Los Angeles Archives, III

In my previous post about the Los Angeles City Archives, I described an "organized room" and a "disorganized room." But that's not accurate. The organized room looks meticulous and tidy, yet it holds vast mysteries. And the disorganized room you see here, the vault, is very much in order in many ways. Yet there's work to be done.

Archivist Michael Holland cannot shelve, check and itemize every day. There are documents to be delivered, boxes to be retrieved, city officials to be informed. The job is immense.

I'd love to give Michael a staff to go through it all. But there's something beautiful about these old books as they are. In a way, I hope there will always be mysteries in the archives.

Then again, organization has its beauties, too.

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You can visit the Los Angeles Archives, too. (You even can see some records online.) If you want a tour, just call for an appointment. If you want to see a specific document, you need to call ahead for that, too, so the document can be found and retrieved for you.

Michael can often be heard on KPCC's Off Ramp with John Rabe, Saturdays 12-1pm and Sundays 6-7pm. Thanks to Anne Louise Bannon for setting up the tour and coming with me.

Los Angeles Archives, II

In my previous post I showed you an impressive room at the Los Angeles Archives. I think of that room as "The Organized Room." It's awesome in the true sense of the word.

Perhaps even more awesome is "The Disorganized Room." This one's a vault. Many of the files are ancient by California standards, some are of more recent memory. Some are in need of repair, some just need to be organized. There are photos, paintings, memorabilia and documents. Michael Holland, the Los Angeles Archivist who gave me a tour, has a big job on his hands. So did the Archivist before him. So will the Archivist to come after. There is so much here it will never be finished. "I'm in danger of learning something new every day that I come to work," said Michael.

Before 1877, all court documents were written in Spanish, by hand. This document is from 1850.

After 1877, legal documents began to be written in, or translated into, English.

 

I offered to take this old library shelving cart off the City's hands if it was taking up too much space. My offer was not accepted.

See that red tank behind the cart? It contains halon gas, a fire retardant used in spaces where a sprinkler system would do too much damage. If there should be a fire, the halon gas comes down from above and suppresses the oxygen in the room to keep the documents from catching fire. If that ever happens, the tanks would not be refilled with halon in the future because halon is now outlawed. LA still has it because it's never been deployed.

If you're working in the depths of the vault, you have 30 seconds to get out before there's no oxygen left. I couldn't forget that the whole time I was there.

More to come. I have a few more pictures to show you from the vault.

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You can visit the Los Angeles Archives, too. (You even can see some records online.) If you want a tour, just call for an appointment. If you want to see a specific document, you need to call ahead for that, too, so the document can be found and retrieved for you.

Michael can often be heard on KPCC's Off Ramp with John Rabe, Saturdays 12-1pm and Sundays 6-7pm. Thanks to Anne Louise Bannon for setting up the tour and coming with me.

Los Angeles Archives, I

In another life, a dream life, I was an archivist. I worked among the dusty files, cataloged and notated maps, learned to preserve the oldest books. I researched the answers to obscure questions. I found letters that had been lost and forgotten, and brought them back to life. I was a curator of the arcane.

This is the life of Los Angeles Archivist Michael Holland, who gave me a tour of the City Archives the other day. First, he showed me this room:

 

Neither words nor photographs can do justice to this space. I gasped quite a bit before pulling myself together to photograph Michael in the presence of 290,000 boxes of files. The shelves on the left securely hold box after box, from floor to ceiling. The shelves on the right are a vestige of those that were used before the Northridge Earthquake of 1994. To say the least, the quake showed the necessity for change.

The contents of boxes are known by the department that generated them, and not necessarily by Michael and his staff. Each box can be located by a bar code.

I love looking down this dark hallway of shelves. A mystery could happen there. An electric current runs through the line on the floor to guide the fork lifts. And a fork lift can raise a person to the highest shelves.

Michael told me many stories. My favorite: through a complicated bureaucratic process, some files become obsolete and are eventually slated for destruction. It's a cycle. Since the Northridge quake, some of those that were set to be destroyed remain undiscovered. They're still in the archives, possibly mis-marked or not marked at all. An intern is working to find them. A quarter of a million boxes is, after all, a lot to go through, and our Archivist does what he can with a small budget. Other things are of more immediate concern.

This is the original deed to Griffith Park. The original.

You can visit the Los Angeles Archives, too. (You even can see some records online.) If you want a tour, just call for an appointment. If you want to see a specific document, you need to call ahead for that, too, so the document can be found and retrieved for you.

Michael can often be heard on KPCC's Off Ramp with John Rabe, Saturdays 12-1pm and Sundays 6-7pm. Thanks to Anne Louise Bannon for setting up the tour and coming with me. There's another room and I took a lot of pictures so there'll be more in a few days.

Webster's Fine Networking

Anton Anderson emcees as Lori Webster looks on. Fluorescents be damned, I like the shot anyway.

Like a lot of people, I've been looking to spruce up my online social networking skills for the sake of my business. I'm okay at blogging, but I've got a few things to learn about Facebook and my LinkedIn page is neglected. (I'm so pathetic at Twitter I'm not at liberty to discuss it here.)

Lately I've been speaking to groups about blogging. The first thing I tell them is that blogging is networking. The second thing I tell them is that networking is giving. Networking used to conjure up depressing pictures of dreary social functions where you'd pass out your business card in hopes of getting work. It felt like begging and I was lousy at it. But that's an old idea. Now, networking is about service--finding out what your network needs and filling that need, knowing the returns will come. Giver is a much more powerful position than Beggar.

Last Friday night, Webster's Fine Stationers in Altadena showed us how it's done. WFS, owned by Scott and Lori Webster, hosted a well-attended Social Media Meet and Greet event, free and open to the public. The audience comprised upwards of 50 local entrepreneurs of all stripes and levels of networking knowledge. Everyone was eager to learn and share.

Anton Anderson of Productivity Consulting emceed and Hilary Cable of Business.com Answers led the evening with an informative talk about using Facebook for your business. (She cleared up some Facebook mysteries, which until Friday I would have told you was impossible to do.) I spoke briefly about blogging, and Deb Halberstadt of HalfCity Productions guided us through the uses of LinkedIn.

Then we got to eat! courtesy of Amy's Patio Cafe. And there was wine tasting! provided by Anne Louise Bannon and Michael Holland of OddBallGrape.com. And there was much offline networking, quite social, provided by a lively and interesting crowd.

It would be nice if you clicked all the links, though I know you won't. Still, it gives you a visual idea of how many people and businesses contributed to the evening.

I'd like to see Webster's Fine Stationers do this type of event again, perhaps with even more community input. At a time when so many of us need to stay on top of these changing networking platforms, WFS provided a forum, a gathering place, a community service. Lori, Scott and their great staff filled the needs of their network, and I know the returns will come rushing back to them.