PROGRAM LEARNING OUTCOME 4

Lead and manage people and projects in an equitable, just, and culturally competent manner.

Program Learning Outcome 4 centers on leadership, management, and advocacy—values that are foundational to my work as an information professional in museums and archives. Over the past decade, I have cultivated a leadership style grounded in empathy, critical thinking, and a commitment to equity. Whether managing volunteers and graduate interns at the Met, developing policies that ensure ethical decision-making, or advocating for increased access to provenance records and digitized collections, I view leadership not as authority, but as stewardship. I have come to understand the power of positional influence to shape institutional values and create inclusive, responsive systems of information management. From day-to-day communication with stakeholders to proposing cross-institutional digitization initiatives, I consistently aim to build trust, champion justice, and lead with care. The experiences presented in this section highlight my ongoing efforts to direct people and projects with integrity, while ensuring that the cultural records we manage are accessible, accountable, and equitable for all users.

4.1 Apply leadership and management principles and practices to direct and manage people and projects.

One of the most important tenets of mine is good leadership and management, whether it be people or the work people do. Through many years of being mentored in the museum industry, I have worked my way up to being able to pass down the wisdom related to good practices in the field. In my current work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I have had the opportunity to manage volunteers and interns. Every week I have the pleasure to manage volunteers that assist me with filing reports and other archival materials. Additionally, I have managed graduate students in library science to assist in processing, digitizing, and creating workflows of archival materials in my holdings. These experiences have been pivotal to my viewpoint on management and ethics in treating people with respect and giving people the opportunity to be independent in the work they do, with the appropriate amount of guidance.

4.2 Use positional power to advocate for information equity and justice.

In my work it is important to advocate for information equity and justice, both for internal and external stakeholders. Through my position, as a documentation manager for a department, I can advocate for information equity for the staff I represent, objects conservators, so that they have access to the resources they need, as well as making their data secure and safe. Additionally, this position can be seen in my IST 613 final paper where I propose for the Met to create a grant funded digitization project of provenance documents related to restituted art objects to be made available on the public website. Ultimately the work I do in digitization and archives management revolves around the idea that I must use my position to advocate for information equity and justice.

4.3 Apply principles of equity and justice to ensure ethical decision-making

As a steward of museum collections information and metadata, it is vital to apply principles of equity and justice in my work to ensure the institution remains ethical in it’s decision making. In this program, I was able to learn how to produce messaging that enforces these standards through projects like the Collections Development Policy Assignment in IST 635. This project forced me to think through the eyes of every stakeholder of the collection and its information, specifically in what made its development effective and successful, which can only be done when looking through an ethical framework. Similarly, after I completed this course, I applied the information I had learned to create a similar style document for the department I work in, for the materials I work with, a Collections Access Policy for Objects Conservation at the Met. It is imperative that information professionals in cultural heritage organizations maintain industry standards related to equity and justice in all aspects of our work to create a field that allows all people to succeed and feel welcome.

4.4 Solve problems using empathy, evidence, and critical and creative thinking.

As an introverted professional woman who has experienced lots of toxic work environments, and workplace discrimination, I have learned to lead by example and to fight for a safe and inclusive environment for myself and my peers. When I was a museum technician at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, I spearheaded a project called the Smithsonian CHAT project, or Collections Histories for Accountability and Transparency. This project was a group designed effort among museum technicians who wanted to make the objects in our collection told in their fullest context. This meant telling the stories of underrepresented individuals who had contributed to our collections, Native American guides, women who took notes and photos, among many other examples. Ultimately these stories were added to descriptions in the database about the objects and eventually were added to didactic materials in the galleries. I am passionate about transparency in a largely colonial industry in order for our institutions to tell whole stories, including those that are difficult to tell. In all, it is important for us to solve problems using empathy, evidence, and critical and creative thinking.

4.5 Facilitate communication with users, colleagues, and community stakeholders.

It is important to facilitate consistent communication with users, coworkers, and other stakeholders in the world of museum collection information. This is due to many reasons, the main being that we are all doing so much work that it is important to share any updates, as well as this is a constantly evolving landscape of a field. An example of this can be seen through my day-to-day communication with new standards to my staff through emails, announcements in staff meetings, or other messaging. Most recently, I was given the opportunity to present work that I have been doing with outsourcing slides and x-rays to an external company to be digitized. This process is very lengthy and bureaucratic. Through my sharing this process and experience with the archives and records management group at the Met, it was a way for other people to learn from my mistakes, not necessarily make them, and be able to more easily approach a complex project compared to how I did. In this way and others I maintain constant communication with users and colleagues.

4.6 Direct and participate in responsive public relations, marketing, and development.

While public relations, marketing and development are not areas I have much experience in as far as my career, I was able to learn about and enact many of the tenets of communications through my work in IST 613. In my final paper I created a proposed recommendation to the Met’s archives which included how they should be marketing this work to the public and other stakeholders. The marketing side included putting how-to videos and document guides on how to use and access the newly digitized archival material through the museum’s website. Additionally this project would allow for a dialog within the greater museum community and the general public, which would create great opportunities for seminars, panels, and lectures related to this work. Ultimately, marking, PR and development are areas that I will continue to participate in as I become more aware of my impact on the internal and external stakeholders of the institutions I work in.

Related work includes: Library Innovation Paper, and Final Project for IST 613.

4.7 Manage information resources through the information life-cycle, including processes of information creation, collection development, representation, organization, preservation, curation, access, and dissemination.

As an information professional, we are always focused on managing information resources through the information life-cycle, including processes of information creation, collection development, representation, organization, preservation, curation, access, and dissemination. In my work I have made museum collections accessible to the public and staff through data entry in databases, and digitization and imagery of surrogates of physical museum objects and specimens. I worked to create records through data entry both at the New York Botanical Garden and the Smithsonian NMNH. I also worked to publish photos of the entomology flat box collections at the California Academy of Sciences through Flickr. Through collection development, I have learned about creating policies through IST 635, which in turn allowed me to write one for the final assignment of the course. I could keep going on, all is to say, I have spent the past ten years focusing on this value, and plan on continuing work in this arena, as it is what I am most passionate about.

Related work includes: Library Innovation Paper, Collections Development Policy.

Discussion of Learning Transfer

In all, the learning objective of this section hits close to home for me. I have spent the last ten years (my entire career) working to make collections accessible, and to make sure that the data and metadata related to our museum collections is accurate and secure. This objective is something that I will always strive for, as this means I will have to keep constant tabs on evolving standards in the industry, as well as relay those changes through communication to stakeholders in order to maintain ethical workplaces and organizations. This goal is the most important to me when it comes to moving into the mentor and leadership side of museum collections work.