2016 Election Nominee Statements

For the coming 2016-2017 year, we are electing a Vice Chair/Chair-Elect, Secretary, Education Coordinator, Web Liaison, and Social Media Manager.  The Vice Chair position is a 2-year term, while the others are a 1-year term. The electronic ballot will be available in early July and will be publicized via the Web Archiving Roundtable email discussion list.

Vice Chair/Chair-Elect

Karl-Rainer Blumenthal

I am a web archivist for the Internet Archive, in which capacity I support the collecting needs of 400+ partner institutions, many of them represented on the Web Archiving Roundtable, and the development of the tools and services upon which those partners rely. I previously served one such organization, the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC), as a National Digital Stewardship Resident, developing the consortium's web archiving quality assurance and preservation policies and workflows. I also serve as the founding co-moderator of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) Web Archiving Special Interest Group, online at: artwarc.org.

Candidate statement: Web archiving presents tremendous opportunities for archivists and records managers to reach or refresh relationships with key stakeholder groups, introducing much needed clarity and reliability to their digital archiving needs. At the same time, it remains an excitingly untamed landscape of possibilities for infrastructure, access, description, and the myriad other issues to which roundtable members bring their unique perspectives. I strongly believe that these kinds of web archiving questions are best and most sustainably answered through collaboration, so I would be very excited to support and contribute to the roundtable's sharing of resources, both internally as well as with the broader communities of archivists and stakeholders who look to us for leadership.

Secretary

Rachel Taketa

I am the Library Specialist for the UCSF Industry Documents Library, a research archive of over 14 million internal tobacco and pharmaceutical industry documents.  I earned my MLIS from San Jose State University and am a member of SCA (Society of California Archivists) and SAA.  As the Library Specialist at UCSF, I process digital assets, teach search workshops, assist a wide variety of researchers, and manage the social media presence of the archive in the form of blogs, listservs and twitter. In 2009, I initiated our Industry Documents Web Archives project with the CDL and (somewhat successfully!) managed the transition of our archives to Archive-It last year. Over the years, I have presented on a number of web archiving panels and sessions at SAA ranging from how to develop web archives with limited resources to considerations for web archive development.  I had the pleasure of serving as the Social Media Manager for the Web Archiving Roundtable for the 2014-2015 cycle and I would be honored to be of service again this coming year as Secretary.  

Candidate Statement: The Web Archiving Roundtable is a rich resource of knowledge and experience for SAA members taking on projects to capture, preserve and provide access to web resources.  To facilitate the important work of this group, I am seeking election as Secretary. I have worked at UCSF as their Library Specialist for over 10 years and prior to that worked in Acute Psychiatry at SF General Hospital.  Talk about 2 ends of a spectrum!  Outside of my working life, I am on the Board of Directors as Secretary of the ‘Team Willpower’ Foundation for Autism and have served for many years as a committee chair for a women’s symposium in California that is now going on its 33rd year.  A committee Secretary is more than just a record-keeper and I would appreciate the opportunity to ensure an effective flow of communication between members as well as uphold the requirements of governing documents and maintain accurate minutes as a part of the Roundtable's permanent formal record.  I believe providing Roundtable members with timely, pertinent and accurate committee information enhances the worth of our expertise to SAA colleagues and I would be honored to be of service to the Roundtable in the role of Secretary.

Education Coordinator

Alexis Antracoli

I am currently the Assistant University Archivist for Technical Services at Princeton University’s Mudd Manuscript Library, where I lead technical services operations, including the implementation of our web archiving program.  Previously I worked as Records Management Archivist at Drexel University and Project Archivist at the Bentley Historical Library.  I graduated from the University of Michigan’s School of Information in 2011 with a specialization in Archives and Records Management.  I have published on web archiving and the archiving of born-digital audio visual content, and my professional interests include preservation and description of electronic records (including web archives), acquisitions outreach, and enhancing access to collections.

Candidate statement: I am interested in serving as the Education Coordinator of the Web Archiving Roundtable in order to build up on the excellent work that has been done by the roundtable in this area, including continuing to support the webinars and supporting the aggregation of resource on the blog.  I would like to build on this work by getting to know the needs of members and extending educational opportunities so that members can learn from each other.  I also currently help organize the Mid-Atlantic Archive-It User Group where I have found that discussion is an effective professional learning tool, and would be interested in finding ways to translate that to a virtual setting and pursuing official SAA channels for training.  Mostly importantly, I am interested in what the priorities of Web Archiving Roundtable are, and would reach out via a survey and personally to assess member educational needs and plan appropriate programming.  Thank you for your consideration for this position.

Social Media Manager

Danielle Moses

I am a new professional in the archival field and live in Little Rock, Arkansas. In May of 2016, I completed my M.A. in Public History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. While completing my degree, I served as a Graduate Assistant for the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s Center for Arkansas History and Culture (CAHC). After graduation, I became a project archivist for CAHC, and I also serve as a project archivist for the Arkansas History Commission. 

Candidate statement: I am interested in serving as the Social Media Manager of the Web Archiving Roundtable, because I would like to become more involved with SAA as a new professional, and I feel that I have a lot I can offer the post. I have contributed to the Facebook pages for both the manuscripts repository where I served as a graduate assistant and the historic preservation nonprofit in which I served as an intern. For both pages, I created relevant content that featured digital items from collections and brief research. I explored new and interesting ways to pique the interest of unreached audiences. I also maintained a blog as a graduate assistant and created a post at least once a month for 16 months. I hope that in this position I will be able to progress the mission of the roundtable by promoting advocacy and awareness of web archiving related issues. Social media is an invaluable resource when it comes to collaborating to problem solve in this young branch of archival practice. 

Michelle Schabowski

Hello! My name is Michelle Schabowski. I spent nine years as an English teacher in Japan and two years as a social media agent before deciding to come back to the states to get my Masters of Science in Information Science through the University of Tennessee. While I was obtaining my degree, I worked at the Howard Baker Modern Political Archives and was the president of UT’s SAA student chapter and the technology secretary for the ALA student chapter. After graduation I worked with the Everglades National Park’s archives for a nine month internship. I am now working as the archivist for the Physician Assistant History Society in Johns Creek, GA.

Candidate statement: I would love to be the social media manager for the Web Archiving Roundtable because I already have the experience to do so and it is something I really enjoy doing! The use of social media, especially how it relates to archives and library science has always fascinated me. I was a social media agent for two years, which is what partly caused my getting a degree in information science. While in my grad program, I acted as tech secretary for my university’s student chapter of ALA. As a graduate research assistant, I have also helped professors study how social media is impacting archives and libraries, how these repositories use these sites, and how social media is being archived. Social media is a big part of my current position, archivist as the Physician Assistant History Society, and is used for outreach and to make our users aware of updates to our collections and the projects we are doing. 

Web Liaison

Heather Caldwell

I am a somewhat recent graduate from San Jose State University from their Master of Library and Information Science program, December 2014. My GPA is 3.7 and I worked diligently in my classes. I took an academic reference class, collection management, grant writing, cataloging and many others including website design. I found my interests lay more in archiving and I pursued this interest by completing a five-month internship at UC Berkeley as an archival processing Intern. I followed this up by another archives internship at Napa County Historical Society, processing a fairly large collection. I love science and the process of learning and discovery. I am currently applying for jobs in both libraries and archives, preferably in an academic institution and am going to do the Post-Grad Certificate in Digital Archives and Records Management beginning in August 2016. I am determined to find a career that is fulfilling as well as intriguing where I can put my education to use and serve that particular user population.

Candidate statement: I think I would be an excellent resource for the web archiving committee. I love remote work and am serious about keeping up with the latest news and communication, especially from the SAA. I am willing to make a one-year commitment and will make sure to update the most recent news and fulfill my duties on the committee. I am looking forward to more responsibilities in the digital archiving field and am going to be taking a course on digitization in January of next year. Beginning August, I will be taking a course on digital curation, tools and methodology and I welcome any questions and will make myself available to people who have questions. I did a website design class in 2013 and I created a five page HTML website with CSS design and some JavaScript YouTube videos. The website was to showcase my father’s watercolor paintings, which he wishes to sell to the public. I welcome this opportunity!

Todd Suomela

I currently work as the CLIR-DLF Postdoctoral Fellow for Data Curation in the Sciences and Social Sciences at the University of Alberta. My focus is on web archives, including collection assessment, project management, web archive education, documentation, and research outreach. I am currently a co-investigator for the Web Archives for Longitudinal Knowledge research project which is currently migrating web archive data from partner institutions into the Compute Canada cloud in order to improve access for research. The project is a joint effort between University of Alberta, University of Waterloo, and York University.

Candidate statement: I have produced online content since 2000 and am very comfortable with writing for a public audience. My goal is to raise the awareness of web archiving among researchers and the public. In addition to weblogging and supporting the online presence of the web archive roundtable I would like to explore opportunities to incorporate other media, including screencasts and podcasts, into the outreach efforts of the roundtable. I hope you will support me as web liaison for the web archive roundtable.

Karina Wratschko

I am the Special Projects Librarian at the Philadelphia Museum of Art- where I have worked for over six years. As a dedicated information professional, I am passionate about stimulating new discoveries through the preservation, descriptive cataloging, and access. I am particularly interested in digital preservation and the use of digital asset management to facilitate innovative research methods, illuminate connections amongst collections, and create a more collaborative scholarly environment. At the close of the summer, I will complete my MLIS at Drexel University’s College of Computing and Informatics with a concentration in Digital Libraries.

Candidate statement: I have studied web design as part of my Digital Libraries coursework at Drexel University. I have managed websites for internal communications website at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Library and Archives (WordPress) and the department’s Sharepoint page on the Museum’s intranet. I have launched several WordPress sites including a web exhibition called Beneath the Covers, the project website the National Digital Stewardship Residency for Art Information Professionals (http://ndsr-pma.arlisna.org/), and am currently working on one for the Exhibitions Special Interest Group for ARLIS/NA. Some of these WordPress sites have been enhanced with hand-coding, which I used exclusively for my own website.