Rikki Chesley

I started my career while going to grad school, working at a newspaper and television station doing newspaper archiving and news research. I was at the Tampa Tribune, which no longer exists, and I was really collecting and preserving the 100-year history of that newspaper. That is what I wanted to focus on after grad school - collecting and working on collecting the history. After grad school, I took a job as a corporate librarian and archivist at a publishing company. Around 2006, the fallout of Enron and Arthur Anderson was trickling down into all industries, and lawyers in corporations were starting to say there is a thing called records management. I was working for a general counsel at a publishing company in San Antonio, and he came to me and said he needed me to also be a records manager. I did some research and found out that the best certification I could get was through the Institute of Certified Records Managers to become a CRM, and I got on that path and became a certified records manager. That is what I have done ever since. I went from that publishing company to Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, then to the Atlanta Housing Authority, and I have been all over. I have done this in government, private industry, and quasi-government. I have gone around helping companies clean up their records act. Now I am at Buckeye Partners, which is an oil and gas pipeline company, pipeline and terminal company, and we are working on getting our records act together here. I love the puzzle of it, the compliance aspect of it. There were very bad people doing very bad things, and people like me had to come along to help protect companies and help protect people to make sure that we keep the right things for the right amount of time. I like finding the mess, cleaning up the mess, and putting the puzzle pieces together.