Profile: Lydia Rice

Lydia Rice is the records manager in Archives and Special Collections. Her main responsibility is to help staff and faculty manage College records throughout their life cycles. She assists the community with the maintenance, storage, and disposition of their physical and digital records. This includes providing guidance for keeping, transferring to the Emerson College Archive, or disposing of records while following College policies and procedures. What ultimately happens to the records can depend on, among other things, operational needs, fiscal and legal requirements, best practices, and enduring historical value.

Staff and faculty tend to ask for her help when they need to move offices or are moving into an office that contains documents that were left behind. The first step in the process is to undertake a record review. Rice has forms and instructions to guide people through the process. A major part of this is deciding which documents are considered official College records and which are not. College records are digital and physical items that provide official evidence of College business transactions, decisions, and actions. Items that are not considered College records include copies of records, personal correspondence, most student projects, and AV material produced by faculty.

Rice works with approximately 70 departmental record officers (DROs) who oversee departmental retention schedules. She considers them to be the foundation of the College’s records management program, because they provide a plan of action for retaining and disposing of records. Usually, a DRO will contact Rice with a records management request, such as requesting a destruction bin, inquiring what to do with an inherited filing cabinet full of documents, or asking to retrieve a box from off-site storage. She also occasionally works with Archives and Special Collections, General Counsel, and relevant departments when a revision to a retention schedule is needed.

Rice is also available to help staff and faculty organize their physical and digital files. She can assist people with basic file management on Google and help them organize files based on accessibility and confidentiality concerns. She helped the College community make the switch from file storage on Box to Google in 2022! Over the course of five months, she held office hours during which she answered questions on topics such as whether deleting files in Box was necessary (it wasn’t) and accessibility. She also sent out email reminders about the approaching deadline and directed community members to IT when necessary.

As the amount of space on campus is finite, the College contracts with Iron Mountain to keep a number of documents stored off-site. When a department decides that some College records should be stored off-site, Rice shares procedures and provides guidance to the department members so they can organize their files for storage to fit their needs. Iron Mountain also assists in the destruction of confidential physical and digital files. When a faculty or staff member is working on a big project, such as moving offices, they can contact Rice to order special destruction bins from Iron Mountain. 

Another responsibility of Rice’s is the creation and execution of records management training videos. Many staff may have taken the mini-Canvas course “Introduction to Records Management.” She also conducts an annual training for the DROs to inform them of any policy updates. Other training topics that she has covered include: office moves, AV materials, off-site storage, and record retention. These trainings are available upon request.

Rice manages a student worker as well, who helps with a variety of records management projects, including updating contact lists and sorting through paper and audiovisual files to determine whether they should be retained or destroyed. 

Besides working with individual community members, Rice collaborates with several offices across campus. She naturally works closely with her Archives colleagues, contacting them when staff or faculty are looking to get rid of files that might be of historical significance. She also works with General Counsel on creating and updating retention schedules. For any type of financial documents that come her way, she consults with the Finance Office. She also consults with the digital archivist in Archives and Special Collections and IT when she has questions about particular digital records.

Rice has been at Emerson since 2021. She said her favorite thing about working at Emerson is her colleagues. “I’ve learned so many different things from so many different people,” she said. She also appreciates that she is encouraged to engage in professional development and stay up to date on the latest records management processes and policies.

Prior to her arrival at Emerson, Rice worked at Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) in a program that helped qualified individuals file their tax returns for free. She also worked as a data manager at the University of Wisconsin Press. 

She currently lives in Somerville, MA, and is a native of Minnesota. She received an MLS from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a BA in film studies from Oberlin College. She noted that because of her upbringing and graduate school experience, she arrived here fully prepared for the New England winters.

One of her favorite hobbies is reading, especially plays. She also enjoys memoir and nonfiction graphic novels, sci-fi, horror, and crime. Movie watching is another favorite pastime. She tends to watch older movies, such as Sunset Boulevard and Bride of Frankenstein.

Rice frequently dabbles in arts and crafts; she does needlepoint and is currently teaching herself how to draw. She also finds a lot of joy in trying novelty foods. She wistfully reminisced about the everything-bagel ice cream that she tried from Jeni’s. She’s hoping that the company brings back the flavor someday.

Nancy Howell (Communications and Marketing)