Alison Clemens, Candidate for Council

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Alison Clemens

Access Strategist

she/they

 

As of the end of the 2022 fiscal year, SAA had 5,611 members. I’d love to have the opportunity to consider ways for as many of those members—and new and returning ones!—as possible to engage in the work of realizing SAA’s Strategic Plan and DEIA Work Plan.

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BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT

I am the access strategist at Beinecke Library, where I identify and implement strategies to provide seamless, meaningful, and ethical access to Yale’s special collections. I previously served in head of processing and archivist roles at Yale. Throughout my ten years at the university, I have become increasingly interested in user experience and ethical access considerations in cultural heritage. This professional interest extends to the organizations in which I participate: I was particularly pleased to have recently co-authored a successful proposal to create an SAA User Experience Section. Beyond my areas of professional practice, I am dedicated to supporting my fellow cultural heritage workers. I strive to incorporate antiracist and anti-oppressive practices throughout my work, and the greatest pleasures of my career so far include convening the Abolition in Special Collections group of the Abolitionist Library Association, leading a group to establish a scholarship for BIPOC students at the University of Texas iSchool, charging and serving on Yale’s Reparative Archival Description Working Group, and serving on the SAA Archival Workers Emergency Fund Organizing Committee.

In SAA I have been honored to serve in formal leadership positions throughout the Society. Some personal highlights include serving on the 2022 Nominating Committee and in chair positions on the Membership Committee, Manuscript Repositories Section, Committee on Education, and Archival History Section. I am also active in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the American Library Association, where I serve on the Diversity Committee and have served on an RBMS conference planning committee, the RBMS Membership Committee, and a task force to outline core competencies in special collections librarianship. Outside of SAA and RBMS, I have been actively involved in informal working groups, including the DLF Born Digital Access Working Group and the Term Labor Best Practices Working Group, which authored the Best Practices for Archival Term Positions.

DIVERSITY STATEMENT

Each candidate prepared a diversity statement according to SAA guidelines.

Addressing “diversity,” broadly conceived, is challenging in such a short response, and I think that it will be more useful for me to address just one of the prompts provided for this statement: “How have your own personal, academic, and professional experiences and expertise prepared you to advocate for inclusive, equitable practices?”

I am a white person with class privilege working at a very well-resourced institution. In my work at Yale, in SAA, and in other professional spaces, I try to continually think about power: its concentration, its disbursement, and its functions. I am committed to using the power I have and to which I am adjacent to work toward equity and justice (a lifelong and a longer-than-life endeavor). I am skilled at navigating complex bureaucracies, and I try to use that power for good at every opportunity.

I have made it a priority to facilitate and participate in groups that advance what I see as key priorities for our field. I’ll provide just a few examples: my work on Yale Library’s Reparative Archival Description Working Group (RAD), my leadership of a scholarship for BIPOC students at the University of Texas iSchool, and my facilitation of the Abolition in Special Collections group of the Abolitionist Library Association.

I charged and served as a founding member of Yale Library’s RAD Working Group, which created local recommendations regarding principles and practices for reparative archival description. RAD has prioritized community consultation, transparency, cultural humility, and an explicit dedication to dismantling white supremacy, and it’s been an honor to work in service of the group’s goals. Outside of Yale, I recently co-led a successful effort to establish a scholarship for BIPOC students at the University of Texas at Austin’s iSchool where I received my library degree. My colleagues and I heeded a call from current iSchool students to establish this scholarship, and I’m so pleased that our fundraising efforts will result in an annual financial award for a BIPOC student. Finally, in 2020 I co-founded the Abolition in Special Collections (AbSC) subgroup of the Abolitionist Library Association which strives to divest from all forms of policing and the prison industrial complex (PIC) in libraries and invest instead in our collective liberation. Finding the AbSC community has allowed me and my AbSC colleagues to grow our shared understanding of how the PIC intersects with our work and how we might disrupt and subvert those intersections.

QUESTION POSED BY NOMINATING COMMITTEE

As you look at the SAA Strategic Plan, Work Plan on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA), and the A*CENSUS II report, how do you envision the future of SAA, keeping in mind some of the challenges and/or opportunities the Society should prepare for?

CANDIDATE'S RESPONSE 

The SAA Strategic Plan and the DEIA Work Plan provide tremendously robust, ambitious outlines for SAA’s future. I appreciate their emphasis on supporting SAA members and archival workers, particularly BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and disabled workers. These documents provide a bold vision for SAA’s future, but how do we get there in practice? How might SAA and the profession look different fifteen years from now?

SAA, like all organizations, is invested in its own survival and is resistant to disruption and structural change. If I am elected to Council, I will be explicitly responsible for the stability and survival of SAA. But I hope to continuously find opportunities to ask: what is serving us (archival workers and current, past, and potential SAA members) about SAA’s structure? What is restricting us? How can we look at SAA’s structure to see how the organization is and isn’t making the vision outlined in the Strategic Plan and DEIA Work Plan possible? How is and isn’t our shared professional culture empowering us to pursue the future we want to live in?

As of the end of the 2022 fiscal year, SAA had 5,611 members. I’d love to have the opportunity to consider ways for as many of those members—and new and returning ones!—as possible to engage in the work of realizing SAA’s Strategic Plan and DEIA Work Plan. I appreciate that there’s been an effort to assign ownership of items on the DEIA Work Plan, but how can we avoid having the responsibility for carrying out that work lie on just a few shoulders? This is a real opportunity to consider how we can achieve broad member engagement. Two things come to the front of my mind in thinking about this.

First, I hope that we’ll find opportunities for real and acknowledged contributions to SAA outside of the formal appointment cycle. There are excellent, open opportunities for engagement in SAA sections, but how can we welcome members into the larger work of the Society, for their own benefit and for the benefit of their colleagues? In doing that, how can we bake in inclusive practices, including compensation and acknowledgment for labor? How can we make engagement opportunities broadly available while acknowledging different lived experiences and professional realities?

Second, I hope that in carrying out the Strategic Plan and DEIA Work Plan, SAA will continually center member needs and member support, with a particular eye toward the needs of people underrepresented in the archives profession. As we prioritize goals and figure out how to meet them, how will we center those needs and foster those support structures?

As this statement demonstrates, I have many questions. I have my own ideas about the questions I’ve posed, but I believe that even continually raising these questions will provide a real service to SAA. I hope I have the opportunity to pose them in pursuit of a better shared future for us.

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