And Now, I Present: SCA AGM as a Panelist

Guest author: Emily Lapworth
Digital Special Collections Librarian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and SNAP Roundtable Steering Committee Member

The Society of California Archivists Annual General Meeting (#SCA16) was held in Santa Rosa, California from April 7 to 9, 2016. I attended on Friday, April 8th.

Dr. Michelle Jolly, a history professor from Sonoma State University, gave the plenary address on Friday morning. Dr. Jolly discussed her own recent experiences with primary sources and her struggle getting her students to use and understand them. Part of the problem is standardized testing- teachers are teaching to ensure that students are prepared to pass these exams, but at the cost of cutting out other kinds of learning and the development of creative and critical thinking skills. Faced with an ambiguous assignment and resources, and no one right answer, today’s undergraduate and even masters students feel overwhelmed and anxious, sometimes flat out refusing to participate.

Therefore it is important that teachers, professors, and archivists collaborate to share skills and experience in order to teach students the skills they need to use primary sources. Dr. Jolly discussed workshops she participated in with K-12 teachers and ideas for activities and assignments that introduce students to primary sources effectively. Members of the audience shared similar programs other universities are implementing to overcome this challenge, and Dr. Jolly asked that the lines of communication are improved between the different professions and universities so that we may build on each others’ successes.

The First Conference: SCA AGM as a First Time Attendee

Guest author: Mary Priest
MLIS student at the University of California at Los Angeles and 2016 James V. Mink Scholarship Winner

I glanced down at my packing list one final time before pulling the door closed behind me. “Chargers, tooth brush, business cards, baby Yoda plushy (my travel buddy)…YEP!” I dashed to my car in the early morning light and eagerly began my road trip to Santa Rosa, California for my very first conference: The Society of California Archivists’ Annual General Meeting (SCA AGM).

I was introduced to SCA at the USC Archives Baazar in my first year of my MLIS program and by my second year, I became the Programs Chair for their first student chapter at UCLA. Because SCA board members were so supportive of our student group, I knew that their conference would likely be just as welcoming. The AGM was also alluring because it seemed a little more intimate than some of the nation-wide conferences and it was more affordable for this thrifty grad school student. When looking for more information about the conference on their website, I found details about James V. Mink Scholarship which would help support a student’s attendance at the meeting and a pre-conference workshop, so I applied. A couple months before the meeting, I received an email stating that I was selected as the 2016 Mink scholarship recipient. I squealed gleefully, shared the news with my grandma, danced around my room, and then registered for the conference.

New England Archivists (NEA) Spring Meeting 2016

Guest author: Kristen Weischedel
MSLIS and MA Dual Degree Student at Simmons College School of Library and Information Science

New England Archivists hosted their annual spring meeting in Portland, Maine from March 31-April 2. This year’s theme was “Uncharted Waters,” examined through a multidisciplinary lens. (You can find more discussion on twitter with #neasp16, each session marked with #sSessionNumber, for example 1.2 is #s102)

The pre-conference options on March 31 included a Day of Service at Maine Historical Society, or one of three workshops, emphasizing different approaches the preservation, description, engagement with different types of records (oral histories, paper records, and electronic records). More about each of these workshops can be found here.

The conference kicked off with a plenary talk by graffiti artist, Caleb Neelon, who talked about the evolution of graffiti in American culture and how he incorporates historical artifacts into his graffitti. Although not an archivist by training, Neelon spoke on how he resonated with the work of archivists and how his graffiti was his way of preserving moments.

Hack Library School – 3 Lessons From My First Library Conference

Having just come back from my seventh conference in the GLAM field – one where I presented on a panel for the first time! – I tend to forget how intimidated I was at that first conference because now I know a lot of the attendees, whereas back then, I did not. There are a lot of first time conference attendees heading off to regional conferences in the next couple of months, and Atlanta will welcome many first timers to SAA/COPA in August. When I read Lauren Hester’s post on the Hack Library School blog earlier this week, I knew I wanted to give it a boost over here. Lauren has three really great tips for us to consider when attending that first conference. And you never know, old hats, we may end up needing to attend a conference in a different field – and you can bet I would be intimidated about that!

SNCA 2016

Guest author: Valerie Szwaya
MSLS Student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The Society for North Carolina Archivists and the South Carolina Archival Association held their annual conference jointly at the Mint Museum Uptown in Charlotte, North Carolina from March 30-April 1, 2016. This years theme was “Advocacy and Engagement: Demonstrating the Value of Archives.” Participants discussed collaboration, community engagement, advocating for the profession, and education about archival collections.

Wednesday, March 30 consisted of three pre-conference workshops held at the Mercy Heritage Center. Their descriptions can be found here.

Thursday, March 31 began with a keynote address from Dr. Seth Kotch, Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of American Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, on the subject of digital sharing entitled “The Collector, the Community, the Reel, and the Real.” He discussed his participation in the Media and the Movement Project, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, that looks at the role of journalists and media throughout the Civil Rights Movement. Despite not being an archivist himself, he recognizes the function of the archivist as being essential to his efforts.

SAA 2015: Session 505, Regional Advocacy, National Impact

In advance of the 2015 Annual Meeting, we invited SNAP members to contribute summaries of panels, roundtable and section meetings, forums, and pop-up sessions. Summaries represent the opinions of their individual authors; they are not necessarily endorsed by SNAP, members of the SNAP Steering Committee, or SAA.

Session 505 had a large panel compared to other sessions, wherein the archivists discussed how their individual repositories or the state and/or regional associations successfully advocated on behalf of archives and archivists. As panel moderator Rachel Chatalbash, Archivist for the Yale Center for British Art and Co-Chair of the Regional Archival Associations Consortium (RAAC), pointed out, much of the advocacy in our profession is done at the local level, yet unless the issue is big enough to enter the national consciousness, the work is often unnoticed and unacknowledged by SAA. She also said it only took one person invested in an issue to sustain the issue, and she has found that if she kept at it, eventually others joined her cause.

Society of Georgia Archivists (SGA) 2015 Conference Recap

Guest author: Cathy Miller
MAS Student at Clayton State University

The 2015 Society of Georgia Archivists (SGA) annual meeting was held October 22-23 in beautiful downtown Columbus, Georgia at the Columbus Marriott, which was constructed around a restored cotton mill first built in the mid-nineteenth century. The photo you see, courtesy of SGA member Angelique Richardson, is of the hotel lobby, where the brickwork can be seen to be part of the original mill. Related fun note: the Library of Congress has some photos of the mill from a Historic American Engineering Record survey done around 1968.

REPS-NEA Day of Service 2015

Guest author: Rose Oliveira
MLIS student at Simmons College and Student Liaison for REPS-NEA

On October 17, 2015, the New England Archivists’ (NEA) Roundtable for Early Professionals and Students (REPS) organized our second annual Back to School Day of Service.  Over 35 archivists and students volunteered in repositories in Vermont and Central and Eastern Massachusetts. NEA and REPS began hosting its fall service day in 2014 as an opportunity for new students and archivists at all stages of their career to meet and donate their professional expertise to local institutions. The Day of Service would not be possible without the sites who have welcomed us into their archives and NEA and REPS members giving their time to volunteer and coordinate. We thank everyone who has been involved in the past two years and express our deep gratitude for their participation.

2015 Day of Service

In choosing the locations for the Day of Service, we try to select a broad range of institutions across New England that would benefit from the additional help. Over the past two years we had sites in Central and Eastern Massachusetts, Vermont and Connecticut. This year we had four repositories participate. In the Boston area, there was the History Project and the USS Constitution Museum’s Samuel Eliot Morison Memorial Library. The History Project is a volunteer-run community archive focused exclusively on preserving the history of Boston’s LGBT community. Volunteers worked on the Boston Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Youth (BAGLY) records, weeding and creating box and folder lists. The USS Constitution is a private, non-profit museum with a small staff. Within the museum, the library holds a strong collection of primary documents and secondary works, which are of particular interest to historians, educators and ship modelers. Volunteers helped with a backlog project by processing several boxes of museum records. In Worcester, Massachusetts, volunteers had the opportunity to work with the Worcester Refugee Archive at Clark University’s Kasperson Research Library. This repository collects the materials, knowledge, research and resources related to Worcester’s refugee and forced migrant communities and offers resources for researchers, students and community members to learn about and preserve the rich experiences of both newly arrived and well-established populations from refugee backgrounds. Volunteers helped by entering item level descriptions in their WordPress “catablog” and researching orphan works. Finally, in Hardwick, Vermont, volunteers traveled up to the Hardwick Historical Society, a small, all-volunteer run collecting repository dedicated to preserving the history of Hardwick. Volunteers worked on a variety of projects for the historical society and were treated to a lecture by noted historian Charlie Morrissey on oral history.  

Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC) – Fall 2015 Meeting Recap

Guest author: Christy Fic
Archivist & Special Collections Librarian, Shippensburg University and SNAP Roundtable Steering Committee Member

The Fall 2015 meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC) was held at the Hotel Roanoke & Conference Center in beautiful Roanoke, VA from Thursday October 8^th – Saturday October 10th. We might have been an hour away from Blacksburg, but we were definitely in Virginia Tech country. Exhibit A (the only photo I took during the conference): this sparkly Hokie bird statue outside of the Hotel Roanoke.

The theme of this fall’s conference was “Moving Mountains: Ingenuity and Innovation in Archives.” The plenary speech by Ed Summers of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) was an inspiring start to the conference. Summers’ presentation on web archiving described the power of archives to preserve evidence of social justice movements that spread via social media. He focused on archivists’ efforts to collect tweets and websites in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Summers’ presentation slides can be found here. The slides provide an overview of how the content was collected, what type of metadata was gathered, and links to access the collections at MITH. Summers shared a powerful tweet from Bergis Jules, University and Political Papers Archivist at University of California Riverside, which I felt perfectly captured the magnitude and importance of these projects:

Disaster Response Resources in Wake of the South Carolina Flooding

Back in May, I decided to participate in the South Carolina Archival Association (SCAA)’s spring workshop, which was being held in partnership with the Palmetto Archives, Libraries, and Museums Council on Preservation (PALMCOP). The topic: disaster preparedness.

Ann Frellsen came from Emory University to present on the basics of preparing to face disasters, and she had us do a hands-on activity that simulated a tornado followed by rain. That day was fun, and I learned a lot. I met so many great folks from all over South Carolina.

This week, I worry for them.

South Carolina has seen historic flooding. The damage from so much rain in such a short period is both impressive and heartbreaking. There are a number of organizations that have volunteers assisting on the ground and are providing basic supplies to evacuees. As someone who grew up close to the most heavily affected areas, I’m thankful for that assistance and for those lovely people willing to help. I’m grateful that President Obama has already declared the state a disaster area, so that federal aid can be sent quickly.

However, as the rivers finally crest, as the television cameras turn away, that’s when our fellow archivists are going to need help. Shortly after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, SAA set up the National Disaster Recovery Fund for Archives, now administered by the SAA Foundation. These grants of up to $2,000 can be awarded to any archive needing to recover damaged or at-risk material.

There are several options available to assist archivists as they deal with damaged materials. Locally, PALMCOP has a disaster kit that it loans to institutions. SAA’s Regional Archival Associations Consortium (RAAC) has compiled a list of disaster response resources. The American Library Association (ALA) and the Council of State Archivists (COSA) also have lists available. Finally, the American Institute for Conservation (AIC) has a group of 107 trained volunteers that can be deployed to disaster areas to assist with collections recovery efforts. If an institution is in need of on-the-ground assistance, they can be contacted here.

For the rest of us, this is a reminder of why disaster preparedness is so important. It’s not everyone’s idea of fun, getting ready for the worst case scenarios, but it ensures the continuity of our collections. As archivists, that’s something we value.

How You Can Help:
SAA Foundation
AIC-CERT
Red Cross
United Way
Salvation Army

Reminder: Submissions Due Soon for SNAP Edition of Provenance Journal

As the semester winds down and finals come due, please consider submitting an article or review to Provenance’s SNAP special issue! This is a great opportunity to spruce up one of your final papers and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. Submissions are due January 31, 2015. See the call for papers below for more information, and feel free to contact the guest editors (me and Roxanne Dunn) or Cheryl Oestreicher if you have any questions.

Best,
Caitlin Wells
SNAP RT chair, 2014-2015

Attention SNAP members attending MAC

Any SNAP members attending the Midwest Archives Conference annual meeting in Kansas City this week?

Then plan to join us for a happy hour! (er, SNAPpy hour, if you will).

The SNAP Roundtable would like to invite current students, new professionals, and any friends of SNAP to a happy hour at the Westin Hotel’s Brasserie Bar Lounge this Thursday (4/24) at 5:00pm. We will mingle for a bit and then head to the opening reception together. Hope to see you there!

Questions? Contact Lisa Huntsha.

Tales of a First-Timer: The NEA Fall Meeting 2012

Caitlin Birch is a second-year graduate student at Simmons College pursuing an MSLIS with a concentration in Archives Management and an MA in History. She occasionally tweets at @preserCAITion.

When I first volunteered to write a review of the New England Archivists Fall Meeting (held Nov. 2-3 at Simmons College in Boston), I had every intention of summing up the four sessions I attended, communicating what I learned from fellow conference goers about the sessions I couldn’t attend, and perhaps recreating the morning coffee spread (in the caffeine department, NEA delivered!). While all of those — OK, two of those — would be valuable uses of this blog space, it occurred to me during my brainstorming that I might have something better to offer.

This year’s NEA Fall Meeting was my first professional conference. Many of you have attended conferences before — I imagine some of you have attended quite a few — but I know there are those of you out there who, like me just a month ago, are still waiting to take the plunge and enter the conference world. SNAP, by its very nature, is a great place for us to share a whole host of professional firsts, and I’m happy to share this first in my career — what I gained, how I’m applying it, and why I’d recommend the experience to SNAPpers everywhere — with all of you.

First: If you’re anything like me, you might be envisioning your first conference with cautious excitement, half-enthused by the knowledge, networking and free food that awaits, half-convinced your shaky first step into the professional conference arena will send you sprawling. I can gladly report that my very first session at NEA was far from terrifying. It was, conveniently enough, “How to Talk to Strangers,” featuring Karen Adler Abramson, Beth Carroll-Horrocks and Laina Lomina, and we not only learned how to talk to strangers, we did a fair share of stranger talking before session’s end. A good chunk of the session was dedicated to discussion amongst the audience, with beginning professionals positing questions about networking strategies, and more seasoned archivists sharing their experiences and advice. It was such a welcoming, productive atmosphere, and I learned right away that conferences are not nearly as intimidating as I had imagined.

Second: Participation is everything at conferences. Especially as a first-time attendee, the temptation to sit back, soak it all in, and will yourself into invisibility is definitely present, but it really is true that the more you put into the conference, the more you will get out of it. For me, this meant that I needed to find a way to engage with the sessions and the community as a whole, and I accomplished that with my good friend, social media. I live-tweeted all four sessions I attended, and by the end of the day, my humble 140-character insights had reached a wider audience through retweets (some from SNAP!), I had conversed and forged professional bonds with fellow archivists (both within and outside the conference), and I had preserved the most important bits of my newly acquired knowledge in a series of easily accessible notes, without ever putting pen to paper. Live-tweeting, of course, isn’t the only way to go, but I would encourage all first-time conference attendees to dive in and get involved in the manner best suited to you.

Third, and finally: I found it very worthwhile to reflect on what I’d like to do differently in the days after the conference. It’s pretty easy to criticize yourself for the things you didn’t do — I should have struck up more conversations with unfamiliar faces, I should have asked better questions in sessions, I should have remembered that lunch was provided before I purchased an overpriced panini — but it’s a lot harder to give yourself credit for the things you did do and morph any regrets into goals for your next conference. And that’s the key here: you’re more than likely going to have a next conference! I am already looking forward to the NEA Spring Meeting (March 21-23, 2013 at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.) and thinking about how I can do more, give more and get more from a conference now that I have my first one behind me. Take time for reflection after Conference Number One, and realize that this is the beginning of a very exciting part of your professional development. For me, the NEA Fall Meeting was a great induction into the conference world, and I look forward to meeting many of you SNAPpers at conferences on the horizon.

NEA Fall 2012 Session Review: “Things They Didn’t Teach Me in Library School”

Abigail Cramer has kindly offered to review a session from the New England Archivists annual Fall Meeting for those of us unable to attend. Cramer received her MLIS with a concentration in Archives Management from Simmons College in May 2012. Since that time, she has been working as an Archives Assistant at Northeastern University’s Archives and Special Collections, as a Project Archivist at the Old South Church in Boston, and as an intern at the State Library of Massachusetts Special Collections.

On November 2-3 at Simmons College in Boston, New England Archivists held its annual Fall Meeting. The meeting, themed “Proactive Archivists: Moving Our Profession Forward,” included a session titled “Things They Didn’t Teach Me in Library School.” The session was moderated by Jessica Steytler (Archivist, Congregational Library, Boston, MA) and featured speakers Janaya Kizzie (Archivist, RBS Citizens Financial Group, Stamford, CT), Marta Crilly (Assistant Archivists, City of Boston Archives), and Sam Smallidge (Archivist, Converse, Amherst, MA). Each panelist gave an overview of the unique skills he or she has had to develop since graduating, and audience members were given a glimpse into some less-traditional positions in the archival field.

Janaya Kizzie spoke about her experiences working for RBS Citizens Financial Group. Kizzie was tasked with making over 60 site visits to subsidiary banks in which records were being stored, often in neglectful environments, in order to survey the records and make plans for transferring them to the Group’s headquarters. Kizzie’s first recommendation for making successful site visits was to create a toolkit equipped with supplies to facilitate planning, surveying records, ensuring your own safety, and processing materials on the fly. Kizzie also suggested finding ways to overcome “basement fear,” including bringing something comforting (such as the toolkit itself) or recruiting a partner to accompany you on your first trip into a new space. Kizzie recommended that archivists making site visits be prepared to “be MacGyver,” and cited her need to find inventive solutions on short notice (such as using her camera phone to take pictures in areas she couldn’t otherwise enter or see into). Kizzie’s final recommendation was to create and practice an “elevator pitch” to give to the many stakeholders one meets during site visits to educate them about the importance of the work being done and the value of that work to that stakeholder.

Marta Crilly spoke about her need to learn to effectively use social media as a method to increase the visibility of the City of Boston Archives and improve on the Archives’ outreach efforts. The tools Crilly used to facilitate outreach included Omeka and Flickr for creating web exhibits, Twitter and Facebook for publicizing events and exhibits, and Tumbler for publicizing interesting and engaging materials from the Archives’ collections. Crilly asserted that the biggest obstacle to a successful social media outreach plan is finding the time to manage it; her solution was to create a robust and long-term schedule, which included scheduling tweets and blog posts up to one year in advance. Crilly recommended that social media projects be designed to be cross-platform rather than platform-specific to increase efficiency and visibility. Crilly also indicated that not all social media outreach needs to be about the home institution; Crilly retweets and links to projects being conducted at other area repositories, acknowledging that her audience will be interested in these projects and that doing so encourages those repositories to do the same, increasing the visibility of both institutions. Crilly also recommends exploring other repositories’ uses of social media to find ideas that can be tailored to suit your own institution’s needs.

Sam Smallidge discussed his unique position as Archivist for Converse, a role for which he could hardly have been thoroughly prepared by his education. How are you supposed to archive shoes? How do you handle a collection that has been damaged, mishandled, pilfered from, and which has never had any level of consistent intellectual or physical control? Smallidge found that some of his greatest allies were current and former Converse employees, many of whom knew institutional history for which there was little or no documentation. These employees also donated materials to the archive, many of which probably had previously been part of the collection; in these cases, the employees who donated them were able to provide information about the items’ provenance which would otherwise have been lost. Smallidge also worked to rebuild the collection by examining old catalogs to identify missing items which he then searched for on EBay. He found that searching for “vintage” or “rare” or “old” Converse often yielded good results, but knowing the company’s history helped him create more targeted searches, such as searching for the company’s original name, “Converse Rubber Company.” In dealing with EBay sellers, Smallidge discovered that he could often learn a great deal about provenance from them, too, as long as he made sure to ask for it. Smallidge has also had to find ways to make the archive relevant to the employees and customers, and he does so by making use of Converse’s Facebook page, which has over 35 million followers, and by educating Converse employees about the value of the company’s history as a tool for identifying forward directions.

As a recent graduate and new professional, I found this session interesting for the unique perspective the panelists had about their work and the archival field in general. Although each of them was prepared enough to be hired for these positions, they each also had to learn a lot on the job. I think it’s important for SNAPpers to keep in mind that very few people possess all of the skills they’ll need for their careers when they finish graduate school. Ideally, we should each be able to learn from our jobs and develop unique skills. Not only will this make our work more interesting, it will also give us an edge as we move forward with our careers. In many cases, it’s our early professional positions that allow us to develop into the unique, talented professionals we hope to someday become.