Transcript of National Archives History Office Oral History Interview
Interviewer(s): Brian Knowles
Interviewee(s): Edward J. McCarter

Brian Knowles: I am Brian Knowles. I’m acting as an oral historian for the National Archives and Records Administration. Today’s date is 24 April 2014. I am conducting an oral history interview with Mr. Edward J. McCarter, Chief of the Still Picture Branch, Special Media Archives Division at Archives II, College Park, Maryland. Good morning, sir. If you could, where we left off was beginning with you being made Assistant Chief, Archival Projects, Supervisory Archivist, Still Picture Branch, Non-Textual Archives Division.

Edward J. McCarter: That was it.

Brian Knowles: That was 1989-1998. There is a lot of ground to cover with this one, so I’ll just kick off with my first question. What’s involved with being the Assistant Chief? What does that mean for when you took over that position?

Edward J. McCarter: Well, essentially, you’re responsible for all of archival project work that’s accessioning. For non-text, we pretty much handle the entire lifecycle of the record, so, unlike textual, and similar to electronic records. We go all the way, beginning with the appraisal process all the way through providing access to the public. So my responsibility was to be able to deal with all those different archival functions from the appraisal scheduling process through the accessioning process, through processing the records, getting them prepared, all the holdings maintenance preservation work that had to be done, to the descriptive work. And then, eventually, turning it over to the reference staff to handle. And there was a Reference Chief at that time. That person would be responsible for answering the letters, telephone calls, the in-person researchers, basically, you know, all the work that dealt with facing with the public. Whereas my work was really more focused behind scenes and literally my customer was the federal agencies. That’s the way we looked at it. Our responsibility was to work effectively with the agencies so that we could get the records transferred and preserved and made available. And that was difficult to do because we had a lot of hurdles to get over with, a lot of agencies had this view that NARA was kind of like a black hole. You sent the records here and they were gone forever and nobody ever knew what happened to them. And, God forbid, they were thrown out by mistake. I mean, all sorts of horror stories. And I remember during that time period with the people we had on staff, as well, working very hard to try to turn that opinion down or around. And you could only do it really agency-by-agency. There’s no other way to do it. So we would focus on an agency that we were interested in getting the records transferred and work very hard to get them here. One of the big successes we had was with DOD. We had the military records up through the end of the World War I period, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps things. Maybe a little bit later than that. Practically nothing from the Marine Corps after the turn of the century. That is the 20th century. And the Air Force, zip. We had nothing from the actual Air Force. So we worked very hard with the DOD to get the records transferred. And we were pretty successful. We got all of the World War II records through Korea. And probably through that period all the way through 1998, which includes moving from Archives I to Archives II, which was a whole other feat, if you want to put it, getting all of the Army records up through the Vietnam War and getting the Navy records through that period and getting the Marine Corps records through that period. And then eventually, after much tugging and pulling with the Air Force, because the Air Force had literally turned their photo collection over to the Smithsonian Institution to create a video disk. We were never alerted to what they were doing. But literally the entire body of records was at Smithsonian. So we worked very hard for a number of years convincing the Air Force that this was the place the records needed to go. And we had to jump through a lot of hoops for them. Well, if we need a copy of a photo, can you get us a copy of a photo? Yeah, sure. You know, it’s not a problem. We’ll do it. So we did what we had to do. And, eventually, we convinced them. And they directed the Smithsonian Institution, which was not very pleased, to turn over the photo collection, because it really was, you know, for the Air and Space, it was literally at the Air and Space Museum. For the Air and Space Museum, this was like a gem, because it had Army, Air Force and Air Force photography, you know, up, basically, up through the Vietnam War. So, we literally had to go, whenever we got these records, these big chunks like this, we physically went in vans over to the facilities, packed up all the records ourselves, put them in boxes and brought them back to the archives. That’s just what we had to do. And the Army, that was a real complicated one, because there were prints and there were negatives but the real issue was the index. The index was by subject. So while you could determine approximately where a cut-off was for the negatives because they were arranged in numerical order, same with the prints. You couldn’t do that with the index. Or in the case of the Army they had the photographs and they had about 6,000 albums by subject.

Brian Knowles: Wow.

Edward J. McCarter: So, what we literally did is kind of go in and pick and choose the albums that fit the timeframe and go to the index and literally take it apart by subject and recreate it at the Archives, put it back together, but missing what was there. And then, eventually, after some more tugging and pulling and convincing, and some help from some of the people at DOD, we were able to get the rest of it so we could put the entire index back together. We had all of the albums. We literally had everything, because in about ‘82, what happens is DOD decides to centralize its photo collection instead of having the Marines in Quantico and the Army at the Pentagon and the Air Force at Fern Street, and the Navy at Anacostia, they decided to create a central photo file. So all the Marine Corps photography, all the service photography, including the Coast Guard, was glumped together into this huge series. So that was a great cut point in terms of getting everything else they had up to 1982 transferred to NARA. So we were able to do that during that timeframe. And that was a big; that was a big deal getting all of that. And it dramatically increased our reference requests because we had all this World War II stuff that people had been dying to get at, and the Korea material. And then eventually Vietnam has become very active, too, for all the Services. So that’s kind of an idea of how we worked with the agencies. And the only way to convince them to transfer it was to literally bring them to the archives and show them what we did and how we kept things and that this was not a black hole and that the public had access. And what really helped, particularly for the Air Force, was when we moved out here to Archives II, because this building was designed exactly for storage of special media records, motion picture records, cartographic records, and photography and posters. So they were literally blown away when they came out and saw the facility and the fact that we had a huge cold storage vault at 30-34 degrees. And we could store the color material better than they could. And I mean at that point we could say, “We can store the records better than anybody else in the federal government,” except for the NASA photography, the moon photography, which was at a zero- degree vault in Johnson. And we’re still in a tug of war with them over that. We’ve gotten all the digital material from the Apollo missions and the Mercury and Gemini and the Shuttle, but we’re still working with them to get the original photography transferred. But that was a big thing to be able to show them the facility and what we did and how we made it available. It just literally took away any reason for them to be hanging on to the things, particularly the preservation aspect of it. When you can tell somebody that we can keep your records for a lot longer than you can and we’re going to make sure that these records last as long as possible, they’re pretty much up against the wall with that sort of an argument, because there’s nothing they can. So that’s a good example of how we’ve kind of big agency by agency at the outset. And then, we’ve also worked with smaller agencies. We try to go and kind of turn that opinion around about the archives, what we are. and what we do. And then, of course, once it’s here, there’s the processing work. I was responsible for making sure the stuff got processed, it was done correctly. When new people came in I basically did the training, teaching them how we went about processing records, the photographic and graphic records. And the preservation work, I got very involved in preservation. I learned a lot about photographic processes, the different photographic processes that had been in effect from basically the daguerreotype to digital photography. So that helped me a lot in terms of making decisions when you get a body of records in. What kind of records do you have? What needs to be done? What kinds of holdings, main and actions? What kind of boxes do we buy? What kinds of folders do we buy? Because we didn’t necessarily buy the same boxes that you would use for textual records. Sometimes you would buy boxes that were specially designed for photographic records, if they were particularly valuable, had a lot of intrinsic value. So you have to kind of learn all that stuff. What undergirds everything we do in special media is this media-specific knowledge. You can’t do the appraisal work, you can’t do the accession, you can’t do the preservation, the description or anything, unless you really have a solid grounding in that specific media. So that’s really kind of what’s important. We would send people to classes to take classes. RIT was the one that we sent people to most. It was a great, great place for learning about the history of photography, different kinds of photo processes and what kinds of actions you should take to help preserve the records you have. So every new member who came in, annually we would, it’s a week-long training class. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exist anymore. But so, you know, all those sorts of things. I kind of hope I’ve kind of described what it is. But you really have responsibility for basically the entire lifecycle of the records. We worked a lot with appraisal, because most appraisal archivists don’t have any idea what photographs are. And they don’t exactly know what to look for. You know, they’ll go into an agency and they’ll see this huge print file, and they’ll say, wow, this is great. This is all we need to schedule. Uh-uh. Where’s the negatives? Where’s the finding aids, things like that? You know, they don’t have the tendency to think about that. So that’s the kind of input that we would be able to provide. And helping them write the schedules, the transfer periods. Sure, textual records, they don’t want them for 30 years. That’s not the case with non-textual records. You know, with us, ten years from the point of creation and you start looking at deterioration. So we try to push the agencies and the appraisal people to write the schedules that will directly reflect that. And now with digital, it’s even shorter, two to three years after the point of creation now. And that’s not so hard to get the agencies to agree to, because digital photos, you just make a copy and you transfer it. With the analog it’s a lot different because, making copies of 50,000 or 60,000 prints, that’s a big deal. And it’s also very expensive and very time consuming. So, you’d never get anywhere telling them to make a copy of that. You have to try to work with them in a different way to get things transferred. But so those kind of issues, those kinds of things that we would deal with the appraisal folks. And like I said, oftentimes in big accessions we just go out and pack it up ourselves. Because we know what we want. We know what’s there. Usually with these big agencies, we’ve had a fairly long relationship with them. Over the years there have been, there were several, what they call, “gaps projects” that were done. And there was at least one done during this time period, to try to identify the gaps in the records that we had. You know, we had, for RG 57, we had records up to 1910. Well, where’s the rest of it? So we’d have to try to get in touch with the agency to try to figure out where was the rest of the photography that fills in the gaps for what we have. So, that was a real good tool for us to get a good handle on some of the agencies that we traditionally wanted to get more records from. But it gave us a vehicle to actually do that. In addition, the other thing they used a lot during this time period were the agency evaluations where they would pick an agency like, and we always picked some goodies, like the Park Service or NASA, and a whole staff of NARA employees would go in and evaluate the records management program. How things are being stored, what things needed to be transferred. You know, at the end of these evaluations, we’d always prepare a list of the bodies that should have been transferred based on their schedule. Not that we were just making this up. I mean, they had a records schedule. They just weren’t paying any attention to it. So, that was a really good tool. The gaps projects are a good tool for identifying some of the big agencies we needed to really work with to get the records transferred. So I’m sorry, I think I’m —

Brian Knowles: [Interposing] No, that’s perfect.

Edward J. McCarter: —just going on and on, but, it’s a pretty wide-ranging set of responsibilities. And of course you have your standard personnel stuff that you have got to learn. You’ve got to learn all the stupid personnel rules and performance evaluations and all that sort of stuff.

Brian Knowles: Well, before we move on to that section, I wanted to ask you about the relationships with the Smithsonian. From your perspective and your experience, what has been the relationship with the Smithsonian Institution? Is it a competitive nature or not?

Edward J. McCarter: The only time we really had this sort of competitive nature was with that Air Force collection that was over there. And that was really the Air Force’s problem. I mean, they were responsible for the problem. But it was also I’d laid some of the responsibility at the door of the appraisal people. I mean, whoever was responsible for the Air Force, it’s like all of a sudden we wake up and find out, oh, by the way, the Air Force has transferred all their stuff over to the Air and Space Museum because they’re going to create a video disk. Well, why didn’t somebody tell us about this beforehand? That’s their job. That’s what they’re supposed to do. They’re supposed to keep their ear to the ground. So we never found out about it until it was after the fact. And, you don’t solve problems after the fact. So that’s the only real time we had had any kind of issues. And the same thing with the LC. I mean, we each have our sphere of responsibility. And, at least as long as I’ve been working here, there really hasn’t been any attempts by the LC or the Smithsonian to try to grab archival federal agency records. They understand that that’s our responsibility.

Brian Knowles: And now are they pretty good customers to NARA? Do the Library of Congress or the Smithsonian for the Museums, do they come to NARA for materials?

Edward J. McCarter: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Knowles: Okay. I mean, they were copies not necessarily originals.

Edward J. McCarter: Sure.

Brian Knowles: Yeah.

Edward J. McCarter: You know, the Smithsonian is a sprawling place. So a lot of the museums come to us when they have photo exhibits because we have things that nobody else has. All of the Brady material, all of the Western Survey material. I mean, we have the greatest collection of that material here, World War II, World War I. You know, we have things that nobody else has. So when parts of the Smithsonian are doing exhibits, like we’re in a discussion right now with the National Portrait Gallery over Alexander Gardner prints that they want to use for an exhibit in 2015. So that happens quite frequently. Not so much with the L.C. I mean, they’re not really into exhibition. We refer each other back and forth. And about five years ago, myself and the person over at the LC set up sort of a—we go over there and get kind of a half-day preview of what they have. And they come over here and they get kind of a half-day preview of what we have and what we do, which is kind of so the reference staffs on both sides had some kind of an idea about what they do, what they have, and what we do and what we have, which was very beneficial, because somebody could say over there, oh, well, if you want that, you really need to go over to NARA. And if people come here and they’re looking for the, you know, the FSA collection, the Farm Security Administration photos, which were very famous during the thirties, we know we don’t have them. They’re at the LC. We just refer them over to the LC.

Brian Knowles: Cool. All right. Can you explain the process with preparing Deeds of Gift?

Edward J. McCarter: Boy. For a long time we were very involved in Deeds of Gift. We don’t do that so much anymore. We’ve got more than we can possibly deal with from the federal agencies. But really what we would be looking for are things that are unique and that have some connection to federal activity and that fill in a gap in materials that we don’t have. Now, that’s a pretty tall order for somebody to have, because we have pretty good coverage of most federal activity. But, you know, there are these cases where that doesn’t occur and somebody has something that we think fits in. And we’ll transfer it here.

Brian Knowles: Who might be one of these individuals or companies who have [crosstalk]—

Edward J. McCarter: [Interposing] Well, we had, I remember having a discussion, although this was a failed discussion. It never resulted in a transfer, but it’s the kind of thing we would be looking for. I don’t know, maybe we were at Archives II. It’s got to be ten years ago. A woman came into the research room and she was talking to reference staff and said she had some photographs she wanted to know if we were interested in. Her husband fought in World War II. Well, we’ve got boat loads of photos from World War II. And, we try to tell people is that what we have is the official photography created by the agency, and that’s our job. That’s what we focus on. We’re not looking for bits and pieces from service guys who served. There are places for that to go and we refer people there. But this isn’t it. But this was pretty unique, because he was at Iwo Jima and he was one of the, I don’t know, I guess you’d call them the drivers of the LSTs that they hit the landing beach, the thing drops and everybody runs out. And he had a bunch of color photographs of the landing at Iwo Jima, which was very unique. I mean, I’d never seen any color photographs of that. So that was the kind of thing that we felt that because of what it was, because of its physical format, color photography, it made it unique. We’ve got lots of Marine Corps photography of the invasion of Iwo Jima, but we don’t have any color photography that documents that. So that was something I felt that really kind of fit the bill or the criteria that we have for accepting donations, whereas you get a lot of things from veterans who say my father served in World War II and fought in Europe someplace. And usually what we’ll do is we’ll kind of see if we have any photography that covers the same time period and the same location. And more often than not, we do. So, we’ll say, respectfully, you know, this really doesn’t fit into our holdings. But here are a couple of places that are really interested in veterans’ photography and have veterans’ history projects that you might want to take your photographs for and see if they’d be interested in them. Does that kind of answer your question?

Brian Knowles: Yes, sir.

Edward J. McCarter: But once you start down that road, it’s a very involved process. It’s just like accessioning records from a federal agency. You have to do an appraisal report and it has to go through channels and be approved by everyone. The Archivist, of course, has to sign the donation letter and you send it to the donor. They sign the letter. They keep a copy. We get the original back. We get the photographs and everybody’s happy. Usually.

Brian Knowles: All right. How does it feel knowing you’ve helped create the standards for accepting digital photography?

Edward J. McCarter: Well, I think that’s a real accomplishment, but I’d have to really say that two of the people who are most responsible, at least on our staff, are Billy Wade and Nick Natanson. Yeah, it was my idea to go after digital photography. I could have said, oh, the heck with it. You know, let NUMI take it, and, I mean, that’s the electronic records folks. Let them take it. That’s their problem. We don’t want to deal with it. But, the way I looked at it, and I think we may have covered this a little before, is really photography. You have to look at what it is first. Not that it’s digital, but that it’s photography. It’s imagery. And what is it imagery of? It’s imagery of the same subject matter as the analog imagery we have here. It’s just a different physical form. It’s no different than, the way I look at it, an albumen print from a Collodion negative from a salt paper print. It’s just a different physical process. In this case it’s an electronic process. But we took the approach that these are photographs first, and secondly they’re in electronic form. So because they were photographs and because they’re related to the records we already had from federal agencies, it made perfect sense to us that we would take the digital photography as well. And then we’d learn about the digital part of it. And it took Nick and Billy a couple years to work through when you take in a digital accession, how do you process it? You know, they kind of adapted the procedures that we use for processing analog photography, the same general ideas, but now you’re doing it on a computer rather than going through a box. But it’s very similar. And so they had to figure out step-by-step how you would go about doing this in electronic form and what kind of tools you needed. That’s a big thing. And it’s something that we’re still working on, we needed file-naming tools. We needed tools that oftentimes an agency will create the photographs, and they’ll put the caption information in the header of the photo. Well, that doesn’t help us very well because OPA can’t read the header. I mean, another program could read the reader, and you could just dump the images in and do a search. But OPA can’t do that. So we had to find a tool that would extract the captions out of the header and put them into a separate file. And Billy and Nick banged around, looking at programs, trying to figure out what worked. And we had some help from the electronic records people, as much as they could help us, because it was a different kind of record. And it had required some different tools. And that, what really helped us a lot was when Bob Spangler came in to the agency. He was the head of NUMI for a while and now he’s in a kind of a special office that provides support for the custodial units with electronic records. He was very helpful in helping us find tools. Bob has a long background working in electronic records. He got what we were trying to do. He understood it. So, he was very helpful in us getting the tools we needed. And now this little group that he’s created that’s one of their main jobs is to find tools that would help custodial people working with electronic records do their job every day. But the initial work really was done by those two guys. They worked very hard at it. They developed processes. They figured out ways, not just to process the records, but also to get them in shape so we could just turn them over to Gary Stern in the OPA office. And then Gary would do a little bit of magic electronically with what he did. And then poof, they’re uploaded into OPA. So we’ve got close to a million images from federal agencies, over the past two or three years, that we’ve uploaded into OPA that are available for public use. And that’s a credit to what they’ve done, the hard work they’ve done every day trying to figure out how to do it. And, the thing is, too, there’s never an accession that’s like the last one. Every accession’s a little different. So you have to kind of be flexible on how you’re doing things. And that’s really important, but, yeah. I mean, I feel good about the fact that I didn’t just say well, give that to NUMI, you know. And it’s going to be a pain in the butt, and I really don’t want to have to deal with it. I’m only going to be here for another five years, anyway. So what the hell. But I really felt like that was our responsibility. We were the people who were most knowledgeable about all the records from an agency that related, like DOD. We have everything from Vietnam back in analog form. Just because the new stuff that’s being created, you know, for the Gulf War is in digital form, it’s the same. And we’re the logical people to handle that. And, researchers would kind of scratch their head if all of the photographs were over in electronic records, but if they wanted to do some research on, you know, Vietnam, they had to come to us because that’s where the analog was. It, to me, that made no sense. The whole thing needed to be together. So, I do feel good about that. But the hard work, again, goes to the staff people and they have to slog through it every day.

Brian Knowles: I’ve been prompted to ask, what is the General Record Schedule Item 21?

Edward J. McCarter: Well, that’s, right now, the General Record Schedule is being revised completely. And we’re very plugged into that whole process, because what they’re doing is, instead of, well, GRS 21 is, basically, the General Record Schedule for audiovisual records: motion pictures, sound recordings, and video materials, still photography photographs, and…I’m not sure is in that. Can’t remember. But, basically, it tells the agencies these are records that you don’t even have to come to NARA to pitch. Okay? They’re disposable right off the bat. So for us one of the big things is like passport photographs. Every agency, particularly ones that have a lot of overseas activities, they have big collections of passport photography. We’re not interested in passport photographs. So if you have passport photography, you can dispose of that without even coming back to the archives. That’s what the General Record Schedule does. It provides a vehicle for the agency to look at the records they have, look at the different categories on their General Records Schedule, and if they fit into that category, then they’re approved for disposal without the normal procedure, which is you’ve got to come to NARA and get approval. So, it covers generic things like that. Training videos, training photography, you know. I’m trying to think of some other things—screen images that were used for printing purposes. They are photographic, but they’re really a printing vehicle. They’re not a true photographic record. So, you know, those kinds of things are disposable. I think there’s kind of a catchall in there. I haven’t looked, I’m sorry, I haven’t looked at a General Records Schedule in a while, but I think there’s a catchall in there, I mean, that just sort of indicates records that do not document the activities of the agency. They’re not critical. But that’s what the GRS is. What they’re doing now is, instead of there being a GRS by media, they’re now taking it apart and creating a GRS based on subjects. So, we’re talking about, what’s the last one we were talking about? It was a grant photograph or grant records. You know, an agency who has money for grants. It would now encompass any photography that was part of the grant process. Instead of it being capsulized in a General Records Schedule, there’s now a reference to the photographs that are created as a result of the grant process. So now it’s kind of, the schedule, the old, simple, straightforward General Record Schedule is kind of torn apart and it’s all over the place. So every time we get a General Record Schedule to review for this process that we’re going through now, we have to look at it in terms of, and of course, they’re always big bucket, media-neutral schedules. They don’t get into any specifics about whether there actually are photographs related to whatever the subject is. We always have to look at it with an eye of, well, if they did have photographs, is what they’re saying workable? I’ll give you a good example. One of the first ones we got was on, I can’t remember how they defined it, but sort of output product, something like that. And Nick and I read it over. We had to read it about four or five times until we figured out what they were talking about. And what they were saying was that when an agency scans its records, the originals are disposable. Well, once we realized that, we did, oh, no, that can’t be, particularly for special media. You never throw out the original negatives. I don’t care whether everything has been scanned at the highest resolution that God can create. You just don’t get rid of the original negatives, because that’s the record copy that was made by the agency. And sometimes you can’t duplicate what’s in that original and in digital form. And from a physical point of view, if I keep those records in proper storage, and I take care of them, they’re going to last 500 years, at least. I have no idea how long these digital photographs are going to last. I mean, I hope they’re going to last. And, they’ll be transformed over time into new file formats so that in the future they’ll continue to exist, but I know those original negatives are going to exist for a long time. So that, that was an example of where once we figured out what they were saying, and we realized what application it might have for photography, we had to say, oh, no. That’s got to come out. Or you have to say something in the General Record Schedule that this does not apply to non-textual records. I hope that’s an explanation of the GRS, anyway. It’s a pretty simple straightforward deal. The problem with this new process is they’re trying to get into permanent records. You know, the GRS was designed for records that were common across federal agencies that could be disposed of. But now they’re trying to add to the GRS permanent records. And one of the things that we feel should not be there. They shouldn’t even be talking about permanent records, when you’re talking about a General Record Schedule. You should only be focusing on the records that are common to agencies that can be disposed of without prior approval. Do not get into permanent records, because you’re just going to confuse the agencies.

Brian Knowles: In the overall field of audiovisual records, is there anywhere, any particular section or genre of it that you wish you could have spent more time on, or even worked on at all?

Edward J. McCarter: Probably the Western Survey photography. That was pretty much described when I got here, so there really wasn’t much to do, other than ensuring that it was properly preserved and making sure that we got, I think last time we talked, I explained about Doug Munson and how he copied the Brady negatives. Well, he also copied the Western Survey negatives. So we have high-quality duplicate negatives made of those, just as we do for the originals. And making sure that we preserve those records properly, and they’ll always be there. But, yeah, that would have been something I would have liked to have probably dug into a little bit more. But since it was pretty much described, there could have been some more digging done, but, you know, sometimes you get into these things, and you could spend years just tracking down different things that you think you’d want to know. And some point you just have to draw a line and say, okay, I need to get the basic description written so that I can get these records out to researchers. But, if I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time, that’s probably a group of records I would have really liked to have because it’s just fascinating. It’s just absolutely unbelievable the things that they took. I mean, they’re up on top of mountains with glass negatives and chemicals. All this stuff has to be prepared on site, the Collodion has to be mixed. They have to coat the plate. They have to sensitize the plate. And they’re 15,000 feet up in the air, dragging all this stuff around to take these photos. It’s just absolutely unbelievable that as many have survived. I just find it’s kind of mind-boggling. Yeah.

Brian Knowles: You made me just think of a question for you. How many descriptions have you written in your career?

Edward J. McCarter: Oh, gee.

Brian Knowles: If you had to give a number, what would you say the number would be?

Edward J. McCarter: Probably not as many as you’d think, because I ended up getting into sort of a semi- supervisory position fairly soon after Stills. But it’s got to be over 100 at least, and I know that’s not very much, really. But I’ve done some pretty big record groups. One of the biggest ones I did was RG 77, the Corps of Engineers. That was a biggie. That was a pretty complicated group of records. RG 306, the U.S. Information Agency, I worked on those a lot. One of the great things I found in there was, it’s just amazing, the stuff you get and you don’t have information about. They had this big series they called staff and stringer photos. And it’s a great, it’s a great thing. I mean, it’s got a lot of interesting stuff in it, but a lot of it is trash, too. And a lot of it should have been disposed of. So I’m going through the stuff, and I’m looking at it, and I hit this one thing. And what am I looking at, but the March on Washington? Right smack in the middle of this body of records that wasn’t identified. There was nothing on the, on the list that came to us that identified clearly that it was there. And there it is, probably one of the most historic events of the past 50 years, you know, boom, right in the middle of this thing. So, you know, that was, that was fun to write that description. And we actually probably broke a couple of archival rules because I took that whole series of photos out, and I put it aside and made a separate series so we could describe it. I referred to the fact that it came from staff and stringer photographs, that it’s part of the staff and stringer. But, you needed to break a few archival purity rules, because you just had to have that stuff identified so people would know it was there and they could use it. Those were a couple of, but I, yeah, after I got there, I worked in Stills. I got in Stills in 1980. Probably by ‘83 or ‘84 or so I was kind of in a semi-supervisory position, even though there was an Assistant Brief Chief, who was Betty Hill, but she sort of let me be responsible for a lot of the preservation and the descriptive stuff that was going on. So, I didn’t get to write as many as I would have liked, and I have my intent to come back after I retire to work one day a week and help them out with descriptive work, because that’s the fun job. It really is. It’s a lot of fun to go through records and look at things and just see all the documentation and the people and the events. And, I could do that forever.

Brian Knowles: Who are some of the individuals that you worked with as the Assistant Branch Chief?

Edward J. McCarter: Oh, wow. Well, you know, Paul White. Paul was in the reference branch for a long time, and then moved over to processing. I worked with Paul for a number of years. We had a lot of students. You know, we’ve always had a lot of students. Gosh, I couldn’t even begin to remember all the students we’ve had, but they came in and came out periodically as they get to the point of graduation. And then they’d have to leave and go onto another position. But other people on the branch, I worked with Barbara Burger a lot. Barbara was a reference chief so we always had a lot of communication. And that was really one of the important things about the way the special media records are handled. A lot of people think you should do things functionally, well, we’re going to have a pretty little unit. We’re going to have a descriptor’s unit, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. One of things that underlies the successes that special media has had, is that it’s always managed by one person who’s got knowledge of the media and looks at the overall to make sure everything gets kind of integrated. So you don’t a pipe for accessioning. You don’t have a pipe for description, which is separate from a pipe for reference. And the supervisor here never talks to the supervisor there. So, some of the things that they do these people can’t effectively use. One of the things we always did is have a close connection between reference and processing so that the stuff that we processed and the finding aids we created made sense to them. They could look at them. They’d review the finding aids before we’d ever finish anything. And I think that was really a very useful tool, and it’s helped a lot over the years. So, as I said, Betty Hill was Branch Chief. Jack Saunders was a Branch Chief for a while. Jack used to be the head of accession and disposal out in the Suitland. Then he came downtown and for a while he was our Branch Chief. That was after the first Branch Chief that I worked with was Joe Thomas. And Joe had been here for eons. And Joe was there for probably another five or six years before he retired. And then we had kind of a gap where we had sort of people cycling in and cycling out, you know. They needed a 14, so if they had a 14 floating around who didn’t have a job, so they’d put him in Still Pictures or wherever. And, hopefully, they wouldn’t get their fingers involved too much and just kind of let us do our job. And then, eventually Betty took over. And Betty was Branch Chief for a long time, including coming out here. And she retired out here. I’m trying to remember some of the other actual people I work with. Boy. Well, Nick came on board when we were still downtown, Nick Natanson. Billy didn’t come on board until we moved out here. Ellen Walker. Yeah, Ellen was with us for a long time. Richard Henderson, who had been working in textual, did a cross-training with Stills. And the Branch Chief decided she wanted, if she could finagle it, to get him in. So, we must have had a position open, and he applied for it. And she accepted him, and he came to work for Stills when we were still downtown. I’m trying to think of some of the students. We had so many, I’m not sure I can remember. It wasn’t a real big staff, but it was pretty good. I mean, they worked. Everybody worked pretty hard. They did a lot of good work getting records described because there were a lot of records. Even though the division or the branch had been around since the place was created, there was still a lot of records that were not very well described. So, one of our focuses was to go back and in some cases re-describe the records, because they were particularly valuable, interesting, and probably had a lot of research value that you really couldn’t identify based on the old descriptions, which often were just like two sentences, if that. So we tried to kind of punch those descriptions up. Gee whiz, I wish I could think of some more of the folks because most of the people I’ve mentioned were supervisory in nature. That’s about all I can think of, though. Other than the students, as I said. We didn’t have a big staff, not a really large staff for processing.

Brian Knowles: All right. What are some of the major conservation projects that have needed to be sent off to the conservation lab?

Edward J. McCarter: Well, the big one, of course, was the Brady/Western Survey thing that I mentioned before. That was a huge project, multiple, took us probably four or five years to get it all completed, working with the lab to take a look at all of the negatives. The ones that were broken, they had to be set aside. And the lab had to design these sink mattes, I think I explained that before, what the sink mattes were. Well, they had to design those. And we had to take the broken plates and fit them into the, into the sink mattes. Plates that weren’t broken, you kind of identified as to what they were, in terms of physical characteristics. And that process took a fairly long time. And then we went into the stage of getting a contract to get them duplicated. We were successful to get that done. And then the other big that happened along with that was being able to get a room with reasonably decent environmental controls. The Brady stuff and survey stuff was all the way up in 19, which was pretty near the top of the building. And they were stored in wooden crates, God awful enclosures. I mean, everything that you wouldn’t want to do with something valuable, that’s the way it was. But, you know, as time goes on you learn more about what to do about records. So when they first came here, they figured, that’s the right kind of storage, vertically on the long side of the piece of glass. You don’t store them flat, because they’re not even. Most of the plates are warped a little bit, because they were 19th Century glass. So, you know, they had basically what they knew at that time is what they did. And as more advanced knowledge comes on, you look at it and say, okay, we need to do something different. So we were able to get that room. It was 3E4 in the old building. And they had a special environmental unit that was put in the stack outside of it. They sort of carved this little room out that pumped in cooler air, a lot less humidity. I mean, it was very tightly controlled. It wasn’t as good as we have out here, but it was still very, very good, particularly with humidity. And that’s the key. Control the humidity, because it is water that creates all the problems with photography. Anything that can go wrong with photographs is exacerbated by the high role of humidity. High temperatures not great, but of the two, the humidity is the key. So that, that’s what Connie McCabe, who was the photo conservator at the time, she focused really closely on getting environmental conditions in there that were pretty, pretty tightly controlled. You don’t have all these wild swings. You know, one day it’s 34%, then the next day it’s 60%. It’s pretty constant. So that was a big thing. The next big preservation thing was really related to the move. I’m not sure if I mentioned this before, but we sort of had an unwritten rule that nothing left the building that wasn’t in an enclosure. It had to be physically protected to move it from AI to AII. We had hundreds of things that were stored in roller drawers, like long panoramas that were not in separate containers. They were in roller drawers. We had posters that were in large map case drawers, which is fine. But we had to figure out a way to move those without destroying them in the process. And, these oversized materials that we had, like albums that we had that we didn’t really have enclosures for, they were just kind of sitting on the shelf. And they were protected, but to move them, we had to do something. So we spent, must have been at least two years, with working the lab, going through each body we had, pulling it off the shelf, taking it down. They constructed special containers. If you go into our stack now, in 532, if you look at the top, you’ll see all these containers that they created for the move. And basically everything that was not in a container was containerized so that it would be safe in the move process. And it, that was a huge project, and it took us a long time to do that. But it was very worthwhile. And, as I said, the containers are still very useful. So, it’s sort of served a double purpose. We were able to move them safely, but also had something to keep them in and protect them in once we got out here. So those were the probably two biggest things downtown. Out here, because of the temperature controls and humidity controls, things are pretty good. Basically, what we have been doing is, in terms of preservation, is not so much sending things down to the lab, but identifying different series where the boxes are older. The folders the older, and they really needed to be re-boxed and re-housed. So we spent a lot of time, that’s what, students do a lot of that work, is just helping us get series that have been here for a long time re-boxed, re-foldered, negatives re-jacketed, things of that nature, so that they’re in the kinds of storage materials that are really going to protect them over time. But, periodically, we’ll work with the lab. One of the big things that Sarah Wagner, she was one of the subsequent photo conservators, did, is we had a beautiful set of prints that Alexander Gardner did called “The Sketchbook.” He did this at the end of the war, 1865 or ‘66, right in there. And originally it was in albums because I actually saw the albums at a gallery that were selling. And they’re, I think there’s only one or two of these albums in existence. We actually had, that the War Department obtained, we had all of the prints that were in those albums, but they had taken them out of the albums and mounted them on these crummy old Signal Corps mount cards. And they were deteriorating. The cards were tearing, and I was starting to worry that they might start tearing the photos that were mounted on the cards. So Sarah spent a fair amount of time going through and pulling every single image off the mount card and remounting it onto acid-free board, and doing all the things necessary to make sure long-term preservation was going to place. So that was one of the bigger things we did out here. And then the other thing, I’m sorry, I keep going on, is panoramas. We had so many panoramas that were rolled. They were in letterboxes. I remember we got an internal transfer from textual, and it was like 40 legal size boxes. And I said, “What the hell is this?” You open the boxes, and all of these rolled panoramas. And they’re all rolled together, you know. There’s like 40 panoramas in a box, because they’re all tightly wound. Well, we couldn’t do anything with them. I mean, you couldn’t open them because you’d just destroy them. So we got involved in a long-term process with the lab, and they flattened every single one of them. Put them in a Mylar enclosure designed just for the panoramas, and gave them back to us. And now we have them. We can actually serve them to researchers. They can, and some of them are just amazing, because in the early 20th Century panorama photography was really in its heydays. And so you get these long images. Some of them, literally, are ten or 12 feet long of units, military units. A lot of stuff was done overseas during World War I and just before World War I, and they’d do these long panoramas where you get everybody in the unit would be in the photo. And you had to have, I mean, the only way you could do it was with a panoramic camera. There’s an exhibit outside of the lecture rooms that talks about panorama photography. And some of the images up there are examples of the ones or copies of ones that we have. But it was special camera designed, literally, it was on a timing mechanism that panned. And as it panned, the negatives were in rolls. They would, they would pass through the lens this way so they would make this pan of the entire group. Now, you couldn’t have any movement, because if you did, everything got blurry. It was sort of like the photography from the Western Survey and Brady period where they used a lens cap. And they’d pull a lens cap off and you’d make a two- or three-second exposure. Well, nobody could move when you made that exposure otherwise, you’d just blurs. But so that was a big, significant effort we made to get all of those things. And we found some just absolutely amazing images in there. And researchers now have access to the images, which are things they didn’t have before. That was a big, big project. It went on for a number years.

Brian Knowles: Was that the roll film project, or—

Edward J. McCarter: [Interposing] No, the roll film project is really a, it’s good you brought that up. How could I forget that? The roll film project began with the identification of acetate-based negatives in our holdings that were deteriorating. Years ago I did a survey. I went through every different series, and I noted physical problems with the records, what needed to be re-boxed, what needed to be re-housed. One of the other things that I identified was physical deterioration of negatives in a series. So we kind of made a priority list of things that we wanted to have duplicated, because they were deteriorating. This began when we were in downtown. It’s become a little bit less of an issue when we’re out here, because we now have put all of the acetate negatives in cold storage. So it buys a lot of time preservation-wise. But when we were downtown, this is when the project, that’s when the project began. And I mean, there were series that were in just terrible condition. You know, 35-40% of the negatives had deteriorated to the point where you just couldn’t use them. What happens is the emulsion starts to delaminate from the base. You’ve got a plastic base. It’s an acid, cellulose acetate base. You’ve got the emulsion on top of that. Well, over time, the acetic acid, in poor storage conditions, begins to shrink. And when that shrinks, then the emulsion on top of it starts to pucker up, and you get these sort of rivulets that run through it. And, literally, if you tried to print it, you’d crack it, because the emulsion is so fragile. You know, normally, you think of a negative as pretty flexible. And, it seems it’d be pretty indestructible, but it sure isn’t. It doesn’t take much for that thing to start because it’s literally coated onto that acetate base. It doesn’t take much for that to begin to delaminate. So we had to address that problem. And one of the things that we did was the roll film project. When we first started, we were using sheet film, Kodak direct duplicating film. And that worked fine. There were some problems with direct duplicating, mostly because it took a long time to do it. But, also, because direct duplicating was a little quirky, I don’t want to get into this. It’s complicated, but if you hand somebody a duplicate, direct duplicate negative, and you don’t tell them, they have no clue which side that they’re supposed to print from, so that they can end up, you know, reversing the negative. And, of course, when you print it, unless there’s writing in it, there’s no way to tell like you’ve got everything reversed. You know, that the guy who was over here is actually supposed to be over there. So we decided to go to a roll project, and we figured it would automate better. We could do many more images a year. And we started using 70 mm roll film, instead of 4x5 inch direct duplicating film or 8x10 direct duplicating film, if we’re duplicating original negatives, 8x10 negatives. And it did. It dramatically increased it. I think, the best we ever did when we were contract printing using sheet film was maybe 35,000 40,000 images a year. And with the roll film, we got as high as 80,000 images a year. So it was a huge, a huge jump. So that project had been ongoing from the time we were downtown until we moved out here. There were just sort of changes in the cameras that were used over time, but basically it was all 70 mm roll film. And that has kind of stopped now, because the lab doesn’t do photography anymore. Everything they do is digital. So we’re continuing to try to preserve negatives that have been identified as potentially having deterioration problems if we didn’t duplicate them. We’re doing that in digital form now, instead of, you know, analog. And all of those images will end up in ERA or whatever the vehicle is where these electronic images will be permanently preserved. So that’s, that was a big project. And that, like I said, that started downtown and continued out here, and continues on today. Not quite as systematic as it had been, but we’re still doing it because we still have a lot of negatives that had been identified as potentially having problems, even though they were in cold storage, so…

Brian Knowles: Is the new collections coming in, are those still, do they still have the non-digital format, that—

Edward J. McCarter: [Interposing] Oh, yeah.

Brian Knowles: —they contribute?

Edward J. McCarter: Absolutely. There are a lot of agencies that still have tons of analog materials. So, there’s still a lot of acetate material that some agencies are sitting on that they haven’t transferred. You know, they’re always reluctant to, oh, I can’t turn it over. We’re going to need it for this, or we’re going to need it for that. NASA is a big problem. They’ve got a lot of, like I said, all this moon photography they’ve got. There’s a lot of it out there. USGS, a huge body of photography out in Denver. It’s the USGS photo library. We’ve been trying for years to get them to transfer things. We’ve had some successes, some not so successful. But, yeah, I mean, we’re a long way from an only digital world. There’s still a tremendous amount of analog stuff that’s out there. And that’s important for upper management to understand, which I’m not quite sure they get, that we aren’t in an all-digital world yet, that there’s a lot of analog material out there that needs to be preserved, needs to be brought in. And we have a lot of analog material in the stack that we have to be concerned about that, too. We can’t just close our eyes to the fact that we’ve got all this stuff here, and there’s all the stuff that’s still out there.

Brian Knowles: All right. Getting back to your staff. Once you became Assistant Branch Chief, and this also leads into when you took over as Branch Chief, with the increased responsibility, how did you maintain your relationships with your staff? Did you, did you have to delegate more to take on the administrative side? Can you elaborate?

Edward J. McCarter: Not so much when I was the Assistant Chief, because, as I said, the unit, the number of people I worked with was pretty small. So, I had a very personal relationship with each person. I knew what they were working on. I reviewed what they did, all that sort of traditional stuff that supervisors have to do. Where it really turned was when we moved out to Archives II. One of things that was the management idea du jour was teams. We’re all going to be teams. So they kind of crammed us into this team structure, where we had a processing team and we had a reference team. And the teams took over a lot of responsibility for the day-to-day work, and they still do. And that, even at that point, we still had a processing head, which was me. And there was a reference head. It was Fred Pernell. And the Branch Chief, who was Betty Hill, when we got out here. They retired. So I’m left with taking over the entire place. Well, I couldn’t have done this job, and we couldn’t have been as successful as we have been, I believe, if there weren’t really good people in both of those teams. And there are. There are people who will kind of takeover, unofficially, the kind of supervisory role. More advisory, you know? When new people come in, I can’t train them. When you’re in a position like a Branch Chief, you’re being dragged all over the place. Every day there’s some other problem that somebody wants you to deal with. So, those day-to-day issues that I used to address personally by training and talking to people and, whatever, there are people there now, Billy, pretty much Billy and Nick, who I know I can trust to make sure the processing team does what it’s supposed to. And the same thing is true in reference. There are a lot of people on the reference team who’ve been there for many years. A lot of the people we have, they have a tendency to stay. They don’t wander off other places, because they like working with our kinds of records. So, the reference team does the same thing. Before I came here we had our monthly meeting. At monthly meeting, we sit, the reference team sits down and I’ll impart any information I have that came from upper management that I think they need to know. But, generally, what they do is they set the work plan for the month. Who’s going to work in the research room? Who’s going to do the letters? Who’s going to pull? Who’s going to do that? So they pretty much do that on their own. So I know, again, that that group can pretty much work by itself. When new members come in, they’re immediately assigned to a mentor. And that’s the person that’s their umbilical; they’re literally stuck to them like an umbilical cord. Everything they need to learn, they’re going to learn from that person. And it’s always somebody who’s been around for a long time, is very experienced, and knows the holdings. It’s a way for us to get those people up-to-speed quickly because we need the help working on whatever it is: working in the research room, working on letters, pulling, and refiling for the researchers or the vendors. So that’s a very good process. And the same sort of thing kind of unofficially goes on in the processing. If a new member comes in, Billy and Nick will kind of take them under their wing, kind of show them the ropes and move along. And, you know, I’m plugged into both, so I know what’s going on. But you can’t have the same direct supervisory connection that I had when I was only supervising five or six people. And now I’ve got 25. Well, you know, it’s ridiculous. You can’t keep track of what 25 people are doing. You have a general sense of what’s going on. And the same thing in processing. But, you really depend, and I’ve been lucky that way. I’m sure there are lot of supervisors who haven’t had that much luck, that the people they have working for them were that good and were that dependable and thought the same way I did. And that’s, really, that’s certainly a part of it. I mean, the kinds of decisions they make kind of reflect the way I think, because we’ve been working together for a lot of years. And they sort of know how I think. And the same thing is true in the processing side, so I hope that answers your question.

Brian Knowles: It does.

Edward J. McCarter: So, vastly different approach to how you’re supervising. With that little group, you really, I mean, I was really tied in tight. I knew everything everybody was doing every day. We talked about it, what was going on. When you get to the bigger thing, you sort of unofficially delegate to the teams responsibility for a lot of things that formerly you had probably done. And, again, you can only do that if you’ve got responsible people and people you trust. And, you know, like I said, I’ve been fortunate that way, so.

Brian Knowles: That’s good. That’s good. Could you speak about the NW design review?

Edward J. McCarter: Oh, geez.

Brian Knowles: Well, what is it, to begin with?

Edward J. McCarter: I’m trying to think. I mean, we went through so many of these things when we moved out to Archives II. The design review didn’t have anything to do with the—I don’t think it had anything to do with setting up of the teams, because that sort of came in just as we were moving out from Archives I to Archives II. But basically, ah, geez. I may be at a loss here. If I remember right, basically, we just kind of, and it was kind of reviewing all of the work within NW and trying to figure out a different structure to handle the work. You know, I’m really, I’m stretching here. Mostly, I remember the special media unit going through a design review, reviewing all of the different work that went on in the media and kind of coming up with an idea of how we thought things should be structured. And, essentially, we said, well, let’s pretty much leave it the way it is. You know, don’t start mucking around. There’s a reason you’ve got a Cartographic unit and a Motion Picture unit and a Stills unit. The people in it have been there for a long time, and they know the records. So, be careful what you do because you’re going to end up creating problems when you start redesigning things and changing activities and moving people around. You know, it sounds like a great idea. You know, oh, well, I’ve got a problem over here. I’ll just move people over there. Well, the only problem with that is the work that these people are doing is complicated. And it’s not something you can just take people from one place and put them in another place and have them immediately have an impact. If you’re going to leave them there for two or three years, that’s one thing. But that’s not how these things generally work. It’s like hit teams. You know, let’s run over there and fix a problem. Well, the problem that these people have here is more complicated than something you can do in two or three or four months. You know, it’s a much larger problem and, generally, it has to do with lack of staffing. You don’t have enough people to do what you’re supposed to do. So, it’s like answering letters. You can’t just pull somebody from Cartographic and stick them in Stills and have them begin to answer letters. It doesn’t work that way. First of all, they know nothing about the records, have no clue where to look. They have no idea about the finding aids. They don’t know anything. So, what you end up doing is somebody who is answering letters then has to take the time to train the person who is there to help, which takes away from their ability—it’s a like a dog chasing his tail. I don’t think it ever accomplished anything. But I have to beg off on characterizing the design du jour anymore. But the only thing I can say is that I just remember that there were all these different management ideas that were brought in to help NW or, what it used to be before that was NN, work better. You know, become more functional, become more efficient. And I don’t know whether any of those things ever really accomplished exactly what they thought they were going to do. But I’m sorry. I shouldn’t really get into that. So, I’m sorry I can’t answer that.

Brian Knowles: All right. From 1998 to 2005, you were the Supervisory Archivist, Still Picture Branch, Special Media Archive Division. Why did it take so long for you to officially become the Branch Chief?

Edward J. McCarter: Got me.

Brian Knowles: I asked a couple questions to others, trying to figure out why no—

Edward J. McCarter: [Interposing] Well, for one thing, it meant a promotion.

Brian Knowles: Well, yeah.

Edward J. McCarter: You know, and they were pretty chintzy about it. You know, we were essentially, the people who were in charge of Cartographic, Motion Pictures, and myself, we were all GS-13s. But we were doing the same job that all the GS-14s in textual were doing. You know, the Branch Chiefs in textual were all 14s. And, unfortunately, we were all 13s, which was okay. We just went along and did our job, and it didn’t make any difference to us. But because of that we never actually officially got titled as the Branch Chief of motion or the Branch Chief. And they were always fooling around with what they called us. You know, we were a LICON and we were a unit, and we were this, and we were that. But, you know, we were branches. That’s what we were. But, yeah, it took a very long time to do that. And I have to credit Bob Richardson. Bob was the Division Director at the time when that all took place. He pushed very hard to get each of the units, not the people necessarily, but each of the units to be recognized as having the same status on the organizational line as the branches in other parts of NARA. And Bob worked very hard at that. He had to convince a lot of people, and yak, yak, yak, yak, talk about it at all kinds of meetings and write all sorts of papers. And, we discussed it ad nauseam with upper management. But, eventually, he was able to accomplish that and got the recognition that the division itself had to have a division head, and it had to have separate branch chiefs. And that they needed to be on an equal footing with the units in what they were called and what their GS grades were in textual. And, yeah, it did take a long time. And, but, as I said, Bob was very instrumental in that. He worked very hard at that. And I think, from our perspective, that was one of the major accomplishments was that we finally got the status. And that’s something, it’s kind of funny. We’ve always had, how do we say this? We’re always kind of looked at as poor sisters, you know, the non-textual division. Like there was something weird about us, you know? So, that’s why they are the way they were. And now, of course, textual was always the king of the block. But so, and I can always remember with other people who were in, like, upper management positions, not archivists, but like NW and WNW and places like that, when they came in and they didn’t really know that much about it, we always had to convince them that, yeah, this is the special media archives division. We do a lot of cool things. And, we really need to be recognized as a separate entity. We’re not part of textual. We do things pretty different than textual does. And the reason we do that is because of the records we have. That’s what drives everything we do, is the kinds of records that we accession and process. It drives everything. But you have to kind of re-explain that, every time. And we had to do it again this time with Ann Cummings. We had to start from scratch and try to convince them that no, you really don’t want to put us under NUMI. And, no, you really don’t want to put us under textual, because we’re not going to fit there. We’re just not going to work. But so I, you know, why it took them so long, who knows? But, you know, it did take a long time. And like I said, Bob Richardson gets the lion’s share of the credit for accomplishing that, which I think was significant.

Brian Knowles: Yes. From 2005 to 2014 to you retire May 31?

Edward J. McCarter: My last day will be the 30th. It’s a Friday. But the 31st, I guess, is the official day, yeah.

Brian Knowles: You have been the Chief, Still Picture Branch, Special Media Archives Division. Was there any change from Assistant to being the Chief?

Edward J. McCarter: Not really.

Brian Knowles: Just the title?

Edward J. McCarter: Yeah, because I had been doing the work for five or six years before that. When Fred and Betty left I had the whole ball of wax. So, I literally moved my desk—I had been sitting on the processing side, which I was supervising those folks in 5350. So, I literally moved my desk from there over to the reference side. I didn’t use the office, because, first of all, I don’t like offices. But, secondly, I felt like I needed to be out among the people who were doing the work, because you just hear a lot of stuff. And people will talk to you that when you’re in an office, doesn’t always work that way. It’s kind of formal when they knock on your door and come in. But when you’re sitting in cubicle, they just come by your cubicle, and they start talking, you know? And you understand what’s going on. You understand the inter-relationships between the people. What’s working. What isn’t working. Who gets along. Who doesn’t get along. Who do you put on the same pull team because they get along, or you don’t necessarily put another person it. It’s just all the sort of interplay between people because the one thing you have to keep in mind is when you’re doing a job like this, is you’re dealing with people. And they have feelings. They have personalities. They have good points. They have bad points. And, as a supervisor, you have to deal with all that stuff. I’ve often, I joke with my wife that probably 40% of what I do is kind of therapy, don’t put that in there, you’re just listening to people. You know, you’re listening to them talk about their lives and the problems they have. And they may not have anything to do with work, but they do have something to do with work because people don’t leave their home lives at home and show up to work. Whatever is going on there, it comes into work. So there’s a lot of that that’s involved. And I just, I’ve always felt that when you’re sitting out there, sort of like one of the hoi polloi, you know, people are more apt to talk to you and communicate with you. And so you get a better sense of who people are and what they can do and what they can’t do. And, you don’t put them in a place where you know they’re not going to function, because you’re just setting them up for a failure. And that makes no sense. There’s probably somebody else who can do that, so you figure out who it is. So that didn’t really change much, because I, like I said, I’d already been doing it, but I guess the big change was I pulled myself from sitting over on the processing side to moving over to reference. And, that I just felt like I needed to do that. Because I didn’t really know the reference people that well, and what they did, because that wasn’t my job. That was Fred’s job. My job was working with the processing people. So, I really felt like I had to get over there and know who they were and what they were about and what was happening to them. What was killing them that prevented them from maybe focusing on what they were doing, you know? Something going on someplace.

Brian Knowles: So, does a pro-active leadership style, did that help you develop the NWCS roadmap, the pathways career that you developed?

Edward J. McCarter: Yeah. It was all, it was all plugged into that. I mean, each of us kind of looked at our units and looked at the people we had working there. And, realizing how under-graded everyone was, in comparison to the work that they were doing, and it was terribly under-graded. We had reference people who were providing, honestly, archival quality reference consultation and research who were GS-7s, you know, GS-6s. It just wasn’t fair. So this was another one of Bob’s ideas, Bob Richardson. We sort of put this thing together, because what we wanted to do was create a vehicle for upward mobility. And so we the managers and Bob got together, and we sort of talked about what we were going to do. And we kind of set up these things. Each of us went back to our units and kind of wrote a little sort of path, roadmap, for our specific units, talking about what grade levels we thought people should be. And the key to that whole thing was not partially getting the promotions for the people who deserved it, which we were able to accomplish, but it was creating a vehicle that if somebody at the GS-11 level happened to leave, that that job didn’t revert back to a GS-5. That job stayed at a GS-11. And if we had a GS-9 who we thought could do that job, we could then move them to that position. I mean, I have to post it and everything. You have to go through the same rules. But you kept that position. That’s why we called it a roadmap. It literally was. If somebody was a 7, and there was a 9 above them and an 11 above them, if one of these people left, duh. It was there was a possible promotion involved there, which is how it was designed. And it worked for a while. And then upper management kind of lost interest in it. And then it just kind of disappeared. But at the time, we thought it was a really good idea. It was a way to provide upward mobility for people who really deserved it. And, the key, again, was not losing those graded positions because what generally happens in NARA is if somebody’s at a grade 11 and they leave that position, they’ll take that position and they’ll stick it back to the GS-4, 5, 6 technician and start all over again. No, we didn’t want to do that. We wanted to keep that GS-11 there. And if we had somebody who could do that job, then we’d put the job out and the vacancy announcement out. And people would compete for it, and that person would have a real shot at getting the job. It’s certainly possible that somebody from another unit could apply and that’s what happens when you put the vacancy announcements out. But the way they were crafted, they were designed for people who actually worked in the unit, because they always focused back on the work, on the media. You know, what we expected out of the person who was going to take the position. So, it created this little kind of a roadmap for people to move from one grade level to another.And like I said, it worked for a while. And then it just kind of disappeared, you know.

Brian Knowles: Why do you think the interest waned on that?

Edward J. McCarter: Well, at some point, NW started this pool. And I think that may have been a result of, even above them, that there was some sort of a pool. You know, now we have this freeze board thing. You’re familiar with that?

Brian Knowles: No.

Edward J. McCarter: It’s kind of like the pool. No longer if you had a vacancy, like, let’s say a GS-7 on the staff took a job someplace else. Well, that positon was not necessarily available for us to fill. It went into the pool. And up here they then decided, well, do they really need that GS-7 position, or do we need to put it over here in someplace else? So, the way I saw it, and, again, this is just my point of view, that literally, destroyed the roadmap because now these positions that you hoped you were going to have available for people to move if you had a vacancy, that disappeared. And if you were lucky, maybe the pool gave you the position back. But more often than not, it went someplace else. Then there were other things going on. And that’s basically, the pool thing, is since we were out here at Archives II. That was not downtown. And it came really into effect sometime after we finished with the roadmap. And that was approved all the way up the line. But that whole pool thing just really kind of, and, you know, again, we don’t have enough money. We only have so many positions we can fill, blah, blah, blah, blah. And to me, that’s the job of the Archivist. You go out and get us money. That’s your job. That’s the only thing you have to do, is you get the money to fill the seats in the desks. That’s what you do. If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t be there. That’s just my simple-minded position from where I sit. But that’s his job. That’s who I look at it. Go get us the people to do what we need to do. And I don’t know. That has not been happening.

Brian Knowles: Let’s see.

Edward J. McCarter: So, that’s kind of what happened to the roadmap, the pool. And now we have the freeze board, which is just as bad. They’re not going to listen to any of this, are they?

Brian Knowles: No. Never. All right. Going to jump around a little bit.

Edward J. McCarter: Yeah, I’m all rambling.

Brian Knowles: You’ve mentioned LICON before.

Edward J. McCarter: Yeah.

Brian Knowles: Can you explain what that is? It’s not an acronym, it’s a—

Edward J. McCarter: [Interposing] Yeah, actually it is.

Brian Knowles: —abbreviation. Yeah.

Edward J. McCarter: Yes, I guess. I guess, yes. Well, what it stands for is lifecycle control unit, and they just shortened it to LICON. And, essentially, it kind of replaced the branch structure, because they weren’t talking about branches anymore. They were LICONs. And we were the still picture LICON. And there was a motion picture LICON. And there was a cartographic LICON. And there was textual records LICON. So that, you know, that came in, I’m trying to remember. I think that came in when Jim Hastings was head of the textual division. And he always had a very close relationship with Mike Kurtz. So, like the design review you were talking about, I think Jim was heavily involved in that. And Kurtz, of course, was heavily involved in that. And then, this concept of the LICON came in, which, as best as I could tell, was basically just they didn’t want to call us branches, so they called us LICONs. And, at one point, they were calling us units, the Still Picture unit. Well, okay. So now we’re back to where it probably ought to be.

Brian Knowles: Now, do you still provide tours of your section, of your unit? Do you still conduct those? I’ve heard that you do those yourself.

Edward J. McCarter: Yeah, I do. I do a fair amount of tours. Nick does a lot of tours. I used to do all of the talky things, like the Modern Archives Institute and gobs of other things where you do presentations to agencies. And if the appraisal people wanted a tour for a particular agency, I would do that. And then as I kind of moved and had more administrative responsibilities, I couldn’t really do that anymore. So some of those went off to Nick. Nick does the Modern Archives Institute and does a fabulous job. He does a lot of tours with agencies. But for a long time, I did that a lot. I did them for special visitors, too. You know, there were people who had, buddies of somebody or other, who would come in. You know, I think I mentioned before, Barbara Streisand came in one time. And that was kind of hilarious, because when they had identified the people who were going to give her the tours, when they were passing the information around, they never used her name, because, apparently, she didn’t want people to know she was there. I don’t know why. They kept on calling her “the visitor.” So it was kind of funny. “The visitor would like to see Still Pictures.” So, when she came up, I gave her the tour. I showed her some pictures we had of her in the holdings. And but a lot of the tours I did were really focused at federal agencies, because, again, going back to what I felt was what we needed to do was to turn their opinion of us around, was to give them first- hand knowledge and understanding of what we did. And as I said, it became particularly convincing when we moved to Archives II because of the character of the building. But, yeah, I did a lot of tours. And, somebody would call and say they had a friend in town, and can I give them a brief tour. Yeah, sure. So, you know, I did a lot of tours.

Brian Knowles: Can you comment on some of the famous, other famous individuals, that you’ve had visit Still Pictures, Ansel Adams and Annie Leibovitz?

Edward J. McCarter: Ansel came in right before I got to Still Pictures, about a month before I got to Still Pictures, so I missed that. I’ve been unhappy about that ever sense. I actually did spend a lot of time working with his assistant. He had an assistant who came in. After he came in and looked at things, he, you know, he sort of, oh, gee, I don’t remember that. You know, one of those things. And so he sent his assistant back to review the entire collection of photographs that we had. So, I worked with her and brought all the original prints out. And we looked at them, and she was talking about she was going to do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I mean, she wasn’t really a famous person. But, I mean, she was very knowledgeable and, obviously, she must have been competent if she was Adams’ assistant. One of the other ones, including Barbara Streisand, Bob Hope was here and we showed him around. Yousef Karsh, I think I mentioned this before about that Churchill photo, where he pulled his cigar out. That was a real treat to be able to talk to him, because he was such a great photographer. And the Annie Leibovitz thing, that’s pretty recent. I guess that was about three years ago. She just contacted personnel, or Miriam Kleiman in public affairs, and said she was really interested in Abraham Lincoln. She would like to see some of the photographs that we have of Lincoln. So she, Miriam, contacted me. And we started a conversation with Leibovitz about it. And then she decided she wanted to actually come out and take photographs, not just of prints, but of the original plates. Well, then we started to get a little nervous about it, you know. So Miriam said, “Well, do you think you can do that?” And I said, “Yeah, I think.” You know, I brought in Sara Shpargel and Warren Barga. They were two, well, Sara’s a photo conservator. Warren has a good background in photography. So I brought them into this and we figured out how we were going to show her what she wanted to see. Because one of those plates that she wanted to see was pretty big and another one was broken in half. So, we had to be very careful with the whole thing. But, yeah, she came out here and spent at least two days photographing. And it was kind of interesting to watch her work, because she had these two assistants who did all the work. And then when it was time to take the pictures, she got up and looked in the lens, yeah, that’s right, and clicked the shutter. But she was very, very nice to work with. You know, you never kind of know how these people are going to be. You know, some of them have big heads and they expect you to yes, yes, you know, tug your forelock and everything. But she was very friendly. I found her a very pleasant person to work with, very nice. But she took these photographs, and they’re in her book. She did a book on things that, I can’t remember the exact title of it now, but things that affected her life personally. And one of them was Lincoln. She also had an exhibit at the, over at, I think it was, I think it was at the American Art Institute over in the Portrait Gallery. And she invited us to come to the exhibit, and we went over and saw it. It was very nice. But she’s a very nice person to work with.

Brian Knowles: Have you recommended any of your staff for awards, such as the, any of the archivist awards?

Edward J. McCarter: Oh, boy. That’s a hobby horse of mine. I have put in for archivist awards numerous times and never once, never once, was it even acknowledged. I never even got a note back that we got it, and it stinks, and we’re not going to give them an award. Zippo. Nothing. Zero. From anybody. And that is one of the things that makes me very angry, because I’ve got a lot of people, I think, who deserve the awards. I mean, I look at some of the awards they’re giving out, and I say, “Are you joking me?” I mean, that’s what they’re supposed to be doing. That’s their job. And I’ve seen people who work for me do some really significant things that are well beyond the confines of what their actual job is. But I’m sorry. I just, when I hear the archivist award thing, I just, I want to throw something because it just really rubs me the wrong way. You know, I don’t care if somebody reads something I write and says this is garbage. I mean these people have no business getting an award. Well, that’s fine. Just tell me that. Come on, do a better of this. But zippo. Nothing. I mean, I don’t even know whether it got up the chain of command. I don’t remember how these things even go. I mean, there’s a procedure for filling out the award and writing a lengthy justification for the award. And then it goes on. But it just like goes into the black hole. So, I did a lot of awards, cash awards, for specific things, like when we did the move of the military stuff from, from DOD way back in the ‘80s, and when we moved the Air Force stuff from the Air and Space Museum. You know, things that were really extraordinary activities. I did some big cash awards for those, for those groups of people who were involved in that. And then of the things that we designed, which I thought was a great idea, and actually the reference team was pretty responsible for designing it, was we designed a procedure for getting a day off, the time off awards.

Brian Knowles: Yeah.

Edward J. McCarter: Yeah. By dramatically exceeding all of our strategic plan goals, like I don’t know what the goal is for letters. Let’s say it’s, you know, 92%. Our goal was we had to make 98%. The goal for pulling and refiling for the research room was, you know, 85%. Our goal was 100%. Pulls and refiles for vendors, our goal was 100%. So we designed this, and if every quarter if the team met those goals, and this was approved up the line. We didn’t just institute it by ourselves. Every quarter, if the team met the goal, everybody on the team got a day off for it. And, they really looked forward to that. And they, they liked it. They felt like it was a motivational kind of thing. And it told them that somebody appreciated what the heck they were doing every single day to accomplish that kind of work, given the workload that they have. And it’s a pretty big workload for the number of people who are doing it, to be able to accomplish that. So that award was a great motivator. And disappeared for, I don’t know, a year or two, and now it’s back again, which is great. Unfortunately, we’ve lost so many people that the team can’t meet the goals that they were making consistently every quarter. So it’s like, oh thanks.

Brian Knowles: Are there any non-NARA awards or recognitions that your section has been given?

Edward J. McCarter: I can’t think of anything, you know, specific, like somebody getting an award from DOD for doing something specific for them. I can’t really think of anything like that. Not for myself. I can’t remember any of the other managers or the unit. Nope, I can’t think of anything like that. I might be missing something, but I just don’t remember anything around that. Now, individual people get a lot of letters. I get a lot of letters from customers about what a great job they do, that sort of thing. And that’s important, but nothing officially like, well, like the DOD move. There was never anything from DOD commending our team for moving the records from Anacostia to downtown Washington, DC, and getting them up and ready for use in a fairly short period of time. Nothing like that. They just said, “Great job. Good. We’re glad you did that for us.”

Brian Knowles: Hmm. Well, is there any person or your whole unit, anything in particular that you want to do a special mention now for?

Edward J. McCarter: Well, I think I’ve mentioned Billy and Nick multiple times. They just do an amazing job given the amount of work that’s involved. And it’s going to get even harder after I leave, because that’s one less person to deflect a lot of things that somebody’s going to have to deal with. I’m not even sure who. But, I mean on the reference team everybody really does a very good job. I mean, Holly Reed, for example, she works in the research room three quarters of the time, 75% of the time, and 25% of the time other people cycle through. And you’ve worked in the room, so you’ve seen, in addition to her, there’s always somebody else on the staff who’s in there as well. But Holly does a really remarkable job. She’s learned all this on her own. Holly has a high school education. That’s it. But she is one sharp kid, let me tell you. She is very smart. And she’s picked up the work. She has just a really huge knowledge of all the holdings and how to direct people. And I think she has a pretty good manner with people, too, when working in the room, which is really important. You walk in there and somebody’s looking at you like what do you want? You know, it’s kind of intimidating for a researcher. And I don’t think that happens in our room. And there are other people. Sharon Culley is very knowledgeable about the records. Sharon does a lot of the really complicated letters behind the scenes, because she’s been here for a long time and has done great work. You know, Rutha Beamon does an excellent job with the vendors. She’s in charge of the vendor coordination. She does it for both Stills, as well as Cartographic. She does that plus she does a gazillion other things to help the team because, again, we’re really down in terms of staffing. So she’ll jump in and pull records for the researcher for a week. She’ll answer the telephone for a week, or she’ll do this, or she’ll do that. In addition to doing her regular vendor activities. Those guys are really the kind of the three leaders of the reference team. I mean, and as I said, Nick and Billy on the other side. So, the five of them are really class people.

Brian Knowles: Well, what are your plans for retirement?

Edward J. McCarter: Well, I think I alluded to, at one point that I was hoping to come back and work one day a week here. In fact, I talked to Judy Lewis Watson yesterday about it, and she gave me all the forms to fill out to be a NARA volunteer. Probably will do that come fall. Not during the summer. Also, when we were on the extended vacation from Congress, because they couldn’t figure out a budget, I spend some time poking around in different places. And I live very close to the Howard County Historical Society. It’s just a bike ride away from where I live. So, I talked to them about volunteering there, helping out. I asked them if they had any photographs, and they were, “Oh, yeah. We’ve got a lot of photographs.” I said, “Well, I’ve been working with those for a while. You know, I might be able to be some help.” So that, I think, is going to take up some time. I’ve also gone back to the high school where my kids went. This is completely off topic, but I ran into the cross country coach, who is a good friend and worked with my daughter for years and turned her into really a very fine runner, but mostly because of his psychological ability to deal with her because she’s an unusual person. But he said, “Hey, you really ought to come back and help me out next fall. I could use some help on the cross country team.” I’m, “Hey, Paul, I don’t know beans about running. I mean, if you want me to help out with hockey or football, I could do that. But I don’t know anything about running.” He said, “Oh, yeah, I got all kinds of things for you to do.” So I think I might help him out. You know, carry cones around and stand there with times. And at the meets, at the cross country meets, sometimes you have to stand there and point kids to go, no, this way, not way, you know, stay on the track. That sort of thing. I then I might help him out with track, too, because my daughter ran track. And I’ve also thought about contacting the hockey team. And I played hockey in high school and college. So I thought, well, yeah, maybe I’d help out with that, if I could. So I was thinking about doing some work around the high school. And then that’s pretty much it.

Brian Knowles: Great. So looking back over your entire career, how much did you enjoy the work?

Edward J. McCarter: It’s been amazing. It absolutely has been amazing. I think back to when I was in graduate school at Maryland, and I didn’t have a clue what was going to happen to myself. My goal when I finished graduate school was to go back and teach in a small college back in Illinois, hopefully, the one I graduated from. I had a good friend, he’s the one that got me interested in American Studies to begin with, he went to Bowling Green and got his Ph.D. and came back and was teaching in the English Department. And he said, “Hey, you know you really get into this American Studies thing.” He said, “Maybe, I could help get you on board after you get out of graduate school.” So that was my intent, but then I backed into the job at the Archives. They needed somebody to move boxes from the records center to someplace else. And one thing led to another, and the next thing you know, like almost 40 years later, you’ve had just an incredible experience. The records you’ve worked with, I mean, that’s really the neatest part of the job. Everybody who stays here for any length of time will always tell you the records are just so interesting and so neat to work with. The researchers are fun to work with, too. You meet some really interesting people. You learn a lot of things from researchers, too. They have a lot of good ideas. Sometimes they’re kind of way out there, but, you know, other times, they’re really good and you need to listen to them. The photographers I’ve met over the years, learned so much from different photographers that I’ve talked with federal agencies, and even some of the more well-known photographers, you learn things from them. I’ve just been incredibly fortunate. Somebody with a history degree, you’re lucky if you can find a job. When I was graduating, I was thinking, “This is going to be kind of hard to find a job.” But most of the people I knew who were in the same graduate program that I was at Maryland, they were looking at maybe, one-year positions here and another one-year position someplace else. And, nothing long-term that they could count on. I did just kind of back into it. But once I got here, I realized what a place this was. And I really threw myself into it and learned as much as I could, particularly when I got to Stills, learning about photography, because I didn’t know anything about photography. And I’m not going to pretend that I’m a photographer. I’m not. But I’ve learned a lot about the history of photography and the different kinds of physical pieces of photographic materials that have been created, and learned how fascinating they are. And, printed materials and how interesting that is. And how do you make an etching? My God, you’re doing everything backwards, because when you print it, it’s got to come out right reading. But when you’re etching it or you’re engraving, you’re doing it backwards. It’s just mind-boggling. So, it, I’m sorry. I’m rambling, but it just, it really has been pretty amazing. I’m extremely fortunate. I wish every history major had the same opportunity when they got out of school. Not everybody can gravitate toward this kind of work, too, because it is, it’s different. It’s not the same. You’re not a historian. You’re an archivist, and that’s the not the same. There was a period of time there where they were trying to hire people, and they would kind of sell this place as a great historian’s place to come and do research. And when they got here, they found out that isn’t quite what the job means. An archivist is an archivist and a historian is a historian. We’ve got two different tacks going on here. So, in many ways, I guess I sort of like it because it was, I guess I’m kind of an introvert, basically. And I like working by myself. And I like starting something and finishing something. I don’t like to start something and it not get done. So, there’s a real sense of satisfaction when you start working with a series of records, and you go through it, and you look at, and you find things. Oh, my God, you find some interesting things, just incredible. And then you finish it. You write the description. You put it out there, and people start using it. And, there’s a real sense of satisfaction that you’ve done something. Maybe it’s not a car or a tank, but you’ve done something that people can actually use and will want to use and have an interest in. And I guess you don’t think about it that way when you’re doing it, but when you start looking back on it, you say, wow, that you did something. You contributed. You’ve done something that contributes to society. And particularly for our kind of work, contributes to people learning about their government and what it does, what it doesn’t do. That’s been pretty amazing.

Brian Knowles: What has been your involvement, your level of involvement, excuse me, with the National Archives Assembly?

Edward J. McCarter: Well, you know, it’s funny. I really haven’t had much involvement with the Assembly at all. But when the Assembly was first started, years and years and years ago, I remember I was at a restaurant with a bunch of archivists, one of which was Gerry Haines. And I don’t know whether, Gerry Haines was there, Mike McReynolds was there, John Butler. These are all old-time guys. You know, I’m talking about 70s. The guys I played softball with on the archive softball team. We had a pretty good softball team, by the way. But and I remember that the idea for an Assembly, a group of professionals who were interested in the organization and what was happening to it at the time, I’m pretty sure that’s where it started. And then Gerry and Mike went on to kind of create, I’m pretty sure you’d have to go back into the history of the organization, but I’m pretty sure they were very heavily involved at the beginning with the creation of the organization. And I have to say, I’m not much of a joiner. I don’t do that too much. So, I don’t think I’ve ever actually been a member of the Assembly. I never went through that archivist hoopla that they used to have with the Society of American Archivists, so you could become certified. I never bothered with that. I’m just not much of a joiner.

Brian Knowles: That’s actually my next question, about the SAA. If you’d, if you had involvement with them, but…

Edward J. McCarter: No. I mean, I’ve done some presentations on photography at different SAA things and MARAC, and a couple of other odds and ends. But other than that, I’ve never really joined the organization. And I guess I was particularly offended when they came up with that whole archivist certification thing. I thought something’s squirrely about this. And they were going to grandfather everybody in, if you did something or other. And I just said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got more important things to do than that.” But, no, I’m not in the SAA. I’ve never joined it. And like I said, I’m just not a joiner by nature.

Brian Knowles: All right. You’ve served under a number of Archivists of the U.S. Do you feel there’s a trend that each new Archivist has to make their imprint on the agency, that they have to change something?

Edward J. McCarter: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it seems like every other one wants a reorganization, to kind of reshape the organization to fit some view they have, like the one we’ve got now with all these pillars and all that stuff. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s kind of a natural thing for somebody at that level to want to come in and kind of put their stamp on the organization. And I don’t have a problem with it, just as along as it doesn’t affect what we do. Once you start mucking around with how we get our work done or, worse, if you don’t even understand how we get our work done, then I’ve got a problem with it. Then it becomes an issue. But, otherwise, I mean, I think I told you what I think the role of the Archivist is. The role of the Archivist for the United States is to get us bodies. I’m sure they don’t think of it that way, but that’s how I look at it. It’s sort of like a general manager of a sports team. Go out and get the people you need to do the job to get it done. And, I’m not sure they’ve been all that successful at doing that. There’s a lot of emphasis on trying to figure out what to do with what you’ve already got. And, yes, sometimes you can shift things around. But, sometimes it’s just a matter of how many people there are and how much work there is to be done, and that’s just the way it is. It’s the reality. But, yes, they all do, pretty much.

Brian Knowles: How about presidential administrations? Has that affected the agency at all?

Edward J. McCarter: Oh, well, yeah. I mean, take Reagan, for example. When he came into the office and then we had those huge RIFs. I mean that really dramatically affected the agency, as well as the individuals. I mean, it made it very difficult for, I think, NARA to really do its job. So, not very far down the road after all that went through and, he came in and sort of dropped all these little bombs, they had to hire a lot of those people back, because they couldn’t really get the work done with the staffing they had. So, they needed the people that had, a lot of the people who had been RIFed. So many of them, I think, pretty sure came back to the building within a year or so of that. So that had a real, yeah, when he came in, that had a real dramatic effect on the budget. But, I mean, on others, not really. You know, there, sometimes they’ll create something that they think is a great idea to affect some something or other. And, it really doesn’t turn out to be such a hot idea after all, once they’ve put it in place and once you see how it starts working. You know, it creates problems. I think the biggest example I have of that is this Pathways thing with the students. It’s just crazy, I mean, the way it works. It’s like hiring a full-time employee, and these aren’t full-time employees, they’re students. And I understand the intent of what it is, but it’s not being implemented that way here. I think the ultimate idea is that some of these students would eventually come on to be full-time employees. And we’ve got some really good students that have been working here for a number of years who cannot get into the agency, and that is a crime, because they’ve been trained. They’ve been taught. They could make valuable contributions, and they are dead in the water. And that’s a shame. There’s no way to move, I mean there are some positions that, if they were identified that way, like before that there’s a possibility to move them up, but, generally once they finish their college or graduate programs and they graduate, they’re gone. And if you’ve had somebody for a long period of time, and we’ve got, we had two people like that who’ve been here for some quite some time and have done some really excellent work. One of them left last December, because he graduated, and another one’s going to leave this May, because she’s graduating. And it’s a shame. It really is. So, I don’t think the thing kind of worked the way they thought it was going to work. And it has been kind of big administrative pain in the neck to deal with. Anyway, I’m looking at it from a very low level. So but that’s just my opinion, as somebody who has to deal with it, day in and day out.

Brian Knowles: All right. I just have two questions left for you. With the Still Pictures unit, what strikes you most about how it has changed from when you first got there?

Edward J. McCarter: Well, obviously, use of technology. I mean, it’s dramatically different than it was before. In reference, for example, when I first came to the unit, they threw me in the research room. You know, that’s kind of how you learn. They just throw you in the research room and it is trial by fire. And everything we did was you either had to remember it, or you had to go what we called the inventory cards. They were the series descriptions on these little 5x7 cards. And, you had a general idea. Like if somebody comes in and they said they’re interested in a topic if you’ve worked at the archives before you have a kind of an idea of, okay, well, that’s probably this agency. But then you have to go to the cards and kind of read through the cards and try to figure out, oh, it’s this series, or, well, maybe it’s that series. And then you have to go to the finding aid and pull that out and provide it to the researcher. Well, all of that can be done on a computer now. All of the things that used to go on in your head. I mean, I think the staff still does that, because of their knowledge of the records. But because all this information now is in electronic form, it’s much easier to just point to the, you know, PACP, the public access computers for the research and say, “Take a look at OPA. Do some searches, and it’ll start telling you the kinds of record groups you want to look at. Once you start to identify those, then we’ll take a look at the finding aid.” So, it takes away the possibility that whosever in the room might forget, because people have different levels of knowledge. But if you’ve got it all there, and it’s in the computer, and somebody can go in and do a search then that reduces that. And, obviously, if what’s in the computer when you’re doing a search, if the terms you want to use aren’t there, they don’t come out. That’s where the staff comes in handy, because they can say, oh, well, yeah, in addition to this, you also want to look at that. And that’s based on years of knowledge. And then on processing, it’s the same way. I mean we’re dealing now more and more with digital photography and all the work we do is being done using computers. We got specially-designed computers that are different from the baseline computers, because we needed them to work with the volume of records we’re getting. We needed double screens, so we could be looking at a set of captions, while we’re simultaneously looking at the image. So you’re not having to click in one file, close it, and go to another, you know, back and forth. You can open two files or three files simultaneously on multiple screens and do your work much more efficiently. So, if I would say any one thing that really changed. And, I’m not saying anything that’s earth shattering. I’m sure everybody would probably say the same thing. But we have jumped into that electronic world, I think, a little faster than some of the other units. I mean, textual, I don’t think, is anywhere near this. Cartographic doesn’t go anywhere near it. Motion is starting to move there, but they’ve got the limitations that they’ve got no place put stuff. They get such huge, massive files that even the processing computers that we got from the IT department, we work with Mike Wash to get these, I call them souped-up computers. They’ve got two four-terabyte hard-drives in them. The processing speed is triple anything that the baseline is. So, they really do function well. But even for Motion Pictures, it’s still inadequate, because the size of the files they deal with are so big. So, yeah, for us, I think that’s been the big thing. We kind of jumped into that with two feet as early on in the process as we could, because I think we all realized that this the direction we wanted to go. We wanted to be able to work with those records, because, as I said before, it made sense for us even from a reference point of view. Well, from a reference point of view that the images that were in electronic form created by DOD are closely related to the ones that were created in analog form before that, so. Yeah, that’s the, the technology thing is really, and it’s happening more and more. We’re getting into more and more technology. Cloud computing, cloud storage, all this kind of stuff that we’re going to have to go to, because there just ain’t no place that you can put a lot of the stuff that’s being generated between accessioning and the volume of things at the lab, the preservation labs are doing. And they’ve got huge, a huge volume of material that they have no place to store it.

Brian Knowles: What’s your favorite image or group collection from Stills?

Edward J. McCarter: Oh, boy. Well, I’m not very original. I would probably say the Ansel Adams. Nah, I go back to the Western Survey. Ansel Adams stuff is really great. It really is. It was really interesting because that was right about the time that he was developing his own theory of photography. So, a lot of the images in there kind of reflect this sort of technique that he was trying to create. They’re wonderful to look at. They’re amazing. And black, you know, a lot of people don’t like to look at black and white because they think it’s boring. But, gosh, black and white is just, it’s more than black and white. It’s just, it’s something else. And the Western Survey, there is some just amazing images in there. And that, again, I think not only they’re amazing from an artistic perspective, but the fact that they were able to do it with all the limitations and problems and stuff they had to lug around, gee, to get these images. Very interesting. Very amazing thing. So those are probably, that’s not very original, probably a lot of people say the same thing. But there are so many. I mean, there are so many groups of records that have such interest and interesting things you find in them that it’s hard to say just one or two. But I guess those two are probably the two that I have most interest in.

Brian Knowles: Is there anything else you want to add? To speak about?

Edward J. McCarter: No, I just, I appreciate the opportunity. You know, I hope it’ll be useful. I know I ramble a lot, and I’m all over the place. And I’m not a very logical thinker. I jump from place to place. So, hopefully, somebody can listen to this and it’ll make some sense and provide a little context. I mean, I’ve been around for a while. So I’ve seen a lot of different things. We haven’t talked very much organizational structure, as it has gone from way back when it was Mabel Dietrich was forming NN and to the time we have now. But, hopefully I’ve given you some kind of idea about what’s going on in Stills from when I showed up in 1980 to when I leave in 2014.

Brian Knowles: Well, thank you for time, sir.

Edward J. McCarter: Okay.