Shifting to remote work, part 2

I have been fortunate in some regards, as much of my daily work in our department was fairly easily translated into remote work, especially after I gained access to our servers. I have encountered roadblocks attempting to help staff and the public with reference requests - a substantial portion of our physical image archives have yet to be digitally cataloged or imaged, so they are inaccessible. My work assisting with the development of our department’s new order management system and museum’s new digital asset management system have continued during this time. I have created new keyword lists, a data dictionary for all museum users, and have spent a good bit of time testing functionality and reviewing existing documentation. So too has my own work improving documentation about the physical and digital archive - in the form of a completely revised section of our departmental standard operating procedures and revised protocol for metadata creation and quality control, for example.  

Our department was still hosting an intern when we transitioned to remote work, and my co-mentor and I had to adjust quickly in order to continue to support this student. While we no longer had the chance to continue archives digitization and photography studio work, we are able to shift our focus in order to continue providing learning opportunities. We met weekly and discussed ideas surrounding work in libraries, archives, and museums. These conversations were organic, and it was a welcome standing meeting on my calendar. Staff across our department also created a series of presentations on different topics: my co-mentor provided a walk-through of how to edit photographs she and the intern had worked on together, another staff member provided a deep dive into complex image editing in Photoshop, and I provided one on metadata and another on cultural heritage imaging standards and quality control. This was certainly not the ideal outcome for this internship - effectively cut short by a pandemic - but it was encouraging to know we could still connect. I hope we’ll be able to welcome our intern back someday soon, once we are no longer living in a socially-distanced world, to give this student a proper thank-you for all her hard work.

In July, new changes came in the form of layoffs and a museum-wide restructuring. My role shifted and title changed, and I became a part of the newly reimagined Research Center. I will now be a part of a centralized Archives unit, that is comprised of the Art, Architecture, and Design collection, Institutional Archives, and the Imaging Archives. Given my need to continue focusing on physical and born digital materials created by the Imaging team, I will still work closely with my old department. There are still many questions that remain about what this change will look like and how I’ll work with my colleagues. But if I’ve learned nothing else in 2020, it’s that I need to take things one day at a time.

Watching this small garden grow has been grounding

Abruptly adjusting to working remotely during a pandemic has been challenging. It has been hard balancing the realities of life outside of work with the needs and demands of our museum. If nothing else, I am glad to be learning and growing both because of and in spite of what we’re collectively facing. I feel fortunate to have retained my job (so far). I sincerely hope that our institution, our field, and our society as a whole can recover from this reality.

Shifting to remote work, part 1

On March 13, the museum where I work made the announcement that it would be closing for the next two weeks due to COVID-19. This decision came after several weeks of mounting cases of the virus in the US. Commuting by public transit, I felt increasingly nervous during this time - apparently so too did many staff, as our leadership emailed the day prior to the announcement about our concerns expressed via the museum’s all staff email account. It became much more clear how real the situation was when word came that week of the Metropolitan Museum of Art opting to shutter temporarily. It felt like a matter of time before our museum did the same.

That Friday, we arrived at work with notice from our division head that we should begin creating a contingency plan for our department, just in case, that would cover: what equipment or resources we would need access to in order to work remotely; what work would need to be put on hold; and what projects we could turn our attention to while out of the office. Since our department was without a department head, the other manager and I turned our attention to building out a plan with our team. While there was no official word yet that the museum would be closing, it seemed best to prepare as if that were the case. Staff began gathering files onto external harddrives, requesting access for museum-owned laptops in order to get VPN access, and tending to any tasks they could only do while on site. Word finally came late in the afternoon that the museum would indeed be closing for two weeks.

Given the nature of our department’s work - photographing and managing the images that document the collections, exhibitions, people, and daily events at the museum - we knew that it would be difficult, if not impossible to translate much of this to remote working. The other manager and I had developed a list of items we could accomplish, namely working on documentation for various aspects of our work and boosting professional development. These two areas had repeatedly fallen by the wayside as a steady stream of high priority projects and a shrinking department kept the entire team busy. We broke these categories down with subtasks and proceeded to prioritize each to create a general plan. 

We also started to generate some “norms” for communication and check-ins. Given the highly collaborative nature of much of our department’s work, we knew it would be a substantial adjustment needing to proactively reach out to communicate with colleagues. We opted to set a standard for daily “stand-up” meetings at the start, to allow a forum for folks to connect, and to help provide guidance on what to do or troubleshooting on technology issues. As a second part of these meetings, we also tagged on a reading and discussion group. These would be focused around an article, white paper, video, or some other media that related in some way to our work. One staff member would be the leader and facilitate the discussion, all other staff would participate in the conversation. This responsibility would rotate among all staff on the team.

The following Monday, we all began working remotely, most of us for the first time ever while employed at the museum. Our daily meetings took up an hour to two hours daily in the first couple of weeks. Folks started easing into the documentation work our department had long put off. As we got the news from our leadership that the shutdown would continue for at least the next month, we spread our meetings out and reduced the frequency of our reading and discussion groups. Our stand-up meetings took on a concrete agenda, with prompts for each staff member to respond to: what have you been working on, what are you planning on working on, and what’s been keeping you busy outside of work? The team then dove into any questions we might want to get clarity on from leadership, specific technology issues we were facing, and resources we could share with one another. We also gained some breathing room around the projects we wanted to focus on - instead of needing to get this work done in two short weeks, we had much more time to reflect, write, and revise. 

Views from my home office.

As the weeks turned into months, we have continued to iterate on how we gather as a team, how often we do this, and the time we meet. We have also embraced flexibility as it relates to working on documentation. We have moved deadlines, shifted responsibilities, and allowed other unanticipated work to take the center stage when necessary. It has been challenging to juggle all this, especially in a completely new and largely unplanned for context. But it has been encouraging to see our department come together in ways we never previously had, to see staff more comfortable with expressing their opinions and asking for adjustments. It feels like we have all grown from this experience, difficult though it has been.