remit trying to capture the memory in all formats, digital technology and all that sort of. The format has changed, the format has changed and our approach has changed, but the mission and the role remains quite the same. With regards to the second point, the impact we have on society, I think there is a growing realization that archivists are, are much more needed nowadays than before, due to the issue of authenticity of, of records. The last years, the last decade, practically, we’ve experienced not here in Malta, but everywhere, the issue of bombardment of news, false news, issues of challenging in courts, the authenticity of records, WikiLeaks and all that. So I think that in those countries where archivists managed to move away from the traditional focus, which was even in Malta, and in most of Europe the traditional focus on simply reading medieval texts, palaeography and all that, that’s still important, but there is a bigger role, I think, in the archivist as the guardian of authenticity, and as a front liner against fake news and all that, those problems in society. So whether we’re reaching that role, it’s quite difficult to say, because there are big disparities between one country and the other. But in some countries, yes, I would say that there’s a big impact and archivists are making a difference.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (11:47)

Okay. And you mentioned that in archival practice and theory, there has been a change from Jenkinson’s approach. Whereas before, as mentioned in the manual Jenkinson’s primary role was the safeguarding of the archive, but now in the digital world that we live in, access has been, has been called out, of being the essential role of an archivist to provide access to these, to the records, to the documents that are held in the archives. So, in your opinion, what do you think is the main importance or the main role of an archivist? Is it a mix of both, or is it to do more, to do with the safeguarding of the records, or to provide, to enable access to these records?

Charles Farrugia (12:37)

Well, I think, again, it depends a lot on the context you’re working in. Sort of, I had the opportunity during the last almost 10 years to work a lot on the international field. I was chairperson of the Commonwealth Association. I am presently Chairperson of Eurobeca, which is the European branch of ICE, and there is a lot of different approaches. Even within the European Union when we discuss something like licensing to third parties, there is, there are different schools of thought and different levels of development. So, where we are in Malta, for example, I think that I’ve worked now for 30 years at the National Archives and till now, our focus was on the safeguarding of the document. But at this point in time, we are investing a lot of energy on building a new National Archives, which hopefully should solve a lot of the problems we have in safeguarding, and we’re shifting a lot of our focus on even the capturing, sort of we’re entering a lot, we have a particular project, which is called the Memoria, which is an oral history project and we’re focusing a lot on capturing the memories of people, something which in the past was a no go area, sort of, we were not really even thinking of entering into the area of creating records. At this point in time we are there, we are moving in that direction. Now, I know that this is not the case in a number of other countries, there are other countries who don’t even consider going in that direction, either because of policies or because of the belief they have in what an archivist should do.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (14:29)

Okay, and how and what factors do you believe, to have like, influenced you and the National Archives in Malta, to enable these new projects? Has it to do with the digital world that we live in, where we’ve got a lot of ICT technology, or is it due to society? So what are the factors?

Charles Farrugia (15:01)

I think there were a number of factors, which I would consider basically there the some of them were political. So we, the population, has changed a lot in Malta, especially after we joined the European Union. So we have, we had a lot of influx of people, some of them coming from the European Union for, to work in Malta, then you have a whole other part of the population that are migrant communities. So we started, our historians and NGOs started questioning the whole issue. Sort of, they were saying, when we say preserving the memory of the Maltese nation, which is the mission statement of the archives, but who is the Maltese nation? Sort of, at this point in time in Malta, we have probably about 50,000 or 60,000 people working here who are not Maltese. You have other migrant communities, so we started realizing that we need to capture the memory even of these people, because they are part of the Maltese nation at the moment. And then there were, I think, conscious political processes to try to use even this concept of memory, to enhance integration in our community. Apart from that, there were other factors such as digital technology, even social media. I think we’re using a lot of platforms such as Facebook, to reach communities. And sometimes initiatives were taken not from us, but from NGOs, sort of a Facebook group collecting the history of the railway in Malta, our Facebook group collecting the history of cinema in Malta. And we realized that most of these groups were doing a wonderful piece of work when it comes to collecting, to reaching out to people. But then they had problems with the long-term preservation of the content they were collecting. So we’re trying to reach collaboration with these third parties, sort of they are still doing the collection bit of it, but we are providing the permanent preservation platform to them, and we found that as highly successful in giving us… to some extent I could say that sometimes we lost hope of convincing people that we are important, we are necessary with the traditional approaches of medieval documents and all that, but they are realizing we are important with the more recent documentation.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (18:01)

Okay, so do you believe that now record-keepers, archivists wield a high degree of power?

Charles Farrugia (18:11)

Oh, well, I cannot really say that, no, we’re still struggling, when it comes… I think we’ve managed at least here in Malta we’ve managed to win a lot when it comes to the archivist in better lighting. Nowadays, archives and archivists have managed to win the trust of the public and the fact that the government decided to invest in building a new National Archives, I think we managed to convince the public and politicians there. We still have big problems when it comes to record keeping. There is still psychologically I think, administrators don’t associate us very much with the record keeping function. For them, when it comes to data protection, for why buying new systems to manage their records, for them they don’t really see automatically the link between National Archives and what they’re doing. So there, there is still a lot of work to be done there.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (19:20)

Okay. And so what do you think are the ethical dilemmas faced by archivists today?

Charles Farrugia (19:30)

I consider one major problem, which is the pressure we have to, to be financially sustainable. Sort of, I come from a National Archives environment, but I’m sure that even private archives have the same pressures. Sort of, there is a lot of pressure to have your services sustainable. So it’s quite difficult for our guys to make money or to justify their existence financially. So that’s what I consider one of the big, big issues. Sometimes we’re tempted to try and make profit-making activities within the archives, sort of hiring off premises or selling off copies, which is not wrong in itself but sometimes there is that we go too much commercial rather than fulfil what we’re there to do.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (20:35)

Okay. So going back to your points, so how do you think archivists will continue their professional work in a time of austerity, where governments or funding providers are reducing hours, cutting staff? So how do you think the archivists will continue their professional work?

Charles Farrugia (20:57)

Well, it’s quite a tricky question. What we’re doing now here locally, in Malta, we’ve managed for a number of years to strengthen our profile, and that has brought with it a number, a considerable amount of government investment. We had the good fortune also that for the last 15 years, new funding streams were coming in, because when, after we joined the European Union, there was for a number of years, a certain amount of money coming into the sector. And also, I think we’ve managed also successfully to get some support from the private sector in terms of sponsorship for certain preservation works. Obviously, all that is sort of, for a period of time, we’re already, we are already realizing now that our golden years in terms of funding from the EU are over. As a country, the fact that our economy has strengthened itself now means that we will be getting less funding from the European Union. Again, our profile building has reached to some extent a peak. So again, we have to find new ways of how to do that. I believe that the way forward is the more willing ourselves to information security, and the more willing ourselves to sort of safeguard for organizations not to end up challenged because they mismanaged their data. I see prospects there, in that area. And maybe in areas also, you know, that most of the countries are facing problems with, when it comes to their identity, their historical identity. So, there may be areas there also to tap into.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (23:07)

Okay, and so going back to that point, how do you think we can, as archivists, can maintain the worth of an archive? And even though this is a bit of a, how can we sell the worth of an archive to the general population, so, in this case, the Maltese and to government investors or private investors?

Charles Farrugia (23:30)

Well, I think, from past experience, the areas that were quite successful were when we managed to show that our records are not simply there, I don’t know, as monuments of our of our identity, but that our records have still relevance. Let’s say there were a number of let’s say programs, one of them is the famous Who do you think you are? Where these foreign television stations came to Malta bringing over prominent persons, and from the archives they are tracing their roots. So something like that, basically, where you have a prominent television program that basically is making use of the archives, or in other areas where you have issues in court related to ownership of land. Those areas are the areas where people realize that the archives are still important. Simply selling the cultural value of archives in a world that is continuously moving towards moneymaking activities might be quite challenging to use. But still we have within our archives, we still have those pockets of records that can be marketed out there.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (24:59)

Okay. And I remember you mentioned before, that now in Malta, there’s been a wave of new communities since joining the EU. So, how do you think archivists can engage with different communities, especially those that in previous history haven’t been recognized, or they’ve been marginalized from society and from the archives.

Charles Farrugia (25:29)

Well, there are a number of different communities. So you have communities that still carry a certain level of stigma. We mentioned migrant communities, especially illegal migrants that reached Malta and are often kept in closed facilities. I think we’ve managed to tap into those communities through collaboration with the academic institutions. Sort of you have students who are coming from archives courses, or sometimes from anthropology, or psychology or history, they are visiting these people and conducting interviews and we’re offering to collaborate in that. So in that way, we are bringing to the archives not simply the migrant who is feeling that his story now is being appreciated, but you are bringing in also students from different faculties that are not in any way interested in, in archive studies, but still have to work with us because of their projects. And those are the sorts of, what I call, the underrepresented, or, let’s say, communities that had a taboo linked attached to them. There are other communities that are usually more of these communities, sort of you had a case in point, for example, is the public transport industry. There’s a whole community of persons in Malta that used to be linked to the public transport system. So there were buses built in Malta in the beginning of the 1900s, and bus drivers, bus dispatchers, all these communities of people that felt they have been side lined because some years back government privatized the whole sector. And we got this Arriva Company from abroad taking the whole running of the operations. So these people felt that their memories, their history, they have been dumped, literally dumped by government. So again, in that sector, we gave them enough space to record their memories, we collected their pictures, their memorabilia. So in that way, we are sort of, apart from recording their history, we are also to some extent, becoming the intermediary. So we are still government, we are a government institution, but they told us straight and clean, you’re the first government entity that is treating us in the right way and is interested in our past. So I think we’re being quite successful in those areas. This brings big, big challenges, however, this links to what I was telling before. These projects are putting enormous burdens on our resources, burdens on financial resources and human resources. So again, we’re widening our audience, however, it’s putting much more pressure on our operations.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (28:49)

Okay, and do you think it’s possible for information workers, the record managers, archivists, to adhere to social justice mandate within information and record keeping, even though let’s say the society, the organization, the structure that we live in now, is profoundly anti social justice? Where people use information to control, discriminate and marginalized other people in society? And if you believe so, how and in which ways is this possible?

Charles Farrugia (29:36)

Yes, I’m a strong believer that, as archivist, I think when I compare ourselves, the archivists, even with the public officers that we meet on a daily basis in our routine work, we do feel that, compared to other categories of workers, we do feel freer to sort of focus on the social justice mandate without doing it, I don’t think we do it on purpose, we sort of automatically do it when certain categories of people reach out to us. We tell them: Yes, why not? Let’s record your memories. Because we’re focusing simply on the capturing of that data, we’re not really entering into the repercussions. A case in point, for example, is that we had big debates with other archives that hold drawings of government property. And we realized that the whole approach is completely different. While we were saying: “Let’s open as much as possible these records”, certain departments were telling us “But are we on the right line? What happens if a citizen is using these records against us, against government?” And again, that’s sort of when I heard it the first time, it was quite shocking for me because we automatically, as archivists, consider our role as defenders of opening up the data, not as defenders of the government institutions we are working in. And I think we’re extremely, very well placed to, whether we know it or not, to push forward towards this social justice mandate.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt  (31:33)

Okay. And so how do you think we can address systematic bias in archives, which includes archival collections, archival cataloguing, the structure of an archive, the workforce of the archive, and also the teaching standards and frameworks that we use to guide information literacy instruction?

Charles Farrugia (31:57)

Hmm, we’re finding that this project, for example, this oral history project, is being very, very useful in this fight against systematic bias, because first of all, you are, you are bringing to the archives, the perspectives of people who either were hit by the system or whose perspective was not in the document. Sometimes, we’re not interviewing migrants only, we’re even interviewing ex public officers. So we’re interviewing permanent secretaries, and some of them, surprisingly enough, during these interviews gave us even reports. Let’s say, there was a case in point where one of the permanent secretaries was holding on to a report which he received in his duties and although, technically speaking, he shouldn’t have kept that public record, but the reason was that this was a report conducted years ago, where an economic adviser was giving advice completely contrary to what the government of the time believed. And this Permanent Secretary responsibly, sort of kept this document because he was afraid that someone in the system would destroy this record. So at this point in time, he returned the records to the system. So basically, you have a case in point where these people are sometimes giving us or saying things, which they could not say when they were in office. So basically, you have literally new information coming into the system doing justice, with the record keeping system. It’s not always that easy, because obviously, when it comes to let’s say, you mentioned training and other courses, and it’s not always easy, because you’re always working in frameworks, either in our cases, the public, public administration, or for colleagues of mine who work in the church archives, you still have the rules of the institution that sometimes keep you from doing or saying certain things.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (34:37)

Okay, and so, you believe that in order to address these issues, the archivist with the information worker has to be active, has to be looking at what, at filling the gaps in what is held in, in the archives?

Charles Farrugia (34:56)

Yes, although on the other hand, we’re not in any way saying that the main role should be that. Sort of, there’ll always be gaps in archives, there will always be conscious and unconscious gaps in the archives and there is a limit to what you can do. Sort of, let’s say with these, these projects we’re in no way, sort of trying to do a systematic filling of gaps. It’s more that, in what we’re doing, we’re leaving quite an open agenda. And we’re, we’re inviting people, we’re inviting anyone who has records, memories to come forward, and the scope is more to put side by side with the other information, material that traditionally was not captured in the archives or we as archivists were not involving ourselves in. I’m a strong believer that what may be, could help a lot, is that in our training, we emphasize much more the ethical dimension of the job. And sometimes I think in our curricula, we focus a lot on the how-to-do aspects, cataloguing, you’re going to see things like that, which are important. However, especially with the challenges we’re facing now, with data protection and new concepts of social media, there is much more need of, the emphasis is on the ethical, ethical side of things.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (36:40)

Okay, so in relation to that, how do you think record keeping can support a shared sense of reality, and then individual sense of identity?

Charles Farrugia (36:52)

Hmm, it’s quite, quite complex to say in a few words. What we’re insisting here a lot is that we’re trying and we’re experimenting. Basically, here, we’re trying as much as possible to convince ministers that the person who is leading their records management programs, has received training in record keeping. Obviously, we’re insisting on degrees in this area, but sometimes it’s not always practical to ask for that. But the whole point is, and the big challenge we have is to move away from the traditional frame of mind of the civil servant, that basically, whatever my manager tells me, I’m going to implement. What we’re trying to push in government is that the person who takes decisions and decisions on the design of the system on the most important things, what we’re going to create, what we’re going to keep, on appraisal issues, we need there to have persons who have received the professional, the professional training. We’re not saying, as we used to maybe do in the past, in the past we were much more ambitious and we were saying anyone who handles records needs a qualification. We’ve realized in time that we will never arrive there, because unfortunately, most of the posts that relate to records management are not very much well paid jobs. So basically, the problem there is that the more we insist on high degrees, the more we’re going, the less we’re going to find persons to fill those posts. But what we’re insisting on is that somewhere in the system at a senior management not at lower grades, we need someone with the necessary training.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (38:56)

Okay, and now these questions are in relationship to the future of record keeping and the future for information workers in relations to the modern technology that has been created to date. So this is a bit of a long question. So what do you think is the future role for information workers and formally established memory institutions in an online environment, where it is characterized by a greater variety of competing information sources, and also fake news, corporate and governmental surveillance, and then associated crisis of authority to the official voice?

Charles Farrugia (39:41)

Again, I think, to some extent, and especially not me in Malta, but even some of my experiences in certain countries, is that at times, you meet certain archivists who are still resisting change, and they feel much more comfortable in the traditional world. So they will tell you social media is not our remit, audio-visuals have nothing to do with us. And basically, on paper, some of them might be right because some institutions might not be responsible for that material. However, in future, it would be impossible, I think, for any archivists to say audio-visuals is not my remit, or electronic records are not my remit, sort of, very few of us will not work in a hybrid environment. So, I think we did have to go there, we have to utilize this challenge of entering in in this area of information workers, online, fake news and all that. It’s challenging in the sense that sometimes it’s not easy, especially academically, to adapt your training, to adapt courses and to get the right people to teach on the courses. So we’re finding big problems there, that although we are willing to change the training platforms that we have, and open up as much as possible, there is this fear that the more we go into the information workers stream, the more we fear that we will be losing the traditional profession, the archivist profession. So it’s a bit of a dilemma how to tackle it.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (41:45)

So a follow up question. That’s what you’ve just said. So how do you think information workers and archivist can take advantage of new the technologies whilst adhering to their traditional archival values?

Charles Farrugia (42:00)

Well, I think it is possible at least, as I said, we’ve tried it out with projects like this memory project, we were quite afraid at first, that what we were doing is right, or would literally take us in unknown territory. But I think we’ve managed to combine the traditional, we’re still applying the traditional principles, let’s say when we have, we had cases when people who are interviewed were literally challenging certain non historical facts. They were telling us well, that event did not happen in that year, but it happened in another year. So we faced those challenges, and, again, we had to revert back to the archiving principles. So it’s not incompatible that you apply the principles we teach in real life situations. If we don’t go in that direction, I feel will literally die a natural death, because we have even in archives committees, we have had people telling us, I won’t use Facebook because it’s against my principal. Then again, it’s taken so much in the sector nowadays that everyone is using Facebook. So it’s not a question of whether we can resist change, we have to move forward. Trying sometimes, easily and sometimes not that easily to still maintain our main basic principles.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (43:48)

Okay. And so what do you think are the practical, ethical, social, and political implications of using computers, technology, modern technology in the archival field?

Charles Farrugia (44:05)

Well, I think that most archives have managed to introduce computers and I couldn’t even imagine what archives would be like without the use of computers, sort of, with the developments in finding aids nowadays, with online catalogues. So I think most archives did embrace that change. We even have nowadays volunteers who are cataloguing for us in Australia, so imagine. And I’ve experienced that transition, sort of, I do remember the time when we had this volunteer who is in his 80s nowadays, and about 20 years ago we were trying to find ways how to send him data for him to catalogue, and I do remember a case where, initially, we were trying to send microfilm reels to him and foreign affairs came into the issue, when it got so complex that we didn’t really manage. With computers, basically, it’s so easy nowadays, to send them data, to have Skype meetings, to have him even catalogue almost physically. So I couldn’t imagine archives without the input of digital technology. Obviously, the big worry is what we mentioned earlier on, the sustainability, sort of. When it comes to the preservation of digital data, for example, I do fear that sometimes the costs are for that, and is so large, so huge, both in terms of the infrastructure, but what worries me more is the human resource cost that it’s going to be much more challenging when it comes to sustainability. Sort of, if I’m running a hotel, and I’m investing in technology, I know that I can get back each and every cent that I spent in that technology. In archives, we almost know the opposite that the cost of the technology would be much larger than any financial income that we can get into our institution. So that’s a bit the dilemma I have in this argument.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (46:37)

And how about the likes of cyber security when now, as we have seen many institutions have been hacked, and personal data has been taken away. So how do you think archivists information workers can mitigate these risks?

Charles Farrugia (47:00)

Well, on one hand, when you have traditional archives that usually keep the older data, I don’t think we worry that much on the harm that hacking can do to our institution. Sort of maybe we’re not that worried, as certain other companies, as banks are, for example, the harm that the misuse of data can have. On the other hand, I do fear that we’re not equipped as a sector, and because maybe we don’t feel the threat that much, or our financial resources are not that huge we’re not really prepared for that. Sort of most of the IT specialists that we have in the sector, are much more worried about, let’s say, the preservation of digital data, the different formats, the accessibility, rather than the risk of data. That’s my take on the situation.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (48:10)

And now talking about AI, artificial intelligence, has become a very popular trend nowadays. So how do you think information workers archivists can implement the use of AI in their profession? What could be the advantages of implementing AI, and also, the limitations of implementing AI?

Charles Farrugia (48:37)

Well, until now, we’ve had some attempts at using AI in our work. However, we haven’t really, we’re not really seeing much prospects there, at least till now because maybe, because we’re still very much preoccupied with the day to day running. Sort of, let’s say, in our case, in Malta, our big priority is training people and having this new National Archives in place. So we’re still very much in the situation where our focus is on the infrastructure. When we try to, for example, we tried to conduct some research here at university with the faculty of ICT. And till now, we didn’t really find compatibility between what they wanted and what we wanted. Sort of, we were very much interested in solutions that can facilitate the life of cataloguers or of users. And they were very much more interested in very specialized like, How can you read medieval manuscripts? How can you create a system that can automatically read medieval manuscripts? Now for them, from an academic point of view, having the project and arriving at, let’s say, 75% success rate would have been a very rewarding situation. For us, we consider that that’s not really a priority, because again, we want our catalogues to reach much more successful rate and then simply read 75% of the manuscript in an automated way, then you still need the human intervention to do the rest. So we haven’t really, at this point in time in our development, found a lot of solutions in the AI technology.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (50:56)

Okay, and this is, will be the final question of the interview. So, since you started the course and UCL, what do you think, in the profession, the archival profession, what do you think has been the biggest change? And what do you think students starting this profession should engage in the most?

Charles Farrugia (51:21)

I think there are two big changes. One is the electronic environment obviously, and when I came to UCL, I think we were the first students who started using computers. The systems were quite, very basic systems. We still got on the course some training on some initial software in cataloguing. So nowadays, literally we work throughout our whole archival work, using computer. So that’s, that impacted not simply the whole process, the whole lifecycle of records nowadays is impacted by that. The other aspect that has changed is the whole concept of information and the whole concept of information and how clients access information. So I think that archives have remained, compared to the other institutions, the more challenging organizations to reach using technology. So when compared to libraries, for example, when compared to museums, most libraries nowadays have their catalogues online, museums, in most cases, you can simply do virtual tours in them. So I think we are still, and there are reasons for that, the nature of our work, and where people are, there still cannot tap into most of our holdings without coming to the archives. So that’s a big challenge that we need to prepare our students for in our archiving courses.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (52:59)

So in relation to that, what do you believe is the future of an archivists?

Charles Farrugia (53:08)

I think we have to emphasize throughout the digital, the digital aspect. The principles remain the same, whatever the cataloguing principle is, the issue of provenance, the issue of ethics, that one remains the same, but we have to understand that all the processes will need the electronic, the digital components. So it’s impossible if we’re teaching palaeography, it’s important to keep teaching palaeography, but we need to find ways how to, to involve in that training, technology to study the palaeography, but even the type of palaeography we teach, we need to go into the diplomatics of modern day electronic records or so.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (53:55)

Okay. So that is the end of the interview. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much for the answers that you provided. They’ve been very helpful, then helping us to curate our exhibition on the 100th year anniversary. Unfortunately.

Charles Farrugia (54:15)

It was my pleasure, awesome.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (54:17)

Okay. Some of the stuff that you said is very relatable to my experience as well because I worked at the Gibraltar National Archives.

Charles Farrugia (54:26)

Okay. Okay. So, you worked with Anthony there with the archivist.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (54:32)

Anthony Peteruger, yes. I worked with him and Gibraltar, as you know, there’s many similarities between Gibraltar and Malta, even with a lot of Gibraltarians, their origins come from Gibraltar. So it was definitely very interesting what you said, especially in regards to the, to the colonial, being an ex colony. So I did learn, and will use a lot of stuff, which hopefully, I can implement when I go back to Gibraltar.

Charles Farrugia (55:05)

Great and good luck for your studies. Also.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (55:08)

Thank you very much. Have a great day.

Charles Farrugia (55:10)

Feel free to keep in touch and to send back if you need some clarification.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (55:15)

Okay, thank you very much. Have a great day. Thank you for your time.

Charles Farrugia (55:18)

Great, all the best. Bye, bye.

Mohamed Ben Tahayekt (55:19)

Bye.

Jess Conway  (00:01)

Okay, so the date is the ninth of March 2020. I’m Jess Conway interviewing Chloe Anderson for the Department of Information Studies centenary project. The interview is being conducted over Skype with me in London and Chloe in the Falklands. [Unclear] start with with some kind of contextual information about you, so could you tell me when and where you were born and also where you live now?

Chloe Anderson  (00:32)

Yeah. So I was born on 23rd November in 1995. And due to medical reasons, I was actually born in Leeds. I was actually meant to be born in the Falkland Islands, hmm, and I have lived the majority of my life in the Falkland Islands. And then I moved to the UK when I was 15 to continue further education. As we only have two schools here.

Jess Conway  (01:05)

Oh wow. And when you say further education was that for your undergrad degree that you moved to the UK?

Chloe Anderson  (01:11)

So that is for A levels, secondary school and it goes up to GCSE level. You go before your A Levels and then undergraduate and then I of course went on to the UCL Archives and Records Management master’s degree.

Jess Conway  (01:25)

Yeah. And what did you study for your undergraduate degree?

Chloe Anderson  (01:30)

So I studied history and English at the University of Portsmouth.

Jess Conway  (01:35)

And was it during that time that you first, studying history I mean, that you first became interested in archives and records management as a potential career or did it happen after that point?

Chloe Anderson  (01:46)

So it actually happened before. I mean I’ve always been interested in history. It’s always been the subject at school that I’ve excelled at the most. And then when I went over to the UK when I was 15 to do my levels, we then come back home for like Easter breaks and Christmas and things like that. So it’s actually the first Easter break. So that would have been in about, I don’t know, March, April 2012. And I returned and I decided to contact the archives here and do some volunteering just to get some experience in a history related workplace and just try to see if I felt interested. And after the first day of actually volunteering, I kind of knew that it was something that I wanted to do. And then since then I’ve kind of got the bug if you like. Everything I’ve, everything I’ve done has been geared towards history, working in archives. So since then, I’ve volunteered in many different organisations, and well every time I came home to the Falkland Islands, I volunteer at the local archives here. Actually the National Archives here. And then when I went to University of Portsmouth, I then volunteered at an archive there whilst doing my undergraduate course for three years. And yeah, just made sure that all of my experience that I had was just geared towards there so that I had, you know, I was prepared to, that by the time I completed my undergraduate degree I could apply for the, the UCL course, immediately.

Jess Conway  (03:28)

So if like an interest in history and a sort of academic interest in history, was your motivation for getting interested in archives as a career, has that motivation changed at all? Or is that still kind of primary thing you’re interested in? If you see what I mean.

Chloe Anderson  (03:43)

Yeah, erm, it’s kind of not changed that that much. I mean, obviously working in archives, as I’m sure you know, you, it kind of just becomes a lot more than just a thing to do and something to fill your time with, it becomes something that’s so much more interesting. And actually, I found that whether you’re working in a small archives or a large archives, the feeling of satisfaction that you get of helping to preserve and provide access to these really important documents and preserve for future generations has been kind of a real motivation to, to do this work. Because it’s not just for you or, you know, any current objectives that, you know, anyone may have, it’s just for the future. And to think that some of the documents, you know, they date back hundreds and hundreds of years before you were even born, it’s just fascinating and yeah, I just can’t get enough [laughs].

Jess Conway  (04:44)

So, when you were studying for your undergrad and sort of volunteering and everything and thinking about studying the master’s degree, were you, was there any particular factor that made you decide to pursue it at UCL specifically, as opposed to another UK institution?

Chloe Anderson  (05:11)

So, I probably looked at UCL because, I mean, it’s a great institution, you know, already so it already had quite a good, erm, background and I heard quite a lot about it just through my own research. But then when it came to actually having the interview and having a look around the campus, just a short time I was there and looking at the course material, it was the, it’s the subject matter that really interests me and all the different opportunities that came along with it. So the opportunity to do a preservation unit, a digitization unit which then had my master’s focused on, well my dissertation focused on, was probably the driving factor. I also just, you know, as you do you apply for lots of other courses, so I also applied for the archive, administrative course at Aberystwyth and also the similar one at Liverpool University. And even though I was accepted at all three, essentially, I started at UCL was, was just probably the best feeling, really. That was still very, a good decision, when I went there, so.

Jess Conway  (06:19)

Did you have any prior perceptions of UCL or maybe of the department before studying there that turned out to be maybe incorrect or something was unexpected or something about your learning experiences, not what you had anticipated, at all?

Chloe Anderson  (06:35)

I have to say I was probably a bit naive in that my perception was that, you obviously have to be super intelligent to get the best grades essentially, to get to UCL in the first place, and I think once I actually started, it kind of helped to grow my confidence in my own abilities, and actually the you know, I was expecting perhaps lecturers to be a certain kind of way. But actually, it was just a whole amazing experience and everyone was so, so nice. And obviously, you know, the lecturers are kind of, well, the best in their field. So it was a fantastic experience. And yeah, definitely just throw away any previous negative perceptions that I may have had about the university. But yeah, it became completely positive and it was great.

Jess Conway (07:29)

Great. And did when you were studying on course, did you sort of become aware of any interests within the profession that you hadn’t previously had?

Chloe Anderson (07:40)

I’d probably say digitization, only because I’d never done, had too much experience with it. I’d obviously had to scan some documents. But it was really the kind of that practical element that I wanted to get more of, because I’m not naturally perhaps a practical person. So I wanted to kind of push myself a bit more and get more involved in that type of element. But so by doing that unit, it kind of gave me an interest in, in a more digital side of archives, because previously I, you know, just primarily work with the, with the paper side and the hardcopy work so, so that was actually really interesting. And that’s kind of given me a bit more, I don’t know, options I guess, when it comes to the field of archives. I’m like, I’m actually interested in looking at that side of things rather than just, kind of, stepping away from it.

Jess Conway  (08:37)

Was there anything, sort of thinking maybe a bit more broadly, when you were studying that changed your perspective of the profession as a whole, you know, like any kind of view that you held about working in archives prior to studying the course that had changed upon completing the course?

Chloe Anderson  (09:01)

Erm, so it wasn’t particularly in terms of archives but it terms of records management, previous to the course I had no experience in records management at all, it was all primarily based in archives. So, so records management side of the course kind of frightened me to begin with, I didn’t really know what I was doing. But by the end of it, you know, doing various units, and coursework involved with that, it kind of made me a bit more aware of the records management side of things and just how important that element is. And how, because I’ve said, I had no experience prior, just how closely the records management link is with archives and how really can’t have one without the other. And, and, yeah, I think that that kind of changed my perception of the field a bit more.

Jess Conway (09:48)

Yeah, I noticed when I was looking at your, your LinkedIn prior to this interview that you had mainly experience prior to UCL with kind of, I don’t know maybe what we say more sort of traditional archival work in a sense, or very much archive based, like you just said, but then after the degree, you’ve worked mainly in a records management capacity. Was this a conscious decision that you made at all? Or was it sort of just how it panned out after graduating?

Chloe Anderson (10:18)

It’s completely just how it panned out. I mean, once I finished the masters I was like, right, I should just get a job, erm, initially I was actually wanting to get a job in the UK, but due to my own personal circumstances, I thought I need to come home for a bit first. And so I’ve got this job and actually the job wasn’t, wasn’t titled or geared towards records management at all. I’ve actually found I’ve forced FIG to do this. So essentially FIG, Falkland Islands Government, had no kind of record management policies or any record management processes in place at all, with hardly, you know, like records retention schedules or policies, no policies, absolutely nothing, so alongside my normal day to day job, my line manager kind of agreed slash wanted me to work on this because we acknowledged it was a, you know, a problem, you know, essentially. So that’s how I kind of got involved in that aspect. And then it just kind of grew from there into now having an actual position as Record Manager. And obviously, because I was, my own experience was really through the course that really helped, you know, writing a 4000 word business case actually really came in handy when having to, I had to write a business case for lots of various things to do with the records management element and implementing a system. So it kind of just all fell into place. And then saying that, you know, I still have my interest in archives. So still, even though I’m working, you know, primarily as records manager in the government, the government, I’m still pursuing my archival work in terms of being a remote volunteer for some projects. And as you know, I volunteer once a week, also at the National Archives still here in the Falklands, just to keep up that archival skill base. But yeah, records management a lot more interesting than I first thought.

Jess Conway (12:18)

And did you find that there is, or rather maybe what was the period of transition, like between full time learning and then full time, you know, working as a professional out in the field?

Chloe Anderson (12:31)

Yeah, I mean, it was, I mean, it’s a pretty big step for anyone to take in and pretty daunting, but I think that the course set, I mean the theory and all the information that you learn, really does set you up very well for actually going into the workplace. Because with all the previous experience that you’ve had in order to get onto the course, you know what to expect. So actually getting into the workplace was easier, perhaps, then I thought it was going to be as a professional because actually, I did know what I was doing, and I could do all these, all these things. And yeah, even just writing a policy, which was probably one of the first things I did when I, when I actually, you know, wasn’t employed, the tools that I developed through the course and in just being able to know the difference and being able to define a record, and all the theoretical concepts behind that really helped. So I didn’t have any challenges or you know, have anything, barriers in the way for when I actually went into the work place. I felt completely at ease and like, okay let’s just get on with it.

Jess Conway (13:48)

Is there any kind of education experience or thing that you learned or class that you took that you found has been particularly helpful in your job, maybe something that you’ve kept returning to or always held in your mind?

Chloe Anderson (14:00)

Yeah, I mean, I mean, specifically because it’s a records management focused role as opposed to archival, the recordkeeping unit was quite useful and the, Creation and Capture. That was a really, really helpful unit, because it gave you, well it gave me my first introduction to records management and what it is, what it means, and the various processes that come along with it. So I’ll go back to an example, records retention schedules, we had a whole unit focused on that, and we had to go away and look at various other records retention schedules that are used in different institutions to see how they’re laid out, and you know, the importance of them. And so from going from essentially knowing nothing to knowing quite a lot, that really helped for my current job role because it meant that when it came to explain to people the importance of implementing a records management system and having a records retention schedule, you know, people are like, oh, it’s just a document, but just explain the importance of the document, and how it provides accountability and, you know, all, all of that kind of reasoning behind it that I learned myself enabled me to explain that to others. So that really helped, because that’s brilliant, that you know, where most of my knowledge and, and everything came from, in order to do this job. But saying that each, each unit really gave me the confidence in my own abilities to just be able to just get on with it and do it. And that’s probably the best thing, really.

Jess Conway (15:39)

Yeah. Is there anything you learned that has been brought into question in your professional practice? Like, is there anything that maybe you learned whilst at UCL that has maybe turned out to not be your perception of something, or you have a different experience of that which you learned about.

Chloe Anderson (15:59)

That’s a good question. I don’t think so. I don’t think so. Um, and I mean, just prepping for this interview, I’ve had to go over all like to have a quick look at all my assessments I did, because it’s hard to think that it’s almost been three years and I thought, oh, yeah, I remember what I did, and actually, I, you know, my memories going I’m like, oh, what did I do for that unit? They all kind of merge into one, but no I don’t actually think, think that anything has, has changed? And really, kind of, yeah, no it’s all been fine, I’ve not thought any condemning thoughts [laughs].

Jess Conway (16:42)

Great. Have you found, I mean, most of your professional experience has been on, in the Falklands, in the Falkland Islands. But have you found any differences between British approaches to record-keeping or maybe other international approaches to recordkeeping that you might have learned about and those that are applied in the Falkland Islands?

Chloe Anderson (17:04)

Well I think the Falkland Islands, it kind of wasn’t, the National Archives is actually quite well established in terms of, well, the practices that it has, in terms of records management, it’s a completely different area, essentially, because there’s, there’s nothing really, well previous to my time in this work in the Falkland Islands or anything, at least formal. And so the practices in the UK are, well, they’re a lot better. And it’s a bit more like a better oiled, oiled machine compared to ours which is like just, just starting off, it’s just getting its nuts and bolts in really. So, but it’s been fascinating. I mean, even just working for three years in a Portsmouth archive, it was great to see the different technologies and just the way, even cataloguing is a completely different experience because, we because we’re such a small institution in the Falklands, and we don’t use some national standards, even just, you know, ISAD(G), we don’t necessarily follow the exact rules of that. We don’t have Calm because we don’t have any software that may need… well because of just geographic where we are, in terms of support available, it’s quite difficult. So, actually catalogue means based on Microsoft Access. So then coming over and having the experience in the UK, which is completely different, and you know, being able to use Calm, being able to digitise documents, and just seeing the, you know, the large institution, so working at the Royal College of Surgeons, you know, their archive is, is amazing, and it’s massive, and even the British Library, it’s, I mean, that was a privilege to work in and it’s completely different to the archive here because obviously we’re so much smaller. And actually we don’t have moveable racking. So, I mean, that was fascinating. And just the amount of researchers and you’re dealing with requests and things like that. It’s just a lot smaller in comparison. So it’s a different way of working. Firstly, and so that was an interesting thing to look at and, and acknowledge. But then the different, the experiences in the UK are also completely different. So there’s more opportunities to kind of try different things. Again, I’ll go back to digitising and preservation and cataloguing and, yeah, but I mean, saying that they’ve all got fascinating collections. So you kind of just get lost in them eventually.

Jess Conway (19:55)

Yeah. What’s the kind of public perception of archives like in the Falkland Islands, like do you find it, it’s maybe less thank over here where it’s still, you know, maybe not recognised as a form of heritage as much as museums or other kind of forms.

Chloe Anderson  (20:14)

I think here it is kind of, it’s a bit difficult. Because the archives here, in order to be able to access it, really, if you don’t do any research, you’ve got to actually make an appointment. So already in comparison in terms of some UK based archival institutions where people just be able to just go in and have an open exhibition, things like that. It’s already a bit more restricted, I guess, in terms of being able to access because it’s almost that you have to have prior knowledge of, of an archival institution, you’ve got to know that it’s there essentially, before you can use it, it’s not something that you can just kind of stumble across, which is probably a good thing in all respects. But I think here you know, how, people know how important it is and they know how important it is to, why to preserve the documents and especially with our own political situation with Argentina and the fact that actually having all this information and being able to prove that you know, we are a self-determining country and that we’ve made all these achievements is, is a great, is a really great thing to preserve so people understand the importance of having the archives here and of preserving the information but I think in comparison to maybe like a museum or something I’m not sure they see it quite as a, something that they can easily access or information that they can you know, just go and see because as opposed to a museum where you know, exhibitions are everywhere and it’s probably a bit more open. The archives [unclear] here isn’t potentially great in… I don’t know, in probably, doing any advocacy, you know, opening up and presenting, you know that we are here and just closing the message of just how important archives are for, for society. And particularly for such a small community such as this where you know everybody and you’re, you know the history and whether you’re a ninth or fifth generation Falkland Islander is important. And knowing that your, your granddad was, you know, the harbour master and then he went on to do this and then he went on to do that, it’s fascinating to track your family history and how different families intertwine, and I think the perception, the perception is there, and people understand the importance of it, but I think potentially more could be done and it’s a little bit less open, I would say here in the Falklands than perhaps in in the UK, certainly in terms of research and just learning your own history really.

Jess Conway (23:03)

Yeah. Do you have any just personal ideas yourself of how you’d like to see openness and advocacy and accessibility towards archives and records improve in the Falklands?

Chloe Anderson (23:12)

Well, I think a good step is just public awareness really. And maybe having an open day, you know, it doesn’t even have to be too pretty, it’s just having people come in and have a look at the collections that you hold. Obviously, not anything that’s really fragile, but you know, things that you can take out, show them. I mean, the archivist just has some, she does have some exhibitions, but they’re kind of mounted on the wall and they’re not, you know, you’ve kind of obviously got to be invited or have an appointment in the building before you can actually enter and see these. Because, I mean, it is your facility and that’s, you know, totally the correct process because just how small the archives is, but yeah, having an open day or something, you know a big exhibition or even just a small exhibition where people can come in and have a look or really, I think it’d be a good starting point to raise awareness and show people the importance and also get people interested, because then you’ll have more people coming in doing research, finding out about their history, the Falklands. And then, you know, we have the SS Great Britain, here. So it could potentially have people interested in other topics or then go to other archival institutions to find out more, and just be a really educational source, really.

Jess Conway (24:35)

You mentioned, you spoke a little bit earlier about your experience in volunteer roles, and that you had a number of volunteer roles before studying at UCL and also that you continue to volunteer now whilst working professionally. Have you found there’s any, or maybe what kind of benefits have you found of working in a volunteer capacity whilst you’re also you know, working professionally as a records manager?

Chloe Anderson (25:01)

One of the great things about volunteering is you can kind of, [unclear] up when you want to. So it kind of, it works around your own schedule, which has always been great when doing full time education. Because everyone’s been kind of great as to when you can come in and what you can do, and also the range of opportunities. I mean, working in archives anyway, it’s so, it’s just a variable profession anyway, so you could be cataloguing one moment, as you know, and then, I don’t know, preserving the document next, or just talking to researchers, so there’s all sorts of things that you can do in one day. I think with volunteering, it’s, it’s great because you just get to have an experience doing lots of different roles. Even if you’re just there to do cataloguing, you could just become involved in another project. I mean, when I was at Portsmouth, I had so much experience I did cataloguing and then we had an archive store move from one location to another, and I was involved in that, which is, you know, you don’t really get to do that very often. So I think we’ve volunteering I found that I can get involved with a lot more elements of the profession and of the field which has then been great for, you know, previous experience getting onto the course. But even now, you know, up keeping my archival skills and even though I’m in a primarily records management based role, or even just challenging myself, and just getting involved in different elements and, you know, digitising things, and it’s, I think that’s probably the best thing is just the variety. And then also the flexibility that you know, I can do it alongside a full time role.

Jess Conway (26:40)

Yeah. Aside from your sort of personal experiences volunteering, do you have any thoughts on the role volunteers play within the profession, generally speaking?

Chloe Anderson (26:52)

I think it’s, it’s so important, really, it’s so important, I mean, from hearing archivists actually talk about volunteers themselves it just, it really emphasises just how important volunteers are to the sector really in, in, in, in helping the work. I mean, especially in terms of something like cataloguing, where there’s, in some places a massive backlog of records that still need to be catalogued, and that the import contribution that volunteers make, you know, in terms of actually helping with that, but then just getting involved in different kinds of projects, you’ve got, you know, the actual work that they’re doing in terms of helping in the field, but then the contributions that they have in terms of helping up with exhibitions, and then also how they impact on themselves as well because it helps them get into research and encourages them to use archival institutions. And of course, volunteers may consist of, you know, people like you and me, like students who then get encouraged to actually get into the field or have an interest in history and then that could, you know make them do an undergraduate course, a master’s course, I think it’s just so important genuinely. And then you’ve got the social factor that actually encourages people to get involved in local history, find out about their own area, or even just make friends. And, you know, it could have just so many other benefits rather than just helping, helping an archive catalogue a few documents. So it’s, it’s so important.

Jess Conway (28:33)

You mentioned earlier that you wrote your master’s dissertation whilst at UCL on digitization. Was that influenced by anything particularly you learned whilst studying?

Chloe Anderson (28:46)

Yes, it was mainly from a mixture of what I learnt during the course but also through my own practices, was the emphasis that the field, archives and records management field, tends to have on the access impact of, of digitisation rather than the benefits that it might have towards preservation and the fact that lots of these initiatives or funding projects that may be undertaken for digitisation, the main reason or motivation behind it is really getting more information out there and making it more accessible and making people be able to come in and use it rather than or opposed to this document is very fragile so we need to digitise it in order to you know, kind of reduce the amount of footfall for people looking at the original and, you know, even in the British Library, the focus preservation, digitization projects, the EAD even that is very much motivated by access. So I think doing the course practically and, you know, seeing the actual benefits of digitization and reading all the theory behind it really motivated that topic for my master’s dissertation.

Jess Conway (30:11)

Has, working as a records manager now, have you been very much involved with, with digital records whether that’s digitising records or born digital material, in your kind of professional experience post-UCL so far?

Chloe Anderson (30:25)

So in the Falkland Islands government currently we are, well we’re years behind the practices really. So a lot of it is still very much paper, very much paper-based though, of course, a lot more electronic records are growing. So it’s been a mixture, definitely a hybrid of the both, of the two in terms of electronic records, because we don’t have any formal management system for electronic records, it’s kind of been a bit difficult, in a sense to manage them, and also because there’s no centralised kind of repository, if you like, means that every FG department are kind of doing things by themselves and ad hoc, so even file name conventions, there’s no file name conventions and they’re currently, you know, doing things for themselves. And so my experience has currently been mainly raising people’s awareness of the fact that you need to manage electronic records effectively and writing guidance documents, and performing training sessions for staff for how to manage electronic records. Same as you would, you know, with paper records. And raising awareness [unclear], you know, the growing reliance that we have on, on the electronic now rather than the paper and how even something as simple as auto archiving or, or, you know, having your folder, hierarchical systems set up correctly, on a shared drive is really important as accessing your material. And so that’s kind of to the extent in terms of records management element, in terms of digitization, I’m currently writing a policy for digitization as to whether you should digitise records or not. And that’s very much in draft stage. So it’s kind of limited in, in that kind of sense. I have to say, just as an aside, in my work, most of my digitization experience right now comes from the volunteer work that I do at the archives. So it’s still kind of very much paper based in my current role. But I mean, the importance of managing electronic records is still there, so I still do get involved with it in terms of training and providing guidance notes and trying to manage everything at once.

Jess Conway (32:53)

How have you found people sort of within the government within your organisation respond to you, to this awareness raising about the management of digital records, have you found that people respond positively? Or is it sort of with trepidation at all?

Chloe Anderson (33:10)

So people have responded really positively, obviously when you talk about records management, initially, everyone’s like, Oh, it’s such a boring subject, so one of the first things I did was create these little advocacy cards, so they’re kind of like business-sized cards with just simple and helpful advice and tips for people managing electronic records and just records generally, that was kind of the first thing on that I did, and people find that a good way of just looking and saying, okay, so when I need to name a file, I should use this date format, for example. And then since then, I’ve conducted specific training sessions for managing electronic records, and I think that was really helpful. That was a, just to provide some context, it wasn’t a compulsory thing, so I sent an email around to all 800 members of the government, and people then just, just attended the sessions when they were free and if they wanted to. But actually, the take up was much better than I thought and I had to put on extra, extra sessions, because more people were interested than I thought, which was great. And already, that’s a positive thing, because it shows that staff are willing to raise awareness, you know, themselves, but also to learn about the importance of managing electronic records in the first place. And actually, the presentation, well it was a training session, which was mixture of presentation and actual exercises. So people having to tell me whether a file structure was good or bad and tell me you know, the justification like why is it bad and explain, that kind of thing, getting people involved. That was a good way of kind of re-emphasising the good practices in terms of managing records, and it made it more enjoyable for them because it wasn’t just a boring presentation. It was kind of getting involved making it a bit more of a fun experience, as I said, because initially, the perception of records management in general can just, you know, oh, it’s just about paper and filing, but actually, you know, it can be a bit, bit more fun than that. So through the training session, and the advocacy cards, that was, those were probably the best way because people found that it was more fun and more positive to do it. And even just explaining to them because that was a great chance that also with the training sessions was that they got to tell me any immediate problems that they had. So if they had trouble finding a file, or if they had any questions they could directly ask me and they had, they had someone to ask because previously, there wasn’t anyone in place, you kind of had the knowledge, if you like. So I think that was also a great way of showing, you know, showing me as a profession, professional, that actually there is someone here who can help you, I think provided that initial support that made people more open to attending, more open to asking questions and more open to actually looking at this as something that’s not just, you know, a time consuming job that actually is really important. So that was a really, really positive thing. And since then people have been coming back to me with questions, and actually one department there kind of, because all of our electronic records in the government are maybe sort of are share drive based, so it’s kind of specific to your Directorate. So following one of my, well my training session, and I also wrote a guidance document, and so that I could kind of distribute it at the same time. So that was great because it showed because they actually took and interest, because they took an interest they decided to restructure their entire share drive in order to make it more accessible in order to try to improve how they manage their records. And so that was fantastic because it showed that you’ve had an organisation that’s gone from having absolutely nothing in place to having a guidance document or policy, having had a training session, and then think actually, we need to do something about this and actually changing, changing how they work in order to improve, prove their efficiency, improve how they carry out their day to day jobs in terms of managing records. So that’s kind of how I’ve done it. And I think it’s been quite, it’s been quite positive, you know, initially, perceptions really were negative, but I think the work and the results have showed that actually, it’s, it’s much more exciting than filing, filing something in a cabinet, or something like that.

Jess Conway (37:38)

Yeah. What are some of the most common problems that people come to you with in regards to their own records management within an organisation?

Chloe Anderson (37:46)

Oh, probably the fact that there’s nothing, there’s nothing at all, really. That’s pretty honestly the thing. So it’s a range of different elements, file-naming conventions is probably quite a good one. Because there’s nothing held or that, you know, we follow across government; it’s all very ad hoc. Going back to the example with shared drives, even just having a good structure in place, you know, having some core files, and that are maybe our process or function lead. I think [unclear] showing people the benefits of having, something as stupid as a well-named file is, has been really important, and records retention schedules. So that’s currently a massive one that I’m doing at the moment, mostly for a corporate side of things, rather than what directorates actually want. So I’m currently doing a, going to do a workshop for lots of government departments specifically so that they can develop a records retention schedule, because there’s only about three out 11 that do have one in place. So try to get that as a tool that’s used and understood, you know, the importance of I think it’s going to be a really good thing. So that’s kind of been forced upon them. But then, I, because of any requests or any information that people ask me, I then kind of actively proactively, create guidance sessions. So, frequently, people come or have been coming to me more frequently with maybe data protection elements. So I have just finished last week doing some training sessions on data protection, which were more just saying this is what data protection is. This is the principle under the Data Protection Act, and this is what the Falkland Islands government currently has in place. So that’s been, that’s been worthwhile. So it’s just a range of different things really, as I said we don’t really have anything in place, so it’s every, everything and anything.

Jess Conway (39:53)

Has it been challenging for you to kind of build this role up essentially from scratch to be the first records professional within the organisation?

Chloe Anderson (40:03)

Hmm, yes and no, I mean, I’ve been very fortunate because I’ve had the support of senior management. So from the very beginning, I’ve had the support from my line manager, but also the chief executive. So because it’s such a small organisation, and actually, even the offices are so small, so I’m just down, I’m down the corridor from the chief executive. And because of the Falkland Islands government and the way it works, because you’re only ever one person deep, people, you know, across teams work very well to cover any staff absences. So there’s also been occasions where I’ve actually, and this is a kind of a tangent, but getting back to it been, been the executive assistant to the chief executive for maybe three weeks. So you know, I’ve had to drop everything to kind of handle this diary and things like that. So kind of having a good relationship with him, has then meant that when I come to going to CMT, which is a meeting where you’ve got the chief executive and all the directors from across government, so director of education, director of health, the Attorney General, things like that, they all meet, and that’s where I then present my ideas. So that’s where initially I presented the fact that we need a records management policy to begin with. And then from there, they were like, you know, yeah, we definitely need that. So actually, the chief executive following my presentation said, we really need to focus on this, we acknowledge that it’s a problem within our organisation that we need to improve, so we’re going to direct this amount of funding towards you for this project, in order to implement these procedures in order for you to, you know, make us have records management processes in the first place. So I think the support has been the most important thing because without people supporting you in the first place, you know, having specific funding and having the chief executive say yes, yes, yes, yes, yes to kind of essentially everything that you put in front of him has been, has been great because that’s also given the different government departments a reason and kind of a motivation to, to then kind of have the time day for you to say, okay, let’s, let’s have a look at this. And then for them, to then communicate that to their staff to say this is an important issue, we are going to focus on it. Even if you have negative perceptions of it, it’s an important thing for us to do, and we’re going to, we’re going to focus on it. So even something like developing a records retention schedule, if your government department is behind it, then the staff are going to attend and they’re going to, you know, you’re going to develop one whether they’re whether they’re happy about it or not. So, yeah, the support has been the greatest thing and I think the challenges has probably been me just trying to figure out what to do because obviously there’s just so much to do. It’s kind of getting a plan in place as to what’s a priority, and, and then obviously, ah, I finished my undergrad degree in essentially August and then I started this job in September. Kind of the, the immediate hit the ground running, was really true. So, kind of developing my own confidence in my abilities, even just my ability to be able to present and, and talk to people and certainly in terms of advocacy, that that was not necessarily a challenge. I mean, it was it was just something that I’ve not really done before. So it’s such a, so many different learning experiences that have come from this role. And just sharing, well emphasising just how important that profession is. So, yeah, long winded, but yeah. The support has been the best thing and has made everything less of a challenge then perhaps it might have been otherwise.

Jess Conway  (43:56)

Yeah. Do you have any thoughts on how the digital age, generally speaking, has affected the profession or professional landscape, maybe beyond of your own personal experiences or the way in which you work now, any kind of thoughts on how the profession has shifted in light of you know, for digital age, I suppose?

Chloe Anderson (44:22)

I think it’s shifting immensely. I think, you know, even if you just look back at the old theories of, of Jenkinson and Hillary you know, even though those, as I’ve kind of mentioned with my Masters [unclear] the debate between access and preservation is becoming way more centred towards access. Because of the electronic age in which we live in and things are much more accessible and people, people expect it to be accessible as well. When you go on to, you know, an archival website, you kind of expect to be able to download copies of documents and be able to access things immediately. So I think because of that, we are definitely looking more into, you know, things like digitization and, and making, making our paper based records more electronic, and, but then also the technologies that we use to support it. So, you know, paper based records are, well they’re still very much important. But, everything here in, in the current age in which we live is becoming way more electronically based. So we have to make sure that our storage capacities that we have in archival institutions and records management elements in, just in any way work can support that for long-term preservation. Or even if you’re just retaining it for a certain period of time, you’re gonna make sure that you can, you can retain it and that you can then you know, put all those processes, you know, retention and destruction in place, and I think because of that, we’re, we’re having to rethink how we work, but then again, it’s providing lots of opportunities, some people because they can access things electronically, they don’t have to come to your buildings to do research. And then with any other technologies, it’s just becoming easier for people to interact with material, which is great, and providing awareness. And the opportunities to come in technology provides us with, you know, I mean things that, opportunities that we could never have before. So even digitization, being able to scan something onto a computer, and then use a technology, editing software or whatever, to then see, you know, potentially a hidden message or, or something that you couldn’t see before when it was paper based, and when it’s on the computer, you see something, and then that’s important, because we can, you know, we find that new information. So I think it’s completely changing how we work as a profession. I’m not saying that it’s in any way decreasing the importance of paper based records, but it’s kind of pushing us, pushing us more towards electronic based records, and actually making that a primary focus and you see more and more job, jobs being advertised, which are for digital archivists or, you know, more digitally emphasised than, than just your traditional archivist.

Jess Conway (47:16)

Where do you personally stand on the, the preservation versus access debate?

Chloe Anderson (47:25)

Oh, I don’t really know. I mean, from doing my, my dissertation I was kind of just like, ‘oh my god’, just exhausted by the whole thing [laughs] I don’t know I think both are very, very, very important. I think probably more towards access, only again, because in terms of the digital world in which we live in today, it’s becoming, people are expecting you to have things online. If I think from my own experience in terms of working in the Falkland Islands, people, actually, you know, they can’t necessarily travel eight thousand miles, just to have a look at a paper based record, so actually having it electronically and having it accessible is really important. And it helps them because it means you know, they didn’t have to travel, but it also means that we can have a much wider reach than we did before, because obviously, we don’t get a lot of visitors. So having, essentially the whole world being able to look at your archival collection is, is brilliant. But then at the same time preservation is equally important, if you’ve got a fragile document, you need to make sure that people don’t want to keep coming and you know, handing the original. So you want to make sure that you can, you know, protect it. And then, but then of course it has access benefits. So and I think from doing this Master’s dissertation, I found that a lot of the, in terms of measuring impacts, it’s more focused on access rather than what it’s done in terms of preserving the documents. So that’s probably where I stand but to be fair, I kind of see both elements of it.

Jess Conway (49:02)

Sure. What do you think is the role of records in our society today?

Chloe Anderson (49:10)

That’s a good question.

Jess Conway (49:12)

It’s a big one.

Chloe Anderson (49:13)

It is a big one. Yeah. I mean, I think it’s just, it’s very important. It doesn’t matter what element of the record you’re looking at, whether it’s just from creation to, you know, retention, to being an archive, I think that they’ve, it’s so important not only in providing accountability of decisions that governments and just organisations make, but, you know, in terms of in terms of archive material in terms of being able to preserve information for future generations so that they can see how a society has developed over time or how a particular thread of, of knowledge has developed and how perceptions have changed, really, so I think records are so, so important. And then if you look at it in terms of an organisation and the day to day level, you know, that’s one of the things that I often say to people, when I’m trying to show them the importance of records management or, you know, essentially just records is that you use records in your everyday life, and you might not necessarily realise it, you know, in terms of, you know, having a passport in terms of just writing down something filling in a form, you know, it becomes an evidence of a transaction, it then becomes, you know, a record, you use records every day. And then even if you just file it away, you’re going through some kind of process, you know, you’re, you’re storing it, and then you’re deleting it. Records are always there, and, therefore, the importance of managing it is, is, you know, it’s never gonna stop. And so I think it’s, for society, it’s a benefit in lots of different ways. And I think just trying to show people that it’s so just a very important thing for us as a profession to do, and raise awareness. And of course, we’ve got the insight because we’re already professionals so we already like, come on people, get on with it. But yeah, I think it’s, it’s an, it’s such an important part of society, wherever you look, whether it’s your day to day life or, you know, in the long term future of preserving, preserving a record, so important that I’m probably just rambling because there’s so many different elements of it.

Jess Conway (51:24)

Yeah, and when you spoke about the digital age impacting our perception of records, and also just information, that’s obviously a significant change from maybe 10, 20 years ago. Do you think that society’s perception and needs for records will continue to change? And, if so, how do you think that might sort of alter in the future, if that makes sense?

Chloe Anderson (52:00)

I think it will make a big difference on how people perceive records and, and essentially use them really. As I said, I think people are already now at the stage where they expect to be able to have access to everything. And I think as technology develops, and the opportunities and different things that we can do with technology, it’ll just make people…greedy is definitely the wrong word but you know, a bit more, you know, they feel obliged, they feel that they should have these, you should have access to everything, everything all at once. And I think because of that, we’re going to have to change, change with it. And we’re going to have to kind of anticipate what people want from, from our records, anticipate how people are going to use them. You know, because I mean, they’re using it differently because of the technologies now because things are electronically, you know, you can have optical character recognition, you know, which you didn’t have before, so you can kind of search for documents a bit more easier. And then, you know, that comes with its own different set of, set of benefits. So I think the fact that we’re becoming more electronic and so because of that our technology is developing and expectations for what we should be providing will change, and how we then move on and how we process things is also going to change even if you think about the UCL course, I mean, I haven’t actually done any research, so I could just be making it all up, but, you know, even while I was there, it was almost becoming a bit more centred towards electronic records, looking more at the digital realm and the importance of that, you know, even just looking at something like coding, you know, that’s normally an IT specific role or function, but it’s becoming equally important to us now, as we head into, you know, having more electronic based records, and we’re almost becoming a bit like IT professionals and archivists. So our role itself is developing as we go on.

Jess Conway (54:09)

Do you think that record keepers are inherently active or passive in what they do?

Chloe Anderson (54:19)

I don’t know. I don’t know. I think it’s probably a mixture of both. I think it also depends partly on how you as a professional work, I think, because obviously sometimes it’s, it’s just, well, from my experience, it’s just you. So I think that if you as a professional, are more of a reactive person, then your processes are going to be reactive. Whereas if you’re someone who might be I don’t know, again, maybe more outgoing or something, then you might be more proactive. So you might be the one implementing decisions where previously you might be reacting to things. It’s such a good a question…it’s very hard. As a whole, I think the profession is becoming, I think becoming a bit more proactive. I think Previously, we might have been a bit reactive like, oh, okay, records have become electronic, we should probably do something about it as opposed to now where we’re like, okay, we’ve realised that it might be a problem, something that we actually have to deal with. So let’s, let’s kind of get on and look at how we work and how we can improve and how we can kind of move on. So I think it’s a mixture of both. That’s a very good question.

Jess Conway (55:32)

We’ve spoken a little bit about what people expect from records and a little bit on people’s perception of archives and records. I’m curious as to whether you noticed a difference when you moved from studying at UCL, so i.e. being part of an environment in which recordkeeping is inherently deemed valuable, you know, into a role within a large organisation that may not understand or even be aware of this importance. If you noticed… if that was something that you noticed and felt was, was different at all?

Chloe Anderson (56:12)

100, 100%, 100%. I mean, the whole environment, you know, being on the course, as you say, you’re surrounded by people who are aware and who are part of the profession. But then when you get into a workplace, I mean, I’m, of course talking from my own experience, but I mean, it’s definitely, you know, people weren’t accustomed to even looking at a record and thinking, oh yeah, that’s important. Maybe I should, maybe I should think about how long I’m keeping it for or maybe I should think about what I’m gonna do with it once it’s, that retention period is finished, or maybe I should think about how I’m naming it because I want someone in even two years time to be able to find it. It’s been such a stark reminder really, because I, you know, essentially I did come here and people were like, what is records management? What is a record? And you know, what are you even talking about? It’s just paper. So, I think, yeah, it was it, definitely people definitely here didn’t understand the importance. And so being able to talk about it outside the profession, was really, really a good thing, and I think that was definitely what I noticed, as you say the most, from going straight from the course to the workplace was that you didn’t have the people who were already there advocating records. You, you had to do that all yourself. But that’s good. That’s part of the challenge.

Jess Conway (57:35)

Yeah [laughs]. You’ve spoken quite a lot about how it’s an important part of your role for you to be an advocate for records management within your organisation. Do you think that archivists and record managers have the ability to advocate in a wider context, so, I’m thinking sort of beyond their place of employment and to the public, you know, like to become public figures that advocate for, for archives and records management?

Chloe Anderson (58:02)

Definitely, definitely, I think with I mean, of course, we’re in a digital age. You know, you’ve got things like your different social media platforms, you know, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, all these different things where you can you can show not only your workplace-based achievements, but also achievements and, and advocate for, as you say records management to show the importance of managing records or having the archival collections accessible. There’s a lot more opportunities for people to be able to, to advocate for records management and to advocate for, for archives, and I think that’s, that’s a really great thing, and I think even from my own perspective, having something like a poster that you might put on LinkedIn, or just showing people the kind of different elements that are out there, it not only advocates records management’s role, the importance for those people who don’t know it, but it also, it helps other professionals who are maybe thinking about how to advocate themselves, because we’re such a small, you know, field anyway supporting everyone and, and, you know, we’re all going towards the same aims so, sharing tools and you know, sharing how we interact and engage with people and you know, the more positive platforms and the methods that work really is a really great thing, because we’re trying to do the same thing at the end of the day. So yeah.

Jess Conway (59:39)

Yeah. I feel like advocacy’s something that sort of come up quite a lot when you’ve been talking, because it is obviously a really important part of your role. Do you remember learning about being a, being a records management advocate or being an advocate in that way whilst you were at UCL, was that something you remember being advised on at all?

Chloe Anderson (59:59)

So, one of my biggest memories that I have, at the time I thought, I’m not gonna remember this or this is really weird, but it was actually one of the lecturers actually, in the records management unit that said, did an exercise and people, I wasn’t even one that had to stand up, but one of my peers were and you had stuff and you had to have a scenario where you were in a lift with someone, and maybe, maybe the chief executive, someone like that. And you had to say, maybe given in a scenario, your, your funding was being cut, and you had 30 seconds to put forward your view in order to increase your funding or get a specific thing across. And that was when we talked about advocacy. And honestly, I can’t remember anything else other than that scenario, but that has stuck with me, and that really showed me the importance of even just how a 30 second conversation can really impact on how successful you are as a professional, and how people, and how people look at you and engage with you, and for me in such a small working environment, such as the Falkland Islands, and, you know, having that route, almost, in fact, same scenario where I’m in a corridor with the chief executive, and I’m essentially saying, oh, hello, how are you? By the way, we’ve not got a records retention policy in place. I’m just going to write one, is that okay? You know, something like that. And, yeah, so that really stuck with me because I actually ended up using that almost exact same scenario. Being able to, being able to prepare for that and thinking actually, we have we even though we’re professionals, and we might think that people, you know, don’t think that we’re important, actually, we have a real voice and that we can make a real difference. Even 30 seconds was, was really great. But I don’t remember, I don’t remember anything else other than just that moment.

Jess Conway (1:01:59)

What would you say motivates you as a record keeping professional?

Chloe Anderson (1:02:05)

A mixture of different things really, I think, primarily just the importance of preserving documents and the fact that they could be used for future generations is pretty a big motivator. I think coming from such a small community where history is so important and looking at seeing how nations developed is so important, and has really made the preservation side of things a motivating factor for me, and even now working in records management and in the government, making sure that information is then available for, you know, future government workers to find out how a project has developed to find out why they made this decision this year to follow this particular process or, or you know, to approve this, specific funding is really important because people go back to historical information time and time and time again and actually, it’s the historical information that’s actually the most important, not what they’re doing right now, people seem to be continuously asking for, or what did we do here? Can you find this paper? I need to find out what happened. So, I think seeing that, is just a fascinating thing, because I thought, oh, records management, they’re all going to be about using the records now, and, you know, maintaining them, but actually, I think preserving them and making sure that they’re accessible is probably the biggest motivating factor for me. And it’s certainly the most enjoyable because it shows that all the work that we’ve all done for our various processes has actually, has come into, come into our room because we actually want, we’re doing it for a reason and, and, you know, we’re not just making record retention schedules, because we want to inflict pain and misery on our people, we’re doing it for a reason. So it’s really great, I think, and that’s what motivates me.

Jess Conway (1:03:58)

What are your future career’s aspirations?

Chloe Anderson (1:04:03)

So for me right now, I think it’s just developing my volunteer and just work experience to make sure that I have these opportunities, and really just keep, keep in touch within the field, I think, because I’m in the Falklands and I’m kind of so far away, it’s great to be able to know that I can keep up all of the skills and knowledge to still be a competent professional, and I think for my personal circumstances at the moment, in the near future, I’m looking to maybe go to the UK to maybe get some more experience so that eventually I can maybe come back in a different role or different capacity and keep doing important work in terms of preserving records. But yeah, so I think that that’s currently my motivation, not my motivation sorry, my ambition.

Jess Conway (1:05:05)

Is there anything you wish you knew before starting working prior to graduating from UCL?

Chloe Anderson (1:05:15)

Not really, um, I act as a, as a peer mentor, so I have kind of given advice to new professionals before. But I don’t think there’s anything else of what I actually learned, but I think it’s actually how I feel, I feel that we all need to have more confidence in our own abilities, because we are, you know, we are way better than what we actually think that we are and we can achieve so much, and even just speaking from my own experience, you know, I never thought that I would ever be in this position where I’d essentially have created a post for myself and develop a records management programme, and I would never have been able to do that if I hadn’t had the UCL course, obviously, so I don’t have all the confidence in my abilities because of doing that course. So yeah, I don’t think I’ve specifically learned, I think it’s just the feeling of being a competent professional.

Jess Conway (1:06:14)

I think we’re pretty much done, or nearing the end, before we wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to add at all, any favourite memories or experiences or just anything else at all?

Chloe Anderson (1:06:25)

Um, oh favourite memory because it’s, it’s always, it was my first interaction with an archive, and because it’s quite funny, my first experience was when I’d been given a tour by the National archivists here in the Falklands of the archives, and we were going over the security protocol in place in the alarm system. And she was talking about how important it is obviously to protect the archives from, from any theft and you know, all that important thing, and then the intern while she was showing me around, she accidentally set off the alarm, and it was a very, very loud alarm and just seeing how quickly she went into, into action was really, really impressive, and really my first kind of wake up call, quite literally of how important the archive is. And one more memory that I have with my mum, for one occasion had to come to the archives to do some kind of research, and she got a paper cut, so then she started bleeding, and my first priority was not her, and whether she was okay, but to get her away from the records so that she did not put any bloodstains on them, and at that point, I thought, yes, archives and this whole profession is now literally in my blood, and I care, I care so much about it. That was really the time that I thought yeah, okay, I like this, but that’s kind of a favourite memory I have.

Jess Conway (1:06:56)

Yeah. Um, okay, I think that’s probably it if that’s okay with you.

Chloe Anderson (1:08:08)

Yeah, yeah.

Jess Conway (1:08:09)

Great. Okay, I’m gonna stop recording

Nicole Spitzer (00:00:02)

My name is Nicole Spitzer and it’s Tuesday March 17th at about five past two in the afternoon and I’m speaking to Kerstin Michaels and we’re doing this interview on Skype and I’m located in London. So, I just wanted to remind you this project is part of a larger group of oral history interviews celebrating the Department of Information Studies’ Centenary and through the perspectives of people like you, who have either worked within the department or alumni, we wanted to tell the story of the people who made the department what it is today, as well as learn about the influence of the department on your life and professional life. I wanted to start with your early life, when and where were you born?

Kerstin Michaels (00:00:49)

I was born in Germany but I’ve lived in the UK for over 40 years.

Nicole Spitzer (00:00:56)

Okay, where in Germany?

Kerstin Michaels (00:00:58)

In a place called Wuppertal.

Nicole Spitzer (00:01:01)

So was German your first language?

Kerstin Michaels (00:01:03)

Yes

Nicole Spitzer (00:01:05)

What was it like growing up there?

Kerstin Michaels (00:01:07)

It was fine, you know, I’ve got a younger brother, I’ve a mother and father, so it seemed just a normal childhood.

Nicole Spitzer (00:01:16)

Was it a big town? Small?

Kerstin Michaels (00:01:18)

Not too big, it had about 650,000 people.

Nicole Spitzer (00:01:23)

So you did your primary school there?

Kerstin Michaels (00:01:26)

Primary school and grammar school yep.

Nicole Spitzer (00:01:29)

Do you have any memories of that?

Kerstin Michaels (00:01:32)

I always enjoyed school, unlike some of my friends who hated it, I enjoyed school. I never had any… I was lucky I didn’t have any problem. I’ve always enjoyed learning, I’ve always enjoyed reading, which I think is a great help.

Nicole Spitzer (00:01:50)

Do you have any books that you remember from your childhood that stand out as your favorites?

Kerstin Michaels (00:01:56)

Yes, I mean there… Funnily enough I used to, when I was slightly older, I used to read a lot of Edith Blyton books in, obviously, German translation.

Nicole Spitzer (00:02:07)

So how old were you when you moved to England?

Kerstin Michaels (00:02:11)

Um I was.. How old was I? I was 20.

Nicole Spitzer (00:02:19)

Oh so you did.. I would call it high school but I’m not sure, what is it called there?

Kerstin Michaels (00:02:25)

It’s called grammar school. So I did grammar school and then I did about 18 months training and then the next worked for an import company, but then I came here in January 1979.

Nicole Spitzer (00:02:41)

What was that like? Why did you decide to come to England?

Kerstin Michaels (00:02:45)

I met my, well he’s now my husband, but he wasn’t then. So that’s why I came to England.

Nicole Spitzer (00:02:54)

Okay, he’s English then?

Kerstin Michaels (00:02:56)

Yes, he is.

Nicole Spitzer (00:02:58)

I guess let’s keep talking about school a little bit, what subjects were your favorites? What did you enjoy doing?

Kerstin Michaels (00:03:08)

I enjoyed doing history and English, I had an extremely good English teacher and the German school system that we had at the time we had four years of what you would call junior school and then you either went to a grammar school up to A levels, so 18, or middle school which is more of like a technical college or what in England is called a comprehensive, where you would normally leave school at 16. I went to the grammar school and started English straight away and had it throughout, which actually helped tremendously when I decided eventually to come and live in this country.

Nicole Spitzer (00:03:53)

And when you did come and live here, was that when you started working at the import company? Or was that in Germany?

Kerstin Michaels (00:04:01)

That was in Germany, when I came here I got a job at a charity and I worked there for quite a long time before I left and joined University College London. Of course, the department wasn’t called the Department of Information Studies then.

Nicole Spitzer (00:04:19)

What was it called?

Kerstin Michaels (00:04:20)

It was called the School of Library, Archive, and Information Studies.

Nicole Spitzer (00:04:24)

What did you do at the charity?

Kerstin Michaels (00:04:28)

At the charity I started off as secretarial work, it was only a very small team, there were only six of us and so I worked for the secretary and then switched to becoming the membership secretary when they computerized all the membership records and so that was collecting membership subscriptions, that kind of thing.

Nicole Spitzer (00:04:51)

Did you enjoy it?

Kerstin Michaels (00:04:52)

Yes I did, you know there’s some point when I really didn’t want to do that anymore so I then found another post advertised which then turned into the one I did for the department for very many years.

Nicole Spitzer (00:05:12)

How long were you with the department?

Kerstin Michaels (00:05:14)

The Department of Information Studies? Just over 24 years.

Nicole Spitzer (00:05:21)

Oh wow, that’s amazing. I guess I just wanted to go back to your early life a little bit. Were you parents from Germany?

Kerstin Michaels (00:05:29)

Yes, they are still in Germany. As is my brother, the whole family.

Nicole Spitzer (00:05:36)

What were they like growing up? Were they strict? Easygoing? If you want to share a little bit about what they were like?

Kerstin Michaels (00:05:45)

They were… to me they just seemed like normal parents, you know we always did a lot of things as a family, going on trips, going on outings, and so on. I suppose they.. Hmm would I call them strict? They had their moments when they needed to be a bit stricter but on the whole they were always very supportive, you know they encouraged my brother and me to do hobbies, and I don’t remember them ever putting pressure on us to sort of perform very well in school but they were there to help us and support us to do what we wanted to do.

Nicole Spitzer (00:06:37)

And what did they do for work?

Kerstin Michaels (00:06:41)

My mother, largely because of the time, when I was born, my mother was at home. She then, when my brother was old enough to go to school she started working part-time in an office and my father worked in an architectural office, for an architect but then branched out on his own. He ended up managing very large building sites in Germany. For example, he effectively managed the building work of the staff car park for Lufthansa employees at Frankfurt Airport and various other large projects around Germany. Which was a bit of a problem because by then my mum.. he had to work away from home quite a bit so he retired… 20 years ago. He’ll be 85 in April, so he retired when he was 65 largely you know because he had to work away from home quite a bit. You can imagine you have to be.. That sort of work you have to be on site.

Nicole Spitzer (00:07:53)

Yes definitely, what was that like for you?

Kerstin Michaels (00:07:58)

Well of course I’d long since left. But it was obviously more of a problem for my mother.

Nicole Spitzer (00:08:12)

What’s your cultural background? How did you guys celebrate holidays? Were they important to you? Birthdays?

Kerstin Michaels (00:08:21)

My family has never been religious, we never really went to church although we did celebrate Christmas. But you know we’re not, neither my husband nor I are particularly religious, we go to.. Where we live now, we live in a very small village, and the church has a Christmas service every year and we go to the, but that’s about the only time we do go to the church.

Nicole Spitzer (00:08:58)

Thank you for sharing that, let’s move back into your adult life. What are your past times? Did you have any hobbies in the past that you don’t do anymore?

Kerstin Michaels (00:09:13)

I still read a lot. I’ve always enjoyed things like needle cross, the last few years I didn’t really have a great deal of time but since giving up work I have gone back to knitting. Which I enjoy and you know we go out and about, we walk around alot, we have a garden which we obviously spend time in and we in the summer try to spend as much time outside as possible. But, we’re still kind of in the process of switching over from full time work mode to leisure mode. I can put it like that.

Nicole Spitzer (00:10:07)

What does your husband do?

Kerstin Michaels (00:10:10)

My husband was an accountant, we both retired at the same time because we basically thought, you know we’re done with work full time and wanted to do things that we wanted to do.

Nicole Spitzer (00:10:26)

That’s great. Let’s talk about your career path a little bit more. So you started after Grammar School at the import company and then you met her husband and moved to England. Was it to London or where?

Kerstin Michaels (00:10:42)

Just outside of London.

Nicole Spitzer (00:10:45)

And so at the charity you did secretarial work.

Kerstin Michaels (00:10:51)

Yes, the membership secretary dealing with membership matter

Nicole Spitzer (00:10:57)

Did your role there evolve? Did you start in one, end up in another?

Kerstin Michaels (00:11:03)

That’s right, so basically the membership secretary retired so I moved into her role at a time when the charity was moving purely from paper records, I mean this was the mid-nineties, from paper records to a computerized system because she had done work for many many years and didn’t want to have to learn a whole new system. So when she retired, I was offered the role and it was quite good because it was a sort of starting right from the beginning, dealing with the.. In those days you couldn’t really sort of buy things.. You had to go more bespoke systems. It was still in its infancy. So it was starting really at the beginning talking to the developers, writing the systems, to testing it, implementing it, transferring the records, and then building it up from there. Once that was sort of implemented, at that point I then started to look around for something else.

Nicole Spitzer (00:12:21)

Were you always comfortable with technology? Or was it something you had to grow into?

Kerstin Michaels (00:12:25)

It was, at first, because it was relatively new and not so intuitive as it is now. You know it took a little while for everybody to become comfortable with it because there was always that sort of worry that if you did anything wrong that thing would just sort of shut down or explode or you’d lose your data. But, I soon became quite comfortable with it and certainly now it’s almost, I don’t want to say second nature, but I’m quite happy to sort of try out new things and expand. But of course the work I did at UCL, for the department changed tremendously over the time I was there.

Nicole Spitzer (00:13:30)

You mentioned you had a husband, did you say you had any children?

Kerstin Michaels (00:13:35)

No we don’t have children.

Nicole Spitzer (00:13:40)

So let’s move to your life at UCL now that you’ve brought that up. So when exact years were you employed by them? You said you were there 23 years right?

Kerstin Michaels (00:13:50)

That’s right, I started in May 1995 and I left July 2018.

Nicole Spitzer (00:13:58)

Oh so recently.

Kerstin Michaels (00:14:00)

Yes, it was only, well.. I left almost two years ago.. 18 months ago.

Nicole Spitzer (00:14:08)

What exactly was the role right when you started?

Kerstin Michaels (00:14:12)

When I started the job title was Office Manager/Departmental administrator. SO basically it was running the administration for the department. So…That would be finances, HR matters, bearing in mind that UCL is so large, obviously there is a finance department and an HR department, specialists. But at a local level, as a management team, that deals with all the administration management functions that you expect.

Nicole Spitzer (00:14:57)

Was there a learning curve when you got there? Did you hit the ground running?

Kerstin Michaels (00:15:03)

Yes, well I’d never worked in higher education before. I’m sure you’ve come across, every industry, every company, has its own procedures, its own acronyms, abbreviations you know and it takes time to sort of find your way around, doesn’t it?

Nicole Spitzer (00:15:27)

How long do you think it took until you felt a little more comfortable?

Kerstin Michaels (00:15:31)

I think, you probably have to go through a whole cycle, because working in a university has its own cycles. So you have, fo example, the academic year, which  you as a student would be most familiar with, but in parallel you also have things like the financial year, you know, which is different from the academic year, you have exam periods, and you have budgets, all sorts of things which are happening at different times of the year. So you really have to have gone through a whole year, really. The post I had was a very sort of generalist post, I was expected to do all sorts of different things and we were a small team, so we didn’t have any specialists within the team and we were even smaller than the team is now, so you were expected to turn your hand to everything. And of course you’re reacting not just to the university, but the university itself is governed by new laws, employment laws for example, immigration laws, that has changed tremendously over the recent years, budgets, new constraints, new initiatives, it was a role that required quite a bit of flexibility, it was the kind of, sort of thing that the central administration would pass on things to departments and the departmental level, we were then expected to implement them as best we could, meet as many of the deadlines as we could, stay within our budget, all that kind of things. It was quite varied, and of course it changed quite a lot because of technology and with the different demands that arose.

Nicole Spitzer (00:17:48)

What kind of technological changes did you see while you were there?

Kerstin Michaels (00:17:52)

Well when I first started, email was in its infancy, we still had people typing on typewriters just about, so there were very few networks. It’s not like now when you just buy a piece of kit and you plug it in and everything works, like the printer talks to everything.. It was a bit more clunky at the time as everything was then, all those years ago. We used to get everything by mail, snailmail, so we’d have internal mail and external mail, so we would get very few electronic communications, but certainly when I left and the last few years of my working life there, if you got a letter it was “wow!” because everything was electronic. When it changed, that changed how we worked a lot.

Nicole Spitzer (00:19:01)

When did you notice the shift?

Kerstin Michaels (00:19:04)

It was almost sort of gradual, there was almost a phase where people almost did both. You know people didn’t trust the new electronic system, you know I’m sure you read on the screen a lot, and initially we would print everything out because we didn’t want to read on the screen, we still want to… but then there comes a point where you’re just sort of like why am I doing this? This is just double the work. I guess what we all find, and I’m sure everybody still does, is that it’s more.. everythings become faster. When you used to send a letter, well you probably don’t remember this, but when you got a letter, you would then respond to the letter, post it off and knew you’d have a few days before you could expect a response… I know you could use the telephone, obviously, but with email it’s like instant, they can come back and say “why haven’t you done this?” and it’s like you’ve only sent it to me five minutes ago. I mean, It’s a fantastic tool, there are many things we wouldn’t have been able to do without it, but it also has its downside because everythings quite fast and you have to be quite disciplined to carve out some time when you don’t check you email in order to get on with some reading or report writing or whatever.

Nicole Spitzer (00:20:42)

What do think you the main problems with the speed of it have been within the department and within your own life?

Kerstin Michaels (00:20:50)

It was quite difficult because of the… I had to be quite disciplined, which is not my normal style of working, but you had to be quite disciplined in terms of time management in order to achieve and meet deadlines. I think it becomes a little more difficult to distinguish between what’s urgent and what’s important, you know that sort of time management. If you’re always reacting to the urgent, you never really get to what’s important that needs doing. For example, if you have a big restructuring project that takes an awful lot of time, or introducing a new procedure or adapting a procedure you need space and time to make a plan to trial it and all sorts of things like balance. And you sometimes feel you don’t have the luxury of the time because there’s another 15 emails in the box that needs to be responded to.

Nicole Spitzer (00:22:13)

How did you deal with that, the management aspect of it since it was so new at the time?

Kerstin Michaels (00:22:18)

It really was only in the last few years that it became a particular issue because things were getting faster and faster and more and more work. Was generated perhaps in the sense of the demands of everybody because if you have the tools to do this, to do it faster, people want a faster turnaround time, don’t they? The students want a reply, they want their coursework feedback more quickly, they, you know, everybody is working on it on a much tighter turnaround. And the only way that you can really manage it is.. I mean in the end I just had a very detailed color coded Google Calendar, which, you know, diary, which just filled with deadlines and prompts to start on projects and it didn’t always work, and cause you sometimes don’t feel like doing it, you know, particularly when it’s something that you’re not keen on, an aspect of, we all have aspects of our work that we don’t like as much as others, but that was the only the only way really to kind of keep control over me, so that things wouldn’t get lost.

Nicole Spitzer (00:23:53)

So you mentioned there was a little bit of distrust around technology when you first started implementing it?

Kerstin Michaels (00:24:00)

It was sort of in the 90s. But people weren’t quite… it sort of then switched, initially was a sort of, well, I don’t really trust the computer when it says this, which then after a few years flipped over completely, so that you know, whether on the computer must be wise in though you might have typed it in before you fed it data, which, you know, isn’t isn’t correct. But now, everybody’s working life is so completely different. That, you know, they don’t really have paper anymore.

Nicole Spitzer (00:24:42)

When did you start trusting it?

Kerstin Michaels (00:24:46)

It’s a sort of gradual process, I think so you don’t really you’re not really aware of it until one day you sort of think oh it’s all just on here and we hope that somebody somewhere the central information systems division backs up all your data.

Nicole Spitzer (00:25:12)

So I guess I want to… let’s talk more about your day to day life at UCL. Do you feel like you had such a varied role and your team was small so you’re expected to kind of be masters of all but do you feel like you developed like an expertise in any one area?

Kerstin Michaels (00:25:31)

It was very much a sort of a generalist role. As I say, over the years, particularly the last few years. I had to do far more budgeting and financial planning because that became a requirement from UCL, you know, the financial model was changed so that we were required to do quite a lot more budgeting and forecasting. And that was an area where, you know, through sheer necessity one just had to sort of knuckle down and get on with it.

I didn’t really, I suppose other than that it was just a sort of a generalist. role, as I say. And as we employed more people on the admin team, my particularly my contact with students, my student administration, or the student administration side of my work, fell away completely because I then had a team of other people, the rest of the team members were doing that. So I was left basically with human resources, finance, and particularly any sort of problems that would arise.

Nicole Spitzer (00:26:49)

Did you have a favorite part of it? favorite aspect?

Kerstin Michaels (00:26:53)

Well, actually, I think still, I actually always enjoyed the student administration side of things because you’re dealing with real people and real problems and in a tiny sort of way, you might make a difference to somebody’s life. So, you know, I did regret that, by necessity, you know, because you can’t do everything. And then it seemed that it had carved up in that way… the workload so…but you know, you just, you just do what you need to do.

Nicole Spitzer (00:27:30)

So, what were your first impressions of DIS? Well.. now its DIS

Kerstin Michaels (00:27:37)

It’s always sort of struck me, we of course when I started the department was quite a bit smaller in terms of student numbers and staff. It didn’t have the publishing program. I mean, that was largely the reason why the school changed its names because you can’t forever be adding bits to it. You know the School of Library, Archive, and Information Studies was

significantly long anyway. So you can’t then put on electronic communication which we had at the time and publishing and and and and… so that’s why it was one of the reasons to go for a very generic Information Studies title. But the department I think, then, and I hope it still does, and obviously, as I’ve said, you know, I haven’t been there for nearly two years. But it’s always been a friendly place, it’s always put the students at the top of its concerns, if you like. And, you know, I met many, many very interesting and very nice people over the years, both from the student side and from colleagues within the department and from right across the university.

Nicole Spitzer (00:29:01)

Did any of them make a big impression on you? Was there anyone you were particularly..

Kerstin Michaels (00:29:07)

Obviously, the role I had.. in that role, I worked extremely closely with whoever was head of the head of department, or directors, we called them in the early days, because that really is the only way that that you can cope, you know, you can run a department. And so I worked with a number of people over the years.. all different, but all good in their own their own styles, their own ways and I was extremely lucky in all this having a very, very supportive… because the head of department also was my line manager. And of course, you know, you have that sort of dual relationship, you have to… you have to have a good working relationship because a lot of it is delegated to the role. It’s not called department manager. And because of this, I sort of thought departmental administrator wasn’t really reflective of it. So a few years ago, they changed it to departmental manager. Because the head of departments, it’s impossible for them to be able to do absolutely everything. So they need to have a manager in place to manage most of the sort of day to day administration activities.

Nicole Spitzer (00:30:38)

Were there any changes in management while you were there and did that change the culture?

Kerstin Michaels (00:30:44)

Yes, every course every head of department changes the culture slightly.With personality and their interests and their own contacts. So it is every… every head of department has an impact on the department. That’s for sure. But as I said, You know, I was always extremely lucky, I had very, very good heads of department who were always very supportive of me. And it was always a partnership rather than, you know, the sort of more authoritative or authoritarian… which I’ve seen in other departments where, you know, didn’t work quite well.

Nicole Spitzer (00:31:34)

Do you have anything to say about the connection between the department and other departments at the university? Or were they always kind of separate?

Kerstin Michaels (00:31:42)

The department was always slightly separate because… because of its subject matter and I mean, obviously, we have people in the department who work across with colleagues in other departments, but we’ve never had any joint degrees. We’re always the home department, well for many years we didn’t have any undergraduates. We used to run our own undergraduate degree for a little while. So being a postgraduate and research student departments, you have slightly different links. And really, the.. You know, we work pretty much quite a sort of on our own, which wasn’t a bad thing. But I don’t think it was ever regarded as a problem.

Nicole Spitzer (00:32:48)

Do any significant moments stand out during your time there?

Kerstin Michaels (00:32:59)

For me personally, I think it goes back to really dealing with individuals, whether they were members of staff, colleagues and friends, or students, because I’d always regarded that as the most important aspect of what we did. And that, you know, the particularly in times when, when people were having problems, that was always you prioritize that, you know, you dropped everything else to to make sure that if somebody had a problem, whether it was it could be it could be something relatively small, but it would have might have a big impact on them and affect their studies or, you know, their life… are heavier. And so that was always..  I always thought one had to have a sort of like a priority pyramid, you know, sort of anything like that would always have to be dealt with first. And everything else would have to take its place. Well, down the line, even if it then took longer to deal with it.

Nicole Spitzer (00:34:13)

So were there any major changes you noticed or shifts in the approaches of the department while you were there? And if so, what were your roles?

Kerstin Michaels (00:34:25)

In terms of…it obviously changed quite a bit over time as we reacted towards changes. Those could be legal changes. As I said before, you know that the department is an employer or you see UCL is the employer so you have to comply with a lot of things. Immigration law changed an awful lot and that put a huge extra workload burden on all the departments at UCL. And across the country, the whole of universities. I mean, are you for example, a visa student? Are you there on a …?

Nicole Spitzer (00:35:10)

I have citizenship through my mother.

Kerstin Michaels (00:35:13)

Right. Okay. So it doesn’t apply to you. But you know, with an increase in tier two visa students and monitoring the attendance and all that kind of thing in latter years. The workload really shifted tremendously. You have to… because you have finite resources, the thing that always that always happens, and I guess it still does, is that somebody, you know, something needs to be done, but you’re not given new resources to do it. And so you’re forever trying to reshuffle and adjust and balance. That was just the way you know, things work. So we try to do that as best we could at local level in the department and still work effectively as a team and still you know, work well together and have a giggle. Not take it too seriously, if we could.

Nicole Spitzer (00:36:21)

So what immigration policy are you referring to? I’m sorry, I’m not familiar exactly with.

Kerstin Michaels (00:36:26)

This is visa students who are overseas students who come to the UK to study. The government requires universities, as sponsors of these visas, to monitor attendance. So basically, do you still sign in attendance sheets?

Nicole Spitzer (00:36:51)

Yeah, we do.

Kerstin Michaels (00:36:52)

Yeah, that’s exactly that and that was… we would then need to report on overseas students attendance several times throughout the year, and make sure that we knew where they were, the same staff who were in the UK under work visas. It takes a lot of time to do that.

Nicole Spitzer (00:37:14)

So the attendance sheets, that’s a new thing? or in the last few years?

Kerstin Michaels (00:37:17)

We’ve always had sort of attendance sheets to sort of pick up if anybody was missing, and were there any problems? Do we need to follow that up? But it’s much much more rigorous now. Because you need to need to prove that you’ve checked attendance. Although I guess now with… I was reading the other day, a couple of days ago that the government is dropping that requirement now that face to face teaching is no longer being done because of the virus.

Nicole Spitzer (00:37:56)

Oh yea, we’re doing remote learning right now. How would you have dealt with the situation we’re going through right now? Or did you deal with any..

Kerstin Michaels (00:37:07)

I must admit it sort of vaguely passed by in luxury… of not having to worry about any of this anymore. It’s wonderful. But I sort of thought, Oh, my God, all the exams, because of course, I don’t think the postgraduates do very many exams anymore, but the undergraduates do. And just the logistics of organizing it is just “Ahhh!”.

Nicole Spitzer (00:38:33)

Yeah, no, totally. My siblings are both an undergrad at University of Toronto and all their exams are going to be just online at home.

Kerstin Michaels (00:38:44)

I think UCL has decided to do the same. Well I mean you can’t risk it can you, you can’t put several hundred undergraduates into an exam hall, i mean that’s just not going to be a good idea. But it’s, I mean, that’s a good, good example you would have to cope with, you know, if something like that would happen. And you’d go, oh, how are we going to cope with this? And then you’d have to sit down and talk to colleagues and you make a plan and you’ll be you know, you talk to others and you try to just basically try and cope with it as best you can. And you just as you as you go along, and that was very much the type of work that I did. You expect it’s a lot of unexpected stuff. You know, where you were, you were just because you wouldn’t know what I mean. You can’t plan for something like this. Yeah. So, but that’s a very good, good case in point where you, you have to try and do the best you can with the resources and within the timeframe, and I think the best thing, you know, I always used to say to people when that sort of comes, that was another big part of my roles, problem solving, if you like. People sort of kind of say, you know, what about this, I will sort of say to them, just leave it with me and when they were out of the room, I’d go “Oh my god ahh!”. But you need to give people the confidence. And they, if they went then went off and did their own work. And that was the result, you know, they didn’t need to know about all the underlying, rushing around that one had to do. You need to, you need to create an environment where people can do the best work. And it doesn’t matter what that is, whether that’s, you know, one of the teaching administrators or one of the research assistants or the lecturing staff you need to, as best you can within your resources and restrictions. You need to try and enable them to do their best work.

Nicole Spitzer (00:41:01)

Would you say that that was kind of the core of your role, like, all your tasks and everything all put together? The core of it was creating that environment?

Kerstin Michaels (00:41:09)

It was very much a kind of, I was regarded as a kind of catch all. I mean, it didn’t, it didn’t mean, I would always do everything because you can’t possibly do it. But, you know, you sort of sort of say, Well, how are we going to do this? Oh well… And you’ve developed something with your colleagues to try and work out to know who would be best placed to do this? Because many, many times people just don’t have the time or the resources or the interest. And why should they have to grapple with the underlying structures? That’s not their job. It’s a bit like a student… I mean, you expect things, you expect Moodle to work, expect the library to have the stuff you need, you know, you have all these sorts of practicalities. You shouldn’t have to then also try to do these.

Nicole Spitzer (00:42:12)

So do any of these problems or challenges stand out to you from when you were there? Like, were there any specific big challenges that were kind of hard to overcome?

Kerstin Michaels (00:42:23)

Hm well, we had quite a number of them over the years. I mean, you know. Hum… We moved, we moved the departments, we were split, before we moved into foster court. About 10-12 years ago, we were scattered over five different buildings. So moving everybody and you know that that was a major, major project. That was really a major project. And then of course you have, as I said, it’s very… you have your own cycles, you have your financial cycles, you have your academic year… you have, you know, obviously, particularly busy times… the start of the academic year, the exam season. Then on top of that you have a number of major assessments like the research excellence framework, I think it’s still called, which comes every five or six years well, that’s a huge, huge undertaking where all research done in each department across the country is assessed by panels. And you know, it’s you kind of sort of.. go from one to the other, there’s nothing… while still trying to keep all the basic day to day stuff run as best you can. And I would imagine that going forward universities face even more challenges, you know, because you don’t know where the overseas students will come for the next academic year. We don’t know what our life has been…

Nicole Spitzer (00:44:17)

So you mentioned the department was all scattered. How did it change the workflow or culture or anything when you moved it to one building? Was that a huge..

Kerstin Michaels (00:44:27)

It was much nicer because we were all even though we were all, well the department still is one either side of the Foster Court archway, we were at least in one building, and it was much easier  to see people and even though you know, you send an email to the person in the next office. It’s quite nice to sort of, as you wander by, to sort stick your head around the door, say hi, and we’ll discuss something I was doing electronically.

Nicole Spitzer (00:45:03)

Do you feel like it brought more cohesion?

Kerstin Michaels (00:45:07)

Yeah, I think so. And it was better because it had been renovated.. the building.. more than before and.. Was really not. It had sort of outgrown its usefulness for modern. I mean, over the years, you know, there were many changes that many of its… I think, as a department it has retained… It hasn’t had very high staff turnover, so I worked with a number of people for very many years, which was great. But you know, as I say, you…it sort of sounds like lots of people who have done it. My God, you were there that long, but it’s changed all the time and you just adjust to it and you’re, you know, you get on with it. So until there came a point when I decided that I really wanted to do something else. So, my husband and I, we decided together and we’re fortunate to be able to do it.

Nicole Spitzer (00:46:31)

So how do you feel about things like, we speak a lot in the department about GDPR and FOI? Do you have any thoughts around those and like, did it affect your work at all or?

Kerstin Michaels (00:46:42)

Um, well, it did, of course, because data protection was something that we needed to be aware of FOI, I only ever had to deal with two FOI requests, I think and then the time I was there, it didn’t really affect us. I think it’s a very good thing personally. Because, you know, you need to be able to find out things. But personally, it didn’t really affect me a great deal. Data Protection, probably more so because we need it to be sure that we, you know, just follow the rules and regulations I left just before GDPR really came into force. I wasn’t affected by that too much.

Nicole Spitzer (00:47:32)

Did you feel like before GDPR came into play, were you kind of, I’ve heard from some people that they were kind of following the same data protection methodology before anyways?

Kerstin Michaels (00:47:49)

I think so, I think we tried because, you know, obviously being a department that actually teaches this stuff, we had people who were experts who could advise us. And of course, UCL as a whole, we would have briefings and guidelines and policies. So, you know, we think

it wasn’t a particular… in particular, something that we were particularly worried about. But you know, things can go wrong quite easily.

Nicole Spitzer (00:48:23)

Did you, being at the department, did you get interested in one aspect of the academics there? Or were you kind of more interested in the running of the program?

Kerstin Michaels (00:48:34)

I used to try and.. the department sort of runs or ran, perhaps it doesn’t do it anymore, these lunchtime talks, where people would present their research and so on and I used to try and go along to those to find out what my colleagues were doing. My own background is in history. You know that that’s my interest. But I tried to get a handle on understanding what they were doing. And of course, another aspect of the work I did was dealing with research projects if they had a research grant, and you can’t help but absorb some of the stuff through, you know, dealing with the applications and then if a grant is awarded dealing with advertising for a research assistant, for example, so let’s say you even without trying you absorb a little bit of the type of work that they do. My background has never been… and when I left the charity and told people what I was going to work, a number of them went, Oh, you’re going to become a librarian and I said no, haha.

Nicole Spitzer (00:50:04)

Did you feel drawn to any of the themes that you were kind of absorbing as you did the administration around them?

Kerstin Michaels (00:50:10)

I suppose, mostly on the sort of historical side of things, because you know, a number of my colleagues are doing historical related things.

Nicole Spitzer (00:50:26)

Are there any specific projects you remember being particularly interested in by your colleagues?

Kerstin Michaels (00:50:35)

I supposed, Andrew Flinn’s oral history projects. He also did a research project with the Institute of archaeology that was quite, that was kind of sort of more my own personal interest, you know.

Nicole Spitzer (00:51:00)

I guess I kind of wanted to move into where the department kind of is heading in terms of like power relations around race and gender. There’s kind of a strong feeling of the department now that we kind of need to evaluate these things and we’re bringing in different voices and different perspectives within Information Studies. Do you feel like these feelings that we needed to move that direction were there when you first started? Or do you remember when they began emerging?

Kerstin Michaels (00:51:37)

I suppose it’s it’s more sort of in later years or in the department has always been and there was a time when there were actually fewer men than women working there. And of course in some of the fields like librarianship and archives These women have always, you know, outnumbered the men. So it was a slightly different sort of makeup. But I think particularly in terms of I mean, I don’t think that I think the department is more evenly balanced now. But it still needs to bring more diversity into it. And, you know, and I think that’s the same and that in all the professions and shipping information, professional backgrounds, I don’t think it’s diverse enough yet.

Nicole Spitzer (00:52:43)

Right. Do you have any ideas on how they would make it more diverse?

Kerstin Michaels (00:52:49)

I think it really has to start quite early because in a lot.. For librarians and archivists in particular, they have to have to decide so early that this is going to be their profession, because they need some professional expertise, experience before they come and do their masters. So you need to really start very early in the process to bring people, to ensure that they realize that this is a good career, good profession for them.

Nicole Spitzer (00:53:30)

So, how do you feel about.. We also speak a lot about interdisciplinary skills and how those are highly valued. Currently in research and professional practice problem solving, DIS being a multi-disciplinary department, how was that aspect understood through time? With your time there?

Kerstin Michaels (00:53:53)

I think that’s perhaps a more recent understanding and development that people have appreciated that they can’t just remain on their own. Occasionally sort of things like silos have banded about, I think it’s much more understood that crossover that people need to work together, interdisciplinary needs to be encouraged. And I think I think that’s a very good thing because by, you know, by talking to other disciplines to reflect you, you reflect on your own, you try to see it from a new angle, a new perspective and bringing in good ideas from other areas.

Nicole Spitzer (00:54:59)

We’ve had some speakers and connections from the history department. Do you see any partnerships being beneficial from other departments with DIS?

Kerstin Michaels (00:55:10)

The department, particularly academic staff and their research have always worked across disciplines from computer science to English to history to you know, archaeology, anthropology, the you know, it’s many different collaborations and I think that’s, that’s only going to continue.

Nicole Spitzer (00:55:40)

What do you think, like a future critical area of enquiry and research within Information Studies will be? Maybe based on, you know, the research grants you submitted or the things you’re interested in or saw your colleagues talking about. Where do you think it’s going in the future?

Kerstin Michaels (00:55:57)

I really don’t know. I mean, I haven’t…the things move so fast that I’m, I’ve really not been, you know, even two years out of it is probably past the points.

Nicole Spitzer (00:55:19)

I think that’s a good place to leave it. Thank you so much.

Kerstin Michaels (00:56:26)

Indeed. It’s made me think about.. its quite funny to sort of go back to thinking about it, because, as I said, I’m sort of in the process of switching. It took a little while to switch from full time work mode to leisure mode, but we’ve achieved that now. So it was quite interesting to have to try and think back on it.

Nicole Spitzer (00:56:52)

Yeah, it was great. Thank you so much.

Kerstin Michaels (00:56:55)

Thank you very much.

Nicole Spitzer (00:56:57)

Do you have any final thoughts that you’d like to share? Well, we did just cover a lot of ground..

Kerstin Michaels (00:57:02)

I hope that you know, I hope the department goes from strength to strength and they have a 200th Centenary.

Nicole Spitzer (00:57:11)

Thank you so much.

Kerstin Michaels (00:57:13)

Okay Nicole, thank you!

Xinyu Ma (00:12)

So the first part I want to ask, why did you choose to study at UCL and what was the major of yours?

Manan Vohra (00:19)

Sure, so I studied MSs Digital Humanities at UCL, this was in 2011, and so the reason for studying at UCL was, one it was a reputed university, and the second was I was researching a lot about Digital Humanities as a discipline, and I was quite intrigued by the focus on museums and art institutions and using digital technologies to enhance user experience in these spaces. So that caught my eye because my undergraduate degree was history, and I have a bit of technology background as well, so I thought it sort of came together. And you know, we were the first batch, so that also excited me, you know, we are the first batch to do this. And it was all sort of new and in my head it all came together at the time.

Xinyu Ma (01:18)

Right, so it was like a right combination at the moment?

Manan Vohra (01:21)

Absolutely.

Xinyu Ma (01:23)

So, I noticed that you studied art, you know, history in your undergraduate degree, was it a big transition to study information studies, you know, because of lots of technical background?

Manan Vohra (01:35)

Not necessarily, for me it was not a huge transition, because I did it when I was in school, I had programming in school and then later actually in 2000 I did a diploma in web development, so that was the thing you did in India. So it was not a huge transition for me.

Xinyu Ma (02:00)

1. So, does it help to have a technical background to study information studies?

Manan Vohra (02:06)

I would say it does help, but I don’t think it’s a limitation. Because at end of the day, you know, at UCL or I would argue at any academic institution, the way curriculum has been set up, it has been set up that is accessible for non-technical students as well. Because really you start with an overview of a subject area and you know gradually get into detail. I personally thought when I was studying, it was quite a level playing field for everyone, from a technical or non-technical background.

Xinyu Ma (02:40)

So you don’t really have to have a technical background. What would you say is the most useful coursework that you studied?

Manan Vohra (02:52)

Actually my favourite coursework during my degree there was the legal and social aspects of electronic publishing. The reason for that is that every lecture focused on an area, so there was a lecture on copyright, a lecture on surveillance and data protection. So it gave you quite a board overview of the domain you are in. And second, it was a participative module. Every lecture you had three students present three key papers. So it was really collaborative. And so I think it was a very steep learning curve when it came to that module, because we were overwhelmed by information, every lecture you are learning three things, but it was really really nice because it gave an board overview that… I was not necessarily able to get it in other modules like XML or database systems.

Xinyu Ma (03:56)

Oh, but still, that course was really really useful.

Manan Vohra (04:01)

Very useful.

Xinyu Ma (04:02)

That’s good to know, because I was thinking about choosing that course, but I chose database management instead. I thought it would give me more technical background, you know. So, did you have a clear plan for your career after graduation? Or did you always know what you wanted to do?

Manan Vohra (04:23)

No, I never had a plan. I always have been…you know, I would say it’s an issue, but I personally don’t believe in big plans. So I mean I moved from a traditional broadcast sector to technology and for 10 years I worked in the broadcast media. But I was very sure that I wanted to work in the technology industry, but not exactly sure what I’d be doing, you know my job in there, but I was sure I wanted to work in a technology space. The second thing was, I was very clear that I want to work on building things. I don’t want to work on, you know, pushing papers abd talk about… you know, communication and things like that, I was very clear I want to build something with my hands. And the last thing, because I came from a more traditional industry, broadcast media, I wanted to work at, you know, almost creating a non-hierarchical work environment, where people have more autonomy, they can work remotely, there is more equality and fairness, and you know, when I started looking at the technology industry, that’s the thing I started to see. I was very clear that that’s where I see myself, probably leading a team and create a work environment where I would like to work.

Xinyu Ma (05:50)

Right, that’s really nice. So, you kind of have a big picture in your head, but not clear about small or specific things, but you have a general direction.

Manan Vohra (06:02)

Yes, it was a general direction, it was things that, you know, outcomes that I always sort of expected in my life, to be in that space, but I was not clear what the path is.

Xinyu Ma (06:14)

But you kind of know what you wanted to do. So how would you say that your studies at UCL prepared you for your career as an entrepreneur and product leader at 7digital?

Manan Vohra (06:30)

To be very honest, in one way, Digital Humanities opens many pathways for you, but it doesn’t prepare you for a specific role. And I didn’t have that expectation either, because the university is a space to, in my opinion again, is to validate your thinking, is a place to research, a place to meet different people who have new ideas. And that’s exactly what I did, you know, when I was at UCL, I started looking at startups in London, what are they doing, I started looking at hackathons, I read a lot, lots of different domains, not just restricted to what we were provided in our core reading for Digital Humanities. And I think in my head, that was always what a university is for, foster these ideas and speak to academics because they have this knowledge which they have cultivated over time, which you never had opportunities to access these sorts of people. You know, imagine somebody who has worked for 20 years on a specific problem and has done research on that. You would never meet these people in a private sector or in an industry.

Xinyu Ma (07:50)

Yeah, that’s true, I think the most important thing is probably, like providing opportunities and like to research and meet different people, just to expand your vision.

Manan Vohra (08:06)

Exactly, a university is the place for that.

Xinyu Ma (08:10)

Of course, and so what is your professional role right now, and what are your responsibilities at 7 digital?

Manan Vohra (08:18)

So currently I’m the Chief Technology Officer, so my role at 7 digital is to lead people up a technology roadmap, and, you know, one of my roles is also to lead our customers understand what they want and to make sure that that fits with our strategic goals of our businesses. And internally, my role is also to make sure that all our teams are working on high priority tasks, tasks that help us achieve those goals. So it’s literally you know, understanding the context outside, and making sure that people are well aligned to achieve the goals of our business.

Xinyu Ma (08:58)

OK, and what would you say are the skills required to be a top performer in this job? Like to be responsible, or to able to see the bigger picture?

Manan Vohra (09:10)

I would say there are four things that are very critical to perform in this role. One is analytical skills, you should be very comfortable in analysing the trade off between technologies. So why should you go ahead and use Google Cloud or AWS Cloud? In order to do that, you need to have a good methodology and how do you compare these different cloud vendors? What are the problems with them, what are the opportunities to work with them. So at every level, I’m constantly analysing and making these trade offs for my team so to make sure we understand the risks of using that technology. Second is to be able to lead and mentor teams. I have, you know, my team members reporting it to me what… you know, they are smarter than me in certain aspects, far more knowledgeable than I am. But you know It’s my ability to make sure that they have clarity, they understand why we are working as a team together. It’s not necessarily about an individual, it’s really about building a team. Third I would argue is really your ability to understand the market. You know, what does your business do, why does it, how is it able to add value to the market? And you are able to produce a strategic vision for a business, to say, we are doing all these things because I believe this is where our business is heading. So working with my CEO to make sure that we are well aligned and we can talk about our strategic vision back to everyone working in our company. And fourthly, I would say is commercial acumen. At the end of the day, a business, you know, is there to make money. At the end of the day, it comes down to having margins and profitability. So it’s really important that you think in those terms and is not necessarily about greed or we are here to make lots of money. It really comes down to being responsible, you know, when you lead the team of 100 people, it’s your responsibility to make sure they have rules, they have families to run. So making your sound commercial decisions, making sure that you deliver value, so having commercial acumen is very important.

Xinyu Ma (11:26)

So it sounds like it’s quite complicated to be a top performer in this industry and needs lots of skills including hard skills and soft skills.

Manan Vohra (11:40)

It’s a mix of both, but I think these skills… I mean, OK, I have 15 years of working experience, and these skill sets, I mean even if you take it at a small instance a person, who is running their coffee shop,let’s just say that. They have the same level of skill sets that I do, but for a smaller scale, you know. If you are managing a team of 2 people in a coffee shop, or even working for yourself, you will make the same trade offs to understand, where should I buy my coffee from, you know, what kind of milk should I buy. It’s the same idea, youneed to be able to understand the market, what sort of crossanit should I have? Those skill sets are there, and it really comes down to at what scale you need to apply these skill sets, what industry context are you dealing in. So these skill sets are there, I don’t think it’s something unique or complex to my position or industry.

Xinyu Ma (12:43)

So what would you say would be the biggest challenge that you had to face in your career and how did you overcome it?

Manan Vohra (12:52)

So my biggest challenge I would say was my move from broadcast to technology. Because, you know, you can almost imagine, somebody comes to you, with a history and Digital Humanities background, you know, prior experiences in broadcast and media, and they want to work in technology. So lacking prior experience was one of my, you know, hindrances to enter a new sector.

Xinyu Ma (13:21)

Yeah I definitely agree with that. So it’s like applying for a job, but then the interviewer saying like, you lack experience and like, he or she wouldn’t give you the opportunity because you don’t have that experience. It’s like a loop.

Manan Vohra (13:37)

It is, and I think in those, you know, in those troubled times, I would argue, but also because we graduated in 2012 when the market was still reeling from the 2008 financial crisis. So they were not as rosy as they look, well, I wouldn’t say now, but in the last one or two years. So what I did at that point was, I actually worked with smaller startups. I almost pitched myself and said, well this is what we can do, and take this power. And I worked a lot, to be honest, you know, in my years after graduation. I was working, sometimes I was working 7 days a week, taking on more projects than I could complete. And I made sure I delivered on those, so you know that was the process and I also build my own business, so I learned by failing, and I think that was the best decision, in hindsight, it was to make sure I understand what does it mean to run a business, so you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes.

Xinyu Ma (14:46)

So I think it’s probably best for the students right now to grab every opportunity they can, and once they have an intern or a part-time job, just do their best at their jobs right now. And then they can pick up some skills and maybe network with other people as well?

Manan Vohra (15:07)

Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. And I think it’s very important, even if you join somewhere, and you know, that’s what lacks in a lot of students, I feel that, is this confidence to be very clear in terms of what they want. And I’m not saying clarity in terms of where you see yourself in five years from now, but it’s really about, if you join a company, if you work as an intern there, set your expectations, you know, tell the team, this is why you are here, this is what you are trying to do. Make sure people understand that you are there to achieve something, contribute there. It’s not necessarily about, you know, you waiting for them to teach you something. You really have to go and grab that opportunity.

Xinyu Ma (15:52)

Right, so you have to be, like, more proactive and…

Manan Vohra (15:55)

Always very proactive.

Xinyu Ma (15:57)

Alright, and would you say that it is always a common ground that information workers work in a multidisciplinary environment and therefore they need to equip themselves with interdisciplinary skills or this kind of perception became apparent only lately?

Manan Vohra (16:19)

I would say it’s more of a later, because if you traditionally look at Information Science, it’s more geared towards library and archives. That bulk has disappeared, I mean today we live in a world where I would argue all jobs are multidisciplinary. You cannot just be a traditional marketing person, you need to understand a bit of data analytics, you cannot just be a product person, without understanding a bit of design, a bit of technology. So I would say in every discipline the idea of being multidisciplinary has sit in. When it comes to Information Science, because the needs and requirements of businesses when it comes to information are so varied and are so diverse, you know, having more people into this discipline is actually, it’s a good thing.

Xinyu Ma (17:15)

So it can bring more perspective into the industry as well.

Manan Vohra (17:20)

Absolutely.

Xinyu Ma (17:22)

So what would you say, like, how is the Information discipline evolving right now, and what would be the main changes over the past few years?

Manan Vohra (17:34)

I mean one thing, and I think we could all aruge or agree on that, is that, you know, software is eating the world. I mean today, every business, be big or small, you see more and more tools being used, platforms being integrated to, you know, automate processes. And, in such a set up, having information specialists, I would say become almost critical to the good of that business, you know. So having a very clear vision in a business, not just… traditionally a business has been set up around like having these IT departments and them helping businesses to do things. I think those ideas will disappear because you would have teams who would have their own information specialists. And you see that, you see that in big companies where marketing teams have search specialists, or sales teams have people who can help them look at the market in a different way. So Information Science as a discipline is continuously evolving, and is evolving because businesses’ needs are changing.

Xinyu Ma (18:42)

Right, so with all those evolving technology, and so many softwares in the market, I think there’s a term called technology disruption. So would you say it’s a good thing to have lots softwares in the market right now or is it a bad thing?

Manan Vohra (19:00)

I think it’s a good thing, because you know, if you look at jobs that would come 15 years from now, they are already coming into the market. You would never imagine these jobs 20 years ago. So, of course, there are ill sides to technology automation, but the good sides are, you know, it frees up a lot of time for people to focus on other things and add real value. I, in my whole life, have seen people doing roles, which can be completely automated now. One question is, is that a good thing? What happens to that person’s role, how do you make sure that person has enough resources to re-create themselves? But you know, for the future generations, I hope those jobs don’t exist, I hope these jobs will disappear. Somebody has to do invoice reconciliation manually, you know, that’s where my hope is that technology is going to disrupt these roles and creates new ones for the future generations.

Xinyu Ma (20:05)

So it’s like a constantly evolving industry, and bringing new opportunities as well. So what would you give advice to current Information Studies students or students who are interested in IT related fields?

Manan Vohra (20:22)

I mean… because as a student, you are about to enter the job market and trying to understand what you really like, so it’s very difficult to be locked to a specific domain. But I think there are two things, that I think students should definitely think about. One is understanding methodologies of work, you know, how is software produced, how do modern companies work, so you know, all these models around HIL [hardware-in-the-loop] methodologies, and you know, collaborative working. Because, you know, the way the world used to work and the way the world works now is completely different. You know, companies are more data driven, companies are, you know, the decision making has a shorter time now. So it’s very important to understand how are businesses are set up to grow and what are the methodologies in which they work. Second, I think, I mean you know, people are studying right now and it’s great that they are doing their Masters and undergraduate degrees. But keep time for lifelong learning, you know, keep your time for learning new things, because you’ll need that. And thirdly, I would say, I mean this is something you will probably find out, a bit, one or two years into your career, try and pick up a specific domain. So let’s just say, you are an Information Studies student who want to work in the legal sector or medical sector or banking sector or art sector. Try and understand that domain, because at the end of the day you will see new opportunities coming out of that. I give you an example, the legal industry right now is going through this transformation phase, they are implementing new tools and technologies to, you know, research or accelerate time to decision making. So you will require people who come from a more Information Science background helping this industry to transform. It will require more people who are domain experts in these specific domain. So, probably not right now, but in one or two year after you graduate, it will be good to focus on a specific domain.

Xinyu Ma (39)

So, the important thing is to keep learning and keep your opportunities open to different areas, because you will never know what will come up next.

Manan Vohra (22:51)

Absolutely.

Xinyu Ma (22:52)

So what would you say is the future for the Information Science discipline and how can we better prepare for it?

Manan Vohra (23:00)

I mean, I personally feel that the modules that I had done when I was at UCL, and now I would like to understand how these modules are being changed or updated to address the changes in the market. It’s very very important for academics and UCL to look at course structure and also look at, the point I just addressed around working methods. Are there smaller courses for students to learn agile methodologies or can they learn, your know, two or three smaller courses on building skills that help them bridge the gap into the market. That’s one. Second, I think students should think about taking parts in hackathons or collaborating others on projects that are not necessarily a startup, but you know they are interesting projects that help you, create a portfolio on things you’ve done. Because it’s very important for a discipline to grow, that you have people in that discipline who are practitioners, and also that are challenging the status quo. For example, if you were to work in library sciences or work in an archive for a big company, try and think what are the new things that could happen in that space?

Xinyu Ma (24:35)

So it’s like predict the future and to see how things will change from that perspective?

Manan Vohra (24:45)

Yep

Xinyu Ma (24:46)

And the last question, what job search strategies would you recommend to the current students?

Manan Vohra (24:53)

So, the key strategies that I think, and it all comes down to “a” what is your prior work experience? And then second you know, to be very blunt and honest, what is your visa situation in the UK? Because that is not easy. So one is, of course, joining graduate programs, for kind of big banks and services businesses, like KPMG and McKinsey. But it’s very important that when you join these programs, that you are working on roles that are future roles. You know, because in very large organisations, there is a huge scope for working on things, which, you know, make you realise that after two years your role has been made redundant. So make sure that you work on programs that are transforming that industry at presents. This is again the same point which I said earlier, is about this confidence to manage expectations when you work in somewhere. Make sure that you tell your employer “I’m here to grow, to learn things, not just to get any job”. Second thing is to work in startups. If you really want to gain in depth experience, try and work in a startup. Why? Because there are very limited resources that a startup has, so by nature, you will get a lot of responsibilities and you just end up learning more. It’s not easy, to head up to a startup, I understand, but if you can, I would say it’s one of the best learning experiences that you can get after university. Last, I would say, that’s what I did, start your own businesses.

Xinyu Ma (26:48)

I will definitely keep that in mind as well. Would you say, is it necessary to have lots of relevant work experiences to join a startup? Because, you know, with a small company, they will expect you to perform lots of tasks as well.

Manan Vohra (27:07)

I mean, I would almost say that, let’s say you don’t have any work experience. You don’t have work experiences in gaming, or commercial, or whatever that startup does. It’s really important to make somebody understand in an interview the possibilities, rather than your reality. It’s very important for you to showcase that “why are you interested in working in that startup company”, and that can only come through if you can show something. For example, there’s a guy in San Francisco, I believe, who wanted to work with Apple on Apple Music. He applied for a role, he didn’t get through, so rather than waiting for new roles, he designed the UI for Apple Music. He just created this blog and tagged the Apple design team that say, hey I was rejected from your internship program, but this is what I’ve done, I think based on my research with users, I think this should be the new UI for Apple Music. They actually get in touch with him and they offered him a role. So, you know, there are lots of ways, as you look at industry, so if you go and apply at a startup and say “Hey, you do X Y and Z in the payment sector, and I did two day research and understood the problems of the people in the payments so these are the limitations and I’m really interested in solving these problems in this space. How can I work with you? It becomes a very different pitch. So it’s not necessarily about addressing the requirements of the job. 35% of the role that are not advertised right now, are those companies are thinking about them. OK, six months down the line, we might require two interns here or we might require two senior people here. And sometime, it does help to just reach out to a company and say “Hey, I’m so and so, and I’m really interested in what you are doing. And why am I interested? Because these are three big problems of this industry, and I’ve done this research, where you know, users have been talking about it, how can I work with you?” And then it becomes a very different kind of conversation.

Xinyu Ma (29:43)

Definitely, so like, be proactive and do some research by yourself and then reach out to as many people as you can. Allright, I think that’s everything for now and I’d like to thank you again for participating in this project.

Manan Vohra (30:02)

Thank you very much.

Weixin Li (00:02)

This is Weixin Li interviewing Dr Laura Dietz, and today is 10^th March. This interview is recorded by Skype. So my first questions would be like “When did you start your study at UCL?”

Laura Dietz (00:20)

I started my PhD at UCL in the autumn of 2013. I did like many people who’ve studied in DIS who are already working, whether they’re archivists or in publishing studies. I did a part time PhD, so I took five years and finished and I submitted and had the degree awarded in 2020, no in 2019 I beg you pardon.

Weixin Li (00:47)

So I did some background research on you, I mean on the Internet. So I saw you previously did like English and writing, which is more like a creator of the content, right? But as far as I know the publishing studies that is in our department is more like the curator like for the content. So, what is your motivation to make this kind of change? What’s your ambition to take part in this PhD programme?

Laura Dietz (01:28)

Oddly enough, it is quite the opposite. As opposed to being a split between two different kinds of things, it is very much an integrated program. I’ve started out my career teaching just creative writing. I now teach creative writing and publishing, and far from being two different paths they’re, I don’t wanna say two sides of the same coin, but they’re two strands in the same braid. I don’t believe it is possible if you’re working on fiction and on publishing as I do, and on literature, you can’t study writing. Understanding and having a knowledge of the publishing industry because it’s not just selling books, it’s making books, it’s turning a bunch of words, a text, into something called a book and turning a person who produces those into this thing called an author. So that sort of certification process and that kind of assignment of status and certainly reputation and legitimacy is really kind of in the middle of the study that I did with publishing at UCL. To talk about, I mean publishing is a creative act. Curating has obviously a huge role in it. It’s huge and important not to deprecate that at all, but publishers are anything but sort of passive receivers of ideas, and their gate keeping role will huge, isn’t just about kind of examining what other people have come up with and saying this goes in, this doesn’t. Publishers are incredibly active, incredibly creative, are the originators of ideas and are really the kind of creative partners. And when it comes to, say authors, if you’re writing a new novel, you know, the author too, is incredibly involved in the decisions that are required to say, if this is gonna be presented to an audience, how is it going to be picked? How is it going to be presented? How is it going to be framed? How are we going to instruct the audience or guide them in their interpretation and work, and to say what it is? Is it a novel? Is it a novel in a particular genre? Is it a novel for a particular audience? So those roles are actually really entwined, and that hasn’t pulled me away, if that makes sense at all, and it is at the core of the writing teaching study that I do. Such a long answer, sorry about that.

Weixin Li (04:00)

No, it’s perfect. So you’ve talked about like the different roles that a writer and publisher would take part in the like wider industry. But like how you combine these three like professional roles in your own professional life?

Laura Dietz (04:19)

Certainly. Certainly the classes that I teach and the study that I do, I do publish papers, chapters, I’m working on a monograph, I’ll soon publish a novel and short stories and they really do fold together. My interest when I started doing the kind of research that you would call publishing research, or really the kind of interdisciplinary work between the two fields it came from when I was investigating questions that were coming up in my creative writing teaching and my creative writing practice, things like online literary magazines. It was like, oh, how do they work? What are they in terms of places for writers to publish their work? If there isn’t a physical component, or if there is a digital alongside the physical, are they serving the same kind of purpose, if that makes sense, in terms of making a new writer and making their work visible to the audience, which is not a large audience but an audience of taste makers who read the little magazines as they call them in the US, relatively small elites, you know, kind of magazines and journals often based in universities where young writers can publish short stories that appear in a certain tradition to really kind of get their careers going and also to kind of show their work to the world. Do they function in the same kind of way? So I ended up working with a colleague in publishing, you know, bidding for some funding, as a small cross publisher to assist, and I did a kind of mixed methods, and a free study, and it really kind of went from there.

Weixin Li (05:59)

Oh, that’s cool.

Laura Dietz (06:02)

Technically, you know, publishing means, but very much integrated, answering the same kind of questions, serving the same kind of goals.

Weixin Li (06:11)

So you did like digital publishing, the more electronic publishing, to like publish magazines online in the digital form? But do you think like digital form would be a mainstream, like in the near future?

Laura Dietz (06:36)

Oh gosh, I think it’s long since mainstream, I think the questions that you actually prepared and submitted. I mean, obviously you know a lot of the nuances, and a lot of the changes, but when it comes to, hum, scholarly publishing, educational publishing, contract publishing, trade publishing are all integrating in the digital in different ways. But in each case, digital is… remember it might have not been possible 10/15 years ago to talk about digital as a little subset of trade publishing, but that’s simply no longer the case. It is absolutely central, but at the same time, there’s no sign whatsoever in trade publishing that print is on its way out, or that even that print is under threat. It seems to be sort of stabilizing with different strands coexisting, different purposes.

Weixin Li (07:31)

So do you think, like, what is the value of, like, the virtual bookshop and the physical bookshop as a book place? Is it still like creating a space for people, or what is it, like, what is the value of it?

Laura Dietz (07:51)

I love seeing that in your listed questions. I’m glad to say that there’s no sign of the bookshop or the book experience is under threat. It’s still very much valued. Obviously, book retailing is changing all the time. If one checked in a book retailer let’s say 20 years ago or 40 years ago, this scare be at that time before EBook for more of a tiny fraction of book publishing, it was small independent shops being afraid of first, the mall chain stores and then of superstores, like the Barnes and Noble, and Borders chasing independence out of business. When Amazon and other kind of online retailers appeared selling physical books, it was a sense that the likes of Amazon were on the side of readers, on the side of booksellers against those big bad chain stores. Now that Borders and Barnes and Noble have been so battered, then the mall shop is pretty much gone. We’re actually seeing in the US and in the UK an increase in the number of new independent bookshops being founded. But of course this is for the factor of books. There was also a time maybe five to eight years ago when the trajectory of the increase in the portion of the market that was going to e-books was going up so sharply. There was a question, “Will print be crowded out, or will print be crowded out for certain kinds of books, for certain sorts of reading?” And that hasn’t happened. The plateau has been reached, but well, the big concerns about in a physical book being sold, and more than that, in a physical book being sold in a physical shop, as opposed to the likes of Amazon and other online retailers, that how many shops can the high street sustain? People are certainly looking at Waterstones and saying, you know, will they go the way of so many other high street adge. But in terms of the role culturally of bookshops, there is no sign that people undervalue the bookshop experience and no longer think there’s something unique and special about walking into one of these places, picking a book up off the shelf, possibly sitting down and easy chair to read, and then handing over cash to a person at the till and walking out with this thing that you have brought from this special place.

Weixin Li (10:22)

Hum, yeah.

Laura Dietz (10:23)

A very long answer!

Weixin Li (10:25)

Well, me, myself I’m a kind of bookshop maniac, I really like to hear this.

Laura Dietz (10:31)

You know in the department the person doing the really exciting bookshop research is Dr Samantha Rayner.

Weixin Li (10:45)

Oh, that’s cool. Because I did a little bit of journalism before and I can see how this was shocked by the digital format.

Laura Dietz (10:59)

Yes.

Weixin Li (11:01)

So that’s quite obvious, so I was really curious about this part. So let’s get back to, a little bit to, your experience at UCL, like How do you feel that your study helped you with your current career path?

Laura Dietz (11:21)

It’s been ordinary in the sense of, let’s say, for anybody who’s pursuing a career in academia, it is not a question of whether to do a PhD, but where, what subject are you going to do? How are you going to focus? I think for a lot of people who are doing studies around Information Studies, you can pursue a lot of these questions in a lot of different kinds of department. So the question is do you want to, say for something like publishing, for example, in one university publishing might be filed with literature in another it might be that the students might be housed alongside Communications or Media program. But at UCL is Information studies and for me, that location was absolutely ideal and I can’t imagine kind of doing it anywhere else. Resources at the department, the different kinds of scholarship, the different kinds of research methods that are kind of in play, they answered questions I didn’t know I had, if that makes sense, and certainly allowed me to examine my research questions using a wide array of research tools and research methods, and definitely for the best. The data that came out of it was certainly a stronger study for that.

Weixin Li (12:45)

So what is like the most important skills you think you gained from this period of study?

Laura Dietz (12:55)

Experience with doing larger scale mixed methods studies. I had some experience with qualitative and quantitative research before I came, but not that much than the amount of expertise, statistics expertise, certainly in different styles of qualitative research, things like grounded theory, things like discourse analysis, that staff in the department would, that’s the area of expertise, it was an amazing resource to have. Instead of knowing that these things exist, you go and talk to somebody who actually uses them. So I was, developing those qualitative quantitative research skills was really key.

Weixin Li (13:37)

So did you like to use this method in your a current research, qualitative and quantitative?

Laura Dietz (13:46)

I do, I do, I’m afraid so, and since finishing I’ve been extending that as well. I’m currently working, like in this past week, in the past couple of days have been actually very intense on it gathering data for some related and follow up studies and also working with some of the same professors and lectures on the idea and with other colleagues just gathering more data about things like digital reading, about audio book, which wasn’t a part of my PhD study but is incredibly interesting, and how people react to, and how they feel about how they evaluate, how they stream work, which they see on screen or listen to through headphones?

Weixin Li (14:31)

You’ve talked about how you took the part time PhD program. So it’s like quite a long time that you spend in UCL like five to six years, do you have some memorable experience and what impressed you the most?

Laura Dietz (14:53)

Ok, so I think that’s a great question to bring up. And it’s really, it’s… I think it’s a huge question for someone. I don’t know if you’re thinking about a PhD study after your MA?

Weixin Li (15:05)

Hum, not really. I can see that in my studies I need to do a lot of coding, and you mentioned the data analysis and I found myself not really good at it, seriously I am going to cut this phase off, but really I am not good at coding!

Laura Dietz (15:37)

Ah, but things do change, and certainly I think most people that I know who are looking at PhD study, and I’ve got PhD students myself, that question of “What would you use it for?” Is key, and for some career paths, it’s essential, and for other career paths it’s a question. But in terms of doing it part time, the UCL DIS department is, I just said department when it’s a department of Information Studies, so department of Information Studies departments, sorry about that, UCL DIS, when I was coming into it, was incredibly welcoming in the sense that I was not the only person doing it part time. I was not the only person doing it part time while doing another job. And it can be a great part of the experience to be doing a PhD full time, you’re totally immersed, it’s kind of all you do, the people around you are all living in the same place, working on the same thing a hundred hours a week? And that intensity is part of it. But that was simply not an option for me. And it was great to be doing it where I wasn’t the only little sad money, if that makes sense, in spreading it over five or six years. I was one of many and it was checked that I also made the most of being able to do things like in a longitudinal study, looking at the change over time. There was just the time to do certain kinds of mixed methods, research that could have been quite difficult to cram into doing it, say twice as fast for half as long. And it was e-reading an audio book listening. And the whole digital publishing scene changed so much over that period of time. I’m very glad I didn’t have to just eventually talk about a subset like how things were changing over a given year. I think it was definitely for the benefit of the project that it was stretched out over time.

Weixin Li (17:38)

Yeah, because I remember, like from 2013 to 2019, like the whole environment, our digital environment really changed a lot. Yeah. So is that like another advantage that you could take your time and to experience the whole transformation? So is it helpful for your research?

Laura Dietz (18:05)

Hum, for me, it definitely was. I can imagine for people working on objects and certainly people with different life and family circumstances. I was also doing the PhD kind of mid-career, working full time, I have a young family, so kind of dropping everything and study wouldn’t have been a possibility, even if I wanted to do it. So it was in some ways a kind of happy accident, but I’m very glad that it happened. I would think that the part time versus the full time, whether it was beneficial for the subject, would probably depend very much on the subject. There could be things where that total concentration for a shorter period of time is ideal. But traditional publishing, the stretch was great.

Weixin Li (18:50)

Yeah, ok. So do you still remember like some of the funny stories, some memorable stories that you experienced during this time?

Laura Dietz (19:03)

Oh dear, I’m actually struggling for that one. I don’t remember anything funny that happened related to PhD ever. Hum, yeah, it’s not an amusing thing. I wonder if I could park that one and come back to it if I think of something. But a memorable experience, hum, let’s see… I would say, interestingly, if I think when it comes to a question of what impressed me the most, I think a number of the things that I have already been describing would count as things that impressed me the most in terms of the DIS being a place for a certain kind of interdisciplinary study and a chance to work with experts from, you know, related, but overlapping, but different in some cases fields and disciplinary backgrounds. So I think for that reason, if I were thinking of a memorable experience, it might be as quotidian as sitting in the office of a sum of professors and lecturers at DIS, and just a chance to talk to them about statistics, about computer science, about archives research, about librarian ship, and how they use these things in their different methods, in their research, and others methods might apply to my work, and just a feeling of the expansion, if that makes sense. Sitting in a chair opposite an expert, having their eyes on your work, and it’s like being in a house and turning on the doors as you were there, and you open the door and the house is bigger than you ever imagined.

Weixin Li (20:46)

Yeah sure, just like, from my personal perspective, because I saw you also have like a lot of arts background, in English right, so did you come over difficulties in like coding and data and the whole Information studies system sort of thing?

Laura Dietz (21:09)

I think that’s another kind of, hum, it’s a really good question. I came with some background and no particular fear. Hum, because I’m the black sheep of my family. Everybody else is pretty much an engineer, a scientist, the occasional doctor. I think I have a cousin who’s an architect, but he’s the other black sheep.

So because I kind of grew up with this, and my father is in computer science, and my brothers are computer scientists, and neuroscientists, and the other brother is in physics and what have you, and I had done as an undergraduate, you could do this where I did my graduate, a lot coursework in chemistry, and physics, and some in programming, and because I grew up with it, instead of doing coding, the were always computers around the house and my brother does this kind of thing. And also because I had also in terms of for paid work, my first job when I came out of university was in the traditional consulting, I had done this stuff before. I’d use some of these statistics offer packages. Hum, and so it didn’t feel intimidating, and I was curious to learn more and to get up to date on some of these skills. But I think for that reason it was like, there are you guys again, good to see, it’s been too long.

Weixin Li (22:34)

Okay. So you did your bachelor in Stanford and then, to UK. So do, like, some differences in between the two experiences?

Laura Dietz (22:50)

Certainly it’s very, very interesting to do a PhD in the UK. The US and the UK systems are so different. My family, back in the US their experiences in doing their PhDs, there was just no relationship. They had classes for the first two years. They had exams and everything. There they have these committees. Their defense was totally different. So I did have a lot of translation to do, if that makes sense. And oh boy, the UCL reg! The research degree regulations, if you want to ask me about the content, because I really needed to educate myself on the mechanics of the system, but I will say that coming from… like having things like the seminar series on DIS was lovely and a chance to see the other people. But the fact that you haven’t got core classes together and go straight to the research, it saves a lot of time. Probably a certain amount of cohort I think that you kind of miss out on. But the trade off in terms of being able to go straight to your researches is really enjoyable and beneficial. I spent a lot of time translating between the kind of vocabularies of PhD sets.

Weixin Li (24:08)

Okay. So it’s more like in your experience, just doing the research that takes like most of the time, while in the US is like you have to do courses and like exams and sort of things, right? Did I understand it right?

Laura Dietz (24:29)

And the upgrade process and system is so different. Weirdly, I would say, I remember I was talking, hum, to someone in the English department as I was having dinner some years ago. And they were asking kind, what are the differences? What’s it like to be doing this at UCL and not in Stanford? And although the individual departments, the English departments of those two institutions are very different, there I did feel a certain affinity between the cultures, if that makes sense. They are both very kind of forward thinking universities that make sense? Very kind of 21st century focused on the future. I would say, hopefully that will not step on anybody’s toes or offend anybody, but I thought they were certainly very forward thinking and very opened to new fields of research and new kinds of combinations and expertise. I just didn’t feel any… hum, how shall I say this, unproductive conservatism on either one.

Weixin Li (25:42)

Hum… so what was the word?

Laura Dietz (25:44)

Actually, conservatism is not a bad thing, but I certainly didn’t feel any unproductive conservatism, if that makes sense. Like, “that’s not how we define these disciplines, so you won’t be doing that”. You know, they were very open to the idea of different combinations, different ways of working across disciplines. I would see a similarity there. I don’t know if you feel the same way.

Weixin Li (26:12)

A little bit, because like it’s still totally different, like between the education I received back in China, so, but it’s still a lot of fun. And I think you like to get into the study and research into some new kind of things. So there’s another question that was suggested by our curator, like if you have a chance to re-do your PhD, like to re experience other studies, what would you like to change? Or like, What do you miss the most?

Laura Dietz (26:55)

That’s such a good question. I remember when I was in the throes of writing up the last of my PhD I remember looking back, because I did a lot of empirical data collection, looking back thinking, why didn’t I ask about x, what was I thinking? Why didn’t I ask about say audio books? Why didn’t I ask about E-Book loan services? Oh no, I can’t go back four years in time and redo the questions. And I was talking to my sister, who’s a neuroscientist. She said, “Don’t worry, this always happens”. I think once you don’t see what you found I think it’s inevitable that you look back and you think, if I could go back in time, I would shape my questions slightly differently. I now know that there’s kind of good material in this area, and I’m really interested. And, hum, studying, when you study, just as you said, a very fast moving phenomenon like digital publishing, the world that was is just gone now. It can be a little bit heartbreaking where it might be different if I were, let’s say, looking at renaissance literature in the English department. But there’s kind of no way to get back that sort of data. So I rejoice at what we had been able to find, I weep for what I just didn’t ask about, because I didn’t think to back then. But I would say that that’s the biggest change. I don’t have regrets about the study design about the general focus at all. But I look back at questions that really interest me now and I wish I had them in a survey or an interview or a focus group in 2014.

Weixin Li (28:41)

Okay, I have that feeling as well. You always when you look back, you always can find what you missed out and what is new that interest you, but wasn’t at that time.

Laura Dietz (28:56)

I know, as a journalist, I don’t know if this happens at the interview level, if you walk out thinking, “Oh why didn’t I ask?”

Weixin Li (29:03)

Yeah, because when you start to do your final, like script and edit your videos, like I needed this point, but I just didn’t ask.

Laura Dietz (29:12)

So possible, I’ve become like a macroscale. Why didn’t I ask that? Yeah, you never.

Weixin Li (29:21)

So have you like published in academic books or others in UK right now?

Laura Dietz (29:30)

Yes, I published a number of book chapters as I was writing up for my supervisors and I just did one co-authored paper, but we have since finished the PhD. We’ve done some conference papers together and are working on pulling that together and submitting that. So going on to keep publishing with my supervisors is an absolute joy. And what I’m working on at the moment is converting… hum, reworking my PhD thesis as a monograph. I’m working on that for Cambridge University Press.

Weixin Li (30:11)

Okay, so what do you think about like the current drive by policy makers in the UK towards like open access publishing and digital publication?

Laura Dietz (30:23)

I’m really glad you asked that as it is on everybody’s mind, they’re already there. There have been significant changes of plan as the delay is a huge one. The changing approach to hybrid publishers is a significant change. So I would be lying if I said I had even a clear idea of the work plan on this. I think open access publishing is a clear beneficiary. My biggest concern with open access and the use of article processing purchase, and book processing charges to support the industry will mean that lots of people can read, but fewer people can write if that makes sense, that it will effectively just amplify the same kind of voices. The new plan, as ideas with waving article processing charges for dollars and acronyms in certain countries is a step in the right direction. But it’s still quite a crude instrument. In terms of saying we want to hear from everybody, not just based on your resources and what institution behind you to fund it. Hum, but I think one of your questions as well is talking about how could you lead to the demise of traditional academic publishers, and this is not something that I am as worried about. Traditional academic publishers, the university presses have a certain ubiquity, press at UCL have been very fast to look at how this would affect their work flows and how are posting charges could actively replace sales in many cases. So I don’t see traditional academic publishers as being particularly under threat if that makes sense.

Weixin Li (32:03)

I get what you’re saying. So this was like, so what you mean basically is like the do you think the traditional academic publishing is not like totally under threat, but is it like being affected to some extent?

Laura Dietz (32:22)

I think so I think this whole question of using APCS and BPCS instead of sales to fund, it requires, it demands a reconsideration of every part of the process. Everything will be affected with how would you commission books? Will you commission differently if you’re thinking of them being accessed and paid for in this way? It might not change a few things, like some aspects of peer review, because this might go the same way, but how will you, with this reshaped audience and with the success of a book, perhaps measured by downloads or views of citations, how would that change what you publish in the first place, how you present it, how you market it, how you package it, what cover you have on the front, and how you select the kind of voices that you want to elevate when perhaps the same pool of people may not position to put their work forward for publication at all. The publishers that I know are taking this incredibly seriously and know the important of that gate keeping role that they play and are anything but cavalier in their approach to this thing. They are thoughtful, very mindful and thinking about the future and how that will affect scholarly communication.

Weixin Li (33:44)

My last question is like more of in general and looks back the whole interview. Like if I need you to describe, or not the very right word, like to say what is Information Studies and how it helped you with your career, what would you say?

Laura Dietz (34:08)

That’s a really good one. So for me, and I’m called upon to do this, because people will say, what’s your PhD in? And like they say, what is that exactly? So to me, if I were put on the spot to say what Information studies is, I would say that it’s a complete holistic look at what do we consider knowledge? What do we mean by data? What do we mean by gathering and keeping certain kinds of Information as being important? How do we select it? How do we store it? How do we quantify it? How do we elevate certain voices over others? How do we decide what’s important? And also who’s watching the watchmen in terms of deciding, assigning importance, and awarding longevity to certain kinds of data. So I find it an endlessly, fascinating set of questions.

Weixin Li (35:09)

Okay, thank you so much for your time. And I’m really happy about our interview today.

Di Wang (00:12)

Susan Hockey was graduating from Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford. She was the Director of the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies of University College London from 2001 to 2004 and then she has been Emeritus Professor of Library and Information Studies at UCL since 2004. This interview is designed for the DIS Centenary exhibition in 2020 and takes us through her memories of the department and her perception and opinion on some critical issues in Information Systems. Well, Susan, please reflect on your memories of DIS, Department of Information Studies.

Susan Hockey (00:59)

I think one of the things I remember most is the people. The staff, they were a wonderful group of people who did a lot of work. We have met very many students, and I think fewer staff than there are now. I really enjoyed getting to know them, talking to them, finding out what their interests were, and talking to them particularly about how we could move forwards. I also enjoyed working with the students very much. At all levels, we even had one undergraduate course which I taught with Vanda. I taught some of the masters students and I supervise some of the PhD students, and it was interesting getting to know groups of people from all over the world, different ages, and different perspectives. So I think that’s one of my major memories. We were in the Henry Morley building then, which was not the ideal kind of accommodation, I think the school had been there a very long time. It was quite… there were too many people for the building. But we made the best of it, and I think things worked out well there. I’ve been to the department once since it moved to Foster Court and it seemed to have improved quite a lot in terms of accommodation. There was a lot of pressure on the department to do more research. And I think we did our best in all of this. But the issue is when there are so many master students, and they all have to have supervision for a dissertation during the summer, we’ve tried to balance, try to get more of the students involved in doing the research of their academic staff so that we could get some more work done in that kind of way. The other thing I really liked about the department was that while the old name libraries, Archives and Information Studies, I assume you know, I’m not a professional librarian, my backgrounds really in digital humanities. And I thought that it was really interesting to bring together more these different, what I think were originally thought or perhaps different streams of work, because a lot of what they were doing was more of exactly the same things, but with different data, and different material. So those are the things that I remember more than anything, but more than anything, it was the people. I really enjoyed working with the people, I found them a great bunch of people to do lots and lots of different things. And they were energetic. They had lots of ideas. They really provided a lot of input to how we should run the department.

Di Wan (03:48)

That is great, how did you start your life at UCL?

Susan Hockey (03:56)

How did I start my life?  I was working in Canada, I’ve actually spent all my working life doing Digital Humanities. I worked in the government laboratory, a university computing service in Oxford. I ran a small Research Centre in the library at Rutgers University in New Jersey. I spent then three years at the University of Alberta in the English faculty doing, developing computing in the humanities facilities and research projects there. So coming to UCL was different in many ways, but I did feel after I’d been involved in digital humanities almost since it started, that there was an environment at the department that helped me develop a lot of my ideas and bring together people who had interests in similar kinds of things, but were coming to it from a different perspective. I mean, when I first started working in digital humanities it had nothing at all to do with libraries, nothing, and slowly, and particularly when I lived in America for five years in the 1990s, it was the time when libraries were beginning to get more interested in digital resources, and really weighing what they should be doing about them, because this was before the Internet, certainly before Google, and other technologies like that. But I found it interesting at UCL to have the opportunity to bring together a lot of the traditional work. And there was a lot of traditional work there, particularly an emphasis on humanities related things, rare books, collection, archives, old archives and material like that. And to try to think about what we need to do to bring that into the digital age, and bring in the skills of the different professional groups who were in the school.

Di Wang (05:53)

All right, and I heard about the Susan Hockey`s Lecture in Digital Humanities and Information and that UCL named it after you. Tell me, how it came about?

Susan Hockey (06:06)

Well, I don’t really know, I suddenly got an email from Melissa Terrace who’s now left, saying they want to set up this Susan Hockey lecture. So I thought, oh well, this sounds wonderful, but you know, why me? But it went ahead, I actually gave the first lecture, which is the last time I was in the school because we’d been living up here in Yorkshire and traveling a lot ever since. And so I really felt honoured that they wanted to name a lecture after me, but I think it must be because I’ve been involved in Digital Humanities, I started in 1969. Okay, I’ve got 50 years now of computing. I wanted to go back to your previous question about shaping the teaching, because one of the things I did as Head of the School was reorganise the teaching. When I arrived, there was a group of people teaching Library and Information Studies, and another lot teaching Archives, and others teaching Information Management. And I spent quite a bit of time in my first months trying to find out exactly what was going on. And I began to realize that in several instances, the same information mostly was being taught to different groups of people, by different academic staff in the department, which I came, I decided in the end, that probably the best thing to do was to get the staff on board to modularize the courses. So the modular system was something that was set up when I was Head of the School, and I really tried to involve the staff in determining what we were going to do, and I’ve been looking at the website, some of the modules have changed, but then also being involved in the electronic Publishing Masters, which is the thing that I was teaching on, made me really think harder about how we could bring this together and make sure that there was little duplication of effort as possible. And I think another thing on the teaching, certainly with teaching digital materials, it’s really important that students reflect on what they’ve been doing. So we used the idea that was to get them to write an essay about what they were doing. And actually, that helps a lot when you’re marking an electronic public project, particularly if it doesn’t work.  But I know other places have been teaching just the technical parts. But I think it’s important that people really think about what they’re doing, and explain how they’ve arrived at a particular way of doing something. And I assume that’s carried on I don’t really know now. But I know other Digital Humanities courses have done that, even this was the very early days of web technology and we`ve got students, I thought it was really good for students to learn something about how the web works, because let’s face it, not many of them are going to go on into an academic job. And they needed to understand this technology. And I know things have moved on a lot now, but we’ve got a lot of our students. Here in the undergraduate class, I talked with Vanda as well, building a little website to try and understand more about the technology. And they have to write up about how they’ve done it as well.

Di Wang (09:40)

And what is the most important thing to consider when designing the key term plans?

Susan Hockey (09:47)

Sorry, can you repeat that? Most importantly, consider….

Di Wang (09:52)

What do you think is the most important thing to consider when designing the key term plans?

Susan Hockey (09:57)

Well, I think to try to get this to reflect on what they’re doing. For an individual course, I think there are practicalities and the intellectual aspects of what’s going on. And there’s a lot of outcomes. As far as the Master’s degrees are concerned, there are obviously requirements by the accreditation bodies. And I certainly got a sense from that time, the people teaching the Library Information Studies and the Archives and Records Management, that there was an enormous amount of information to squash into one year, full time. And once you’ve stopped bringing the digital into that as well, it just adds another dimension, without really emanating any of the rest. So that I think it was important to try to work out what’s the best thing to do to fit the material into the time.

Di Wang (10:57)

Okay. And now we’ll move on to some more democratic questions, maybe existing in our system now. Would you agree that there is a systematic bias in laboratories, including laboratory collections and the laboratory cataloguing structure? And if so, how best can we address these issues?

Susan Hockey (11:22)

Well, I was struggling a bit with this because I have no training in Library and Information Studies at all. I think there are obviously some biases to collections, and I think it depends where you are in the world, and what the interests are of the people who are actually likely to be using the library. I think this is all changing to a considerable extent with the digital, because it doesn’t matter where you are, if you want to work with some digital information. In most cases, you have no idea now where it’s stored. But I think it’s important to give people that kind of broad background, and not to think that they’re just doing this one particular thing. I think you have to think about the financial implications of managing these collections as well. On the cataloguing, I do know that libraries were one of the very early adopters of information technology, in the days when you had data on magnetic tapes, which you could only read in a linear fashion. And I really wonder whether marked record would have emerged now, or whether there would have been some better way of describing the information. I know, the department, particularly the classification people have been doing more work in that area. But I think libraries, in terms of that I think libraries have suffered from having an enormous amount of legacy data. And it’s so embedded now, it’s quite difficult to think about changing it in certainly a large way. Except when you look at what Google is doing. I mean, they just have vast databases. And my students even 20 years ago used to come to me and say “Oh, I found these things on Google”. What do you do? They really have to learn and understand how to assess information that’s not been professionally curated. Because they’re all doing it now, I guess they’re all still doing it. There are certainly quite a number of them who were doing it in my time, and I think it poses quite a lot of problems for libraries in the future. When I was living in America, it was the time when information, as I said, information, digital information was first coming around. And there were quite a number of people I met in libraries there in 1991 – 92. “We’ve got this piece of digital information, what should we do with it?” I called for it. But of course, the key thing with any interesting, certainly with sophisticated digital resource in the humanities, the key thing is, what software is associated with it and what you could do with it then. And that led, of course, to a lot of emphasis on machine independent data, so that you can operate different tools on the same piece of data without having to reinvent the wheel. But in the days of information on CD ROMs, you bought this package thing and it provided you with some software. And if the software didn’t do what you wanted, it was kind of tough, you know. So I think there are interesting issues about getting the curators of this information, to be sure that they understand what people might want to do with it, beyond just reading it, or looking at it. And I guess things have changed a lot now, but that was certainly the kind of emphasis, the feeling I had when I was around really working in this area and haven’t done any academic work hardly since I retired at all, I still have various projects on my computer. And I read a lot of things online, but I haven’t… I knew I would never be able to keep up with changing technologies, so I just decided to have a rather different life.

Di Wang (15:22)

Okay thanks. And how can we best grasp the makeup of the Information Studies workforce? I mean, the whiteness of the profession.

Susan Hockey (15:35)

It’s mainly female. But I think it’s important to think about what workforces might be needed in the future. And this goes back really to the idea of the digital. And it doesn’t matter where you are in the world if you’re working with digital material. And I think a lot can be done to encourage people whose countries who may be not. (sorry, my telephones ringing but it’ll stop…to wonder, wait till it stops? Because I have to get up to answer it, the answering machine will pick it in a minute. All right. Okay, it stopped).  I think there are lots, lots of things that the digital can do. And if you travel in less developed parts of the world as actually we’ve actually done since I retired, most people have a mobile phone. And they use it to access the internet via satellite or something like that. They’ve bypassed all the other old technology. And I think there are a lot of opportunities to use the Internet to try to reach people who’ve had less opportunity before. I think that’s probably one of the best things. And it’s important to look sort of broader at what’s happening, and get people to communicate more. I think one of the issues in getting people to study, say to come to UK to study is obviously how expensive the fees are now. But distance learning is something that could be developed, I think, a lot more. And it is difficult. And I mean, since I retired, I’ve done one or two distance learning courses in completely different subject areas, things I wished I’d done at school and didn’t. But I think there are opportunities for doing all of that as well. But nothing beats the face to face. But if the expense and costs is the real issue, I think a lot of things can be done over the Internet. And it’s getting better and better. So I think encouraging people to really get online, I mean, I was like I said, we’ve travelled a lot since I retired 10 years ago, we went to Vietnam and everybody there was learning English on the Internet. And that hadn’t really occurred to me, how far you could reach people and you know, the countries that are a long way away and have got different civilizations to begin with, can use this technology to learn things. So I suppose… But I think, as I said earlier, it’s important to think what sort of skillset the future workforce might need. And it is changing all the time. And it’s quite difficult to keep up with digital material. But I think people have a much better understanding about what’s the potential of it now than they had, say 20 years ago.

Di Wang (19:04)

Yeah, good. And how can we best support marginalised communities, refugees, and second language speakers in terms of library users?

Susan Hockey (19:18)

Well, I would go back to the same issue, again, is the digital.

Di Wang (19:22)

Yeah, but maybe more focus on that. Marginalised communities, communities, for example, of second language speakers.

Susan Hockey (19:38)

I think it depends really on exactly what that… when you say library users, do you mean people who actually come and access library patrons or people who Yes. Well, I think there are still issues around that. But again, it comes back to technology, depending on what it is that you want to read. A machine translation is not bad now for a lot of things. I have got used to Google Translate a few times, and it works fine. But I think it’s important that people understand that these technologies are available, people who actually work in libraries, managing the collections, understand that these things are available, and try to look out beyond, you know, their immediate working environment and horizons. I think there are issues… There have been major issues in funding public libraries in this country. And in the library in the nearest small town to us, it’s operated entirely by volunteers who’re lovely people, but their skill set is obviously fairly limited. I mean, if you can’t ask them with the best will in the world, I know, I’m not going to get a good answer if I ask them a complicated question. They’ll try and find the answer. But I think there does need to be more investment, and I think that reduction in support for facilities like that in this country has been a really bad thing. And it’s, it becomes self perpetuating in the end, because if the libraries have been open fewer hours, people don’t come and we all know what happens then. But I think it’s also a question of what kind of material is provided. I mean I use electronic information a lot, but it’s reading a book from start to finish is not on unless I’m reading a novel on my Kindle. It’s the type of information that’s available. And you know, I thought when, when I was living in America, again, there was a huge discussion about how to make digital monographs. Well, I mean, what do you do, you can use the digital as a distribution mechanism, but people are not going to read something like that on the screen. And even worse now, when the vehicle for using the digital is a phone, they’re certainly not going to read it then. But I think even in terms of public library system, just organizing events and making people feel welcome. I think the second language is an issue because, you know, what’s, how many different first languages are involved in that? And how do you deal with all of that? And I go back to, you know, what I said about our trip to Vietnam when everybody was learning things off the Internet?

Di Wang (22:43)

Yeah. Okay.

Susan Hockey (22:48)

A good thing to remember is that most people have a mobile phone now, even if they’re marginalised in any kind of way. They have a mobile phone, yeah.

Di Wang (23:03)

And Google. Yeah. Okay, now this is the final question, you know this is the age of AI, so my final question is what are the benefits and the problems with artificial intelligence (AI) into our library system?

Susan Hockey (23:18)

Well, I think it depends what you mean by artificial intelligence. I mean, many, many years ago, what was talked about as artificial intelligence is much more sophisticated than the kinds of things that have been described as AI now.  Really, the things that have been described now are more algorithmic procedures, where you just need to find out what you want to do. A long time ago there was much more sophisticated stuff, I mean, the kind of stuff that certainly Rob Miller was working on when I was in the department. I think, again, helping people to find things could be a really important, I suppose, task for the kind of AI that’s being talked about now. Because the volume of information that’s available now is so huge. How do you drill down? How do you learn what people are interested in? I mean, I’ve had experience of working with technologies like OCR that you train and it learns what you’re on at the moment, but I think there’s scope for improving. Again, I’m out of date on that, but improving the kind of technology that’s involved in that, but of course, the issues is, if it learns the wrong things and it propagates them, what do you do then? I think though, again, I think some of the big tech companies like Google, they’ve got some pretty smart algorithms and they’re obviously not going to let anyone know exactly how they do. But that’s not far off what people are talking about as AI now. On Amazon, you buy these books, and it tells you “Don’t you like all these others as well?” And I think maybe there’s scope for individual kind of learning spaces. I don’t know how they would be called, now maybe people are working on this now where something can really, everybody can really have an environment that homes into some extent on their interests. But it doesn’t want to get it like Facebook, which if you like something, you get a zillion other things the same as that and it closes your mind to anything else. Yeah, I know, I might have to stay on that because some of the relatives post pictures of their little kids, but then, you know, it needs to be done in such a way that it can help you set up some kind of system that lets… makes it easy for you to find the things that you particularly want, without excluding that augments that might turn out to be the most valuable things that you’re interested in. And I don’t know how to do that even I don’t even know whether anybody’s seriously working on that. And as I said, I’m not up to date. But I think the problems are if people believe intrinsically what these things say without questioning it. And going back to the School overall, in the department, what we really tried to get our students to do was to question what they were doing, rather than saying, do this, you do this, you do that, but reflect on whether it’s the right way of doing things. And I think it was one of the most important things that certainly I tried to address in my courses, that a lot of the time was spent in telling people which buttons to press on the computer while getting them to understand that. But it’s important to try and understand what’s going on behind that. So I think there are pluses and minuses of AI. And also I think the meaning of the term has been, I don’t know, less than what it once used to be. It’s a trendy thing. I mean, you hear it on TV. And there have been a lot of advances and things like that, but I think there are issues too. For example, I spent quite a bit of time working with people who are studying manuscripts, and the technologies of learning how to study these things have come on enormously. And a lot of that’s been based on some sort of AI techniques, but they also based on understanding what the real user does. The first thing to think about is what the real user does without the benefit of the technology and then trying to model that.

Ying Wu (00:03)

This interview is with Ashwin Khurana by Ying Wu recorded on the 7th of March 2020.

Ying Wu (00:13)

The first question is, what was your first professional role after graduation?

Ashwin Khurana (00:18)

Yep. So after graduation, I basically went into Dorling Kindersley. As an editorial assistant, I was transitioning from schoolteacher into publishing. And so my Master’s course enabled me to start applying for jobs in publishing. In London, I applied for a lot of jobs in London, Egmont, Penguin Books, Walker books, Hachette, and then Dorling Kindersley, and Dorling Kindersley was a perfect fit for me. And I got an editorial assistant job, which I did part time. And then I got a full time job after about six months. So that was about, but 10 years ago.

Ying Wu (01:03)

Oh, yeah, that’s quite a long time ago. Yeah. So was your academic background relevant to the start of your career? Because I noticed from your profile that you just work as a schoolteacher, right?

Ashwin Khurana (01:18)

That’s correct. So I worked as a schoolteacher for about five between five and six years, nearly six years. And so I was looking for a way to change for my teaching profession. And I’ve always been interested in literature and in books. And so I was thinking of a way, how I could incorporate that into my everyday sort of my job. And so doing the masters at UCL really helped me make connections, and also to get work experience as part of my internship. So there was an internship there, which I think from memory was five weeks. And I did my internship at penguin actually, in the digital internship, so kind of like in marketing, digital marketing. And I did that and that sort of opened some doors for me, I guess. And I made some connections. There’s some really interest I met some really interesting, smart people. And then I basically applied for jobs. I did some other work experience while I was doing my Master, but also after my Master on my school holidays, because as a schoolteacher, you have school holidays. And so on my school holidays, I was looking for different jobs, and then eventually Dorling Kindersley came along and I did some work experience there which turned into a full time job.

Ying Wu (02:36)

Okay, so I noticed that you gained a bachelor’s degree in psychology first. So what was your initial motivation to work in the teaching field, decided to continue working in the same field for more than five year?

Ashwin Khurana (02:56)

Honestly, teaching was a good fit for me. I wasn’t, I’m from Australia. I was born in Australia. And I originally did psychology thinking I’d become a psychologist, actually. And then after that, sorry, if you hear some background noise of my son, he’s just in a bad mood. So basically, my feeling was, if I couldn’t pursue psychology, my second plan was to go into teaching. And so I did teaching. And I did that for five, actually, I did it for two years in Australia, in Melbourne and at a fantastic school. I was a grade five teacher there. But then I wanted to do some experience in Europe and in London specifically. So I taught as a supply teacher while I was over here. And while I was supply teaching I found it quite difficult, and actually teaching in some of the schools in London… but more than that I just wanted a change. I wasn’t sure, at the age of 23, 24, 25, how the rest of my life would look like in terms of my career. But I’ve always been interested in books as a hobby. So I thought, how could I use my hobby has a job? And I thought, with my teaching experience, and with my interests, what’s the good combination? And the good combination for me was book publishing and specifically editorial. So I went and did my Masters at London, UCL, I was living in London at the time. And it worked out for me.  So from that point, as I said earlier, I did some work experience while I was doing my master, and I went on to apply for jobs and then I went to Dorling Kindersley. So, does that answer your question?

Ying Wu (04:45)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ashwin Khurana (04:47)

Okay, cool.

Ying Wu (04:48)

So, I want to ask a question about choosing our first job. So what should we take into account when choosing the first job? You know, a lot of students like me, we are quite confused about our career. So it seems that we have more than one path to choose after graduation. So how do we know which one is the most suitable one? And what’s your advice?

Ashwin Khurana (05:14)

I would say my first advice is that you can never be 100% sure. But look at… if it’s a company that you’re looking at, look at the values of that company, and if they align with your own values. So for example, if it’s something where you’re interested, when it comes to how they treat the environment, for example, if that’s something that’s important to you, then how does the company sort of deal with that? Do they deal with books that are 100% responsibly sourced? Or do they not really care about that kind of stuff? And if they don’t really care about that stuff, do you really want to sort of join a company like that? If you’re looking at the kind of work hours, you know, and if you’re looking for a work life balance, is that in alignment with how you see your day to day, are you willing to work 50 hours a week, that kind of stuff? You know, I think you could never be 100% sure about the job until you start it. But one thing you can be sure is that, once you’re there, is that you give it your best shot, you have to give it your best shot. And then just hope things fall into place. You’ll know pretty quickly, if they don’t. I think another thing you have to look at is what kind of structure the company is. So ask questions in interviews, for example, how big is the team going to be? Is there a hierarchy? Because some people find that difficult, I found that difficult. Are the decisions made by committee, so does every little decision has to be sort of seen by five different people, and that can be frustrating for some people. Hmm, so, you know, some companies are very big, like a big ship you know, to move in the right direction, it takes a little bit of time to move in the right direction. Whereas a small start-up company, you can make decisions much quicker. So think about what kind of company you want to work in. And it’s okay to change. It’s okay to make mistakes as well. So, the good thing is, you know, you really do learn from making mistakes, and that is an important lesson. It’s good to be communicative with your manager as well. That’s something that you learn over time, you can’t get along with everybody, but at least you can be respectful, cordial. You are not there to make best friends, though, to be honest, in my experience, I’ve made some of my best friends, and effectively through my work, because I’ve been there for 10 years, I spent so much time with them. I’ve made lots of good friends, which is great. Hmm, but yeah, I mean, I think ultimately, you don’t know for sure, but you’ve just got to try. And yeah.

Ying Wu (08:09)

Okay, thank you. Hmm, so I’m gonna ask about… So just now, you just answered me something like, the reason why you chose to do a brand new job after work as a teacher? Yes. You mentioned that the biggest reason might be your passion to publishing and literature. Is that right?

Ashwin Khurana (08:36)

I didn’t hear the second thing you said but to publish and to what?

Ying Wu (08:43)

Literature.

Ashwin Khurana (08:45)

Literature, yeah, yeah.

Ying Wu (08:46)

So this is the most important reason why you switched your focus to this fieldwork?

Ashwin Khurana (08:54)

Hmm, so I work… Hmm, that is an important reason. Sorry, I interrupted you. Did you have a question there, or…?

Ying Wu (09:03)

So I mean, with respect this reason, do you still have any other reasons why you just switched your focus to the publication area of work?

Ashwin Khurana (09:14)

Well, I think the teaching profession in itself is very difficult and the kind of hours I was doing, they were very, very long hours, including well into the evenings onto weekends. And I think you have to look at the personal and the professional balance. You know, in my personal life, I was going through marriage, and there were children coming, and I was thinking, do I want to be so invested in teaching? Is it the right fit for me, and you just know, you just know, in, I think, to myself in 10 years time do I still want to be doing this. You have to sort of project five-year plans and 10-year plans, it really helps, to see if you can visualize yourself in a classroom. And I couldn’t, I couldn’t do that. And so I was thinking, what else could I do? And so as I said, I’ve always had a deep interest in books, and anyone in publishing obviously does. And so, you know, how could I, how can I make that transition? I was looking at every possible way, so I joined lots of networking groups, for example, there is one in London called the Society of Young Publishers, and I met like minded people, even while I was still teaching, and that gave me sort of an insight into what publishing life is like and the kind of jobs there are, and that gave me the confidence to change. And, you know, I was always a bit unsure, I was very unsure, and as an international student, you have to pay a lot of money and I’m not sure if you are an international student yourself, but you know that if you are, you think, well, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is. I hope this in the end translates into a good job. Hmm, most people go into publishing not for money. It’s not a hugely lucrative career, but it’s a very comfortable career. So I knew that as long as I’m comfortable, and I’m doing what I really enjoy doing, I’ll have the kind of life that I know I want to leave, and that will be good. Hmm, and that’s the kind of reasoning on why I changed from teaching into publishing.

Ying Wu (11:33)

Yeah, yeah, I think that sounds reasonable, because you had your interest, as well as you just participated in a lot of activities to get to know what the publishing industry is like. I think that’s great. Yeah.

Ashwin Khurana (11:47)

And actually, I should, I should say, that living in London gives you, affords you many opportunities. Unlike, I would honestly say there are very few cities in the world like London. You can do anything. Hmm, there are opportunities everywhere, in whatever profession. So whether it’s publishing or whether it’s some other area of Information Science, or engineering or data and insight, there are always things that are coming up. There are always opportunities, if it’s a small company, medium or large. There are opportunities there for people in the Department of Information Science. So I think you just have to network. You just have to meet people and keep your eye open. When I was looking jobs, originally, there was no LinkedIn, or there was LinkedIn, but it wasn’t really a big deal. These days LinkedIn, everyone uses LinkedIn and social media is such a big deal. So that’s how people communicate. That’s how people do their search. That’s how people read articles. So I think you just got to find, like you said, that sort of combination of what you’re interested in. And do you see yourself doing that every single day? You know? And how that balances with your own personal life? Yeah.

Ying Wu (13:11)

Right. So for a lot of students, we have the idea that once you start in one field, it is hard to make any changes in the future, because you already devoted a lot of time and energy into the previous field. So what is your advice for those who realize they want to switch studies or career path?

Ashwin Khurana (13:35)

Well, I think I’m a living example that it’s possible. You know, I changed career paths, after six years of teaching, as I’ve said, already several times, so I think it’s possible to do that. I think it sometimes can be a difficult decision, because you don’t know if it will work, and there is no way of knowing, but the best way of knowing is doing your homework, not rushing, don’t rush into it. So to those students who are sort of concerned, ah, you know, do I know for sure that what I’m changing into is going to be in the best possible choice? Do your homework first. Speak to people in the profession that you are interested in. Do work experience there for a couple of weeks, if that is possible, or an internship, or just you know, have lunch with someone who works there for half an hour, an hour? It’s exactly what I did. And only then will you get a better, clearer understanding, and then you go for it, then you have to apply. And it is a bit scary. I’m not saying it’s not a little bit scary. It is. But the more homework that you do, more understanding that you get, the less scary it becomes, hmm, and in whatever career that you choose, and that’s my experience.

Ying Wu (15:03)

Okay, that’s a very useful suggestion. So, another question is, what did you think about the Publishing programme at UCL DIS?

Ashwin Khurana (15:18)

Okay. Interesting question. Okay. Well, I must admit, that was the first year that Publishing was taught at UCL. So there were some teething problems. That said the teaching staff were very dedicated. The teaching staff, at all levels, really, really wanted the most, I think there were 25 students, if I remember correctly. Yeah, 25 students, and some of them were younger than me, some of them were older than me, I remember very well there was a lawyer in my class, who was just really smart. And there were other ones who were, who literally had never worked apart from maybe part time work in like a cafe or something like that, or doing some odd jobs here and there, but had never had a career, and so they’d come from undergraduate into master’s program, and I was somewhere in the middle. So, that I didn’t know what to expect. I knew that UCL was sort of a venerable institution, an internationally renowned university, and so I was feeling confident about that, that I was at the right place. And I was living in London at the time in Finsbury Park, and I remember cycling into university and thinking this is great. And I had really good luck, a good one year. The teaching specifically left a little bit to be desired on some courses, and so I thought a few times, it wasn’t run as well as I’d like to. But I put that down to, in hindsight, it being the first year, as I said that it was run. And I think that they’re still trying to figure things out. I made some very good friends into this day, there is one person in particular who I keep in touch with out of the 25. But occasionally, I bump into others at networking events. So yeah, I mean, that’s my feeling about it. I think it’s improved a lot. I came recently to a like a CV session with… yeah recently at UCL, and I spoke to some students there, some of your colleagues, some of your students there and they seemed really switched on and I was asking about the degree and it seems like in 10 years, since I’ve done it, it’s improved. And, there was some courses that I liked more than others, some subjects, I really thought publishing business was taught very well, for example, I thought the digital programming was a little bit behind, and could have been taught a little bit differently, but you know, through no fault of the teaching, I think they were just under pressure to teach for the first year, and to try and get it right. And I think they might have got it right now. And publishing is a vocation as well. So teaching a vocational thing can be hard, you know, because publishing, historically speaking, was the kind of job that you did after English, or History or Philosophy. And so people then look for a job in publishing based on those sort of credentials, those kind of qualifications. The fact that Publishing has become, I think, more of a professional degree, people had to think about what kind of curriculum do you do create, to make it professional, to make it enviable. Hmm, and I think that takes time. So I put down my experience as to being the inaugural class. You know, it was just its first year, had some problems, but on the whole, a good experience, and it got my foot in the door, as the best thing about it was the internship. I did a five-week internship at Penguin, and I met some great people there. And to this day, I still bump into them. I didn’t work with them, but I bump into them, because DK is in the same building as Penguin and so that’s really nice.

Ying Wu (19:26)

Well, cool, and so the most specific question is, what kind of skills you learned from this Master programme, which ones you found very useful in your current work?

Ashwin Khurana (19:40)

Oh, okay. Hmm, I guess critical thinking skills, but I sort of, I think that’s what it honed, because critical thinking skills can be used anywhere. And, and what I mean by that is sort of, you know, if I was, if I’m reviewing a book now, or if I’m coming up with an idea for a book, which I often do, and presenting it to a meeting, I have to think critically, but it also helped me thinking about competition, you know. And by that, I mean, once I’ve done that critical thought that had gone through that process, how to present it. So the good thing about the Master’s program, which helped me in my career, a little bit, was presenting my work in a clear way, in a way that’s understandable, using visual displays, if required, so all that kind of stuff. I did that obviously in my undergraduate, but there was a bit of a gap between my undergraduate degree and my master’s and things have progressed. So I think they’re probably, you know, critical thinking skills as well as presentation, you know, actually delivering a presentation to people, so especially around the thesis time. I think also, I guess, I guess what was quite important was just having really in depth conversations about the very specific area, very niche area of publishing. So I remember coming up with a question and discussing it in a critical way with my supervisor. So in the same way, I’m doing that with my publisher. Yes. So as I’m a senior editor, now, for a few years, I have my line manager, and you know, I’ll have to sort of have really critical, interesting conversations. And I imagine a lot of those skills I learned at my Master, but it’s also I think, you learn on the job, you just have to, and you get better and better over time and with experience.

Ying Wu (21:52)

Yeah. Right. That’s very interesting to hear about your experience. So, okay, so, this question comes about… So it seems that interdisciplinary skills are highly valued currently in research, professional practice and problem solving. So such as an, you know, Information Studies is indeed a multi disciplinary department. Was interdisciplinary understood in the same way at DIS as it is in the professional world?

Ashwin Khurana (22:35)

Hmm, I don’t know how interdisciplinary publishing was in the past, but it’s become more interdisciplinary today. So for example, my job originally was very much just about making books. Now it’s more about data and insight. So a lot of my work is thinking: “How do I find the best idea for a book?” and it used to be just about talking about “Oh, I have an idea”. But now it’s all about looking into the trends using different software. For example, you know, Nielsen BookScan, or using something like Brandwatch, or some other kind of data information tool. That’s something that’s sort of relatively new, over the past 5, 6, 7 years and actually, quite a lot of publishing houses have employed, sort of stats, stats-people, people who are really, really, really good and are qualified in statistics, and data and insight to actually help publishers make decisions about not only the kind of books that we should make, but also the kind of audiences we should be pitching our books to. So Dorling Kindersley is no exception to that. And in the past couple of years, that has sort of changed the way people work. So you were talking about, to answer your question on interdisciplinary, the kind of problem solving skills, and the way we work, as an editor specifically, because I can speak from that point of view, has changed. So the way we problem solve, the kind of people that we employ to help us with that problem solving has evolved. And I think, obviously, with the kind of, just the way the world works now, it’s a pretty fast paced world. People using social media, we tap into that we have to tap into that, because the kind of books that we make, and the kind of books that we want to make money from, have to be sometimes, not always, but sometimes trend driven, for example a book on cooking, for example a book on veganism. You know, we have to think, okay, we want to do this now a book on climate change. Hopefully, that’s not a trend. Hopefully, that’s something that lives on, and people want to continue it. But, you know, we have to jump on certain bandwagons as well, to piggyback on what the conversations are happening. So as an editor, it’s all about, you know, that multidisciplinary approach to problem solving.

Ying Wu (25:16)

That’s, that’s very interesting to hear about that, because I just participated to a video interview last week for jobs are one of the interview question was: “Do you think data analysis is important in current working experience? And why?” And I will say, yes, because collecting and examining the large amount of data can lead us to know about some potential features, like you mentioned, the predictive trends used in certain industries, and they can help us to make more correct decisions. So interesting to hear about that, because Big Data is already used in the publishing industry, and I’ve never thought about that.

Ashwin Khurana (26:05)

It is used in publishing. And I think publishing is notoriously slow, compared to some other industries, but they’re finally starting to, to sort of take it seriously. And it helps, you know, it helps us with our decision-making. And I’m not going to say that it’s we, you know, when we make our decisions that we rely 100% on the data, but it helps support what we’re thinking. So if I have an idea for a book, I will look at the data. And I think to myself, okay, actually, I was on the right track. But actually, I’m a little bit off. So for example, if I’m looking at a book on, I don’t know, hmm, computer science for kids. And I think, well, I have this book I want to teach Scratch, you know, the Scratch program or Python. I could make a book for children to teach them that. But what I need is a really good spokesperson, someone who can then help me publicize the book. So if I’m thinking about that, I know how to make a great book, I know how to find computer scientists who can help me write the book. But what I need is someone to actually be the face of the book. And so if I look at the data, and try and match the idea of computer science to say, certain not celebrities, but public figures, we might, I might find a person who’s a good match. And so I would use the data and insight team which we have to help me find that that person, because they may have a profile, they may have an inbuilt audience say on YouTube, they may have an inbuilt audience on Instagram, they may have an inbuilt audience at a university, they may have an inbuilt audience somewhere else some kind of social media or otherwise, which they can tap into. So, I know that that book will already do well, because the spokesperson, and will have a picture of the spokesperson on the front of the book, and they’ll be doing some publicity to offer us, the people will come to them, not because the book, but because of them. And I wouldn’t have known about them, if I didn’t have the data and insight people helping me find that right person, that perfect match for the book. So, it’s all about it’s a balance between, I guess, human intelligence and data intelligence. And, and that’s, that’s what it’s all about.

Ying Wu (28:33)

Cool. Cool. That’s very interesting to hear about that. So we’re just going back to your career as an editor. So what was the biggest challenge you faced when you started your new role as an editor?

Ashwin Khurana (28:49)

My biggest challenge, I guess, for me, you know, prior to publishing, I was a schoolteacher. So, you know, my day to day was very different. And honestly, it was just working in an office. I had never worked in an office before, which sounds weird, but I had never done that. And so, I was surrounded by adults, I wasn’t surrounded by children. You know, that was the first challenge. So I could have adult conversations, interesting conversations with grownups, which I loved, obviously, hmm, that was the first challenge. That was a very immediate obvious one. Second challenge was just the day to day, you know, trying to figure out how I can make a book. So I don’t know how much you know about Dorling Kindersley, but the kind of books that we make, we make in the company, we don’t have people supplying manuscripts to us, we actually come up with the ideas ourselves. So if it’s a book on dinosaurs, we will create the book on dinosaurs, but we have to find the author, we have to find the palaeontologist to help actually create that book, and we have a huge sales team, they go all around the world, trying to find other publishers who will publish in their own markets as well. So it’s a very different publishing model to say, Harry Potter, or to, you know, any kind of mass-market trade publisher. So it’s different in that way. So I had to understand that model and that, to me, was a true challenge. So I guess that’s, that’s the second thing, understanding what my job actually is, in terms of the kind of books. The other thing was this technology, so I had to learn a bunch of new technology, everything from… well, the main thing being InDesign. So that’s a very design led program. And I had to go on training for that. So a couple of days a week, it’s, you know, using a particular kind of very powerful program to create books, and half our team are graphic designers, half our team, are editors, and we are always working together to create, you know, the best possible book. Hmm, so that’s another challenge. And the other challenge, I guess, was working to deadlines. It sounds silly, but we’ve always had that, you know, whether it’s an essay, or it’s, you know, some kind of event that you’re planning. But at work, in publishing specifically, the deadlines are very important, because if I don’t meet my deadline to finish the book, then the printing dates will get pushed back. And that’s really bad, because that will cost the company money, because they’ve already set that, they already paid for the printing date for the book to be printed on a particular day. And then that has a domino effect on when the book is published. So there are lots of deadlines that we have to meet and I think that’s another challenge that you get used to. And even to this day, you know, keeping to a schedule and keeping everything, all your ducks in a row, you know, making sure that you finish things by a certain time, it still remains a challenge. And I think that’s, that’s, that’s true for everyone, in whatever profession.

Ying Wu (32:16)

Yeah, but it sounds like you accumulate a lot of experience and skills in time management, right?

Ashwin Khurana (32:23)

Yeah. You have to. You have to. I think with time management, the way it is, is that hmm, like you’d like you’re a student right? So you understand that time management is important. You know, whether you got a part time job or not, or whether you’ve got… hmm, you want to spend time with your friends. So you’ve got six essays due, you always try to bounce things. And in a job, it’s no different, you’ve got not one project, you’ve got five projects. And so you want to make sure that you prioritize, that’s all you can do. You always have to constantly prioritize and think: “Okay, this has got to be done. Now, the other thing can wait for now, and I’ll come back to that.” You’re just one person with a limited amount of time. It’s also good to know that over time that you can rely on other people to help you out. I think it’s important in a profession to be very, very open and transparent about when you’re struggling. So if you are struggling, and if you’ve got a good manager, you should be able to explain that, you know, I’m working very, very hard on this project, but I’d like some support on this particular area. And you frame it in a way that is a pro business, you know, in order for this to get done, it needs this much amount of money, it needs this amount of time, I’ve got an idea. So time management, budget management. So one of the parts of my jobs is monitoring budgets for books and other projects. So that kind of stuff is a challenge. And, you know, in my first year of publishing, it was, it was difficult. And over time, it becomes easier. Yeah.

Ying Wu (34:08)

Okay, so you just mentioned that you learned a lot of skills or softwares after graduation. I mean, yeah, where you started your job. But for a lot of students like me, and also, you know that in our Master program we just have one year to explore the subjects. We’re just seeing that we can’t go too deep in some of the subjects. So a lot of students do not have a very specific career goal or motivation, because we don’t have that confidence. We think we just learn a bit, not very deep. So, everyone is panicking a bit at the moment, and we don’t know where to start from because, like, if I’m a publishing student, but I didn’t learn publishing before, or I gained my bachelor’s degree in other fields, or I will feel that, I don’t learn too much in this field, so I don’t have the confidence to finding a job or something like that. So do you have any suggestions for this kind of situation?

Ashwin Khurana (35:16)

Hmm… I mean, I mean, the nature of the beast is such that in one year you can only do so much. And that’s down to the structure of the university course and how they teach their different subjects, the different courses. I would say that when it comes… the one way you can get around that is, if you’re thinking ahead that is, is to choose something in your thesis, in your dissertation that really, really interests you, where you can do a little bit more of a deep dive, because find something that aligns with your values, something that you’re interested in, and also potential aligns with the kind of company that you want to work for. Because if that’s the kind of company you want to work for, you can use that dissertation to actually understand that particular area, whether it’s data, whether it’s insight, whether it’s a particular kind of publishing model, whether it’s a particular genre, a genre publishing, you know, whether it’s literary fiction, romantic fiction, whatever it is, and then align yourself with that, and then actually really get to grips with it. Because in one year 100% I agree with you, you can only do so much, and I can understand the frustration. I think I mentioned earlier on, but that’s how I felt doing the Master’s as well. So it seems to me that things haven’t changed a huge amount. But I don’t have the answers to that, you know. But what I can say is that one solution, one potential solution, is to then make your dissertation count, and really think very hard about the kind of question that you want to ask, and also how you want to answer it and the kind of people that you want to, you know, is it a project that is possible to do in London? Right, and in the limited amount of time that you have to do it, to do the best possible job. Do you have the resources to do that? And as I said also early, London is a great place for that. I mean, you people are very lucky to have the opportunity to study in London, because we have a lot of, you know, resources at hand. So I would suggest that the students who are lacking in confidence maybe, that’s what you said, or are a little bit frustrated by it, yeah, I think the way is that they’re trying to cover a lot of material and all you can do is to cover the surface. And then when you find something from that surface, a particular area, hone in on that and then use that idea maybe, and then explore further in your dissertation. And then align yourself with your dissertation, maybe with a company, a goal, if you’re thinking sort of in that way. Or if you think you’re doing further study in a PhD program, think of it in terms of that. So, yeah, but that’s what I think about that. Does that answer your question?

Ying Wu (38:04)

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Ashwin Khurana (38:05)

All right.

Ying Wu (38:06)

So I’ve noticed that you now work in the publishing industry for more than 11 years, right?

Ashwin Khurana (38:13)

Yes, about 11 years now. Yeah.

Ying Wu (38:15)

Right. So could you please describe the changes in the role during the years and the changes you witnessed in the publishing sector?

Ashwin Khurana (38:24)

Okay, so as I said earlier, so publishing is one thing, and DK is part of that, but the kind of books that we do in DK are quite unique. So we, we create our own books. So in DK, we’re changing, we are changing. So and it’s funny because a lot of people would think it’s not, it’s not a dramatic change, but for DK specifically it is. So we’re set, we’re starting to commission more books. By that, what I mean is that we’re trying to find authors who are actually going to write books for us, whereas previously we’re just all about the topic. Okay, we want to do a book about dinosaurs. We want to do a book about climate change. Now, we’re very much, let’s find a great author, you know. So that’s changed. So that’s specific to DK. Publishing generally, I guess, what has happened is the whole E-book thing. And that was a big deal. 10 years ago, Kindle was doing pretty well, it was on the rise, but in the past three, four years, the number of people who are using Kindles has kind of plateaued. So what does that say about the way people read? Potentially, they’re going back to physical books. And you see that, you know, people are going to bookstores maybe more. But then again, people were worried about with Kindle, people are gonna stop reading. That didn’t happen. People just read in different ways. You know, some people use the Kindle, some people use physical books, a lot of people now read on their phone, whole books on their phone. So people are still reading, they’re just reading in different ways. That’s happened over the past 10 years. Another thing that’s happened more recently is audiobooks. So DK is really trying to get into that. Penguin, Hachette, Simon and Schuster, all these sort of, Faber and Faber, all these publishers who have really big author names have done this for some time. You know, they get people to read books, you know, Dame Judi Dench might read some spy thriller or something like that. JK Rowling probably read her own books, her Harry Potter books. So DK tries to be there now. And how we make money from that, and whether people will actually listen to the kind of books that we make, which is nonfiction? You know, fat books is very different to how people consume fiction. So that’s a challenge for us, but we’re exploring those different avenues. Yeah, that sort of the embracing of data and insight, as I said earlier, you know, that is something that publishing was notoriously slow to adapt to. But now more and more publishing houses take it seriously, we’re starting to understand the value of using data to understand the audience, but also understand the kind of books to publish. That’s happened over the past 10 years, as well, probably over the past five years in publishing. So yeah, the other thing that’s important is looking at the recruitment. So a lot of people in publishing, I’m talking about here, has been very white in the past, and also very, very male dominated. This has, is changing. And in terms of not just the junior staff, but also senior staff and senior management, there is still a long way to go, but in terms of recruitment at DK, but in other publishing houses, they are thinking long and hard about the kinds of people they want to work in their company. So that’s important in publishing, especially, because that reflects in the kind of products that you make, and the kind of products that we make are books, and people read books. So the life experiences of the people who are involved in creating those books, will then have an extension to the people who read them. And people’s life experiences matter. So for example, my life experience might lead to the kind of a certain kind of book where someone from a different life experience who’s richer or poorer or black or white or different religion or ethnicity will have their own way and own interests and they will choose a different kind of book. So yeah, so we are championing new sort of recruitment and drives to make, I guess, a more equal, diverse, inclusive workforce.

Ying Wu (43:12)

That’s what I feel about the change of scene in the publication industry.

Ashwin Khurana (43:19)

Ah, Okay, so you’ve heard that before, have you?

Ying Wu (43:21)

Yeah. Because I mean, so I just feel that like, when I was in high school, because of that, I mean, that years, Kendo was quite popular among school students. So everyone just started using iPad or Kindle to read digital books instead of reading physical books. So I just feel that I haven’t bought physical books for a very long time, because, yeah, now I’m just using my laptop and my phone to do the reading. But I just feel that I still missing the feeling that I can write down on the paper. Because when I’m reading, I really want to take some notes. Yeah, I just forgot a lot of things. So but you know, that if I do the reading on online or on laptop, I couldn’t write anything on, on that material. So I think people’s preference for reading changes a lot, but still a lot of people will prefer to read physical books. So that’s very interesting.

Ashwin Khurana (44:29)

Yeah, I think that’s what the evidence is suggesting, is that people are, at least some people are going back to physical books. I think the digital books can be a distraction, because people are on their screens a lot and a Kindle is another screen, essentially. And the great thing about a book is that it’s just one thing. And you don’t have to keep looking at your emails, you don’t have to keep looking at your social media feed, you just have your book in front of you. And, yeah, it’s just one of those things that people I think, are moving back to. And potentially, you know, bookstores obviously are really loving that. So for a while, some bookstores were closing quite a few bookstores and big, big chains like Borders, for example, a couple of years ago, quite a few years ago, they closed down, and that was one of the biggest book chains around. But slowly, slowly, there have been other independent bookstores that have popped up. I’m not saying that they don’t have their own challenges, because they rely on people buying physical books and they are using different means to get people into their bookstores. They could be using author events or other activities for children, if they’re doing if they sell children’s book to get them through the door, and once they’ve gotten through the door, the parent who’s often with them, will look at the books that are in there and buy a book. So that’s good, I think. I think that’s an important thing, I think a lot of that skill of browsing, that enjoyment of just going into a bookstore, and just looking around, I thought was something that was on its way out, but I think there was a slump, and it’s potentially it’s coming back in. So I think a lot of parents and carers value the idea of walking into a bookstore or a library, I should say, or a library, and just looking at the books, feeling the books, opening them up, looking at the pictures, if they’re picture books, you know, for the youngers, for the young children, and then getting the information that way, enjoying the book that way. I think that that’s very important.

Ying Wu (46:46)

Yeah, that’s very interesting, because there’s a Waterstones bookshop near UCL, you know, I always go to this.

Ashwin Khurana (46:58)

Yeah, I know that one, yeah.

Ying Wu (46:59)

It’s kind of relaxation for me, just going to the bookshop and walk around and browse some pages. Yeah, that’s cool. So next question is about, could you please share your biggest achievements during your career as an editor?

Ashwin Khurana (47:21)

Hmm, so, my biggest achievements, well, I mean, honestly, I’m not sure. I guess, one of the achievements I had was… No, I work on particular books, so there was a book I did about four or five years ago, which was a real challenge for me. So when I say achievement, it was a real challenge and it worked out in the end. It was a book about spacey science experiments, and it involved a lot of work in terms of preparation, and management, and photography, which I had never done before photography. I didn’t do the photography myself. Well I had to organise it. And if you can imagine a science experiments book for children, you have to do the science experiments first, so I had to get a scientist to help actually create these experiments. So long story short, it was a headache to do. And, but the result was wonderful and a very popular book, and it was the most popular children’s book for our company that year and it led to an award with the Royal Society. And it was, it’s really nice to know that people recognise books like this, that they are really important for boys and for girls. And I think that was an achievement for me because it was something new, and that was about four or five years ago, but even to this day, I really, I really think that. And, you know, I guess apart from that, like the achievements are to do with what I’m doing now with data and insight, which is, as I said, something that’s very, very important. So a lot of my work now is looking at books that have sold for years, sometimes 10, 15 years, and trying to bring them to the attention of people specifically on Amazon. So I’m working quite a lot with Amazon, not directly but indirectly, to try and sell my books on there. And that has my work on there with metadata, and search engine optimization is something that I learned on the job with the data and insight people has actually reaped really positive results. So that’s something I’m proud of. And, broadly, speaking of, you know, publishing is, you know, the kind of people that you work with they’re creative, they’re interesting people, you know, for the most part, and everyone sort of wants the same thing you want, we want to create great books that, that reach an audience, which is something that we do every day. So, you know, that’s, that’s something that I’m that I’m proud of that DK does. And, you know, now and hopefully in the future.

Ying Wu (50:23)

Yeah, lovely to hear that. So I still have two questions to ask. But it’s nice to hear your experience in this industry. Yeah, that’s very, it sounds great. So, yeah, as students we read and use different academic articles and books on the databases. So do you have any experience of working in academic publishing? And what’s the role of a publisher in getting the ideas of academics to a general readership?

Ashwin Khurana (50:57)

I don’t work in academic publishing. So I can’t answer that specifically. Hmm, you know, academic publishing is a very different beast. I mean, a lot of the manuscripts that get sort of turned into books. And when I say academic publishing, that’s in itself, a very big field, whether we’re talking about history, or science or another area. So if it’s history, it might be a very small number of people who will read your book. But then academic publishers help realise that, but the model is just very, very different. And so I can’t really answer that specifically, I think some publishers, some academics will then go on to write for a more mainstream audience over time, as they build their reputation in the field. But then, I would say that there will be academics, who finds a different kind of publisher. They won’t necessarily work with an academic publisher, they might work with a trade publisher, you know. So a lot of the people who write nonfiction for example, they are academics, but they’re also talking heads, you know, they’re just people that you see on TV now. And they find a publisher who is like Penguin Random House, you know, and they’ll be able to help them reach a wider audience. So academic publishing is very, very different. Obviously, they have peer review, as well, which is not something that a lot of trade publishers have. So, yeah, sorry, I can’t answer that too much from my own personal experience.

Ying Wu (52:18)

It’s Okay, but it just reminds me of another question. So, you mentioned that you have participated in some project like books for children, right. So I mean, there is some academic knowledge that may be involved in that kind of children’s book, but how to make it understandable for children like, you know, something like Python, or?

Ashwin Khurana (52:43)

Oh, yeah, sure, sure, sure. So, hmm, yeah, so, with that I have to, that’s a bit different. So the kind of books at DK does is wide and varied. So literally anything from dinosaurs to Python, we are huge. We do, we publish a huge number of books. When I did a book on coding for children, such as Python or Scratch, we find the kind of, the right people for that role will help us write the book. And then we have to teach ourselves how to do that particular skill. So we become a specialist in a knowledge in a particular area, for the duration of the project, which could be three months, four months, five months, six months, however long it takes that we are given to create that book. So, yeah, that’s how it works for every book, whether we’re talking about, you know, dinosaurs, or science experiments, or, or coding for children.

Ying Wu (53:45)

Oh, that’s, that’s quite interesting. So you, you’ve already learned a lot of coding language?

Ashwin Khurana (53:51)

I did, I had to actually I did learn quite a bit of coding, and then I quickly forgot about it. Because the nature of my job is that you have to learn a lot of material in a very short amount of time, and then you move on to something else. So yeah, it’s fun. I mean, it’s a real, it’s a fun job in that way that you’re able to go from one completely different area to another. So right now, I’m working on a graphic novel that has about environmental, about the climate change, but it’s also got superheroes in it. But my last project before that was on an animal book, which is all about weird and wonderful animals. And my project before that was on the plant kingdom, so a book on the natural world. So every book that I do will be just very, very different.

Ying Wu (54:34)

Yeah, that’s, that’s very interesting, because you will meet a lot of challenges and new knowledge, and you just learn on a daily basis. That’s, that’s really cool. So we are going to do the last one. That’s true? So, what are your aspirations with regards to the impact of your profession in society?

Ashwin Khurana (54:55)

Impact? Well, I think ultimately, publishing has to be… it’s a big question. That’s a very big question, I have to think about it, but I think ultimately, the impact that publishing needs to have is to make sure that a wide variety of voices are heard. I think for too long publishing has been very insular, and by that, I mean that it’s the same stories that have been told. I think it’s important that there is BAME representation, that we have in a place like London the opportunity to sort of champion as many voices as possible, and have them represented on the page. I think, that would have a really wide social cultural impact, and I think that’s important. I think, that is probably the number one thing, and that’s reflected in the kind of people that we employ, and that’s not just editors. I’m talking about publicists, editors, marketing people, salespeople, everyone. And I’m also meeting junior people all the way up right to the top, and I also mean, men and women. So there has to be the kind of balance that you think is representative of the wider world. Because we’re not making toothpaste here, you know, these are not, we’re not making shoes, what we’re making is information, and that’s rich, and interesting, and you can get it wrong. And also, what’s, the challenges I think change over time. So you should never be too harsh on yourself, but move, move with the times, and don’t be left behind.

Ying Wu (56:36)

Cool. Okay. So thank you so much for sharing your inspiring story and professional experience in the publishing industry with us.

Ashwin Khurana (56:47)

No problem.

Ying Wu (56:48)

And thank you so much for your time, because I really learned a lot from our interview myself, because I didn’t have too much knowledge, previous knowledge about how the publishing industry works. Yeah, I really learned a lot from you.

Ashwin Khurana (57:03)

Oh good, good. Well, I’m very, very glad. If you have any other questions, just let me know.

Ying Wu (57:09)

Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you so much Ashwin.

Ashwin Khurana (57:12)

No problem Ying. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Yunke Sun (00:02)

Today’s March 3, and this interview is taking place on UCL campus. I am Yunke Sun Kirsten and current student at Digital Humanities programme. It’s my great pleasure to interview Professor Anthony Watkinson today to share his experience with us. This interview will be a part of the DIS centenary exhibition Geographies of Information, which will chart the history of the department and the role that teaching has played in the creation of international professional workforce over the past decades. There are three main purpose of the interview. The first is to explore your professional practice and the way in which the critical areas of inquiry emerging from research and teaching carried out at UCL Department of Information Science is reflected in your everyday professional life. The second is to use our history to explore the opportunities of sharing your professional experiences with the wider community of practice, at UCL and beyond. And the last is to explore how participatory approach might support the way we create exhibitions and outreach activities and the role of participants in creating shared cultural heritage products. So let’s start with the first basic questions. Where did you go to school? And where did you study at university?

Anthony Watkinson (01:41)

I went to school in Nottingham. And I went to the University of Cambridge. And what I studied was first History. Okay. And then I changed to Theology. And then I did research in Ecclesiastical History. But then I did not finish my dissertation. I was naughty. And so I had to get a job. And I got a job as assistant librarian at the college in Oxford, through a friend. And then, after two and a half years of being a librarian, I realised that it wasn’t enough money. I needed to have more money, I just got married, I needed more money. And I became, after some effort at getting a job, I managed to get a job in publishing. And my job was in science publishing, academic science publishing. And I’ve been in that for many years, until 1998, when we will, my company was bought by another company, and they told us all to leave, they didn’t want to leave us okay. So, I became a consultant. And I have since then had a portfolio jobs, yes, which includes some more publishing, some working for representative bodies. And then in 2002, I had become a Visiting Professor in the Department of Information Science at City University. And then I set up with the head of department, a group called Cyber Research, which was to do with search on scholarly communication, primarily, the best of scholarly communication. And since then, I’ve been working for that was my main job as a researcher, an academic researcher. So my interest main interest is scholarly communication since then, but I’ve done lots of other things. I’ve done more publishing, I’ve done work with representative bodies, teaching, training. I do teaching still at UCL. I’m here today to do some teaching this afternoon.

Yunke Sun (04:20)

What’s your main role at UCL at this time?

Anthony Watkinson (04:26)

It’s been retired. People occasionally asked me to do a lecture.

Yunke Sun (04:32)

So you’re still a lecturer here at UCL. Yeah. So in what years were you employed?

Anthony Watkinson (04:41)

I’m just trying to remember… I finished at UCL in 2010. I retired and then I must have started at 2006.

Yunke Sun (05:00)

Did you still remember what was the first role that you played?

Anthony Watkinson (05:03)

Yeah, I was given a 20% job, 20% of my time and, yeah, and I was mainly doing research to start with my boss, who was by then the boss at UCL, Head of the Department at UCL.

Yunke Sun (05:22)

Of DIS?

Anthony Watkinson (05:23)

Yeah, DIS. It was called Library School in those days. We changed the name. Digital Humanities was already there, Library Studies was there, Information Management was already there, but we bought in publishing.

Yunke Sun (05:43)

Oh, so you was a co founder.

Anthony Watkinson (05:47)

I was a co founder of the Publishing Programme. Yeah. And I, we had, we made a major decision. Do we bring in somebody who was an experienced person for running a department or programme in publishing, we bought him from Information Science. He died about just after I retired. But he, we set up the department so that it was like most publishing departments, or courses or programmes, they are mainly about trade publishing, almost to trade, like fiction and things of this sort. They’re not academic, no. So we insisted that the course should have both trade and academic for all the students. So that’s how we started. But now it’s gone back to being more like a normal publishing course, so it’s mainly trade. It has an option, which I’m talking about this afternoon, an option called academic publishing or something like that. Yep. But that’s normal in publishing. Unfortunately, it means that people don’t get trained up in academic publishing usually, unless they choose the option. The other thing we wanted to do was to work together more with the other groups. And it’s never happened. Unfortunately, after my boss resigned, he resigned about… it must have been 2009 or 2010? A long time ago, hum, he’s still working, hum, it has changed, it hasn’t gone back to what… it hasn’t changed as we want it to do, in the sense that, for example, I was teaching a course about publishing on the library programme, and that’s no longer there. And we had people from the library programme who would be teaching and also the digital humanities programme, who are having more to do with us, because quite a lot of our students, were and are people from English literature background, they come from English usually, almost all of them are from humanities background.

Yunke Sun (08:23)

Yeah, like me.

Anthony Watkinson (08:24)

Like me, but I worked most of my life with scientists. It’s quite possible, It’s where the jobs are. Yeah. But all the courses are like this.

Yunke Sun (08:34)

Yeah, but this, like, what you talked about, brings to another question. Like, the interdisciplinary.

Anthony Watkinson (08:45)

Yeah, yeah, that was I thought.

Yunke Sun (08:48)

Yeah, because it seems that interdisciplinary skills are highly valued currently in research, professional practice, problem solving, and etcetera. And Information Studies is indeed a multidisciplinary department. Was interdisciplinary understood in the same way in the past as it is today? What do you think?

Anthony Watkinson (09:16)

No, it wasn’t. It was very little. This was mostly… this was really a Library School originally just to teach librarians. And in those days, they didn’t, they weren’t really interested in the other disciplines. They are now, libraries got lots of jobs for people with information knowledge, for example. I know that because my son is a librarian in America. He is at the University of Michigan.

Yunke Sun (09:39)

That’s really good.

Anthony Watkinson (09:41)

I know. His job is… he is Associate University Librarian in scholarly… in publishing, and he is in library publishing, he runs the press and he also looks after a repository. So I know could a quite a bit about it. Yeah.

Yunke Sun (10:00)

Yeah. So it’s quite interesting to get to know, it’s like quite different from past as it is nowadays. But I think that it’s also like for digital humanities to student like me, we take many interdisciplinary modules, and this is good. Yeah, it’s definitely helpful for us to like broadening our horizons, but sometimes we only have like, concerns, because we only have one year to explore our subjects, and we can’t like go too deep in some of the subjects during this one year short programme. So we don’t have, like for many of us…. So far, we don’t have any like specific career goal or motivation yet, even even if we’re graduating very soon, like in three or four months, so everyone’s still a big panicking about it. So we don’t know where to start from. Do you have any, like career advice or suggestion?

Anthony Watkinson (11:09)

Well, somebody with your background would be very useful in libraries and in publishing. Do you have some modules jointly with libraries, do you? Do you have a libraries’ group?

Yunke Sun (11:22)

Ah…

Anthony Watkinson (11:23)

I don’t think you do. Do you? Nor the Publishing Group… that’s where the jobs are, you see. A lot of jobs in libraries are for people with your background. I could tell you, I know that, because my, my sun employs people with your background.

Yunke Sun (11:41)

What’s the pay rate?

Anthony Watkinson (11:43)

I don’t know, not as good as it would be in industry.

Yunke Sun (11:47)

That’s true.

Anthony Watkinson (11:48)

But there are plenty of jobs in industries, you know, but particularly… and in publishing as well and in libraries, there are jobs, which we should be catering for in digital humanities, but we have never done.

Yunke Sun (12:01)

Yeah, we should talk it talk to the Head, the director of our programme, yeah, maybe to expand some optional modules of publishing, to like, seek for more opportunities in that industry. That might be helpful. And yeah, so… so what was your, your first job in the industry?

Anthony Watkinson (12:30)

Librarian to start with and then I became what they used to call a manuscript procurement editor. It is an American term. It is the term they used, but is what they call a junior commissioning editor, now, junior commissioning.

Yunke Sun (12:46)

But why is it commissioning?

Anthony Watkinson (12:48)

Commissioning is finding people to write books, finding people who are writing books, and as time gets under contract… finding people, people who are writing books already, the thinking of books… Or they will… you have an idea for somebody to have a topic where you think there’s a need for a book on, and find somebody. So it’s commissioning, is free…

Yunke Sun (13:16)

It’s like a film producer.

Anthony Watkinson (13:18)

Yeah. It’s more like a producer. Yes.

Yunke Sun 13:21

That’s interesting.

Anthony Watkinson (13:22)

Yeah. It’s quite a typical job assistant, assistant publisher it tends to be called in this country, or publishing assistant. In this country the way it works is you start as a publishing production or marketing assistant. But the publishing assistant quite quickly becomes an assistant publisher or the same works. And the same thing goes for the other jobs.

Yunke Sun (13:49)

So like there are a lot of transferable skills.

Anthony Watkinson (13:53)

A lot of transferable skills, yeah.

Yunke Sun (13:54)

You can apply to other jobs.

Anthony Watkinson (13:57)

It is because… it has happened quite a bit actually, quite a bit of move between libraries and academics… Academics move in and out of publishing. Librarians do the other way around, like publishers become librarians, like my son has done. It’s possible. But the digital thing is a common thing, because since we became digital, it makes a difference because the skills are very transferable. You know that.

Yunke Sun (14:39)

Yes, that really leads back to another question, like when… what was your initial motivation to working in this publishing field?

Anthony Watkinson (14:54)

I couldn’t think what else to do because…

Yunke Sun (14:57)

So there wasn’t like another ambition.

Anthony Watkinson (15:01)

No, I knew that… I come from a background where originally I was going to be a schoolteacher. I was the first person in my family to go to university and my relatives were schoolteachers and nurses usually. And as I was doing history it wasn’t nursing the thing, but I thought of becoming a schoolteacher all the time, most of the time I was an undergraduate. Yeah. And then I started doing research, so have to become an academic and I didn’t finish my research. And so I didn’t… No good.

Yunke Sun (15:38)

Could you tell us why?

Anthony Watkinson (15:40)

Because I was too lazy, I wasn’t organised.

Yunke Sun (15:45)

Oh, I thought you did…

Anthony Watkinson (15:49)

No, I was too lazy. My supervisor wasn’t tough enough for me. Nowadays, I would have probably finished, but it’s sad!

Yunke Sun (15:55)

Oh, my God, I have the same like feelings of… exactly the same stage as you, when you were like…

Anthony Watkinson (16:05)

In those days you would get a job even without a doctorate. I have friends who got jobs. I was interviewed for jobs. And I might have got them sometimes, really. But I had a friend who got a job in New Zealand, it’s quite easy to get a job if you were in Cambridge, if…

Yunke Sun (16:20)

You started with something that you were able to do instead of like…

Anthony Watkinson (16:26)

Well, I thought I’d get a job in either trade publishing, that is to say, nonfiction, yeah. Or that I would get a job in something I knew about like, theology or history, where they had a list in that programme, in that field. And so I went on to talk to quite a lot of people, because I was quite well connected by then, because I was seven years in Cambridge, I knew people. I thought I wouldn’t have any difficulty, I did have. I went for interviews and people used to say, things like “We almost certainly got a job for you, we’ll be in touch”. And it hadn’t. It went away. So eventually, I started applying for jobs I wasn’t qualified for, like, what we’re looking for is a scientist with publishing experience. And that was the job I got. And I’m not a scientist. I had no publishing experience, and I got the job. I never looked back and I’m quite good at it.

Yunke Sun (17:30)

So you, yeah, just…

Anthony Watkinson (17:33)

I became the boss. I became the director in charge, the publishing director. And then I moved on to another place, Oxford University Press, and I became Head of the Journals Operations there, and then I was approached by a large international company, a company called Chapman Hall, which no longer exists, and which was very exciting. I had 17 members of staff.

Yunke Sun (17:58)

That was amazing.

Anthony Watkinson (17:59)

But I enjoyed it very much, and I was quite good at it.

Yunke Sun (18:02)

But at least, in the first place, you know, where your, your strength were.

Anthony Watkinson (18:07)

Yeah, I found out what my strengths were.

Yunke Sun (18:10)

Even though you were not sure about your career goal, or something like that, but you were aware of your strength advantages all the time. Yeah, your writing skills, and something like that sort of thing. Yeah. And you apply for jobs with this?

Anthony Watkinson (18:31)

Yeah, I got a job because I was quite familiar with academic life, having been taught in Cambridge, as well, I was quite familiar with that, with how to talk to academics. My wife was an academic, is an academic. We’re both older now, of course. So I wasn’t worried about science, for example. You soon get used to these things. You soon find out how to talk to scientists. Yeah.

Yunke Sun (19:03)

So you’re more like a connection between academia and also the industry, like a bridge.

Anthony Watkinson (19:10)

Yeah, that’s right. That was exactly it. But because I had been a librarian, I was always interested in libraries, and so I’m still connected with libraries, I keep talking about libraries this afternoon here, because I couldn’t find the librarian. But I’m the director of a thing called the Charleston Conference, which you wouldn’t know about. It’s the biggest independent library conference in the US, in Charleston, South Carolina. And I’m a director of that, of that conference, a director. It’s very exciting. But I’ve been, I’ve been going there for 30 years, more perhaps. All my colleagues are librarians and I I’m used to librarians.

Yunke Sun (19:52)

That’s amazing… but have you ever thought about quitting, or like… in the middle of your career switch to another industry?

Anthony Watkinson (20:04)

No, not like that, no, not really. I do various jobs in the same sort of area. Well, I consult at the moment, for example,

Yunke Sun (20:12)

What made you so determined to do it all the time?

Anthony Watkinson (20:17)

Because I had already started and it was easier, you know, I didn’t feel the need to go to a different sort of industry, the publishing industry, I know quite well. I’ve written about it. I’m an expert, to some extent.

Yunke Sun (20:28)

And you, you also, you did find your true value, like, a lifelong value out?

Anthony Watkinson (20:37)

I enjoyed it. Yes, that’s right. Yes, and I still, I still do research you see, in information science.

Yunke Sun (20:43)

This is meaningful for you?

Anthony Watkinson (20:45)

It’s meaningful? Yeah.

Yunke Sun (20:47)

That’s so nice. Yeah, it’s really inspiring.

Anthony Watkinson (20:51)

I didn’t feel the need to stop and do something totally different. I know some people do, they say, I want to do something different.

Yunke Sun (20:58)

But you have already like, because the start of your career was, you know, a turning point of your life because you used to like working in academia, with history…

Anthony Watkinson (21:12)

But I was dealing with academic people, even though they weren’t historians anymore. I was used to deal with senior academics. So it’s difficult… Some people find it very difficult. I mean… They’re worried about… They feel they’re not able, because they don’t look clever enough, they think. I mean… I’ve employed people who’d be very nervous about talking to senior academics. It’s no good. They’re just people. But I mean, my biggest thing is I work for a mathematics publishing. A lot. At one stage I was the Head of Mathematics in Oxford University Press. I’m not a mathematician at all. But I got on with them quite well, because they’re quite easy, as long as you know other mathematicians. They’re not difficult to work with. Don’t expect to explain what they are doing. They can’t explain to other mathematicians usually. Do you know a little bit about mathematics?

Yunke Sun (22:10)

I hate mathematics

Anthony Watkinson (22:12)

Ah, naughty. So do I actually, I’ve never been any good at it. Ah, it’s a pity. Yeah, you wont’ talk properly.

Yunke Sun (22:22)

Yeah, I feel like I shared a lot with you as a younger professor, but, of course, you were way more talented. I share the same feelings, yeah, with a younger professor…

Anthony Watkinson (22:37)

I would never have felt that I would have anything to do with mathematics. Well, it’s not completely true, because I had friends, who were mathematicians or computer scientists in that stage, when I was a student, and I knew a number people, it was very fortunate to…

Yunke Sun (22:50)

Yeah, just use your connections.

Anthony Watkinson (22:53)

And I got… Yes, I used to use my connections, used to tell us what I should do about something. I had lots of friends who were young, early career researchers, which I worked on since, but yeah, I had lots of friends who I could ask advice from, and my wife knew lots of people as well so it helped. So you start….

Yunke Sun (23:20)

It’s like, great opportunities are actually around us, but we have to explore connections.

Anthony Watkinson (23:28)

It’s about to be confident about things. I don’t think you should ever think: “I can’t do this because I don’t know anything about it”. All my life has been involved. I think a publisher, it’s true, and certainly, in libraries, too, this happens. I mean that I went to a university a few years ago, in the US where the librarian had an English graduate engineering library. It didn’t worry her at all. She got used to understanding what they wanted.

Yunke Sun (23:57)

That’s what makes people great because they do something they can’t do in the first place, right? And yeah, I have another question about, speaking of self-employed, to my knowledge you’ve been self-employed for a long, long time. Yeah. So like, what was the motivation for you to be self-employed, because I feel like in uni, like great confidence, especially in your generation being a being self-employed, it’s not the only thing.

Anthony Watkinson (24:33)

Well, the reason is that when I started I was too young to get my pension, I was only 56, so when I started being self employed, and I already quite quickly built up what they call a portfolio jobs, which are very satisfying, it bought in as much money as I was used to having before. And then after a while, it becomes more difficult because you can get further away from your previous jobs, but I did some more publishing for a large company. It’s a different field for me, dental research, but I was the Head of Dental Research Publishing in the world, probably, by the time I finished it. But I found other things to do, different sorts of jobs, and I was doing this research, this group, grants, we got money. I needed to have more money than my pension to live the life I want to live.

Yunke Sun (25:26)

So that’s why it made you become a multi-tasker.

Anthony Watkinson (25:30)

Yeah, I’m multi-tasking. Yeah, it’s quite difficult, actually.

Yunke Sun (25:34)

I know.

Anthony Watkinson (25:35)

Are you multi-tasking?

Yunke Sun (25:37)

Yeah, like, you know, our generation… For our younger generation we have, we were like, trained to be or… We had to be multitasking in our study or life. This is what society and the, you know, the new age expects us to do.

Anthony Watkinson (26:01)

That’s right, it’s a good model.

Yunke Sun (26:03)

But it’s more difficult for you to do that.

Anthony Watkinson (26:06)

I can do it. I’ve always done it to some extend. So you see, when I was a publisher, I had to start thinking I was not in charge of just one area. Initially, I was working in medical science, and mathematics, some social sciences as well. So I had to learn to do lots of different… Understand lots of different disciplines. I wasn’t somebody who did one thing only. I’ve never done history or theology ever, the areas I know about in theory, still know about. But I started my first job and because we were based in the US – the academic base is now part of Elsevier, but it was then quite a big company based in New York – the New York had a psychology editor, mathematics editor, publisher they call them now, but editor in those days, and chemistry editor, and so forth. And it was only the three of us, so we did everything, including the boss. So I got used to the idea of working

Yunke Sun (27:12)

So from management to administration, like everything?

Anthony Watkinson (27:15)

No, we had people doing advertising and things of this sort, and administration, but we did all the publishing part, the commissioning part, the getting, making sure that the content, the content, yeah the content, everything to do with the content, in all sorts of disciplines is very useful. So you had to be used to moving from one discipline to another, the most difficult was chemistry, because chemists expect you to understand what they’re talking about. Whereas mathematicians don’t; but chemistry is very difficult for the non-chemists. But I mean, I could do with biologists, quite almost all areas of biology are quite interesting, easy to me. And so physics is difficult, but the more applied it is the easier it is because you can then visualise it. But it really was a good training for me to start in my particular job. And in the end I had to have some knowledge of every academic field in the sciences and some of the social sciences.

Yunke Sun (28:21)

So the very important, I would say, ability for people to be self-employed is to multi-tasking.

Anthony Watkinson (28:33)

Yeah, it is in any job, I think now.

Yunke Sun (28:35)

Adjust…

Anthony Watkinson (28:36)

Yes, adjust, be flexible.

Yunke Sun (28:42)

And communication skills.

Anthony Watkinson (28:43)

Probably, yes, communication skills are important I think. As I say, the digital… So much of the basics… Everything is digital now, all these jobs are digital to some extent, and publishing particularly. And it helps to have some understanding of how digital works, which I was fortunate to get because I was one of the first publishers probably to put journals online. Working with Adobe Acrobat in the computer science department it’s very exciting. This would be about 1995 just off the web. The web was a big change. So I mean, it’s possible we started thinking about putting things online. We thought we’d have to send them about by email. That was the web; the web is a big change. So you could put things on the web and people could see them but before that you would have to send things in the earlier Internet. I think it must have been in 1994… when was the web…

Yunke Sun (29:55)

But you still had paper…

Anthony Watkinson (29:57)

Yeah… I find that the time it takes to turn machines on, and find the things… And I use paper; I’m talking to people. Yep. But there’s all the danger the machine will run out of juice. But no, I’m very happy working with computers, but I’m not really terribly good at it.

Yunke Sun (30:26)

That’s nice.

Anthony Watkinson (30:29)

I spend all my time in front of a computer, usually at home. So rather than… Not on an iPhone, because I’ve got a phone, but you tend to use it for telephoning mainly and messaging.

Yunke Sun (30:45)

Oh, but this is a Huawei.

Anthony Watkinson (30:49)

We didn’t have any problems with Huawei.

Yunke Sun (30:51)

I was joking, but it is a Huawei.

Anthony Watkinson (30:55)

They’re good phones.

Yunke Sun (30:57)

Yeah, it’s much cheaper.

Anthony Watkinson (31:00)

Well, it’s much cheaper than the other ones. And I wasn’t going to pay… It’s just all the functionalities.

Yunke Sun (31:08)

Yeah, exactly…

Anthony Watkinson (31:09)

But there you go I think I was very lucky because I had no particular digital… Well, I had friends in the computer science. I went to the funeral service of Exact Two, which was one of the great early computers, you know, big frame things. So I had friends in that area. And I knew they were sort of somewhat familiar with the concept of what went on the Internet, and so forth. They didn’t have anything to do with it until this time we set up… as we went into this project with the, you know, PDFs, of course, obviously, the Acrobat people who have invented PDFs, and the earlier PDFs. And I was called, approached by them to see if I would work with them on a project, which turned out to put e-journals online. And we were the first people, because we worked with the computer science department, as well. It was all very exciting, very exciting.

Yunke Sun (32:09)

That’s so impressive.

Anthony Watkinson (32:11)

There’s a long time ago, it must have been 94-95.

Yunke Sun (32:15)

It wasn’t even born.

Anthony Watkinson (32:18)

I think I’m right to say that, yeah. Yeah, I think it would be 94-95. I think I had my journals, all my journals online before anybody else did. I had about 75 journals at that stage.

Yunke Sun (32:29)

That’s so amazing.

Anthony Watkinson (32:32)

But it was not difficult. I mean… there’s a lot of myth about this.

Yunke Sun (32:37)

It wasn’t difficult, but people like… it made things much easier.

Anthony Watkinson (32:42)

Yes, it made that. The Head of the top Japanese bookseller and a subscription agent, as they were in those days, Marazin, the president came to my office, and I was able to show him something online, on my computer, such as it was in those days. And then I was able to print it out, and he was amazed by this, because you had to have special printers, you didn’t just print straight out. But there was no problem, absolutely no difficulty about printing up, you get a perfect look just like an ordinary page, typeset page, even then, at the very beginning, you could do that. I mean, there are all sorts of things that needed to be… they were just starting… XML predecessor was called SGML. And HTML was the web form of it. But in those days, we didn’t really I didn’t understand the potential for that, the discovery potential. In those days, I didn’t understand that. But I understood that what we had to do was something like… Academics didn’t take to it unless it looked exactly like what was on the page. They were very suspicious of the web. We used the Internet because they used to have to dial up the Internet, and you could take down a lot of stuff, the librarian had to do it for you because it was so technical. But that was just data usually, like ANI databases usually. They were the things that you looked up on the web, on the Internet. But when you got the web it was a whole different thing because it was much easier for everybody.

Yunke Sun (34:41)

But what do you think was the impacts, the impact of your profession in society?

Anthony Watkinson (34:55)

Yeah… that’s not easy… Hum… I’ve been talking… my biggest piece of research in the recent years has been on early career researchers, people who haven’t got tenure, but are under 35, and are doing research and publishing it. And we do this with scientists and social scientists, and we’re part of a team. We have a Chinese colleague who was doing it in China. I’ve been doing it in the US and the UK, I mean, by Skype. The project was interviewing on the basis of a questionnaire, an early career researcher, and then they will agree to do it for next two years, using more or less the same questions, we will then notice change in attitude. Now, one of the things that became clear from doing this is that although early career researchers believe very strongly in sharing and openness, and you probably do, sharing openness, transparency, is it a good word for you?

Yunke Sun (36:07)

Yes.

Anthony Watkinson (36:08)

Yeah, you believe in it, it’s part of your belief structure, and so they could tell from talking to people. And then they wanted to reach out to the public or to the opinion formers or share with colleagues. But the trouble is that sharing with colleagues is quite easy. They didn’t want to do it too much, because they were worried about losing their data, of somebody wanting to use it, use the data, you are familiar with privacy?

Yunke Sun (36:37)

Yeah…

Anthony Watkinson (36:38)

They wanted to hang on… they were worried about…. They wanted to use their data for publications. That’s true of most academics, I know Digital Humanities doesn’t believe this, but it’s true for most academics, they want to publish things. In science certainly, not so much in humanities, because books are more important, but journal articles are absolutely crucial to scientists.

Yunke Sun (37:02)

That actually does lead to another question I was trying to ask. So what do you think about the current drive by policymakers in UK to open access publishing for academic books?

Anthony Watkinson (37:16)

It’s okay. Yeah, it’s okay as long as they recognise that as a publishing function, and it has to be paid for. At the moment not all the people recognise this. The government doesn’t certainly, and I could talk at length about this, but this is…

Yunke Sun (37:35)

Is there any ethical issue to be concerned?

Anthony Watkinson (37:41)

Not really, I don’t think it’s an ethical issue. No, maybe we found that these early career researchers would be uninterested in ethics actually, but the point that I’m trying to make is that they didn’t feel able to do the outreach they’d like to do. They didn’t feel trained to reach communication, that type of communication. They kept saying, this is somebody else’s job, not ours. We’re doing research for, to communicate to other researchers. We’d love to do outreach, but we don’t know how to do it. We need help.

Yunke Sun (38:14)

So like, who would be the ones that…?

Anthony Watkinson (38:17)

I don’t know. Well, that was never defined, you see, it’s a trouble.

Yunke Sun (38:21)

Oh, so, this is the issue?

Anthony Watkinson (38:24)

Yeah, there’s a big concern. Open access is good. But all you’re giving open access to is the papers which are intended for other researchers usually quite in a small field. Even in the humanities this is true. If you think that literary critics are not understandable by the general public or even the educated public. My wife is a scientist and had to learn all about literary criticism, since she became… she’s a poet now. But she’s had to learn that whole new way of working and she teaches, doesn’t teach very much, but she writes a lot of poetry. She’s a poet in residence. But she’s had to learn all those things, which are technical. You think, people in English literature think of them as quite normal, but they are very technical.

Yunke Sun (39:16)

I think that people studying their major in linguistics, they’re more and more technical.

Anthony Watkinson (39:23)

Yeah, so technical, I know I published in linguistics, incredibly technical.

Yunke Sun (39:28)

Yeah, you have to learn languages.

Anthony Watkinson (39:30)

Yeah to understand that… But it’s a special language they have, it’s like philosophy, it’s a special language. Very few people could communicate that to anybody else outside of the academic field. That’s the big need at the moment. It is all very well making it with the open access, but this isn’t going to help reaching out to people.

Yunke Sun (39:48)

This is the thing that we should look out at to solve.

Anthony Watkinson (39:53)

People are beginning to look at that. Yeah, I’ve been to lots of conferences.

Yunke Sun (40:01)

Do you have confidence… like how many years…?

Anthony Watkinson (40:04)

No, I don’t know… The thing is they are not putting enough effort into this, they are not thinking… But then, it’s difficult… The emphasis is changing. People begin to think this is important, but only just very recently. Their objective is just to have open access, which is very good but only part of the way there.

Yunke Sun (40:33)

I have the last question for you. Could you please describe the role…I mean you have already described the role you played during your work experience in our department, and did you witness a significant change or anything that you find was an interesting change over the years?

Anthony Watkinson (41:02)

It’s gone backwards, a lot of things have gone backwards actually. I found it very difficult because they were so against publishers. I don’t think is like that now in Digital Humanities, but this is a question of scholarly outputs and okay Digital Humanities did some important things. Unfortunately they don’t go straight enough into archiving and preservation, that’s an area I know about.

Yunke Sun (41:37)

So that’s the biggest challenge.

Anthony Watkinson (41: 38)

It’s a big challenge of the Digital Humanities I think. I’m going to be running a session at a conference in April, which I’m going to have Digital Humanities people speaking, and I’ve also other people speak like publishers, in Athens, unless I get stopped by the virus, but we hope not.

Yunke Sun (42:00)

I hope it will pass soon. It has a huge impact.

Anthony Watkinson (42:05)

But when I was here the Head of Digital Humanities was very rude about publishers and you see, I know from my current research that academics trust publications. We did work in 2011, 2012 a bigger grant, which we found this is true in all disciplines, less so in computer science, perhaps, where they had more conferences for example, but it is important to people, for people in the humanities it is books primarily, but even less so recently. I give you something. I’m easing the idea of digital content, which is that most research is actually digital. For example archaeology, obviously, but the best way of presenting it is not in a monograph. You need to have a digital object, yeah? This is what my son is doing in Michigan, and I have a small part of the dissertation with me and I’ll show it to some publishers this afternoon to see what librarians can do. But there is one thing called enhanced d-box and these are totally digital content, which can be associated with a monograph, but which actually are needed to really express the content properly. So if you are an archaeologist you can get so much out of having a digital content. You have to archive it and preserve that, and at the moment it’s quite difficult. It’s potentially quite easy, but it’s difficult for most people. If it’s straight text, like the Bentham papers in your department, that’s just straight text, there’s nothing to it, it could just well be in print, just easier to search basically. But what I’m talking about is multimedia stuff and most subjects are multimedia, including things like archaeology.

Yunke Sun (45:01)

So that is a challenge?

Anthony Watkinson (45:05)

It’s a challenge going on because it’s going forward. It’s a challenge, and it’s not being met very well. So one of the difficulties is in archiving and preservation, which no one is doing, some departments are doing it, but it’s very difficult. There is a lot of literature on this, people started to think about this earlier in this part of the century, but they haven’t done it. Libraries are not doing it, they should be doing it.

Yunke Sun (45:37)

Is it because it is too difficult?

Anthony Watkinson (45:43)

It’s difficult, but also is costly, is money.

Yunke Sun (45:47)

Oh, that’s why. It’s not like that feasible.

Anthony Watkinson (45:51)

It’s quite difficult.

Yunke Sun (45:53)

Thank you so much again for sharing your experiences in the publishing field, and your experience in our department, and also providing your advices and insights in working in the information professions.

Anthony Watkinson (46:20)

Thank you.

This interview is with Anne Thurston by Isabelle Jones recorded on 10^th March 2020.

Isabelle Jones (00:12)

To kind of begin with, I wanted to start with, uh, the beginning of your career. So, at what point did you start taking an interest in information studies?

Anne Thurston (00:22)

Hmm, when I lived in Kenya in 1970-1980, I worked for the National Archive, and, uh, really I just became aware of how critical it was that we all understand, that we understood how to train people really, how to train the staff. And I could see that there was no professionalism at that time in the National Archives. So when I returned to London I audited the UCL course, and then I began teaching Administrative History, and eventually Elizabeth (Shepherd) and I took, well, I took over the training for, hmm, international students and we recruited Elizabeth. Which was one of the best things we ever did. And, hmm, and then after a few years… Oh and then Elizabeth and I restructured the Archives course for international students. And then I left UCL and directed the International Records Management Trust, always with the same objective of ‘how could we strengthen professionals internationally?’ … I ran the trust from… I started the Trust even before I left UCL, but once I took it over I ran it until last December (December 2019). So, for many, many years, I tried for every avenue I could to strengthen the International Records Profession.

Isabelle Jones (02:19)

Yeah, I was reading James Lowry’s book, which was the Essays in Honour of you [Integrity in Government through Records Management, Essays in Honour of Anne Thurston, eds. James Lowry and Justus Wamukoya, 2014] which gave me a, sort of, perspective on the arguments that were surrounding the issues with the course before, and how engaged people were before that period… And I was just wondering, how difficult was it to reorganise the course (the international programme) to include that globalised priority?

Anne Thurston

Have you interviewed James (Lowry)?

Isabelle Jones

I spoke briefly with him, because he was a guest lecturer in one of our modules.

Anne Thurston (03:00)

Ah, very good. When Elizabeth [Shepherd] and I started, there was, I thought, a very sort of rigid approach to Archive Studies, which, was, um, still put heavy emphasis on Latin. It was basically geared towards local record offices. And, um, well actually, what we’d done for the course, which was, really, to reorganise it to look at issues with modern concern to strengthen records management. Gradually Elizabeth [Shepherd] took over the whole course, and I think that was a very, very good thing. And I know that she’s upgraded it and upgraded it and of course now it’s again at that point that, where we were years ago, where what was being taught was no longer really relevant. And I think that now it needs, um, I’m not saying she’s not looking at, she is of course, but I’m saying that it needs an overhaul, to serve the needs, especially internationally.

Isabelle Jones (04:31)

In what ways would you suggest overhauling that content?

Anne Thurston (04:37)

Well, to me, um we can’t any longer look at records and archives as a distinct area. I think the principles of how we manage an archive are a constant, and are the same, but it has to be so much broader. And I’m just finishing work on a book of essays, to which Elizabeth has contributed, where we’re really looking at the relationships between managing data, statistics and records. And there’s so many different angles on how we manage information. I think they have to start to be explored in a new way. They are so interconnected. Without, um, forgetting their unique contributions. Looking at the way that they interface. What we decided to do for the book was to look specifically at the Sustainable Goals (the United Nations Sustainable Goals) and see, ‘could you measure them if you were only looking at records?’ No. ‘Could you measure them if you were only looking at statistics?’ No. I don’t think so… Or ‘only at data?’ So the whole picture of how we fit together I think we have to emphasise

Isabelle Jones (06:14)

So it’s about gaining a new perspective, or, a wider perspective?

Anne Thurston (06:20)

Yeah, I think so. I don’t think you’d want to give up the specific perspective that, of course, has developed over so many years, and is so valuable. But, a statistician doesn’t really understand the whole concept of provenance and how you’ve really got to pay attention to that and got to capture evidence of how the data and statistics works. But similarly the records (manager) doesn’t understand how the statistician approaches… So I just think that the whole holistic nature has to be brought in and become a central focus.

Isabelle Jones (07:19)

Um, how do you think that educators should respond to those changes? So how should we encourage students to question and critically analyse the thinking that has come before? Because, obviously, if you’re talking about large changes that need to, be, undergone, how do we, sort of, translate that into our teaching?

Anne Thurston (07:38)

Yes, I think that probably there are some new courses that will be important. You need to know… I’d like to see a unit on statistics and how records support statistical measurement of anything, of data. I don’t think that you can teach it in isolation. Probably new course units need to be brought in. And that’s really what we tried to do years ago. Is to say, “We can’t simply look at records in terms of how they were kept in past centuries”. We have to broaden that out and look at least at the relationships to current records. You don’t think that anybody could attempt to teach it without being aware of that whole life cycle. I’m just thinking, now we must really broaden it out again.

Isabelle Jones (08:49)

I completely agree. I was kind of taught this concept in my undergraduate degree, that ‘information isn’t created in isolation it’s created within a vacuum’ so when you’re putting something out there you’re not only having to take in what has come before but what could come after the information. So I think that that kind of touches a bit on what you’re talking about.

Anne Thurston (09:16)

Yes. I think that it’s just an ever-broadening perspective. I think once you get into digital information you can’t keep it in boxes anymore.

Isabelle Jones (09:31)

No, not at all. In terms of that globalised element, how do you suggest that we, in turn, should weave international examples into our teaching? Because obviously up until quite recently there has been an English focus, or like a Western focus, until you came in and overhauled the course. So how do you suggest keeping it that kind of globalised, hmm, geographical awareness?

Anne Thurston (10:08)

Hmm, it may need just another course unit. On, you know, what is happening globally. There are so many initiatives in Europe, but also I love to think that the course could be aware, or could teach an awareness of how much these issues are in common throughout the world. It would be very easy to do some creative networking with the University of Botswana. To have some online discussions about what challenges they’re facing. And how we could support one another. It’s just at a crisis point. I think the International Council on Archives has such an important role to play, but only if we can break out of this old thought that we are managing records.

Isabelle Jones (11:16)

Hmm… What kind of international professional issues do you think would be at the forefront of that new teaching?

Anne Thurston (11:21)

Hmm, I mean, we know for instance that Open Data would be a huge topic, and there’s almost no communication between professionals and open data professionals. So I might, I have this marvellous woman who runs something called ‘data.org’ and if she could address the students, if they could ask her questions, even that could open awareness of ‘what are the amazing gifts that open data brings?’ and ‘how do they need to be underpinned by records skills?’ and similarly with data specialists. I mean James Lowry has done a lot of work on establishing data authenticity and using records strategies for doing that. And it would be fantastic if the students could interview him. Similarly I’ve got some really good statisticians from Northumbria, they’re studying at Newcastle, and their perspective is just different but, um, what they’re working on is very valid. I mean, how do you ensure that the information is protected and authentic and preserved through time? So that would just be one concrete way, finding specialists in these different areas and encouraging students to talk to them, to understand how these different perspectives support and reinforce one another.

Isabelle Jones (13:07)

Yeah, I completely agree. I think my experience of the course thus far, we’re about halfway through at this point, is completely different to my learning before, because, I feel like, UCL have really opened up a narrative. Like I feel much more confidant talking to professionals, such as yourself, about the issues that I’m learning about literally as I go along. What do you think is the value of talking to professionals while you’re in your learning process?

Anne Thurston (13:38)

Oh, I think it’s extremely valuable! I think your mind can go into such a narrow interpretation of the field you’re studying. Thinking again about that open data specialist, in talking to her, and working with her, I really understood, it’s not that open data is better than records management it’s that we need each other. We need to make sure that people have, and can use, information effectively, and they need to understand that if they don’t put in place an infrastructure that will, protect and preserve it in time you can’t get back to it. You can’t have confidence in citing it. So it’s just a very valuable opportunity to create an interchange of approaches. It doesn’t devalue anything it just enhances it.

Isabelle Jones (14:44)

Yeah absolutely, I mean, do you think that there were any individuals in your early career that influenced the way that you thought?

Anne Thurston (15:00)

It just became… You know when I worked for the Kenya Government, years and years ago, we would, we weren’t bringing in records from any government departments at that time, but if ever we had the occasion to want to trace even records about myself, in any other government department, you just couldn’t. You couldn’t see. You just couldn’t find anything. Even in our own department things were just created by piecemeal, they didn’t match up. I could see an enormous benefit to be able to search and to use information across the government. I’ve always worked closely with John McDonald, who worked in the Canadian National Archives for many, many years, and since been a consultant, but it’s really been working with him and exchanging ideas with him and incorporating his recognition that cross government you need a dialogue. So that’s been very valuable for me.

Isabelle Jones (16:25)

So do you feel like you’re still learning? Even though you’re such a recognised and experienced information professional?

Anne Thurston (16:36)

Oh thank you! Hmm, I’m at the end of my career frankly (chuckles) Isabelle. I mean we closed the Trust just before Christmas, so it’s not that I never want to do anything anymore. But I’ve been focusing on this book of essays, as I mentioned and we’ve been looking at achieving sustainable development goals by, um, bringing in ideas about statistics, and about data, and about records and seeing where they fit and where there are gaps between them. And that has really been a major eye opener for me! I was always trying to argue that development specialists were leaving records out of the equation and that records were the foundation of everything, and I really do still think that, but that’s just my perspective. I see now that all of these perspectives are absolutely valid and that the most helpful way for me to look at it is for me to, just to see that where the structures for managing interface and how can we look across them to come to something that is much more meaningful and useful. And I just keep going back to that example of the Open Data colleague, and I never, I never could talk to open data specialists because I thought that, well, they aren’t working with records so how could this be useful. But I see now that it absolutely is useful. We can’t delay any longer how we share information with the public. But nor can we lose the archival principles. So, I think, for open data specialists to work as they do, but for the record specialists to come and, um, help them capture and preserve the information that they are collecting is a very much better approach.

Isabelle Jones (18:50)

Yeah, I do agree. At the moment I’m learning about the concepts of linked open data, at its (chuckle) very basic level. And, I think, coming from an archival perspective, it really surprised me how collaborative their approach to information is.

Anne Thurston (19:10)

Yes. Yes it is, but the one thing that the records bring I think is ‘how do we authenticate and how do we protect and preserve the information through time?’ And that’s not all of it but that’s a critical piece of it, that’s been left out. I think that the records profession gets marginalised when it tries to hold a space that isn’t shared.

Isabelle Jones (19:44)

Yeah, I do agree. I think, archives, speaking very very broadly-

Anne Thurston

Yes.

Isabelle Jones

Archives and records management have been, slightly somewhat, isolated? Um, I think that we could learn from other disciplines.

Anne Thurston (20:00)

We have to. Yes. I’ve often thought that the International Council on Archives could so easily die if it doesn’t broaden out. If it doesn’t relate to the present realities, and, um, it’s such a challenge because it’s trying to bring together people how have had training in different worlds. But, yeah, just the opportunity for interchange is so great, and would make all the difference. And its such a, such a, overwhelming world if we don’t have that interface. If we do it together I think that it can be incredibly valuable to the world.

Isabelle Jones

Touching on your point on traditional training, what was your, sort of, entry route into the field?

Anne Thurston (21:02)

It’s such a good question. My initial entry point was auditing the UCL course. So I never went through a professional training but I did sit in on all the classes at UCL and that’s how it began to fit together for me. Yeah that’s how I came into it.

Isabelle Jones (21:29)

Yeah, because we’re, at the moment within the course, there are very overlapping themes about entry routes into the field. And trying to find a way to ensure that our professionals are equipped for the challenges that are upcoming, and making sure that they’re ready for a future, but, at the same time, not being exclusionary. Because the diploma then and the Master’s now are only one of many routes that it’s quite expensive and quite inaccessible for certain people. So, based on what you were saying about how, you came in on quite an unconventional way, what do you suggest for people who are looking to get into our field but don’t know where to start?

Anne Thurston (22:26)

[Chuckles] I don’t know where to go with that question. Um, to me, it always came to me as practical experience, and to me, I lived in Kenya for 10 years and worked for the National Archives, and it was just overwhelming to think, how can we find solutions to what they really need. But, I did a world tour, in the early 80s I guess it was, and we went to 30 countries where we looked at their archival holdings and looked at the state of how they managed their records. And it was just so completely obvious that we had to think more deeply about how, um, what they needed. So I guess I was sort of at the same point then as you are now? And to me the discussion, the looking at it, the studying it was what led me into it. And, I just have to put in a plug-

Isabelle Jones

[Chuckles]

Anne Thurston (23:53)

Elizabeth Shepherd. She was the most wonderful partner. We interviewed people from all the major UK universities that taught information and we thought their views on ‘how could we modernise, how could we view, how could we open up?’ Introduced new topics. I don’t think we could’ve done it if we hadn’t gone that way. I’ve always loved the questioning and the talking, and then integrating and opening it up again, and thinking, and talking and questioning again. I don’t think that helps you but that was my path.

Isabelle Jones (24:38)

No, actually, somewhat similarly I kind of got into the field, or became interested in information through actually talking to an archivist. At my first job, I was organising a sort of conference, and I happened to be talking to an archivist at the lunch table and she was telling me, quite casually about her job and the kind of things that she does in the day-to-day. I was just starting to find my way and hearing her talking about her position and what she’s been doing and what she has done was possibly one of the most interesting 10 minutes of my life. [Chuckles] Like, honestly, it was sort of like a dawning moment.

Anne Thurston

Yes!

Isabelle Jones (25:23)

I completely appreciate where you’re coming from about talking to people, and gaining perspective, and sort of… learning. Just learning. And how hearing other people’s views can be incredibly humbling and enlightening.

Anne Thurston (25:39)

Yes, and just going to what we were talking about a little while ago, if the course were to incorporate some kind of dialogue. If you talked to the African universities, you know, you’ve always had people come in, and talk about professional issues and how you’ve approached them. But now that we’ve got Skype and we have different ways of connecting, through conference calls and so on, you could completely facilitate a different dialogue.

Isabelle Jones (26:23)

Yeah, I completely agree. Like we mentioned earlier, with James Lowry, he did a remote lecture over Skype for one of our ‘Concepts’ lectures on displaced archives…

Anne Thurston

Yes.

Isabelle Jones

And I found that really useful. Because, even though he wasn’t physically in the space, there was still and atmosphere and everyone was completely quiet and drawn into what it was said.

Anne Thurston (26:50)

Oh, fantastic!

Isabelle Jones (26:51)

And then, I was maybe naive, it’s never occurred to me to open up that conversation and talk to professionals outside of the UK context. I think, that, I agree that the course would really benefit from an African perspective.

Anne Thurston (27:07)

I think so. I mean, now James is in New York, so, but that is no barrier, you could just as easily involve him. And my other colleague who works on displaced archives, Mandy Banton, her perspective is so valuable, and you could so easily have a conversation every week, in different parts of the world. And I’ve been so privileged to have friends and students from Africa who have such valuable perspectives. One of them, who’s now the Dean of the Faculty of Information Studies at Moi University in Kenya, he, he’s doing the most amazing things. And I think your students would have a real eye opener in, to talk about, he’s actually built an assembly plant for computers. And they’re making sure that every school in Kenya has computers. And, this is a very valuable part of how we begin to communicate in new ways. I mean, I think that this is just information flows are just really about a flow of communication and the records’ contribution to that is how do we capture the record of that communication and protect it so that we can refer to it through time. There’s so much going on in Africa that we could learn from, but also encourage, and, if you think students in England are isolated, the whole African profession is craving that kind of communication.

Isabelle Jones (29:07)

Hmm, again this is kind of an open-ended question, but why do you think that, that level of communication hasn’t occurred before?

Anne Thurston (29:18)

I just think people are thinking in, sort of, those kinds of tighter boxes. They haven’t really been thinking ‘oh we really are part of a global profession that’s got to move forward together’. We cannot have the profession moving forward in England and not moving forward in Kenya. It’s part of the same thing. We are, I think we’re a global community now. And we just haven’t had the tools to do it. So, a couple of years ago, Skype would’ve dropped out continuously if you and I tried to speak, we’ve dropped once but it would’ve happened a lot. Even the telephones couldn’t connect easily. So we’re in such an exciting time now.

Isabelle Jones (30:11)

Yeah, I completely agree. For context, obviously for people who haven’t read our email correspondence, hmm, I think, it kind of makes me chuckle when I think back to our first email when I thought that you lived in London.

Anne Thurston (30:29)

Yes! Yes, but how would you know!

Isabelle Jones (30:30)

I thought ‘oh of course your experience is based in London, and you taught at UCL, so you must be based in London!’

Anne Thurston (30:39)

Of course, I must be in London, but I’m no longer UK based, and I haven’t been for 20 years, but I’ve lived in London about 4 months a year. I haven’t lived there fully for 20 years.

Isabelle Jones (30:56)

Our sort of communication and conversation is a testament to the fact that the quality of communication is great and technology is rapidly expanding.

Anne Thurston (31:08)

Yes. Yes I think so. It’s a very different environment to what we had 10 years ago, 5 years ago. I think to take advantage of it would be a great benefit to the students. Like, I love your story about how you opened your mind so much when you talked to that archivist or when James (Lowry) spoke to your students.

Isabelle Jones (31:34)

Yeah, I completely agree. I think, quite casually, when I talk to the other students from the course we refer to it as a kind of ‘archivist origin story’, about how people have come into the profession and, conversation is quite a common route-

Anne Thurston

Hmm.

Isabelle Jones

So, even though there’s this stereotype of us, sitting in a stuffy basement flicking through records, um we’re quite varied. And I know a lot of archivists are almost advocates for their industry.

Anne Thurston

Yes! Yes they are.

Isabelle Jones (32:20)

Hmm, kind of touching on that, one of the key themes that we’ve been exploring is social justice mandate…

Anne Thurston

Yes.

Isabelle Jones

And the way that a single archivist can kind of push for a social justice mandate within an organisation that may be ‘anti social justice’ or quite rigidly structured. Obviously, you were a massive agent of change during your career, so how do you, hmm, do you have any suggestions for an archivist who wants to make social change but may be intimidated at first?

Anne Thurston (32:52)

I can’t without an example, a concrete example, think how to answer that.

(Overlapping talking)

Isabelle Jones (33:13)

So, maybe, take for instance, if your organisation, if you’re new to it, and you are entering and there’s a rigid culture around records management and people aren’t really receptive to changing their habits, how would you suggest going about making a change?

Anne Thurston (33:33)

Well, I’m probably going off track, but when I set up the [International] Records Management Trust, my sole objective was to explore ‘how could we strengthen the records profession in countries where it was totally overlooked?’ So, if I think of that experience, we developed training materials, we ran seminars and again we exchanged ideas. So my wish, my goal, was always to empower the people with whom I was working. And we did, for many, many years, work across countries. So at least the records person could bring in other country experiences. Or… again, sorry, without a concrete thing to hang it on it I can’t quite get it.

Isabelle Jones (34:39)

Well, then again the concept is massive. It’s something that the modern archivist is really juggling with. In today’s society everyone is kind of an activist. Everybody has a belief, or something they want to move towards.

Anne Thurston (34:59)

I think of Adrian Brown at the House of Lords Record Office. He has had such a massive impact on his organisation, I mean he’s built, he’s communicated with his colleagues, he’s built systems and procedures, and he’s worked internationally to acquire new thoughts and new um approaches. He’s opened things up so much for them, so maybe that’s part of the key for how it can be done. It’d also be interested to hear what James [Lowry] would say about that, how he’s worked in Liverpool, because, I think for him, he was in a fairly narrow environment but he’s worked so far to continue his international work, you know, going in and out of Sudan all the time. Just… I think always the content that’s come in through James has had an impact on the University.

Isabelle Jones (36:22)

I think that you’ve answered the question quite well. We’ve reached kind of got at what I was trying to get at. And, drawing into one of my last questions, I was really interested when I was reading about your experiences with the International Records Management Trust, and you stressed that, or I’ve read that you’ve stressed that, the resources you made available through the Trust should be free-

Anne Thurston

Yes.

Isabelle Jones (37:00)

Obviously, they’re great quality, and you could’ve charged if you wanted to, but, could you speak about the value of having free and available resources?

Anne Thurston (37:10)

Yes, I’m totally committed to that, because we’ve always tried to serve people whom really didn’t have resources. That was part of the buy in, that was part of the problem, they had no resources and it was just a circular problem. They couldn’t expand their ideas and reach out. So getting grants, working together not making a lot of money but still contributing something was really a joy. And this present work that I’m doing on the sustainable development goals, we’re working with the University of London Press and um it allows material to be shared freely but can do print on demand if wanted, and that you would pay for, but you wouldn’t pay to access the material. So I’m totally comfortable with that. And I think our colleagues internationally are so generous, it’s such a good collaborative community, and quite often we can pull together in different ways. And I really thank you for picking up on that. For me that’s really fundamental. We shouldn’t be charging our professional communities, I don’t think.

Isabelle Jones (38:45)

Yeah, I think in a way we should reward people who want to take the opportunity to learn. It would effectively hinder our own progression if we were to charge for those resources.

Anne Thurston (38:59)

I think so. I think so. It’s just a totally different feel to it when it’s commercial. I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for that. But just, for me, personally my heart has always said you give it freely.

Isabelle Jones (39:17)

Yeah I think there’s a phrase I heard recently for the first time, which is ‘pulling the ladder back up after you’ve climbed up’. And I think that charging for those kinds of resources would fit in that, for me. I think that, for myself personally I’m only at the beginning of my career and I sort of dream about what I want to achieve… but one of the values that I’ve learnt from the course so far is that, I feel like one of my personal values is that, I want to help people. So I’m inspired by the fact that you made those resources free.

Anne Thurston (40:00)

Well, that’s wonderful to hear you say that. I just can’t imagine any other motivation. Which is why I called it (the International Records Management Trust) a ‘Trust’, because it was a trust between me and the professionals of Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia.

Isabelle Jones (40:22)

Yeah. I never thought about it from that perspective but that’s a really fitting name for it.

Anne Thurston (40:29)

It always felt right to me.

Isabelle Jones (40:32)

Hmm, because what I was saying, in the course we always really stress, those concepts of authenticity, integrity and trust, trust comes up a lot.

Anne Thurston (40:45)

It does! It does.

Isabelle Jones (40:46)

Like, someone mentions trust at least once a week, and it’s because it’s so important, especially in a world where information is readily available but not always reliable.

Anne Thurston (40:58)

Exactly! That is why I think the records profession is absolutely crucial to any international development. Because we have to be able to demonstrate that the evidence that we present is trustworthy.

Isabelle Jones (41:18)

I think that that’s, kind of, it covered all of the topics that I wanted to talk about.

Anne Thurston (41:27)

Oh good.

Isabelle Jones (41:28)

Just a last sort of very casual note, hmm your book, when are you aiming to release content?

Anne Thurston (41:38)

Oh, I think I’m in a queue for the University of London Press. Everything is ready to go to them. I think they’ve just got a lot on their plate. They’ve always talked about June, but the reality is it may be that it wouldn’t be released till September?

Isabelle Jones (42:00)

Great! Honestly, I can’t wait to read it.

Anne Thurston (42:04)

Oh thank you! It’s been so much fun working on it, and Elizabeth and Julie have really made a wonderful contribution. And James has, and all the people we’ve been talking about.

Isabelle Jones (42:24)

I’m really looking forward to hearing more about we’ve been talking about today, and Open Source Data.

Anne Thurston (42:31)

Thank you. I’ve been very stimulated by your questions, and how the course could be expanded to bring in an international perspective, and if that could be done I think it would play a unique role internationally. I mean, Julie McCloud has been able to stimulate so much international exchange and it’d be great to interview her. It would just broaden the perspective of the profession in a wonderful way.

Isabelle Jones (43:16)

I think, especially within the context of this project and this exhibition and this centenary, I think it’s almost an exciting thing that we still have far to go and there are places that we can expand into.

Anne Thurston (43:30)

Yes, absolutely! And what, would you, I couldn’t quite, probably I didn’t pay enough attention, but would your objective be to play sound clips or just to have quotes in the exhibition or how would you envisage?

Isabelle Jones (43:49)

I believe that the Curator is aiming on releasing parts of the interviews or the interviews in their entirety, but there is going to be a mixture of a physical exhibition and the interviews, which will go into a collection I think and stored for future use, but sound clips will definitely be present.

Anne Thurston (44:10)

That would be wonderful, yeah. I mean, what a massive transcription job you would have. Or your team would have.

Isabelle Jones (44:20)

Yeah I think that it definitely takes a village, but the people who have organised these exhibition and facilitated these conversations have done really well. I mean this is my first ever interview.

Anne Thurston (44:36)

Oh wow! Well, you’ve done brilliantly!

Isabelle Jones (44:38)

Thank you! And it’s my first experience as an oral history volunteer, and the training was great.

Anne Thurston (44:52)

It was.

Isabelle Jones (44:53)

And honestly I feel very lucky to be a part of this.

Anne Thurston (44:56)

I think so too. And that’s what I mean about such a good strong community that we have, that it can exchange and cooperate and collaborate. And that’s something the International Council on Archives has done so much to facilitate.

Isabelle Jones (45:15)

Yeah, I think that with the kinds of people we have in our profession there’s only ways that we can improve, you know, we have the motivated workforce but we just need to find the direction.

Anne Thurston (45:30)

Yes. And when will the exhibition be?

Isabelle Jones (45:35)

Well, obviously the interviews are taking place this week in March 2020 but I think the exhibition itself is going to take place in the summer, this year.

Anne Thurston (45:55)

Ok. Well, if there’s anything I can do to help just let me know and my other request is please give Elizabeth lots of love from me.

Isabelle Jones (46:08)

Of course, yes. So thank you for talking with me.

Francis Aziza (00.00.02)

My name is Francis Aziza, I am a student at Library Information Studies from UCL.

And I’m doing this oral history interview with Lynn Coleman, on Thursday, 12th of March 2020, via Skype. So please, can I get your consent about this interview?

Lynn Coleman (00.00.31)

Yes, certainly, Francis, I consent to being interviewed for the Centenary project.

Francis Aziza (00.00.40)

Thank you. Okay. So as we begin, please could you tell me about yourself and any information, which you feel may be relevant for this interview?

Lynn Coleman (00.00.55)

All right. When I read the newsletter about this Centenary Exhibition, I thought I’d get in touch, because I have had a long association with the department since 1992, and during the period of 1995 to 1996, I was a full time mature aged student undertaking the Master of Science degree in computerized information systems and I graduated in 1997.  So I thought there may have been some of my experiences, some of the contacts and relationships that I had with people in the department that may have been of interest to the project.

Francis Aziza (00.01.42)

Okay, thank you. So let’s move on to your studies at UCL. You studied quite a long time back. Can you tell me what the focus of your studies was and what motivated you to pursue an MSc in Information Systems?

Lynn Coleman (00.02.03)

Well, I’ll probably start the other way, my motivation was at that time, pre-1995 was the infiltration of the digital age in the workplace and I believe that I needed to be in the forefront of that in order to do my job as a professional records manager. At that point, I could see that my role would be as a liaison between the IT department and the business concerning records management issues. And as I had an arts degree, I felt that I needed a Science degree in computerized Information Systems that would give me greater credibility mainly with the IT staff that perhaps I would need to be dealing with, perhaps rather than an MA in Archives and Records Management that was also on offer by the department at that time. So that was why I went for a science degree rather than another arts degree, and so the focus of my studies then, which essentially was my thesis, was an information needs analysis for the International Records Management Trust, which was the organization that I was working with just prior to studying full time at UCL. And as a result of that analysis I recommended any Information Systems Development Strategy for the Trust.

Francis Aziza (00.03.39)

Okay. So, like I said earlier, your study at UCL was quite a long while ago, but do you still remember anything about your time at UCL?

Lynn Coleman (00.03.54)

Ah, yes, somehow it’s seeded into my memory. Certainly what I can remember was, because it was over the course of the year, it was quite relentless in terms of having to produce what would sort of major pieces of work, which we were doing every couple of weeks, culminating in writing the thesis. Now, I had never written a thesis before, so it was quite a new experience for me. The other thing I remember is having to book time to use computer labs, which probably would have been okay if I was on campus, just need to lead there first thing in the morning, sort of thing, or whatever. But I lived halfway to Cambridge and so I had to commute on by train 35 miles into campus. So you know, getting there, then have time at the labs, and so on, and of course, the labs were not 24/7, they had a limited time. And so you compete with every other student to get onto the computers and, and some of them would have been just doing their work using the computer because they hadn’t hand in a typewritten essay, rather than a handwritten one. Yes I had to do that too, but along with them, everyone else on the course, because it was a computer based course, we needed to use of computers for that sort of work, so that was quite difficult. Fortunately, I ended up being able to having a computer at home and also an internet connection and so that made it much easier for me. But if I didn’t have that, it would have been quite difficult. Hum, yeah, so that was sort of the main thing that I remember, having to get major pieces of work in, and once you’ve done one, you will then sort of be moving on to the next one to get that delivered and having to commute in. Whereas when I did my Arts degree in Australia, I lived on campus, it was just so much easier.

Francis Aziza (00.06.10)

Ok, one thing is the number of pieces of work that you have to submit, that number has not reduced. So we have a lot of that right now. Computers are more available right now, so good thing for us. But I can imagine how it must have been quite difficult for you then.

Lynn Coleman (00.06.32)

Yes, because, do you live near campus?

Francis Aziza (00.06.35)

No, I live quite far away, but walking distance far away, walking distance but still…

Lynn Coleman (00.06.42)

But not 35 miles.

Francis Aziza (00.06.45)

Not 35 miles, most definitely not.

Lynn Coleman (00.06.47)

Well, I wish you good luck submitting your work.

Francis Aziza (00.06.52)

So what significant changes and events and moments occurred while you studied there, anything of note that you remember?

Lynn Coleman (00.07.03)

There were a couple of things. Well, the first major thing was the World Wide Web, because I think it was only in recent times that academic institutions were given access to the web. I don’t believe we had it prior to that. No we didn’t at the Trust, everything was based on paper, paper directories, and things like that or it was telephone calls. I think there was email, yes there would have been email, but certainly not access to instant knowledge and information via the Internet that we have today. Also, I remember meeting the late Ia Mcllwaine, when she first became director of what was then SLAIS, the School of Library Archives and Information Studies, which is now the Department of Information Studies. The possibility of distance learning for Archives and Records Management education, because up until that point the main way to receive that education was by going to a university or an educational or training institution. So you physically had to go to that space rather than that information come to you, wherever you were located. And I suppose this ties in with the theme of this project, which is about geographies of information, about where that information is located, and the uses of that information and people who provide the content of any information. I also remember UCL was starting to focus ahead more of an outward looking view and started to focus on its global ratings. I think around that time, they started to do quite a considerate funding drive, in order to place itself in a more preeminent position in terms of research funding and research results and reputation, which of course, has done exceedingly well. And also the amount of construction that was going on in campus, I think there was a new medical building or something that was being built and as you know, the building is on campus, because the campus is quite old. There was all this scaffolding and that you sort of had to duck and dive in order to get to the classes. So these are some of the memories that I have, during that year or so that I was there at UCL.

Francis Aziza (00.10.06)

Okay. So, based on all the memories, I noticed many of them, even though a number of them would have faded away by now but can you remember the best memory and probably the worst memory you had of studying at UCL?

Lynn Coleman (00.10.25)

Well, I’ll start with the worst, which was, like I mentioned was the limited access to computer labs, you know, that was, it was just so, it could have been quite stressful. And then, of course, the best was the actual graduation ceremony. And finally, finally I got it. And I did that. And of course, the people, you know, who I worked with, and met along the way. Some of those people I’m still in contact with and have very strong and close friendships with to this time.

Francis Aziza (00.11.05)

Okay, so can you tell me about some of these people, some of these personal and intellectual relationships that you developed while you were at UCL?

Lynn Coleman (00.11.16)

I’m sorry did you say personal and intellectual relationships? Okay, yes. Well, the first person whom I came in contact with was Dr. Anne Thurston. And this was before I went to study, during 1992 to 1995, I worked at the what was called the Overseas Records Management Trust, it was in the International Records Management Trust, which Anne had set up a couple of years before. Anne was then a lecturer in the department on the Overseas Archives and Records Management program. And what the Trust did was it utilized graduates of the overseas program to introduce improved archival and records management programs and practices in countries. So if they came from the Gambia, or Ghana, or Uganda, if they came to UCL to study, they then went back, of course, to their governments, these civil service positions, and so by utilizing those graduates she was able to use the Overseas Development Agency Aid funding to put together programs to improve the systems within those governments. So it was through working with her and coming in contact with those students, and also the programs we ran in those countries, was how I became aware of the department and then I decided that I want to do study myself.

Lynn Coleman (00.13.20)

Hum, intellectually, along with a team of lots of other people we insisted to develop various programs in those developing countries or developing Commonwealth countries. And as a short-term consultant, and as an author of the training module of her Managing Public Records study program, that was how I engaged with her at that level. Anne was subsequently awarded an OBE for her contributions to the Commonwealth and that was deservedly so, she was passionate about her work, and about improving the lives of the citizens within those countries. And also working at the Trust enabled me to meet the leading proponents of the Archives and Records Management global community, you know, people like Michael Paul Hawken, Michael Grover, Rick Berry, David Beeman, Christina Dern, because they would come to the Trust offices for meetings from time to time, so we were able to meet those people and work with him, like I did some work with them, with Barry, in Uganda for example. Elizabeth Shepard, I first met Elizabeth, it was in about 1992. She was a consultant with the Trust, and that was before she got her PhD, I think. While I was a student, she invited me to become a part time research assistant on a distance learning project that she was leading at the time, and I also helped co-arrange the Society of Archivists annual conference at UCL, and to lecture part time in Records Management, the UCL undergraduate information management students and UCL and City University postgraduate librarian students for a semester. Intellectually, I needed to research the distance learning courses in Archives and Records Management offered by the universities worldwide and capturing this information into a database that I needed to construct. And using my studies I then constructed, what I believe would be the first web pages for the department as a gateway to the research project using HTML.

Lynn Coleman (00.15.55)

Hum, Geoffrey Yeo. Initially, Jeffrey was a consultant with the Trust, but then I later collaborated with him in his role as a series editor and two other co-editors to bring a book to publication called Managing Records in Global Financial Markets Ensuring Compliance and Mitigating Risk. Hum, I also came in contact with a couple of doctoral students, Vicki Lemieux, and Laura Miller before they got their PhDs. We worked on various Trust projects. Yes, so they’re in terms of professional and intellectual relationships, they’re the ones, the main ones that I had with people from the department.

Francis Aziza (00.16.54)

OK, are there any others that you would like to mention?

Lynn Coleman (00.16.59)

Suddenly, I had a personal relationship with Hella Jean Bartolo-Winston. Hella was just vivacious; she’d walk into a room and she’d just light it up with her enthusiasm, and her personality. Hella came to the department, I think about 1992, when she came to undertake her MA from the Central Bank in Malta, where she used to work. And I first met her when Anne had asked me to conduct keyboarding classes for overseas MA students before they started their first semester. Considering that all the coursework had to be submitted in type written format, and most students probably didn’t know have the time, so I was to give them a bit of a starter on how to negotiate a keyboard. Now, Hella had already authored several books of fiction, so she didn’t really need to come to the class, but she came along anyway, and we struck up a strong friendship. I used to meet up with her whenever she came to London. She was President of the Friends of the National Archives of Malta. She was a founding member of that group, and she also did a lot of work internationally with ARMA International, which is a US based Archives Records Management Membership group. But sadly, Hella passed away in 2004, and Charles Farrugia, who’s the national Archivist of Malta, produced a book of essays in 2008 in memory of Hella and to who work locally and internationally to promote archival education, and it was called Guardian to Memory. So a fabulous relationship with Hella, unfortunately cut short.

Francis Aziza (00.19.08)

Okay, I’m really sorry about that.

Lynn Coleman (00.19.11)

Sorry?

Francis Aziza (00.19.12)

I’m really sorry about the loss of Hella.

Lynn Coleman (00.19.15)

Yes, Hella, she was… you could ask anyone who knew Hella, and you know, they would all say the same as soon as you’ve mentioned her name, you know, everyone’s faces light up with the memory of her, of being with her, and her passion for archival education.

Francis Aziza (00.19.33)

So looking back at your time at UCL, what would you say were the highlight of your studies and achievements?

Lynn Coleman (00.19.41)

Study highlights certainly connecting to what was a fledgling World Wide Web, this whole concept that instead of having to go and run around, purchase hardcopy directories, you could just go on and you could put in search terms into this, onto the screen and come up with information from a huge variety of sources from around the world. Of course, it was nothing as like or as responsive, as fast as what it is today, what we enjoy today, it certainly it was an amazing concept, then going from analog to digital environment. Learning about how software, one of the things that we had to do for the coursework was to do some programming, computer programming, where I had, we had to develop a, I think it was called a Notepack. It was an online catalogue. Yes, so instead of going into a library and going to the boxes and drawers to look up a book or whatever was there, it was the electronic version of that. And so you had to be able to make sure you go onto a homepage very much like you do now, onto a homepage, but then be able to link to various bits and pieces, even about what was available in the catalogue and so on. That’s one thing I find now with, I’m a member of the Brisbane library, and they have software package they call Overdrive. And what I do now I don’t buy books to read, I just go onto the live, using the library app, and you know, can search for what’s there, I can find out, I can add books to a wish list, I can go and I can see if something’s available to borrow, which I do I download it, I can determine how long I want to keep it for, my 21 days, when its time comes up, its due date comes up it expires, then I delete it or I can return it to the library earlier than beforehand. I can place holds on books, I can recommend publications for purchase, and that’s all done electronically, it’s fabulous. Especially with me traveling, I don’t have to carry big books with me anymore. I can just take my phone and it is all there.

Francis Aziza (00.22.36)

Okay, so even though you studied quite a while ago, are there any changes you would have liked to make then, about your program and your study?

Lynn Coleman (00.22.48)

Yes, back then. Yes, certainly at that time, again, priority, giving priority to computing students’ access to the labs in order to complete the computing assignments, or having the computing labs dedicated to department students. Because back then, computers were expensive, and you couldn’t necessarily afford it to have one yourself. And there were no laptops around then or tablets. So you had to have like, you know, a big screen. And they were the chunky screens you know, with the deep back on them, they were not like these slim line screens that we have now. And you had a tower and then you had to have an Internet connection. And they were sort of done with, like those acoustic couplers that took ages, you know, had that funny pinging noise and took ages to connect. And I think back then I might have had an AOL account and it just took forever to do anything. And so back then it was for the students to get access to equipment. So that would have been helpful. Hum, I think more thorough discussions and regular contact between the supervisor and the student concerning a thesis topic, progress, because I was a Records Manager doing essentially a Library Degree, I was having difficulty to try and work out what I was going to do for my thesis, because I knew the world of records management and I was learning about the world of librarianship and in order to produce a thesis which, you know, I had to do in order to be awarded my degree, it was quite difficult for me to work out what was I needed to do. And also again, being off campus, getting in and having time to talk to my supervisors about what I needed to do, and have been able to contact that person more regularly. I suppose I’m used to project management, or working on projects, and on those you always have a point where you are in contact with, either the project manager if a coordinator, or as a project manager with your client and saying, this is what’s going on, or this has come up, or how do you want to handle this? This is progress that I’m making. I think, if I had that framework, it would have made it a lot easier for me to have done my thesis, because sometimes there I struggled a bit to work out, where do I start? And what I ended up finding was that I had to start what was around chapter four, before I could write chapter one. So it wasn’t a linear thing, I had to jump in and do obviously do all my data gathering first, once I determined how and what I was going to do, which was this analysis of information needs. And what I ended up using was a technique that I learned when I worked for BP Oil. Elizabeth Parker, who was a leading proponent of records management in the UK, she taught me a functional analysis technique, which is actually a technique used by computer systems analysts. So I used that technique on the records of the Trust and the information of the Trust. And then once I put that in place, then I could write the thesis and then come up with a recommendation as to how to go forward with their information system, computerized information systems in the future, because up until that point, essentially, most of the records were hardcopy, and we were starting to, we had a computer mainly used as a word processor at that point to produce all our reports for the ODA and the training materials that we then put together for the Managing Public Sectors study program. So for me, that would have been helpful back then. Although the Master’s program was entitled Management, an MSc in Computerized Information Systems, the course material was totally dedicated to librarians, with the exception of one lecture we had on Geographic Information Systems, which was a special interest to one of the lecturers at the time. I was the only records manager on the course, and at no time, did I really feel that my interests were accommodated, except when writing my thesis, because my thesis was a records management view of the organization. So I was wondering whether, perhaps more input could have come from the MA program, or contact with the MA program, by the MSc staff, so that a records manager doing the Master Science program could work on more relevant exercises. I don’t know, it’s difficult because all the exercises were already put in place and it meant that I needed to join in on those exercises, and because some of them, a number of them, were group exercises. So you know, you had to have an input to what was going on. But having said that, it meant that I learned about the live librarian world, which I wouldn’t have otherwise had an opportunity to do. So it gave me a greater appreciation for how librarians organized information and knowledge, versus how records managers organize records.

Francis Aziza (00.29.20)

So that was quite a very detailed discussion on the highlights of your studies. I guess by now things might have changed a bit in terms of how the curriculum is structured and the interest of archives and records are much better taken care of.

Lynn Coleman (00.29.47)

Yes, I hope so. I suppose, yeah, in hindsight I should have enrolled in the MA because it specifically was for archivists and records managers. But at the time as I understood it, only a small segment of the degree was dedicated to computerized archives records management systems. Whereas I felt that I needed to understand the whole computing area as thoroughly as I could, in order to have an intelligent conversation with IT staff who I would be dealing with, and that was why I decided at the end to go with the Master of Science degree for that reason.

Francis Aziza (0030.32)

All right, so at this point let’s go through your life after UCL. So when you left UCL, did you further your studies, and if you did, what might have motivated you in that direction.

Lynn Coleman (00.30.50)

I would have liked to have done a PhD. But by this point I was probably mid-career. And I think if you’re going to do a PhD, you might have to do it earlier in your career to get the full value out of it. So no formal studies, because I returned to the workforce. But I continued, I never stopped learning, and I continued with other trainings or other professional vocational and competency based training. And, you know, completing units offered by various organizations. For example ARMA, which is the American Records Management Association, they have an excellent array of information that you can access once you become a member, in terms of journals, and articles and training modules and things like that. So I completed quite a few of those. And I said, if needed, as a work requirement, I needed to become a Six Sigma Green Belt. Six Sigma has to do with business processes. So I was working in the second investment bank in London, it was a requirement of the records management staff there, which was a records manager and to regional records managers. We needed to go through that and that was quite intensive, in order to get that done and learning about various records management systems is over time, things like Objective, and Trim, SharePoint and so on. So I was always learning and I needed to do this in order to improve my knowledge and skills in various fields, including management training as well. It’s part of my job requirements and career progression.

Francis Aziza (00.32.58)

Okay. After your studies how difficult or easy was it to get a job in your field?

Lynn Coleman (00.33.08)

Due to personal circumstances, I continued working in several parts of Records Management related roles during 1997. To be with TFPL, which was a specialist Information Management recruitment agency, in November 97. I’m happy to say I was immediately engaged by a leading High Street retail bank to undertake a three months records management contract with them. And then after that, I was offered permanent employment with the bank’s Records Management Project unit. And that unit comprised of Project Manager consultants, and I was one of those consultants. And I worked there for the next six years.

Francis Aziza (00.33.51)

All right. So with all of the work experience, and not all of it is particularly from the course you studied, I wonder whether there are some key transferable skills which you may have picked up that may have helped you in some of the positions you assumed which were not directly related to your course of study.

Lynn Coleman (00.34.21)

Yes, well even studying you had to have time management skills. Yeah, certainly time management skills have definitely played a factor in every job I’ve done. Also project management skills. Mainly because as soon as I graduated, I was working on a project unit, so everything was projects. So I’ve always applied project management skills throughout everything that I’ve done, either working on projects or managing projects. I’m just thinking with other things, when in my last position I was a corporate archivist with E Services Australia that runs the air traffic controllers of major airports, other airports in Australia, and also the firefighting units that are stationed at all the airports. Now E Services Australia is a federal government agency, so its records are public records and come under the jurisdiction of the National Archives of Australia. So most of my career since graduating from UCL was in retail or investment banking, and in a commercial records management, or records management in a commercial environment, but now I was dealing with a public service or civil service position, reporting to a National Archives. So fortunately, while working in banking, in order to produce some of the work that I needed to, I turned, I often turned to work and information that was available online from National Archives, either the National Archives in the US, or in Australia to help me. So, I was able to apply that information I already had, and knowledge of what they offered, what information they provided to the work that I then needed to do for Air Services. Every day, we have to deal with information, so it’s any skills that I’ve learned at, that I acquired over the years is applicable to anything. Like for example, I’ve now retired and my husband and I travel, and we write a travel blog. And that’s essentially a private travel diary for us, so we know where we went and what we did and the photos we’ve taken. So I still apply that knowledge, what we do with that. Fortunately we use WordPress as our blog software and already WordPress organizes our tags of information into countries and cities, and sets up an archive, a monthly archive, so I don’t need to do anything. The software does it all for me, which is great.

Francis Aziza (00.37.56)

All right. So from your profile, it appears you’ve worked in a variety of roles in different places over the years. And from what you just told me, it looks like you’ve been in a number of very exciting and quite challenging roles. So could you tell us which were the most exciting and the most challenging roles you had?

Lynn Coleman (00.38:24)

I think the most exciting and certainly the most satisfying, was working with the Trust, working in Eastern West Africa. And what I found exciting about it was that I was exposed to totally different cultures and landscapes and technologies. I was, as a consultant I was advising and training civil service staff to implement sound record keeping systems and practices in order to provide better public accountability, transparency and governance for their governments. And this ultimately transformed the government’s ability to provide basic rights and benefits to their citizens. Hum, the most challenging, I think was working for the investment banks, because it was all about constant pressure. You know, every day there were high expectations, there was pressure to perform, and there was always, always about costs and cost containment. Certainly when I worked at Lehman Brothers, I was the only employee totally dedicated to records management. And so I had to cover a water basis with that, oversea records manager for Europe with them. So it was just me! I didn’t have any staff, what I did have was access to off site storage. But what I did with that, we just dealt with the offsite storage provider, and with the facilities staff on site, so they would arrange for the boxes of records to go down to the loading bay, a man would come and pick them up and take them away, but the rest of the records management fell on my shoulders. The main thing was… So besides that, it was when things went wrong, that you had to deal with them, as well as your day job. So that’s what I always found very challenging with investment banking.

Francis Aziza (00.40.41)

Okay, you mentioned that you worked in with the Trust in East and West Africa. And coming from Nigeria, Africa is very close to my heart. So I’m interested in your work in these parts of East and West Africa. Based on your experiences, what would you say has been an influence of archival systems developed in the global west on these archival systems in these places, East and West Africa?

Lynn Coleman (00.41.17)

Yes, with Gambia, Ghana and Uganda, and certainly at that time, it was already… they already had systems in place because they were former British colonies, and so when the Brits were there, they put in place their systems, and essentially the registry system that, you know, is used in the civil service in the UK today. And what I understand is, when each country gained its independence, the Brits left but didn’t leave any instructions as to how to operate the system nor why it was in place, because it was the Brits who had the jobs in the registries and so on, you know, not the local population. And so, for example, when I was looking at one registry, some registry files in Ghana, I saw there was a notation made by an action officer to the registry, and that notation said KIV, and I was totally unfamiliar with what KIV was, so I asked one of the file clerks and he said to me “Madam Lynn, he said, it means Keep In View”. And this meant that rather than put the file back on the shelf in the registry in its correct location, where it is easily found, with the use of finding aids, it was instead stacked on a table top, which this table was just inside the door of the registry. And what was there was a whole lot of other files, other action officers had put in, had put KIV on the file. And so there were hundreds of these file folders, files that were in stacks on the table and falling over. And of course, if you tried to find a file in a hurry, it’s much easier to go to the location, instead of being able to locate that file quickly, whether it’s on the shelf, or you know who would have this, the poor file clerk would have to go through all these files on the table top that would be just no order whatsoever, probably just stay put on top whenever it came back. So this is what the registry staff had to deal with. And when we arrived, this is what we found. So what we’re able to do then was to, by using consultants who essentially were senior records officers within the UK civil service, they volunteered their time most of the time to go and do this work for the Trust within these countries. And then we focused on things like finance, HR, legal, police, medical, getting them into place. We focused on hardcopy records first and then translated into electronic copies. But when I was doing the work with the Trust, it was essentially the hardcopy records that we were dealing with then. And what we found was its records may have never been created, because those countries didn’t traditionally have a recorded history, they had an oral history. So people’s date of birth was never known and never recorded, and certainly for civil servants, that you had to know someone’s date of birth to provide a whole range of health benefits or pensions or things like that. So slowly by making sure that these records were in fact created and captured, citizens within the countries were being given benefits, or basic human rights essentially, that they didn’t have before. Also at the time, there was already an archival system in place in Ghana. It had a National Archive and a national archivist. But we found that the debt department was underfunded and staff lacked appropriate training and equipment. And by introducing a package of measures, the Trust was able to get these government’s record keeping systems up and running, and to make them become sustainable. This package included things like an Archives Act and for Ghana that was drafted by the keeper of public records Michael Robber. We put in place a staffing structure and training for the National Archives, and work placements between archive staff with records management staff and vice versa. We also put in place “train the trainer” type of programs, where archivists and records managers already trained by UCL, who then trained trainers with their own departments. And they then trained trainers in the Gambia and Uganda, for example, whereby the reliance on external players like Trust consultants could diminish and then the Africans were able and were qualified to be able to train themselves and others in a self sustaining way, which is very much the way that Anne wanted to work, it was to bring the systems up to speed. And then within each country, the staff and the governments could manage their own records going forward.

Francis Aziza (00.47.11)

And you worked in those parts of Africa for how long?

Lynn Coleman (00.47.16)

Africa, they were only short term consultancies, so you would go for like, one week or two weeks at a time and depending on the funding and what we were up to with those countries, you might go out there several times a year, you might go out once a year, or you may only go once. But while I worked at the Trust, that was between 1992 and 1995, I went to the Gambia several times, I went to Ghana several times, and I went to Uganda just once.

Francis Aziza (00.48.01)

Okay, because it was quite, hum very interesting in the detailed discussion on a lot of things that you saw in different parts of Africa.

Lynn Coleman (00.48.14)

Yes, I really, really enjoyed my time there, especially and particularly with Uganda, because they just come out of this horrible, horrible Civil War, and when I went there on my own for two weeks, normally we will go out with, say at least two consultants, like in Ghana, for example, I went with Colin Crooks for a couple of weeks to do some work there. And this time I was on my own and so the first week I needed to, I had to do a review of the registry systems there. And, you know, we always wrote up our report, which we submitted to the DODA. So they knew what was going on and what needed to be done and making sure that we were spending the amount of money wisely and correctly and so on. And it was so good that when I went there, this records management staff there, were just so happy to see me. “Oh wonderful, it’s so good to see you! You know, we want to learn how to do these things”. And you know, they were so attentive, you know, they learnt very quickly and they were excellent, they were such a joy to work with. That was why I spent my time working in the Trust doing that, helping people to help themselves, was just so fulfilling. I just loved it.

Francis Aziza (00.49.47)

Can you tell me some of the professional bodies you have belonged to and how they have influenced you or helped you in your career?

Lynn Coleman (00.49.58)

Over the years I belonged to sort of the usual raft of professional bodies that were in existence at those times. And since then, most of the ones that I belong to have either disappeared, or they’ve merged with others under a new name. At the time, certainly in the 1990s, I was a member of the Records Management Society, the Society of Archivists, the Library Association, the Institute of Information Scientists and I think certainly the Institute… the Library Association. They merged and I think they now come under the banner of CILIP, I think. I also was a member of Aslib and they had a Knowledge and Information Management Network that I belonged to. And I also was a member of the USA based ARMA International. The most influential for me were the last two. Aslib network was run by a team of seasoned information professionals, and they were mostly librarians. It was the combined years of experience, their knowledge and passion, and thirst for knowledge that inspired me. As a younger member, both in age and experience, the topics that we discussed, the guest speakers that they engaged, were always timely topics. And those sessions engaged everyone in terms of debates and discussion. And that group, led by those people, had an energy and drive to further their knowledge of the management of information and to contribute to that body of knowledge. I really enjoyed my time there, I always looked forward to going to those meetings and being involved in it and participating and learning about, from them. In fact, one of the pieces of work I had to do for my coursework was to design a relational database. And what I chose to do was to put together a database that could be used by that group, on a piece of work that they were doing, and so that was great, because I had to interview some of those people and say, “Okay, you know what do you want to get out of this?” and so on. And with that, then put together that database for them. Because the things I like to do is, rather than just do a piece of work just for the sake of doing it, and tick the box and hand it in, sort of thing, is I like to know that what I’m producing is of practical use to someone, that if I’m going to spend the time and effort to do something, that someone can actually get a benefit from it. And so I was really pleased to be able to do that piece of work for them.

Lynn Coleman (00.53.00)

The other one was the membership of ARMA. Like I mentioned, it has always been great value to be a member of ARMA, because you have access, online access to training modules and credentials, publications, you can go to annual conferences that have great excellent guest speakers, and they’re held in various cities across the USA. I was also approached by ARMA International when they were trying to determine whether there was a demand for a European group comprised of various country chapters. And although I really didn’t have the time to pursue this at the time, I realized that if I didn’t take it on, no one else was going to and an opportunity would be lost. Because I believe that there was a gap in the offerings of the UK and European professional membership organizations that existed at the time, that ARMA could potentially fill. And after putting some structures in place with like-minded individuals like Michael Marsh, ARMA Europe was on the way to becoming established, and I handed over the reins. So to my knowledge, ARMA Europe is alive and well and flourishing. I checked the other day, and it has 1600 members on LinkedIn. So I’m really pleased that I was able to be at the forefront of that and to introduce something that obviously had a demand for and is continuing to until today.

Francis Aziza (00.54.31)

Okay, so just maybe the last thing about your professional experience. It has been said that theory has no role in records management, that records management is purely a practical field. So what is your view on this?

Lynn Coleman (00.55.03)

Okay, although records management can be a highly practical and logistical field, I disagree with that. Throughout my career, I’ve always relied on frameworks and models to make sense of things. The Lifecycle Management and Records Continuing models gave me a context in which to work and in order to understand where records that we were discussing, where they fit in the scheme of things. And then once I understood that, once I understood what practical means were required to manage their records, so we needed both the theory and the practical side. I couldn’t work in a records management environment that was purely practical with no theoretical context. As an example, I could decide to arrange all records of the business alphabetically by subject. That seems to be a practical plan. But business records need to be arranged by function activity and transaction, as a business record only comes into being as a result of a transaction, and is evidence of that transaction. This way, business records can be classified, grouped together, and relevant retention periods applied according to their administrative, regulatory, legal, historic, archival or other value. Without understanding the context and purpose of business records, as described in a theoretical model that represents the world, I could end up creating what appears to be a practical solution, but in the end, is totally inappropriate and totally impractical. I also found that frameworks were useful as training tools to help students understand concepts and how they fit together, and then how to practically apply the theory to practice such as creating strategies and policies, processes and procedures that fit together for managing records.

Francis Aziza (00.57.08)

Okay, so at the beginning, you had told me about some of your involvement with the department after your graduation. So I would like to find out from you about your research and publications.

Lynn Coleman (00.57.30)

Yes. Well, I only have one publication to my name. And it happened a long time after I left, it didn’t happen and wasn’t published until 2011. And it wasn’t mine alone, I was fortunate to work with a number of outstanding people on a publication. And we were all co-editors with that. And the people involved were Geoffrey Yeo, who is a research associate with the department. But he’s also the series editor with Facet publishing, for its Principles and Practice in Records Management in the Archive Series and the book that we produced is part of that series. As I mentioned, the book is entitled Managing Records in Global Financial Markets Ensuring Compliance and Mitigating Risk. And it was published in London in 2011. I believe it was Rod Stone, who was the records manager with Royal Bank of Scotland, he and Geoffrey used to meet up from time to time and they had this discussion and I think it was Rod who believed that there was a need for, there was a gap in the records management literature about specifically about this sector of financial records in a financial environment, and the records in that environment. And so they met up with Vicky Lemieux and I and suggested that there was a gap in the market, and was there a book there, and if so, were we going to do something about it? And so we did and I think it was about in 2008, when we decided to do that. Vicky, Rod and I were working in banking and in records, and Geoffrey, of course, was involved in records. He had already produced at least one publication and since then, certainly another, was involved in the department at UCL. And so between the four of us, we decided that there was a gap in records management literature about the specific and complex challenges of the financial sector. And we also explored current regulatory, legal and governance issues associated with managing records in global financial markets, and thereby, because these financial institutions operate across borders and jurisdictions. And so we intended that the book was not only for records managers and archivists and information professionals, who manage records in the financial sector but also representatives from other disciplines who rely on records to meet legal and regulatory obligations, such as compliance professionals, data protection officers, IT specialists, risk and senior managers. And so an information governance perspective rather than a system design perspective. And that’s due to the amount of legislative and regulatory provisions that global financial institutions need to comply with in the different jurisdictions in which they operate. We decided that the book needed to be structured in four parts, including, sorry, in addition to an introduction. So the introduction set out the scene about the background and concepts, about various types of banking that are out there. Then it had a regulatory and legal compliance section, a section about balancing risk and return, one on litigation related issues and finally, record keeping approaches to address these issues. And in all, there were 15 chapters within those sections and to ensure a global perspective, the geographical regions and authors represented in the book are the UK, Europe, Asia, USA and Australia.

Francis Aziza (01:02:11)

It sounds like a very good read, which I hope I’ll be able to pick up before I leave UCL.

Lynn Coleman (01:02:20)

Well, it’s good in that, if you work in an industry that’s strongly regulated like pharmaceuticals, for example, it’s the same sort of issues they’re involved in. Certainly, from my experience at Lehman, fortunately I left Lehman six months before they went under, but one of the chapters that I made sure was in the book was about if you have divestitures, if you merge, if you have acquisitions, what a records manager has to make sure happens when those things arise, because there’s so many things that you have to bring together, and make sure merge and work together really well, otherwise you end up with huge gaps. John Ramsey was the author who wrote that. I certainly really enjoyed being involved in it, I commissioned a number of the authors for that book, and just the whole discussion we had about, what are the things that we need to bring to this, we are highlighting what’s going on in the industry, and then the challenge that we face as records managers in dealing with this. It certainly wasn’t a book about new concepts or theories about managing records, it was like, “Okay, this is the nitty-gritty, you know, you’ve got, you’re at the coalface, these things happen, when things go wrong and things get thrown at you, this is how you have to deal and cope with the situation and come out with it with your sanity and ethics”. And working with the various authors was fabulous, you know, how they… you know their experiences and bringing to bear. I was fortunate to meet a number of them face to face, a lot of them, you know, I’ve had to deal with it just by email essentially back then. So it’s fabulous to actually meet them as well. Of course, now because it was published in 2011, and regulations in the banking industry, hum, there’s more and more of it, probably what needs to happen now is an update to it. But unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be involved in the second edition of it because I am no longer in banking and I haven’t been in it since 2010 when I left it.

Francis Aziza   (01:04:58)

Based on your experience and studies, what would you say is the future role for information workers like archivists and formally established memory institutions in an online environment?

Lynn Coleman   (01:05:14)

I believe they will have an increasingly critical role. I can remember ages ago, because people were going to public libraries, I think there is s resurgence, and we can see from any news items that you look at today, you know, we’re talking about fake news and all that sort of things, and the President features and tweets are full of errors, you need to have somebody there saying, “Hang on a sec, this is incorrect, and these are the facts. You know, this is the situation, not what you’ve been told”. So I believe they will have an increasingly critical role as trusted sources of the information that’s been created, collected and preserved, and to international standards that ensure that information has not been manipulated or corrupted in any way, and that could mean like digital corruption, if digital records, for example, aren’t migrated correctly, and so on. Or, you know, you no longer have the hardware to read the records, like floppy disks of the past if you don’t have the equipment to read them then the information on this is lost. So we need to have information workers in place to carry out those roles and to make sure that none of that will happen. And also, as I mentioned, to make sure that this information is accessible over time and space. Information workers, I think, also have a crucial role in teaching individuals information literacy. And I noticed that CILIP has a document that specifically defines information literacy that they put out in 2018. And to me, it’s the ability to think critically, so individuals citizens need to be able to think critically and make balanced judgments about the information that they find in use, so that citizens, and individuals can discern for themselves, what is fake news and what is not without being interpreted and presented to them by a third party. So yes, you can have any information worker interpret and present the information and then say, I know for sure this, this is a trusted source these are facts, but it is better that each of us have the skills and the knowledge to do that. So we can do it for ourselves, we don’t have a third party intervening for us to do it. That is to me is so important, we have to get back to where people can understand about information and how to find trusted sources, how to verify it, and know for sure what is purely false. Honestly, our future depends on it. You know, it can go one way or the other, people can believe what’s fed to them, and then it’s just going to be a total disaster. It is more important now than ever that people understand about information. And information workers have a crucial role in that, in our present and future for that.

Francis Aziza (01:08:59)

Well, that resonates very well with my course on Information Literacy last term.

Lynn Coleman (01:09:07)

Oh, absolutely, and you see, that was never a subject you know, but I do remember when back in the early 1990s, I was a lecturer at Charles Sturt University in Australia and one of our lecturers who was actually, he dealt with arts, he just was awarded his PhD from the Royal College of Arts in London, and his thesis was about computer graphics, because he was involved with graphics, it was his first degree. And he was talking about computer graphics and this would have been like 1993, or something. And one of the slides that I remember, and these were slides that John was showing, it wasn’t a PowerPoint presentation, these were slides, and one of them was, he could show how you could manipulate with a computer an image. And the image was a crowd and I think it was like, for example the Pope going through this crowd, and in the forefront of that slide, in that image was a person holding a bunch of flowers, you know, up in the air, like, you know, wanting to give them to the Pope or sort of toss them in the direction of the Pope. And the next image was that person with a gun in his hand. That was purely manipulated, what the actual photo, what the actual image was, was this person with flowers, and someone had gone in and manipulated that image and put a gun in their hand instead. And that’s exactly what you see today. You know, for example, I think it was the Indy, it was the Indy race last month? And one of the President’s staff had put out a video showing Air Force One landing and all these crowd, and saying, you know, great crowd today we know when the President is landing. And in fact, it was a video clip from George Bush’s administration or something, which then people pointed out and said, “No, this is wrong, this is false, and this is when it happened”. You know, so now we just have to be so careful about the information that we’re receiving.

Francis Aziza (01:11:33)

Exactly. So we are gradually winding down to the end. I would just like to ask you, with your stellar career spanning over three decades plus, what would you say was the driving force, and what were the motivations behind your achievements?

Lynn Coleman (01:11:59)

I think it’s always been creating order out of chaos. There’s always been a fascination of mine. Like, for example, when I was working as an elected officer for a Member of Parliament, and I needed to, or I inherited a filing system for hardcopy records. And it was just an alphabetical one, random subjects and I thought, firstly I’ve worked for him for a couple of months, now there’s got to be a better way to do this, mess my other drive force, there’s got to be a better way. So I went and talked to a couple of other elected officers and sort of said, “Well, how do you organize your records here?” and essentially, it was, “Oh well, you know, alphabetical, by subject, you know”, and so I started to research it. And so I ended up coming across the guy who was an Australian records manager, his name is [inaudible], and he had developed what was called a key word records management system. And so I read that and I thought, yes, this makes more sense, this is more relevant to what we do, I can understand this better. So I implemented his keyword system, applied that to the records. And it was just so much easier. It had like an alphanumeric code, and that code related to a certain area, and it worked really, really well for those records. I wouldn’t suggest that you used it for business records, like in banking, it certainly wouldn’t work, you’ve got to follow the FAT (function activity transaction) process, but at that time, it worked. So motivation is order out of chaos, there’s got to be a better way to do this. And certainly when times change and you had new things come in, like with regulations like we did in banking, you know, you have to meet the challenge, you have to find the best way to do that job for yourself and certain for everybody else. So those are certainly motivations for me. And I just enjoy learning. I just love to learn as well and if at any time, there’s something that I’ve learned that is useful to somebody else, like if I see somebody doing something, especially, you know, with records or information, I’ll say to them, have you considered this or have you tried that or why do you do it that way?

Francis Aziza (01:14:59)

Still trying to wind down, now that you’ve been retired for some time, do you have any future plans such as in regard to your activity in records management and information management or archives?

Lynn Coleman (01:15:13)

I’m certainly not, now that I’m retired, and certainly not professionally. Like I mentioned, we write this private travel diary. So we’re organizing our information in that way and for example, we kept our blog, because it’s by WordPress, WordPress could disappear, so we converted the blog into e-books and because the e-books software could disappear, we’ve made them into PDFs as well so we don’t lose them. And I will certainly continue to visit various collections and repositories around the world as part of our travels, we’ve been fortunate to visit the National Archives in Malta and recently in Washington DC, along with the Library of Congress, several years ago we visited the museum in Cairo, and the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. I thought I had to do after having studied librarianship during my Master’s was to go with what was considered in the ancient world, you know, the great library, the repository of amazing knowledge that existed at that time. And so it was, it was fabulous to go there. And because the current library is about 200 meters away from where the original library stood and I understand that part of that site where it stood is underwater. And to see this, after having visited the pyramids, you know, there’s ancient structures to then walk into the Swedish architects, amazing modern creation of the new library, it’s an amazing space. And if you’ve had a chance to look at the photographs of the interior and also of the various collections that they’ve got, like the manuscripts collection and so on, it’s just an amazing place and amazing space. And I was so pleased that they decided to do that, to sort of honor the ancient library now with its modern counterpart. It was a great experience.

Francis Aziza (01:17:46)

I’m sure you enjoyed all those different tools and experiences. So finally, and very, very finally, what advice would you give to current and future students of the Department of Information Studies as a former student yourself?

Lynn Coleman (01:18:08)

Well, not only as a student, but I think perhaps now that I’m older and supposedly wiser, never stop learning. Always be curious, strive to understand situations and people and their perspectives. Work collaboratively with other disciplines. Like for example, thanks to computing technique, and functional analysis, we use that technique from another discipline and applied it to the discipline records management and it worked, it just made such a difference to the way that we then managed, classified managed records. Seek out innovative ways to create, share, manage and preserve information in all its formats over space and time. Whether that be rock petroglyphs to holograms to the unimaginable imagined. Never stop trying to find a better way of doing things. Because what we’re dealing with and what you will be dealing with, and what your children and grandchildren, great grandchildren, if they’re also students of information, is you’re dealing with humanity’s collective memory throughout the ages. And we’ve learnt, if we’ve ever learned any lessons from history, where you’ve had great civilizations like the Aztecs and any of the former great civilizations, Egyptians and so on, and certainly, the original Library of Alexandria, was that they were destroyed, the records were destroyed, and we lost all that knowledge. And you you’re back to square one again, essentially, you know, which is crazy. So and especially with the digital age, and whatever comes after that. You know, with digits with ones and zeros, this is so easy to lose, is so easy to corrupt, that you have to be vigilant, you know all the time in order to make sure that none of that information is lost. And yes, so essentially humanity’s collective memory throughout the ages is what everyone will become stewards of. So there’s a huge responsibility out there, but it’s an exciting responsibility and challenge and I invite everyone to step up to the plate and be a part of that.

Francis Aziza (1:21:00)

OK, so, I wish to thank you so much Lynn for blowing me away with your world of experience and a lot of advices that you put here and there to discuss about your career and parts of your life, but also the very inspirational way in which you talked about them and gave a lot of insight into the information world, archives, record management, so I am really grateful that you have participated in this interview.

Julianne Nyhan (00:04)

Hello, my name is Dr Julianne Nyhan and I am Associate Professor of Digital Information Studies, in the Department of Information Studies, UCL. And I have been given three questions to answer. They are: “What is your role at DIS?” “Can you say something about the role that Digital Humanities plays in the wider field of information science?” And “What are the key challenges addressed in your research?” So I could probably talk from now until Doomsday about, in response to those questions, but I’m going to try very hard to restrain myself and give reasonably brief responses to each of those questions. So the first question, “What is your role as DIS?”

Julianne Nyhan (01:07)

Well, I do, my activities cover very money areas, but I guess the main activities that I engage in our research, teaching, enabling, and knowledge transfer. So let me say a little bit about each of those activities. My research is especially on the history of digital humanities, and on the application of algorithmic approaches to historical data. My collaborative and sole authored research has been published in the leading peer reviewed digital humanities journals, and it’s been translated into Chinese, Russian, Polish and Spanish. My books on the history of digital humanities have utilized an oral history approach to advance new understandings about the origin and development of the field since 1949. And maybe, if I leave talking about research for now, other than to say that I’ve worked on a variety of third party funded research projects in recent years, for example, a Digging into Data project that was a transatlantic, and funded by transatlantic funding bodies. I’ve been involved with some Marie Curie actions on critical heritage in Europe. I’ve been a Co-Investigator on a Leverhulme grant with the British Museum looking at the collections of Sir Hans Sloane. And then, in addition to this, I suppose I have a track record of working across the humanities, information science, and computer science disciplines and professions. So some of this enabling that I spoke about includes that I’m an invited member of the Turing Institute’s Humanities and Data Science Special Interest Group. I regularly work with colleagues who hold senior roles in libraries, archives, and museums like the British Museum, the Busa Archive in the university… the Cattolica in Milan, in Italy. And then through activities with UCL enterprise and innovation office, I engage with the creative industries and the commercial sector in London. Other important enabling activities within UCL include, for example, that I’m a member of the faculty level Bibliometrics Committee, I was on the board of the UCL Research Data Repository group who oversaw the implementation of the UCL research repository. One of the enabling roles in UCL that I’m most proud of is the work that I do for UCL Press. So I’m on the steering committee of UCL Press, and it’s been such a joy to have the opportunity to read and to contribute to the evaluation of very many research proposals and to play a small role in building UCL Press into basically the leading fully open access University Press of this kind in the UK and I think internationally. And then I do an awful lot of serving on advisory boards and peer reviewing, and so on.

Julianne Nyhan (05:14)

So that’s all my institutional and external engaging. Let me talk about my teaching for a moment. So I’m the Program Director of the MA MSc in Digital Humanities, and the Program Director role, it involves being responsible for the… I guess the, some of the day to day management, so being the public face of the program, and dealing with students feedback, and coordinating with external examiners, and with tutors who work on the program, but there’s also a more sort of strategic and intellectual aspect to it, whereby the Program Director really tries to develop a long term vision and to set about those sort of incremental steps of trying to enact that vision. So I have made a number of changes to the MA MSc programme in recent years since taking on this role, and more will follow. And in… then, of course, I also teach. I teach three classes, at least three classes, this varies from year to year. So I usually teach Internet Technologies, Digital Resources in the Humanities, and Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. I guess, rather than talk about them, let me tell you which one is my favourite. So it’s probably… it’s hard to say, but I’m gonna say Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, because this is a graduate level seminar class, and it’s here that we really dig into and investigate some of the really contentious topics in the field during a given year. So it’s, I really enjoy being able to engage in this kind of really, I think, classic humanities work of thinking and debating and reflecting and dissecting and really learning from the Master students as I go. So that is my teaching, and in addition to that, I supervise numerous PhD students. And thus… the PhD topics that I supervise range from Digital History, Critical Heritage and Archival Studies, over to a thesis that I co-supervise with colleagues in computer science on museum recommender systems. And again, supervising PhD students is an absolute joy, that opportunity that we’re given to watch somebody embark on an intellectual journey that is not, is basically never straightforward, but that has numerous twists and turns and digressions and bridges and subterranean structures, and so on and to, to, well, it’s not the case that we undertake that journey with students, but we certainly aim to be a guide or to be somewhat of a companion on that journey. And so that process where you watch an individual grow from when they’ve had the often the, the fragment, often they have a fragment of an idea or they have a seed of an idea and to see that research project… hopefully, not always, but hopefully bloom and develop, bloom and develop and along with the individual themselves, that is another particular joy of my job.

Julianne Nyhan (09:23)

Okay, so I’ve done enabling research and teaching. Then in addition to all that, I contribute to on-going work at the department. For example, I’ve been, I’ve had the very particular joy of, and you can hear the word “particular joy” from my voice of being on the REF, the REF management group in the department. And so thinking about research and researchers, and research outputs in… from this sort of evaluative perspective is… well, it is interesting. Whatever concerns we might all have about the, what might be thought of as the over evaluation of academic research remain, but having said that, I think it’s been an interesting process to be involved in. And it’s also given me much pause for reflection.

Julianne Nyhan (10:37)

So that’s the first question answered. The second question is, “Can you say something about the role that Digital Humanities plays in the wider field of Information Science?” And I think Digital Humanities contributes a few things to Information Science, and, and vice versa, I guess. So, we might think of Digital Humanities as being a very fascinating application domain, to really explore what information is, and when information is, and who information is in the context of the humanistic disciplines, and to understand the information continuities and divergences between the humanities and that wider informational landscape.

Julianne Nyhan (11:43)

So, that might be… maybe that’s one way of thinking about what Digital Humanities and the role that it can play for Information Science, and then if we think about this being reciprocal, so what role can Digital Humanities play for Information Science, well I think that Digital Humanities can bring a particularly humanistic perspective to ideas of… definitions of information, performances of information, instantations of information, and those aspects of the humanities are particularly good at paying attention to. So for example, ideas of culture and situated-ness, and what it means to be human I guess, to maybe use a cliché, but it is these especially situated and cultural perspectives that the Digital Humanities can then bring to the Information Sciences and Information Studies fields. And I think that’s very interesting, and that’s very important because particularly in the in the turn to Digital Information Science and Digital Information Studies, we know that of course, resources, digital resources that are used may have a global reach. But the Humanities shows that they’re invariably made and used in situated contexts, and those situated contexts can often shape… I think, we increasingly understand that data is not neutral, algorithms are not neutral, and neither are their objective. So, the circumstances in which digital information is, and digital resources are generated or captured or programmed or whatever it is, they shape, in very complex ways, the types of resources that may be created or that may come about through informational and infrastructural interactions. And the… I think it is the Digital Humanities can bring a very particular perspective on that and alert us to, really help us to problematize those assumptions about data and digital processes being objective and neutral, and to also dig into those processes upstream and downstream of the data with their cultural or algorithmic, that must also be factored into any analysis of digital information, digital informational resources.

Julianne Nyhan (14:56)

So I should say that regarding Information Studies in UCL I think that we were one of the very, I think the Department of Information Studies was one of the very early departments, one of the very early Information Studies departments to develop a speciality and a field of study in Digital Humanities. And something that I should have said, because it’s quite important, but I forgot to say in relation to the first question is that I’m also the Director of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. So the UCL centre for Digital Humanities was founded in 2010. And it’s a cross faculty research centre that brings together a vibrant network of people who teach and research in a wide range of disciplines. UCL DH supports and facilitates wide ranging technological engagement across the arts, humanities and cultural studies. And we also cultivate close relationships across the university and beyond, with international institutions, culture and heritage sectors and industry partners. And we have pursued a wide range of funded external research projects in recent years. And the UCL DH is really, it’s a very important place for exploring exactly that question of “what it is that the role that digital humanities plays in the wider field of information science”, and beyond course, you know, so Heritage Studies and well, and many different fields. It’s an intensely interdisciplinary centre.

Julianne Nyhan (17:01)

So then the third question, “What are the key challenges that are addressed in your research?”

Julianne Nyhan (17:11)

Well, I think one of the… So there’s two main strands to my research. One is the essentially digital cultural heritage, and the second is really on the history of digital humanities. And so let me speak about the challenges of the second, and I’ll try to keep this reasonably brief. So, well, what’s the challenge? Well, with regard to the history of digital humanities, we’re at a very, very early stage in this study. So the field of digital humanities has existed since, well, at least 1949, depending on which of the origin stories you subscribe to. And so even though the field has had sort of relative longevity, until very recently, very little was done about its history, for all sorts of reasons. So my work, I guess, in the most sort of fundamental sense, digs into those questions like, so “What is the history of digital humanities?” “Why do we need a history of digital humanities?” “How can we go about having a history of digital humanities?” “What is the purpose of histories of digital humanities?” And “How might the histories that we write best serve those purposes?” Or, you know, maybe “What are the implicit purposes in the histories that we write of digital humanities, and are they appropriate?”

Julianne Nyhan (19:07)

So the challenges of this work, in the most very basic sense, the challenges have been just finding sources. So, to give you an example, Roberto Busa, he’s often described as one of the founders of the field, and he worked on a concordance to St. Thomas Aquinas, from about the 1950s. The hardcopy publications were in the late 1970s and early 80s, and after that, it went to CD ROM and it’s now the Index Thomisticus is now available online. But even though he was, you know, it was said so often that Busa was this founder, this founding father figure, even though that was the case, it’s true to say that people had really dug into his work only to a small extent, and that wasn’t really such because of carelessness, it was because very many of his publications were very difficult to access. They were published… They were in… you know, far flung archives or libraries, in editions that were out of print, or perhaps had been published in conference proceedings that were essentially were quite ephemeral. So a recent book that I published involved… we identified a number of publications of Busa that we held to be quite important. He also published in another number of languages, as humanities scholars tend to do. And so we had all of those publications transcribed and then translated, and then I wrote some short new introductions to them, to try to contextualize them within Busa’s work at the time of his writing. And then we attached to this a fairly substantial chapter evaluating some aspects of Busa’s intellectual legacy, and we included a full bibliography of his publications in excess of 300 publications. And we also included an oral history interview with the main translator. So we included work, articles in German, which I translated from Italian, which I’m feeling embarrassed I translated, from French, which Tessa Hauswedell translated, and also from Portuguese.

Julianne Nyhan (21:45)

So that was a…. So that’s a nice, that’s a book of, actually essentially primary sources for the field, and that will, I hope, do important work in just, you know, making those formal sources available. A second strand has been, in terms of what were previously more intangible sources, or… so I’m thinking here, especially about my oral history work. So I have done a number of… I saw a number of oral history interviews, which have been published in various places, and the book Computations and the Humanities, was, people who were sort of pioneers, with well known and lesser known pioneering figures in the field. And this work really seeks to understand the history, the emergence and the development of the field, and those sort of social and cultural circumstances that each of those pioneers operated in, either individually or collectively. And so, again, there has been and there continues to be some urgency to this work, because you know, the field has been around for a while, and people are getting older, and some, unfortunately, have already… sort of those who I interviewed have, unfortunately, already died. So I think it was very important to have captured their recollections. And those sources are, again, I understand them as being another contribution to this broader task of writing histories of Digital Humanities.

Julianne Nyhan (23:47)

And then the third challenge of my research, I guess, it goes back to those questions that I mentioned at the beginning of, you know, “What is a history?” “What, who should be included?” “How can it be approached?” And so on. So, one of the issues that I’m most interested in is problematizing that tendency to point to founding father figures like Busa, and to instead think about redefining ideas about founding fathers and also the categories of contribution that determine whether a person is, actually is attributed in any shape or form, for their contributions. So this research is, especially recently, has especially converged on a study that I’ve been doing on the feminized labour, the feminized and devalued labour that was contributed to Busa and his Index Thomisticus project. And I used oral history research and extensive archival research to uncover the stories of those individuals who had done very important work for the Index Thomisticus, so they were the ones who transferred the text of Aquinas and other authors that was to be concordanced onto punched cards. So basically, they were the ones who assembled the entire textual basis of the project, and had they not assembled that textual basis, then Busa and others could not have done all the different quantitative analyses of that collection of texts that they did do or that they had hoped to do, I guess.

Julianne Nyhan (26:00)

But despite their important work, they were, their work was more or less, very much overlooked. So, for me, this is a study of that collocation of gender and technology in the early history of the field, and how, how that is interconnected with ideas about what a scholar is, and boundaries of you know, who is the scholar and who is the techie. And this is about… ultimately it’s a study in hierarchies and histories of, of knowledge production. And asking, in addition to reconstructing the story, the stories of this feminized labour, this devalued feminized labour, it, I guess, digs into those hierarchies of knowledge production, and not so much… so I’m trying to remember a quote of MoRAS where it said that, the point is not to say, for the historian or for the Information Studies person, it is not for us to adjudicate what is scholarly or what is not. The point is a search to identify what has been classed as scholarly and what has been classed as non-scholarly, and to understand the kind of rhetorical and power and even gender frameworks in which those decisions were made, and to understand who was… who profited from these kinds of demarcations, and who did not coffers. Whose voice was heard, whose voice was silenced, I think. And then to also think about how the consequences of those decisions have echoed through the field of digital humanities itself. So we do still very often find it to be the case that even though digital humanities purports to be a collaborative and highly interdisciplinary, collaborative as is the more salient point. So even though purports to be a highly collaborative discipline, and I guess it is, but that collaboration isn’t always signalled in terms of attribution, you know, so it’s still, even though digital humanities projects may require a large team to pursue them, and that team may be drawn from universities, from archives, from galleries, from museums and so on, it can often be the case that it’s, you know, the scholar, the professor scholar is the one who is seen as the one who’s doing the most important work and it’s, so this is not universal, but it can very much be that those contributions of the technical staff and without those contributions the authorized scholarship often couldn’t take place, but still, we find that it is the technical contributions and the technical staff or even the technical work that’s done within the standard research, is what can be devalued and seen as being in some ways, inferior to the so called, as I say the sort of authorized scholarship.

Julianne Nyhan (30:00)

So yeah, so it’s those echoes from one of the earliest projects in digital humanities to today that I’m very interested in. And, you know how this works against the backdrop of a field that likes to present itself as progressive and collaborative and so on. So that is some of the key challenges addressed in my research.

Julianne Nyhan (30:33)

I tell you now… it is… what is it? It is 5^th of January 2021. Yesterday, we went back into a full lockdown, because we are now in the third wave of the Coronavirus. I’m sitting in my little office at the end of my garden, which is an absolute heaven and I feel so lucky to have it, especially because I can hear my two kids whose school is cancelled, I can hear them up in the house and they’re hauling and fighting at this moment. So yes, I’ve been sitting here essentially talking to myself, for however long I’ve been talking to myself. So I hope that I haven’t rambled on too much and I hope that this makes a bit of sense. And I very much hope that lockdowns and Coronavirus are all a very distant memory when you are listening to this in time to come. Thank you for your attention. Bye.