On December 16, 2020 Committee on Public Awareness (COPA) member Rachael Woody sat down (virtually) with Deborah S. Davis to interview Davis on her remarkable success in building an Archives & Special Collections program at Valdosta State University. Davis is a Full Professor and the Director of the Archives & Special Collections at Valdosta, a program she’s been building since 1998. During Davis’ tenure, she has turned a closet (literally) archives collection into a thriving teaching lab, and has earned multiple awards for her and her team’s work. Davis shares with us her advocacy strategies and her secrets for how she’s built her program through outreach, innovation, fundraising, good customer service, and pure grit. In order to deliver the maximum amount of information to our audience, Davis agreed to record our Q&A session, and Woody donated the money towards producing a full transcription so that we can all have access to Davis’ words of wisdom.

Interview

Transcript

Rachael Woody (00:10):

All right. Thank you everybody. I am Rachael Woody. I am a member of the Committee on Public Awareness, and our mission at COPA is to help promote and protect the value of Archives and archivists. I’m here today with Deborah Davis and Deborah is at the Valdosta State University Archives and Special Collections, and Deborah’s agreed to chat with us today about her extensive Advocacy work building the program that she has at Valdosta. I’m so excited to speak with you today, Deborah on this. So thank you for joining us.

Deborah Davis (00:46):

Thank you so much for having me. I’m really honored.

Rachael Woody (00:50):

Wonderful. Yes, of course. So to get us started and in the mood to talk about Archives, I’ll start with a pretty broad question that you may answer however you’d like, and that’s, why Archives?

Deborah Davis (01:04):

Well, when I was going through library school, I was kind of a generalist, but I was interested in preservation. So I took a class in preservation and I did a preservation field study. Then I stayed home with my baby for three years and taught [adjunct 00:01:25], taught English. Then when it came time to start my library career, I started rather obviously as an instruction, a library instruction coordinator. So I did that for five years and I kind of felt like I was on a treadmill. If it’s Monday, it’s history, if it’s Tuesday, it’s English, if it’s Thursday, it’s nursing and you’re constantly jumping from thing to thing. When the person who was serving as the archivist wanted to get out of Archives and be more involved in reference, I was like, “I want that.” My director was like, “Why do you want that? You have the most highly visible library and position on campus. Why would you want to go down there to that closet?” I said, “Because I think I could make something out of it.” So he grudgingly let me take it, but I was right.

Rachael Woody (02:23):

Oh my goodness. I love that story in terms of those are common … Like what your boss told you, those are common things that many of us have heard in terms of Archives isn’t typically the glamorous out front job, and especially when it starts out as a very small, in the closet literally program, but I’m so glad that you had the gumption to take that on and that you’ve had such success with it.

Deborah Davis (02:54):

Yes. It has been a joy and my life’s work.

Rachael Woody (02:59):

Wonderful. Well, thank you for sharing that answer. Question number two for you. If you could please describe the Valdosta State University Archives and Special Collections when you started and you alluded to this, but what is the size and what were the challenges and opportunities?

Deborah Davis (03:18):

Was about 900 square feet. It was under the stairs on the first floor behind the men’s and women’s bathrooms. It had collections, some collections, but it was a total mess. Every archivist that had come before me had decided to rearrange the way Archives was done. It had a card catalog, but the card catalog was completely divorced from the location. So you couldn’t find anything with it, and the last archivist had gotten so frustrated she pulled all the boxes off the shelf, put them back on alphabetically. So the Archives was organized alphabetically, which means that office of minority affairs was under O, office of affirmative action was under A and diversity was under D and they’re all the same office. It also meant that each time you wanted to add to a collection, anytime you got additions, you had to shift the entire holdings of the Archives to fit them in.

Deborah Davis (04:35):

So I knew it was a disaster. I also knew that we didn’t have collections to … That was going to bring people to us much. So the first thing I did was make a web page and put up some digital content to get people interested in us. I looked around the Archives and I decided, what’s the purpose of this place anyway? What could it be? I decided that it could be a teaching lab Archives, that it could bring students in there to explore collections that maybe outside researchers wouldn’t be interested in, but that we can make the students be interested in, and we could also teach them about various aspects of archival work. So I had that, but what I didn’t know was original order, [provont 00:05:35], series, records groups. I didn’t know that stuff.

Deborah Davis (05:39):

So one time I went to a training, the first year, and I poured this out to somebody from the Georgia Archives. She said, “GHRAB, the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Board offers grants, and they can offer a grant to send a consultant out to you to help with this.” So I said, “Okay.” So I wrote a grant and I got a consultant and he came and spent a week with me and I basically sat at his feet and absorbed everything he had to say. We got out the phone book which was organized hierarchically and we looked at a few org charts and we started records groups and series for our university Archives.

Deborah Davis (06:34):

The manuscripts were easier. It was manuscript one, manuscript two, manuscript three, but we needed records [groups 00:06:42] for our university Archives, which comprised the bulk of what we had. Then he went away and based on our conversations, wrote a policies and procedures manual with every kind of form you could want, basic steps, the definition of the records groups, how to do the locations, how to do all of it. Then he also suggested that I get further training. So I took that, I had already asked for other training and been told there wasn’t the money to do it. So I took the consultants report to my director and says, “Look, he says, I have to have further training.” So they found the money to send me to Georgia Archives Institute for an intensive two week, all-day training on how to do Archives. So at the end of the first year, I had a website, some digital content, information on how a policies and procedures manual for how to proceed forward and training. So that was sort of the condition that I found it in, and the first obstacles that I was able to overcome.

Rachael Woody (08:01):

You touched on so many wonderful things here. The first one being the very common, overwhelming problem of when an Archives has somewhat existed, but without necessarily an archivist, trained archivist with it. So discovering multiple different ways it had been organized or identified over the years and the problems that come with that. So I know many people who will watch this interview later will be able to relate to that.

Deborah Davis (08:32):

I’ve talked to my students and some of them are lone arrangers or said, they want me to take charge of the Archives. Currently, it’s in a closet. How do I do that?

Rachael Woody (08:44):

Yes, and as you said, being able to go and get a grant to bring in a consultant to help do some foundational things, like getting policies and forms set up. Then the other point that as a consultant, I found amusing and a somewhat sad, but common way where I often work with other archivists who are credentialed. They know what they’re doing, they know what they need, and they’ve communicated that need to their boss, but it’s not until I say that same need as the consultant or the outside person where they’re like, oh, okay.

Deborah Davis (09:22):

You have to build up your credibility so that when you are the ones saying who you are and what you need and where you’re going, you’ll be listened to, but it doesn’t happen right at the beginning.

Rachael Woody (09:36):

Absolutely. Yes. That is an important point. One follow-up question I had for you was, you had mentioned in this first year or so, you knew you needed some sort of online presence and you wanted to get some things online, which is a wonderful instinct for creating awareness for Archives. I’m wondering, was that just something you knew you needed to do or can you explain a little bit more as to why that was important?

Deborah Davis (10:03):

Well, I had been one of the early website makers as library instruction coordinator, and I had put our instruction on the web using like, here’s the class, here’s all the things the class needs to use. Here it opens up in frame. So they can’t just go somewhere on the internet and mess around while you’re talking. It was trying to solve a lot of issues that we had. So when I went down there, I was already familiar and comfortable with this and I felt like just to exist, the Archives needs a website and it needs content. The content worked really well because when Arcadia Press was looking for schools to highlight in their college history section, they found it and they contacted me and asked me to write a book. So I did.

Rachael Woody (11:03):

Yes. That’s such an important point where I tell clients like, if you are not Google-able, you don’t exist.

Deborah Davis (11:11):

Yes.

Rachael Woody (11:12):

That is just the nature of our society right now. So I love that you had that foresight to do that so early on.

Deborah Davis (11:20):

Thank you.

Rachael Woody (11:21):

You’re welcome. So I know we touched on this, but for my third question, you’ve built such an amazing program and I know you’ve shared some of the challenges and opportunities. Is there anything else that you wanted to share related to that?

Deborah Davis (11:36):

Oh yeah. It’s been 22 years of taking the Archives to new places and advocating for it. We have a volunteer program that over the years has brought about 800 students into our library to do indexing and sometimes processing. We had a 200 box collection that had to be processed. We didn’t have the people to do that. We didn’t have the range to do that. We threw those volunteers and they went through and did all the preservation stuff and entered all the file names into a database by box, and we had our finding aid after we added biographies and a scope note. We did that for free. I know in [PLP 00:12:31] says, don’t pull staples. Well, these were free workers. They could pull staples, and the person who donated this was a historian. So he was used to staple lists collections.

Deborah Davis (12:45):

So he thought we’d done all kinds of great things, and I had done it for free and now we have them indexing our student newspaper. We have them creating a vital records index for our local newspaper, so that people … And we get requests from all over the country from genealogist who want this obituary, this marriage announcement, this kind of thing and that was just one of the things. We created a very vibrant teaching program, which I guess I’m going to talk about later. We worked with alumni relations. We worked with teachers, we found a way to situate ourselves into whatever program was going on. Whatever the mission statement was of the … And the strategic plan was at the university, we made sure we fit in there and we made sure the news that we fit in there got up to where it was supposed to be. We took advantage of every report to tell our story. We just kept going.

Rachael Woody (13:59):

There are so many great things in this, and I just want to underscore the points you made, where it is so critical for Archives to make sure that they are securely housed within whatever the strategic plan is. From the perspective of when resources are scarce, which seems to be a constant issue that Archives need to make sure that it’s clear to everyone that they’re doing mission critical work. Then the second really important point you brought up is nobody else is going to pay attention or shout your praises. You have to let people know and as you said move the good news up the chain.

Deborah Davis (14:39):

Yes, yes. So whatever project you’re doing can become something to situate it higher than you are. When you first started out as an Archives and you look around at the mess and the lack of finding aids and all this, and there’s a common despairing feeling that comes over people. They think I’ll never get the resources. I’ll never be able to do it, and I hear this from archivist at conferences, but you’ve got to commit yourself to getting the resources, to getting the people. If you’re lousy at processing, hire somebody who’s detail oriented. You keep with the big picture. If you are … Hire a student to scan and build that student position up so that it only makes sense for them to give you a tech position, and all of those things are just part of telling the story and pushing and pushing and pushing.

Rachael Woody (15:48):

Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that. My next question for you is I understand that the Archives and Special Collections are housed within the humanities and social sciences versus the library, which for our audience, usually in this model, that’s typically where you find the Archives is in the library. I would love for you to share with us how that happened, if you can discuss the pros and cons that come with the Archives being in that location versus the library.

Deborah Davis (16:20):

Okay. We are still physically in the library. I still sit on the department heads council in the library. We still have a lot of things and some of our expenses like telephones and copy machines and stuff are still part of the library, but I do have my own budget. What happened was my husband became … When the last director left, my husband was interim director and after a long search, he became dean of the library. So he is now head of the library. They have to do something with me. They suggested a whole bunch of things. The thing we picked at the time was under the graduate school because we wanted it to be an area that touched the whole campus. We didn’t want to become just part of history or just part of the art department or something like that. So we went under the graduate school, I worked very well with that dean. That dean was moved to the college of humanities and social sciences.

Deborah Davis (17:29):

We split our college of arts and sciences. So this was a new appointment. He carried me with him and it has been a wonderful opportunity. It allows me to teach more because he expects … He teaches, he expects his department heads to teach. So now I teach fall and spring. I teach with the history department and I teach … These are semester-long classes. It doesn’t count all the Archives instruction that I do, but I teach with the history department, I teach with the MLIS department. I also have become written into the curriculum of the history department.

Deborah Davis (18:15):

These classes will be offered, Archives is this percentage of that class. So not only the class I teach with them, but other classes that they bring in to me. There might be a work project for history 3,000. There might be library and Archives instruction for other classes. So it has solidified and made permanent a program that I’ve worked for years to build and that gives me a lot of security that our teaching program is very stable and very good. I’ve also understood more what the issues are for teaching faculty now that I’ve seen it from the library side and now that I’ve seen it from the teaching faculty side.

Rachael Woody (19:08):

Digging more into this teaching program you’ve created. So in addition to growing the Archives and Special Collections, you have this teaching program, which I love the description you used earlier, where it’s a lab. The Archives are a teaching lab. So I would love to hear, how did you go about creating that? Was it easy or hard? What sort of tips would you give fellow archivists?

Deborah Davis (19:34):

It was hard. It was hard because when I came on as archivist, nobody in the history department was working with Archives. There was somebody from women’s studies and she wanted to use the classroom because it was an interesting looking space. We had a few displays up on boards that made it look interesting. So she wanted to teach small classes in there, but nothing really going on. So what I started doing was teaching wherever anybody would take me. You need to talk to sixth graders about career day. The English department wants something and I just surrounded the history department, made sure … Wrote letters to let them know what we could do for them. Made sure they knew what we were doing, and I went after the new faculty, the faculty that [as 00:20:30] historians knew the value of Archives.

Deborah Davis (20:34):

Didn’t know that some library director, two directors ago had off some historian and he had decided that the Archives was now worthless and he’d take everybody to the historical. So they didn’t know that. So they thought, here’s an Archives I can work with and we started all kinds of programs from work projects to more straight Archives orientations to even library BI, that included primary sources. So I’ll draw up my library teaching experience to teach them books, journals and primary sources. So we just built it. I teach with math. I teach with education. I teach with journalism. I teach with English. I teach with history and slowly, as people found out … And I teach with art. As people have found out what we have and as I have pushed what we can offer, our teacher program has expanded, expanded.

Deborah Davis (21:42):

The only personal library that teaches more than I do is the BI coordinator. I teach as much as all the reference librarians and I teach more semester-long classes. So it’s really been a labor. I like to teach. Teaching is something … And it’s also something I think an archive should do. The mission of these comprehensive universities is teaching. Research and service are important, but teaching is central. So position yourself so that you are an important part of instruction. It gives you security, it shows what your Archives has to offer and it’s just really important to situate yourself there.

Rachael Woody (22:33):

Yes, 100%. I have also worked in a university setting and everything you said I had encountered and felt as well, but everything from teaching being so important and you get more recognition for the value of your work being a teacher. So therefore the Archives is sort of legitimized, to the challenges of one history professor at one time got disappointed or grumpy. So you had to find the ends where you can as you-

Deborah Davis (23:03):

Yeah, and we’re faculty. So we have a university promotion tenure, and the library can say, these people are eligible for promotion tenure but if that university committee, of which there’s only one librarian, doesn’t recognize what you do, doesn’t recognize how this fits and teaching fits. So it sits there and it makes all the other things you do fit too.

Rachael Woody (23:35):

Yes. So important. Thank you for sharing that. You’ve built this great program. You do extensive teaching. I know you’ve also done numerous and publications. How do you balance it all?

Deborah Davis (23:51):

Well, you present what you’re working on. What are you working on right now? How can you get that into a conference that maybe has an overarching theme that year and you can make it fit? So this is what I’m working on. So let’s make sure we present it. Take opportunities to publish, especially with other people. We just had an article come out last … Well, this year, 2020 that was written with the department head and the history teacher and me, and it was on this cohorted freshmen class that we had developed. It talked about assessment. It talked about Archives. It talked about the whole thing and it was easy to do because we wrote it together. The book counts as a peer review publication, and that was a labor of love. We used a lot of pictures. We used a lot of captions that were primary sources, and that book has been in print since 2001 and it spent about 12 years as the best selling local book.

Deborah Davis (25:04):

So just take the opportunities as they come. If you do something with a professor, ask him, “Hey, why don’t we do an article about this?” Because they need to publish too. So if you go in jointly with them, you get your publications, they get theirs and you should plan to have a presentation at least once a year. I had two in the fall, I’ve got two planned in the spring and they’re all things that I’m currently working on. If you present at one conference, you can present the same thing at another conference to a different audience. Just look at it as something that’s part of your job to do. It’s part of getting your Archives out there beyond your institution and becoming a statewide player or a national player.

Rachael Woody (26:07):

I love that your strategy, it’s built in sustainability and more powerful in the end, if you’re building on building blocks to what you’re working on.

Deborah Davis (26:19):

Yeah, it is. I have an ear condition. That means when I fly in an airplane, my eardrums rupture. The only way to avoid that is to get tubes in your ears, which is expensive and painful. So I, long ago decided that my contribution to SAA would be whenever SAA came close enough for me to drive, when I did get involved in believes and doing library and Archives training and believes that was enough of a labor of love, that it was worth the pain and the money of the ear tubes. I made my impression within the state because I didn’t have the choice to make it nationally.

Rachael Woody (27:13):

I think you raised an important point where whether it’s health issues, where I also suffer from chronic pain conditions, autoimmune issues, and excuse me … For many people, if it’s health stuff or family stuff, et cetera, we all have personal lives that we need to pair with our professional lives and making those strategic choices in terms of where can I balance those priorities?

Deborah Davis (27:39):

Yes, yes. That is very important because you will burn out. You have a great idea, it takes time away from your work and you’re going to do this and you never get the time to do it. You never published anything and all of a sudden you’re up for tenure and you’re in trouble. Whereas if you take it on as just part of your work, it’s the next step after you finished the project, it gets done.

Rachael Woody (28:12):

It gets done. I love that. My next question for you, Deborah, is you’ve received recognition and respect from your university through your constant advocacy and doing amazing things, but also being really good at communicating those things up the chain. What does … For you, what does that constant advocacy look like and do you have any tips for advocacy that you could share with us?

Deborah Davis (28:39):

When I first heard about advocacy, it was kind of presented as going up to the legislature and advocating, and I’m like, I don’t do advocacy, but then it dawned on me that I do it every day. So what advocacy looks like for me is always keeping the Archives in mind. Whatever you’re doing, find a place for the Archives within that. Are you sitting on a committee? How can the Archives assist with the work of that committee? Are you meeting with faculty? What can the Archives do to meet the needs of some of those faculty? You’re always thinking about your Archives. You’re always speaking up for the Archives. You’re always making sure people don’t forget the Archives. You’re sort of a one-note pony, but eventually everybody knows you, and if you’ve done enough special projects and you’ve had enough of an impact, they’re like, “Oh yeah, you’re the Archives. You do that such and such.”

Deborah Davis (29:46):

Over the years, we’ve won awards and we won a national award for a website we did for our folk life collection. I’ve worn awards from working with [inaudible 00:29:59] I’ve won awards from working on campus with our African-American studies program, and in 2000, I won a statewide award. In 2018, I won the president’s Excellence Award for service. That is a kind of late career award that sort of sums up all you do and I was very proud to get it because it meant that all the stuff I had been doing had been heard and had been recognized.

Rachael Woody (30:34):

I love that. Getting so many awards isn’t surprising, but I still want to reflect back to you. Those are a lot of awards.

Deborah Davis (30:44):

Yeah. I’ve got a little area in Archives that I just put up little plaques and stuff like that and they’re to me, but as far as I’m concerned, they’re the Archives’ awards. They’re the Archives awards because the Archives allowed me to do all the things that I did. To go back to publishing, when you first start … And presenting, when you first started as an Archives, you have nothing credible to say to the Archives community. You need training, you need work, you need to build your Archives. You have nothing credible to say, but … Unless you’re already trained, but you’re sitting on your Archives and nobody is doing research on your Archives.

Deborah Davis (31:35):

So do research on your Archives and tell the story of Valdosta state and get that story out there and write articles about that, that may appear in local history publications. So you keep presenting and you keep publishing, but you just do it within a different thing and once you’ve built yourself up and gotten certified and feel like you have something to say within the profession, then your focus switches away from the local history and towards professional publication.

Rachael Woody (32:12):

That is an important point. Thank you for sharing that strategy, especially for new to the profession and new to their Archives people.

Deborah Davis (32:20):

Yeah, it works.

Rachael Woody (32:23):

So we’ve touched on this a little bit, but shifting more towards grants, you’ve been able to cultivate an endowment and a foundation. So in addition to bringing in grant funding, are there some lessons learned or strategies you can share with us, in terms of the financial shoring up of the Archives and Special Collections?

Deborah Davis (32:44):

Grant writing is very important. Over the last 22 years, I’ve written 19 grants, or I’ve gotten 19 grants. I’ve written more than that. We tried for awhile to write one grant a year. One year we wrote two and got both of them, and that was crazy, but we try to write one grant a year. They’re relatively small grants. I’ve been on a big federal grant once for three years, and our portion of it was small, but the grant itself was $800,000. I’ve gotten $3,000 grants, $4,000 grants, $25,000 grants. I’ve gotten them from private estates. I’ve gotten them from public people like the Georgia Humanities Council, like the public libraries, granting agency within the state, like the Council for the Arts, like the Georgia Historical Records advisory Board. I’ve gotten several from each one. So grants are important.

Deborah Davis (33:55):

The endowment came about from a close relationship that I was able to build between me, the Archives and the longest serving president’s wife and the president. They believed I had worked with them on all these public programs and displays and all this kind of stuff. The president edited my book that I wrote before we send it off to the editor. They just felt like I was turning the Archives into something that they had always wanted it to be, so that when they died, they left a life insurance policy for $100,000 to our Archives.

Deborah Davis (34:38):

So satisfied customers can be sources of an endowment. My foundation fund, which has about $8,000 in it right now is a place where I can put the interests funding from the endowment and let it build up so that I can buy equipment and other things. I use it to send students and graduate students to conferences. That’s why we always have a graduate student because we do value added. They don’t just have an interesting job to do, but they get to go to conferences. I’ve presented with students before. I’ve done poster sessions with students before, and we fund their trips through the foundation.

Deborah Davis (35:23):

We use the foundation for food, for events, so that our events are always a little more special than just the speaker or the exhibit or the whatever is, there’s going to be nice food and people know that. So they want to come to our events. The foundation is funded sometimes through donations, always through me. I give $125 a month to that foundation, and over time that’s $1,000 a year and that funds a lot of the basic things that we do. The extra donations are just wow, extra and good things that we can do, but it is great to have a foundation to fall back on to, to add to your operating budget, to be able to do things and do extra things. The endowment is good for that, too. We’ve bought art collections. We’ve bought rare maps. We’re saving it right now, trying to get up enough for a new scanner we want.

Rachael Woody (36:31):

You raised a point that I’ve heard recently in another conversation I had with Bridgett Pride and the way you talked about that happy customer, I think was the phrase you used and how Archives, whether we think of it this way or not. It really does come down to relationships and providing a good customer experience.

Deborah Davis (36:58):

Yes, yes.

Rachael Woody (36:59):

So having that happy customer.

Deborah Davis (37:02):

We’ve struck above our weight by customer service by going the extra mile. Like we got some papers from an author and she was being approached by Duke University’s Archives for those papers, but she had been to Valdosta State. So if we could do right by her, we would … She would give us her papers and we did, and she was a very happy customer. Later on, we wrote a grant and we did public programming with her and brought her out into the schools and used the collection and had a giant conference. We just tried to make that customer as happy as we could because we had beat out Duke to get those papers.

Rachael Woody (37:56):

That’s a pretty big deal. That’s a big fish caught.

Deborah Davis (38:00):

Yes. Yes. We have other collections that are like that as well, and that as we have committed extra resources to processing, committed web space to advertising them, they’re excited and happy.

Rachael Woody (38:20):

Well, thank you for sharing those strategies that I know, especially for our newer professionals, learning what sort of funds to even think about and how to go about that will be so valuable for them to hear from you. So thank you.

Deborah Davis (38:32):

Thank you.

Rachael Woody (38:35):

Now we’re bringing it home. We’re almost done here and you’ve covered so much great stuff. My next question is, are there any sort of remaining challenges that you face at this point in your career?

Deborah Davis (38:48):

Yes, I will be retiring in two years and something. So succession planning is very important to me because I’ve put my life into this and I don’t want to see it fall back. So, I don’t have input into who the next archivist is, but I do have input in who the interim archivist is. So I’m working with one of my staff members to make sure he gets experience in all the needed areas that I do. Like teaching, like just some of the other areas that I do. Like, look, we’re going to write a grant. I want you on this. I want you sitting on committees. He’s already involved at the state level. Just some things that can make this person more … And you should seek this certification and DAS certification and you should do it within this timeline.

Deborah Davis (39:56):

So just some things to make this person more attractive candidate. I also have things that I want to finish. A book that I want to write the points out. These are the things that work. These are the things that don’t work. These are the areas where I see weakness in a few years. So that when the person comes in, they don’t try to reinvent the wheel because if something’s working, leave it alone and focus on what’s not working. Just because you happen to be really good at something, that’s something you’re really good at might not be what the Archives needs.

Deborah Davis (40:38):

So here’s the needs. Here’s where you can situate yourself and start presenting and publishing about this to get your tenure and that sort of thing. So that’s what I worry about. Are there other collections that we need to make sure we highlight before I leave so they have a strong standing within the Archives and there are. So I want to make sure to do that. I’ve gotten the teaching program written into curriculum. So I feel secure that the teaching program will continue even if I’m not here.

Rachael Woody (41:21):

What a wonderful gift that you were leaving in terms of making sure that there’s a good succession plan, both in terms of leadership, but also you’re still supporting that person and the Archives as a result with saving them the overwhelm and the … As you said of reinventing the wheel, by giving them a guideline of like, don’t miss a beat here. You can continue running with this.

Deborah Davis (41:51):

I hope so. That’s what I want to do. That’s what I’m enthusiastic about doing. I don’t want to get so over committed that I don’t get time to do that, and I think that it’s going to be important because this Archives has grown and grown and grown. It’s now important within the campus, and I don’t want to see it fall back because somebody comes in who doesn’t appreciate what’s already here and know what to do to take it in a new direction.

Rachael Woody (42:32):

Well, Deborah, I have one last question for you. You’ve given such great advice all throughout this interview, but I am wondering, is there any other advice you have in specifically thinking about our archivist colleagues that are just starting out?

Deborah Davis (42:47):

If you’re just starting out, take advantage of as many webinars as you can, as many training sessions as you can. Get involved at the state level. The state often offers training that is, it’s not as expensive as SAA training. So get involved in the state level and work your way up to the national level. Do not despair. Find out what you have that’s good and build on that. Define your Archives. Why do you exist? What can you beat people? What do you have to offer and write that as your mission statement and your collection development statement should be broad because if you’re a small Archives, one single collection edition can take you in a new area. That’s what we’ve done, where Valdosta State, where the surrounding South Georgia region, but we’re also in supportive curriculum and that gives us a broad area to expand and to use those new collections to reach new people.

Rachael Woody (44:02):

Thank you so much, Deborah. I so appreciate the answers that you’ve shared with us today and for giving your time.

Deborah Davis (44:10):

That is great. I’ll look forward to seeing it, and it was a total pleasure to be able to go down memory lane and say some of the things that I got to say today.

Rachael Woody (44:23):

Yes, yes. I really appreciate your honesty and candidness because that is what ends up being the most helpful for us.

Deborah Davis (44:31):

Great. Great.

Rachael Woody (44:32):

All right. Thank you so much, Deborah.