Summative Interview with Martin Astell

1.        What is your job and what does it entail?

Martin manages the Essex Record Office as an institution which includes the current building as well as the out storing in Colchester and other accessing points. Previous versions of the job have been called archive service manager and before that it was County Archivist which some counties still use.

2.        How long have you worked for the ERO and how did you get this role?

It has been nearly 25 years. He came in towards the end of 2000 and joined as an archivist, working with the archiving team. At the beginning of 2002, he became the Sound Archivist which was a newly created role at the time as sound archiving existed then, but it wasn’t managed by an archivist at the time.

 He continued as the Sound Archivist until quite recently in 2018. Then the Record Office went through a transformation project around 2017/2018, where the archive service manager left, and he was asked to set up to the role. He applied and was appointed the ERO manager.

3.        What does your day to day look like?

His day to day is different. The main designations are line management as he is the line manager for all the team (strictly speaking, he is only the line manager of two people: Richard as the archive and collections lead and Ed as the customer service lead and then everybody else sits under them. In line management there is the budget responsibility where he is the budget manager for the ERO budget.

There is the business planning and strategic management side of things which entails looking at the strategic position and looking towards the future of the ERO – what’s the mission, what’s the vision, how do we get there and how do we achieve that. There is various policies and procedures that the ERO need to have in place. Martin has some responsibilities for the buildings as well. In one sense he is responsible for everything, but he can delegate some of that e.g. he signs all the official receipts for deposits but all the work to do with depositing, taking them in, doing the accessioning and storing as well as cataloguing is done by the archivists but it’s notionally Martin’s job.

His day mostly feels like just sitting in front of a screen and going through a lot of emails as there is a lot of communication that takes place by email and a lot of meetings that he has with various people within the council as well as the ERO’s wider service take place mostly online. Other aspects include outreach and advocacy which involves meeting and talking to people, helping with some of the outreach events that the ERO does, attending some committees and meetings where the ERO may have a role to play.

He tries to do a monthly report to communicate to other people within the county council the work that the ERO is doing to demonstrate the impact the ERO has and that they are being used by many people as well as contributing to the county council’s strategic aims. The reports also serve the purpose of demonstrating to the staff that their work is being seen and recognised as well as being shared.

4.        What skills are required to fulfil your role?

There is a certain degree of knowledge required about the collections and the content of the record office so a professional archives background is of good use. Line management requires people skills and leadership skills. The budget responsibilities are interesting in the fact that the county council is a large organisation that has its own finance team that does its own accounting so strictly speaking it’s not required to have any sort of financial skills but in practice it is very useful to have that knowledge. The strategic element involves a bit of leadership, management, strategic planning but also some political skill when it comes to having the right conversations at the right time with the right people and to manage situations to the best advantage.

Also, in this role it is necessary to have skills related to income generation like business skills or marketing and things around that which wouldn’t have been the case 15/20 years ago. Martin also tries to keep an overview or eye on some sectors related to the ERO but not directly focused on for example, he tries to keep an eye on the cultural sector: museums, galleries and institutions of that sort although the ERO is not a museum or gallery. He also tries to keep an eye on libraries which the ERO can connect to in terms of business. The ERO can contribute to wellbeing and health so it’s useful to have an eye on those to know what to contribute and how to contribute to them.

5.        What career opportunities have you had and which ones/how did they lead you to your current role?

Martin went to university to study philosophy and when he left university, he didn’t know what to do. He worked in various roles for example, a storeman, worked in a restaurant, worked as a projectionist in a theatre. However, he decided he wanted to be a sound or film archivist but there weren’t many opportunities to do so and there is no a clear pathway to get there so he chose to train as an archivist by going back to university to get his Masters at UCL and to get on the course he needed experience which he gained by volunteering at the Oxford County Record Office and then got a one year post at the National Gallery then he was able to get on the archive course.

When he came out of the course, he got a job working at Westminster College in Oxford (which no longer exists as it merged with Oxford Brookes University) and that was a dual post as an archivist and a special collections librarian. From there he moved to Essex and the rest is history. Doing the archive qualification enables you to be an archivist but does it enable you to branch out elsewhere is a question as there are probably examples of those who were able to branch out elsewhere, but it is mostly people who want to become archivists, become so and stay there, in that field. As Martin is in a strategic leadership role now, it’s possible that those leadership, management and strategic skills can be transferable to another similar organisation.

6.        How did you get into this role as Essex Record Office Manager?

It was never Martin’s plan to be manager, his original plan was to be the sound archivist, and he had achieved that. Becoming the ERO manager was the right thing to do at the time given the situation and being in the right place at the right time. Within the archive profession, there are limited opportunities for progression as there is sort of three levels: the para-professional level (the archive assistants and technical staff), the archivists (the people with the professional qualifications) and then there is senior management.  

The senior management roles are very few and far in between so somebody who is ambitious and wants to have a top leadership role, it’s not necessarily easy to get them because there aren’t that many opportunities and it does often involve people moving to a different part of the country to achieve that, even taking up an archivist role can require you to move to different parts of the country.

7.        What lessons have you learned working at the ERO and in this career?

When Martin was first starting out in his career, he never wanted to work for a local authority record office or for a country record office because he thought it would be more interesting and exciting to be part of a special collections in a university or something of a similar realm. However, for various reasons he felt that this was the right place to come at the time; then things happen in your life like marriage, settling down, buying a house so you stay. He remembers coming to the Essex County Council and how different it felt from where he was before just in terms of the size of the organisation and the amount of bureaucracy you must go through but that has now become second nature to him.

He says has been lucky in a way (though I believe he made his own luck) where in becoming the sound archivist, which was a newly created role at the time and it is a separate part of the record office (almost its own entity, to a certain extent), he had a certain degree of freedom to make the role what he wanted it to be. Once you’re established somewhere, you are able shape where you are.

 Thinking about the role he is in now, leadership and management is something that is talked about all the time and there are books you can read to learn about it however, the most important thing Martin was taught by the people who helped him reach this point is authenticity. Due to so many different styles of leadership and management, there are different ways of doing it, but you need to find what is authentic to you, so he has tried to do that to be true to himself.

Management is an interesting thing in an organisation such as this one; for example in the ERO, Martin is the senior manager, he’s the person who decides their fate but in reality there are many positions above him within the council so within the council structure his role is not that senior but because the record office is its own entity, Martin does have a certain degree of influence and responsibility to which he refers to himself as a middle manager who always has to be looking both ways: up and down.

Having come from a position where he wasn’t a manager he has been able to observe different manager styles and try to put himself in their shoes and ask himself what he would do differently. His main aim is to be supportive and enable the team to do what they need to/can do because there is so much knowledge, talent and ability at the ERO so Martin just wants to facilitate an environment where the team can thrive.

8.        Any advice you would give for someone aspiring to go down the same path?

Martin is unsure about the advice he would give because it feels different now. He says someone going to university now who’s thinking about going into this profession is in a different position than where he was when he was younger in the sense that the opportunities are different and may be fewer. To establish yourself in the archive profession is harder now because there are fewer, full time, permanent posts so probably a lot of people must deal with the fact that at the start of their working lives they may only be able to do short term contracts and may have to do a number of those before they find a settled place if ever. Particularly, it’s a challenge as they will be leaving their studies with student debt which may become a genuine barrier for those who do not have resources to fall back on, family help etc.

 If someone asked him whether they should become an archivist, Martin’s enthusiasm would be tempered by the worry of all this but in terms of the actual profession itself, it is really good in that it allows you to often mix with the collections but also its about sharing those with people; that is where the real enjoyment comes, it’s great to be able to interact with people with these amazing artefacts but being able to show those and help other people to discover them is the real joy of it.

It is still very much a collaborative profession as you work together as a sector where if you’re facing a problem here and cannot find an answer, you can ask colleagues elsewhere and be confident that they can help you. The business aspects to it are there and that’s something you must come to terms with because it’s a new thing, part of the reason some people come into this profession is because they don’t want to go into business but now that’s something you must be flexible about.

One of the great things about being an archivist is the number of things you must do and that you find yourself doing as it’s quite varied. In your schooling for your professional qualification, you may be taught about administrative history, diplomatics, Latin or even palaeography but when you’re working you may end up fixing doors, driving vans or heavy lifting of boxes. The stereotype of an archivist is a quiet, studious person sitting in a room surrounded by documents but it’s amazing how many archivists are good communicators and good at public speaking, talks, events, workshops, working with kids etc; There is opportunity to do very different things.

9.        Any challenges/regrets?

When it comes to challenges getting into his current role, Martin did not face many as the circumstances allowed him a clear oath into the role as he did not have to go through a selection process, and everyone was able to get used to his promotion easier. There are challenges in terms of a learning curve as there are things you must learn as you go along. Also, there is a certain potential isolation in the leadership role because you must maintain a certain degree of separation, you can’t be one of the team in some ways.

Another challenge is working out to what extent you are going to be hands on and how much are you prepared to delegate, let go and trust people to do their thing and hope they do what you want which takes a bit of getting used to as how much do you need to know, how much do you need to monitor people to avoid getting bogged down in all the details so you can maintain a detached overview in order to keep view of the bigger picture to have the strategic impact that you really need. In the wellbeing aspect of feeling the responsibility for the whole organisation, if you’re part of a team you can do your bit and know that you have contributed all that you are responsible for, if you’re responsible for a small part of the organisation as he was before when he was the sound archivist he only had to focus on what he was doing and if something goes wrong there are other people who can help to figure it out whereas in a management, leadership role you are kind of responsible for everything even the stuff you do not directly touch, you are held accountable so there is a degree of stress and worry that comes with that. You must figure out how to handle that and how much you take home with you. One of the challenges at the ERO is that the building operates seven days a week so in a sense you’re responsible for everything even when you’re not at work.

 Martin sometimes may regret leaving his sound archivist post as it was less stressful but also because he’s more separated from the collections in his role as the ERO manager and it’s the collections that Martin decided to work in this profession where he was able to interact with the archives and constantly learning new things, in his current role he has relatively little contact with the archives and collections and he no longer gets to participate in researching or interacting with them.

10.   Closing remarks?

Archives are really undervalued and they’re very important as they form the basis of so much, but people often don’t think about them. Nobody cares about records until they really need them so there is a constant job to be done to advocate for the keeping of them and the resources required to do that. There’s also something about the nature of the archivist as they are not there for themselves but for the users and researchers, their work is to enable other people to find and use things. A lot of their work is not about the people coming in today or this week but the people who will be coming in ten- or twenty-years’ time.

It feels like a noble endeavour to preserve and make things accessible for the future, it feels like standing on the shoulders of giants where the team’s job at the ERO is to build on the work that was done by those from twenty years ago and to pass it on to the next generation in the best way they can. There is a feeling of being part of something that is bigger than yourself as the although Martin is the head of the record office, it’s not his, he only acts as the steward of something that has a longer and deeper meaning than just his time here.