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George Despres

As MITRE nears its fiftieth anniversary, preserving the corporate memory has taken on an added dimension. For many years MITRE has maintained its Corporate Archives, which contains a variety of project documents and a large collection of photographs. Now part of Corporate Communications & Knowledge Services in the Center for Information and Technology, the company's Archives has begun augmenting its service areas and promoting more corporate reuse of archival materials. MITRE's professionally trained archivist, George Despres, joined the company in 2004 and is leading this effort to collect, organize, preserve, and communicate MITRE's most important historical activities.

Expanding an archival collection is not as easy as it may sound. "There is a popular misconception that archivists are pack rats, but a big part of our jobs is to make sure that we aren't storing, either virtually or physically, unnecessary or transactional information," explains Despres. "The processing portion of archival work involves a significant amount of weeding out inappropriate material. The goal is generally to hold less than 15 percent of any collection that we receive. Anyone who has spent an afternoon cleaning out his or her office files can appreciate how labor intensive it is to weed through a large number of documents."

Archives Promote Reuse

"One of our primary goals is to expand technical reuse throughout the corporation," says Despres. "Technical reuse does not necessarily mean rehashing an old product in total. Rather, it means taking bits and pieces and reusing them towards innovations. Our motto in Corporate Archives is ‘Helping you apply yesterday's successes to today's innovations.' By that we mean specifications, lessons learned, sponsor relationship histories, and parameters. For example, if a project is deactivated and then reactivated after several years, you don't want to have to start at the beginning—you want to be able to pick up where others left off. That's where archives have a real technical value."

In addition, MITRE's Corporate Archives is developing a set of recommended best practices for managing digital information—a means of ensuring that digital assets are properly preserved and maintained. "It's a paradox that archivists are often considered antiquarians and yet when it comes to digital assets, archives is very much about the future," he says. "There are a lot of hardware and software issues that need to be considered when you are working with digital collections."

Despres continues, "Often one of the most challenging aspects of working in archives is reconstructing the context of historical information. It's interesting that when people use paper they tend to be more formal in their communication. Digital communications are frequently a lot less formal and in many cases require specific background knowledge to decipher. That and hardware and software issues make paper collections the preferred option."

Musician, Historian, Archivist

A history buff from early on, Despres is the first to admit he didn't plan a career in archives. "I was a nightclub musician, both a vocalist and keyboardist, for a decade before heading back to school for a degree in history," he says. "But I quickly realized that the academic history profession had become so specialized and fragmented—I dare say obscure—that I knew I needed to do something else. I had worked in libraries and found the intersection between history and libraries to be archival and grounded in a direct service. I then pursued a graduate degree at Simmons College—a Master of Library and Information Science degree with a concentration in archives and archival management. Part of the degree program included internships, which proved to be invaluable. Theory is good, but practice in this profession is crucial."

When asked what he finds most challenging about his work, Despres acknowledges that archives can be a hard sell. "A lot of people just don't know what we do and others may be skeptical about reusing old information. While it is true that historical information may not be used as frequently as current information, historical information has a definite value—reusing information is definitely better than reinventing the wheel."

Fortunately MITRE is a leader in developing its corporate archives. "I've found the staff and management at MITRE to be very supportive," says Despres. "It's the type of support professional archivists dream about. It is clear that MITRE is a corporation that cares about preserving its history and articulating its identity—there is a direct connection between the heartbeat of the corporation and its archival collections."

—by Kay M. Upham