Writers
Five people who have spent their working lives with permanent records – at the counter, at the bench, at the scanner and in the stacks.
Margaret Thibodeau
3 articles
Margaret spent twenty-five years behind the counter of a town clerk’s office and a county recorder’s vault in northern New England – land records, vital records, a flood or two and every budget meeting in between. She writes about running a records office that will still make sense to whoever inherits it.
Elias Brandt
2 articles
Elias is a book and paper conservator in private practice. His bench sees deed books with failed spines, maps held together by tape and minute books that spent a winter in a damp basement. He writes about what treatment can and cannot do, and why the kitchen-table repair usually makes things worse.
Priya Raman
3 articles
Priya has led digitization and digital-preservation projects for county offices, libraries and a regional archive – scanners, microfilm, metadata and the storage behind them. She writes the checklists she wishes she’d had on her first project.
Dana Whitcomb
2 articles
Dana advises local governments and mid-size companies on records and information governance: retention schedules, email, legal holds and the legacy systems nobody wants to switch off. Dana writes about the policy side of records, with as little jargon as the subject allows.
Owen Lachance
2 articles
Owen is the archivist of a small-town historical society and has spent most weekends of the last two decades in deed books, cemetery registers and church records. He writes about local history sources and the volunteers who keep them.