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The ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2018: Promoting Transparency Program Committee invited submissions of “Pop-Up” session proposals for the conference in Washington, DC, August 12-18. Pop-Up sessions enliven the conference program by focusing on ideas and content that have “popped up” since initial proposals were due in November 2017. 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 five proposals. The five proposals with the most votes will be presented as sessions in Washington, DC. Deadline for casting your vote(s): Friday, June 22.
1968 –"The Year that Changed America"
1968 –"the year that changed America" according to CNN – was a tumultuous one filled with growing anger at America's involvement in Vietnam, the assassinations of MLK and RFK, as well as a contentious presidential election. As these events played out across the country reactions on college campuses gave birth to unprecedented student activism and protests, and, eventually, changes in policy, curriculum, and social mores.
Both Columbia and Harvard endeavored to capture the spirit of those times through unique projects documenting the experiences on their campuses in 1968. The Columbia University Archives commemorated the 50th anniversary of student protests and occupation of five campus buildings in April 1968 by creating an historical Twitter feed (@1968CU) detailing events "as they happened" on campus 50 years ago. Through the use of contemporary documents, images and information from its collections the CUA told the story of Columbia '68 in a 21st century fashion using a social media format. Although protesting like Columbia's did not catch on at Harvard until 1969, 1968 was an epic year for the University as changes on campus mirrored those across the country. To commemorate the Class of 1968's 50th reunion, the Harvard University Archives hosted an exhibition and oral history program with StoryCorps; pairing up Class of 1968 alumni to discuss various aspects of their experiences as students and life after. This program documented both the significant shifts in campus life from 1964 to 1968, as well as MLK's visit to campus and Coretta Scott King giving his commencement address after his assassination.
Archivists Jocelyn Wilk (Columbia) and Virginia Hunt (Harvard) will discuss how college and university archives can showcase their collections by implementing large scale social media projects and/or reaching out to alumni through oral history programs to capture significant moments in institutional histories.
Jocelyn Wilk
Columbia University
Virginia Hunt
Harvard University
Announcing the 2018 SAA ePADD User Forum!
Are you using ePADD to appraise, process, or provide access to email archives at your institution? Or are you considering doing so? Come learn how colleagues are integrating ePADD into their processing and preservation workflows, and hear about opportunities to collaborate around ePADD's future development.
The session will be split between presentations and break-out discussions. Presentations will include the latest updates from the developers, an introduction to new community working groups, as well as an update from Nick Krabbenhoeft on scripts he has written to ensure interoperability with Archivematica via the automation tools framework.
Josh Schneider
Stanford University
Nick Krabbenhoeft
New York Public Library
Glynn Edwards
Stanford University
Archivists' Transparency in Participatory Community Archiving
This session will discuss the main questions: What is the positive and negative influence of archivist in the process of leading or joining a participatory archiving project for specific communities? How can archivists avoid to be negative?
The intended audience includes researchers interested in participatory archiving, community-based archives and Chinese theory and practice.
A case study report will be first given to the audience. It is on the transparency of archivists in the archiving process for Gaoqian, one of the most famous ancient villages in China. For historical reasons, many rural communities like Gaoqian in China are unable to keep their history integrated and authentic, only with official historical archives, leading to the misunderstanding of their community identity and culture. Therefore, participatory archiving for these communities is necessary and significant for a more detailed and comprehensive narrative. However, throughout the participatory archiving, archivists' interconnection with community members may influence the decision about what kinds of materials can be collected and whether the collections are integrated enough for a complete community history. Archivists' understanding of these material may influence how the collections can be described and whether the description is authentic. In this case, archivists determine the basic collection scope for Gaoqian through participatory observation, interviews with the villagers, oral history and some other methods. The detailed description schema was made for different types of materials. It is required to respect the copyright of all the participators in the project, no matter they are researchers or villagers.
After the case, colleagues can discuss together and give their own experience and thinking. Maybe the full transparency of archivists in participatory community archiving does not exist. it is necessary to acknowledge the nontransparency and to document how and why it come to exist.
Tianjiao Qi
School of Information Resource Management, Renmin University of China
AutoCAD for Archivists
The Pop-Up Session I propose is called AutoCAD for Archivists and the purpose is to introduce archivists to computer-aided design and drafting (CAD or CADD) software. Though it is often discussed academically, rarely do archivists or records managers have the opportunity to learn how to work with design files in their native environments.
Most commercial CAD courses are directed toward architects, engineers, and other design professionals who use these programs, and exhaust all of their bells and whistle, from a drafter's perspective. The intent of this session is to teach the program from an archivist's perspective. Attendees will first receive an introduction to CAD file types (.dwg and .dfx). We will proceed through AutoDesk's AutoCAD program, opening files and identifying the features most important to an archivist's needs. Emphasis will be placed on troubleshooting errors, such as how to print and close files.
No experience is required.
We will close the session by delving into the design software, Revit, which is surpassing vector based CAD. Revit is a modeling software program founded on the fundamentals of database systems. We will explore the basics of opening files and exporting views and sheets from Revit to AutoCAD.
Joanna Groberg
Georgetown University
Beyond Regional Borders: Envisioning a National Archival Finding Aid Network
Due to unforeseen circumstances, this proposal was withdrawn by the proposer.
Bolstering Archivists' Research, Data, Evaluation Activities in Conversation with an SAA Task Force
Archivists make strategic decisions with human and material resources by employing accurate data informed by our long-standing principles of practice. SAA, NAGARA, and COSA members and individuals adjacent to archival work will find in this session an inclusive space for discussing new and existing models for benchmarking, gathering, and presenting data about archival activities purposefully and convincingly. While participants will explore insights from particular Task Force assignments completed (interviewing and articulating user personas, drafting a research agenda, suggesting new data partners, referencing existing datasets) our primary purpose will be to discuss and articulate concerns and goals for conducting research in diverse repository settings and environments. What values statements about archives in particular settings can managers cite when framing reports of the collection- and people-facing activities performed on a daily basis? To bolster executive-level and public appreciation of the transformative work archivists do, and grow support for ethical archival labor, archivists may be already combining tools such as activity sequences and Logic Models, with data from recent efforts defining archival public services, collection holdings, and the makeup of our profession (most notably A*CENSUS). In charging a Task Force on Research / Data, and Evaluation over 2017-2018 to recommend a sustainable program for coordinating and conducting research about the archival profession, SAA leaders invited a conversation about future directions and actions. In this session, Task Force members will facilitate a participatory conversation about the need(s) for better data, usage scenarios for such data, and possible mechanisms for collecting and applying data for both research goals and advocacy/stewardship goals.
Sarah Buchanan
University of Missouri
Dan Noonan
The Ohio State University
Can They Get Here from There? Bringing Online Researchers to the Reading Room
Is your website a tool capable of converting online browsers into reading room researchers? How do you know?
Start by comparing your website to a set of guidelines. This session presents the Archives Research Preparation Online (ARPO) Index, a framework for evaluating archival webpages in the context of how thoroughly a researcher may prepare online for an on-site research visit.
This session discusses the ARPO Index two sections:
Audience participation will be encouraged through discussion and Q&A. This session is perfect for anyone whose archives have public webpages and encourage researchers to use their collections.
Come join us for this interactive session. You'll leave the session having completed a benchmark evaluation of your website that you can use to gather support for your next redesign or the implementation of useful tools.
Scott Pitol
University of Illinois at Chicago Archives
Computational Treatments of Archival Collections that Promote New Modes of Transparency and Access
An earlier pop-up session was held at the 2016 SAA Conference on the theme of "Archival Records in the Age of Big Data", related to the increasing use of computational methods with cultural collections (see: Computational Archival Science portal at: http://dcicblog.umd.edu/cas/). This was followed up in December 2017 by an unconference workshop organized by Harvard Libraries (https://saaers.wordpress.com/2018/05/08/diving-into-computational-archival-science/). Our proposed pop-up session highlights the latest developments in this space over the last six months and brings together practicing archivists and librarians, technologists, and educators from Harvard Library, U. Maryland, and the National Archives.
The presenters will highlight concrete applications, projects and demos of how automated computational treatments can enhance the traditional processing of archival workflows. Examples include:
A lively interaction with the audience is expected on the potential to promote transparency and access through new modes of archival processing and access.
Mark Conrad
National Archives and Records Administration
Daina Bouquin, Head Librarian
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Digital Transparency: Record(s) Creation, Records Appraisal, and Archival Appraisal
One major goal of records management and archival administration is to facilitate transparency of the operations of records creators within a legally defined framework. The foundation of such transparency is undoubtedly records, and currently, digital records, and for transparency to be possible, records must be created, known to the records professionals, accessible and trustworthy. However, do we, the records professionals, really know when a digital record is created, where, how, and why? Do we consider creation in business systems or equate creation with capture in records management systems, i.e., under the control of the RM program? How should we react to the situation where the information or data in business systems obviously qualifies the definition of records, or possesses the utility of operational transparency, but are not called records and are not clearly known to the RM program? Have technological developments, such as cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things etc., impacted on the RM professionals’ ability to participate in digital records creation? If we don’t have a clear understanding of records creation, how about records appraisal, the activity results in retentions? If we don’t have a comprehensive retention schedule, how about archival appraisal, which is responsible for keeping a representative record of the records creator? Based on observations from records literature, this session intends to bring these questions to the attention of session attendees, who can be anyone who cares about the forward path of our profession. It is highly hoped that comments and suggestions can be generated by live discussions during the session, in particular, those that shed light on the question whether or not we should care about the creation of digital records to the extend that we know the creation of every record, at any time, in any information system, or on any technological platform.
Sherry L. Xie
Renmin University of China
Digitization IS/NOT Preservation
“Digitization is not preservation” is an oft repeated mantra on social media, a quick-fire response from heritage professionals to media stories declaring that at-risk materials have been digitally reformatted and thereby preserved. As recently as April of 2018, the cries went out on Twitter, when Google announced the release of high-resolution scans of 25 at-risk historical sites (which mimicked a similar outcry in 2016 when Google announced the release of high-resolution scans of art works). This session will allow practitioners to present their own approach to the issue, through case-studies and reasoned debate about the current state of best practice on whether digitization is, could be, or should be a means of preservation.
This session is intended for practitioners of all experience levels who have some responsibility for digitization, preservation, or providing access to collections. The session will be a lighting talk format followed by questions and discussion.
Fletcher Durant
University of Florida
Siobhan Hagan
DCPL
Maureen Callahan
Smith College
Documenting the Animal: The Surprising Challenges in Archives
This pop-up session was inspired by the Libraries' Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives CLIR grant recently awarded. The grant will fund the digitization of materials from the Libraries' nationally significant animal rights and welfare collections, as well as materials from its partnering institution, the ASPCA, which holds records that document its history as a national leader in animal protection.
NCSU Libraries collects in agricultural innovations; animal rights and welfare; zoological health; and veterinary medicine. While these areas may seem complementary, and all relate to animals, we have identified numerous examples of deep conflicts inherent to these subjects.
The questions we hope to address include: How do we document diverse viewpoints about animals when there are polarizing ideas about their role (and their rights) both at our own institution and beyond? How do you ensure equal access to records that document animal protection even when donors express concerns that their records/collections are open to all researchers and their detractors can access them? How can equal access to the archival record be ensured, while also encouraging new donations? To what extent do we have an obligation to collect opposing points of view (for instance, anti-animal rights), and what are the potential consequences with donors? In what way do advocacy and scholarship become conflicting goals?
The intended audience of this session are those archivists who are interested in ethics in archives and the challenges of donor relations. The session will also be of interest to archivists who work in land grant universities or other institutions with a strong collecting emphasis in agriculture and science.
Gwynn Thayer
NCSU Libraries, Special Collections Research Center
Eli Brown
Acting Associate Director for Collections and Research Services
NCSU Libraries
Doing Good Deeds: A Working Session on Crafting a Transparent Deed of Gift
When was the last time you updated your deed of gift? Do your potential donors find it intimidating? What do you do to make the process of transferring ownership transparent to potential donors -- or do you even ask for transfer of ownership at all? How has your institution adapted your deed of gift to address digital records or new models of custody?
While virtually every collecting archives uses some version of a deed of gift, we never seem to talk about it as a profession. In this pop-up session, we want to hear from you! This working session will begin by using digital polling software to survey session attendees about their current deed of gift practices. Following polling, moderators will share their experience updating deeds of gift, reviewing the document with potential donors, and partnering with community archives on joint ownership. Attendees will then split into small groups for guided discussion to be followed by a larger group discussion regarding current deed of gift practices. Survey results and discussion notes will be made available after the session.
Sarah Bost
University of Arkansas Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture
Kate Hujda
University of Minnesota Libraries Archives and Special Collections
Community Archivist, TBD
Evolving an A/V Education Infrastructure: The Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellowship
In 2017, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting launched a collaboration with five universities and five public broadcasting stations to support audiovisual preservation training for graduate students. The Fellowship funded digitization equipment at the universities and week-long training sessions for the Fellows and their mentors to teach them the fundamentals of A/V digital preservation, followed by ten-week funded internships during which Fellows digitally preserved station content and created training documents for the digitization equipment.
In this panel, participants in the Fellowship will present on the process of learning about audiovisual preservation through institutional collaboration and hands-on experience. The presentation will include an overview of the project's achievements and challenges, discuss lessons learned for collaborative training initiatives, and consider whether the Fellowship format is viable in the long term for providing graduate students a solid grounding of experience in handling specialized at-risk formats. The session will conclude with a discussion of the sustainable growth of the audiovisual training programs at the partner universities, and the prospective long-term impact of the program on the participating schools, stations, and students.
Rebecca Fraimow
WGBH
Sarah Buchanan
University of Missouri
Tanya Yule
San Jose State University/Bay Area Video Coalition
Dena Schulze
UNC Chapel Hill/WUNC
Evelyn Cox
University of Oklahoma/Oklahoma Educational Television Authority
Virginia Angles
Clayton State University
Getting a Job like a Boss
This session would be aimed at current students and recent graduates. Getting a job will be their top priority and the session will give them tips on how to find one in this tough job market. Topics that will be covered include writing a cover letter and resume, where to search, networking skills, and interview tips since these skills are often overlooked or not covered well in graduate schools. This session will be a combination of lecture and active participation this will be especially helpful when covering interview skills. During this section, I will ask for a few volunteers to take part in mini mock interviews where they will given roles and play out a part of the interview. Then the group will discuss how the interview could have been improved.
Collette McDonough
Kettering Foundation
Global and Transformative Access to Digital Archives with the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF)
This session will serve as an introduction of the International Image Interoperability Framework (http://iiif.io/), or IIIF, to the archives community. IIIF is a community focused on developing shared technical solutions to support delivery of and access to image-based materials of any format (including photographs, digitized manuscripts and archival materials, born-digital records, and more) in standards-compliant ways that encourage their adaptability and reuse across a variety of contexts. IIIF has made it easier for dozens of institutions to deliver their collections online, to develop engagement strategies for those collections, and to enable new forms of research.
IIIF is being broadly adopted by libraries and museums, and also holds great potential for the archival community. This session will thus focus on three major topics: a high-level overview of the IIIF community and technologies; why IIIF is valuable to the archives community as a means to improve delivery and access; and specific examples of projects that have applied IIIF to improve delivery of and access to archival collections. These examples may include:
The session will proceed either as a special focus session or a lightning talk session depending on the number of confirmed presenters, which we are currently actively soliciting from the IIIF community. Anyone working to provide online access to archival collections would benefit from attending, including curators, digital repository managers, and public services staff.
Mark A. Matienzo
Stanford University Libraries
Josh Schneider
Stanford University Libraries
Ben Brumfield
Brumfield Labs
Sara Brumfield
Brumfield Labs
Toby Reiter
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
Herding Cats: Managing Grant Funded and Distributed Collaborative Digitization Projects
Writing and implementing large grant projects presents challenges and rewards that are compounded when working on a collaborative initiative. In 2017 the Herding Cats: Managing Grant Funded and Distributed Collaborative Digitization Projects
Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library was awarded a collaborative grant from CLIR to work with Spelman College, Morehouse College and the Digital Library of Georgia to digitize, create metadata and develop a shared online portal of over 700,000 pages of historic publications and photographs. Working with partners from four institutions in different locations and a commercial vendor requires meticulous tracking, shared procedures, and effective strategies for asynchronous communication. Project partners will provide a quick overview of the project, showcase the newly accessible digital content, and lead an audience-involved discussion about project management strategies. Topics to be covered include: methods for developing a proposal, working with vendors, developing digitization and metadata standards, communication and tracking strategies, and disseminating and broadening access to digital content.
Intended audience: Archivists involved or interested in managing collaborative grant projects.
Sheila McAlister
Digital Library of Georgia
Holly Smith
Spelman College
Aletha Moore
Atlanta University Center
It’s MY Job: Managers and the Ethics of Inclusion
What should a manager do about diversity and inclusion? What can a manager do to move beyond basic concepts to a fully inclusive work environment?
In any workplace, managerial responsibilities go far beyond approving vacation time and holding meetings. Many HR departments set expectations for managers to embrace and promote “diversity and inclusion” initiatives, but what does that really mean within the context or our own professional ethics? How do we practice the ethical management of our programs so that staff, researchers and donors feel and see inclusion in our spaces?
D&I for a manager can't just be limited to the hiring process, which may occur infrequently, but should be integrated into everyday work, from strategic planning and individual goal-setting, to creating an office culture and customer service ethic that is truly welcoming. Setting an example or leading the charge affects all areas of archival enterprise: acquisitions, arrangement and description practices, access services, and most importantly, people. Our staff, our donors, and our patrons can all benefit from practices that create space for creativity and reflection. Managers should be the first to embrace these challenges and engage in whatever difficult conversations are needed in our own institutions to rethink what diversity and inclusion means to us, and how to move beyond basic concepts to an ethos fully integrated with our job responsibilities.
This session will be a discussion session directed at managers (though all are welcome to share their perspectives). Participants will discuss the professional ethics inherent in management, brainstorm managerial tasks that have explicit or hidden diversity and inclusion implications, share the questions we have found ourselves expected to answer, and discuss what the goals can and should be within different institutional contexts.
Courtney Chartier
Rose Library, Emory University
Labor Practices in Archives
Archivists entering the labor force in the decade following the 2008 financial crisis face starkly different economic realities than previous generations. Ours is an economic landscape filled with uniquely exploitative labor practices, such as unpaid internships and volunteer positions in lieu of paid entry-level jobs, and other modes of precarity such as the persistent field-wide epidemic of temporary, part-time, and term-limited positions. These practices have a negative impact on everyone involved—workers, institutions, collections, donors, and users. However, while they cause distress and insecurity for archivists at all stages in their career, they disproportionately affect recent graduates and early-career workers and pose yet another barrier to entry in a field already severely lacking in diversity.
If we as a profession are truly committed to the diversity, equity, inclusion, and sustainability of our field, it is imperative to make visible and minimize our reliance on these harmful practices. This panel responds to the call put out in OCLC's Research and Learning Agenda for Archives, Special, and Distinctive Collections in Research Libraries (2017) to, “communicate [our] value and advocate for the resources to support our programs.”
By highlighting ongoing community and coalition building efforts that aim to collectively support early-career workers affected by exploitative labor practices and job precarity, panelists will shed light on this subject from the vantage point of workers in various stages of their careers and specializing in different facets of archival work. In addition to addressing topics such as unpaid internships, temporary positions, itinerant labor, leveraging unions, and fostering supportive local and national community organizations, this panel will highlight the panelists' projects, research, and community-building efforts in these areas, as well as brainstorm additional approaches to effectively communicate and advocate for the value of our labor. The intended audience includes students, early-career archivists, supervisors, and hiring managers.
Courtney Dean
UCLA Library Special Collections
Steve Duckworth
Oregon Health and Science University
Rachell Mandell
USC
Margaret Hughes
UCLA
Let's Plan Together!
A global trend of journaling, list-making, and calendar planning is currently underway. Bullet journals have played a significant role in this. Since their creation in 2014 by designer Ryder Carroll, they have become immensely popular. Moreover, the very personal act of bullet journaling—something one does with a pen on paper—has lept into other media, as journalers share designs, successes, and failures online. Many of us in the archives profession may be engaged in the bullet journal craze ourselves.
I propose a pop up session that looks at bullet journals (and the wider planner trend) in terms of several interpretational lenses: the historical precursors of bullet journals (from scrapbooks to journals) that exist within archival collections; the gendered dynamics emerging in bullet journaling (as well its historical predecessors); how professionals are using planners and journals in their work life; and the opportunity bullet journaling presents for archival outreach.
Other areas to explore around this topic are the tension between public/private, work life/home life, aesthetics, the planner as student record, collaboration possibilities, social gatherings such as planner lunches for library staff or patrons, and event and outreach inspiration - for example creating videos for YouTube using archival material in the style of bullet journal videos.
This panel session would bring together presenters to talk and lead discussion about how bullet journals provide new possibilities for outreach and community building, collection development, and exploring archival materials through a new lens. The session will provide attendees with a new perspective on collections, outreach, and their own note-taking habits. The audience for the session is those who currently use a bullet journal at work, those interested in doing so, or those who are interested in learning about this trend and how it links to historic objects.
Greta Kuriger Suiter
MIT
No Small Parts: Fundamental Collaboration in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative History Project
This session introduces the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), a partnership consisting of the World Health Organization, Rotary International, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United Nations Children's Fund, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that seeks to eradicate polio worldwide. Based at the CDC, the GPEI History Project ensures the preservation of materials related to the history of global polio eradication and the partnership. Led by the GPEI History Project Archivist with commentary by the Project Oral Historian, the purpose of this session is to focus on the archival component of the project by highlighting the imperativeness of the collaborative efforts involved.
The GPEI History Project Archivist has three objectives: identify existing archival collections held by the GPEI partners; organize and preserve GPEI records; and collect and preserve GPEI-related materials from individuals who have been or are currently involved in polio eradication. Collaboration is essential while working with the archivists and respective archives of the other GPEI partners to bolster their polio-specific collections; establishing and maintaining fruitful relationships with donors and content creators; and working in tandem with the GPEI History Project Oral Historian to supplement each other's work by weaving firsthand accounts and primary resources.
The session will further explore the deliverables, approaches, and challenges associated with this project while pointing to successful collaboration as the key facilitator. The speaker will also invite attendees to break into groups, introduce their current projects, and brainstorm different ways they could hypothetically collaborate to support each other's work, showing the importance of communication, creativity, and engagement. This session is intended to be of use to all archivists, but might be particularly pertinent for lone arrangers and those working on contract-based assignments whose ability to merge disciplines and collaborate with outside professionals and agencies could prove especially advantageous.
Laura Frizzell
David J. Sencer CDC Museum, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Hana Crawford, Oral Historian
David J. Sencer CDC Museum, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Partnering with Artists to Create and Access Living Archives
The purpose of this session is to bring out the challenges in creating and managing archives of living artists, especially those in the performing arts—dance, theatre, performance art; and the visual arts—fine arts, design, architecture--and to explore creative ways in which archivists can partner with artists, not only to document their activities and legacy, but to facilitate access to the archives for the purpose of creating new works and outreach. More and more, artists are thinking of their archives as a resource and an expression of their legacies, and incorporating their archives in works. Examples include the archives and archivists (who are potential participants) of Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, Trisha Brown Dance Company, site-specific performance artists such as Ann Carlson. More common today in museum exhibition practices is the adoption of including archival materials shown in vitrines to provide context to visual artists’ works, such as was seen in the exhibition on Gertrude Stein and her family’s preferences in collecting art, first shown at SF MOMA, then traveled to the Grand Palais in Paris and The Metropolitan Museum in New York, “The Stein’s Collect.”
Questions that can be explored may include:
What new practices in accessioning, preserving, describing and providing access to archival materials will archivists need to adopt in order to manage and facilitate living archives?
How can the performative aspects of archival practices align with and enhance artists’ abilities to utilize their own archives as a creative resource, and at the same time allow the archivist to document, preserve and describe the materials and activities that are being generated?
Intended audience: archivists of visual and performing arts individuals and organizations; artists.
How the session will proceed: Case studies presented, followed by Q&A discussion.
Genie Guerard
Curator / Manuscripts Librarian
UCLA Library Special Collections
Responsibility to Remember: How GDPR Impacts Digital Archives
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect on May 25, 2018. Over the past two years, many global brands in financial services, consumer goods, pharmaceuticals as well as charitable foundations and academic institutions have invested significant resources to improve their data management practices. Hopefully most organizations that are subject to the harmonized data protection laws completed the necessary actions to protect the personal information of living natural persons (“data subjects:”) residing in the European Union (EU).
Intended for all archivists, this session provides a tutorial on the purpose, scope and major requirements of the GDPR for archivists who are wondering if, how and when it may apply to their repository. A representative of Preservica, a UK-based digital preservation software solution company, will share how it updated its processes, procedures and documentation to comply with requirements of the law as both a data controller and data processor.
The session will then pivot from the GDPR implementation focus on processing consent and data requests and the means to dispose of sensitive data, to an overview on potential implications of the regulation for digital archives in non-EU countries. Specific derogations or special conditions listed in the regulation, such as historical or scientific research, statistical processing or archiving, may provide a lawful basis for processing sensitive data but only time will tell how enforcement will be handled.
Commentary on how US privacy and security laws are changing will be shared.
Following an overview of responsibilities associated with ensuring the repository knows what personal information it holds on EU residents and where the data lives in the digital ecosystem, session leaders will facilitate a group discussion to explore the capabilities and issues that archives need to face to comply with evolving global data privacy regulations.
Sarit Hand
Associated Press
Lori Ashley
Preservica
The FOLIO Project and Archives: Open Source and Open Process
FOLIO is an open source community effort to build an innovation platform for libraries. The FOLIO platform provides a construct for building and reusing software modules for descriptive metadata management, workflow development, and data and service integration across heterogeneous systems in use in libraries, archives, and special collections. A core suite of FOLIO services has been developed and will undergo beta testing at several institutions this year.
In early 2018, the FOLIO Product Council formed a Special Collections & Archives Working Group (SC&A WG) in response to questions about FOLIO from the SC&A community. The formation of the WG reflected the general recognition that traditional library systems are not good solutions for SC&A and that the needs of the SC&A community need to be represented in the FOLIO project. The current WG members have identified some SC&A-specific issues that need to be represented in FOLIO's development cycle, but recognize that they need input from the larger SC&A community.
The proposed session will cover three things: update the archives community on the purpose, status, and achievements of the FOLIO Project; highlight FOLIO's current relationship to special collections and archives; and solicit input from SC&A community members on features, functionalities, and tie-ins (e.g. with existing archival management systems) that they would like to see in FOLIO. The session's structure will encourage participation of the archives community to shape FOLIO's development in ways that support gaps in current work and available tools. Prior to the conference, we will create and advertise an open document where community members can post ideas, suggestions, and comments. During the session, we will review and augment the growing document and hone next steps for developing an SC&A presence in FOLIO.
Erin Faulder
Cornell University Library
Mike Thuman
Arkivum
Sarah Schmidt
Duke University
The Messy Work of Database Migrations
Moving from one database to another is anything but a smooth transition. A panel of archivists will share their experience of cleaning data, organizing and “packing” finding aids, and migrating them from one database to another. As with a household move, we encountered cluttered closets, broken items, and long lost treasures we forgot we owned. In our commitment to transparency, we will discuss the real and arduous challenges we encountered in our database migrations and will share our programming fixes, plans for standardizing our data, and lessons we learned along the way. No archives have completely perfect finding aids which can cause database migration to be a seemingly impossible task. This panel's goal is to candidly share the hurdles we encountered and solutions we implemented in our own database migrations in order to make yours less challenging.
This panel format pop-up will present on a number of databases from which we migrated from including Archivists' Toolkit, Archon, ReDiscovery, and Homegrown Databases into Archives Space. We will offer our solutions to commonly encountered challenges and pitfalls and show helpful tips and tools. We will share lessons learned and solicit a robust question and answer period in order to best address unique audience inquiries. We encourage anyone who is thinking about a database migration, completed one and may have insight to share during our Q & A, or anywhere in between to attend our session. In addition to our panel presentations, we will highlight a newly created Awesome Archives Space List that can serve as a wonderful resource tool for those in the database migration market.
Christina Luers
William and Mary
Adam Strohm
Illinois Institute of Technology
Margaret Kidd
Virginia Commonwealth Univeristy
Justin Dalton
College of William and Mary
Jane Labarbara
West Virginia University
We Are History Keepers! An Inclusive Approach to Archiving the Histories of Washington’s Local Ethnic and Immigrant Communities
How will stories of 21st century life that more accurately document the racially and ethnically diverse history of our regions be conveyed to future generations? What are archival repositories doing to ensure these histories are preserved while also going beyond beyond the traditional model of collection acquisition that can be colonialist in its approach? One way of doing this is by working with communities to help them preserve and promote their own cultural heritage through instruction, sharing information on archival best practices and available resources.
This session will discuss the community archiving workshop, We Are History Keepers!- developed by archivists and librarians at the University of Washington in collaboration with King County's Ethnic Heritage Council in 2016. What began as a one-off event in November 2016 quickly emerged into regularly scheduled programming for more than 150 participants from communities around the Puget Sound with another session scheduled in Fall 2018. These free, day-long workshops, designed for local ethnic and immigrant communities and families, provide basic instruction and resources on documenting and preserving family and community history through organizing personal papers and organizational records, conducting oral history projects, curating exhibits, and preserving photos and audio/visual material. Panelists involved in the workshops will talk about how the program was developed, plans to sustain it, session structure and content, and lessons lessons learned throughout the process. Specific topics will range from working collaboratively with community members to plan workshops, designing instruction sessions for attendees with varied levels of familiarity with archival practices, fielding questions on the fly, and future challenges in community archiving. The intended audience for this session is anyone interested and/or involved in the development of community workshops on archival best practices.
(We Are History Keepers website: https://wearehistorykeepers.wordpress.com/)
Crystal Rodgers
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections
Anne Jenner
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections
Emily Dominick
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections
Conor Casey
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections
John Bolcer
University of Washington Libraries Special Collections
White Institution: Black Archive.
Why did Black Northwestern Alumni demand that NU Archives aggressively pursue the papers of its Black alumni, faculty, staff and current students? Why did Northwestern acquiesce and create a temporary position entitled the Archivist for the Black Experience to spearhead The NUBAA Archive? Why is the implementation and success of The NUBAA Archive important to track and document?
Northwestern Alumni, led by NARA trained archivist and SAA member Lauren Lowery, met with NU Archivist Kevin Leonard in Spring of 2012 to discuss the history of Black students at Northwestern and realized the information and artifacts compiled was disappointingly limited. Since its founding in 1851, Northwestern has had many prominent Black Alumni matriculate, however the majority of these outstanding graduates including former Chicago Mayor Harold Washington and Actor and Activist Harry Lennix do not have their papers housed at Northwestern. Is the Black History of a predominately white institution valuable? What happens to the public record and to future research when these stories and artifacts are not preserved and respected at the highest level?
This panel discussion includes the individuals outside of Northwestern who contributed to the encouragement and development of The NUBAA Archives. Professionals from Northwestern University Library, Shorefront Legacy Center and the Black Metropolis Research Consortium were all instrumental in encouraging and consulting with the cofounders of the archive Dr. Jeffrey Sterling and Lauren Lowery. The panel will explore the implications and future of this archive and how it might impact institutions and the archive profession globally.
Lauren G. Lowery
Modern Dance Music Research and Archiving Foundation
Jeffrey Sterling
Northwestern University Black Alumni Association
Dino Robinson
Shorefront Legacy Center
Andrea Jackson
Black Metropolis Research Consortium
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