[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.

     

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