A MOUSE CLUBHOUSE EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
DAVE SMITH
talks about his job

by Scott Wolf

I met Dave Smith in 1988 on my first day working for The Walt Disney Company. He told all of us new employees about the Disney Archives, which essentially is the department that, through their own collection of materials, has the answers for anybody who needs to know about the Disney history.

As an employee, I visited the archives countless times often without any need to or reason to other than it was fun and I usually saw Dave piled in work at his desk.

Dave has a very casual demeanor, almost as if he doesn't realize the importance of his role in creating such an important entity of The Walt Disney Company, the Disney Archives.

While Dave probably is asked more questions than any other person I interview, and he is answering questions every work day, this time the questions aren't about Walt Disney or the history of the company, but about Dave, and it's a pleasure to share these interviews with you.

Scott Wolf: The company has grown so much over the years... obviously Disney owns Pixar now and ABC. When Disney acquires something, how do you decide what to keep?

Dave Smith: Well, we don’t go back and collect the pre-Disney history on any of our purchases. So ABC material we’re collecting now, but we didn’t go back and collect all the ABC history before Disney acquired ABC, and that’s true with everything we’ve acquired.

SW: As far as Disney goes, how do you decide out of Disney what to keep and what not to keep?

DS: Well, we’ve just decided within the last year to expand our collecting on costumes and props which we hadn’t collected a lot in the past. So we’ve got a new room for that and are hiring a new staff member and that will be a new outlet for archival work.

Most of what we’re keeping is informational material. People come to us primarily for information, not to see things. So we’re collecting from throughout the company, publications and reports, correspondence and all that sort of thing so that we’ll be able to tell in the future what was going on in 2007.

SW: So it’s most important to keep things that really give you an idea what’s happening.

DS: Correct, and we’ve learned throughout the years what sort of things people are going to ask us to see. So some things that we were collecting a lot of back in 1970 nobody’s ever asked to see and other things we didn’t think to collect when we started people were asking for. So we’ve had to adjust our policies depending on what our users need.

SW: As far as correspondence, do you try to keep the correspondence of say Michael Eisner or Ron Miller when they were there?

DS: Material comes to the archives when it is no longer needed in the areas that created the material. Now, when you come to executive files they are usually still in use even when the executive leaves so, no, Eisner’s files have not come to us yet though I would think that someday in the future they will.

SW: Would you keep email? Isn’t there a lot of email nowadays?

DS: Yes, and it’s very hard for any archives to know what to do with emails. The executive emails are being maintained on some sort of discs but that is not something that’s come to the archives.

SW: Do you ever get anything in the archives that’s very exciting to you?

DS: Well, it’s always fun to find something that fills in a gap in your knowledge of the past whether it’s an actual object or the recollections of someone that worked on the past.

SW: Do you have to worry about counterfeits, for example letters?

DS: Well, there are a lot of forgeries of Walt Disney’s signatures out there because his signature is so valuable today. So we see a number of them. I mean, it’s nothing that’s coming to us, nobody’s giving us Walt Disney’s signatures because they’re too valuable. So we really don’t have to deal with that.

SW: Part of your job is also updating the official encyclopedia, it’s called Disney A to Z, right?

DS: Correct.

SW: For those who don’t know, what is that encyclopedia?

DS: Well, I created the Disney A-Z Encyclopedia originally in 1996 just so that we could make available a lot of the facts and information in the archives to people outside the archives, especially people within the company so they could have a reference book at their own desks to look up information, but of course it’s very popular outside the company, too, because there are a lot of Disney fans out there and they like to have access to the facts about the Company.

So we did a revised edition in 1998 with the plan for a new one every two years, but that didn’t happen. And it took eight years before we had the third edition and it just came out in the fall, so it’s pretty up to date right now. But, we do update it monthly on the Disney website, disney.com, so the first of every month a totally new update is uploaded. I’m working on that everyday. Things cross my desk that give us new information on a release date of a film or the cast of a film or a park attraction is opening and so I’m just constantly updating that and then on the first that goes online.

SW: You really have to be on top of everything for that. Do you seek out the information or do people within the company deliver the information to you?

DS: It’s usually me seeking it out. A lot of it will just cross my desk on a regular basis because we’re on a lot of distribution lists so we get all the publicity releases on the films and so forth. Other times I might have to make a phone call or two to find out, for example, if a shop closed at Downtown Disney. I may hear that the shop closed but nobody told me what date it closed, and sometimes it’s a little difficult to track down especially with shops and restaurants. Attractions are news events usually and opening and closings of attractions get noticed and it’s fairly easy to find the date, but it’s not true for shops and restaurants.

SW: Do you have a typical day?

DS: No. (chuckles) And you know that’s what so fun about the job is no two days are the same and we don’t know when we come in in the morning what we’re going to be doing that day. We may have one or two things on our calendar but then it’s all the other things… the emails that we get. Some will be a question that we can answer right off the top of our heads, others we may have to go do ten or fifteen minutes of research or maybe more to find an answer, so it depends completely on what requests come to us and they could come by email, they could come by phone, they could come by a letter, it could come by someone walking in the door and asking for something.

More from Dave:
Starting the Archives
His favorite Disney memory and Roy O. Disney

See other interviews

NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in the interviews are solely those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views of Mouse Clubhouse. Mouse Clubhouse accepts no legal liability or responsibility for any claims made or opinions expressed within.