For The Record
Carol! Today, I met Carol. What a joy, what a character. She works in ATB's archives and she is somehow the present and the past and the future all at once. Going to see her at work means dropping down an elevator shaft into the concrete hallways and beige paint of the document storage rooms. There, giant, floor-to-ceiling stacks just stand there shoulder to shoulder, holding seven decades of history safe from gravity and forgetfulness. Lady Managers You get the sense that Carol's work joy is rooted in the ability to rescue what she calls "points of time," whether in the form of text, film or video, from that oblivion. Carol is irked when documents are not dated properly, she is saddened by gaps in the company record of, say, the succession of branch managers. She knows the evanescence of digital records is a challenge for her craft. She has an ear for how the documents tell stories that weren't obvious when they were composed. For instance, that ha...