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Co-chairs: Larry Stevens, Craig Ellsworth
Melinda Arviso-Ciocco, Jan Balsom, Shane Capron, Kurt Dongoske, Craig Ellsworth,
Leslie James, Vineetha Kartha, Jessica Neuwerth, Larry Stevens.
Invited technical advisors: Helen Fairley.
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Dear members of the ad hoc administrative history advisory team,
I’m writing to provide you all an update and get your feedback on the GCDAMP administrative history project. The last time I wrote to you was August 2019. A lot has happened since then. My pared down team is making steady progress now. We plan to complete our project deliverables as originally anticipated in September 2020. I will retire from my position at ASU in May, but will remain on emeritus status working on this project through September.
Oral histories: At the end of year 3 of the project (last September) we had 15 completed oral histories with 15 more to conduct in this final year of the project. With assistance from Emily Omana-Smith and Lee Traynham over the past 6 months we have made contact with most of the remaining people we want to interview for this project. So far this year we have interviewed Chris Harris, Bob Lynch, Paul Grams, and Angie Bulletts. We are flying to SLC tomorrow to interview Rich Valdez. Steve Carothers (SWCA), Lori Caramanian (DOI), and Ed Norton (Grand Canyon Trust) have agreed to be interviewed this spring but no dates are set yet. Randy Peterson and Ted Mellis have declined to be interviewed. I am still working on securing interview commitments from Richard Begay, Amy Heuselin, Dennis Kubly, Don Ostler, Scott Vanderkooi, and one person each with USFWS and AZ Game & Fish. If I get all of these people, that would total 31 interviews for the project (I promised 30). Regarding AZG&F, I have spoken to Larry Riley and he gave me quite a few excellent suggestions, so I’m confident we’ll get someone. I’m not sure who to talk to about a USFWS perspective. If you have advice about adding or subtracting anyone from this list, please let me know.
Besides the recorded audio files of the interviews, we prepare a verbatim transcript along with a minute-by-minute summary annotation of the content, which becomes the transcript’s “table of contents.” We publish the final as a PDF document on the website and link the text of the transcript to the audio file so people can read along while they listen and can search for specific names or terms or dates. Eleven of the oral history transcripts have been thoroughly checked for accuracy, finalized, and “published” on the website: https://gcdamphistory.org/archive/oral-histories/ More will be uploaded every week or two. An example of one of the finished transcripts is attached to this email.
Website: We finally solved the two key problems regarding development of an administrative history website: the permanence of the archive and the annual maintenance cost. You may recall in the earlier incarnation of our web development led by my two faculty colleagues Mark Tebeau and Josh MacFadyen, we ended up with a very complex web platform and database hosted by DiscoveryGarden, a top web hosting and database cloud service out of Canada. The maintenance of the site would have been difficult to hand off to anyone and the annual cost charged by DiscoveryGarden was $3,000. So I cancelled that effort, transferred the web design and development tasks over to a trusted external consultant (Patty Ferrante), and arranged for a permanent archive to be housed on the ASU Library’s new Digital Repository. For a small upfront fee of less than $1,000 ASU will permanently preserve and make publicly accessible and searchable all the digital documents, images, and objects collected for this administrative history. The collection we are creating in the Digital Repository is not yet accessible to the public, but here is an example of what it will look like from the “100 Years of Grand” collection: https://repository.asu.edu/collections/313
In addition to populating the digital archive at ASU, Patty Ferrante is creating an interactive administrative history website on a WordPress platform: https://gcdamphistory.org/ When it is completed, ASU’s Digital Repository staff will use a web crawler to capture and permanently preserve each page. The WordPress site will remain live and updatable for as long as the $50/year fee is paid to Reclaim Hosting for registration of the domain name under a “Faculty/Professional Plan”. I will pay that fee for as long as I am alive, or someone on the GCDAMP team can take over as owner of the domain at some point in the future. Anyone who knows how to use WordPress can maintain and update the site.
Administrative history narrative: Jen and I drafted a portion of the administrative history narrative in 2019 as a contribution to the Grand Canyon Centennial issue of the Journal of Arizona History. The article is titled “Grand Adaptation: A Dammed River and a Confluence of Interests” and was published in December 2019 along with ten other contributions on Grand Canyon history. It is accessible here: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/41627 After Jen and I finish collecting and processing the oral histories over the next three months, we will go to work writing the more comprehensive, full-length administrative history. We hope to have a draft to you for comments by August, so we can revise and improve it before the end of September. If you have comments on the article we wrote for the Journal of AZ History, please send them along.
Orientation Packet for new members of the GCDAMP: This deliverable is being compiled and will be housed on the website. It includes a collection of “Key Readings” curated from the hundreds of documents we’ve collected, which is housed here: https://gcdamphistory.org/archive/key-readings/ It will also include a concise history of the program, information on the administrative structure of GCDAMP, key web links, and a special section where Jen and I will feature bits of advice for new members of GCDAMP excerpted from the oral histories. One of the final questions we ask everyone we interview is “What advice would you give to people who are newly joining the Glen Canyon Dam adaptive management program?” There are numerous pearls of wisdom that we will highlight using the voices of the interviewees themselves. It should be a very useful and interesting feature of the website.
I may be scheduled for a brief update on the project at the April TWG meeting in Phoenix. That’s still up in the air, though, because of the attention and time needed for the budget discussions. Certainly I will be scheduled for a full presentation at the August meeting when most of the project deliverables will be completed, at least in a draft form.
I’m sorry for the length of this email, but wanted to give you a thorough-ish update half-way into the final year of the project. Jen and Patty and I would be grateful for any feedback or advice you may have.
Warm regards,
Paul Hirt
Professor of History
Senior Sustainability Scholar
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-4302
[email protected]
520-404-6392
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