Professional Poster Descriptions

P01 - Conducting Collection Surveys in the Archives
Alexis Peregoy, Center for Creative Photography

The Center for Creative Photography has been conducting surveys on the processed collections in the archives to increase access and use and enhance long-term preservation. Project goals include identifying conservation/ preservation concerns, under-processed collections, and finding aid inaccuracies. The top priority has been identification of film-based supports and vulnerable materials. Through an in-depth look at the collections, this project allows archivists to identify and prioritize work based on the report ratings and recommendations.

P02 - Back to the Future: Digitizing Orphaned VHS Collections at the University of Cincinnati
Gina K. Armstrong, Birmingham-Southern College

Described is a pilot project undertaken at the University of Cincinnati DAAP Library in spring 2015 to preserve and update access to a collection of VHS tapes unavailable in another format. The nature of the material revealed thorny notions of artistic intent and whether format transcoding interferes with original artists' intent. The poster presentation details the history, technical formatting decisions and details, copyright permissions work, and proof of concept for streaming access achieved with the project.

P03 - The Oregon State University Sesquicentennial Oral History Project
Chris Petersen, Oregon State University Libraries

OSU is celebrating its 150th anniversary by commissioning and presenting online the largest oral history project that has ever been conducted by the university. This poster presentation provides an overview of the project--which captured more than 330 hours of content with more than 200 subjects--and specifies the unique METS and XSL-based platform that was created by the OSU Libraries to present this large volume of video along with full transcripts in html and pdf.

P04 - Museum, Meet Your Archivist: Allied Professionals and the Need for Advocacy
Sara Seltzer, J. Paul Getty Trust

The J. Paul Getty Museum opened its permanent installation on the life and legacy of its founder in 2016, a presentation unique in its showcasing of institutional archival materials. Archivist Sara Seltzer shares how her participation in this project created new opportunities while also demonstrating the need for advocacy regarding the role of archivists (and archives) among allied professionals. Learn how misconceptions were optimized to bring awareness and form partnerships at the Getty.

P05 - Digitization Requests for Internal Staff
Tess Colwell, Brooklyn Historical Society

Brooklyn Historical Society's Digital Asset Associate displays how she streamlined the digitization process for internal staff requests. She created an internal staff workflow that includes an instructional sheet, Google form, and spreadsheet to streamline the process for everyone involved. This workflow could benefit any cultural heritage institution trying to manage significant digitization requests from internal staff.

P06 - But Is It Archival? How We Determine Research Value
Kathryn J. Hujda, University of Minnesota Archives and Special Collections

Is it possible to create an exhaustive list of document types with research value? Can one determine if an object is archival in five questions or less? Using flowcharts, diagrams, and lists, this poster presentation explores tools for assessing potential research and for guiding collection donors who wish to actively shape their archives.

P07 - The More the Merrier: Mentoring Undergrad Interns in the Archive
Adriana Flores, Boston University
Sarah Pratt, Boston University

Are you trying to encourage undergrads to use your collections? Want to foster a better understanding of what archivists do? By partnering with Boston University's College of Arts and Sciences, the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center was able to accomplish these objectives and more by participating in an undergraduate internship program. Come see our poster presentation to learn about how we broadened the community we reach through this successful campus partnership.

P08 - You Are History: Encouraging Donations and Feedback from Students to the University Archives
Sara DeCaro, Baker University

In an effort to increase donations of materials that reflect the diversity and richness of student life, the Baker University Archives sought feedback from students to determine their understanding of the archive's purpose and their likelihood of donating. Student clubs and organizations are an excellent source for such materials, so a survey was distributed to the student leaders of these organizations. This poster presents and examines their responses.

P09 - Same Job, Different Commute: The Remote-Access Archivist
Jeni Spamer, Virginia Mason Health System

I relocated to Baltimore, but kept my job in Seattle. Many archivists question "How does that work?!" upon hearing that I telecommute. My poster presentation demonstrates what is alike and what is different about working off- vs. on-site, sharing statistics, strategies, accomplishments, and challenges from this new perspective.

P10 - Bringing the Student Voice into the University Archives: A Student Organization Documentation Initiative Case Study
Jenifer Becker, Washington State University Vancouver

To increase representation of student voices in the University Archives, WSU Vancouver Archives and Special Collections implemented a student organization documentation initiative. Student groups were asked to engage in a brief archival instruction and donation discussion regarding their concerns with and interests in donating their materials. This poster presentation covers the implementation and outcomes of the discussions and the greater issue and importance in documenting the student voice, especially in times of volatile campus environments.

P11 - Student Voices: Preserving First-Generation Student Experiences at the University of Northern Colorado
Jane Monson, University of Northern Colorado
Emory J. Trask, University of Northern Colorado

At the University of Northern Colorado, librarians and archivists worked together to develop a program to capture oral history interviews created by first-generation students in the library's credit-bearing information literacy courses. The interviews are accessioned following archival standards and ingested into the university's digital repository. These resources provide invaluable insight into the experiences of our diverse student population, preserving these student voices for future researchers.

P12 - Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature
Patrick Randall, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University

Expanding Access to Biodiversity Literature (EABL) is an IMLS-funded grant that assists small natural history institutions in digitizing their unique biodiversity-related collections. The digitized material is made available through the open-source Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). This presentation explores the challenges of working with under-resourced organizations to digitize collections that often lack archival description?challenges that are compounded by copyright restrictions, training needs, and conservation concerns.

P13 - Archives in Japan: A Case Study from an "Outsider"
Jane Thaler, University of Pittsburgh

Archives in Japan run the traditional Western gamut of museums, university, and government types, but there are major differences in the access afforded by these archival institutions. Especially in government archives, there is a palpable separation between the accessibility afforded to "insiders" versus "outsiders," culturally speaking. This process evaluation will contribute to the growing body of knowledge around diverse materials/archives and the challenges/opportunities of working in this wonderfully multidimensional world of archival research.

P14 - Bridging the "Digital" Divide: Implementing a Distributed Digital Preservation Program at Georgetown University Library
Joe Carrano, Georgetown University Library

Most often digital preservation is the distinct job of librarians and archivists with "digital" in their title. Although digital preservation is centered in the IT department at Georgetown University Library, during our NDSR project staff distributed knowledge to different departments, recognizing the need for "digital" tasks to become less isolated and restricted to a few experts. This poster presentation discusses this theme, the implementation of Academic Preservation Trust, and the creation of a born-digital ingest program at GU.

P15 - Managing Subject Privacy in a Hybrid Collection: Implementing Tiered Access in the Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program Records
Celeste Brewer, Columbia University

The Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program Records include extensive educational records dating from 2001 to 2013. Educational fellowship programs are a major trend in international philanthropy, and the collection has high value to researchers. Rather than close the bulk of the collection, archivists at the Ford Foundation and Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library implemented a tiered access system to certain record types, with subjects' consent. This poster presentation describes that system and its implementation process.

P16 - North Dakota Pulitzer Prizes: Programming Supported by Archival Collections
Trista Raezer-Stursa, North Dakota State University Archives

The North Dakota State University Libraries and Archives partnered with the North Dakota Humanities Council (NDHC) to help celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize. A grant from the NDHC enabled the library to educate its community about excellence in journalism in North Dakota and highlight the NDSU Archives' collection from Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Cal Olson. Exhibit panels, a web app, and a panel discussion attended by 66 people proved successful.

P17 - Six Degrees of Separation: Implementing EAC-CPF to Explore Connections Between Physicists and Their Records
Sarah Cochrane, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives
Amanda Nelson, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives

The Niels Bohr Library and Archives has worked to connect our online union catalog with a biographical resource of more than 800 20th century physicists using the Encoded Archival Context - Corporate Bodies, People, and Families (EAC-CPF) XML standard. EAC-CPF gives researchers the ability to see relationships between and among people, their institutions, and the resources they've created or are subjects of. This poster presentation shows the digital workflows we created, how the online resource improved during the implementation, and how institutions could adapt our methods for themselves.

P18 - Keeping on Track: If You Miss the Train I'm On...
Elizabeth Parker, Cornell University - ILR School, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives

Marginalized and under-documented communities are often given short shrift in the historical record. Whether through conscious exclusion or through unintentional oversight, the contributions of these groups are minimized or missed, even when collections contain diverse primary source material. Using detailed description to bring forward contributions from these communities, the Kheel Center's project, "Keeping On Track: Processing and Digitizing Railroad Collections," demonstrates how providing greater access to records can provide greater inclusion in the historical record.

P19 - Roadblocks to Care: Veterans and the National Archives
Marci Bayer, National Archives and Records Administration

Past and future record-keeping practices of the U.S. Armed Services deeply impact the lives and medical care of veterans. This poster presentation explores ways in which veterans currently use archives and how the gap between the Department of Veterans Affairs standards of proof and government records schedules sometimes leads to inefficient veteran care.

P20 - Partnering to Preserve and Provide Access to Legacy PC Games
Heidi Elaine Kelly, Indiana University
Luke Menzies, Indiana University

In September 2016, the liaison librarian to the Indiana University Media School approached the Born Digital Preservation Lab with a new collection and a set of new challenges. The collection was a faculty member's legacy PC games, and the challenges were ensuring preservation while also providing long-term access for students to use these games. This poster presentation outlines the full process undertaken to create preservation packages and to install all games on four reading room computers.

P22 - Connecting to Users Outside the Archive: Archivists in the Classroom and Community
Alexandra Mills, Concordia University

The presenter examines the significance of moving primary sources out of the archive and into the classroom and community. A case study showcasing the undergraduate course "Telling Stories" at Concordia University is outlined. This course, centered on the Negro Community Centre fonds, provided students the unique opportunity to engage with the history of the Centre and its surrounding community through rich primary source documentation.

P23 - Connecting Archival Materials to Prison Inmates
Derek Potts, DePaul University

Through DePaul University Special Collections and Archives, prison inmates have access to copies of prisoner-made and prisoner-centric zines. Prison inmates are an often overlooked and marginalized community that archivists must consider in reference, outreach, and instruction. Potts shares his experience managing prisoner interactions at DePaul and provides a summary of his research on the topic with the hope that archivists will increase prisoner access to archival materials.

P24 - Su Voto es Su Voz: Documenting Democracy through the Records of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project
Leah S. Rios, University of Texas at San Antonio

Given the anti-immigrant and nativist rhetoric that surrounded the most recent presidential election, at a time when voting rights are being attacked and retracted all across the nation, and given their disproportionate effect on ethnic minority groups, the work of Willie Velásquez and the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project (SVREP) Collection is explored to highlight the impact that SVREP has had on Latin@ political engagement, advocacy, and policy making throughout the last four decades.

P25 - Archival Education and Changing Foundations in the 21st Century
Desiree Alaniz, Simmons College
Kathleen Carter, Simmons College

This poster presentation explores the content and structure of archival education in North America through an analysis of syllabi from introductory archives courses. Using qualitative content analysis, this project examines syllabi structure, content, assignments, and readings to better understand how students in archival studies programs are being prepared to work with increasingly diverse and decentralized communities of records and understand their roles as memory-workers in rapidly changing social and information environments.

P27 - TMI? Non-destructive Redacting Options for Archival Collections
Erin Hammeke, Duke University Libraries

Archival practices for redacting information can be wasteful, damaging, and/or time-consuming, and are especially poor solutions for certain collection materials. Duke University Library conservators have developed a pre-coated paper redacting patch that is non-destructive and reversible in the event that information no longer requires redacting. Technical services staff just need a tacking iron to apply the patches over sensitive information. Case studies of collections at Duke that warranted alternate redaction strategies are displayed.

P28 - Translating Pigments: The Ways in Which We Can Digitize Color in Archival Objects
Alyssa V. Loera, University of California, Los Angeles

Imaging requires a level of technical skill afforded to most professional photographers and color management is a particularly important aspect of this process. Accurately representing the true color of an archival object requires an understanding of color values, light, screen capacity, and the human eye.This poster presentation seeks to highlight how a digital object and a physical object differ in terms of color representation, and offers some solutions to bridging this gap.

P29 - Collaboration Among Small Archives: Going Beyond the Limits of Limitations
Robert Schimelpfenig, WSU Vancouver

Constraints on small archives to break into the digital medium are often due to a lack of staffing, financing, skills, and technology. These limitations result in the inaccessibility of valuable local history to local communities and national researchers. WSU Vancouver Library, Archives and Special Collections has learned the value of partnerships with other organizations to expand digital collections, innovate technology, provide inter-institutional training, and give students the experience of working in different archival environments.

P30 - Always Be Teaching: Reading Room Exhibits and Displays as Instructional Tools
Joshua Cobbs Youngblood, University of Arkansas Libraries

A university's special collections is often a featured stop on campus tours, whether for visiting dignitaries, prospective students, or guest lecturers. This poster presentation highlights successful planning that has allowed a special collections without dedicated classrooms or galleries to utilize limited exhibit spaces in the reading room for rotating and long-term exhibits that align with library-wide initiatives while also focusing student and visitor attention on curatorial strengths, cross-disciplinary opportunities, emerging research trends, and hidden collections.

P31 - Public Access to Reparation and Restitution Files in German State Archives
Katharina Hering, National Equal Justice Library and independent researcher

The presenter illustrates her research-in-progress (supported by the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure) on the history and role of German state archives as mediators in the process of making reparation and restitution case files accessible for public research. She focuses on the approaches of the Bavarian State Archives.

P32 - Moving Music: A Collaborative Project at the Library of Congress
Ashley Greek, Library of Congress
Jennifer Lewis, Library of Congress

This poster presentation addresses the move of the Library of Congress's Dayton C. Miller Collection, a large group of archival and research objects consisting of the acoustician's historic prints, photographs, correspondence, ephemera, and nearly 1700 flutes and other wind instruments dating from the 16th to-20th centuries. Come gather ideas for your move or collection storage plan. Tracking strategies, challenges, collaborations, novel housing designs, and realia that forms the backbone of a research collection are all considered.

P33 - Leveraging Opportunities: Small Steps Toward a Records Management Program
Asako Shiba, University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Do we really need to wait to establish a records management program until our institution loses big money on litigation or penalty? Not necessarily. There are opportunities we can leverage to start advocating for records management. The presenter shares one such case of the University of Hawaiʻi, a 10-campus public university system, discussing its ongoing effort, including challenges, accomplishments, and plans.