Transcript of National Archives History Office Oral History interview
Interviewer(s): Rebecca Brenner
Interviewee(s): Michelle Dozier

Rebecca Brenner: This is Rebecca Brenner at Archives II, and I am conducting an oral history interview of Michelle Dozier on June 30, 2015. So, could you provide a brief overview of your background and education?

Michelle Dozier: Sure. I was actually born at Fort Meade, Maryland, an army brat. My dad retired around the time I was in first grade. We ended up moving to Ayer Massachusetts, or Fort Devens, which I don’t believe exists anymore. So, all my elementary, middle school, and high school education was in Ayer, Massachusetts. I then graduated high school in 1977, and went to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. My degree is Hospitality Management. I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Hospitality Management. I did that after I graduated in 1981. I worked in the industry, probably about a year and a half to two years, and I had a boyfriend at the time and decided that I would move to Iowa, working for Marriot Corporation, and they were getting ready to move me to Nebraska. And I decided that I really didn’t want to work in an industry 365 days a year, 24-7, and came back over to Maryland, where my husband-to-be was stationed at Fort Meade. So, I ended up back at Fort Meade.

Rebecca Brenner: And what positions have you held at the National Archives, and what did you do in them?

Michelle Dozier: Okay, I started at the National Archives in 2001. I came from the U.S. Department of Labor, where I had been there since 1983. I came into the government as a clerk typist. So, in 2001, I was hired as the Archives.gov team leader. I had also competed for the web manager position, and I was a finalist but did not get selected for that position, which was absolutely the best thing because I don’t think I would’ve done very well in that position at the time because I did not know NARA. So, in 2001, NARA established a web program staff, and I think I was the fourth or fifth person hired at the time. And we proceeded to hire a total of eleven people to manage the Internet and Intranet websites, and to also support the Presidential Libraries websites. So, I was a Team Leader, and then in 2007 I became the Web Program Manager. Jennifer Nelson left, and I became the new manager for the group. And then in 2012 we had a reorganization where the Office of Innovation had a new position for a digital analyst, and that’s what I’m doing now. I didn’t officially start that until 2014 because they had trouble filling my position, so I was still doing my old work for that period of time, and then we did hire someone but they only stayed for about nine months, so I continued to do that web program manager job for a lot longer than originally intended.

Rebecca Brenner: When you first started at NARA, what were your original impressions of the agency?

Michelle Dozier: When I first came here, honestly, I thought I had made a mistake, and the reason was: it was very quiet, compared to where I had come from, it was a very quiet agency, and people didn’t seem to be very friendly at the time. One of the reasons I took the job, or applied for the job, was that where I was, I had started the first Intranet at the Department of Labor, called Labor Net, and I was kind of getting bored and wanted to do something different. There were no opportunities for me to work on the public website. So, when I applied for this job, here at NARA in 2001, it was to work specifically on the public website. So, when I came here, all the people that worked in my group—two of them had worked for NARA before, but nine of us had not. So, we didn’t have the NARA, you know, we weren’t archivists, we weren’t historians, we weren’t preservationists, so we had to learn a lot about the agency. So, there were plusses and minuses to that because not knowing the agency we could bring new ideas, and then the disadvantage was we had a lot to learn in terms of what the work was in the agency. So, we did a lot of rotational assignments and details, where we would work in a research room, or we would work in a different area, so we could learn about the different jobs. So, that was interesting, and it took me about six months to think that I didn’t make a mistake in coming here. I immediately got into creating a design and managing contacts, and the work became very interesting. It took us a lot of effort to kind of get people to trust us to represent them on the website—there was a lot of reluctance to put things on the website back then—and then we also did some training, which was in my background. We would train the staff because the way that the web program works is we centrally managed the content of the website, and we rely on staff all over the country who are subject matter experts to provide content and to update the content.

Rebecca Brenner: Could you speak more to that transition into the website and the web program staff, and what was the general attitude towards that?

Michelle Dozier: Well, the interesting thing about us, again, we were from outside, so there was a trust issue, but we used to have a lot of fun, and I guess I would see we were kind of noisy, and boisterous, and things like that, which was kind of a new thing, at least I felt it was, but we used to do a lot of things together. It was a lot of good team spirit and we enjoyed our work, so it was just really going out and meeting with people and explaining, you know, what we were trying to do, and to get offices—you know, we felt like we were just constantly pulling teeth to get people to give us content to put on the web. And we reached another point, where they wanted to put everything on the web, and everything doesn’t belong on the web, so it was kind of a tipping point right before that started to happen. But each staff member was assigned to a certain area of content, and so they built relationships with people in the agency, and you know, over time I think it just really built a good reputation. We did a couple of redesigns, which were kind of challenging to do, where you try to get people to really review their information, and decide whether it’s up-to-date or necessary. Sometimes people were resistant to getting rid of things. But when we did our first redesign, in 2002, and we did a content audit and discovered we had 18,000 files on the server, and by the time we got done we were down to 8,000. There was a lot of excess stuff that had never been removed, and so we went from there, and now there are probably 25,000 files on the website now. But yeah, so it was an interesting time—I think they started their website in 1996 originally, and it was one or two people who were kind of working, so by the time they actually made that full staff of 2001, all of that stuff had just been sitting there, you know, things were getting posted, but none of it was coming off.

Rebecca Brenner: Did you have mentors early on?

Michelle Dozier: No, I think what it is that we did rotational assignments where we, for 120 or 180 days, we would go into a different office. We obviously had IDP’s, Individual Development Plans, and some of our elements of the IDP were to actually do a rotational assignment, and you had to take a class called Archiving for Non-Archivists. I can’t remember—that’s gone away and come back—it’s kind of interesting, so we could learn more about, you know, what this agency does, and the different aspects within the agency. So, you know, we didn’t really have mentors, per say, but we did try to do rotational assignments and get to know other people in the organization.

Rebecca Brenner: What successes have you achieved here?

Michelle Dozier: Well, I think we established a good reputation for providing good customer service, and for representing the agency very well. As I said, in 2002, we did one redesign. We did another one in 2005. We did another one in 2010. So, we’ve also done two on NARA@Work, the Intranet. So, I think each time we’ve done a redesign, we’ve brought best practices into our work we’re doing. On staff, we had a lot of staff participation. I think the first redesigns we did were paper-based, for example, the way to design a website is to do cards or post-its, and you put topics on them, and then you would just organize them, and that became the basis for your websites, so you’d group them together, and this became one topic, and you’d group this together, and that’s how you did web building from the beginning. Or if you wanted to do a redesign, you know, you called the card sorts, so that was the way that we did them, and we did them on paper. Well, by the time we did the last one, those were done online, so we had staff participating. They could do the card sorts online, and we did a lot of user testing. They were usually paper-based, and by the time we finished we were able to do all that stuff online now, which meant we had participation from across the country. When we were doing paper-based stuff it basically had to be AI and AII. But by the time we got to the very last one that we did with everything online, everyone across the country could contribute and participate. So, I think that was one thing I could say too was that we invited employee participation, and they voted on the name. NARA@Work was a vote by the staff. The design of Archives.gov was a vote by the staff. So, I think we always took into consideration— actually we had a public vote too, so it was public and staff votes. So, I think we always made an effort to include staff in the processes that we undertook to make the websites, to make improvements to our websites.

Rebecca Brenner: What aspects of your work have you enjoyed most?

Michelle Dozier: Well, I like working with people. I like solving problems. I was talking with someone yesterday, and I think when I first came here, it seemed like we had a crisis every Friday, at 3:00, there would be a crisis! We would wait because some announcement was coming, we would have to post it, and this was just how it was. There was always something crazy going on that we would have to stay late and try to, you know, address. But it also was exciting to be involved in that and to know you have that kind of impact, you know, to be able to spread the word like that very quickly. Now there is social media, so the web does not have to be up to date as much, although we can do that remotely now. Before, we used to have to physically be here. Now we can do that remotely, so someone doesn’t have to come into the building.

Rebecca Brenner: What’s an example of a particularly memorable Friday crisis?

Michelle Dozier: Let’s see, usually it would be some press release that had to go out, about some issue. I guess, and it wouldn’t necessarily be a Friday crisis, would be when we were releasing Presidential records. So, whenever the was a Supreme Court nominee, I’ve done Alito, Sotomayor, John Roberts, there might be one more—when they got nominated, the agency looked in all of our records to find out if they had ever worked for the government, they had records here. So, they would get digitized, and then we would end up publishing on the website. And sometimes, you know, we would have rollouts of one big launch, or sometimes we would be launching them. So, all the Supreme Court nominees—I learned about what they had done in their past, and it was just, again you’re having impact, and all of them obviously got confirmed. One that was particularly—it wasn’t something that I like to be really proud of, in terms of what our country did, but the CDC [Center for Disease Control] had these files—America had done some experiments with prisoners and prostitutes and things like that, and had injected these folks. They had syphilis, and even though we could treat it, we did not treat it. We wanted to see how the disease progressed. This was a very shameful thing that the agency did, but anyway, we ended up publishing those records: graphic pictures of the results of these experiments. So, we had to work with General Counsel; we had to work with all these different people to make sure—because it was something that could cause, well, had already caused an uproar when people found out that we had done these things. But when you put them on a website, and they are very graphic, people will be like: “you’re publishing porn,” you know, things like that, so we had to figure out a way we would put up—this is the first time that we had done that, we had put up this alarm when you click on a page, an interim page would come up and say: “these pictures are very graphic.” If you want to continue, click here. If not, go back. You know, because, it was very, very sensitive.

Rebecca Brenner: When was this? And what were the legal implications?

Michelle Dozier: I’m going to have to look up when that was. I am not really sure of the timeline for that.

Rebecca Brenner: Just approximately, early 2000’s?

Michelle Dozier: It was late 2000’s.

Rebecca Brenner: Okay.

Michelle Dozier: It was, I want to say, ’09, or 2010 possibly. But we can look online to see those exact dates. But mainly it was that people would file complaints against us for posting stuff like that. And then, of course it hit the news. Even though it had sort of been there before, now, you know, the Guatemalan government would get upset. You know, different, it could have had, I guess, a lot of political ramifications. Apparently, it was agreed upon by the countries that allowed this to occur, but the families of these people were very upset, and I don’t know if they received reparations, but they may have. That was the most—it was a very difficult project that I was involved in.

Rebecca Brenner: Would you say that NARA was serving as sort of a watchdog in that scenario, or just had access to the records?

Michelle Dozier: No, we weren’t a watchdog because mainly we can’t publish things if they are records from another agency; we have to have their permission to publish them. So, all this was being worked out, with our General Counsel, their General Counsel—I guess it’s possible that they were FOIA-ed—we would not have released them without coordinating with CDC. So, you know, all this back and forth was going on about when we could release them, how we were supposed to release them, so there was a lot going on across these agencies to publish. But we were not really a watchdog. We just can’t publish some of the stuff until, you know, the agency agrees to release them.

Rebecca Brenner: Moving to a more specific question, can you describe a typical day in your unit?

Michelle Dozier: Well, we do have staff now who telework. We used to not be able to do that. Staff had to be here. But mostly work comes in from all over the country that we review, check for, you know, spelling, formatting, and things like that, and then they get published. A lot of stuff now can be, like on NARA@work, we have a content management system, so we do not have to touch that stuff as much. They self-publish—we don’t have to monitor that. Right now, I’m actually not on the web team anymore, I’m doing other work, but right now they are implementing a content management system for the public website, so that eventually staff will also be able to self-publish. They won’t have to rely on us to be here to physically touch a file and push it up, like we used to have to do. That’s the manual process. There, let me see what else is going on—well of course, we have the catalog. In my division, we are responsible for the online catalog. In my role now, what I’m doing is I’m looking at how our unit supports the strategic goals. So, I look at the data from the different groups, like the catalog, how much stuff we are publishing, the digitization lab, how much stuff we’re digitizing, how much of that ends up in the catalog on the web and social media side, looking at: is our traffic increasing, what are people looking at, what are they searching for, are we getting traffic from social media to the website, are we getting traffic from the catalog there, and then we have these digitization partners. I’m looking at how much they’re digitizing and how much traffic they’re getting on their site. So right now my role is more about how we are helping support and reach a goal that will give access to the records and all the different units in my Office of Innovation and how they contribute to that.

Rebecca Brenner: You mentioned the strategic plan. Is that what it is called? What is that?

Michelle Dozier: Every agency has a strategic plan. And you have a certain number of goals, and one of our goals is providing access to the records, and I think the fourth one is developing staff. So, there are four elements, and when I do my performance standards, for example, there might be five or six, and I just have to say how I would be performing them and they have to align with the strategic goal that is listed on our plan. So, it’s published, I think it’s updated; I want to say, every five years. But it changes over time because things can change from year to year in terms of what you are—we are trying to, in terms of access, we might have a goal to describe 95% of our holdings. I think it is 90% for this year. So, I track: are we doing that, are we keeping up with that, and then that gets reported, that is reported then into our plan to show if we are meeting our goals.

Rebecca Brenner: How has web traffic changed over time?

Michelle Dozier: Actually our traffic has gone a little slower. I would like to say 5%, or between 3% and 5% per year. And one of the things is that I think that we are putting, and this was always a challenging idea for people, we are putting our content in more than one location. Instead of just publishing things on the web, or publishing in the catalog, they get published on Wikipedia, they are published on Facebook, you might see things on Twitter, we have a YouTube channel. We have Flickr. We are publishing photographs. And then we have these partners who are digitizing stuff, and they are putting the stuff on their website. So, while we might get eighteen million visitors on a year of traffic to the website, Ancestry gets that in a month. So, they have many more images of documents on their site, but so we are seeing billions over last year. We saw over a billion on Wikipedia alone.

Rebecca Brenner: What is the relationship between the National Archives and Wikipedia?

Michelle Dozier: Well, we have a Wikipedian in Residence. And we work with them. And they are going to have a little space down in the Innovation Hub downtown, where we collaborate with them to get materials up into Wikipedia, and then we also track how often our material is used in articles and Wikipedia. We are actually in Wikipedia Commons. So, we have one person who is just devoted to cultivating that relationship with them—Dominic Byrd-McDevitis—our Wikipedian in Residence. And then with our partners, they have usually an agreement that for five years they can digitize certain records, and they get to use them, obviously they get to charge for those uses for however long we have the agreement. And then, once the agreement is done, we get the records, and we can publish them in our catalog. So, that is what we are in the process of doing now. I think we have twelve million things that we need to put up in the catalog right now.

Rebecca Brenner: You have mentioned a few, but can you speak to changes over time that you have experienced at NARA?

Michelle Dozier: Changes over time, I guess, well obviously technology. We used to have, the web team used to purchase our own PC’s because the ones that they gave to staff were not as powerful, so we often were ahead in technology. NARA itself, I think things have changed outside of NARA that have made us have to change, for example, social media. There was a lot of staff who did not want us to participate in social media. They felt like it was not really supporting the mission. There was a lot of resistance to it because they did not feel like we should be publishing our materials on other sites. So, I think people have gotten used to that, and even having staff speak on social media, like someone tweeting, and writing on Facebook, there are people who are very resistant to that. And so, there were some comments that we had 200 people working in my office just to do social media, and the reality was we only had two people working in the office on social media, but we might have had a hundred and something other people across the agency who were publishing on social media. They might be putting on Flickr photos; they might be putting on videos on YouTube. So, they did not actually work for our office. And actually, this was “other duties as assigned.” They all had other jobs. They probably were archivists, or they were doing other work. Here they were also participating on social media. So, the other thing I think, that has changed in the agency is that we have the ICN, the Internal Collaboration Network. That really changed the communication process in the agency, where a lot of people are able to share ideas and get information very quickly, like today everyone’s blasting about Facebook being down because people actually use Facebook. They publish Facebook materials or things like that. So, Facebook has been down again. We cannot get to Facebook from here. It is not that Facebook is down; it is that we cannot get to it. So, people who actually do work on Facebook and look for information to publish on Facebook cannot do their work today for whatever reason. So, I think, something that was interesting was the ICN—people share things like pet photos and what I did on my summer vacation. But they also share information on where they can find certain things, like records, or how to address a researcher’s problem. We have a virtual scream where you can scream, and they don’t really write swear words, but you can tell that that’s what they want to do. So, the ICN, I think, has had a big impact on communication, and again, people can talk to each other from all over the country. I don’t think that would have happened before if you had to call somebody and look them up. So it’s good for immediate communication, and you can put something up there and say: “does anybody know where this is,” and next thing you know, you have five responses. I think that has had a really big impact. Again, people were resistant to it and did not want it. But some people still complain that a lot of non-work stuff happens on there. But we describe it as sort of being the water cooler talk. So, you might be walking down the hall or standing by the water cooler, and you guys have these conversations, now these conversations happen on the ICN. That’s how we view it.

Rebecca Brenner: How was the decision made to start social media sites, or being involved with Facebook and Flickr and YouTube and all those?

Michelle Dozier: So, in 2009, the administration, President Obama, they decided that we should be using social media. The government issued a lot of guidance. There were two memorandums issued by the Office of Management and Budget that allowed us to do two things. One was to use cookies, which meant that you could get some information about people and their behavior on your website, and also that you could use social media. So, OMB, gave us a list of all social media platforms, and GSA, General Services Administration, started working with these different groups, these different platforms, to negotiate terms of service agreements that would allow us to participate. So, it started in 2009, and the first agreements that we signed, and this is what we had to do. We had to get the agreement, we had to take it to our General Counsel, we had to run it by IT security, and then the CIO had to sign the agreement. And once the agreement was signed, we had to set up policies and procedures to use it. So, we had internal training, and first we did a Twitter account, we did one Facebook page, we did a YouTube channel, we had Flickr. I think those were the first four or five that we first did. Now we have over a hundred and sixty different places on the network, which means there is twenty-five Facebook pages, or forty Facebook pages. So, each region has one, each library has one, but there are 160 locations where we are participating on social media. It started in 2009, with the administration encouraging us to do it. And then what we would do was we would start some of them internally, and some things got shut down because they were not successful. One thing people did not realize is that if you have a Twitter account, you have to tweet regularly. You cannot just put it out there and just leave it. So, that happened a few times before, so we set up a process where people would send us proposals for what they wanted to set up, and they would be reviewed, and then we would meet with them to discuss it, and then they would decide whether or not they wanted to continue or not. They realized that we were not going to be doing the work for them, other than setting them up, establishing them. They were going to have to do it themselves after we got things set up. So, it just blossomed, and I’d say every couple of months a new service would get released, and sometimes they would change their terms of service agreement and we cannot use them anymore. Or, they could charge us for it. Or, they decided to charge us for the services, so we just decided that we were not going to continue with it.

Rebecca Brenner: How would you evaluate the transition overall to the ICN, and NARA using social media— how would you evaluate that transition overall?

Michelle Dozier: Well, I’ve been in the government, like I said, since 1983. I have never seen anything move as quickly as I have since 2009. I would say that it just, in many ways, how it moves on the outside of the government agency, and we have made such progress in terms of moving much more quickly to get things set up and get things approved, and things like that. I have never seen anything like it. It is really just how social media is. It has just been fortunate that we had an administration and an agency that decided to participate.

Rebecca Brenner: Along the lines of things being online, another change I was wondering about is the digitization of records, including both digitization of paper records that are already here, and then what happens when the records at NARA that are received are already digital?

Michelle Dozier: Well, those go into the ERA, the Electronic Records Archive, and then we ended up pushing them up into the catalog. The partners—they deliver hard drives with the images on them, and then we move them up into the catalog. So, again, there was a lot of resistance with the partners that were not very much appreciated, back when it started. And we often still get complaints from members of the public. We have a customer satisfaction survey on our website. We have had it in place since 2003, and we ask questions about the website, what they were looking for, or what the best thing was. If they could change something, what would they change on the website? So, we frequently see complaints about they do not want to have to pay to use Ancestry to get access to the records, and the only other option is for them to come to a NARA facility. And so, you know, there are complaints about that. The 1940 census was another one that there were complaints. We did not have the capacity to host that here, so we had to host that externally. So, you know, the customer does not like to pay. First they think everything should be online, and second they think it should be free. That’s the bottom line. It’s their taxpayers paying for this stuff, and they think it should be free. It will be eventually, but we just do not have the capacity to digitize everything.

Rebecca Brenner: I am not sure if this question is under your line of discretion, but what gets digitized? What are the priorities within the strategic plan?

Michelle Dozier: I am not able to address that, other than to say there is a digitization strategy group, and they are within the Office of Innovation, and right now they are doing a digitization prioritization strategy. So, that is again on the ICN. The Digitization Government Board is asking for agency input on what should be digitized. I don’t know how each unit decides what to digitize, but we share information on our survey. If the public says we’d like to see more of this, we share that information with the different offices that have those records. I think we have a bunch of State Department records that are ready to be published soon that are going to be of high interest.

Rebecca Brenner: What are those, just out of curiosity?

Michelle Dozier: I’m not 100% sure. I just heard about that yesterday, of what the content is of those records. I’m not sure what they are, but I just know that for right now, they are not uploading stuff right to the catalog. But as soon as that is functioning again, it’s 1.2 million records from the State Department. It would be uploaded, but high-interest records tend to be Nixon tapes, for example. That would be, that was one that was something we did, you know, transcriptions from Nixon. We posted those online, so whenever that happens, we have to be prepared because the website will get a lot of high traffic. But high interest records require coordination, and like the 1940 census, the site crashed, the day that it launched, and it wasn’t here. It wasn’t us. It was externally, but it crashed. And there were so many people that were interested in it, you know, that they just could not support the traffic.

Rebecca Brenner: Any other changes over time?

Michelle Dozier: Well, obviously things like tele-work—when I first came into the government that was not very common. I didn’t know anybody who worked at home back then, and I would say that this agency, like the one I worked at before, supported work-life balance, so teleworking is one of the things. One of the things I liked at Labor was that, less so here, was that the Department of Labor had a day care center that my son went to, is that they were visible in the building quite often. They had events. Whenever we had, let’s say, Black History Month, they would be part of the program. So, you got to see them more. Here, they cannot go into certain areas of the building. So, it is nice to hear them when they are downstairs, or outside of our offices. I think it is helpful for parents, and I was a single mom too, to be able to have your kid right there nearby, that you could see them during the day. So, those kinds of things in government in general just have made life for working parents a lot better. This agency supports the work-life balance.

Rebecca Brenner: You said NARA has a daycare, or have we heard them?

Michelle Dozier: NARA has a daycare. It is actually when you first come in the building—no, you actually have to access it from the outside. So, when you first come in the driveway, if you look to your left, there is this little short area. That is the daycare, and that is where the playground is. The other time we see them is when there is a fire alarm, and parents rush down to get them, and then they, I mean, it’s kind of fun to see, but they put seven of them in a crib and roll them out—it’s kind of cool.

Rebecca Brenner: Does Archives I have its own daycare? Do they send the kids on a shuttle here?

Michelle Dozier: I don’t know. It’s open to other people; it does not just have to be NARA employees. But there’s more facilities available downtown. The Department of Labor had their daycare center since 1963. But you have more opportunities to use other daycare centers nearby. You don’t have to rely on your own agency. So, my son went to Labor from three years to five years old. I think here they take them as infants, six weeks to eight weeks.

Rebecca Brenner: He can put that on his resume: Department of Labor, age 2 to age 5.

Michelle Dozier: Yes, you know, that was the fun thing. And so, I’d see a school bus come up here sometimes, so I’m not sure if there is school age, but an elementary school bus comes in the parking lot sometimes. So, there might be a kid down there who is already going to kindergarten.

Rebecca Brenner: How do you view your time at the National Archives?

Michelle Dozier: Well, it’s interesting, because at first, one of the things I liked about working at Labor is I felt that the Department had a lot of impact on Americans, and I did not see that so much when I first came here. But over time I see that we’ve got so much history here. We are providing access to those records. Again, I’ve learned a lot. I do feel that this agency has a huge impact on all Americans, not just working Americans because that’s what Labor was: working Americans. Everybody who worked, but so, I definitely feel proud and honored to have worked for the agency. And it also, again, I think, I don’t know if you’re aware, we have low scores in terms of employee satisfaction.

Rebecca Brenner: I didn’t know that, but that’s interesting. Can you tell me more about that?

Michelle Dozier: Well, they do a survey every year. And this is all online; you could look it up if you wanted. We are like second from the bottom, which is very sad. I think pockets vary; I have been very satisfied with my work, and a lot of people who work in my office are too. I think most dissatisfaction is the lack of advancement opportunities. Like any agency there is sort of this jealousy over headquarters versus the field offices. That’s one thing; they feel like they’re step children. But that’s the same way it was in the Department of Labor. Every regional facility felt like they did not get everything like the Headquarters did. You know, so, in general though, I think most people I’ve worked with seem very happy with their work. They think there were opportunities to work on special projects and do different things. The only thing I could say might be lacking was promotional opportunities to be able to move up, because people don’t leave. I have not had one person leave the web team, for probably seven or eight years. And most of the people who are there came in 2001. Most of them have come in and have not left. But I think the work has changed, so they are interested and developing skills, and also I think the culture in terms of work-life balance because a lot of people have children and families. I think it just fits everybody well, and so they don’t leave. The employee satisfaction in general is pretty poor. There are a lot of activities that the agency has been doing to try to bring morale up. But a lot of it is external stuff. We had a sequestration with these big budget cuts. We have no control over that. We have no control over whether Congress gives us raises or not. So, when people want more money, Congress did not give us any more money. There are no wage increases, so some of that we cannot control, but I think there is a big effort, and I think, a sincere effort, to try to improve employee satisfaction. I’ve been very satisfied with my work.

Rebecca Brenner: That was 2013, right? How did the government sequester affect NARA?

Michelle Dozier: Well, again I cannot speak for everyone, but for example, a lot of contracts were cut or reduced, like we used to have a contract in the fitness center. We had staff that did classes. They updated equipment, and their contract was cut. So, I think our security contract had to be cut, so I think we used to come in by the entrance down there, so there was fewer security staff. We had a hiring freeze. People were leaving, and we could not replace them. That was bad everywhere. It wasn’t just here. Some of my friends were furloughed. They were off from eight to ten days with no pay. We didn’t do that. NARA did a lot to prevent that from happening, so we didn’t have furloughs. But there were a lot of cuts. Like I said, the gym was one of them. We have no more contracts for that. I think that’s the main thing. Some things like you put off upgrades, or updates and things like that on technology. But they kept us from being furloughed and laid off, so I think that was another thing that the agency should be proud of.

Rebecca Brenner: What contribution are you most proud of at the National Archives?

Michelle Dozier: I would say, just in general, the quality of the websites. We have always tried to do a really good job of portraying the agency in an accurate light, not necessarily always positive, but an accurate light. I am also proud of the social media effort in 2009. I was the first one to get these set up for us when it became feasible for us to do that. I would also say that the satisfaction survey—we were one of the first agencies to get that on our website. We have been doing that since 2003. We have won a couple of awards on the websites. We won a Webby. We received an award of recognition from the Federal Web Managers Council, you know, for the content and plain language. As the manager of that group, I think we always worked really hard to produce a really good product on the web representing the agency.

Rebecca Brenner: Are you affiliated with any other professional organizations, such as SAA or OAH?

Michelle Dozier: No. On the web team, we were not archivists. The only thing that I do right now is the Federal Web Managers Council. And then there is a social media group, but they are not recognized like SAA.

Rebecca Brenner: That’s okay; tell me about them.

Michelle Dozier: Well, the Federal Web Managers Council is, again, sponsored by GSA. They’ve been around for quite a while, but we used to have an annual training where we would share best practices and things like that, and so, there is a website, digitalgov.gov, where there is all the information. So, we would review new policies and new guidance. We would share all of that information and that kind of stuff. So, they used to have monthly meetings that I would attend and then when social media kicked off, that Social Media Council did that same sort of thing where, you know, you can go online. That’s the other things that changed so much: webinars and things, where you don’t have to leave your building and travel too far just to learn about the latest, you know, software that people are using and things like that. But no, I’m not affiliated with any formal things like SAA.

Rebecca Brenner: Okay, and is there anything you would like to add to the interview, such as anecdotes or words of wisdom?

Michelle Dozier: That’s a hard one: anecdotes. I guess one thing is not to judge a book by its cover, probably because like I said, when I first came here I was thinking I had made a mistake because I felt like people were very unfriendly. It didn’t seem like people were very happy here, but over time, as I got to know everyone, there was this serious demeanor all the time, so it did not seem like people were having fun in their work, but that would be one. I guess the one thing that people don’t know about how I ended up in this is that I have a degree in hospitality.

Rebecca Brenner: I know that program at UMass.

Michelle Dozier: I came in as a clerk typist GS-3. I took the test. Back then you had to take a typing test. And I took the test, and I came in, and six months later I had gotten a position in another office doing training. So, I started training, and I was very shy. I ended up as a training assistant and then actually a trainer where I was teaching classes on the consumer price index and the housing index, which produces the CPI, right. So, there you go, I was having this big impact. They ended up just setting up a server email, their own email servers, so I ended up getting training for that. I managed the server, so here I am moving into technology. I’ve gone from training into technology. In the main Labor building I ended up getting a job where they were setting up a computer lab. You probably don’t even understand computer based training, where you would have ten PC’s, and you would have computer training loaded onto them. People would sign in and come and take training. That’s what we used to do; we had a lab. So, one day, I was walking through the suite, through the Secretary’s suite, and he was having a problem with his PC, and he calls me and I go in and everything had frozen. So, I don’t know, I hit a bunch of keys and unfroze his document. And so he was able to continue, blah, blah… And the next thing I know, I am now setting up the Intranet because I solved a Word problem, a Word Perfect is what we had. I solved this problem, and next thing I know, I’m being asked to set up the Intranet. No training, no skills, terrified. Somebody had started the project, but they were six months behind, so I took it over and figured everything out. And I guess the thing is just to be open to new challenges, however they present themselves. If I had not done that, I never would have created the first Intranet at the Labor Department, moved onto Web over here at Archives.gov. These things happened, and I just sort of ended up—no one would have told me with a Hospitality degree that I would end up managing a website and web team of eleven people. I guess just be open to new opportunities when they appear, even if you really don’t believe you have the skills. Things were much simpler back then on the Web, you know, with the coding and stuff. But I can’t even believe how that happened to me because I unfroze someone’s PC, and ended up becoming the Web Program Manager and actually the Web and Social Media Branch Chief up until the end of 2013. Just be open to trying new things, and don’t be afraid.

Rebecca Brenner: Well, thank you so much for your time, on behalf of the History Office, we really appreciate it.