by Caroline Tanski
As the story often goes, Felicia Williamson didn’t intend to be an archivist. She studied German and European history and pursued historical research through a Fulbright scholarship in Austria. She took a student job in circulation at her college library and began to apply for PhD programs so she could become a history professor. Then one day a librarian she worked with pulled her aside and said, “It seems like you enjoy this work. Have you thought about becoming a librarian instead?”
Williamson knew from her own experience as a researcher that she in fact wanted to be an archivist. She earned her MLS from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where she worked as a graduate assistant and met her husband, a digital archivist. Before graduate school, Williamson spent several years working in congressional archives, learning how to understand organizational structure and building skills as a team leader. She left to become the head of special collections for the Sam Houston State University Archives in Huntsville, Texas, where she stayed for four years.
Then, after almost a decade in the field, Williamson saw that the Dallas Holocaust Museum and Center for Education and Tolerance had an opening for an archivist. Given her professional credentials as well as her academic work in German and European history, the fit couldn’t have been better. The Dallas Holocaust Museum was founded in 1984 by survivors who had settled in Dallas. It was created as a memorial that would call visitors to react to history and form opinions. A capital campaign to build a new museum and expand paused during the 2008 financial crisis, and was taken up again in 2011-2012 with a period of hiring and institutional reorganization. The focus of the organization and the archives shifted to both the Holocaust and human rights, addressing many other genocides and human rights tragedies. It was during this wave that Williamson joined the museum, and that the collecting policy for the archives was broadened to include human rights materials. “History is what gets recorded,” Williamson says, “but also what gets collected.”
With her background in congressional and academic archives, Williamson had robust professional qualifications but had not worked in a museum archives before. The Dallas Holocaust Museum Archives is a one-person shop, so she didn’t have colleagues to turn to for advice. So Williamson cold-called every museum archivist in Dallas to arrange coffees, lunches, tours, and anything else that would give her an opportunity to meet face-to-face and gather knowledge. What she learned was that the archives that were doing interesting, important things were the ones that were acting as builders instead of maintainers. “Libraries and archives can become forgotten within an organization,” she says. “One thing I’ve learned is to make sure the archives is included in the vision, the core statements, in the strategic plan. Those are the guiding documents that actually have bearing.” Williamson set about to ensure that her archives were recognized in the museum’s core documentation. It took eighteen months for those changes to be made, but the archives are now inextricably linked to the museum’s vision of success.
In July, 2016, five police officers were shot and killed on streets right next to the museum by an Army Reserves veteran who was motivated by police violence against people of color. Williamson recognized in her new collecting policy a responsibility to respond to the events by gathering oral histories from witnesses. Never having faced this situation before, she once again picked up the phone and called archivists across the country who had worked in the aftermath of crises to learn from their experiences. She went out and spoke with witnesses, with police officers when possible, while respecting the sensitivity and tragic context of the task.
Williamson’s career has been marked by compassionate outreach and sophisticated inreach. Being the sole archivist for the museum can be overwhelming, but she enjoys that “rarely are there two blocks of thirty minutes that are alike.” Taking a cue from successes in Austin, she and her husband, along with other local archivists, are actively planning to bring an archives bazaar to Dallas, taking materials out of institutions and into the city streets, collaborating with food vendors and microbreweries. Williamson wants to get out there where the people are. She wants to be part of opening archives to new audiences, and of bringing new life back into the archives. Building off of the legacy of the museum, Williamson plans to continue reaching out.