4.1 Your Workplace and/or “Home Agency”
Heritage Werks is a for-profit corporate preservation company located in Duluth, Georgia about 30 miles north of Atlanta. The company was founded in 2009 by Kier Walton, a brand and marketing specialists. Walton, the CEO of the company was a former employee of History Factory, another archiving company that has a similar model. Today, HW specializes in servicing DOW 30 and Fortune 500 companies, major technology. Each contract is fully customizable and dependent on the clients’ needs and budget.
As a Senior Archivist, my responsibilities include:
- Drive archival projects from assessment, content organization, to cataloging and preservation.
- Collaborate with clients to provide tailored archival recommendations that align with their strategic objectives.
- Write finding aids, draft inventories, and curate assets primed for digitization.
- Assist businesses and sports teams in repurposing their archives for marketing, brand engagement, and other contemporary applications
- Stay engaged in a team-centric environment, ensuring efficiency, attention to detail, and meeting tight project deadlines.
The company is organized in four departments: Operations, Marketing, Client Services and Content and Creative. Operations comprises the archival processing and digitization departments. The processing team ranges from technicians, to senior archivists and directors of collections, execution, and servicing. Digitization uses state of the art equipment, and can produce a range of high quality digital productions. There are three levels of technicians, archivists, and senior archivists that reflect their experience and educational background. Across the whole company there are 100 employees that work between 5 different cities and 2 main physical locations.
4.2 Organization’s User Population Who/What/How?
Heritage Werks services DOW 30 and Fortune 500 companies, major technology, luxury and fashion brands, MLB, MLS, NBA, NFL and NHL teams, collegiate sports and many others.
In my own work I center the needs of black performance-based organizations, women-leaders, and underserved communities. These groups are historically underserved and underfunded and therefore underrepresented in archival collections. Since the priorities of this organization is to serve the interests of each individual company and not necessarily the community or an area of particular research related to the collection or development policy, they do not have any expressed stake in my areas of interests.
Heritage Werks does not like to disclose how many clients they service. However, the less private companies are featured on the webpage. As an employee, I am limited in the amount of information that I can release, however, I can say there are over 100 million assets preserved.
At the moment, community engaged collaborations and partnerships are not important to the company. As a for-profit, fee-based servicing agency, they directly serve their clients needs and desires as articulated through a scope of work. Through the scope of work, the client learns and is able to choose which services they want. This allows the provider to commit to a certain level of care and timeline.
4.3 Strategic Planning Descriptions:
This organization centers the interests of organizations that can afford to invest into their history through preservation; expand their preservation activities; and/or support their current preservation efforts. A significant percentage of the clientele are professional sports organizations. More than 100 million assets are safeguarded in state-of-the art facilities, protected by disaster preparedness and response plans and supported by teams of professional archivists, researchers and writers, historians and creatives who work tirelessly to discover, mine and make history accessible, and bring never-before-seen stories to life.
Our archival services assist in marketing, promotion, and new organizational initiatives. In many cases our services supplement the organization’s preservation efforts. We offer packing, cataloguing, digitizing, and hosting digital assets on a web-based management system. These services are the most used, however for larger companies that require more servicing, we also offer history talks and presentations. Our professionals travel to home bases and present the company’s materials as well as curating exhibits.
4.4 Existing Community-Engaged Collaborations and Partnerships
Digitization is a particularly highly priority in the underserved communities that I tend to work with. High quality photographing and document scanning produce three dimensional images with OCR capabilities and image restoration.
“Heritage Werks operates the most advanced archives digitization facility in North America, where teams of professional archivists and imaging specialists use state-of-the-art technology and workflows to carefully curate and digitize documents, photos, slides, negatives, audio, video, film and three-dimensional objects. We OCR convert documents to enable search inside functionality, retouch and restore photos and perform a host of other services to improve access and use of archival information. Utilizing archivists ensures the highest quality outcomes and is a game changer for organizations that need archival content organized, preserved, metadata tagged and fully accessible throughout the digitization process.”
Heritage Werks digitizes: Ads & Marketing Material, Annual Reports, Art, Audio (All Formats), Catalogs, Correspondence, Equipment & Uniforms, Fabric Swatches, Film Reels, Garments & Accessories, Manuscript Collections, Maps & Drawings, Media Libraries, Memorabilia & Artifacts, News Clippings & Articles, Newsletters, Objects; Photos, Slides & Negatives; Press Kits & Releases; Radio & TV Programs; Sales & Marketing Materials; Subject & Research Files; Transcripts & Legal Documents and Video (All Formats)
The website is the main form of communication between the company and its community. The website shares the value, culture, and leadership of the company, but lacks the organizational chart. It also presents the different kinds of services offered by the company. Interested parties usually speak to someone in marketing or client services first. While I understand Heritage Werks as a for profit organization there are some moments I suspect that the company accommodates the client.
This year Heritage Werks attended and participated in two conferences. The first conference was Society of American Archivists 2024 in Chicago, Illinois and the second one was Society of Georgia Archivists 2024 in Athens, Georgia. HW not only attended the conferences, but also sponsored workshops and presentations. At the Society of Georgia Archivists Conference, HW sponsored the pre-conference workshops and the walking tour. These opportunities gave them the chance to talk about the services they provide, the clients they work with, and the type of professionals they are seeking to recruit. As the stakeholder in the conferences, I plan to organize more opportunities for archivists to travel and represent the company. This year, I had two employees accompany me and exercise their public speaking skills. We were able to dispel any myths about the company as well.
This year the company has acquired more collections and clients than any other period before. Therefore, Heritage Werks had to expand its employee base. I was recently hired as a senior archivist, along with another employee who has extensive experience in Black community archiving. Interestingly, both of us are black, have alot of education and degrees, and identify as Black. I believe this was intentional and strategic on the company’s part because they lack racial diversity in leadership positions. While there are quite a few female leaders, Black and other ethnic minorities are not represented on the leadership and executive levels.
References
Falk, P. K. (2015). Heritage Werks; www.heritagewerks.com. Technical Services Quarterly, 32(4), 443–445. https://doi-org.libdata.lib.ua.edu/10.1080/07317131.2015.1059691
Heritage Werks Website. https://www.heritagewerks.com/
The Society of American Archivists website. https://www2.archivists.org
The Society of Georgia Archivists Website. https://soga.wildapricot.org