[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 89 (Tuesday, June 10, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3535-S3536]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
TRIBUTE TO GREGORY SANFORD
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, when Vermonters contemplate the history of
our great State, many think fondly of our former State archivist,
Gregory Sanford. With his flowing gray beard and quick wit, Gregory is
a noted scholar on all things relating to Vermont's history and
culture. Gregory retired from his post as the Vermont State archivist
in 2012. The appreciation of the extent of Gregory's intellect and
influence is not limited to Vermonters. His impressive career was
recently chronicled in Archival Outlook, a publication of the Society
of American Archivists.
Throughout his career, Gregory Sanford served as a critical resource
for journalists, legislators, town moderators, and anyone else
searching to put today's events into historical context. He brought
excitement to the daunting but essential task of preserving State
records. It was his vision, passion, and ability to anticipate the
myriad of ways that technology would alter the job of State archivist
that set Gregory Sanford apart. As the Archival Outlook piece notes,
Gregory spent his career imagining innovative solutions to difficult
problems with limited resources.
During his years as State archivist, Gregory was also an ambitious
author who worked to explain how our laws affect the lives of everyday
Vermonters, often invoking colorful analogies to do so. His regular
column, ``Voices from the Vault,'' never lacked for detail or
readership. In short, Gregory brought history to life, and worked
tirelessly to preserve it, which is precisely why this profile of
Gregory Sanford is entitled, ``The Sense of Wonder.'' My State of
Vermont is so fortunate for his many contributions, and I ask unanimous
consent that the Archival Outlook article be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From Archival Outlook]
The Sense of Wonder
Vermont State Archives and records administration building named for
gregory sanford
(By Terry Cook and Helen Samuels)
Most archivists work in buildings devoted, in whole or
part, to preserving historical archives or managing dormant
institutional records. Over the course of their careers, some
get the opportunity to participate in the design of new
buildings for these purposes. A mere handful are privileged
to lead teams to conceptualize, design, build, and occupy a
combined historical archives and records center. But only
rare--and very special--archivists do all that and then have
such multipurpose buildings named in their honor--in fact,
only one to our knowledge in the United States. Our colleague
and friend, Gregory Sanford, is that rarest of archivists.
This is his story, or at least the story of why he achieved
this signal and singular honor.\1\
Professional innovator and leader on many fronts, our
Gregory is modest to a fault. Part of this is his genuine
belief that he is just working away, trying the best he could
to make a difference, in a small state in a far corner of the
country, neither looking for nor expecting recognition from
practicing a profession that he loves so well. Many people in
life who are modest have much to be modest about, but not
Gregory, for he has envisioned, thought, and accomplished
much, and in so doing set some valuable models for our
profession.
One marvels over the scope of his publications, both formal
and scholarly, and much more pervasively and influential, his
hundreds of newspaper columns and lively speeches given all
across his state, in schools, before local societies, in the
broader New England region, and beyond, as well as before
hundreds of meetings of legislative committees, all extolling
the merits of archives and good records management,
demonstrating through story and character, wild analogies and
moving metaphors (more on that later!) The power of archives
to inform, educate, transform, and amuse--and (as the
official building plaque notes) create a ``sense of wonder''
about the past and its impact on all Vermont citizens.
He transformed a state papers office of one person located
in a tiny office, with shared records storage in the basement
of the executive office building, into a dynamic institution,
the Vermont State Archives and Records Administration
(VSARA), currently with fourteen staff members, an updated
archives and records law (that he authored), and a newly
renovated and expanded archival and records center building.
In accomplishing this, Gregory has worked tirelessly with
legislators, bureaucrats, educators, media, and anyone who
would listen, to give records management, and especially for
digital records, both visibility and strategic direction for
his state in the information world. The result is a
resuscitated records management service now exists under the
control of the state archivist, rather than languishing in
the state's general services department.
His highly innovative use of the archives and its
collections to frame and give context to current issues of
debate in the state, so citizens and legislators do not
ignore the wisdom of past, is especially admirable. This
``continuing issues'' approach to archival public programming
makes the relevance of archives very apparent to citizens and
sponsors, legislators and media personnel, beyond the well-
known uses of archives for history, genealogy, and general
support to government. In effect, and not without some
political risk to himself, Gregory has championed the
fundamental principle of archives being arsenals for
democracy through an informed citizenry. For controversial
issues facing the state and its legislators, he repeatedly
uncovered past precedents where denials flourished that such
existed; outlined forgotten past examples of workable
government processes where chaos now reigned until his
intervention; showed that sacred cows of state policy assumed
to be sacrosanct since time immemorial had in fact changed
many times, and could thus be readily changed again. In his
column, Voices from the Vault, appearing in the Secretary of
State's monthly publication, as well as on the VSARA web
site, Gregory applied his vast knowledge of state records and
Vermont history, its constitution and laws, and his own wide
reading and sense of wonder. Gregory thus for many years kept
``continuing issues'' burning, showing the relevance of
archives and records to living life now. So much so that
legislators and media turned to him for ``backgrounders'' on
many public issues, and those he gave them in his interviews
and in his Voices from the Vault columns--always with flare,
good humor, and self-deprecation, but also with dedication,
passion, and keen intelligence.
Despite his tiny resource base in the state archives and
many pressing home and family responsibilities, Gregory has,
as a committed professional, applied for and received several
NHPRC grants. He wanted to push the frontiers of archival and
records management research, strategy, and best practice, to
try to understand, codify, and share more widely the lessons
he was learning in Vermont with his wider profession. The
most noted of these, in our opinion, was the Vermont State
Information Strategy Plan (VISP), in which we both had
marginal roles as consultants, but enough to observe the
project first hand.
VISP was a gubernatorial initiative embracing executive
agencies. Though the archives was not originally envisioned
as a VISP participant, Gregory succeeded in getting it a
place at the table. He had been impressed by some of the
appraisal thinking occurring in the archival profession in
the late 1980s centered around functional analysis and
macroappraisal. Instead of appraising records by their
subject and informational-value content, which is impossible
for modern records given their huge extent in paper, their
interconnectedness across many creating institutions in our
complex world, and their transient digital formats, archival
theorists like Hans Booms in Germany, Helen Samuels in the
United States, and Terry Cook in Canada shifted the focus for
appraisal to the functional context of creation: which
functions, programs, and activities within which structural
entities would be most likely to produce the best records,
including evidence of citizen's interaction with the state,
rather than which of the billions of modern records
themselves might have potential research value.
Gregory was impressed by these ideas, but he took
functional analysis a step further, and built it back into
the information system planning of the state. Based on
research into the mandates, structures, and especially
functions, programs, and activities of every state agency, he
automated the results to produce a grid that matched
functional activity with the several (sometimes many) offices
performing aspects of that activity. He demonstrated that
promotion and control of tourism, for example, was spread
around nine separate agencies that did not talk to each
other, or that a single mother with dependent children at
school, when seeking benefits, would have to contact and then
fill in similar information on application forms for each of
the twelve agencies. By revealing this overlap and
duplication, VISP permitted consolidation, in a virtual
sense, of these programs through information systems that
talked to each other for greater effectiveness, reduced
duplication and inefficiency, made things easier for clients
of the government to get service (applying once, not twelve
times), helped the state promote itself (tourists now got one
effective consolidated message when they wrote, rather than
[[Page S3536]]
perhaps a few of nine partial ones). And of course archival
appraisal could now be focussed functionally on the location
of the best records in the VISP matrix to document the
state's activities with its citizens, because the state's
functions had finally been mapped and understood.
Though support for VISP waned with changing gubernatorial
administrations, the Vermont State Archives and Records
Administration, through the collaborative work of Gregory and
his deputy (and now successor) Tanya Marshall, used VISP
insights to model and then encourage state agencies to move
to a functions-based, multiple-access-point, facet-designed
file-classification system for its records management
programs.
Our Gregory achieved innovative results with minimal
resources and much imagination. He is one of those effective
facilitators working with ``power'' behind the scenes, as
well as frequently and openly in the public and media, to
make things happen. He is not just a dreamer and thinker,
orator and writer, thorough researcher and master
storyteller, though he does all that with considerable
aplomb. He is also a roll-up-the-sleeves practical archival
administrator who builds buildings, writes laws, plans and
carries out ambitious programs, and lobbies effectively for
his profession with panache and passion.
But what of ``the sense of wonder''? While the dedication
plaque on Gregory's building recognizes his ``devoted
service'' to archives and public records, which we trust the
foregoing account justifies, what state formally memorializes
``the sense of wonder'' of any of its public servants?
Indeed, what government anywhere celebrates ``the sense of
wonder'' through a building dedication? To understand that,
we need to turn from what he did for historical archives and
managing public records to how he did it, to that sense of
panache and passion just mentioned, to ``the sense of
wonder'' he so often felt himself and shared so effectively
with others.
While the sense of wonder most especially describes
Gregory's endless curiosity and voracious reading, to say
nothing of his being a mountain of a man with a huge
improbable beard, what made that sense of wonder as state
archivist so special was his endless commitment to inform
Vermont citizens about the value and relevance of public
records, but always in the most engaging fashion. In this way
he passed on to those readers his own sense of wonder.
During Vermont's bicentennial celebration in 1991, for
example, Gregory organized a series of debates to engage
Vermont citizens around issues of current importance, such as
the death penalty and term limits. These debates were held in
each of the several cities that served over time as the
state's capital. While Gregory explored current issues, he
was always able to provide historical context, through
stories and examples drawn from his deep historical
understanding of the records. Citizens were empowered to feel
at the center of their government, working through
contemporary issues themselves with rich historical context
to temper and inform debate.
Gregory used his many speaking engagements to offer wry
perspectives on record and information management. Regularly
invited to address freshmen legislators as part of their
orientation, Gregory once introduced the importance of the
``big picture'' of records management through an analysis of
the impact of dog urine on trees in New York City! Two dogs
at one fire hydrant that you see at brief glance, is one
thing; almost seven million gallons of urine squirted
annually on expensive (and now dying) city trees is quite
another picture. Similarly, one shelving bay of records in
the corner office is one thing; millions of documents across
scores of agencies, if not well managed in a statewide
integrated recordskeeping system, is quite another. We
suspect those legislators went home and never quite forgot
that image, records management, or Gregory. Nor would they
have forgotten the man who appeared before them, based on a
daughter's dare, with his huge beard newly dyed a bright
fuchsia color!
But Voices from the Vault was his regular forum to
demonstrate the relevance of records to current debates, but
always incorporating that special touch of Gregory's humor
and his own sense of wonder. Here is a fine example from his
January 2011 Voices from the Vault column that, additionally,
provides insight into his goal for his columns:
``Most people, alas, don't find records/archival management
a particularly titillating topic. Therefore I usually start
my column with some misdirection, attempting to ensnare
readers before they realize they are reading about records.
This month I appeal to the reader's prurient interests and
offer a sex column. Female dragonflies, according to those
who study such things, possess `sperm storage organs.' These
are special sites which incubate sperm, keeping it alive for
months until the female is ready for fertilization. Male
dragonflies, however, are only concerned with passing along
their own genes. To them, the thought of the females
cheerfully flying about, slowly incubating the genes of
rivals is not a happy one. So, over time, the sexual organ of
the male dragonfly evolved to include a little scoop. This
allows the male to empty out the female's storage organ
before filling it with his own seed.
``Government is like that. New administrations,
secretaries, and commissioners arrive in Montpelier and
immediately clear out the records of the previous occupants.
They then refill the various storage organs of government
with records of their own programs and initiatives. I confess
that the analogy is not exact since in many cases those
leaving government clean out their own record storage units
before departing.
``The news media comment on these transitions often
speculating on the legacy of the departing administration.
This impulse to quickly define a particular administration's
legacy raises numerous interesting issues, notably the
tension between continuity and change inherent to our
democratic system of government. In other words, to what
degree are we documenting the continuities of government and
to what degree are we documenting the initiatives and actions
of specific administrations or state officers? Obviously
these are not mutually exclusive efforts, but they require
decisions over what files should be left in situ for
continuity of operations; what records should be sent to the
state archives to ensure long term access; and what records
can be disposed of without violence to statute or
administrative need?''
In 2009 Gregory introduced a column dealing with the
history of Vermont Special Session in the following way:
``Traditional marriage is at risk in Vermont. No, no not that
one; it appears to be doing fine. I am talking about the long
standing union between car fenders and duct tape. Duct tape
is no longer good enough to get your car inspected. I am
currently organizing a Tape Back Vermont campaign. I thought
of imploring the governor to convene a special session of the
general assembly to address this unprecedented attack upon
the customs and usage of home auto body repair. This required
some preliminary investigation on the history of special
sessions,'' which Gregory then traces from 1777 forward.
One of Gregory's 2012 columns was entitled ``Sexing Chicks
and the Appraisal of Public Records.'' The column begins with
a brief introduction about how in the 1920s the Japanese
discovered ``that by squeezing a day-old chick's intestines
it was possible to see slight anatomical differences . . .
and thus males could quickly be culled and feed expenses
reduced.'' After this anatomical lesson, Gregory admits that
though the analogy is not precise, ``Sexing chicks is not
unlike appraising public records. [Archivists] don't want to
pay upkeep for records that don't have value. We need ways to
recognize the variations in public records so we can
correctly determine their ``gender'' with high accuracy. Good
records analysts, like good chick sexers, handle large
volumes, quickly, and have sufficient training and experience
to develop contexts for accurately interpreting what they
see.''
His gift to inform, amuse, and educate while promoting the
archives was truly amazing. To further appreciate his
delightful skill in writing about archives and documents,
readers are encouraged to discover more of these wonderful
columns at http://vermont-archives.org/publications/
voice/.\2\
That we all who feel the wonder of archives could so
imaginatively translate that into workplace reality as did
Gregory, and could have such enlightened employers as the
State of Vermont to recognize the merit of ``wonder'' so
publicly!
Notes
\1\ One of the buildings of the Illinois State Archives,
but not its records center, is named for long-time State
Archivist and pioneering records theorist, Margaret Cross
Norton. And a new wing of the Alabama Department of History
and Archives (the state archives) has recently been named for
that institution's long-time director, Edwin C. Bridges. A
few archives may have reading rooms or public areas named
after famous archivists, but these are hard to verify.
Examples (with stories) would, we are sure, be welcome for
mention in future issues of Archival Outlook. We thank Teresa
Brinati and Richard J. Cox for their helpful advice. In
Canada, one Dominion Archivist (Sir Arthur Doughty) has an
official historic plaque, and even a statue, raised in his
honor, and all the Dominion and National Archivists are
recognized by a sculpture inside LAC's Gatineau Preservation
Centre, but none have their ``own'' buildings!
\2\ Sanford's final article for this publication was
printed in the July/August 2012 issue. Since then, Sanford's
successor, Tanya Marshall, has continued contributing to the
publication.
____________________