Margot Note's Blog, page 50
March 22, 2017
Copyright Fundamentals for Family Historians
It may seem as though you wouldn’t have to worry about copyright issues when you are creating family history projects. If you have original diaries, photos, and letters in your possession, you might also think that you own the rights to them, especially if they are old. However, even though you may own the physical materials, the author of the documents retains their legal copyright, sometimes for much longer than you would assume. For example, I may have a diary my mother wrote, but she still retains the copyright of its contents. If I wanted to publish this diary, in whole or in part, I would need to ask permission first.
I recently received a call from a potential client who wanted to hire me to digitize, process, and create a database for approximately one million letters in support of a documentary project. When I asked who owned the copyright of the letters, my client said that the recipient’s son did—because he had physical possession of them. I advised them that they would have to seek the permission of the people who wrote the letters before digitizing and publishing them online because the writers still owned copyright over the documents. Our conversation reminded me that copyright is complicated, but it’s important to understand before starting any project using primary sources.
Even if you don’t expect to create such an ambitious project, family historians should learn fundamental copyright laws if they plan to publish or create histories from their family archives. Here’s a summary of current United States copyright law, based on information from the Copyright Advisory Network of the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy:
A document may be in the public domain and thus free from copyright restrictions if the item was:
first published before 1923created after 1922 and before 1978 and published without a © noticecreated after 1922 and before 1964, published with a © notice, but not renewed after 28 yearspublished after 1977 and before 1989 without a © notice and without subsequent registrationA document will be copyrighted for 95 years after publication if the item was:
created after 1922 and before 1964, published with a © notice and registered after 28 yearscreated after 1963 and before 1978 and published with a © noticeThe copyright belongs to the author or the author’s heirs for the author’s lifetime plus 70 years, if the item was:
created (unpublished) after 1977 and was first published before 2003published after 1977 and before 1989 without a © notice but registered within 5 years, or published with a © noticepublished in 1989 or after with or without a © noticeFor unpublished works, it’s best to err on the side the copyright being held during the author’s lifetime plus 70 years.
You are the sole legal heir if you were named such in the will or legally recognized as such during the legal disposal of the deceased’s property. You share the copyright if you shared the role as heir.
If you share copyright with another heir or if you do not own the copyright at all, you need permission to published from the rightful owner. Always get the permission for use in writing.
If the document belongs to or is housed in a library, archives, or museum, the repository can control your access to it but does not own the copyright unless the author transferred it to the repository. To publish, you would need the permission of the author or his/her heirs and the authorization of the repository.
Fair use laws allow you to quote from works not in the public domain without permission. You can quote brief passages from sources in a way that enhances the appreciation of the work without infringing on its integrity. If you’ve ever written a paper for school, you should be familiar with fair use practices to avoid plagiarism. Consult the Fair Use Evaluator to determine the “fairness” of a use.
Copyright laws change as cases reach court decisions. If you are beginning a family history project where you will need to get copyright permission, check the latest sources available. The American Library Association offers accessible, up-to-date information to consult.
When you are in doubt or the copyright is complex, always seek the advice of a copyright attorney.
When creating your family archives, what are your copyright concerns? Contact me at margotnote@gmail.com.
Creating Family Archives: How to Preserve Your Papers and Photographs
By Margot Note
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March 14, 2017
Determining Authorship and Chronology in Personal Archives
When you are organizing your family archives, determining who wrote what papers and when might not be immediately apparent. Finding out the authorship and date of a document or a letter may be essential to organizing it among your documents or understanding how it fits within a grouping. Archivists use several techniques to establish authorship. They include:
Handwriting comparisonsReferences to people, places, events, and datesLocation and ownership of a document or set of documentsProximity of other documentsAge and nature of paper and inkAge and nature of handwriting styleAge and nature of phrasing and abbreviationsResearching specific details mentioned in the documentComparing the document with new ones foundAsking others who may know more about the documents as a wholeOral traditionCommon senseSimilarly, there are several methods to determine the date of letters and documents, which include:
Looking for clues in surrounding documents, such as newspaper clippings or photographsEstimating dates by comparing documents from before and after the document in questionKeeping envelopes with letters to study postmarksEstimating dates by references to people, places, events, or seasonsLooking for an interruption within a group of documents to see if the document in question fills the gapCreating family archives opens many mysteries for you to solve as you build a valuable resource of recorded information about your loved ones.
What methods do you use to determine authorship and chronology?
Creating Family Archives: How to Preserve Your Papers and Photographs
By Margot Note
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March 1, 2017
19 Ways to Make History
Yesterday, I had lunch with Irene, my mother-in-law, and Donna, my husband’s aunt. Aunt Donna was the inspiration for my latest book after I helped her organize her family papers and photographs; I highlighted her story in my Preface.
Our conversation turned to family history, and I listened to such wonderful stories, like uncles from Italy smuggling sausages and tales of grandmothers and great-grandfathers. Yet, there were so many unanswered questions about long-lost siblings of relatives and people still living in the Old Country.
I realized that although my focus has been to protect the past, we should do a better job preserving the present for the future.
Even archivists and historians like myself fail to capture history. When my father passed away a couple years ago, I lost the opportunity to hear about his personal history. My father, granted, was a quiet, proud, sometimes difficult man, but I wish I had been brave enough to ask about his life while he was still living. When he passed away, his stories passed away with him. Don’t make my mistake.
As you create your family archives, you will encounter so many questions and mysteries. Why not produce the documents about yourself that you wish your ancestors had left behind? Your memories, and the stories passed on to you by others, are yours to record. They exist only in the archives of your mind for now. The stories you craft will be a gift to your descendants and to the historical record.
You can write diaries, journals, letters, and other documents to preserve what would otherwise be lost. Generating your documents requires discipline, but it is not as demanding as you might think. Here are some suggestions:
Keep a diary or journal.Set realistic goals in writing family or autobiographical stories.If you are unable to keep a daily diary, then write only when events make it worthwhile. Journaling should be pleasurable, not burdensome.Set aside a quiet time of the day to do your writing.Make lists of stories that you intend to record.Record your stories into your phone for later transcription.Interview family members, and have them interview you.Print and save emails that document family or autobiographical events.Make each family letter that your write useful as a document for the present and future files of the family papers.If you write annual holiday letters, turn them into family history documents. As you correspond with family members or about family subjects, keep a copy of both “to” and “from” letters.Scrapbook and include as much information as you can into the explanatory text. Simple Scrapper offers easy, accessible scrapbooking advice.Put your name, date, and location on everything that you write and keep.Keep your new family papers organized to inspire others to preserve them. Get a head start on proper preservation by reading Creating Family Archives: How to Preserve Your Papers and Photographs .Ask other family members to create new documents. Here are some suggestions:
Give blank journals as gifts. Tweens and teenagers can start a lifetime of journaling.Encourage older relatives to record their reminiscences.Give new parents a baby book for stories and anecdotes.Start memory books. Use them to accumulate messages from family members and friends for special events.Creating family archives, with new and old artifacts, is a wonderful way to preserve history. Whatever method you chose, you will share the value of the extraordinary memories your family leaves behind.
What are you doing to make history?
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February 24, 2017
Are You A Records Manager?
If you are a records manager (especially in the New York City area), I'd love to get to know you better. I want to gain a broader sense of the challenges that records managers face and the solutions they use to overcome them so that I can better serve my clients. Let 's chat over coffee or on the phone. My email is margot@margotnote.com.
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February 16, 2017
Save Your Memories Before It's Too Late
Everything you own and love will fall apart.
Archivists and preservation professionals try to slow down this process as much as possible. Lucky for you, you have access to the techniques utilized to save the finest and rarest artifacts to protect your family treasures.
Of course, the best way to ensure that valuable items last is to seal them away. They will be protected from light, temperature and humidity fluctuations, contaminants, insects, mice, and people.
But then why keep your family items if you have to stash them away to protect them? People who work at archives, libraries, and museums around the world do their best to balance the need to display and use important items with the need to preserve them.
The same issues that threaten historical objects like the Declaration of Independence threaten your items: light, temperature, moisture, pollution, and mold. Even you, unknowingly, can damage your collections irreversibly.
In my book Creating Family Archives: How to Preserve Your Papers and Photographs, I provide an easy, step-by-step guide on how to protect your family history items. I unlock the secrets that professionals in the finest museums use to save their collections. By employing these methods, you can curtail the damage to your family collections and allow them to be passed on to the next generation.
To provide an overview of the primary sources of deterioration and their effect on your collectibles, I created this risk chart. You can look at your collectibles and, with the help of the chart, figure out where the greatest threats originate.
Margot Note's Creating Family Archives Risk Chart from Margot NoteAre you ready to save your memories before it’s too late? Read Creating Family Archives: How to Preserve Your Papers and Photographs to learn what you can do to reverse or minimize these threats to your precious items.
February 1, 2017
Selecting the Right Project
This article is the first part of a series on project management for records managers, published in ProfessioNotes, the newsletter of the Institute of Certified Records Managers (ICRM). The series focuses on six key areas of project management: selection and prioritization, leading and managing teams, planning and scheduling, budgeting and performance, communication and documentation, and completion and review.
Records managers deal with projects all the time, such as developing a records retention schedule, converting files, or designing an automatic records retrieval system. Although each project is different, they all benefit from the discipline of project management.
The beginning of a project is critical to its success, and teams tend to jump into a project too soon. They are excited to start or feel pressure from executive stakeholders to begin the project. In my experience, records managers always benefit from more effort in selecting and prioritizing the projects that will be the most advantageous to their organizations. Careful selecting and pre-planning saves a tremendous amount of time and effort throughout the project’s lifecycle.
"The most vital part of managing a successful project is identifying the right problem to be solved.”[i] Projects need business cases, which justify them based on their expected benefits. The project’s sponsor is the best person to develop the business case because he or she is invested in the project. A sponsor has the clout and emotional intelligence to certify that the project receives the needed resources to complete it. Larger projects require feasibility studies and cost-benefit analysis. These activities are crucial when the project seems unattainable, yet you need proof to petition executives to reconsider their plans.
Success criteria specify how the project is executed. Universal success criteria include finishing the project on schedule, keeping costs within budget, and meeting goals. In records management projects, success criteria is measured differently than most commercial, profit-making projects. Cost reduction, reduced legal liabilities, faster retrievals, and improved services are factors to track.
A proposal is the first step in launching a project. It includes the vision of the work and a plan for its completion. It’s a necessary fiction because it’s an idealized version of what the project could be. Review the proposal if you are mandated to do the work. Proposals written by others to secure funding often exaggerate results. The outcomes you wish to achieve should be attainable.
When you select your project, think about how you could transform it from delivering a suitable solution to something that catches the imagination of those in your field. Suspend judgment on ideas and be inventive. Consider at least three possible approaches, even when there is a clear solution. Your method should always be grounded in the triple constraint of project management—time, cost, and scope—but a creative solution may improve your project and make it more enjoyable for you and your team.
Your approach should also fit the culture of the organization. Forcing a tactic that is alien to organizational culture is a losing battle. Focus on what the company needs which will also match its modus operandi.
With an approach in mind, your team should discuss its implementation. Projects that use new methods or technologies may be questionable. Consider your assumptions and risks. “A reactive project manager attempts to resolve issues when they occur, but a proactive project manager tries to determine problems beforehand.”[ii] You may assume many things throughout the course of a project, but communication with your team will ensure that you don’t keep your presuppositions for long.
Requirements for the project should be thought out, as they lay the foundation for defining the project scope, testing deliverables, and measuring success. The primary reason for project failure is poorly defined requirements.
As a project manager, you must distinguish between essential, desirable, and unnecessary requirements. Be alert for stakeholders who append wish list items into your necessary requirements. Requirements always need to be documented clearly and thoroughly to permit better estimates of your timeline, budget, and resources, and to provide a means to control changes.
The requirements must also address the right problem. If the project was constructed through its requirements to deliver the wrong solution, it might be considered a failure even if everything was delivered on time and within budget and scope. Gathering the appropriate requirements ensures that the project delivers business value and is perceived as a triumph.
A rough draft of the requirements or a prototype of the project can act as a straw man for stakeholders to critique. Use the opportunity to let them articulate their needs. By stating what they don’t want, stakeholders express what they are seeking in the project.
Consider the deliverables of the project. Deliverables are the defined results and services produced or handed over during the project. RIM project deliverables could be a function-based filing scheme for analog and digital records, a user-friendly filing database, or a retention schedule.
A clear understanding of the scope is the foundation on which successful projects are built. Without it, a project manager will struggle to deliver a project. The project scope is the required work, which the project must complete for it to end. The scope statement gives an overview of what to expect throughout the life of the project and what the desired outcomes of the project will be. It specifies tasks and deliverables so that project success can be measured along the way and at project completion. All stakeholders must accept the scope statement before the project progresses.
Avoid the dreaded scope creep—those small, undocumented changes in the project scope. As the project evolves, you may discover implied, infeasible, or extraneous requirements. You may also realize that you overlooked fundamental requisites that you will need to add to the project. (I’ll discuss making changes in a subsequent article). All changes should be put against the requirements to ensure that the project stays on track.
The best way to prove your records management programs’ worth is to complete value-added projects. Records management offers an unlimited number of projects in which project management methodologies should be employed. When working on projects such as developing a vital records program, implementing a legal hold process, or introducing technology, remember that selecting and prioritizing the right project for your organization is your inaugural step to project victory.
[i] Margot Note, Project Management for Information Professionals (New York: Elsevier, 2015), 19.
[ii] Note, Project Management for Information Professionals, 36.
January 18, 2017
Protect Your Past
Your life is an epic. To those who love you, and to generations yet to be born, it’s as enthralling as a bestseller. It’s a composition crafted since before you entered the world—and it’s still being written.
The words are your family stories, your parents’ love letters, and your journals in the attic. And the images are your photos pasted in albums, piled in drawers, and packed in the cellar. Each artifact tells a fascinating tale, including how and why it survived generations.
Who will pass on these memories to your loved ones?
My guide will help you create your legacy. You’ll learn how to protect your cherished family treasures with techniques that professionals in the finest museums use. These solutions are easy, inexpensive, and crafted especially for you.
You’ll understand history as you never had before. You’ll discover the traits, temperaments, and talents that link generations. You’ll realize that you’re a member of a group larger than your family. You’re part of history.
Preserving memories brings joy to thousands of lives. Are you ready to protect your past, enrich your present, and inspire hope for your future?
Access Creating Family Archives: How to Preserve Your Papers and Photographs.
Join the conversation in my exclusive Facebook group and receive free resources.
Creating Family Archives: How to Preserve Your Papers and Photographs
By Margot Note
Follow me on Pinterest | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook
Like this post? Never miss an update when you sign up for my newsletter.
Who Will Create Your Legacy?
Your life is an epic. To those who love you, and to generations yet to be born, it’s as enthralling as a bestseller. It’s a composition crafted since before you entered the world—and it’s still being written.
The words are your family stories, your parents’ love letters, and your journals in the attic. And the images are your photos pasted in albums, piled in drawers, and packed in the cellar. Each artifact tells a fascinating tale, including how and why it survived generations.
Who will pass on these memories to your loved ones?
My guide will help you create your legacy. You’ll learn how to protect your cherished family treasures with techniques that professionals in the finest museums use. These solutions are easy, inexpensive, and crafted especially for you.
You’ll understand history as you never had before. You’ll discover the traits, temperaments, and talents that link generations. You’ll realize that you’re a member of a group larger than your family. You’re part of history.
Preserving memories brings joy to thousands of lives. Are you ready to protect your past, enrich your present, and inspire hope for your future?
Access Creating Family Archives: How to Preserve Your Papers and Photographs.
Join the conversation in my exclusive Facebook group and receive free resources.
January 4, 2017
Hiring an Archivist? Don't Do This.
Throughout my career, I’ve gone on plenty of interviews, especially for organizations looking to hire an archivist. I’ve noticed a trend that needs to stop for the benefit of potential employees, as well as companies.
Do not ask for a proposal on how to improve the archives program. This is usually asked of the candidate after the first interview.
It’s madness.
During the first interview, the candidate and the employer are evaluating each other to see if they are a good fit and if the opportunity will be mutually beneficial.
Asking for a premature proposal is like going on a first date, then requesting a saving plan for your future children’s college fund—when you’re not even sure you want to see this person again.
Soliciting a proposal is a red flag. It signals that the organization has no clue about their own archives. Why would someone know how to improve the archives department after one meeting? Any information that could be provided would be so general that it would be unhelpful. The only skill set that an exercise like this demonstrates is the ability to bullshit (for lack of a better word), which is not a quality that an organization should seek in their employees.
Some candidates view proposal writing as free work. Whether an organization implements the suggestions offered within the proposal is anyone’s guess. The recommendations would be based on a limited understanding of the specific archives. If an organization uses interviews for free consulting work, it is a place to be avoided.
There’s also a bit of cruelty in suggesting proposal submissions—whether that cruelty is intentional or not. Job searchers are usually leaving a bad work situation or unemployed. To ask someone to invest in hours of work to jump through a hoop to get a second interview is off-putting.
Some would argue that consultants create proposals all the time. And we do. But that’s only after a series of discussions and questions with the buyer at the organization. We gain enough knowledge that we can provide a sensible plan. At the very least, archival consultants are replying to an RFP that contains detailed information about the problem at hand. We don't create proposals out of thin air because we know that they will never be accepted.
A better interview process for an archivist is a short phone screening with an HR representative, followed by an interview with the hiring manager, and then an interview with the rest of the department. Ask for writing samples, and check references.
A series of interviews provides a better sense of the soft skills that a candidate has to offer. A person can suggest the most fantastic archives program on paper, but if he or she does not have the emotional intelligence to make the program a reality, it’s all for naught.
What do you think? Have you been asked to submit a proposal after a first interview?
Are the ideas suggested in a proposal ever implemented?
If you’re a hiring manager, I’d love to hear your perspective.
Comment below or email me at margot@margotnote.com. I have a few proposal war stories of my own!
December 21, 2016
An Archivist Without An Archive
I became an archives and records management consultant, because I have a fire in my belly to have a positive impact on as many organizations and people as possible. Surely, no one becomes an archivist or a records manager because of the pay or the prestige. We like helping others, solving problems, and creating change—from a jumble of dusty boxes to neatly organized and accessible files for research. I want to work on projects that matter.
Self-employment requires discipline and concentration, a high risk tolerance, and self-confidence. Your first sale is to yourself.
In the information management field, our identities are tied to the organizations that employ us. I see now how I’ve hidden behind job titles for years. It takes guts to be independent, to step away from institutions, to be an archivist without an archive.
Many people consult as a side business. I am a full-time consultant who can devote all of my attention to my clients. As a sole proprietor, my overhead is low, which is reflected in my fees. My approaches are tailored, because each client is unique, and their problems merit distinct interventions. I only take a few clients at a time, so my attention is undiluted. Our partnership is a collaborative effort.
If you would like to develop, maintain, or improve your archives and records management program, I’d love to start a conversation.
If you are a consultant, contact me. I’m building a network of people whom I can recommend projects to if I’m not the right fit.
My email is margot@margotnote.com.
