Archivist Interview: Katie McCormick

I knew that an archivist wears many hats in their profession, but in the case of Katie McCormick I was in awe of just how many hats that would be. I had the pleasure and privilege of getting to interview the Associate Dean for Special Collections and Archives at Florida State University, Katie McCormick via Zoom. She was very down to earth and passionate about the mission and future of archiving. 

Katie’s path to becoming an archivist was a winding one and according to her happened “in a round about way.” Her background actually started out in English Literature. She received her BA from Emory University, and her MA with a focus on Irish Literature and Culture from Boston College. From there she became an adjunct English professor and thought of pursuing her PhD in English, but then decided to go to library school. When asked what made her change her direction she responded:

“One of the reasons I went into this field and I wanted to be in academic institutions, is I wanted to still be able to teach and engage, but not necessarily be sort of dependent on that just as the only aspect of my potential employment.”

Katie finished her MLIS at Simmons University in December 2004. “It's sort of wild to me that I'm 19, almost 20 years into the profession,” she reflected, “Time goes fast.” Her early interests and work centered around preservation and oral history archiving. Katie was the Reference Archivist and Coordinator for the Oral History Program for UNC Charlotte, then Assistant University Librarian for Special Collections, a span of almost 7 years, before starting at Florida State University. 

As the Associate Dean for Special Collections and Archives at Florida State University, Katie has quite the list of duties. She says she does more administrative work now, which includes coordinating and supervising. This includes overseeing the resources such as rare books and manuscripts, technical services, and ensuring that cataloguing and description are good. There are two physical reading rooms for archives: an archives research room and the Claude Pepper Library which is more for political resources. Additionally, there is The Heritage Museum which acts as a public interfacing space on campus and is a showcase for the history of the university. 

Katie also explained about Florida’s States digital network:

“I also manage our digital library center, digital archiving program, and the Sunshine State Digital Network, which is Florida's collaborative network. One of its purposes, or its sort of founding purpose, was to be the aggregator of digitized cultural heritage into the Digital Public Library of America for the state of Florida for institutions in Florida. We still do that, but it has kind of morphed also into a network that helps provide training, support, and capacity building for organizations of all sizes to do digitization and description of cultural heritage materials.”

She went on to explain that when she first started at Florida State in 2011 that the Digital Library Center was not part of the portfolio yet. 

“So, it's kind of ebbed and flowed, depending both on needs in the organization, but also I think how the sort of needs of special collections and archives and that kind of, what I think of it as a continuum of stewardship. So, our mission is not just the preservation, but really our mission is to provide access to this resource material, and preservation is a key component of that over time. But it's a continuum of physical and digital engagement.”

What kind of staffing does it take to run all of these resources? According to Katie, she has 7 direct reports, but 11 full time faculty members as well as 15 or 16 part time positions. These are across all of the different branches. 

When discussing the repository and scope of what the university’s collection has to offer, Katie explained, “We have what feels like sometimes a super random assortment of strikes because its representative of how study was happening over a period of time. And then you end up being one of the only organizations that has this stuff.” When she says “super random,” some of their collections include one of the largest Napoleon and French Revolution in the world, the John MacKay Shaw Collection of Childhood in Poetry, as well as the Emmett Till Archives. 

“Our Emmett Till archives is also very important. This is a combination of donated collections from researchers and filmmakers. You have been documenting the case of Emmett Till and this is their research material. You have been through recordings and interviews. And so the scope of that collection is to really, for those collections, the Emmett Till archives is to try to contribute to the documentation, the documentary heritage of Till research to illuminate falsehoods and give people access to the primary sources that reveal the truth of that particular story.”

Surprisingly, the primary user groups for Florida State’s Archives are actually undergraduate students. Katie explained that they have a pretty robust instruction program and they have found ways to connect students with the resources they need. Also they have researchers use their repositories: “We do see international scholars and we have faculty and researchers who come in from all over the country, but we do a lot more digitization and remote request to try to help people because it can be really expensive to get here.” 

The location of Florida State has actually caused two issues for the archivist: getting users outside of the university to visit, and the emergency challenge of flooding that sometimes happens. Since Florida State University is located in Tallahassee, Katie explained that it is sometimes hard for people to come visit the university because it is expensive and out of the way. To combat this issue, besides having more digitization to share their collection, in the last two years they have started the Harper Research Grant that's meant for graduate students, new early career faculty members or researchers who are not in the area. This allows outside researchers to come have the opportunity to do some research at the university. 

Katie went on to explain the flood that happened in their building made them move 70-80% of their archives to Iron Mountain Storage. “That was not something we had a huge amount of time to plan that was in response to a flood that happened in this building structure. Thankfully, the collections were in good shape.”

Another major challenge the archivists face at the university is creating enough physical space and time to process everything they’ve acquired:

“It's almost, we've reached a point where I think people see our value in the place. We should be acquiring more, but really we're in a place where,  if we didn't acquire anything for a long time, we have so much work to do with what's already here.”

We also discussed the future of archivists as a profession and where she sees it going. While much of the world is becoming digitized she really sees a focus on the human element of archives:

“I think there's so many awesome things happening right now and such an excellent kind of paradigm shift in the profession. Really re-centering the concept of archives on the people those archives represent and that, I think, is a really positive thing. Remembering that it’s not stuff, this is people. Whether that's the people documented, whether it's the people doing the documenting, whether it's families, right? There's all kinds of dynamics where the people doing the work who have to interact with things.

And so those conversations that help center that, I think in terms of skills, you know, simple things like project management, understanding, growing sort of your own expertise, but having, developing the skills and communication and sort of collaboration that help design those collaborations. Really fair and equitable work and sort of surfacing challenges to overcome but create possibility. Not in a way that sort of ignores what sort of core systemic problems might be, but in a way that sort of really begins to push those things.

So I think communication, project management, learning to see beyond the stuff into what are the uses(of materials) where really helpful.”

When discussing this shift, Katie brought up that she really wished she would have had training in grief counseling before entering the profession, which surprised me. 

“There's a real human element in this. They've invested so much of themselves in collecting. Donating - it’s like a real sever, like it's a personal part of them. And in my job, I'm working with lots of different collections. But working with someone who is representative material or whose family gathered the stuff or who's giving that to you or who gave it to you and want to know what you're doing with it. For them, it's the only thing and there's a language of grief or sort of like the basic framing of that that I wish I had been trained in earlier. I mean, it's sometimes the last connection to that person if someone has passed and it's part of them, or if they're just getting rid of it and it's been part of their life.

You know, a lot of the reparative work is about this too: to recognize, sort of to develop the skills to listen and to recognize how you're needing to approach something is not the only way that they can, or should, be approached, and to develop the kinds of skills to be able to clarify what what you're needing to represent for whatever reason. There's so much communication than I thought when I first really started this.”

After interviewing Katie McCormick, it really made me reflect on the nature of archives. While it may be easy to get caught up in data and the scholarly aspects of the work, at the end of the day we are organizing elements of peoples’ lives. As archivists, we are connecting humans with pieces of others stories. I find that aspect of archives to be wonderfully important.