If you want to preserve historical items, sometimes you need to look straight down.

“We had a carpeted area in the Concord Room,” said Ashley Miller, the brand-new state archivist who formerly had the role for Concord Public Library, looking back at changes in the city library’s area for holding  historic items, not usually open to the public. “Carpet holds dirt, dust, moisture – which are all things you do not want around your special collection. Now it’s a nice tiled area.”

And sometimes you need to look straight up.

“When I was hired, six years ago, we had had a roof leak in the Concord Room,” she said.

Nobody wants water seeping through the ceiling but it’s particularly bad when that ceiling covers thousands of priceless books, maps and other irreplaceable papers. Fortunately, Miller had experience with flood remediation in historical archives during a part-time job at Harvard University while getting two graduate degrees at Simmons College (now Simmons University), so the team got to work and things turned out fine.

Neither floors nor ceilings are likely to need major work at her new job as head of the state Division of Archives and Records Management since the building on Ratification Way, formerly South Fruit Street, was expanded and upgraded four years ago.  Miller, 28, replaces Brian Burford, who retired this year after 15 years in the division, including 12 years as archivist.

Her hiring was announced last week by Secretary of State Dave Scanlan, and she is still learning the ropes for the operation of a place where she has been to research many times in the past.

“I’ve always wanted to work for a government archive – been researching at national archives and state archives for years,” Miller said.  She recalled how she was at a conference when she heard that Burford was retiring. “That day I sent an email, a very bold email to be honest, to the secretary of state, Dave Scanlan, saying I heard that Brian is retiring and here’s my resume!”

The archives division, created in 1961, has 10 full-time positions and 2022 operating budget of $969,533.

While it contains such historical gems as a copy of the U.S. Constitution given to the state after the document was signed, the bulk of its collection filed in more than 80,000 boxes is prosaic – old road maps, court records,  school transcripts – but no less valuable to the public and to historians.

And to society in general, since archives are part of our collective memory. Miller likes to quote a phrase she learned in grad school that “archives are arsenals of accountability.”

The division building is open to the public but the archives aren’t a public library.

“You do have to come here with a purpose – you’re not browsing the shelves. You should come in with an intention. Are you looking for Civil War muster rolls for a (particular) regiment? Are you looking for a probate record? … Legislative records and probate records are the most commonly (requested) items,” Miller said.

Miller said she would like to create some exhibit space in the building’s front lobby – “There’s a lot of usable space” – and increase the division’s outreach to academic and historical-society researchers.

And then there’s the question of digitizing the collection, an unending job for archives that is also being undertaken at Concord Public Library. “We’re looking to make a digital presence; get a lot more things digitized, put them on a website, viewable for researchers.”

“There’s so much to learn, I’ve only scratched the surface,” Miller said. “I was in a vault, climate controlled, the size of the entire Concord Room. And then there’s so much more here, so much more.”

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