Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum: Archival Planning and Staff Support
Backlog began working with the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum in July 2023. The initial engagement was an Archival Needs Assessment, which included a site visit and a written report outlining priorities for the museum’s collections. Like many museums, only a small percentage of the collection is on display. The rest lives in storage, which is where most of the work happens.
At the time, the archives team was in a period of transition. A long-serving archivist had recently departed, and the team consisted of one early-career archivist and a newly hired digital and audiovisual archivist who had just finished her graduate program earlier that summer. The collection was physically in good condition, housed in archival-grade containers, but the team needed help setting priorities, establishing policies, and tackling large-scale projects with limited time and staff.
After the assessment, President and CEO Kari Watkins invited Emma Prince to return on a monthly basis through the end of 2024. These monthly visits included three days on-site in the archives, where Emma worked with the team to address space and storage issues, assign and monitor project progress, and make decisions around digital preservation, donor relations, and exhibition planning. Between visits, Emma held weekly team check-ins on Zoom, along with one-on-one meetings with each staff lead.
To help facilitate progress and keep everyone on track, Emma set up a shared Monday.com workspace. This allowed the entire team to clearly see what was committed to each month and what needed attention between visits. Reference requests and daily disruptions can easily pull archivists off course. The shared dashboard helped keep long-term projects in view, while providing accountability and structure for the team.
Emma with the OKCNM archives staff in July 2023 during the initial archival needs assessment.
Accreditation and Policy Updates
Emma worked with the team to prepare for their reaccreditation with the American Alliance of Museums, which occurs once every ten years. This included:
Updating the Collections Management Policy and Collections Plan
Writing a Processing Manual for the first time, standardizing workflows across all staff and interns
Completing major storage reorganizations in both East and West Storage areas to address deferred maintenance
Coaching staff on how to communicate their work clearly to the AAM Visiting Committee
These foundational documents now reflect current practices and provide a structure for onboarding, daily processing, and long-term planning.
Digital Preservation and AV Strategy
With digital preservation becoming more urgent, Emma and the digital archivist created a phased plan for managing the museum’s audiovisual holdings. They began with a full media survey to count and categorize items like DVDs, CDs, audiocassettes, and floppy disks. With that data in hand, the team prioritized the most fragile and obsolete formats for digitization.
Key milestones include:
Migration of 250+ CDs containing institutional photographs into digital storage
Creation of new workflows for digital file handling and metadata tagging
Beginning the process of migrating materials stored on floppy disks and other magnetic media into more stable formats
Advancing digital preservation strategy through staff training, including participation in the Digital POWRR workshop
Emma also helped map out a data interoperability plan between the museum’s content management system and digital asset management system, laying the groundwork for better internal access and rights tracking.
People and Programs
Staff development was another critical focus. Emma supported the team through onboarding new processing assistants and coordinated efforts across interns, high school students, and fellows from the Inasmuch Foundation. These team members contributed to major wins, including:
Completing 99% of the First 100 Collections — the first one hundred collections gathered shortly after the bombing, many of which include memorial items, documentation, and personal effects
Digitizing 2,244 pages of release forms for copyright protection
Labeling 398 archival storage boxes to improve access and organization
Hosting stakeholders who reviewed and enriched metadata for over 13,550 records
To keep momentum going in 2025, Emma now visits quarterly while remaining in close contact with the archives leadership team. Processing assistants are on track to finish the First 200 Collections, and the museum plans to rotate quarterly exhibits and broaden stakeholder engagement ahead of the 30th anniversary of the bombing.
Emma with the entire OKCNM archives team at the end of 2024.
Long-Term Impact
Backlog’s partnership with the Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum has helped the archives team define their priorities, document their practices, and build a sustainable path forward. Through a mix of in-person support, remote collaboration, and shared project tracking, Emma has helped the team turn policy into action and collections into access.
