Careers for History Majors: Elias Larralde (BA 2020) – Digital Archivist, American Philosophical Society

I came to FSU wanting to be a music composer, but while I kept applying and auditioning for the College of Music, I needed a degree program to fall back on. I picked the subject I had enjoyed most in school – History and followed the History major map. Eventually, I saw that I could become an ethnomusicologist, combining my interest in music with my interest in History. I wrote my Honors in the Major thesis with Dr. Herrera on Afro-Cuban music history, "Melodies of Mirages: Exoticism, Folklore, and 'Performing' Santeria." I also added Museum Studies as a minor field to my History major.

Current position

I am a digital archivist for the American Philosophical Society, which is a private, nonprofit research facility. Members are elected and include scientists, high-ranking public officials, authors, and researchers from the humanities. It was founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1743 to promote useful knowledge. It acted as a depository for materials before the Library of Congress was founded. There are three broad collection areas: early American history, Indigenous history, and the history of science and technology.

I work purely on materials that were born digital. They originated from a computer environment and have no physical counterparts. Everything from floppies onward, which means that my work is primarily in the history of science and technology collection area. These digital materials have to be catalogued just like other items to make them available for future researchers even if the accession details are a bit different from non-digital stuff. Right now, researchers come to us and have access to these born-digital materials in the reading room of the APS in Philadelphia.

Professional training

After graduating from FSU, I completed a master’s degree in library and information science at the University of Arizona. For the longest time, after I had dropped the idea of majoring in music, I had planned on becoming a professor in ethnomusicology. That is until I did my Honors in the Major thesis. While I am glad that I did that – and I recommend every History major does a research-intensive project during undergrad, it made me reflect on my History major experience. I was pleased that I had completed a big research project, but I realized that one of my favorite things was sharing resources with fellow students, hearing what they wanted to research and helping them find materials.

Through working on an Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program project with Dr. Koslow, I learned about archiving. And it slowly dawned on me, about the same time that I completed my Honors in the Major project, that I wanted to be an archivist and not a professor. That career track included all the things I liked but had none of the drawbacks of an academic career. I pivoted fairly late in the academic year from applying to Latin American studies programs to MLIS degree programs. The University of Arizona accepted my application – so I went there.

Internships

The first thing I did in undergrad was a UROP project with Dr. Koslow. She had been given a box of documents about a person she was researching and needed help with digitizing the material. I scanned the documents and created an inventory of the material. This project was my first real-world archiving experience. I also became a UROP leader the following year. Other internships which I needed for my Museum Studies minor was being a research assistant in a botanical garden for an exhibition and working for the FSU Museum of Fine Arts. All of these experiences were within the realm of general cultural heritage.

Application process

During my time at the University of Arizona, I worked at the Center for Creative Photography which is a large on-campus museum set up by Ansel Adams showcasing American photography since World War II. I digitized material and also worked in the reference section. It was important to me to apply the concepts and topics we were covering in the masters course to real life situations. It helped me understand the taught material much better. I started my job search a couple of months before I graduated. We had been told that it was routine to move from temp job to temp job for a while because a lot of archival positions are tied to grants given to specific projects after which the archivist has to move on. I applied to ca. 50 positions until I got my current job.

What attracted me to this position is that it is endowed. My job title is the “MarBina Rothblatt Assistant Digital Archivist.” It is rare for an archival position to be endowed, which also means it is not temporary. The APS did not expect me to know all the relevant software for my position but gave me time to learn what I needed to know.  While I had been digitizing documents since Dr. Koslow’s UROP project, I had not worked with born-digital materials before.

A regular day

Part of my workday involves ingesting material, taking things from our collection and loading them to our server so that files are in a safe and stable environment. The next step is processing the material, deciding on what to keep and what not, describing the items, determining how to organize them if there is no predetermined structure.

The other part deals with crafting policies and workflows. For example, together with a colleague I am creating a description guideline for the born-digital materials since they need to be described differently from physical objects. I did an environment scan to see how other institutions were handling their born-digital collection, and now I am part of writing our own guidelines. I must admit that this is my favorite part of the job. As more and more material that needs archiving is born-digital, it is so important to get the processing guidelines right.

I am also working in the reading room helping researchers to get access to the materials they need.

When I started out, I kept asking myself how this job is actually an archival position. As I am not working with any physical collections at all. I am moving files on screen from one place to another. I did not have impostor syndrome related to me, but to my job. As I am moving into processing the material I feel less and less like that. I am doing a certificate in digital archiving offered by the Society of American Archivists which is helping me understand the whole dimension of my job. I just did a course on email archiving – a different world in its own.

The History Dimension

Things that stand out that I learned as a History major and that help me in my current position are reading effectively, researching a topic, staying on top of a project, presenting my findings to a larger audience. Being proactive about articulating what needs to be done and explaining how to do it. Working in public history introduced me to how to digitize and inventorize material; the Honors in the Major project allowed me to tackle a large research and writing project that I oversaw myself; and presenting to the UROP symposium taught me how to introduce my research to a broad audience. Bearing in mind that I had to do a lot of that on Zoom as I graduated during COVID!

Advice

I would tell current History majors to think about their relationship to documents and to knowledge. I am interested in helping people find the resources they need to do their research, even to help them define their research project. I like being supportive of knowledge creation, but for me it is a liberating feeling that I don’t need to do it myself.  That does not mean that I might not do a Ph.D. in the future.

The other thing future archivists should be aware of that there are a lot of different archives: corporate archives, government archives at the federal, state, and local levels. Museum archives, university archives. And so on. There are many different kinds of archiving one can do besides the division between working with digital vs. physical material. Ask yourself what you would like to do.

Lastly, I would advise students to take History classes broadly. Because I was thinking about going into Latin American studies to become a professor, I specialized very early and took a lot of Latin American history and art history courses. Looking back, I think I would aim to take classes with as many professors as possible to learn about different ways of doing history.