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The ARCHIVES 2017 Program Committee invited submissions of "Pop-Up" session proposals at the SAA Annual Meeting in Portland, July 23-29. Pop-Up sessions enliven the conference program by focusing on ideas and content that have "popped up" since initial proposals were due in November. Proposers were encouraged to think creatively to point attendees in new directions.
The Program Committee invites your vote(s) on which Pop-Up session(s) you would most like to see presented at the conference. Please vote for up to four proposals. The four proposals with the most votes will be presented as sessions in Portland. Deadline for casting your vote(s): Friday, June 9.
#ResistanceAuntie, Representation, and Asian Americans in the Archives: Processing through a Lens of Critical Librarianship
“#ResistanceAuntie became a viral symbol of rebellion on Inauguration Day. During Trump's first speech as president, this warrior was spotted in the crowd at the National Mall, both middle fingers firmly outstretched in solemn salute at the newly sworn in leader of the free world.”--AngryAsianMan, blogger
Representation matters, whether in mass media or in the archival record. More so, defiant representation matters. Contrary to stereotype, Asian Americans have not lived in passivity in history, but have been agents of change for themselves and with other persons of color. So, who or what is #ResistanceAuntie? How does she as a symbol in this moment of popular culture, of social media fame, connect to Asian American agency in the archives? How can we as archivists arrange and describe Asian American archives and collections effectively in order to do justice to the stories they tell? These questions and much more will be explored in this pop-up session.
This is the primary purpose of this session: I propose to teach my colleagues a framework for processing materials created by or related to Americans of Asian heritage through a lens of critical librarianship. The session is composed of two parts: Firstly, I intend to speak on #ResistanceAuntie, why representation matters, and my own professional examples of how I have applied this framework of cultural competency and familiarity with relevant historical context in approaching collections. Secondly, the session will also include a group activity in which participants are asked to critically assess examples of unprocessed Asian American cultural materials and how to effectively arrange and describe them. This pop-up is geared toward archival professionals who are unfamiliar with, but want to learn about, arranging and describing manuscripts and collections relating to Asian American communities.
Annie Tang
Johns Hopkins University
A Tool You Can Use Today to Evaluate Your Website
Want to know if your website provides the right components to allow a researcher to thoroughly prepare online to use your reading room? The Archives Research Preparation Online (ARPO) Index provides a framework for evaluating archival webpages in the context of how thoroughly a researcher may prepare online for an in-person research visit. This session introduces the ARPO Index and then breaks the index into its individual components for further examination. Each component represents a webpage feature that is currently common to researchers on existing websites but that may or may not be common on archival webpages. Real-world examples of each component will provide concrete illustrations of how to evaluate those webpages. The presentation will feature the online ARPO Index Evaluation Tool to assist archivists in reviewing their webpages and receiving an APRO Index score. The tool helps archivists determine where their webpages need improvement to better assist the researcher in becoming more self-sufficient in their research preparation. The speaker will encourage audience participation through discussion and Q&A.
The target audience includes archivists whose repositories have public webpages and allow researchers to use their manuscripts and/or record groups. The ability for researchers to use the archives is what makes these repositories alike. What makes them different is the archives’ diverse parent organizations in a variety of sectors, such as academic, government, religious, medical, labor, museum, business, public libraries, or performing arts.
The presentation begins with a very brief story followed by the sparkline technique to contrast the current state of most archival websites, as determined by research, with their ideal state for the overall ARPO Index and each component. The online ARPO Index Evaluation Tool (either live or a mock-up, depending upon the availability of an Internet connection) serves as a guide to lead the discussion through each component.
Scott Pitol, CA
University of Illinois at Chicago
Activating Archives for Social Change
We all know that archives and special collections are rich sources of knowledge, but how do we put that knowledge to work in the world outside the repositories that house them? Join us to learn how two tech innovators—cultural heritage non-profit Densho and the Memories of Migration project based out of Santa Ana Public Library—have used primary source oral histories to engage students in civics and social justice projects.
Members of the Densho team will share highlights from the rich archives of Japanese American oral histories and primary source material they have cultivated over the past 21 years. They will lead participants in a hands-on demonstration of a new oral history-based education program they’ve developed, “Examining Race & Discrimination: Learning from Oral History to Become Agents of Change Today.”
Santa Ana Public Library staff will present Memories of Migration, a project that engages teens in documenting their community history, then uses that engagement as a springboard for civic action. With a focus on using technology and history to anchor youth in their community, the project has developed methods for documenting migrant experiences, including the creation of digital stories, oral histories, and an app that is currently in development.
Together the projects show how students can create their own oral history and primary source materials, and how those materials can be used to spark important conversations and learning in the classroom. In addition to educators, the session will appeal to those involved in outreach and anyone interested in using technology to creating and utilizing primary source materials.
Geoff Froh
Densho
Cheryl Eberly
Memories of Migration/Santa Ana Public Library
Caitlin Oiye Coon
Densho
Natasha Varner
Densho
Activating the Archive: Archival Outreach for Creative Resistance
In the wake of the November 2016 presidential election, libraries and archives across the nation sought ways to highlight archival material as valuable resources for activism and promote primary source collections as tools in the pursuit of social justice. This session will provide a model for an archival outreach event that encourages participants to activate the archive through the creative reuse, remaking, and recontextualizing of archival materials. Through the invitation for participants to creatively engage with archival collections, we will highlight archival outreach events as a way to open up libraries and archives to communities in an innovative and socially relevant way. This session will be of particular interest to repositories that wish to promote the use of their collections in community activism and social justice initiatives.
The session will be led by Courtney Dean, Project Archivist at UCLA Special Collections and Jessica Tai, Graduate Student Archival Processing Scholar in the Center for Primary Research and Training at UCLA Special Collections. The session will begin with a summary of an archival outreach event that took place at UCLA in response to the 2016 presidential election and will highlight event logistics. Following will be breakaway sessions that provide participants with the opportunity to brainstorm on how to best promote their respective repositories as spaces of community empowerment, and how to foster the use of archival collections for creative resistance.
Courtney Dean
University of California Los Angeles Library Special Collections
Jessica Tai
University of California Los Angeles Library Special Collections
Archives in the Shadows: Invisible Contributions to the Digital Humanities
A conversation has started among digital humanists, librarians, and technology specialists about invisible work in the digital humanities. This has sparked a call for papers for a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly on the subject. National efforts such as the Digital Public Library of America are bringing ever greater amounts of archival and other cultural heritage material into view and presenting it in a manner that could be utilized in the work of digital humanists. The result is that academic archivists and librarians are not the only ones with the potential to contribute to the digital humanities in ways that are not always apparent or made visible to the audiences, evaluators, or even the digital humanists themselves. This session proposes to explore how archivists, special collections librarians, rare book curators, and other cultural heritage professionals are contributing invisible work to the digital humanities. The session will be in the form of a discussion, either as a large group or in a smaller break-out groups reporting to the whole, about where we as cultural heritage professionals fit into digital humanities work, the degree to which our contributions are recognized, and possibilities for enhancing recognition of those contributions. Subjects of discussion will likely include digitization efforts, metadata creation and cleanup for digital objects, finding aids, support for researchers, and a variety of other topics. Cultural heritage professionals of all types who attend SAA and contribute in some form to the digital humanities will be the main audience for this session. Depending on the size of institution, the contributions will likely be at different scales, recognized or not in different ways, and the impact on everyday workflows and responsibilities varied. This session is intended to open up the conversation in our field and explore our role in this rapidly advancing academic field.
Amber J. D'Ambrosio
Willamette University Hatfield Library
Audio Preservation Surveys: To Plan? Or To Implement? That Is the Question!
In 2014, the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access Planning Grant to survey the Center’s non-commercial sound recordings collection. The goals of the year-long project were to assess the physical condition of 7,695 recordings, as well as determine the intellectual value of 224 recording collections in order to prioritize digitization of the most at-risk recordings and those containing the most valuable content to researchers, institutional programs, and other diverse user groups. The ultimate goal of the survey, was to have the necessary data about the Center’s collections, so the Center would be well-positioned to apply for an implementation grant. At the conclusion of the survey, results were not too surprising, and in some respects, only confirmed what the sound recording preservation field has determined about at-risk media formats. So, was completing the survey worth the Center’s time? Did the Center learn anything new? Did surveying the collection result in any tangible and intangible benefits? After analysis and meeting with internal stakeholders, the Center concluded that surveying the collection in this manner—rather than first embarking on a large-scale digitization project—indeed yielded benefits. This presentation will give an overview of the Ransom Center’s non-commercial sound recordings collection, outline how collection management techniques can inform prioritization strategies, briefly detail the survey process, and examine the results of the Center’s survey.
Amy Armstrong
Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin
Lauren Walker
Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin
Building a Community Digital Archive in Cañar, Ecuador
The Cultural Archive of Cañar is the culmination of my two decades of documentary photography and oral history work with the indigenous and mestizo communities of Cañar, in a highland province in southern Ecuador. With this digital archive, a collective memory created with elders, educators and local families, my aim is to develop a comprehensive visual, oral and written history of this little-known region of South America. This project is of critical importance as massive emigration from the area since 2000 to the U.S. has resulted in disruption of families and communities and a rapid erosion of cultural traditions.
During three Fulbright grants in Ecuador (2000, 2005, 2014-2015), along with several visits in the 1990s, I have generated thousands of photographs and collected hundreds of hours of personal narratives, stories, video and music recordings, and documents.
From 2005-2013, I coordinated two complex projects for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). These resulted in valuable documentary materials as well as an interactive multimedia program The Cañari Today (2006), and a bi-lingual Kichwa/Spanish book, The Cañari Nation and Its Cultural Expressions (2013).
Judy Blankenship
Archivo Cultural de Cañar, Ecuador
Collecting the Resistance
Throughout the 2016 presidential election many students responded to the rhetoric of candidate Donald Trump and have continued to do so as he transitioned into the role of President of the United States. For many of these students it was their first election in which they were eligible to vote and their first time participating in political resistance. This session would explore archivists’ responses to activism of student and non-student groups from the both the 2016 campaign as well as the subsequent presidency. It will also address the efforts made by archivists to document this political moment before it’s too late. This can be an opportunity to have a discussion centered around the difficulties faced by librarians and archivists to capture this political experience, especially among under-represented groups that are fearful of the new president’s agenda. The session would encourage discussion and could be an opportunity for archivists working in different types of institutions to share difficulties they may have with these rapidly changing and often ephemeral collections.
One such example is at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. Students organized an Immigration Wall in support of undocumented students and immigrants that was promptly defaced with pro-Trump and anti-immigrant graffiti. The event pushed administration to respond to the country’s political climate and its effect on the campus, issuing a statement in support of the university’s undocumented student community. The University Archivist initiated a project in January 2017 to capture the voices of the students and faculty involved with the wall for the University Archives through oral histories.
Lauren Zuchowski Longwell
Loyola Marymount University
Deep Impact: Records and Archives in the Anthropocene
In May 2017 NYU-Litwin Books hosted the Libraries and Archives in the Anthropocene Colloquium (LAAC) which explored the realities of cataclysmic environmental change, with a dawning awareness of its dramatic implications for the missions and activities of libraries and archives.
While SAA session 107 addresses similar themes, this pop-up session will review major highlights from the colloquium and look at the topic from a “big picture” perspective. Even as we prepared this proposal, news came that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault flooded - an event predicted in one of the LAAC presentations. The far-reaching two-day conversation spanned approaches that touched on community archives and activists, environmental informatics experts, information risk analyses, the unraveling of systems, and the opportunity-cost role of libraries and archives in a world much different from the one we currently take for granted. Ideas were unpacked, drilled down and extrapolated from, providing a fresh and timely response to global and sector events. We asked ourselves hard questions and even answered some of them!
The session is intended for all attendees who are concerned about the complicity of our professions and repositories in climate change, and who want to explore ways forward to confront and address it, both personally and institutionally; and in some cases including the difficulty of acknowledging our constraints and limitations. Speakers will use “mind maps” in their presentation as a device to explain the inter-connectedness of topics, the challenges we all face as we piece together solutions, and to encourage audience members to add their ideas in an interactive discussion.
Sarah R. Demb
Harvard University Archives
Jennifer Gunter King
Hampshire College
Jan Zastrow
Consulting Archivist
Digitization Matters: 10 Years Later
In 2007 OCLC Research and the Society of American Archivists held a seminal meeting to explore barriers preventing institutions from scaling up digitization of archives and special collections. Inspired at the time by book scanning projects spearheaded by Google and the Internet Archive, participants examined what was preventing libraries from doing more to get collections into the hands of users. A report from that meeting, “Shifting Gears: Gearing Up to Get Into the Flow,” summarized these (sometimes contradictory) ideas for making digitized special collections more ubiquitously available.
Ten years later, digitization of archives and special collections has moved across the spectrum from boutique scanning and carefully curated online exhibits to massive digitization projects that have converted millions of pages of documents and microfilm for online access. There have been major advancements in access to digitized materials through state-wide digital libraries, the partnerships that formed HathiTrust, and the emergence of the Digital Public Library of America as an aggregator. Legally there is growing support for digitization as a fair use and a value added contribution. Once only accessible to the most privileged of users, archives and special collections are now available to diverse populations around the world.
Yet, are we any closer to reaching the scale we imagined ten years ago? Are the challenges and solutions to large-scale digitization any different? How has the landscape changed, or remained the same, in special collections and archives? How should special collections and archives approach digitization in the future? What opportunities lie ahead?
Moderated by Merrilee Proffitt, OCLC Research, this panel discussion will include Erik Moore from the University of Minnesota and Michelle Light from UNLV, and will encourage audience feedback.
Michelle Light
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Merrilee Proffitt
OCLC Research
Erik Moore
University of Minnesota
Forget the Best: Good and Better Approaches to Preservation
Preservation resources often emphasize “best practices.” Having an optimal collections care program might be desired, from electronic compact shelves to completely processed collections. However, not everyone has the funds for a high-tech HVAC system or the staff time to develop a preservation plan. With limited staff, time, and money often the norm, how do institutions find ways to implement preservation practices that are feasible and sustainable?
This session will focus on how institutions forgo the “best” in favor of “good” and “better” approaches to preservation, highlighting how to make preservation a component of any archives program, even one with little to no resources. Panelists will draw on their own experiences providing guidance to varied institutions through their work at the Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts as a part of the Preservation Services Office. They will briefly present common, feasible recommendations often given to repositories in the areas of collections care, environment, policies, security, emergency preparedness, and more. The remainder of the session will serve as a platform for discussion and questions about how attendees have addressed preservation concerns with limited resources.
This session is intended to address the needs of all archivists. Whether one is a lone arranger, special collections librarian, or university archivist, finding feasible solutions to preservation issues is a must.
Anastasia Matijkiw
Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts
Samantha Forsko
Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts
Getting Personal: Rethinking What “Personal” Means in Archives
This session explores the meaning and potential of the ‘personal’ in archival theory and practice. Typically, archivists understand personal archives as a category of record, a particular thing: what if we think about ‘personal’ as a relationship or approach to records, recordkeeping and use? How might this change how we think about records, including institutional records, and the different functions record-keepers undertake?
Two presenters are working on a project reconsidering personal archives to show that what makes a record ‘personal’ is the relationship between the record and its activator (to borrow Eric Ketelaar’s term). The other two presenters recently completed a survey of Canadian archivists’ understanding and experiences of secondary trauma. We’ll begin with a brief introduction to these projects and how they reframe what ‘personal’ means in relation to the records we care for, how we care for them, and our roles as caretakers. Through this introduction, we’ll begin to situate archives as a “contact zone” (CLIR, Terra Cognita: Graduate Students in the Archives, 2016), characterized by different personal relationships and interactions.
We’ll then break into groups, facilitated by the presenters, to discuss particular questions. These might include:
The session will end with groups coming together for a larger discussion about archives and relationships: Does something need to change in the archival mindset and practice to accommodate and embrace the personal? If yes, what might it be? And how does this start to happen? Notes will be taken and circulated via a Google doc; it’s hoped this session will spark ongoing discussion within the archival community.
Jennifer Douglas
School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia
Making Home Movies Visible
Home movies and provide an opportunity to bridge the distance between archives and the public. Researchers and documentary filmmakers want them, and many archives have them. Yet there are few archival objects that present greater barriers to access. Legacy film formats may be difficult to preview and expensive to digitize, while effective description and intellectual control pose further challenges for catalogers. As a result, many archives hold these remarkable moving-image artifacts in archival limbo -- unprocessed, uncatalogued, and unavailable.
This presentation will illustrate the unique historical value of home movies, and then demonstrate how holders of these materials can begin to get them before the public eye. First, Rick Prelinger will show how he has brought broad public attention to home movies through his popular series of audience-participatory “Lost Lansdscapes” screenings and by making over 1,100 home movies available on Internet Archive. Then Megan McShea will share her experience successfully promoting interest and access to home movies in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American’s manuscript collections.
Dwight Swanson of The Center for Home Movies will then present two initiatives that enable and encourage archives to make more of their Home Movie holdings. The Home Movie Archives Database, a survey of home movies and amateur films in archival collections in the United States, is the beginning of a union catalog of American amateur films and offers an immediate opportunity for organizations without expertise in film handling to invite interest in their home movie holdings, whatever their state of description. The Home Movie Registry (www.homemovieregistry.org) is a related project that provides a portal to digitized amateur film collections that are already available online, allowing non-specialist archives a ready avenue to make even very small home movie holdings visible to researchers along with the offerings of archives that specialize in moving-image collections.
Dwight Swanson
Center for Home Movies
Megan McShea
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Rick Prelinger
Prelinger Archives
On Assimilation
The archives and special collections profession’s implicit expectation that professionals of color assimilate to a white patriarchal culture has consequences that extend beyond the fact that our profession is no more diverse today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. This expectation of assimilation results in a body of collections that do not always reflect marginalized communities with the nuance and depth they deserve. It means that communities whose record keeping practices cannot or will not assimilate to the profession’s traditions and practices are dissuaded from entering the archives—as creators, as users, or as practitioners. It means that while we may consider our collections representative of a local, national, or global cultural heritage, the people that make up that culture are not always given the agency to represent themselves. In short, it means that while we champion diversity and inclusivity among our ranks, in our reading rooms, and on our shelves, our practices have not caught up to our intentions.
This session invites archivists of color to consider the ways assimilation shapes the archival record by exploring traditional conceptions of archives through the lens of their own histories and experiences. A series of panel presentations by archivists of color will provide a starting point for a discussion that asks participants to posit new approaches to collection development in order to more fully account for the varied and complex ways marginalized communities document themselves.
Jillian Cuellar
University of California Los Angeles Library Special Collections
Oral History Collections as a Means of Diversifying the Archival Record of Labor and Social Justice Collections
Oral history collections can augment the documentation scope of archives by expanding and diversifying the archival record. By encompassing social history that includes stories of labor and social justice and the history of individual workers and activists, these narratives expand upon traditional labor history by foregrounding the perspectives of a more diverse groups of workers, including women, people of color, immigrant communities, disabled workers, and others who shaped and expanded the scope of the labor movement. This panel will highlight archives that have employed oral history collections in their programs and how this format has helped to drive interest in a more inclusive history of workers and their organizations.
Intended Audience: Those with labor and social justice related oral history collections, especially repositories that aren't on their face considered "labor" related.
Session Format: Lively panel discussion with presentations and highlights of several repositories including the Labor Archives of Washington, University of Washington; The Anne Rand Memorial Library and Archives, International Longshore and Warehouse Union; the Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University; the Michigan Technological University Archives; and the Southern Labor Archives, Georgia State University.
Conor Casey
Labor Archives of Washington, University of Washington Libraries Special Collections
Lindsay Hiltunen
Michigan Technological University Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections
Catherine Powell
Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University
Robin Walker
International Longshore and Warehouse Union Library
Outreach From Your Couch: What Archives Can Learn from Person to Person Sales on Social Media
After endless invitations to Facebook parties selling essential oils, children's books, beauty products, nail polish and more, the George Fox University archives were inspired to throw a Facebook party of a different nature, a party to connect users with archival resources. Carefully selecting photographs from one organization spanning a couple of decades, we developed an online outreach event to accomplish two purposes, raise awareness of archival resources and crowd source identifications for previously unlabeled photos.
It was a resounding success. After the two hour digital event was completed, insights showed that over 300 people attended, and over 6000 interactions (likes, link clicks, comments, photo tags) occurred. More parties were requested by participants and are now in the works.
This session will explain the entire process from the first brainstorming session, to advertising, to the live party, and continued interactions resulting from the event. Presenters will share what they learned about holding a successful outreach event from the comfort of their couch.
Rachel Thomas
George Fox University
Outreach Live! Bring Your Archives to New Audiences
Archivists are keenly interested in bringing in new users, donors, and supporters, but so often, our efforts are directed inward. Sometimes what seems like outreach isn’t actually effective in reaching beyond a library’s friends group or current user base. And, some outreach methods that are effective for one repository or archivist might not work for others. Presenters in this session will talk about how archivists can use their networks and current infrastructure to reach new audiences. Archivists will come away from this session with strategies for executing actual outreach, not just inreach, in their unique repositories.
The session will last for 60 minutes and include two parts. In the first 40 minutes, four archivists will share short presentations (10 minutes each) about how they have done outreach that truly reaches out. The second half of the session will consist of an audience-led brainstorming session, where the audience and session presenters will collaboratively create a Google Doc with a list of questions archivists should ask themselves when planning outreach and a list of outreach activities that can help get their content and services to new audiences. This document will then be shared for anyone to see.
Carissa Hansen
University of Minnesota
Principled Archivists: How to Make the New DACS Principles Work for You and Your Users
The Technical Subcommittee on Describing Archives: A Content Standard (TS-DACS) proposes a pop-up session that will provide an opportunity for the archival community to engage with a set of newly revised DACS principles. The revised principles, which were authored by a group of archival description experts at a four-day SAA-sponsored meeting in March, provide an updated framework for archival description. This pop-up session is a chance for the community to learn more about the revision process and the rationale for revision. Participants will dig in and interact with the revised principles and test them against real world descriptive use cases.
The session will:
1) provide a learning forum for understanding standards maintenance and revision in general, and the principles revision process more specifically;
2) provide an opportunity for both TS-DACS and session participants to discuss and develop strategies for educating our peers and colleagues about the revised principles;
3) ask participants to engage in activities and exercises that will teach them how they can enact these principles at their home institutions;
4) discuss the principles as a tool for advocacy and provide participants with strategies for implementation.
Everyone with an interest in archival description and the revised principles is welcome. We envision the session to be a lively mix of presentation, discussion, and active learning.
Participants will leave with a fuller interpretation of why and how TS-DACS revised the principles, and how the old and new principles interact and overlap with each other and with Records in Context (RiC). We hope that participants leave the session energized and equipped to incorporate these principles deeper into their own archival practice.
Sue Luftschein
University of Southern California Libraries
Protests, Protests Everywhere: An Informal Discussion on Archiving Activism
The purpose of this open fishbowl session is for participants to share their work on documenting current social justice movements through community engagement. As a pop-up session, we will focus on protests, marches, and activism that has surfaced over the past year, but we will welcome the perspectives of those who have done this work previously. Session organizers will get the discussion started then pass the mic to hear from additional perspectives. Whether you are an activist archivist who has been doing this work for years or you feel overwhelmed with how to begin with the newest wave of social justice activity in your community, we welcome your participation. Facilitators include Dawn Schmitz, UNC Charlotte; Jamie Seemiller, Denver Public Library, Western History Dept. and Katrina Vandeven, MLIS Candidate University of Denver. Movements discussed include Movement for Black Lives, Women’s March, Disability Rights, and any others introduced by participants. This session will be informal and open to all that want to share and ask questions about engaging and documenting the current protest movements in your community. We want to hear how archivists have connected with donors and community members in both traditional and new ways to ensure there is a historical record of today’s social justice activity.
Jamie Seemiller
Denver Public Library Western History and Genealogy Department
Dawn Schmitz
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Katrina Vandeven
MLIS Candidate, University of Denver
Speed Dating for Archivists
Attendees will be paired with another person and will have 5 minutes to share with that other person on a given topic. After 5 minutes they will be moved and paired with the person next to them. The session leader will give directions and will announce the next topic from a prepared list of questions. Attendees will be encouraged to bring business cards to exchange with others if they wish to follow up.
Joseph Coen
R. C. Diocese of Brooklyn
The Catalyst Fund Program: Funding Concept to Fruition
Ideation, creation, innovation. Archives, libraries, museums all have innovative ideas but do they have the sustainable funds to test, try, test again or move an idea to creation to production. In the fall of 2016, LYRASIS developed the Catalyst Fund to help seed fund innovative ideas with the caveat that these funded projects become available to the larger archive, library and museum world for all to use. We received 61 applications, met with leaders in the field to vote on 10 of those, and funded the top projects and ideas with over $100k. In this session, listen and learn what projects were funded, the status of those projects and how you can reap the benefits of these innovative ideas and products from our colleagues.
Jenn Bielewski
LYRASIS
The Elephant in the Room: Archivists' Technological Competencies
Do we have the technological competencies archivists need to be effective using 21st century technologies? How do we stay up-to-date with current and emerging technologies? Are opportunities available to gain knowledge and skills with emerging technologies? Please join us for a conversation about why we must develop technological competencies, as they are critical to our professional practice.
This pop-up session is intended for anyone who is interested in discussing the challenges of dealing with rapidly changing technologies. It will be an open-discussion about the varying levels of technological knowledge and skills present in the profession. This is an opportunity to take a critical look at our professional practice and our relationship with technology.
Anne Daniel
Western University Archives
The Good, The Bad, and The Spectacular: A Special Collections and Archives Renovation Case Study
The purpose of my session is to discuss the recent four (4) million dollar renovation, which I experienced over the course of the last eight (8) years in my role as Head of Special Collections and College Archives at the Fashion Institute of Technology-SUNY. My intended audience will be anyone who wants to learn about the many aspects of such a complicated and impactful project, whether s/he is currently involved in a similar project or anticipates being involved. The session will be an overview of my experience -- from planning and design, to construction schedules and meetings, to transformative completion; there will be reserved plenty of time for questions and answers.
Karen Trivette
Fashion Institute of Technology-SUNY
The WASAPI Project: Web Archiving Systems APIs (& More!)
The session will present the outcomes and current work of the WASAPI (Web Archiving Systems APIs) project, an IMLS-supported initiative of Archive-It (Internet Archive), LOCKSS, Stanford, University of North Texas, and Rutgers to build the technical and social architecture to support API-based systems interoperability and collaborative technology development for web archiving. The presentation will demonstrate project-specific research and development around production-released APIs for web archive preservation data transfer from Archive-It and LOCKSS. It will also feature utilities and code for use of these APIs in local preservation systems as well as outcomes from project-related research into community formation, future API engineering, and economic modeling for digital preservation. The intended audience is any institution with an active web archiving program, especially those interested in local digital preservation approaches, data modeling, systems interoperability, and national-scale community building for web archiving knowledge sharing and technology development. The session builds on a National Symposium for Web Archiving Interoperability attended by 40+ web archiving institutions in February 2017 and continues the WASAPI projects’ work presented on a special online webinar conducted for SAA Web Archiving Section members in April 2017 and presented to the International Internet Preservation Consortium in June 2017. The session will include outcomes and findings from the project’s research, live demonstrations of data transfer APIs, an overview of affiliate project APIs, and an open discussion of future interoperability efforts and planning for the formation a North American community and annual event focused on web archiving. This proposal will also alleviate the dearth of sessions on web archiving in the general program. The speaker also promises a presentation rich in animated GIFs.
Jefferson Bailey
Internet Archive
Lori Donovan
Internet Archive
Nicholas Taylor
Stanford University
Use Case Workshop with the Software Preservation Network
The Software Preservation Network (SPN) (http://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/) coordinates software preservation efforts to ensure long term access to software - connecting and engaging legal, public policy, social science, natural science, information & communication technology, and cultural heritage preservation communities.
In this interactive Pop-Up Session, representatives from the SPN team will engage the archivist community in the articulation and documentation of software preservation use cases. These use cases will be used to inform work articulated in the software preservation community roadmap developed at the SPN Forum in advance of the 2016 SAA Annual Meeting, namely: identifying common barriers to participation across collecting contexts, Fair Use best practices for libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs), and the development of example access strategies and workflows.
Use case creation has been adopted across a wide spectrum of sectors and disciplines -- from software development to archives -- as a tool for improving communication, identifying priorities, and exposing gaps. This session will offer anyone who is interested in use case development a solid, hands-on introduction to the use case writing craft. Attendees will work in small groups and emerge from the session with sample use cases they can utilize as templates in future use case work; the samples will also feed directly into the SPN’s ongoing work: http://www.softwarepreservationnetwork.org/
Jessica Meyerson (submission contact for presenting team)
The University of Texas at Austin
When the Archivist Goes Missing: Personal Narratives and Audience Discussions on How to Avoid the Digital Curation Gap
The “archivist gap,” or as we describe “when the archivist goes missing” is a problem that occurs when the archive loses its ability to function for a period of time that can range from a few months to years. This could be due to a loss of the ability to purchase supplies, a lack of control over physical space and digital platforms, or most importantly, losing archival staff, skill-sets, and institutional memory that can take years to replace. The context of this issue changes when we exist in today’s ‘born digital’ age of information where digital documents have a short shelf life, and available space to store boxes of physical documents is diminishing rapidly. Today, when the archivist goes missing, so does current history. Or does it?
Our presentation begins with a personal narrative about experiences of federal archivists taking over collections after a multi-year gap in curation services. The practices involved may be familiar to archives with academic, medical, and historical collections. We will provide lessons learned of how best to recover from a loss of institutional memory, how to integrate old and new collections, and the surprisingly important role that diverse community engagement plays after the archivist goes missing. This will be followed by an open discussion on the threat of the ‘archivist gap’ to all archives in a born digital age of information with increasingly politicized funding, the experiences of the audience, and the solutions they have discovered. This pop-up session is a prequel to a planned research study to determine the extent of these problems – and solutions – in the wider community.
Michael Crane
Stimson Library, Army Medical Center and School
World War I for Dummies: How to Survive and Thrive During the WWI Centennial 2017-2018
The 100 Year Anniversary of the United States entry into World War I is now upon us, which means that almost every Archive in the country is already or will be called upon to support the commemorative events, rolling in like clockwork, over the next two years. Federal, University, State, Local and just about every archivist in the country will eventually be called upon to search their collections, but then what? How do we cope with more tasks when we already have more than enough to do? How do we add our individual voices to the national narrative? How does my archives fit in to this entire clamor?
This session will provide simple answers to all of these questions, using guides to aid archivists with little time and modest resources, giving them the ability to locate information on just about any subject on America's involvement in the conflict, along with ideas on quick displays, go to websites, social media, images, veteran and genealogical resources, and more.
Handouts and PPT presentations include contact information for international, national, and state and local events that can be utilized and personalized to match any archivist’s need for ideas and answers to some of the many questions that will arise in the coming months. Presenters will provide guidance on essential websites, documents, exhibit plans, outreach from simple to complex, which can be customized to fit the needs of the individual archivist.
The ultimate goal is to ensure each archivist in attendance leaves with tools to not only deal with the coming Centennial events but also to flourish with accurate focused strategies, accomplishing their mission in the months ahead. Contact information will be provided for future questions as well.
Mike Miller
Emeritus, Marine Corps History
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