Denise Rayman, Candidate for Treasurer

BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT

I entered the archives field through student employment and from the start have found it to be a congenial profession with meaningful work. I graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Information Sciences in 2013, and while I was there, I worked at the University Archives and the American Library Association Archives.

I started working at Indiana University Indianapolis (formerly Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis) in 2015 and I am currently Digital Archivist and Interim Director of the Ruth Lilly Special Collections and Archives. One of our collecting foci is philanthropy in America. Our most-used collection is 990-PF tax forms, the required yearly tax filing for private foundations. My knowledge of the history of philanthropy from working with researchers and the records of nonprofit organizations informs how I approach nonprofit finances in my service work. I also teach as an adjunct lecturer in the Indiana University Indianapolis Department of Library and Information Sciences, where I teach the archives internship course as well as Social Issues in Archives, which I re-developed in Spring 2024. I also previously re-developed and taught Archives and Records Management, the introductory archival science course for our program.

I served as Treasurer of the Society of Indiana Archivists from 2019-2023 and as a member of the SAA Finance Committee from 2020-2023. I have written and received two project grants for my archives: one funding web archiving to document COVID-19 in Central Indiana, and the other funding data transfer plus arrangement and description of all records housed in obsolete digital media in our collections. Along with my colleague Lydia Spotts, in 2023, I received an SAA Foundation grant titled "Graduate School Archival Internships: Exploring the Efficacy," which funded a study on the impact of internships on archival careers. I am also an SAA Digital Archives Specialist.

DIVERSITY STATEMENT (Each candidate prepared a diversity statement according to SAA guidelines.)

My working definition of "diversity, equity, and inclusion" is to promote and support historically excluded groups in our profession as well as in the records we hold. As a white woman in a majority white and majority woman profession, I am aware that I hold a tremendous privilege. No one questions my presence working in an archives. As a bearer of this privilege, it is my duty to support and amplify fellow and emerging archivists from underrepresented backgrounds and advocate for the ethical collecting and reparative processing of records from historically excluded groups. I see my work through the lens of "ethics of care," as presented by Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor, both as an archivist and as an archival science educator. I openly embrace that my work is not and will never be impartial and approach it from an emotive, caretaking perspective instead. When I recognize biases in myself, I recenter on this perspective to re-direct and reconsider my thinking.

Some of the most meaningful work I have done includes diversifying the syllabi of my classes by targeting readings from archivists of color, mentoring student employees of color through the IUI Wilma Gibbs Moore Fellowship in Library and Information Science, and co-writing a grant to create the online collection "Urban Displacement and the Making of a University" which documents how my university acquired its land and, in doing so, decimated the oldest Black neighborhood in Indianapolis. The treasurer has a key role to play in the DEI of any nonprofit organization, but especially in professional membership organizations. Ensuring the fees set by the organization balance accessibility and sustainability is an act supporting diversity: it is useless to say you want a diverse body if people who want to join and attend conferences cannot afford to. When I served on the SAA Finance Committee, I learned that running hybrid conferences is expensive and has hidden costs, but it is vital for the future. Ensuring we can fund virtual attendance options for our annual conference and other section events is a critical way to promote diversity in the field, especially for archivists who are unable to travel due to disability and/or parental or other caretaking duties. Another often overlooked aspect of nonprofit finance and DEI is investments. A nonprofit organization has a duty to seek ethical investment strategies; a historical example is the wide divestment of nonprofits from South Africa during apartheid.

QUESTION POSED BY TREASURER

One of SAA's core organizational values is "ensuring transparency, accountability, integrity, professionalism, and social responsibility in conducting its activities." SAA treasurer supports the financial good standing of the organization, while balancing investment in member needs, short-term opportunities, and long-term sustainable initiatives. As treasurer, what measures would you take to support good financial standing and how would you communicate with SAA members about SAA's current financial situation and its impact on decision-making?

CANDIDATE'S RESPONSE

Professional membership organizations like ours are a unique type of nonprofit organization. Unlike many nonprofits, we appear to serve ourselves instead of any obvious philanthropic mission. However, membership in a professional organization is a concrete way to support the future of our profession, representing goals independent of our employers, our governments, or our consumers. As our national professional organization, SAA is an important home for us to develop standards and shared tools, educate and support other archivists, and advocate in political and legal arenas such as records retention and intellectual property. It is important to maintain our organization for the long term, and I see financial sustainability as an act of preservation, both for archives and archivists. Keeping SAA on a sound financial footing would be my leading priority as a treasurer.

As a membership organization, our primary funding is membership dues, supported by other charges primarily paid by members, such as annual conference registration, education offerings, and publications. SAA must strike a fine balance between fees that are enough to allow us to continue doing our work, including fair and equitable pay for our nonprofit professional employees, and fees that make our organization accessible to all archivists who want to join, including those without institutional funding. Dues and fees should be evaluated regularly by the board, and the recent bylaw amendments now allow the board to set membership dues without a member vote. However, this does not mean membership should no longer have active participation in the financial process. Finding the right balance on dues and fees requires frank and frequent communication with membership. I would communicate with membership in a variety of ways other than the formal yearly written report and presentation at annual meeting: inclusion of information in newsletters, blog posts, and "Office Hour" style virtual meetings where members could ask questions. It is the treasurer's duty to work with membership to help them understand the organization's financial structure and situation and give them full insight into participating in SAA's financial future.

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