Austin Schulz, a native of The Dalles, works as an archivist at the Idaho National Laboratory. He worked for the Oregon State Archives in Salem for a decade before transferring to his new position.
Bobby Joe Nelson operating the manipulator arms at the Experimental Breeder Reactor I hot cell, circa 1960. This photograph was donated to the INL Archives by his daughter Suzann Henrikson.
Photo courtesy Idaho National Laboratory, Archives and Special Collections
The Loss-of-fluid Test (LOFT) Research Program was designed to use the LOFT experimental nuclear test facility at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL), in a series of safety experiments between 1978-1985. This challenge coin was created to celebrate employee contributions to these safety experiments.
Photo courtesy Idaho National Laboratory, Archives and Special Collections
Technopoly board game which was created to celebrate 50 years of innovation at Idaho National Laboratory. At that time, the Laboratory was called INEEL or Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (now INL; formerly INEL).
Photo courtesy Idaho National Laboratory, Archives and Special Collections
Austin Schulz, a native of The Dalles, works as an archivist at the Idaho National Laboratory. He worked for the Oregon State Archives in Salem for a decade before transferring to his new position.
IDAHO FALLS — Austin Schulz thought he was going to be a surgeon. But a history class at Western Oregon University in Monmouth changed his path.
“I started out premed,” Schulz said. “I was going to be a brain surgeon. That was my goal, inspired by my friend, Andrew Rawson, a standout athlete, who died of brain cancer before graduation. One of the baseball fields is named in his honor.”
Schulz was a valedictorian when he graduated in 2000 from Wahtonka High School and was invited to attend a youth leadership forum on medicine with other students from around the country. That’s when he decided to become a surgeon.
“I fully intended to pursue a career in medicine until I got to that history class and I was like, hold on a second, this feels like a natural fit for me. I found that I really enjoyed learning about the past and interpreting it and bringing it forward,” he said.
The Schulz family: Austin, wife JoEllen and their children, Geneviéve and Hudson, and dog, Nalla.
Photo courtesy Austin Schulz
When one of his history professors suggested an internship at the Oregon State Archives in nearby Salem, his new path became clear.
“I found out I was really good at it,” he said. “I kind of had a knack for archives, and archives really pairs well with history.”
That internship eventually led to a paid position. That’s where he worked while studying for his master’s in history, again at Western, and then passed the Certified Archivist Exam — 100 questions pertaining to different facets of archives.
“Most people don’t realize this, but every large corporation has an archivist. Nike has an archivist,” Schulz said. “Archivists and record managers are crucially important to a functional government and businesses.”
He worked at the state archives for 10 years before moving to his current position with Idaho National Laboratory in 2019. He’s the lab’s first certified archivist, charged with setting up its entire archive program and special collections. He’s contracted through Battelle Energy Alliance, which runs the lab for the Department of Energy.
Bobby Joe Nelson operating the manipulator arms at the Experimental Breeder Reactor I hot cell, circa 1960. This photograph was donated to the INL Archives by his daughter Suzann Henrikson.
Photo courtesy Idaho National Laboratory, Archives and Special Collections
According to Schulz, many real-world discoveries have been made at INL, which began in the late 1940s.
“A lot of cool history came out of INL and continues to do so,” Schulz said. “Before I got here, I had no clue about the Idaho National Laboratory, but it’s had some significant impacts for our country. Being immersed in that history here is just really incredible.”
The Experimental Breeder Reactor I is where the first power was generated using nuclear energy, he said. The lightbulb that was powered can still be seen at the EBR-I museum today. INL also developed the engine for the Mars Rover.
His work with Oregon State Archives gave him experience in digitation — a process that makes digital reproductions of records — as well as processing records and preservation.
“While I worked at the state archives in Oregon, I found the original plot plan for Astoria, Ore., and it was on a piece of wallpaper that had been included in the circuit court case file,” he said. “At the time, they didn’t make photocopies, so they would take that original and put it in a case file and they would give that to the court without realizing that original needed to make its way back to where it was.
The Loss-of-fluid Test (LOFT) Research Program was designed to use the LOFT experimental nuclear test facility at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL), in a series of safety experiments between 1978-1985. This challenge coin was created to celebrate employee contributions to these safety experiments.
Photo courtesy Idaho National Laboratory, Archives and Special Collections
“And it’s the same type of thing here,” Schulz said. “Sometimes you’ll find items in an area where it doesn’t make sense that they would be, and if you understand the way records work, you can kind of follow that trail, and be like, ‘Okay, I see what happened here.’ So solving those problems is something I really enjoy.”
He also enjoys finding ways to unlock information stored in defunct technologies, and still uses a process he developed while working for Oregon State. INL has an original model of an engineering test reactor (ETR) that was at the site in the 1950s and ‘60s. The model included photographs of various dignitaries by the ETR — as well as audio that was no longer accessible.
“I was able to take that original player that we had here, and I looked through the patent records to kind of reverse engineer it to figure out how it worked, and to find a weakness so I could get into the system, pull that audio off and make a digital copy,” he said. “And now we have the original audio recording to go along with the model that’s no longer trapped on defunct technology.”
Technopoly board game which was created to celebrate 50 years of innovation at Idaho National Laboratory. At that time, the Laboratory was called INEEL or Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (now INL; formerly INEL).
Photo courtesy Idaho National Laboratory, Archives and Special Collections
One of his goals has always been to get younger people involved and interested in history — and archives in particular. Schulz has mentored interns at Oregon State Archives and Idaho National Laboratory, and taught archival science at WOU. He plans to have a booth at a local school district career fair in April.
“If someone says, ‘Hey I’m a librarian,’ every little kid knows what a librarian does,” he said, noting that when he tells people he’s an archivist, he gets blank looks. “But a lot of those books that are based on true events, the materials that folks got to write those, they had to go to an archives to get that information. We’re the first stop for writing all those historically accurate books that you would find in a library, so it’s unfortunate that more people don’t know about archives.”
Mentoring, he said, is fulfilling. Especially when those interns become archivists as well. “I enjoy that, I think, more than anything else — being able to share knowledge of archives and make it fun and exciting for other people. That makes the most impact for me.”
“Most people don’t realize this, but every large corporation has an archivist. Nike has an archivist,” said Schulz.
Photo courtesy Austin Schulz
Though he no longer lives in the Gorge, Schulz visits regularly — and appreciates its history.
“It was cool growing up around so much history that later in my life I found out about,” he said. “Like, there were some areas where we would go and play around rocks down by the Columbia and then you find out later that could be the place where Lewis and Clark set up camp.”
Because he understands how technology can impact future archives, he thinks about how records are created now — and the effect they could have on future generations of historians.
“It’s important to help people realize that everything you’re doing, you’re making records all day long,” he said. “All those emails you send — whether or not they’re permanent or permanently important to you, they’re still records of your life, of your existence.
“In the mid-1980s, Andy Warhol used the GraphiCraft digital painting program on a Commodore Amiga home computer to create some of his first digital color art as part of an ad campaign to support its launch,” he said. “Some 30 years later, around 2014, Carnegie Mellon University was able to recover information off the original floppy disks, and now via the Andy Warhol Museum, you can actually see Warhol’s digital drawings.
“It’s one of those things — what you’re doing now may not seem important, but down the road, it may have a different importance than what you intended. Which is where archives comes in. Because we look at not necessarily what the records were created for, but how they might be useful to us now.”
For more information about Idaho National Laboratory and its EBR-I museum, visit inl.gov.
Before he was an archivist, Austin Schulz was a paperboy for The Dalles Chronicle, starting at age 6.
Photo courtesy Austin Schulz
Early (early) employment
Schulz began working at age 6, delivering The Dalles Chronicle. In the winters, he’d load papers onto his sled; in the summers, he used a wagon.
“You can’t do that now, but back in the ‘80s, you could,” he joked.
He said it came about when he realized that, if he had a job, he could buy whatever he wanted to. His mother went to the newspaper office with him and was told that as long as he had parental okay, he could sign up.
“That was a fun thing. I would imagine I’m probably the youngest employee the Chronicle had,” he said.
He saved about $10,000, he said, some of which went towards college and a trip to Germany. “It was a good way to think about how to save money, and also work for what I want,” he said.
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