Meet Austin Justice (BA,'20, history), an assistant editor for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln (PAL) at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum. The PAL project is dedicated to publishing every document written by or addressed to Abraham Lincoln. In addition to his role at PAL, Justice works remotely as an archives assistant for Northeastern University's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project. He credits his history degree with helping him discover a passion for using digital tools to connect people with the past. Read on for a Q&A with Justice to learn more about his career.
Why did you decide to pursue a degree in history?
Growing up, my interest in history began with an affinity for documentaries. Shows on the Second World War, classical Greece, ancient engineering, medieval life, and other historical topics captivated me, as did historical dramas like Band of Brothers and HBO’s Rome. I always found myself wanting to dive deeper into these topics, which naturally led me to check out books on everything from ancient cartography to Cold War Berlin. My parents were kind enough to indulge my interests through family vacations to places like Philadelphia, Richmond (VA), and Springfield (IL). They also took me to see historic sites all over my home state of Kentucky like Mary Todd Lincoln’s childhood home in Lexington, Henry Clay’s Ashland estate (after which my hometown is named), and Perryville battlefield.
Studying the past became a way for me to explore other cultures and ideas while gaining insight into how our present social and political realities came to be. By high school, I had already decided to pursue a history degree. At some point one of my teachers, Dr. Lockhart, had me read Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. That book shifted the way I thought about education, and I began to consider how folks learn about and construct the past, both inside and outside of the classroom. Once I got to U of I, courses like John Randolph’s Publishing the Past and the late Kathryn Oberdeck’s History Harvest helped reinforce my interest in using digital platforms to connect the public with the past.
Did you pursue higher education after undergrad?
I went into undergrad thinking I’d pursue a doctorate after my BA. Instead, after several college internships and part-time jobs with libraries and archives like U of I’s Illinois History and Lincoln Collections, the Spurlock Museum, the Kentucky Historical Society, Appalshop Archive, and others, I decided to get a master’s in library and information science. I took a full-time library job at the University of Southern Mississippi and used my staff benefits to earn an MLIS from their library school. The lessons I learned as a history major at U of I served me well in grad school. The ability to identify and document reliable primary and secondary sources, critically analyze evidence, synthesize information, and construct a well-written, structured argument frequently came in handy.
Research, interpretation, and writing skills proved useful for project-based coursework like authoring digital subject guides and more academic exercises like my capstone research project. My historical background also spurred an interest in the history of libraries and archives. Researchers rely on archival collections to reconstruct the past, but the collections - and the institutions that steward them - have histories all their own. Ones that contextualize and inform the acquisition, arrangement, description, presentation, and interpretation of archival materials in our care.
I am also currently pursuing a certificate in digital asset management through Rutgers University.
What was your first job after college?
Thanks to the extensive part-time work experience I racked up in undergrad, I was fortunate enough to land a job as the digital archivist and metadata lead for the Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi (CWRGM). The CWRGM Project was originally a partnership between the University of Southern Mississippi, the Mississippi Digital Library, and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. It aimed to digitize, describe, transcribe, annotate, and digitally publish the Mississippi governors’ papers from 1859 to 1882. I served as one of the project leads and oversaw all aspects of metadata team training as well as metadata creation, quality control, documentation, and troubleshooting during my time on the project.
It’s rather rare for someone to find a role like this in the archives field right after college. The experience I built there has been invaluable to my career.
What is your current career and how does your degree in history inform your work?
Since moving on from USM, I’ve continued to focus on metadata and digital collections in academic and research libraries. Last fall, I left a job as a cataloger at Ohio University Libraries to join the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (ALPLM) in Springfield, IL. I work there full-time as an assistant editor for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln (PAL). The PAL project is a longstanding digital documentary editing initiative dedicated to publishing every document written by or to Abraham Lincoln. I consider my position to be an interdisciplinary role. It requires me to perform historical research, evaluate the contexts of and relationships between documents, and draw on other skills from the historian’s wheelhouse. It also requires skills traditionally considered the purview of digital archivists or librarians, e.g. subject analysis, metadata, authority control, and content management.
For the last two years, I’ve also held a part-time, remote metadata job with Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project.
What do you enjoy about your work?
I appreciate how metadata and digital library work lets me blend technical and intellectual tasks. Functionally, building a reliable digital library or archive requires adherence to detailed standards and protocols to ensure data quality and consistency. I get to use a variety of data tools and content management systems. I enjoy finding solutions to metadata and digital asset problems and designing efficient metadata management workflows. At the same time, my work involves critical analysis of digitized archival materials. Creating metadata for a document means, in part, describing what the item is about, who made it, when/where it came from, and how it relates to other documents. This frequently requires bits of additional research. As a metadata practitioner, I think I have a responsibility to acknowledge my own positionality and to make an effort to educate myself on the historical collections I work with, and the people or communities represented in them, so that I can accurately and respectfully describe them.
The collaborative nature of many digital projects is also exciting. I’ve had the opportunity to work with librarians, archivists, historians, web developers, and other professionals from multiple institutions. In prior roles, I particularly enjoyed training and mentoring students from a variety of academic backgrounds.
What does a typical workday look like for you? What is the most interesting aspect of your job?
Currently, my work at the ALPLM involves a lot of transcription and tagging. I access digitized documents through our system called Xmlref. I use an XML editing software to transcribe, structure, and format text from each document, encoding certain elements and recording bits of metadata along the way. I use the same software to tag people, places, organizations, and events that are mentioned in transcribed documents. These tags link to what are called authority records in the content management system.
Authority records essentially disambiguate people, organizations, etc. by providing standardized versions of their names and unique numerical identifiers. They contain other key identifying information as well, like dates of birth and death, geographic coordinates, and short biographies or histories. They also allow users to search or browse all tagged documents that were written by specific individuals, or that mention specific persons, places, organizations, or events. I regularly create new authority records, which can lead me down some fascinating research rabbit holes as I attempt to confirm someone or something’s identity, gather accurate details on their life or history, and determine how they relate to other documented people or things in the database. Others have called authority work “small acts of scholarship,” which is precisely how I like to view it.
Eventually, transcribed and tagged documents will be proofed, annotated, and fact-checked before publication online.
What advice do you have for students interested in pursuing work in your field?
Find a way to get practical experience before you commit to grad school. You might volunteer at a library or museum, apply for a summer internship, complete a practicum, or vie for a part-time student job in the University Library—whichever you have the time, resources, and bandwidth to do. The academic coursework you complete during a graduate program will help you learn about the theoretical underpinnings and standards that shape the field, but classes cannot fully convey the day-to-day realities of working in libraries or archives. Practical experience is the best way to discover whether or not you truly enjoy this kind of work and want to pursue it as a career. Plus, it’s key to finding a job after grad school. There are more MLIS graduates, for instance, than there are librarian or archivist openings. A combination of education and experience is your best shot at standing out from the crowd.
I’d also encourage students to keep an open mind. There are many kinds of libraries and archives out there with a diverse range of professional roles. Take advantage of the wealth of cultural heritage organizations around Champaign-Urbana. Find folks who work in different roles in the University Library, campus museums, public libraries, and elsewhere, and ask them for informational interviews. These meetings can be a great way to learn about their career paths, the work they do, the grad programs they attended, and any advice they may have for you.
What is your proudest achievement?
So far, probably my work on the Civil War and Reconstruction Governors of Mississippi. People in the nineteenth century wrote to their governors about nearly every imaginable issue, big or small. The result is a collection that represents the diverse voices of people across categories of race, class, gender, etc. from a transformative era in U.S. history. Leading the efforts to describe, contextualize, and make those papers discoverable online through rich metadata during the project’s first couple of years gave me a sense of partial ownership in it. I like to think that my contributions, alongside the work of the many metadata student assistants I supervised, were some of the crucial elements in the project’s success. Of course, the project leads responsible for other areas of production, like digitization and transcription made their own vital contributions as well. The Mississippi Historical Society recognized the whole CWRGM team with its 2022 Excellence in History Award.
by Eva Grein