Every year, staff at North Carolina’s State Archives field around “9,000 questions,” according to Kelly Policelli, the state’s new head archivist.
Those questions might regard any number of things: family history, an old architectural survey, a News & Observer clip, a colonial court report, or any court report from the past 200 years of North Carolina’s Supreme Court. Maybe someone just wants help tracking down an old college transcript.
Policelli, who began the role in December following the retirement of longtime State Archivist Sarah Koonts, is eager to brush the dust off documents and help answer questions.
“Archives are participatory,” said Policelli, recently, over a Google Meet call with the INDY. “There’s a lot of power in being an archivist and selecting material, but—without the public participating, without agencies participating—this archive is not going to reflect the full history of North Carolina.”
“I want everyone to feel,” Policelli continued, “like this is their archive and to see themselves in our archives.”
Policelli previously served as an assistant librarian and coordinator of University Archives and Special Collections at Elon University and has worked with an impressive roster of other Tar Heel institutions, including Digital Durham at Duke University, the North Carolina State University Special Collections Research Center, and the University of North Carolina Photographic Archive.
A month into the job, Policelli hopped on a call to chat about the ongoing need to advocate for public history, what people might find in the State Archives, and how her office is preparing for the United States semiquincentennial, better known as America250.
What is a day like in the life of the North Carolina state archivist?
I’m a division director in a government agency—it is a lot of meetings, reporting, and troubleshooting, which, that alone might surprise people. I get the impression that folks don’t really understand what archivists and librarians do all day, but we are confronted with problems that we must solve. It’s a lot of advocating for us, for what we do in our staff, because there is not a great level of archival literacy in terms of what it is that archives need [in order] to continuously operate, and then just making sure everyone has all the information and direction that they need to move forward with some of the more complex projects that we’re working on.
I met with legal counsel already today, and was talking with someone about some staff shake-ups that we have and how they’re going to affect the different units here, because we all work together. We’re always collaborating.
We have folks here who do digitization of original records. We have folks who do digital preservation of materials that were born digital—meaning, stuff that was never printed on paper and for which we really only have a digital copy. We have people working on processing, which means going through collections, sorting them, figuring out if there’s an original order, putting it into archival-quality boxes and folders, so that some of the chemical processes that break down paper can be arrested to a certain extent. Some people are working specifically on outreach and thinking about programming that the public might like.
How does material enter the State Archives?
We have processes for that to happen. We have point people who work with each of the individual agencies, and then private donors who donate their materials to the archives, and that goes into our Special Collections. We have private papers there from organizations from around North Carolina, and we have photographic archives.
This is one of the places where it gets technically complicated, because all the things that make digital material great—the fact that you can send it out, that you can change it easily, that it’s easy to alter, easy to share, and that kind of thing to store makes it harder to capture and fix.
We have a lot of things in place that make it possible for us to capture things on the digital side very easily, with a lot of information surrounding it that helps us to prove it is the thing it purports to be. On the paper side, it is a lot easier. People box stuff up. They give us a call. We get them to the right person. If it’s in North Carolina, we schedule a pickup. If it’s not, it gets a little bit more difficult. But we have a van. We take our van out—
There’s an archives van?
There’s an archives van. And then [the next] part is documentation—that’s the bread and butter of what we do. It’s kind of like an art collection. You need provenance information so that we can say, “These came from this place on this date; this person signed off on it,” and show that this was within the normal course of business. There have been lots of stories in North Carolina of materials that were supposed to be kept in the courthouse disappearing, going where they shouldn’t go. We have very strict public records laws here in North Carolina. We want to show a chain of custody to make people understand where the stuff came from.
What resources do you think people would be surprised that your office offers?
At this point, I am so dialed into what we have that it’s hard for me to say what would be surprising. We have a lot of county records, and I’m not sure that everybody knows that. We collect county records regularly. We have a lot of court records. We keep everything related to most Superior Court actions. We also have minutes from county boards. There’s a lot of local history here that I’m not sure people realize they can access here at the archives.
We have very strict public records laws here in North Carolina. We want to show a chain of custody to make people understand where the stuff came from.”
We have the N&O collection of photographs, we have different kinds of films from North Carolina, all around the state. One of the other things that we need to be more clear about is that we have multiple locations—we have special collections out in the western region, in Asheville, that are accessible.
One of the biggest collections is the Black Mountain College collection, which is really interesting. And then we have a facility, the Outer Banks History Center, that collects private collections and organizational collections from the Outer Banks region. That’s a really rich collection that I’m not sure everybody knows about.
What’s something you’ve encountered recently in the archives? that is cool or interesting?
My emotional reaction to some of the material we have in our vault collection has surprised me. We don’t pull out the North Carolina copy of the Bill of Rights very often, because it is so old that at this point, any light is damaging to it, and it has been digitized. It’s available online, but when we pull those things out—we have an original copy of a constitutional reader from the period around the grandfather clause and the Jim Crow laws—the things that have happened in our history that were harder histories, it’s that kind of stuff that I find really emotionally resonant.
On the flip side of that, I have worked as a digital archivist, so my fear is that the digital records that we have will never be quite as resonant because they’re not physical. There’s not a tangible kind of thing, and there’s less of an opportunity to imagine someone using a pen to write the document. Our exhibits from digital records are going to be digital, and that’s going to be a change that I’m not sure people are ready for. The fact is that our history right now is digital.
I did want to ask about America250. How is your office preparing?
We’re really excited about America250 because it’s given us an opportunity, through some of the funding initiatives, to produce new exhibits that we can take around the state. Most will be “One Day Wonders,” which means that we roll in in the morning, we set it up, it’s open to the public throughout the day, and then we take material back to make sure it’s preserved the way it should be. We’ve produced a One Day Wonder on the constitutional history within North Carolina. We’ve got a One Day Wonder on the experience of Revolutionary War soldiers in North Carolina. We’ve also had the opportunity to put the 13th Amendment on display in the [North Carolina] Capitol recently.
The funny thing about most of our federal constitutional amendments, the official North Carolina copy of those, is that they just look like a letter. There’s nothing ceremonial about them. They were really just a legal document that we needed to ratify. So it’s fun to see people interacting with that and asking questions—“Well, what does that mean? How did this happen, and what was the process?”
We really also want to get at more recent history and other ways that people have expressed their Americanness. That has given us opportunities to work with the African American Commission and the folks who work with Indigenous groups here in North Carolina to talk about what being American means to a wider range of people. It’s also given us an opportunity to dive deeper into our own records.
We don’t have that much time or that many resources to devote to doing research internally, because a lot of the time we’re helping others to do research—and that’s the primary job—but this has given us an opportunity to get to know some of our records a little bit better. That’s going to be great for the future.
I’m curious if you’re having to do a lot more advocating for public history, given the political climate.
It has been challenging. It is what it is. Mostly, it’s a little bit discouraging when you feel like—especially in the last five or so years—we had this opening up of understanding of what American history could be. What happened in the archives profession after the George Floyd murder was that we started thinking holistically about the stories we have been historically telling—how we’ve been framing things, the kind of access we’re providing, and whether or not there is bias in that access.
Those are really important questions to ask, no matter what the political climate, because it really gets to our core function, which is to provide access to these public records and to these other collections in a way that is equitable and to answer each question as if it’s the most important question, because we serve the people of North Carolina.
Our core mission stays the same. We are seeking to serve the folks of North Carolina who want to look at these records, who have questions that they want to answer using these records.”
To a certain extent, maybe that’s gotten a little bit more difficult. Maybe we can’t use the same vocabulary because that’s become controversial, but our core mission stays the same. We are seeking to serve the folks of North Carolina who want to look at these records, who have questions that they want to answer using these records. We just keep on rolling and making our description better and making it easier for people to answer questions, whether they are controversial questions or whether they are run-of-the-mill questions that people of all political stripes can agree are important.
It’s also an opportunity for us to think about what we’re here to do. We can do hard things, and it’s just one more challenge. Two or three years ago, it was super easy to run a cultural resources institution [and now] we’re struggling with some funding because of some of the federal cuts. We’re looking for other ways to collaborate so that we can make the most of the resources that we have. But by and large, we’re just focusing on our mission, and that mission is written in the General Statutes.
How are AI and other shifts in digital technology shaping your priorities?
We are definitely moving a lot of our operations toward the digital realm, just because that’s where everything else is going. AI is particularly thorny for us. It could be a real boon to things like using large language models to do analysis on large collections of digital materials. Because of how easy it is to create digital records, there are a lot more of them than there were paper records back in the day, and so we have a lot of data that we need to be able to provide access to. AI could really help with that.
On the flip side, AI is not trustworthy. If we are, you know, the stewards of this digital information, we have to look at AI as a risk. That’s part of the conversation we’re having with folks in the government agencies that we serve is. It makes sense to use AI in business operations, and we get that, but we need to think very carefully about how AI is interacting with our records. Rogue AI programming has already been proven to take actions on documents within Cloud-based systems that they weren’t authorized to to take. It’s a complicated sort of landscape when we know that people are going to use these things—how do we provide guidance so that they’re using them ethically and in a way that is not going to make it more difficult for us to do our jobs?
We’re going to have to remind people that it is not free to maintain these things, if we’re going to maintain them in a way that meets international standards for archival, digital collections. There is constant work that it needs to be done to do that [and] help people understand that this is our history. It’s a new technology. There was a time when paper was a new technology. So it’s been a long time since we had to make a shift like that, but we’re making that shift right now.
There are a lot of thorny issues, I think I’ll say right now—this is new, so we’re all going to make mistakes. But hopefully, if we approach it responsibly and transparently and share our knowledge with people, we’ll get to a good place with all of it.
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