The working life of Museum of London

This week Sarah Demb, the Hub Records Project Manager talks about her role.

Name: Sarah Demb
Job title: Hub Records Project Manager
Department: Information Resources

What is your role as Hub Records Project Manager?

My remit is to survey records keeping practices and procedures across the Hub museums and to make recommendations for improvements. This means I get to interview people about what they do and how they do it – lots of meetings! It’s a fantastic opportunity for me to meet many people in the community and for them to let me know what they would like to see in the way of records management practices to make their work easier.

What were you doing before this?
I spent three years as Project Manager at the International Records Management Trust where I worked both in the field in Africa and in our office in London managing and consulting on projects to improve government records keeping. I worked with National Archivists, other senior government officials and records creators and users in ministries to increase transparency, accountability and good governance through improved records keeping.

I got to assist local teams in raising awareness of records management as a tool to prevent corruption and ensure citizen rights to things like pensions and the basic tenets of justice. I worked in courts in Kenya and Botswana and a variety of ministries in Sierra Leone as well managing other projects in Nigeria, DR Congo and The Gambia, to name just a few places.

Why did you decide to become Hub Records Project Manager at the Museum?
As my contract at my last job was ending, I knew I wanted to stay in London and work at a museum. This job was a prefect mix of the work I had just finished in a museum environment.

Have you always wanted to do this and why?
I grew up in Canada, spent over 9 years working in the United States and then moved to London, where I had wanted to live ever since reading too much Brit kidlit! I came to the UK on an employer-sponsored work permit in 2003 and if you had told me then that I would end up working at the Museum of London, I would have had a hard time believing you! But I first knew I wanted to work in museums after my graduate internship at the JFK Library in Boston, where I got to work with the Ernest Hemingway Archives as well as Kennedy administration records.

I still felt the same way after graduate school and was lucky enough to be hired by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Boston as the first professional full-time archivist in its 130+ years’ history.

After five years there, I moved on to the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution where I worked directly with many of the Native American communities; it was a very different way of looking at records keeping and intellectual property than at the Peabody. Having worked at a museum whose primary focus is scholarly and then at one which is a huge national institution, it seems fitting to now come to the Museum of London and to work across the Hub museums. Museum of London has been one of my favourite museums for a long time; I used to visit the UK before I moved here and always checked out the Museum.

What do you love about your job?
I’m passionate about museum records! The relationship between objects and documentation is so important; without provenance collections have little or no value, so all museum records, including the material that documents administrative processes like HR or Finance, contribute to the knowledge, history and care of the objects.

The best thing is to help locate records that people think have been thrown away or gone missing. More often than not, they turn up and it’s just a question of designing a system to keep them that will be useful to as many people as possible over the most appropriate time period. I’m delighted to say that the project has been extended through March 2009, so we’ll be bringing on procedures which will help everyone do just that – ensure their records fit into a useful framework.

What do you hate about your job?
Maybe the amount of keyboarding inevitably involved. The interviews make up for that.

What is the strangest or funniest thing that has ever happened to you in this job?
I don’t have any stories about Museum of London or the Hub museums yet, as it is early days. However, anything is possible in museums and records work. In the past as part of my work, I’ve met with Native Americans as representatives of their sovereign nations, attempted to return stolen records back to foreign countries, brought to light 18th century autograph collections, chased squirrels out of reading rooms and taken the airport helicopter in to Freetown, Sierra Leone. I don’t know why people think that archives and records are dusty or dull!

Update 15 April 2010:  Please note, Sarah’s role at the Museum has changed and this post is left here for historical purpose only.