Transcript of National Archives History Office Oral History Interview
Interviewer(s): Jessie Kratz, Ellen Mulligan
Interviewee(s): Jennifer Nelson

Jessie Kratz: Today is February 24, 2014. My name is Jessie Kratz, Historian of the National Archives. I’m here with Ellen Mulligan. We’re interviewing Jennifer Nelson, Chief of the Records Division in the Enterprise Services Directorate at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in her office at 1200 First Street, NE, in Washington DC.

Jennifer Nelson: So my caveat is that everything I’m going to say is going to be rooted in my personal experience. I’m not offering this as concrete history or anything that I perceive to be utter fact, but my understanding of facts, things I’ve heard, or what I’ve experienced.

Jessie Kratz: All right. Well, did you want to just jump right in then? We’ll start just with the questions but we’re not wedded to these questions, and if we veer off, that’s—

Jennifer Nelson: [Interposing] All right.

Ellen Mulligan: Or if there’s something more interesting please don’t hesitate to steer us in that direction.

Jennifer Nelson: Okay.

Jessie Kratz: I thought we would start, even before the questions, for you to just give us some general background on you and your education and your experience leading up to your decision to have a career in the Archives.

Jennifer Nelson: So I always had an interest in American history. As a child even just seeking out the little kiddie history books, but always on the United States. And while my family, some of my family members had interest in European history, I saw it for myself as a distinction that I was interested in American history. And then in high school I took a course called American Civilization, taught by two men, Bob Johnson and Pete Lumer, who taught what I didn’t realize at the time was really an early high school version of something called American Studies, which is an actual field and has been for several decades. So American history and American literature became a great love of mine and I was going to go get a master’s and a Ph.D. and teach. And so I came from Los Angeles to The George Washington University in Washington, DC to get my master’s in American Civilization and American Studies, and I enjoyed it a lot. By the time I finished that degree, however, it just seemed to me the better thing to cast a broader net to get an understanding of what else there was to do besides teach. Not that I had any issue with teaching but I just hadn’t been very curious yet about what else there was. Plus, student loans start to, well, you start to feel there’s an “ouch” point. So I thought, well, I could come back and think about a Ph.D. if I want to. So meanwhile, a colleague—I was working part-time as a contractor at the Smithsonian helping to write abstracts for the African American Abolition Project. And so a colleague, Della Lehane, who was an archives tech working in the Center for Electronic Archives at NARA, who also was in the same GW program as I, and also working for the same professor, Jim Horton at the Smithsonian, said, “Have had you thought about the National Archives?” And beyond having come to NARA to do some field work for a class, I hadn’t really considered it. No one from NARA had talked with me; nobody had talked to the class. We just understood the National Archives as a source. So I said, well, not really, and so Della said, “I know a couple of people over at the National Archives who might be interested. They’re always hiring students for evenings and weekends working in the main search room.” And so she connected me to Sharon Fawcett, Cindy Fox, and Mary Rephlo. And so I interviewed with Sharon and she hired me. So I started, I was still finishing up my master’s paper for GW, but I started working evenings and weekends as a student temporary; this was before students were considered Federal employees. And so then I heard about the, what was unfortunately called then the CIDS program, Career and Development Services, but not meaning the other thing we sometimes unfortunately think about. So I applied to the CIDS program and I was accepted into it, and so I knew that I had to look forward to two years of intensive archival theory and practical training by NARA, which I saw to be an opportunity not only to learn what an archivist is and to decide if that’s what I wanted to remain doing, but to understand whether I wanted to remain with the Federal government, and a sense of just the culture of the place. So I started there and I took full advantage of the cross-training, which was, I think, really the most valuable aspect of the CIDS experience was the having a built-in, structured program by which you moved through, you know, topics, topics of learning, but also you could find people who might be mentors, or might be work friends, or might be supervisors, or might be colleagues. And so that was, that was very valuable. And so the career in archives and records really was, for me, sort of right place, right time, right connections, and desperately wanting to do something with my education that was pertinent to what I’d studied, I mean, with my next step, which was pertinent to my education, is what I mean to say. And I feel that I did that. I can’t say that I started out at any point in time saying, “I want to work in archives and records.” I wanted to work in a history field, and where the National Archives owns, the National Archives’ assets are the written record, that tied into my interest in literature and in documentation and in peoples’ expressions, or the, at least, if not the expression, it’s the historical record that people could use to create literary or artistic or, you know, fundamentally historiographical-based works.

Ellen Mulligan: Did you have anyone who acted as a mentor over time?

Jennifer Nelson: Not early on. I sought that, and what I encountered at NARA, I think, were people who were experts in the processes of the National Archives, and maybe wanted to be mentors if they either felt they had the time or knew what mentoring really is, or were kind of personally suited toward that. I did not encounter, frankly, a lot of people who I could classify as being mentors. But I could say that there were a couple of people that stood out that were very, very helpful. One, not in this order in terms of impact, but in just chronologically speaking, Sharon Fawcett not only hired me as a student, but she saw a utility in a student learning a thing or two about the agency and would spend time talking with me about what the customer service division, which was what she headed at the time, what it was. And from time to time throughout my career, she would offer an opportunity, or, you know, help me get my hands on a tool or a resource so I could do my work a little bit better. And so, in that way, I could say she might have been a mentor. Another person, John Scroggins, was a long-time NARA manager, a GS-15 when he left. And I would say that he certainly had a wealth of information about the National Archives, and he also offered trust and opportunity. So, you know, I guess I could say that there was a mentoring that he offered me in that he would give me something to work on, give me some responsibility. For example, as a kind of a mid-graded person within the motion, picture, sound, and video branch, he headed the division; he needed assistance with someone who would help to run the research part of that branch. And while there were a lot of challenges, organizational challenges in the branch and the division at the time, it was an opportunity to begin to learn how to lead, to begin to learn what supervision is and what it isn’t. And I can’t say that John taught me what those things were but he invited me into a space where I could begin to learn what those things are and what they mean. And last but definitely not least, and I’d say actually foremost in terms of potential mentoring, it would be Tom Mills, who was the former Assistant Archivist for the Office of Regional Record Services and, at the time that he retired, the first Chief Operating Officer for the National Archives. I’d say Tom was more of a mentor, if I had any at all, in that he would pay enough attention to what he was asking me to do and watch how I was delivering what he wanted, and then give me feedback about it. And was flexible in allowing for my own style, but yet, at the same time, if he thought that I was, you know, heading in a direction that wasn’t particularly useful, he let me know that. And he wasn’t afraid of having that kind of a conversation. He would tend to be fairly quiet and reserved and immediate about it, but at least he would have it. So, so I would say those three people stand out in my mind.

Jessie Kratz: Well, we want to explore some of your specific jobs—

Jennifer Nelson: [Interposing] Sure.

Jessie Kratz: —but we want to go through chronologically through your various careers and then we can come back and hit some highlights.

Jennifer Nelson: Okay.

Jessie Kratz: So, we’ve left you where you were just hired as a student. When did you become full-time?

Jennifer Nelson: Okay. So I was a student starting in May of 1991 and I became a CIDS kid, as they called us—

Jessie Kratz: [Interposing] Yes. Were you the first class of the CIDS or not?

Jennifer Nelson: Oh, no, CIDS had been around.

Jessie Kratz: Was it around for a while?

Jennifer Nelson: Oh, yeah. Oh, CIDS, yeah, CIDS had been around since at least the ‘70s.

Some—

Ellen Mulligan: [Interposing] Why did they stop CIDS? Do you know?

Jennifer Nelson: I think that there were, well, there’s my opinion and then there’s, I mean, I can’t really tell you exactly why. I don’t think that the reasons for why CIDS was stopped was ever very clearly explained, ever. I think that, you know, I think it might’ve had to do with money. There was maybe a question about whether or not the program really developed people the way that the managers, or the leadership, wanted that to happen. And it may have been that someone realized that it had been a long time, if ever, that the program was properly evaluated. I have no idea if anybody knew exactly how to evaluate the program. But I do know that I think around the time that it slowed or then stopped was when we started hitting our budget crunches, and we started having hiring freezes. And so I think that that was just kind of a mechanical response to a budget problem, but then it became more of an organizational development question that I think few people really understood how to approach. That’s my opinion.

Jessie Kratz: But you felt that it was a valid program, and it was—

Jennifer Nelson: [Interposing] Absolutely. The only thing that wasn’t valid to me about it was the paper requirement. There was a paper writing requirement at the end. And something that I think was not particularly well-explained is that, one could write a paper that was, again, technically valid in terms of the need for that topic to be explored in the world of information management or archives, manuscripts, libraries, whatever. But if it didn’t sit squarely in a political sense or, I think, in terms of personal perceptions of the managers who were assessing the paper, things could get terribly bogged down. So the only advice I remember receiving that was at all useful at the beginning of writing that paper was, “Make sure you choose a bland topic that nobody cares about.” Once you chose something that somebody cared about—

Ellen Mulligan: [Interposing] Oh, geez. Yeah.

Jennifer Nelson: —that was actually the way it was put to me by somebody. And I’m not saying that all the topics were bland. I’m not saying that my topic was bland or any of my colleagues’ topics were like that. But it was, you know, kind of a shot across the bow to a young archives professional to hear that because it suggested that if you want to move forward, you have to stay safe. And staying safe means don’t come up with things that cause other people to think hard, or to have to deal with some sort of conflicting information, or interpretation that, you know? So it’s kind of hard to perceive yourself being in an organization that wants to move forward, if it’s not behaving in forward-moving dialogues.

Jessie Kratz: [Interposing] What was your research paper on? Do you remember?

Jennifer Nelson: Oh, I don’t even remember. It had to do with privacy. It had to do with application of privacy, you know, FOIA exemptions. Most people ended up with something that they had to change or tweak. And then sometimes the papers just sat on peoples’ desks. You know, it just wasn’t always seen as, you know, sometimes I think that some of the CIDS applicants were kind of perceived as kind of like cogs moving through a program, as opposed to a program that could be very vibrant, and very mentoring in that way. So I’d say it was a mixed bag, but without a question in my mind, the huge benefit was getting people to move around in terms of their cross-training. And if I might project way forward for a moment, one of the massive distinctions that I’ve noticed first coming here to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is that whereas my experience with colleagues at NARA was that more often people at NARA would not move. They would remain, let’s say, a reference archivist at what used to be considered the civil records or military records, and they would specialize in that and they would stay with that. I’m not saying people didn’t move at all, but it, more often than not, they’d stay. Here at USCIS there is a massive value in people doing all sorts of kinds of work. And I’ve noticed in my conversations as I have worked to learn my new agency that so many people who are even in an administrative job were once adjudicators or what we call immigration service officers, doing interviews for naturalization or for green cards or for any other types of benefits people are asking for. So they know what it’s like to sit there, to work the process, to talk across the table with someone, to interview them to try to assess their situation and make lasting life-changing decisions sitting there at the table with them. And so, wow, what a difference. So I wish that the National Archives would put a premium on finding ways to move people through a system or some sort of a rhythm or a flow of different kinds of activities, decision-making requirements contributing to the life of the agency. I think that there would be nothing lost, and everything gained for that. And I think it would’ve made, I mean, so the way I did that in my career, the way I did that was to ignore advice I had been given which was don’t move around too much because then people will think you can’t hold a job here. I decided to try to apply as often as I could to keep moving and keep learning. You know, I’d stay working in a job for a year and a half I’d start to get bored with it. I’d start to feel that I’d learned the processes. I didn’t feel that I had to learn to be a records expert. I wanted to learn how service was delivered, and how decisions were made, and to get the broadest sense possible of the challenges facing the agency, and the best ways of asking questions about ourselves, about those challenges, and then develop approaches to begin to mitigate certain things, and to drive other agendas, mission agendas, forward. So I would work somewhere for a year and a half, and apply for a job, and get that. And most often it was a promotion. And all of that’s a pretty sweet part of the deal when there’s a promotion, that’s part of it. But, so you know, the automatic CIDS-related promotions, of course, end with the GS-11. But between the 9 and the 11, I worked at the Center for Electronic Archives and also for, I already mentioned, the motion picture, sound, and video branch. Then I lateraled to, because I realized that I had not done a lot of work getting to understand the processing and the service of paper-based records. I understood that from the cross-training I had had, but in terms of handling thousands of cubic feet of records around certain record groups, I thought that would be useful. So I lateraled as an 11 to what was called the textural processing branch and division. Worked there for about, again, about a year and a half. Then applied for a GS-12 promotion to the cartographic branch and worked mostly reference for maps and plans, as opposed to the aerial photography group, which sort of was a division of labor there based upon the media format. But I learned there the importance of how the different record format types intersect depending upon the research question that the customer is asking or that we’re asking of ourselves, because there would be maps. You know, let’s say Civil War maps, of course, that would have a very direct relationship to some of the textual records downtown. And understanding the relationships and the, and doing some systems thinking around the relationships of these records was something that became more and more interesting and meaningful to me as I experienced that. And I learned a lot from my colleagues there, particularly Debbie Lelansky taught me quite a lot, as did Bob Richardson, who was the Assistant Branch Chief when I started there, and then he became the Branch Chief. And then after I’d been an archivist at that point about for seven years, where things were getting really interesting and hot and sexy, I suppose, was with project management on the IT side. And so there was an office headed up by Reynolds Cahoon, C. Reynolds Cahoon, Ren Cahoon, who was responsible for IT project management and lifecycle issues. And so I applied for a GS-13 promotion as an IT project manager. Very different move from having been an archivist so I took on a number of challenges and tasks. I was team member there when the Y2K reared its very ugly head in government life, and so did everything from started traveling across country to meet people in the Presidential Libraries, and in the regions, elsewhere. You know, trying to assess their Y2K needs and helping with that, to I was the project manager that ended up delivering NARA’s first electronic-based researcher registration card system, which I think is still the system that’s in use at Archives II. And one of my other major projects was that I was to work with the contractors at the time to further improve and develop NARA’s agency webpage, which at the time was literally a laundry list of things. And that’s not anybody’s particular fault. The resources that the agency had put toward the website at that point in time was a few hours from one of their contractors. And we didn’t have an awful lot of information on the website. I think maybe 50 or 75 pages, tops. So everything was linked from literally just a list on a on a main page, the National Archives website, and people would come to NARA.gov, and that’s what they found. And I see you have some questions that go into more detail about that, but I’ll just try to do a quick overview of the career. So I was IT project manager for the Web program for about a year, a little over a year, year and a half, at which point we were beginning to encounter requirements from the Archivist’s office and from other parts of NARA where we needed an exhibit, an online exhibit for this or for that or for something to support an initiative, you know, an interface for a database, or for an electronic tool, or something like that. And so NARA started to realize that the utility and interaction with customers through the Web was more than listing the pull times on a webpage and posting that. That there was more interaction. There was more value to be had, but we needed a way of resourcing that and approaching those questions and seeing those things through. So there started to become some talk between the Office of Policy that was reporting to the Archivist’s office, and Ren’s office, about what that would mean. So money was pulled, as I understand it, from a variety of places in the agency, and cobbled together to create a Web Program. And that GS-14 Web Manager, Web Director position was posted. I applied for that. I competed hard for it, and I didn’t see anything wrong with that. I mean, for something so new, and so important to the agency, nobody should be just shoehorned into that job simply because they had some sort of a history with it. So I fought hard for that, and was very glad that I earned a place, and began to then, in the year 2000, cut my teeth on really understanding what it means, or beginning to learn what it means, to supervise and to lead people. Supervise, manage, and lead, I see those three functions as three different things. So got a budget all told of about $1 million between funding a Web contract design, a Web design contract, I mean to say, and about 10 or 12 staff members, ranging from I think a GS-7 is where the lowest grade of person started, although they ended up at a nine, and, you know, including GS-13s. So I proceeded, over seven years, to define that program. I wrote the P.D.s, I wrote the crediting plans, I wrote the job analysis for all of the staff. I hired the staff. I supervised the staff. I wrote the policy defining what content management roles and responsibilities in the agency are, and what Web content management means in the agency, and what content was and was not allowed, and what the processes were to conduct that Web content management work agency-wide, not just for the program, but how everybody had, who touched Web content or had a role in making sure that the website is what we needed it to be, what they needed to do and how they fit there. The Web, with my fantastic staff, we identified the electronic software tools needed for authoring, and for the metrics, you know, assessment of the website performance. We designed a number of exhibits. We created code and programming that was incredibly lean, and if I might say, elegant. And I’m simply quoting Haseen Uddin in saying that everything that we did, we passed by the Chief Technology Officer to make sure that as we were innovating new ways to deliver Web content as affordably as we possibly can, that it aligned with the IT architecture of the agency. That was necessary because one of the great failures for us at the time was the attempt to implement a content management system, which would have been, and is, a receptacle or a repository for content that then has a variety of views that users creating Web pages could use. So instead of having to learn HTML code, and scripting, and having to go and do deeply technical work, the idea was they would open up this application and they would cut and paste from a Word document that they had already authored, and dump it in this little window, and click a few things, and pick a few things from some pick lists that would control how that content appeared on the page and how it was delivered, hit a submit button. They’d never have to learn coding. They would be efficient, quick, and there would be a work process flow attached to this so that then the next person in line, let’s say the person who was designated as the Web content owner, would take a look at it. It looks the way they wanted, then they hit the okay button, and it just published. That was the idea. We had some serious, serious project management issues on the IT shop. We didn’t actually own that contract. We owned the requirements for it to make it happen, but there was terrible implementation problems with the contractor. It never ended up going live, and that was a real killer. We were really depending upon that working well to help us move forward, because what I’d envisioned was that we would have a Web program staff where the staff were able to spend more time being engaged with people across the agency, discovering what good Web content should be and helping to actually develop that content with people. You know, using the data that had come to us about the website to understand what people wanted or needed. Looking at the Web surveys that we had implemented, understanding what people wanted and needed, and then working directly with people across the agency to actually develop that content and get it onto the website, as opposed to doing technical coding work all the time just to maintain the website. And I imagine if the National Archives does not yet have a Web content management system behind the website, it is probably still operating as a very, very labor intensive coding operation.

Jessie Kratz: It is.

Jennifer Nelson: And that was a huge disappointment to me, because I think that the agency could’ve been better served if we’d been able to move on that project and make it be what we had funded it to be. So 2006, I think I felt that I had learned everything that I could learn where I was. I thought that maybe there was a new vision that was needed for the program, and I was burning out on that particular topic. And I had actually, at that time, started to look around outside the agency, see what else there might be. And what I remember is having this kind of epiphany thought while I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next, that once upon a time, like, once upon a time, a year prior, I’d had this really interesting conversation on a train between Washington and Philly. I was going to go participate in the Philadelphia city level National History Day judging, as a judge for their multimedia topics. And I had this fascinating two hour conversation with this guy named Tom Mills. And I thought, well, it would be, maybe it’d be interesting working for Tom Mills. And then I felt embarrassed thinking to myself, you know what? I just committed the same sin that I have thought that many people in the National Archives do, which is that the regions are always thought of last or not thought of at all. Here I was thinking about going outside of the agency for my next step in my career, and I hadn’t even considered the regions. So I made an appointment with Tom’s clerical assistant to see him the next day, and we agreed that we’d find a way for me to come and work for him. And so in 2006 officially in August, I guess it was, I lateraled over into the Office of Regional Record Services as their senior archivist. Diane Vogt-O’Connor had been the senior archivist there, and she had just left NARA to go to the Library of Congress, so the timing was strangely fortunate for me, anyway, that that opened up. So I went into the Office of Regional Record Services, and began to learn the culture of the place, began to learn some of the programmatic challenges, some of the opportunities, their various strengths of the regional program. And then, I guess about a year later, I became GS-15 as the Director for Archival Programs for the Office of Regional Records Services. I was reporting directly to Greg Pomicter, but it was really Tom Mills that drove my work agenda. And the scope of what I did included, well, let me say this, and this might help clarify a few things. I directly supervised a small headquarters staff who supported the archival program. Having said that, though, the work assignments and the direct tasking that ended up being, you know, worked by each of the branches, field office branches, were, that actually happened through the tasking from Tom to the regional administrators, down to the assistant regional administrators, down to the GS- 13 directors. So one of the things that I continued to learn to do, which I had started with the IT project management work, was to try to define direction and to build buy-in and interest in certain kinds of programmatic direction through influence of others as opposed to direct chain of command. I could not go to the regional administrators and say, this is what we’re going to do. You know, do it or help me do it. I had to work directly with people and learn their management styles and learn what they thought was important. And certainly it helped that those people and I reported ultimately to Tom. You know, what Tom said he wanted would be the direction we would go. But we would all then work together to move ahead. So we worked on better defining the education program at the National Archives in the field offices. There were no properly graded, properly assigned in terms of position descriptions, people who were actually doing the work. We had to define the distinctions and the similarities between archival work and education outreach work. I worked with human resources to rework the education PDs to the proper series, the 1700 series, rather than having all the education people in the 1400 series. And then we worked on getting training for the people who needed it. And not everybody needed it. And everybody who was doing that work felt very deeply about, again, the value of education outreach work. So we built the education program. We defined it. We had a fascinating branding and messaging project, which resulted in a clearer, a clear identity for what the National Archives in the major metropolitan areas was. Instead of having brochures that said, you know, Regional Archives, National Archives, it was the National Archives at New York City, the National Archives at Fort Worth, for example. And all this was based upon professionally facilitated public conversations that helped us understand the distinction and the difference between how we thought we were presenting ourselves versus what people knew or didn’t know, and what we could clarify in order to help improve the understanding of the public about who and what we are, and then also to encourage, of course, their use of the archives. So, I’ll just pause there and ask if you have any questions about some of the things that I’ve mentioned so far.

Ellen Mulligan: You’re hitting a lot of the questions that we had broken out under regionalization, like your role as director, and some of their accomplishments. Do you think the existence of regional archives affects NARA’s relationship with agencies and researchers? And in what way?

Jennifer Nelson: Oh, hugely. And actually, this was a point I wanted to make. I’m glad you asked that question. What it must be like to be in Chicago, you live somewhere in Chicago, and you hear from someone that there’s this place called the National Archives that might have some useful genealogy stuff, family history stuff that you might be able to use, and you look up on the website or you Google, and you find out how many different buses you need to take. And you take the time to go to that somewhat remote location and spend some time there. That is the agency’s face to those American citizens and to the public there nationally. Their view of the National Archives is that place. They’re not going to think Rotunda. They’re not going to think Charters of Freedom. They may think about it if maybe they were lucky enough to come through on tour as a child or bringing their kids through Washington, DC. But most people who are not in the Washington, DC area, who have direct person-to-person interaction with the National Archive staff, it’s the field office that is the face of the agency. So at that field office, if you remember the public and you’re doing that kind of genie research, okay, that’s the experience you’re going to have. If you are a lawyer in Chicago looking into Health and Human Services programs or Superfund things you’re going to come to the National Archives there at Chicago to access the accessioned records. Or if you have permission from the Federal agency to see records that have not yet been accessioned but are still in the custody of the Federal agency, you are going to go to a research room at that location also, and you’re going to look at those records. And of course, the agencies are directly, they work directly with the records management and with the FRC people at that location. So every one of those, whether they’re collocated or not in a building, if they’re collocated in a city, there is interaction all the time between the Archives and the FRC people helping to deliver services. And that is the hub of archival activity and records activity for people in that area or in that region. So if there is no regional face, or if there is no field office face or branch office face to our customers and to the public there, who still care about personal interaction, you know, that that immediacy is just incredibly important. And it can be lost. And I think that’s something that people crave. You know, I think we’ve seen sort of an ebb, or maybe the beginning of an ebb and flow in how people use digital resources and electronic resources. We’re starting to see that people want to use websites and information on the Web to make themselves smarter about what they can expect or how long it might take to do something. But they also, I think, have begun to appreciate that there’s a fine line between, depending upon everything being on a website, to get what you want versus having a phone number where you talk to somebody who’s an expert, because they want to interact with people often. They want to have somebody who’s an advocate who understands how to resolve a process problem. And human beings just like having other people do stuff for them. Often they don’t want to fully, completely rely upon a fully-automated system. If not only to at least toward the end or at some place in that process be able to check in with somebody to make sure they’re not missing something. Or there isn’t something else that hasn’t been put on that website or in that database yet. Or is there something I haven’t thought of that you guys know. So, so I’ve always personally and professionally perceived that effective customer service is delivered in a national respect and a local respect. Think globally, act locally, that kind of stuff. There’s this polarity. It’s not an either/or. It’s not everything on the website and nothing local. It’s a combination. It’s a combination of human interaction and electronic services. And we, all Federal agencies, too, this isn’t just NARA, have to continue to get smarter about what people really want and how they’re using those tools now, in order to be as effective as possible. And that’s a huge challenge when you consider, for example, you know, Federal budgeting. Let’s say you’re right on it in terms of your timing for doing requirements definition for customer service for IT resources and for knowledge management and transfer of knowledge and information among staff and employees. Let’s say you’re right on it. You really understand what those requirements are and what’s needed. But then how do you fund the services, the design services, the technical design services, the marketing. Marketing is not an evil word, I think, by the way, in the government. It never should be, because that’s what we’re doing. When we’re understanding what people want and we’re figuring out how to speak their language to them, and how to present ourselves in a way in which people are open to using the government as a valued resource, that’s marketing. And so being able to plan that and budget for it in a way that keeps us current and moving ahead so we’re not behind the eight ball in terms of finally delivering those kinds of services and behaving the way in which we want to, and enhancing our own knowledge, and transferring knowledge between employees and between employees and the public, that is a huge burden to bear. And it’s just a really tough challenge, I think, in the Federal environment, the way that budgeting is done and how we’re encouraged or not to, to plan how we devote those resources and then get support for it, speaking very broadly.

Jessie Kratz: I had this is on the list, but it’s sort of related to what we’re talking about, is you mentioned when you started working for the regional archives that you hadn’t immediately thought about that and how lots of times the regions feel that headquarters kind of neglects the field. Do you feel that as you were leaving towards the end of your NARA career, when the Archives became “one NARA,” I guess, do you feel like that made a difference and the regions became more incorporated? Or do you feel like that really was just not the case, it wasn’t bringing the regions into the fold and they were still isolated? Were they still not getting the amount of attention or credit that they might need or…

Jennifer Nelson: [Interposing] That’s a very good question. So there was the “one NARA idea” that really, I think, was problematic in that I don’t know that we really defined what we meant by “one NARA,” especially in terms of what we intended to deliver and what people needed. What I can tell you is this. In my opinion, and in what I observed, while creating a “one NARA” idea and doing reorganization in the way in which we did, while we did do this idea scale, outreach, and collected opinions from people, and ideas, in terms of mature data and problem definition analysis to understand what we were trying to achieve and what was the best way in doing it, in terms of identifying strengths that we wanted to retain and specifically what we needed and wanted to change, and why, and how, in my opinion, I don’t think there’s a lot of data to point to right now that says that was a success. I felt that we did not do a very good job at all in understanding what we were trying to achieve. I think that we were doing a lot of planning and some good, broad thinking at the time, but based upon our personal and professional interpretations and our assumptions about what we wanted to achieve and why. So I don’t know now if much changed for the regions in the end, other than who they were reporting to. But what I do know is that many, many people felt, and I absolutely experienced, a breaking apart of established networks, professional networks that was, in my opinion, a travesty, and was not appreciated in headquarters. It didn’t quite fit the script of the direction where we wanted to go. But, you know, John Cotter’s writing and the writing of other organizational development and management gurus, you know, taught us a number of things, and say a number of things about how you proceed with change management. And NARA has mightily struggled with that, in my opinion, and in part led to my desire to continue to look elsewhere for agencies that would take a properly focused urgency, kind of an urgent approach toward change management, but would try to do that in a way that allowed leaders to lead a little more effectively and, and take responsibility for leading change. I don’t feel that NARA really taught its own leaders very well how, how to try to move forward with organizational change, other than pointing to a couple of books. And, you know, the National Archives Foundation paid a chunk of change for Cotter International to come and work with the leadership group at the time to get together a change management plan. And to my knowledge that was shelved, and that spoke volumes to me. It was discouraging. But you were asking about the regions. One of the great strengths and admirable characteristics, I think, of the regions, is they know their work. They know their jobs, and they just keep swinging. They are not easily distracted from their work by political discourse, by change in management. You know, there was an awful lot of upheaval with the reorganization, but people kept doing their work. They kept serving customers. You know, they kept chugging along. And I think that over time, with all of the various reorganizations and things that have happened impacting the regions, in the end, they’ve kept at it. And there’s something to be said, I think, for that kind of persistence and, and engagement. The other thing that I think is not well understood about the regions that I think kind of gets back to our point we were making earlier, and I’m just checking my time to make sure that we have it, is we were talking earlier about the opportunity to move around in the agency and learn. Well, at least in the regions, there’s a lot of shared responsibility. I’m not saying you’ll never hear someone say I won’t do that work in the regions, but they’re, at least the regional archives, depending upon the location, maybe six in some places, or at least it used to be as little as six out in Anchorage. It’s even fewer now. And, you know, including student employees, maybe, you know, 35 or so in other locations. Or maybe that used to be so. That might be a little high even now. But in any case, people would just be asked to do the work they needed to do, and they take, they’ll be working in the research room this one day, and the next day, go work on this scanning project, or go work with these records or a description project or whatever. And people just did what they needed to do, and learned, I think, more about what archival practices mean and can mean, and I think, developed a greater culture of sharing, and shared purpose. I’m not saying that there’s no sharing or shared purpose at, let’s say, Archives I or Archives II, and I can’t speak to the Presidential Libraries. I have no in-depth experience at all with the Presidential Libraries, I must say. But I know that there’s this perception that the regions are not, the knowledge and the skillsets that the, if there’s such a thing as an average person working out in the field offices has, because of the shared responsibility. That headquarters doesn’t quite get that and doesn’t, whether that happens in headquarters or not is another question, but that it’s not acknowledged and validated in terms of the value that the field office employees bring. I thought that was true, and whenever I’d go to visit, I loved traveling out and seeing what people were doing, and I’d, big quotes, "trying to help." You know, headquarters were here to try to help you in the field. You know, and that was always, I think, looked upon, probably very rightly so, with some skepticism, but I always enjoyed seeing what people were doing, seeing the creativity and the ingenuity. Kansas City, for example, how that staff has managed to run a facility that’s twice as large as probably what that staffing can bear, the exhibits that they put on, the educational programs that they do, and the work that they do in, in partnership with the FRC. Shuttling records back and forth, storing records, preserving records. It is magnificent what Kansas City does, and New York City, too, has done a fantastic job, from what I understand once they moved, especially once they were faced with very similar challenges that New York, that Kansas City faced, New York City staff, once they moved from Varick Street down to the Bowling Green location, had their work cut out for them. And I don’t know that leadership understands it, because I never observed many leaders at NARA actually getting out from behind their desks, getting on the plane, and going out and spending time. They might go and meet with some prospective foundation partners, but the sense of being invisible and the sense of being underappreciated in many respects I think comes from an apparent lack of interest from leadership when they’re not going out and just saying, hey, who are you? What is your name? What do you do? What can I learn from you? Teach me something. Show me how you’re doing what you’re doing. And then just be quiet, except for asking questions, and give these people a chance to learn, to help you learn. Help them reverse mentor you, don’t be afraid to be reverse mentored by people. I think that the NARA culture would benefit greatly from some, some recognition of what reverse mentoring could mean for senior leadership, if I may say so.

Jessie Kratz: That’s a good idea. Well then, Jen, before we move on, what time is it? Do we have time?

Jennifer Nelson: Oh, so it is noon and we’ve got about 25 minutes.

Jessie Kratz: Well, let’s finish, and we can go back. Let’s finish your last your last couple years at the archives after the regional archives.

Jennifer Nelson: Well, that’s pretty brief. So let’s see. Toward the end, it’s the summer of 2010, I guess, is when the taskforce, the transformation taskforce was pulled together and I was put on that. And so it took most of my time, and I had to ask my senior archivist, Michael Moore, to basically act as the Archives Director for the regional program. And so, you know, one thing turned into another. I mean, I was on that taskforce, and then in the following fall there was a second kind of taskforce- related effort that had to do with organization and values definition and, you know, action items to try to encourage peoples’ understanding and buy-in to the transformational ideals. And so I was a member of the steering committee for that effort, and I was also kind of a, kind of a junior co-chair under Jay Bosanko, who had the organization subgroup responsibilities of trying to define, at a high level, what a reorganized agency would look like. And so when that was up, then I was a transformation officer in that I helped to prepare some of the offices for that actual technical reorganization and the administrative things that needed to be done. So I would meet with the managers of those organizations for many for whom their senior leader was going to be hired. And so to try to lead them toward feeling positively toward that change while they didn’t know who they were going to be working for was an interesting learning experience for me, for sure. And so they would create these briefing books and talk with the staff and figure out what their communication plan was. And I just tried to help them with that. And so all of this kind of segued into then since at the point that the office of the Chief Operating Officer was created, and at that time also the Agency Services Office was stood up, that meant the dissolution of the Office of Record Services, regional record services. So I had to go somewhere, and it just made sense given the work that I had been doing for the previous year and a half or so, that I would go and be part of the office of the Chief Operating Officer. So I was special assistant for I don’t remember how many months. It wasn’t quite a year, I guess, but maybe it was almost a year. And then I became the deputy COO, but Tom was planning to retire. That job did not get particularly well-defined. Jay Bosanko became the COO when Tom retired, and in my opinion the job remained undefined. And so at that point, once again, I found myself interested in seeing where is my career going to go? And so then the position here for the Chief Records Office, for the records chief, for the records division here at USCIS opened up. I applied for it, and came here, and so I’m leading a division of 92 people. Responsible for the records policy, the records management training, and for records program evaluation throughout USCIS. And I have colleagues in ICE and CBP who are doing the same, but USCIS has the lead insofar as DHS is concerned, in terms of records policy. So it’s been a fun challenge, and I’ve got some great, great, great staff members, and a leadership that is very interested in seeing GS-15s move and work with authority. And I didn’t have an awful lot of that sometimes at NARA, particularly at the end I didn’t. So this is a very, very welcome change for me, personally and professionally, and it just kind of continues in my career vein of keeping moving, keeping looking around, and continuing to learn. One thing I’d like to add that I did during my career that made a tremendous impact on me, personally and professionally, and really helped me think about what my distinctions and my values were that, that helped me define what I wanted to do next was in 2011 I attended training at American University. I entered an eight-month certificate program of AU, which is called the Key Executive Leadership Program, and so began an eight-month intensive training with an executive coach assisting me. It was a classroom experience, learning the various characteristics of good leadership, and the difference between walking the walk and talking the talk, and talking the walk and walking the talk, and what it means to, as a public servant, to emphasize the work that your staff is doing to help develop them and to develop their own leadership skills. And what it means to do that rather than pointing to yourself as a leader and saying, a-ha, this is my agenda. This is what I’m doing. But what it means to truly develop buy-in among people who want to be engaged but perhaps have worked and lived in a chain-of-command kind of environment where they have not been invited to do that or trusted to, to step up and learn to lead themselves first and then lead others. And I learned that as a public servant and as a government leader, my first obligation is in developing and leading other people, and trusting that their expertise will help us get where we need to go, but not to make my agenda the driving factor in what constitutes an organization’s mission, or how we go about doing what we do. And that that is a major key in developing workforce satisfaction in the moment and in the future if people truly feel engaged and trusted. But what it takes to do that is to have a leadership that listens, that listens critically, and that does not have hidden agendas or something else that’s going on that is not transparent and not conveyed. To use a tired and possibly inappropriate phrase, that’s where we separate the men from the boys, or the women from the girls in leadership. When you have a leader who is willing to trust the expertise of the people around them to invent the solutions, and that what an excellent leader does is create space for people to do that by listening and asking questions, not by dictating and pushing. And there’s an awful lot of the latter in Federal work, you know? And I’m not speaking generally about NARA, just in general. So to me, one of the great takeaways from my work at NARA, and what I’m continuing to work on practicing and learning here at USCIS, is how to be that kind of leader. And I’ve got a long way to go. I mean, you know, it’s a never-ending quest to learn how to lead oneself like that and lead other people, but it is absolutely eye opening. And it gives so much more value and happiness to me when I come into work knowing that that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m not trying achieve a deadline. I’m trying to help remove the barriers from the paths of people who are trying to make that happen. I’m trying to create space where the right questions are being asked. I’m trying to develop trust so that people feel like they’re human beings and not cogs in a workplace environment. And every day has its successes and every day has its challenges.

Jessie Kratz: I just wanted to follow up with one last thing, because, that you mentioned, and I could tell by your tone how you feel about the transformation a little bit. And part of the goal of these interviews are we want people to learn from them, and learn from the successes and learn from mistakes. I know that the Archives has gone through several transformations while you were there. Is there anything, not just maybe this last transformation, or that you would say, I guess positive and negatives. Things that people at the Archives should really take away if they’re thinking about doing a transformation again in the future.

Jennifer Nelson: I’d advise and I think there’s plenty of management literature that advises that if you’re going to reorganize be as surgical about it as you can. What I mean by that is be as precise about what you’re trying to do and touch the areas that you’re pretty sure are the contributing areas to whatever the problem is that I hope you’ve already defined, and well understand. You know, sometimes, we reorganize things because we want things to look different, or we want to put our stamp on something. But there are good things and bad things about any kind of a reorganization. So the question is, what are we trying to do? I would encourage to really take the time and the effort to wisely understand what we’re trying to achieve. And it’s possible to do that with urgency, but we have to take the time and make sure that we’re asking the right questions. And then choose the change wisely and in bite size pieces. Choose a change that people can digest, that they can stomach, that they can perceive that will turn over a result within a reasonable timeframe so that people have an opportunity to kind of experience that and say, oh, well, that didn’t hurt quite as much as I thought it might. And I can see what that was intended to do, and it sort of worked and it sort of didn’t, but the things that didn’t work didn’t break us. I have heard so many people who have left NARA in the past couple of years say that NARA before was kluge and didn’t work too well, but now it’s broken. And I got to tell you, that’s the way I felt. And I didn’t feel that anybody was listening. But I felt that there wasn’t an environment so that the people who might listen could actually challenge themselves to listen. So creating a listening environment is important. We have to have leaders who will, who can walk the talk. They got to get out of their offices, learn what the agency really does and not assume that past experience defines the current situation. For me coming into my new job here, I’ve been begged by people here, please don’t draw conclusions about us based upon what you have heard. Please take the time to spend time with us and get to know us from who we are, not from our reputation. So I’ve started doing that. I’ve got my schedule the next two weeks is jam packed with these reverse mentoring opportunities where I’m just going to go and I’m going to learn whatever people think is important for me to. And I’m going to come to it knowing that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Just because I worked at the National Archives for 22 years or something, doesn’t mean that the way in which systems are used here or records are used here, that they’re the same kinds of problems or that people feel the same. I have to have very open ears and be willing to learn new stuff, rather than just kind of pile everything into boxes of knowledge and information that I’ve already created for myself and that are easy for me to access that way as a manager. I have to be flexible. And I think that in the future, if we’re flexible at NARA, and anywhere that we work, if we’re flexible, if we’re good listeners, if we’re willing to learn from people around us, if we will take the time to define the problem, to not make change because we want something to look different, or to make change because we imagine, based upon our assumptions about how things function, that magically people are going to take to a change if we just make it, make that change, that they’re just going to come along with it. People need to be encouraged. And people can’t be encouraged when managers sit in their offices and don’t circulate. We need to circulate. NARA needs to circulate. NARA needs to do all of the things, I think, that I suggested. And I believe there are individuals who have tried to do various bits and pieces of these things but not in a way in which the leadership team is perceived as coming at it from this place of behaviors that are so open, flexible, and learning. And transparency is important. I remember early on there being a lot of talk about how the leadership team meetings were going to have minutes posted and there was going to be information that people were going to be seeing. And so a lot of the things that were being discussed and were with the taskforce, the transformation taskforce, never got implemented. I think that once certain individuals and once certain needs and agendas kind of transferred over into implementing, I think there was a lack of understanding about how to do it and a lack of maturity in understanding how to do that kind of leading. Their hearts were in the right place, but the skill sets were not there. And that the senior team, so many members of whom are brand new to the National Archives, did not, I think, as a senior team, get the level of attention that they needed to have in order to gel to create that new vision of what a changed National Archives would look like from the top down. And I haven’t heard much about that changing recently. So, you know, I offer all of this with the hope that, knowing that it’s only my opinion, I suspect that there is some, I’ve heard some people say some similar things. But it’s because I love NARA. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t love NARA. It’s easy to love NARA, and I’m proud of having worked for NARA. But it’s had some painful, painful years, especially recently. What I will say is this. In secession, I think, starting with Don Wilson, and I’m just saying that because that was my earliest Archivist I knew in any kind of way, there’s been this progression where Archivists have seemed to understand the need to pull the National Archives out from under the rock it’s been hiding under and to help our stakeholders and our customers understand our value. And so I hope that’s continuing. I hope that your questions about customer service, and outreach and regions and digital services are part of that thinking. I’m not being harsh on NARA for the sake of being harsh, and I’m not bitter. I’m very happy where I am, but it was a tough experience for me personally and professionally. I know that, you know, and there might be some tougher times ahead. I don’t know, you know? But change hurts, but there’s good ambiguity and there’s very bad ambiguity. All ambiguity is not okay. And so maybe a little less ambiguity, a little more clarity, would help. Ad as I say that, I’m also thinking about what I’m trying to do here in my new job. You know, I’m ambiguous about things I shouldn’t be ambiguous about. There are things that I need to work on. So I’m pointing to myself, too.

Ellen Mulligan: Would you come back to the National Archives?

Jennifer Nelson: Not now. And again, it’s not about the mission. If I saw mature leadership that truly, truly knew how to seek and develop development of its own leaders internally, and I’m not talking about identifying an organizational development function and making sure that it’s doing well. I mean, all leaders at the top truly understanding what it means and what it’s like to look somebody in the eye in their own office space, for, say, out of the Presidential Libraries or in the field, and to truly say I hear you. And to take that time and personally connect so that people feel their validity, organizationally and personally, and then to begin a dialogue about what is truly our shared interest in this agency. And what will it take to achieve that rather than committing things, doing things through closed doors, doing things through electronic means because it’s easy or it’s cheap, or that’s the way everybody works today is, you know, no. People still talk. People still need to look eye to eye and to understand one another. I think from a place of true understanding is where that could start. If I saw that happening, I’d be delighted to come back. But I don’t see that happening anytime soon, the way things have been. But it’ll happen. Things will cycle around, and, you know, but by that time, I’ll just years away from saying to myself, gosh, I could retire in two or three years if I wanted to. And at that point, I’ll be in a different part in my career. But I have never personally returned to a place where I came from, okay? I have, for better or for worse, for whatever that means, I mean, a person doesn’t move from Los Angeles to Washington, DC at the age of 23 never even having seen the place she’s moving to, and, you know, and do that lightly. So I move with a purpose, and I don’t know if after this interview, I’d be wanted back, but under a, under a different kind of environment, yeah, I’d, I’d consider it.

Jessie Kratz: Well, Ellen, you might have another question, but this kind of falls in the same area—you talked a lot lately about the morale problem at the National Archives.

Jennifer Nelson: Yeah.

Jessie Kratz: And some people say that it’s been there the whole time and we just didn’t notice it. And a lot of people say, no, it’s new. You were at the Archives for 22 years. Do you feel like the morale problem is new, or do you think it’s something that’s been there?

Jennifer Nelson: So I tend to say yes and yes. I would say that both of the responses are right. I’ve got a ton of assumptions that are packed into, you know, what you’ve just suggested. I would say its yes. Yes to both. And so here are my assumptions about what you’ve said and what I imagine people may have meant. So the morale problem that I remember, and kind of experiencing when I came in, and what I mean by morale, I don’t mean my morale, although eventually I started feeling one. So there’s a sort of a victimization and sort of a high school kind of environment thing where it’s you speak if you’re spoken to, don’t dream too big. You’re in your class or your silo or whatever. But I’ve always experienced NARA as not knowing how to encourage and then reward people for really trying to innovate and encouraging and giving true authority to GS-15s and GS-14s. And from a place now in a different agency, I can tell the main distinction is where I am not an SCS in my current position, but I am afforded the respect of an SCS. I have huge responsibilities, and I am expected to exercise my authority, you know, directly, and how I see fit, as long as I’m also, of course, seeking the guidance and counsel of my supervisor and my reviewing official. And, you know, checking with people to make sure that something that I want to implement makes sense, especially being a new person in the agency. So how does this compare to NARA? I have known too many GS-15s and GS-14s, I feel, at NARA who truly don’t feel like they’re the captain of their division, you know? And I think there’s an awful lot of passive aggressiveness in that. So I’m not saying that they are being unjustly done to. I think that it is an environment where there’s no expectation that people will really step up and really own, really drive like a general or a colonel, you know? Really develop a vision, and really drive it, and really own it, and here’s the money and the resources that you can have at your disposal to reward people. But I don’t, I never experienced a genuine clamor among the 15s and the 14s that, to lead like that. Where’s the fire? Where’s the fire in the belly to do that? I’ve not observed it. So when I say they’re not being unjustly done to, everybody owns at least 50% of the responsibility for their situation. And so they’re not bringing it, and it’s not being required of them. So I see that as a real distinction. Did I answer your question?

Jessie Kratz: Yeah, I’m—

Jennifer Nelson: [Interposing] Could you repeat the question?

Jessie Kratz: —well, I was wondering—

Ellen Mulligan: [Interposing] Morale.

Jessie Kratz: —yes.

Jennifer Nelson: Morale.

Jessie Kratz: Wondering, yes, I mean—

Jennifer Nelson: [Interposing] Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think that, so there’s this victimization when you see your 14, your 15, your 13 behaving that way, I mean, we’d love to think that we’re all self- commanding, that this is our domain, we’re adults. But the reality is we tend to, as human beings, react and respond and put ourselves forward according to what we see above us in an organization. And so leadership really, really matters. And so this victimization thing does roll downhill, and you end up, so that kills innovation. When people wake up kind of like, well, what can I make sure doesn’t fall on me today, rather than, how can I make a difference? And where does public service fit into my life? So I think that that is part of the ongoing staff morale problem. I think the more recent thing gets back to what I said, that people have a feeling that the agency is broken. There was this belief that if we reorganize, people will just make things happen. No. There were networks that were shattered. There were trusts that was shattered and not rebuilt. You know, the new leaders weren’t exactly put forward in a way that I think made it very clear that they were valued and trusted. And, you know, so what was new and what needed to be new was not defined by senior leadership in a clear way at all to give good marching, I’ve got quotes around this, "marching orders" to the SCSes that were hired in. But yet they were supposed to create something visionary and new, and again, and lead that change and communicate it downward. So I think that some of that stuff contributes to the broken feeling. And it will rebuild, but it’s going to take different people and a lot of time. Now your folks are really never going to want to have me back. But that’s okay. I, I own everything I’m saying. It’s my own personal opinion, professional opinion, like I said at the beginning of this tape. But I, you know, that’s what I feel for an agency that needs to work on its own sense of well-defined urgency. The current Archivist has talked about the need for urgency. Okay. What does that really mean? Is that a behavior? Is it, is it a value? Is it both? What’s important and can… Is it fair to people to say behave urgently? Do urgent things. But to what end, and what is the shared interest? What can people get behind? So I think that there is, in pockets throughout the agency, employees who understand that and they do see things that are going well. And they see things that energize them, and they want to contribute and contribute even more. But there is this massive gap between, I think, those individuals who are experiencing the agency in that way and probably have not been around more than five or six years or so. I’m just saying that. I’m just guessing, I don’t know, in terms of the number of years. And then there’s everybody else, who is of a certain age. You know, I think the average age of the NARA employee keeps climbing. It was some years ago something like 46, and I think it’s higher than that now maybe. But there’s the everybody else that remembers and has experienced this long-term staff morale problem. And those folks are really hard to turn around when you’ve been experiencing an organizational behavior for the majority of your career. But I refuse to personally believe it’s impossible to reach those individuals. I think it can be, but it takes, again, that concerted, personal effort from senior leadership to really engage people. One-on-one, if that’s what it takes. And up until the last day that I was at NARA, I didn’t see anybody really going out, you know, from senior leadership and trying to do that. And there was a lot of talk about that.

Jessie Kratz: All right. Well, we’re running out of time, so is there something you really want to add, or…

Ellen Mulligan: I don’t think so. I think we hit most of the questions. We didn’t talk much about specific web things, but you gave us some good overview.

Jennifer Nelson: Yeah, the, like, for example, I mean, you know, NAIL, I can’t give an awful lot of insight— that’s Deb Wall, Carol Lagundo kind of question. First venturing in online services, you know, it was NAIL and that laundry list webpage…Hang on just a sec. We’ve got to run, huh? Okay, I’ve got to go.

Jessie Kratz: Okay, yes. Well, I mean, I think that your overviews were very helpful, anyway, rather than going to specific questions.

Jennifer Nelson: Okay.

Ellen Mulligan: Yeah.

Jessie Kratz: So this was great. Thanks for your time, and we might want to follow up.

Jennifer Nelson: Not a problem.

Ellen Mulligan: Yes. Thank you.