Session 32 - Just Add Water: Standing Up a New History, Archive, and Museum Program for the Department of Veterans Affairs
VA Chief Historian Mike Visconage, Senior Archivist Robyn Rodgers, and Curator Kurt Senn will discussion the evolution of creating the VA’s history program. We will discuss the amusements, challenges, and pitfalls of building a brand new federal history program from the ground up in an agency that traces itself to the Colonial period.
Visconage, a retired U.S. Marine and former Command Historian for Multi-National Forces in Iraq with a variety of private sector “new program start-up” experiences, will discuss the value and issues around early awareness, intentional team culture, and how opening doors isn’t always as easy as it should be.
Rodgers, a former Chief Archivist of NASA as well as over a decade at NARA, both in Research Services and Records Management, will discuss triaging archival and records management choices, why intentional policy-setting matters, and how senior leadership-types aren’t the only relationships that matter.
Senn, a former Deputy Director at Clinton Presidential Library and previous director of the Missouri State Museum, will discuss how Robyn names things for her dog, why the joint relationship between the Archives and the Museum is critical especially in this post-COVID posture, and pointedly using things that go wrong as a way to get things to go right.
New federal history programs are not common, and this session will give an inside look at that process. The session will:
- Shed light on how some of the administrative decisions that plague more mature programs may have come about
- Show how while team culture is always vital to success, it’s even more critical in the earliest days
- Serve as an example of how things that go right can go very right, and things that go wrong can create serious setbacks
Target Audiences: Federal, State/Tribal, Local, Public Institutions of Higher Learning
Focus Areas: Archives, Records Management, Technology/Tools
Presenters: Michael Visconage, VA Chief Historian, Department of Veterans Affairs, Robyn Rodgers, Senior Archivist, Department of Veterans Affairs, and Kurt Senn, Curator, Department of Veterans Affairs