Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Given that the PDHC is now nearly a year old, it seemed like a good time to reflect on the lessons and successes of the past and the possibilities of the future.  The latter was my main focus when I facilitated the most recent general meeting. I aimed to have the mission, goals, and growth plan nailed down by the end of it so I could complete the policy manual and the collaboration could have something to guide them by the time I finished my internship. There was a lot to accomplish, so I wanted to keep people on task, but I also knew that conversations about deeper issues need a bit of time to wander.

As a way to balance these concerns, I started by asking everyone to brainstorm all the things they did, wanted to do, or felt like they should be doing. After a few minutes, there were around 30 items. I asked them to rank them in terms of importance (low, medium, or high), but quickly realized that nothing was seen as being of “low” importance, so I switched tactics and had them each choose the top 5 most important things.

“Some of these kind of go together,” someone commented. “Can we cheat?”

“Sure,” I said. (Compromise is important.)

“And after this,” Roberta Martinez joked, “we all get to be called Sophie.”

Trends emerged as we tallied the items most people considered priorities: grant writing, digitization/metadata, partnering, creating a fuller Pasadena history, increasing the number of collections, exposing new documents to the public, education, outreach, and sustainability. So what did this mean in terms of a mission and goals? What did it look like, specifically, in terms of adding new partners?

The discussions that emerged as people discussed partners revealed a fundamental difference of opinion as to the primary goal of the collaboration: was it to promote and host photos and materials that were already digitized (to act as publishers) or to train people and institutions with smaller collections in digitization (to nurture new collections)?

Each side had a legitimate point. Given that everyone is already fitting the collaboration in around their normal job, it seems a bit much to ask them to devote hours to someone with “a shoebox full of photos.” But if they only entered already digitized photos into the database, wouldn’t that favor only larger institutions and leave out much of the richness and diversity of Pasadena’s history? Many people felt this point keenly and wanted to take on more responsibility for ensuring that the history of smaller institutions and ordinary people were also preserved. They tossed out various ideas for different types of training programs through Pasadena City College, workshops, and outreach programs. Others questioned whether that was the most efficient use of time, given the time and money constraints we already faced.

Finally, I asked, “Is this level of support something we can offer with the resources we already have?”

“No,” everyone conceded.

“What would we need in order to get to where we could do that?”

Funding was the immediate answer. But funding for what, specifically? After some discussion, everyone seemed to concur that the money was most needed for a full-time project coordinator and for training in digitization for smaller institutions.  “Everything else, we can do without the money,” Laura Verlaque pointed out. “We do that already.”

The compromise, then, was to focus for the first year on entering pre-digitized collections from larger institutions into the database while also seeking grant funding for digitization training programs. Someone noted that this focus would give us a better shot at obtaining grants, since previous grant applications had suffered from a scattered sense of purpose. The long-term goal was to establish a city-wide digitization center to help digitize and preserve Pasadena’s historical materials on a larger scale. Everyone seemed excited about the possibilities and glad to have an agreed-upon direction and specific goals.

All that remained then was to finalize a few details on the technical agreement so there would be an official, binding document. (Contract law: Thinking about everything that could go wrong and figuring out how to stop it with words.) To my surprise, the meeting actually ended a little early. It was a good meeting, everybody said. It was helpful; it was focused. We got a lot accomplished.

I find myself tempted to try to glean profound managerial insights from this meeting. You may, if you like. But ultimately it is just one story within the larger story of the Pasadena Digital History Collaboration: one meeting, one conversation, one series of compromises. There are more stories where this came from, and there will be more yet to come.