Tuesday, February 05, 2019

guy with the coolest job I've heard of this week? Neil Dahlstrom, John Deere archives and history manager


podcasts about his job (I guess, I don't do Apple brand stuff)





Neil Dahlstrom, Deere and Company manager – Archives and History, is at the top of his game.

The certified archivist manages a collection totaling several million items for one of America’s iconic companies and is highly regarded in his field.

Dahlstrom’s first job after earning his Master’s degree in historical administration was in Alexandria, Virginia. He was working for a company in the space industry, creating an archive that documented the history of the commercial space industry and private space development. At the time, the space industry was only a few decades old, which made it a strange fit for someone whose main interest was in 19th-century American history.

Dahlstrom had been unaware John Deere had an archive and knew little about the company or the man John Deere. But what he found when he took the job in May 2001 was a trove amounting to millions of items — photos, letters, big pieces of equipment, and toy models of big pieces of equipment. The archive had been started in 1976 and managed since 1979 by the same team.

He taught himself to write HTML, a computer language for creating web pages and applications, and built the archive’s first website.

Today, Dahlstrom and his team use three digital catalogs that allow them to deal with requests a lot faster. A request that would have taken eight hours to research 10 years ago might take five minutes today because the records are digitized.

the John Deere film collection includes about 10,000 hours of footage going back to 1929.

“We’ve digitized 70 films and we’ve transcribed 12 of them, and that took us three years,” Dahlstrom said.

Will all of it ever be digitized? Probably not. Dahlstrom admitted it would be nice, but then asked who would watch 10,000 hours of video? “You’ve got to be practical.”  Who would transcribe it to make it more searchable? And who is ever going to use more than about a 10-second clip from any of the longer videos?

His research found that the last book written about John Deere, the man, had come out in the 1940s. Dahlstrom figured that 60 years later there had to be more content available, which is how he became a biographer, writing “The John Deere Story: A Biography of Plowmakers John and Charles Deere” in 2005.

In August he delivered a joint presentation with the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., to a group of business archivists.

“My talk was about our relationship with the Smithsonian,” Dahlstrom said. “John Deere made its first donation to the Smithsonian in 1938, and our participation in food and agriculture exhibits and programs there puts visitors in the shoes of a farmer.”

https://johndeerejournal.com/2018/10/an-archivists-life/

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