Transcript of National Archives History Office Oral History Interview
Interviewer(s): Stephanie Reynolds
Interviewee(s): Jim Hemphill

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay. Hi again. Thanks for participating in the oral history project. I'm here again with Jim Hemphill for part two. Today is August 16th, 2023. And I'm Stephanie Reynolds. First, I just want to recap what we covered in our last interview session, and you can correct me if I've got anything wrong, but I just wanted to do a quick recap. So last time we talked about your experiences as the executive assistant to Senator Hatfield, who was a big promoter of NARA gaining its independence. And then as you joined NARA, I believe after 17 years, then you joined NARA as the executive assistant to the Archivist of the United States Don Wilson and some acting positions as well. And then you were detailed to the Office of Public Affairs and then to the Office of Presidential Libraries, where you were the deputy archivist. And then you landed in the Office of the Federal Register, where you were for 25 years until your retirement. You were an Executive Assistant to the Director there, and you also helped with moving the Federal Register online. So hopefully that was a good recap. Is there anything that you want to cycle back to or to clarify based on what I just said or anything else that you thought of, you know, in between today and your previous interview?

Jim Hemphill: No, I think that's a good summary. I'll stand by what I said.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay. I want to make sure I got it right, too. Okay. Well, one of the things I wanted to ask about was the National Archives Foundation and the establishment of the Foundation . . . what its purpose was, what your involvement in it was. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Jim Hemphill: Yes. So I would say in about the 1992 or '93 range, the Archivist Don Wilson was very interested in obtaining support for the National Archives in the private sector—the idea of public-private partnerships was growing in popularity at that time. And, of course, coming out of the Presidential Library world (Dr. Wilson had been the head of the Gerald Ford Presidential Library), he had experience and a lot of knowledge about those kinds of arrangements, because most of the libraries have a foundation that provides a lot of support, both financial but also what I call small "P" political support that is very useful to the libraries. Dr. Wilson felt that the National Archives itself could use that kind of supportive group. And he, of course, was well connected with some prominent people and historians and others, and with people with money. So early on in my tenure with him, this was one thing that he asked me to work on. We prepared a charter for the Foundation, and we reached out to potential charter members. There were several meetings with a variety of people early on exploring the willingness of these folks to chip in some money to go to their networks and look for additional resources which would support things like public programs, major exhibits, speakers, and to lobby on the [Capitol] Hill and explain at budget time why the Archives was a valuable investment. This Foundation continued to develop after Dr. Wilson left and was an important legacy of his tenure because the Foundation had made possible a number of exhibits and physical improvements to NARA facilities since it was established. Once John Carlin was appointed Archivist to succeed Wilson, I was no longer a part of that, but I thought it was an interesting piece to explain that really the initiative for that came from Don Wilson. And then, of course, the Foundation has been a significant part of the Archives’ public programming since then.

Stephanie Reynolds: Interesting. So the model for the Foundation was based off of the Presidential Library Foundation?

Jim Hemphill: Yes. I would say that was a pretty good model. There were some differences, but it provided the understanding of what could happen and how it could be set up.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay. What goes into creating a charter, the initial charter for the Foundation?

Jim Hemphill: I think I have a copy of it here. I'm not sure. [LAUGHS]

Stephanie Reynolds: Really? [LAUGHS] Okay.

Jim Hemphill: No, I can't put my hands on it real quickly. But it was an agreement about who would do what and the extent to which we would rely on private resources. And then, of course, any time you get into the governmental space, you're dealing with regulations governing the expenditure of funds. And one has to be very careful about giving people benefits or preferences not available generally based on their involvement. It could be as simple as bringing somebody in for a special tour. I don’t think that would cross any kinds of lines. But if you’re beginning to give significant gifts to people that use public resources, you know, you can't use appropriated funds for that. But sometimes there is a place for that kind of thing—promoting the organization or funding things—that either the Archives didn't have the money for, or would be prohibited from using appropriated funds for. So all of that needed to be laid out and clarified. And the charter laid out how often the group would meet, how it was organized, who would be in charge, you know, how they would relate to the Archivist, because it wasn't a statutory organization—an organization set up by law.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay. Was there a board then with it, too?

Jim Hemphill: Well, initially that was the whole Foundation. But what was envisioned, and what developed was that the public was invited to become members, much like those who join “Friends of the National Zoo.”

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay. Interesting.

Jim Hemphill: You know, in more recent years, prominent individuals—a name I'll mention is Cokie Roberts, the journalist, was a huge supporter of the Archives, and she, behind the scenes, was on the Foundation. And there have been others on the Foundation. I think maybe the author, David McCullough was on the board. And then there have been some philanthropists on it.

Stephanie Reynolds: Interesting. And you said that it was created around 1992 or so?

Jim Hemphill: Yeah, those foundational documents were in that time period.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay.

Jim Hemphill: They're in the records of the Archives.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah, I'll have to check that out. So that was mainly for, like, getting public support for exhibits and public programming, you said?

Jim Hemphill: Yes.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah. Okay, great. Another thing that I wanted to follow up on was you were providing weekly updates to some management officials, something like that? Could you go into more detail on that?

Jim Hemphill: Yeah. So it's kind of interesting that in all of my roles at the Archives, when I've supported the Archivist or the Director, at one point or other, they felt a need for some kind of regular communication, either within the whole organization or within the leadership sector of the organization. The first iteration of this was with Dr. Wilson, who created what was called the Managers Monthly. Remember, this was pre-email, pre-cell phones, and the way people got information within the organization was, you know, inter-office deliveries in reusable manila envelopes—we called them “holey Joes” because they had holes in them to see and not throw one away if it wasn’t empty. If you weren't on the distribution list to receive something, there could be lots of information you were missing. And if your supervisor didn't provide that information, there weren’t other means to get that easily. So communication was very different 30 years ago than, of course, it is now. And the Archivist felt that he wanted to make sure that his managers and supervisors—and that would be down to, I think, the GS-12 level—would get this newsletter weekly or monthly. Initially, it was a monthly newsletter, and it contained just brief paragraphs about important things that were going on, both up and down the organization. So the Archivist would be sharing information about what he was doing, including what he was going to be doing that month. And we would solicit information from the various units to share up the hierarchy telling what they were doing to be able to share it with the organization. And I got super great feedback on that as a really smart thing the Archivist had done, because there just was—if you ever did surveys, they would always talk about poor communication. Probably every survey in every organization, that's the number-one thing. But that was number one definitely in the expression of concerns. So this was a really useful thing that I thought was a smart, smart thing to do. It continued on through one of the Acting Archivists, and then after I left, it wasn't carried on. But when I got over to the Office of Federal Register, at some point—I believe it was when Ray Mosley became Director—he asked me to prepare a similar thing, which was called The OFR Directors Weekly, and it, again, was a gathering of information. And I guess the reason I'm—I mean, lots of organizations have newsletters, but I think my position as being at the table with the senior leadership when decisions were made and my kind of being out there on the floor with people, which happened both at the National Archives Building and at the Office of the Federal Register, gave the Weekly a little more credibility. And it was a little more substantive than many newsletters I've seen. So it wasn't just, you know “Jim had a birthday; Mary had a baby.” But it was also, primarily—I mean, we tried to cover some of those things, but it was pretty substantive. And we were really attempting to make everybody better equipped to do the things they needed to be doing. So I really enjoyed that role.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah, you said that they stopped it after you left. I don't remember when they would have stopped doing that, if they would have done anything similar?

Jim Hemphill: There was an earlier version, now that you pressed me a little bit. Back, I'd say in the early '70s maybe, or sometime in that timeframe, there had been an organ like that that had gone out in the National Archives, and so that was one of the reasons people remembered that and liked that it was being renewed. I think that was part of the impetus that we—that used to be a really good means of communication that we don't have anymore. So I think it's like lots of electronic newsletters. I mean, it played its role during the time that it was in place. Whether or not it's been replaced by other useful things, I mean, certainly it has, but that was one specific kind of thing that served a good purpose. Oh, another point to make is that when staff were contributing news for the Managers Monthly, it was really kind of one of the only times that the managers down to that level of supervisor, I think, were made to feel like they were part of what was going on. So much else was just top down. And this was a bit more saying, "We want to involve you in the decision-making." And so we're specifically not sending it out to folks below you, not because we don't want that information spread, but we're respecting the roles you have as a supervisor, and you deserve to kind of have insight. And then, you know, they could share it with others if they wanted to.

Stephanie Reynolds: Was this being sent to regional managers?

Jim Hemphill: Yes. Yes. That was the other thing. That's another reason why I think it was particularly useful, because it was a way to create the sense, you know, of "One NARA." We didn't use those terms back then, but . . .

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah.

Jim Hemphill: . . . create that sense of we're one agency. And [CROSS TALKING].

Stephanie Reynolds: Do you think it . . . [CROSS TALKING]. Go ahead.

Jim Hemphill: No, I was just going to say, it also really illustrated to me how diverse the mission of the Archives is and how difficult, in some ways, it is to attempt to find a unified mission outside of the unity of administrative support functions that has to be there.

Stephanie Reynolds: Do you think for what you were putting out, the monthly and then the weekly, do you think it took someone with your type of personality? You seem to be one that, regardless of where or what position you're in, you like to go out and meet the staff and talk to them and learn about things, whether it was always appreciated or not. But you seem like you were that type of person. Do you think that's what helped make that such a success?

Jim Hemphill: Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, I think lots of people have those gifts. But if you're going to create something like that, you should staff it with a person that, you know, can do it in an appropriate way. Because of the fact that those types of communications that come out from the main office can be perceived as fluff sheets and nothing substantive, and so they aren't really useful means of communicating. So that's why it was important, I think, to have that. I wasn't—and the Archivist and the Director were not simply trying to propagandize, they were also trying to make this organization a more holistic, well-functioning up-and-down kind of organization.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay. Well, in this way, you're getting other perspectives that maybe you wouldn't have heard initially, and you’re sharing those perspectives through the newsletter-type thing. So . . . yeah. Today, I'm sure that you're familiar with the ICN [Internal Collaboration Network].

Jim Hemphill: Uh huh.

Stephanie Reynolds: And it seems like things are shared through there nowadays. I don't know if it's agency-wide, or if it was just within [the] Records Management [Division], that we have the Friday Roundup. And so there are just emails that kind of have a summary of what's going on, what staff are working on. So we do have different avenues of communication. But I don't know. What do you think of those types of communication, like the ICN or sending out mass emails?

Jim Hemphill: Well, I think this is generational. So you may be getting a generational take on this. I like to know what the official organ is, and then that's the thing I can go to and count on. And as these things are multiplied, and there's a plethora of them—what I was concerned about is that people would be putting up critical information at places to which other people were not going. And unless you tell people “You must see this, you must read this thing, you must go to this site once a week,” you have no guarantee it is seen. There's a large swath of people that just, for whatever reason—they're too busy, they're not interested, they don't know about it—are not going to see things. So when you do that, you know, you have to have multiple ways of communicating. I know that I felt, towards the end of my career, that the agency was putting things up on the ICN, and then we were being told to go to the ICN to get that, where I don't think that was an effective way at the time, at least, or the best way. Some people were using it as the official place to put things, and others were not. So I think it's growing pains. You know, as we moved into this whole world we're in, we had to learn how to do it differently. But it's always dangerous once you get a cell phone, once you get something, and you start using it, to assume everybody else does it. In my personal life, you know, things that happen, I'm not on—I don't have a Facebook page. But for a lot of people, that's how they communicate news. And so they send it out on Facebook and presume that the whole world knows it. I've often found I have surprising gaps of knowledge about a good friend, maybe they got married, or something important happened in their life that I didn’t know about. And so I think it's similar to that, that if communicators aren't careful to know their whole audience, they can miss some of that audience. Those aren't very profound, but it's just . . .

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, everyone has their preferred method for putting out information or receiving information, and so you may be having gaps in there. And who's receiving that message? I'm the same as you. I don't have Facebook either. And so, you know, I have family members that forget I'm not on Facebook. And so they share all these things, and then I'm the last one to find out. Right? So there are pros and cons to technology, social media, and all of that stuff today—methods of information.

Jim Hemphill: Yeah.

Stephanie Reynolds: Another thing I wanted to circle back on . . . there was a study that, I believe, you conducted for the NHPRC. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Jim Hemphill: The NHPRC is the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. The Commission supports the publication of non-governmental documentary materials, and they provide grants to small groups that have editing and archival projects. It's a very small commission that has, I think, or used to have a budget of about $12 million. Its budget was always at risk. When created it was placed under the auspices of the National Archives. And so my knowledge of the NHPRC started back in my days working for Senator Hatfield. The Commission has a Senate member and a House member and a member of the Supreme Court, and some really interesting people as members of the Commission. Senator Hatfield was the Senate member, and I would go with him to meetings, or I would attend on his behalf. Those meetings, I think, were quarterly. So by the time I got to the Archives, it was a Commission that I was familiar with, kind of surprisingly. Senator Hatfield had been a very strong supporter of that Commission's budget. During the Reagan years and in subsequent administrations, it has frequently been zeroed out in the annual budget submission to Congress. And then it's somebody on the Hill that has been the savior of the Commission’s budget. And Senator Hatfield was that savior for many, many budget cycles. So it was a Commission I knew about. Shortly either before or after I arrived, the Commission got a new Executive Director, Jerry George, a real energetic Director. Incidentally, during the time I was with Senator Hatfield, the Commission’s Director was Frank Burke, who was Acting Archivist after Bob Warner, the father of NARA’s independence, retired. I had worked with Frank Burke on the Commission. Anyways, Jerry George felt that their grant processes needed attention. And so I spent about six months working, interviewing, meeting with the staff, meeting with grantees, meeting with people in the historical community about how the Commission was functioning and how it could function better. I produced a bunch of recommendations, and they were implemented, which gave me a great deal of satisfaction, not only personally, but because the Commission’s processes were improved. And Jerry was very supportive, and the Archivist was very supportive when that report came in. But one of the things I wanted to mention is, even in that world, the electronic, the digital- world era was beginning to make an impact. Documentary editing involves reviewing, annotating, and publishing material in large hardbound volumes, such as the huge number of volumes of the Papers of Woodrow Wilson, the Papers of George Washington, and the papers of other significant Founders [Founding Fathers] or important people in our history. Well, those are very labor-intensive efforts, and they involve printing, and they involve all that goes into producing books, a lot of which is not adding anything to the scholarship necessary to produce them. It's just that once the scholarship is done, there is a lot of work putting it in a format that researchers can use. Well, now we have, you know, things are moving into being created in digital mode. Computers were being brought into that process, and in two ways: one is you could digitize old stuff, but secondly, new stuff was not being created in paper. And so a lot of small archival and historical organizations out in the states were grappling with that. They might have this neat collection, some small archives or in college or universities, and think “wouldn't it be neat to digitize that and have it available for their researchers that way?” And so they would come to the NHPRC for grant money. But the time of the life cycle of the development of these new editorial ideas was like back when VCRs and Betamax were being developed for videotape. There needed to be a determination, you know, about what are going to be the standards? And so the NHPRC was pretty deeply involved in helping form what the future was going to look like in that area of documentary editing and archival work. So that was what that was all about.

Stephanie Reynolds: Wow. That's a lot. So, what is the intent of the Commission? Is it so that they're providing grants to enable research that people want to do that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise? This will help them get that done?

Jim Hemphill: It's to provide the documentary evidence that researchers would need. The Commission used to be called the National Historical Publications Commission, and it was really formed to gather the papers of the Founding Fathers and publish them, because that's how scholars did research, right? They needed to get the primary documents, primary evidence. And so documentary history has a long, storied history. But then, at least two things happened affecting the profession. People began to feel that these are all the books of dead white men, and maybe our history is a little more diverse. And maybe what we should also be looking at is not just the Founders—and with no disrespect to the huge work they did—but there are others who made a mark on our history—for instance, Mother Jones, the labor organizer, and Emma Goldman. Historians wanted to gather the documentary materials from some other more diverse people as well. A second thing was that people began to see the need to help small institutions preserve important and interesting records for which they didn’t have adequate resources, for example, to get a photograph collection in order. The Commission began to issue grants for this records preservation work. Each state was to create a historical records commission, and then those state commissions would examine proposals and then submit those they felt were worthy to the Commission for consideration for a grant. While I was involved in the Commission, it was beginning to shift from simply funding an important project to funding efforts that would advance the documentary editing and archival professions broadly—projects that had application in other places. So there were grant requests coming directly to the Commission, and then there were grant requests coming from the state organizations. Today, unless there have been changes, it's this organization that helps produce and make available the documentary materials of significant people in the United States’ history whose papers are not collected by the National Archives, because they weren't federal employees. Right? And secondly, to support—and these are with micro-grants, I would call them. These are not $2 million grants. These are $40,000, $50,000. So this is the kind of money that really helps an organization do some really neat things. And that was one of the criteria for examining these grants is, how can this money be leveraged in other locations? So we're going to support this group that's doing microfilming, because they're microfilming in a new way that maybe other archives can use. So it's, to me, a really good use of minuscule amounts of federal dollars that have significant impact.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay. I think we have it listed under our budget every year. And so that's funding that comes from Congress, that they're allocating whatever towards this Commission. Okay. And was this started then under GSA, when we were still part of GSA?

Jim Hemphill: I forgot. I think it was in the '50s. I forgot the history. I'm sorry. But generally, after the NHPC had been created, and after it was supporting the publication of the papers of the Founders, the Commission made the recommendation that the papers of the sitting Presidents be collected in volumes, like those of the Founders. And, in another ironic connection of various parts of my career with one another, the executive order issued to commence the Public Papers of the Presidents Series placed the responsibility for publishing them with the Office of the Federal Register—where I one day would serve. I've forgotten a lot of that history. I'd have to research it. Yeah, I used to know this.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay, that's fine. [LAUGHS] I think we have Founders Online today that talks about the various Presidents and . . .

Jim Hemphill: Yes.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah? So maybe that was a product of that?

Jim Hemphill: Yep. Yep. That's right. So those books have been converted now into digital resources. So now you don't have to go to Princeton to look at the Papers of Woodrow Wilson, or even to a library. You can sit in front of your computer and pull those up.

Stephanie Reynolds: Mhm.

Jim Hemphill: And those books are very expensive to purchase. Those are not things that you and I could afford, you know, the entire set of Woodrow Wilson Papers. [LAUGHS]

Stephanie Reynolds: [LAUGHS] Yeah, I'm sure. And so then a part of this study that you were working on, you're just checking to see if everything is working well and if there's anything that can be added to it or changed?

Jim Hemphill: Right. Right. So the study had a lot to do with process, but there were a lot of the processes that needed attention and, particularly, needed attention given where the Commission was going to be going in terms of this whole new world. For example, once the Commission approves a grant, there is the responsibility to oversee and monitor the use of the funds to ensure they are being spent properly.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay.

Jim Hemphill: It's worth mentioning.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah, I think that's very neat. And this is yet another piece that kind of ties you to the National Archives when you were working on that also, and learning about the agency and stuff too.

Jim Hemphill: Yes.

Stephanie Reynolds: Very cool. Okay. The other thing I wanted to mention, so at the end of our conversation last time, we were talking about your time at the Office of the Federal Register and how they were starting to move things online. And I know that there were several major projects that were going on around that time. Could you talk about any of those?

Jim Hemphill: Yes. I can't remember where we left off, so I may repeat myself a little bit. So the first thing I want to talk about is eDOCS, the electronic editing and publishing system. When I arrived at the OFR in 1995—I was detailed there first in 1994—they had already obtained a system that was used to track documents, but the documents themselves were being received, processed, edited, and published completely manually, at least on our side of the street. And when I say our side of the street, the other side of the street is the Government Printing Office, now the Government Publishing Office. So we would get all of this material ready for publication, literally walk it across the street in a black suitcase, and then the key punchers there—later computer operators—would type all this information in. Our editors would review the pages, okay them to print, and then they are run on the presses, so a very traditional paper-based process. eDOCS was intended to not simply track the documents but be an electronic means of ultimately ingesting the documents, moving them along the process, processing the documents, sending them to GPO, receiving them back from GPO, giving final review and publishing them, but still in paper format (because that is required by law). I was the project manager of the first eDOCS project. So eDOCS is an IT project. And what makes this kind of interesting also is not just what we ended up producing, the eDOCS system, but the time frame in which this project was happening, because it was happening during the time that NARA was growing up and standing up its IT operations, and IT was moving from—and I may have said this earlier—from being run by people who were archivists with kind of a geek side to them, or just liked technical things, to professionals trained in information technology. And I think this is true across the government that initially, the computers in offices were being supported by people in those offices who just kind of liked it. And then, of course, computers had many phases of coming into our lives from an unconnected desktop computer to an office system, where the drives are maintained in the office, and then back to personal computers but networked and with mainframes maintained centrally and away from the office using the computers. So it was kind of an in-and-out-growth process. One of the aspects of that is that lots of different solutions were being discovered or designed within an organization, lots of different solutions. And so at some point, that became wasteful, inefficient. We were buying lots of different kinds of computers from different kinds of people and different systems, and in some instances the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. Maybe they’re doing the exact same thing, but they weren’t. So again, this is in the broader world. Government and private sector organizations were building their capacity to run this. So, you know, no large organization would leave the accounting department to individual offices. Right? We run our budget out of a central office, and now we run our information technology out of a central office. But that was not where it started. And so, as we were building our eDOCS system—and honestly, we were doing it quite a while before NARA was doing centralized systems development, and the reason was NARA didn't have quite the need we did. NARA was receiving 25-year-old records and processing them and putting them in Hollinger boxes and putting them on bookshelves. Initially, they only needed computers to track this work, not to do it. But we were publishing a magazine every single day, a 150-page magazine, the Federal Register. We were publishing more than 120,000 pages of books in more than 250 volumes—the Code of Federal Regulations—every year. So we had an on-the-ground need to make sure our processes were working well. And my point is, we got into the development of systems earlier than NARA did. So by the time NARA was beginning to feel like it had to get the profusion of computers within the agency under control, and one of those places we need to get under control is what's happening over at the Office of the Federal Register, we were pretty far down the track. And so there was a dynamic that went on for, I'd say, a decade of a fairly high degree of resentment toward Mother NARA's oversight of the project in ways that weren't helpful. There was a sense that those setting up NARA’s IT infrastructure were always trying to find out what we were doing, but not in useful ways or for useful purposes. And so we spent so much time just, you know, reporting stuff without getting the help that we needed from NARA, which was financial sometimes, and in other ways. So the reason, I think, that the eDOCS development project succeeded was that we were able to use the resources of the Government Printing Office. As I already explained, under the regulations of the Administrative Committee of the Federal Register we had access to the funds from the “page rate,” the rate agencies paid GPO to publish material in the Federal Register. So we got a lot of our funding for eDOCS out of that. And so NARA really couldn't . . .

Stephanie Reynolds: Can't complain. [LAUGHS]

Jim Hemphill: Yeah, couldn't complain and also had less control over it. I mean, really, it was nobody being bad. It was just, in the end, NARA has developed, like all organizations, a very large IT organization, and there are now laws that govern what must be reported, and there is a lot of oversight on that. And we can't be out there doing anything other than participating as we should. But because this was being developed while this historic change was occurring, it was quite a frustrating experience. And it often felt like we got it done in spite of our agency rather than because of it. But in the end, we have exactly what we envisioned: It is possible not to have a single piece of paper involved in the production of the Federal Register. An agency can prepare a document, send it to us, it's ingested, and it's moved through the process, which is a very complicated process. I mean, the other point I should make is these are legal documents. These are not just Word documents.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay.

Jim Hemphill: These are the kinds of documents that you take to the court and record. That's their nature, like laws. And also, before they're published, they are entirely confidential. So there's a lot of security involved. There's a lot of integrity that needs to be 100 percent. So on paper, the eDOCS system looks like a relatively simple off-the-shelf document management system. And that, by the way, is what I think the folks from NARA IT would often see. They’d say (we thought), "So you're saying you're so special and so different. You know, it's just a document management system." Well, yes and no. So in the end then, it's the workhorse of the Federal Register. And also I would say we went from, I don't know, 80 employees down to 40 or 45, and we're producing double the volume of work.

Stephanie Reynolds: Wow.

Jim Hemphill: So that was the eDOCS system. I was project manager part of the time, and then we had project managers from NARA come in. But I was always deeply involved in that.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay. And so they still use that today . . .?

Jim Hemphill: Yes.

Stephanie Reynolds: . . . the eDOCS system? Yeah. Okay.

Jim Hemphill: So a second system that was developed, and it developed under the radar, and I don't think it has ever been understood for the amazing thing it is, is the electronic Code of Federal Regulations, the e-CFR. The Code of Federal Regulations is the set of regulations that govern our lives and the regulations issued by agencies such as NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency], the IRS, by every agency of government. They're the documents that govern, for instance, how planes are operated in the sky, FAA directives. Critical, critical stuff to our lives. Of course, regulations have a bad reputation, but the fact of the matter is we're glad for the ones that we like, and then we hate the ones that we don't like. But they have a role. And as I said, there are now, I think, 185,000 pages in 260 volumes. So this is an enormous body of material. And each book or each title—the Code of Federal Regulations is divided into 50 titles or 50 topics—is revised and reissued every year. So if you had a collection of the CFR in your library, you would have the books from the previous year with covers of one color. And slowly during the year, they would turn to a different color as you replaced the old version with the new version.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay.

Jim Hemphill: But there is a complication: a regulation takes effect whenever the agency determines it takes effect. So your volume of a particular set of Code of Federal Regulations may be out of date as soon as you have it on your shelf, because there may be two, three, 200 new regulations. The means to figure out what is the current status of a rule was a very complex process that people hired lawyers to do. What we did—and I was not deeply involved in this, so I don't want to take credit for it, but I want to publicize it—was to convert all of that into electronic files that were accessible online. And that was an enormous task, and then to update those on a consistent basis so they were up-to-date, and finally to create a daily point-in-time system whereby you can look at the status of the regulation at any time in the past, as well as see what is pending to be effective in the future. So it is just a phenomenal resource, and it was incredibly complex to create, and it is complex to maintain. And that was done not by contractors who came in to do it for us. This was done by government employees at the Office of the Federal Register and the Government Publishing Office, and it's up on GPO's website today. It's like having all of the laws of the United States available. Of course, they should be available. What more important material is there that we the people should have access to? And yet, until a few years ago, you could go to a library and look at it, but you also probably had to call a lawyer to figure out, you know, what's going on. So we've taken huge strides, but I'll stop there.

Stephanie Reynolds: We use that almost daily in our job.

Jim Hemphill: Oh, okay!

Stephanie Reynolds: So we greatly appreciate that it's in there. We used to go through other . . . I forget. There was a university, I think, that posted regulations, but you just never knew which was the most current. So it was always very confusing. And so now this is our go-to source. So it's great. Now, who maintains that then? Is it GPO?

Jim Hemphill: Between GPO [CROSS TALKING].

Stephanie Reynolds: Or between both GPO [CROSS TALKING]. Okay.

Jim Hemphill: Well, our office is responsible for the content. I mean, the content is prepared by the agencies, but once a final rule is published and given an effective date, then we maintain the Code, and we use GPO computers for the platform where the e-CFR resides.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay. So kind of a mix of both agencies working together on that.

Jim Hemphill: Right.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah. Okay. That seems like it would be a big job to keep up with all of the regulations, with all the agencies, you know? Yeah. Big job.

Jim Hemphill: Now, the third system is the actual Federal Register itself. I think I said early on that, in some ways, I wish the office was called the Office of the Code of Federal Regulations, because ultimately that's what we're producing. The Federal Register is a way station for documents on the path toward becoming a regulation. It's the place where agencies publish proposed rules and then receive comments. So every day, there's probably 150 documents being published by federal agencies in that category. We're also publishing executive orders and notices. So included are not just proto-rules but also agency notices that are important or need to be published. So, it's a very dense book. When I got to the Office of the Federal Register, there were 25,000 subscriptions. Probably 20 percent of those went to libraries or maybe more than that. Maybe another 60 percent went to law firms who were tracking that, or maybe colleges— I don't have my percentages right. And then there were a few individuals, maybe a thousand that had subscriptions to the Federal Register. But it's not a book that one reads through—it looks a lot like the Congressional Record, printed on newsprint-like paper. Very, very dense. Three columns and mind-boggling and sleep-inducing text [LAUGHS]. But important stuff. But it is also something that very few people are aware of, much less the regulatory process it was created to support. When I used to teach classes on the Federal Register, I would use this example to explain the process: I’d say, “You know, when you drive down a street, and you see an orange sign posted on an empty plot of land with the word ‘HEARING’ printed boldly on it, you realize you’re being notified that somebody wants to do something with this land. They're trying to do something that is different from the way it's zoned. And you have an opportunity to voice an opinion about what they want to do with that land. There's going to be a hearing to listen to the public about whether this should happen or not.”

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah.

Jim Hemphill: And if you're like me, you think, “I'm probably not going to like what they’re going to do with this land, but I don't have enough motivation to go to the hearing and find out what it is and express my opinion. Well, a Federal Register document is kind of like that orange sign. It’s the notice and comment process. Agencies are issuing regulations. They are very significant. They're going to make a difference in our lives, some of them a big difference. And they're giving us notice that if you want to have a voice in the development of this regulation, now's the time, and here's who to contact, and here's the deadline. And then when all of those comments have been received, they're going to publish a document in which they're going to respond to all those comments, and they're also going to publish a final regulation. And so this is your democratic opportunity or your opportunity to be involved in the democratic process. Now, all of us in our lives have roles and groups that represent us in those roles. Like if you're a teacher, you have an organization that represents you. If you're a union member, you have unions. You know, if you're an archivist, you have archival organizations. And these associations are paying attention to these regulations for us, hopefully. So most of us trust that if there's something really, really significant, I'm going to get some kind of communication from somebody, or I'll read it in the paper that this thing that I have concerns about is pending. But, nevertheless, I would say the more Americans that are aware of the regulatory process and can participate in it, the better. It's just, the more eyes involved, the better. So making it accessible was a real challenge. And books are not the way to make it accessible. Well, the way to make it accessible is a website: federalregister.gov. And that's ultimately what we produce—a means to view online the book that we publish every day. Presently we have regulations that require that we continue to print the book in paper format, but that is becoming an anachronism that, one day, is likely to end.

Stephanie Reynolds: Oh.

Jim Hemphill: In developing our website, we had to make sure that it maintained the legal integrity of the content—remember, these are legal documents, so we couldn’t just imagine a creative, snazzy website—and make sure that we distinguish between what was legal language and what was descriptive material about the legal content. And that descriptive content could not be commentary on the documents but simply descriptive and directional. So it was quite a process, and I give credit to our general counsel. His name was Michael White, who was in our office for many years. And he really had a vision for this and a heart for it and worked closely with a lot of people on this. There's a fun story. I've forgotten the details of it, but in general, the development of our website was done by a couple of guys in a garage in San Francisco. They were just an upstart software company looking for a way to show off their programming skills. There was a challenge with a prize for the best re-use on the web of already publicly available data and, somehow, these two guys had found the limited data we had posted and said, "Could we see what we could do with that?" They did it, and showed us the product, and that led to a full- blown project which grew, and it ultimately produced the online Federal Register. That’s another really just unsung accomplishment. The Office of the Federal Register is an amazing place with a very small staff that's really doing incredible stuff. And I'm very proud to have been a part of it.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah, like you said, it's a very fundamental, democratic process. We should all know what's going on and what rules they're proposing and that sort of thing. The public or groups, if they do want to write in or comment on anything, how is that process done? Is there a way to do that electronically? Does that go to the agency? Does that go to us? How does that work?

Jim Hemphill: So another part of the federalregister.gov project was integrating into the website the commenting process, which—remember, we're the publishers of the document, but the comments are going to the FAA or the IRS or NOAA. And so bringing the comments into our system and then sending them out to the agencies was a very complex process. But yes, now all of that can be done digitally.

Stephanie Reynolds: Wow, that's great. I mean, those are some major projects that you were working with. Yeah.

Jim Hemphill: And yet I'll tell you, if anybody ever asked me what I do, I always liked to laugh to see how many seconds until their eyes began to glaze over. It's hard to make the work sound real, real interesting.

Stephanie Reynolds: I mean, how did this even come to be part of the National Archives? Because, you know, when you talk to someone they're going to be familiar with a Presidential Library maybe, or you hold the Declaration of Independence. Where does this fit in? How did this become part of the National Archives?

Jim Hemphill: There's not a real good insight into that in the legislative record. I think the most we know is that both organizations were created at the same time. So the National Archives was created in 1935, and the Federal Register Act was 1935. And so they were looking for a place to put the Office. There was some discussion about putting it in the attorney general's office because it had this aspect of creating records. I think maybe somebody said, "Well, we're creating this Archives. That's the organization that keeps the federal records." So it's not an entirely illogical explanation, but they are two distinct missions in some ways.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah, I think just the public and probably even some of NARA's own staff aren't that familiar with the Office of the Federal Register and what it is that the Office does. And we talked a little bit last time about it being brought up in the news more with the whole Presidential . . .

Jim Hemphill: Electoral College.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah, that Electoral College process and all of that. And people just aren't really familiar with what it is that the Office does. And so you get asked all these questions, and they think that you probably do more than what you do. But, you know, it's . . .

Jim Hemphill: I'll give you a brief history just so . . .

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay.

Jim Hemphill: So, of course, the Federal Register didn't exist until 1935. The U.S. Government was much smaller and was not as deeply involved in regulating our lives. Maybe railroads were regulated in the 1880s, but you know, there was the Sherman Antitrust Act. But business was kind of left alone. Then came the Depression and the New Deal and the creation of many new agencies that were regulated. But what was not created was a process across those agencies for how they were going to be issuing regulations. And it was a very catch-as-catch-can process that culminated, or that problem culminated, in a Supreme Court case in which a company was brought suit against them for violating some regulations. It went all the way up to the Supreme Court, at which time the Supreme Court asked in the discovery for the original signed document, and the Department of Justice or the agency that was to produce it didn't have the signed document. All they had was a copy. And secondly, what was discovered was the regulation that they had prosecuted the company on the basis of had not been in effect at the time of that prosecution.

Stephanie Reynolds: Oh.

Jim Hemphill: So, these procedural problems made the whole system fall. And the court decision in issuing their opinion said, basically to the government, "Get your act together. It is unconscionable that you can't even produce the proof that this document was ever signed, because anybody could mimeograph or Xerox a fake document."

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah.

Jim Hemphill: The second thing that was happening was, as these regulations were being created, there was a lot of concern that they were being created in the dark and not in a democratic way. So these regulations had the effect of law and enforceability of law, but nobody got to vote on it. So there was a lot of this discussion going on. So to resolve that, there was a Federal Register Act where rules would be gathered, all the existing would be gathered in one place. The Code of Federal Regulations and new regulations would have to be published. Okay. So that's that history. The Department of State used to have ministerial roles. So it wasn't just for foreign relations, but they held the Declaration of Independence. They were kind of the Archives, right? They published the laws of the U.S. They published the [United States] Government Manual. So, as a result of the Hoover Commission and the Reorganization Act of 1949, one of the things that happened was the General Services Administration was created, so an organization that will provide general services to the government out of various departments like the Department of State, were removed. Publishing the laws, the Electoral College. So the Electoral College is an administrative task that the General Services Administration was given. It had been done at the Secretary of State in the Department of State. Okay. That's 1949. Remember also, that that's when the Archives was brought into GSA, because archives were viewed as a general service. Okay? So now, the Office of the Federal Register, which is within the National Archives, is now under GSA. And in that process, some by law, but some by administrative action, the Director or the Administrator of GSA assigned to either the Office of the Federal Register or the Archivist these ministerial things. So that's how the OFR has not just the Code of Federal Regulations and the Federal Register, but Presidential Papers, the Statutes at Large, the Government Manual. So thank you for letting me give you that.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah, that's very interesting. I had no idea. Yeah, lots of moving things around and, yeah, trying to find the best place for us and for other areas, right? Yeah.

Jim Hemphill: Yeah.

Stephanie Reynolds: Very cool. Thank you for that. Okay, so we've got a little bit of time left here. I wanted to ask you a few other questions. So, let's see here. In your last interview, you did mention that you were designated as a continuity person in charge of the continuity activities. So like if there is a disaster in the government, you know, it still needs to be able to operate. So there's certain activities that have to take place and that sort of thing. So I was wondering if you could talk about that? And I think you mentioned something with 9/11. Just kind of talk about what was going on, and yeah, whatever you can tell us.

Jim Hemphill: Okay. And I'll break this into pre-9/11 and post-9/11. So during the Cold War, the federal government had lots of contingencies to deal with the effects of a nuclear bomb exploding in the Washington, DC, area, including protecting the administrative processes of government. One of those processes is the Code of Federal Regulations and this process we have in the Federal Register. So I'll call it the Federal Register process. It includes the Code of Federal Regulations. So, I can't speak to the specifics, because I think some of that is still classified. But there were contingencies, and our office was a part of those. And interestingly, one part of it, which is not classified, was a standby set of Code of Regulations. So if the worst happened, you know, those regulations could be brought into effect. Some of those were standby in the sense they were written down, and if needed, could be pulled out by an agency head who might say, "Give me that standby regulation and sign it and make it effective." Others were standby in the sense that they were in the Code of Federal Regulations but were only activated by certain triggers, like the President would say, "I'm activating this section of the Code." So anyways, there was a whole separate Code created. By the end of the Cold War, that whole system was beginning to go away. There wasn't the fear. And so by the time I got to the Office of the Register, we were still doing exercises, but it wasn’t what I would call a real rigorous process. And what we would have put in place would have looked very 1950-ish, even though we were now moving into computers and the like. So again, another place where my career really spanned this movement from analog to digital is in this area of emergency preparedness. So we would participate in these, but, you know, the idea that there was going to be the nuclear bomb, had a very big sense of unreality and a little bit of "Why are we doing this?" And if there were a bomb, would these plans even work (like when school kids used to practice hiding under their desks)—was that a viable option for survival? Then 9/11 happened, and that contingency planning was triggered. Not the standby regulations, but the need to do what was in the contingency plans. And so what I would say is— well, I'll tell you a little bit about my experience of 9/11. Everybody has some experience, but I was in Washington, DC. I was walking from the Metro to the Office of the Federal Register, which is a four-block walk. This was September 11th, 2001. There were cell phones in use by then, and I heard a guy walking in front of me say something on his phone about a plane hitting a building. And I thought to myself, I wonder what kind of an accident he’s discussing; maybe there will be something about it on TV when I get to the office. We had TVs in our office suite. I thought it could have been like there was an accident or something. Well, when I got to the building, I went up to our conference room and there were staff in the conference room watching the TV. The first building had been hit, and they were watching. And I joined them, and so we watched everything transpire in the conference room. Two things I remember in particular: One, of course, the Pentagon was attacked, and we looked out the window and were watching the black smoke coming off the Pentagon. We couldn't see the Pentagon, but we could see all of that. So, you know, it was a very real event. Then the second thing was, there was a lot of confusion about what was happening, playing out on the TV. There were discussions among correspondents, and reports and rumors. There was another plane, supposedly, and there was one headed to the Capitol. The windows of our conference room were parallel to 16th Street. So 16th Street is a north-south street that runs right into the White House. Our office sat on North Capitol Street, only 16 blocks west of 16th Street, and only 10 blocks north of it. We watched a jet basically come down 16th Street, and we had the sense of we're watching the plane that was going to hit the White House. Now, it turned out to be one of the military jets scrambled in defense of the city. But just such an unreal time like everybody experienced. Then I got a call telling me “to do what you're to do,” which meant leave and go somewhere. And I went there, and that was just a very surreal environment. I will say it was a place where there were no windows, and I was there for two weeks initially.

Stephanie Reynolds: Wow.

Jim Hemphill: And all that time, we were watching this devastation on the screens in New York. And we weren't doing that just as private citizens. This was the U.S. Government functioning. And [it was] just incredibly surreal, and. . . . But the reason I mention that also is because the first time I got to come home, there had been a tornado come through the College Park area and into the neighborhood where I live just north of College Park. So when I drove in our neighborhood, there was all this destruction. But it was—well, destruction is what I’d been watching virtually nonstop for two weeks. And coming home, I see all the destruction from the tornado around me, and you know, it was kind of difficult to differentiate between those two. So, I think what I would like to say is that what needed to be done post-9/11 was to take 1960s procedures, and—I'm talking now just about the Office of the Federal Register—and bring them into the modern times and develop processes that could work in the real environment in which we were operating. We needed to create a contingency so that if our main headquarters is not accessible, we could function. And so how is the Federal Register going to function, disconnected from GPO? I mean, literally, in the 60s, the plan was that people were going to get on the radio and read the Federal Register. That was [LAUGHS] how the public was going to find out things. So I really had an experience of being involved in the creation of the new processes that are now in place for that. And maybe I shouldn't say much more than that. It's . . .

Stephanie Reynolds: [CROSS TALKING]

Jim Hemphill: All I'll say is this: Our function is not a classified function. And I should say that about the Office of the Federal Register. We do not publish classified documents. You know, there aren't any secret documents in the Code of Federal Regulations. They just don't exist. I'm not saying there aren't secret documents, but those documents govern how the government should operate. There is no secret document that can control how you are to operate as a private citizen in an emergency. Those have to be public and have to be agreed upon through the public processes. So I hope I'm making that distinction between the directives that apply to the government and directives that apply to the public. So, we were in that classified environment not because our material was classified. We were in that environment because the originators of the sources of our information, and those to which we needed to communicate, had classified operations and needed to be in a classified environment. But at the same time that they were doing classified work, they also will be producing regulations that are peacetime- related or non-emergency.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah.

Jim Hemphill: We still needed to communicate with those agencies. So if their communications are down, if they don't have their headquarters in sight, they are somewhere else. We needed to be somewhere else with them or in contact with them. I'll just say one other thing. At one of the first meetings post-9/11 in that classified environment, where a lot of significant people were around the table representing the Cabinet agencies, we were going around, sort of giving a status of how things were in the various agencies. When it came my turn I said, "Well, the Constitution is being protected. It is under control." And everybody just sort of stopped, and it was just kind of, "Oh, yeah. Wow." And just, here were all these important agencies, carrying out critical functions, dealing with the military, and all that. Then at the National Archives, what do we do? We push paper. So it just made me feel a little proud, and happy that, you know, we did have a little bit of a role there, because this massive edifice that is the United States Government all rolls out from the Constitution which we preserve.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah. Wow. It's like the mic drop kind-of-thing. [LAUGHS]

Jim Hemphill: Yeah.

Stephanie Reynolds: [LAUGHS] Wow. So it was all about maintaining continuity and figuring out how this would continue to function and working with agencies and that sort of thing, it sounds like.

Jim Hemphill: You know what? I'll tell you one take away from that.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yes?

Jim Hemphill: It really showed me that in emergencies, we're relying on people. Emergency response will function as well as the people are capable of functioning—individuals. So, in those situations, the people that rise really are the people who have guts, innovation, energy, expertise, because I would say the first league wasn't out on the field, initially. And it's because this whole thing had become kind of unreal—few people thought a nuclear weapon would be exploded, so the people assigned to emergency preparedness weren’t, you know, when real-life crises occurred, those who were used to frontline action, and some were sort of saying, "What do I do?" And I think that's true in life. You know, a tornado comes through—you know, I have such respect for what's going on like in Maui [Hawaii] and other places where there's disasters—there are a lot of us that maybe wouldn't know what to do. We'd be sort of paralyzed by what it is. And whether it's war, whether it's disaster, whether it's some other kind of emergency, systems are not adequate. I mean, you can have all the procedures in place, and that's important, but unless you have people that use them, that have a sense of urgency—and I saw a lot of that in that process. And it was a really interesting lesson, or I don't know what to call it, but . . . It gave me a lot of respect for it. We all have our roles, you know?

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah. And I guess some are better than others.

Jim Hemphill: [CROSS TALKING] And police, they have a unique gift. And you saw that, and you saw people that knew what to do. So rapidly, there was a response. And then there were the majority of us that just were so thankful there are people there that know what to do, because I wouldn't.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah. I mean, I think there's some training involved, but I think you're right. You know, there are certain innate skills or something about what people can handle and react fast, you know, really fast to something. So, I totally agree with that. Kind of along that same line, I wanted to ask . . . so I believe that you were the executive assistant to Senator Hatfield and then for the Archivist of the United States Don Wilson, and also to the Director of the Office of the Federal Register. Right?

Jim Hemphill: Yeah.

Stephanie Reynolds: Okay.

Jim Hemphill: Five were [CROSS TALKING].

Stephanie Reynolds: What does that say about you? Do you have some knack or skill for being able to support people in their role, of making them successful?

Jim Hemphill: I think I've concluded that the gift I have is not so much being an innovative thinker. I'm not the person that should sit at the top of an organization and think big thoughts, but I am a person who can listen and kind of capture and articulate what others are saying in a pretty simple way for others. I think I have a sense of when I hear something that's right and something that's not right. I don't mean morally. I mean, this is going to work or this—I think I'm a good analyst of things. So, I think what I could do, what I felt best with, is if I could get with a visionary who is also willing to not just think big thoughts but was willing to take action, I could help that person figure out how to take the action or how to say, "Here's how to get from what you want to do to accomplishing it, but you've got to do this. You need to get up and make this speech, or you need to issue this memo, or you need to approach this meeting this way." I still think I'm pretty much a behind-the-scenes person. I can do the upfront to a certain degree, but there are a lot of people who have more skills than I do in that. But that's what I just kept finding myself falling into. So after a while, I realized that's my niche, I guess.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like the Archivist or the Senator or whoever may have this vision, and then you can help them determine how to get from Point A to Point B and to get that implemented.

Jim Hemphill: Yes, or maybe articulate a problem, too. So a time when I didn't think I had the opportunity to have much voice, but I think I could have, was in the development of the strategic plans of the agency. That started to be a thing during the Clinton administration. And I think a whole lot of time was spent on the process—I think those documents can be critical documents. They can be so useful in an organization if prepared correctly and then utilized. But unfortunately, most of the time, people and organizations get completely caught up in the process, and it does become pretty much a document that's put on the shelf and not used to run the organization, or the only way it's used is in kind of a reporting way, not in a visionary way. It's used just to report on measurements that end up being an end in themselves. And I've been involved in the development of some really good, simpler strategic plans that were rejected, that I think would have helped to some degree. They would have been better. I think there was one NARA strategic plan that was really good. It was John Carlin who—and a lot of people have negative memories of that process—but he put together a good plan, and he worked it. And that was good for the National Archives. And it helped get us through a bit of a transition time. He used a phrase: Ready Access to Essential Evidence. Every archivist hated that term, “essential evidence,” because the law talked about “records.” But it was the only phrase I've ever heard that really captured the work of the agency as a whole really well. But it wasn't kosher. And so it was—as soon as he left, it was ejected. [LAUGHS] And, if you think about it, the phrase captures recordkeeping, archiving, the Federal Register, a whole bunch of stuff.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah. Yeah. And from collecting that information, preserving it, making access happen. Yeah.

Jim Hemphill: And having it ready, meaning very available.

Stephanie Reynolds: When you need it. Yeah.

Jim Hemphill: And evidence, because record evidence was kind of what the whole mass of stuff could be collected under. Anyways. . .

Stephanie Reynolds: That's interesting. I wanted to ask . . . you've already brought this up several times, but just the kind of technological advancements and modernization that happened throughout your career. I know you've mentioned analog to digital. Can you talk about that theme a little bit, how the changes evolved, what some challenges were or some positive improvements?

Jim Hemphill: Well, so positives: so much faster, so much more information, so much simpler, so much access, so much information, maybe even lifestyle, you know, can blend a little more personal and professional—maybe that's a negative as well. So all in all, absolutely, I'm glad I made it to 2023 and didn't [LAUGHS] keel over in 1990. But you can even see the transition in the records. You know, you look back at archival records up through the '60s, and they're just beautifully kept, and they're complete. And now, they're a mess. You know, people don't think about it. Part of the reason for that is that we no longer have the time to do so. Why is that? Well, for one thing, there used to be a position called a secretary. And one thing that has happened with computers, and I noticed that very much early on. When I was in Senator Hatfield's office, I had a Dictaphone, and I would dictate dozens of letters a day. Dozens. We had five people whose job was to sit with headphones and transcribe and type that all out. Okay?

Stephanie Reynolds: Wow.

Jim Hemphill: By the time I was at the Archives, I was doing all my own typing, backspacing as I misspelled things, you know. I was doing not just the thinking. I was having to do the technical work that had been done by a secretary. And so, things—the product—were much more sloppy, not as elegant, not collected as well. People weren't thinking about records, in contrast to when a secretary knew that part of the process was making three copies, and knowing where they would go and all that. So traditional recordkeeping just kind of blew up. And for a while, that was very concerning until we realized, after a while—because it didn't happen right away that this was possible—everything you've done is re-creatable. [LAUGHS] You don't really need, you know—. I can Google search someone’s name, and I get access to a letter that I wrote you or an email I wrote you ten years ago, right?

Stephanie Reynolds: [LAUGHS]

Jim Hemphill: So a lot of stuff washes over, and there are other ways to do these things. But, you know, I miss some of that, the beauty of the archival research that . . . Yeah. Even at home, you know, your keepsakes might include birthday cards. Well now, maybe it's going to be an email you got from one of your kids. It's just not quite the same. I mean, it means the same, but not for the future. [LAUGHS]

Stephanie Reynolds: [LAUGHS] Yeah.

Jim Hemphill: I really feel that while the government and organizations were moving from no computers to these highly organized IT offices, there were a bunch of mistakes made, and it's too late now. It's maybe irrelevant, but I will say this, and I've seen this in other organizations outside of the government. It is a common practice for me, as an example, to have a process, and to be an expert in the process. We want to automate the process for efficiency reasons. So we go pay somebody who is a programmer, a very smart, smart programmer, but someone who knows nothing about my process. In between me and that person, we put a project manager. And that project manager's role is to kind of know both our needs and have both our interests at heart. . . . And so what happens is, I tell the project manager, or somebody comes in and interviews me about my process. I do a brain dump of everything I know about this. Somebody captures it and sends it over to the programmer, and the programmer tries to interpret whatever I've said and send something back over the transom door, through somebody else's interpreting, and it lands on my desk, and it's nothing like what I need, you know? And so we just go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And I often thought—this is what I experienced in the Federal Register. We had writer-editors who knew all the quirks of and directions that the process needed to go. And we were working through this very weird process. I often thought, "Why don't we hire some temps to do my work, because a lot of it is not specialty work." There's maybe 70–80 percent that I can teach somebody to do pretty easily. Okay? I'll go off and sit with the programmer—not the project manager—the programmer. And we will work together to develop something that really suits the user's needs, unfiltered by this project manager. And then I can go back to my desk. I can tell you all sorts of things there. I can tell you not only the process, but I can say, “Don't put the button there . . . put it over here,” the kind of thing you never get to till far later in the process. That’s understandable because we may only be designing the chassis of the car and we’re not ready to design the radio buttons on the dashboard. But there may be some good reasons to have the foresight to know something about the requirements of the dashboard’s radio buttons early on in the design process. Why not have access to those potential “assists” in the design process? If you put the radio in the trunk, when you show me the car and say, "What do you think of it?" you will destroy my trust in you and the design process.

Stephanie Reynolds: [LAUGHS]

Jim Hemphill: But I guess that's applying my analytical perspective to the extent I have any thoughts about how things played out. When I observed that process, I thought, "Oh, this is very unfortunate." I wish things were done differently. And then people need to be humble— everybody. We all want to take credit for stuff. And it's hard to admit mistakes. And so a lot of times, you get somebody like that in a position, and it can really be hard. And that happened a couple times, I'd say.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah. Yeah. It probably changes the whole culture of the place.

Jim Hemphill: Yeah. Yeah.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah. Kind of around that, what do you think is your greatest accomplishment, or what are you most proud of from your time at NARA? You've done a lot of things in a lot of different offices, or a few [LAUGHS], not just one.

Jim Hemphill: I hope I made people's work happy, you know? I hope I was a person that didn't make their days worse. At least, you know, they felt like I was trying to help them. I really wanted to serve people well. I wanted to accomplish things, you know? But, yeah. And it's funny. I think I had two reputations. I think I had kind of a negative reputation. This is probably way too personal for this. I don't know. But I think there are a lot of people who really would say, "He was a good person. He helped us, and he was for us." But there were people that, somehow, I just couldn't connect with. And probably behind doors, they were maybe negative about me. I never had bad motives. I didn't have enemies, you know. If I was in an argument with someone, it was just about the topic. It wasn't, "I hate you, and I'm going to make your life miserable." But I think that's so common that that's what a lot of people, maybe—because, I guess I have some passion sometimes, and maybe my passion comes across a little rough, perhaps. And I don't know. I don't know. That's a part that I never think about, honestly. So . . .

Stephanie Reynolds: Well, I think we all get along with different personalities, right? So you can't be the only one. Do you remember your last day at the agency in 2021?

Jim Hemphill: I turned off my computer in my home office, and I went downstairs and had dinner. [LAUGHS]

Stephanie Reynolds: Oh. You were working from home.

Jim Hemphill: Yeah. That was the end of my career. Yeah, it was really . . .

Stephanie Reynolds: Wow.

Jim Hemphill: The office did a really neat thing, though. I think two days before, they had an online “Zoom” retirement party, and so there were squares of most of the people on the staff on my computer screen. And some people said some things. I got a chance to say some things. I had watched a woman who had worked in the Federal Register for a long time and, you know, a lot of times retirement parties are kind of a laugh-and-joking kind-of-affair. But at one point, she stood up, and she just spoke to her experience and her career. And it was moving. It was just really nice. And I thought she deserved that, you know, and we deserve to hear this person who's been here a long time. Take ten minutes to let her reflect on her life. I wanted to do that, so I did that. And I have a video of the thing, so that was very sweet. Oh, and they had a cake. They had a cake delivered to my house!

Stephanie Reynolds: Oh my!

Jim Hemphill: So I had that in front of me. So that was very creative. But my last day was very underwhelming. [LAUGHS]

Stephanie Reynolds: Well, so this is during COVID, right? The pandemic? And so everyone was working from home at the time. Yeah.

Jim Hemphill: I didn't talk about COVID, but like all the other organizations, we shut down. I mean, we shut our office, but we continued to publish the Federal Register every single day. We never missed anything. We had COVID in the office. We had a security guard who was at the Government Printing Office on Wednesday and died on Saturday from COVID. He was the guard who escorted our agency liaisons up to our office. So we were in fear of what was happening. And there were some other people in the GPO building that passed away. So those were very scary times. I remember someone saying when we first were sent home, “How long do you think it'll last? Two weeks?” And I remember rolling my eyes and saying, "Are you kidding? No way they're going to let us stay off two weeks."

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah.

Jim Hemphill: Two and a half years later we're still . . .

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah.

Jim Hemphill: Very strange, strange times.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah, I think we all thought that. I went back into the office just the other day, and I saw the calendar was still open to March of 2020. So those are just reminders of, wow, everyone thought they were going to be right back. So, yeah.

Jim Hemphill: Well, and I should say—this is not a policy statement—but it became clear that we did not need to have people in an office building. We have produced the Federal Register and the Code of Federal Regulations every day without fail for two-and-a-half years. And for two of those years, there were only two people in the office every day. Otherwise, all the other staff—45— were dispersed. So there is no need for them to come back to the office. Well, except for the benefit of the fact that when you leave an office and go to your home to work, you still know what that office looked like, how it functioned as a whole. You know, for instance, that in November I have to do this, or you have overheard things others are saying or doing. But when you hire a new employee into that telework environment, they only know what you tell them. They can’t “catch” any additional information from the office environment because they aren’t in it. So it's so much more important to train people well in the online environment, because there's this big organization. There was all this stuff that was being done that was known generally by several staff members and no one had to say "Oh yeah, in November, we're supposed to do this." So, it will be interesting to see, if organizations stay in a dispersed environment, how they will learn to handle that kind of ingesting of new employees.

Stephanie Reynolds: That's a very good point. Yeah, I think we were all kind of thrown into that position without knowing how this was going to work even. And so this is still kind of a new process where people are still figuring it out, right, even though we've been doing it now since 2020, I think. So, yeah. Well, hey, I kept you over our scheduled time. I hope that's not a problem. Was there anything else that you wanted to add that we haven't talked about yet?

Jim Hemphill: I can't imagine there's anything left. [LAUGHS] No, I think this has triggered memories and made me think. So thank you for your interest. And thank you for asking me to do this.

Stephanie Reynolds: Yeah. Well, thank you for agreeing to do it and to do two sessions, nonetheless! You had a lot to talk about. You've done so much. So it's extremely interesting to hear about all of this from different sides of the house, too, and your perspectives on things. So thank you so much. I'm going to go ahead and stop the recording now. Okay? Hang on just a second.