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Thank you to everyone who shared and participated in the 2024 Accessibility and Disability Section election call for candidates! We appreciate all seven of the nominations that we received and are glad to see a full slate and another competitive election. The names and statements of the candidates are posted below. Please take a few minutes to review them.
Section members will be voting for:
Ballots will be sent by SAA through Survey Monkey and open from June 24 to July 15.
Talea Anderson, Scholarly Communication Librarian, Washington State University
In my current position, I manage our university’s institutional repository and collaborate with our Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections unit. I’m interested in accessibility issues for both personal and professional reasons and, as such, I’ve participated in various efforts to increase access to the archives. For instance, in 2020-2022, I served on WSU’s Ethical Description Working Group. In that capacity, I helped remediate finding aids to remove harmful language related to disability. Additionally, in 2021, I was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Diversity, Inclusion, and Cultural Heritage—a fellowship designed to increase access to underserved collections. As part of that program, I have collaborated with the Washington State School for the Blind to create an exhibit that highlights the history of tactile print. Overall, I would say that I am interested in strategies for making history accessible by alternative means, drawing on a variety of learning styles and sensory abilities. I would love to further develop these ideas by serving as a Steering Committee member for the Accessibility and Disability Section.
Catherine Lucy, Director of the Carondelet Consolidated Archives, Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet
Bio:
Catherine Lucy is a Certified Archivist who has worked in libraries and archives for over 25 years. She holds an MLIS with an archival studies concentration from San Jose State University. Catherine joined the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in 2018 and serves as the director of their congregational archives located in St. Louis, MO. She is also a part-time librarian/archivist at Missouri Baptist University. Catherine is a member of the Society of American Archivists, Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious, Midwest Archives Conference, and the Association of St. Louis Area Archivists. She is a lifelong St. Louisan and mother of three young adults (including one who is neurodivergent). In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her children and two dogs, traveling, watching movies, working on her family genealogy, and serving on the board of the Carondelet Historical Society.
Statement of Interest:
As someone more recently dealing with an “invisible disability” (fragrance and chemical sensitivities), I have developed great zeal for the cause. I want to learn more and be a better advocate for inclusive work spaces, and I feel that I am a natural fit to serve on the Accessibility and Disability Section Steering Committee. In 2022, I made it a priority to transition my department to a fragrance-free environment. Measures included adopting a fragrance-free policy, switching to fragrance-free hand soap, placing signs in the building, notifying all visitors of the policy in advance, running an air purifier, discontinuing the use of chemical pesticides, and enlisting housekeeping staff to use plain water or unscented cleaning products. When interviewing candidates for two part-time positions in 2022, I also used knowledge gained from an Accessibility and Disability Section webinar to inform prospective candidates of additional accommodations/modifications offered by my organization (ex. flexible hours and modified workstations with adjustable furniture and/or adaptive equipment). As a conference planning volunteer for the 2024 triennial conference of the Archivists for Congregations of Women Religious, I proposed and spearheaded the move towards implementing the organization’s first fragrance-free conference. I believe I can serve the ADS well by representing those with similar sensitivities and continuing my advocacy for fragrance-free/chemical-free work environments.
Anne Marie Hamilton-Brehm, Associate Dean of Library Affairs, Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale
Bio:
Anne Marie Hamilton-Brehm, PhD, CA, is Associate Dean of Southern Illinois University’s Morris Library directing the Special Collections Research Center and overseeing Records Management and the Sharp Museum. After earning her doctorate in Linguistics from the University of Georgia in 2003, she earned her MLIS from the University of Alabama in 2008. Over the past two decades, she has developed digital and archival collections and exhibits for universities and public libraries in Georgia, Tennessee, Nevada, and Illinois. An active member of ALA, SAA, and MAC, she serves on the editorial board of MAC’s Archival Issues.
Statement of interest:
Throughout my career, I have worked for access and accommodation for patrons and staff with disabilities. I have measured offices and provided schematics to architects redesigning work spaces to be ADA compliant and provided technology and software that has enabled staff with hearing loss to continue work on audio projects. I have worked to provide access to professional development for staff regardless of ability or means. With access to professional engagement encumbered by recent legislation in many states, it has never been more crucial to support information professionals at all career stages, particularly colleagues challenged not only by funding, but by the hardship of attending conferences in person. Many such colleagues suffer from disabilities which may be hidden or invisible yet discourage or prevent physical attendance at conferences.
In 2022, I distributed the Survey of Conference Attendance Preferences to document the interest in and need for hybrid options in national and regional conferences, distributed through listservs of ALA and SAA, regional library and archival associations, and related organizations that shared the link with their members. More than 430 completed the survey, and many contributed detailed comments. I reported some preliminary findings relevant to archivists in “User Centered Conferencing for the Future of the Archival Profession” at the 2023 SAA Research Forum: https://www2.archivists.org/am2023/research-forum-2023/agenda#peer. Survey analysis and reporting will continue over the next year. I would be grateful to join the ADS steering committee to learn more about and support its initiatives, particularly mentoring and navigating workplace culture, as I work toward universal access to professional resources for archivists and librarians of diverse abilities.
Ruohua Han, Assistant Professor at the Department of Research Methods and Information Science, Morgridge College of Education, University of Denver
Bio:
Ruohua Han is an early career Assistant Professor at the University of Denver, where she teaches courses in archives and preservation and conducts research on improving the discoverability of the experiences of marginalized communities in institutional archival collections. Since 2022, she has been teaching about accessibility in graduate- level LIS courses and volunteering for the ADS, primarily working on the section’s blog and developing the Conversations in Accessibility interview series. She holds an MS in Management Science (majoring in Archival Science) from Renmin University of China and a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Statement of interest:
My passion for advocating for accessibility in the library and archival field was kindled when I helped to develop and teach a course on the accessibility of library resources during the last year of my PhD program. It was a life-changing experience for me: Ilearned so much about disability, accessibility, and universal design, and that experience brought me to the fantastic work that ADS has done. I started volunteering for ADS, and two years later, I am now responsible for the Conversations in Accessibility interview series for the ADS blog and have become a new assistant professor in LIS at the University of Denver.
I would be honored to become an Early Career Member of the ADS steering committee to continue my work on the ADS blog and advocate for accessibility in archival work and education. I believe incorporating accessibility into LIS curriculums is a vital but often overlooked foundational step for improving the awareness of accessibility issues for emerging LIS professionals. Therefore, as a steering committee member and a faculty member, I would love to guide more LIS students to learn about accessibility and apply that learning to their work. I also hope to inspire more LIS faculty members to advocate for accessibility in their teaching, research, and service. I am incredibly excited about the revision to SAA’s Guidelines for Accessible Archives and the launch of Preserving Disability, and I look forward to contributing to advertising them and using them in my archives classes. Thank you very much for your consideration!
Elizabeth Pineo, PhD student, University of Maryland
Bio:
Elizabeth Pineo (she/her) is a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research explores strategies to increase information access in online music archives for Disabled users. She is passionate about music, disability, and archives, and she has followed these passions to their intersection in the field of information studies, where she aims to build a reality in which archives, the starting points of knowledge construction, are fully accessible to and accurately representative of all people.
Beyond working toward her Ph.D., Elizabeth is the Director of Strategic and Creative Operations at the Including Disability Journal and Global Summit and a cataloger at the Vocal Music Instrumentation Index, a digital archive of Baroque vocal music. She is a classically trained pianist, and she shares her love of music by writing scripts for Classical Bean, an educational YouTube series dedicated to demystifying classical music. In her free time, Elizabeth enjoys learning languages and caring for her ever-growing plant collection. She received her M.L.I.S. from the University of Maryland, College Park and her B.A. in Music from Dickinson College. For more information about her work, visit her website: www.elizabethpineo.com.
Statement:
As a prospective student member of the ADS steering committee, I am enthusiastic about the potential to effect real, positive changes in the lives of Disabled archivists and users. Through my research, I have experience assessing the accessibility of online archive record pages, which has given me a practical, detailed look at the challenges archivists face; it has also motivated me to bring those access discussions to the broader SAA community and archival field.
As a Disabled and Autistic woman, I believe strongly in the transformative power of the human right to information access. But users can only retrieve and use information when it is accessible to them. Right now, that right to information access is impeded because records are not made available in or described in wholly accessible ways. By working with and learning from the other ADS steering committee members, I hope to find practical strategies archivists can use to make that right a reality. In short, I am committed to the work this committee does, and I am motivated to contribute to the SAA's collective efforts to increase accessibility, in all its many forms, within our profession. Thank you for considering my candidacy.
Amanda McGrory, Archivist and Collections Coordinator, United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee
I am the Archivist and Collections Curator for the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, as well as a four-time Paralympian in Track and Field. I’ve been in my current position for four years, and my primary goal over that time has been to increase the representation of disabled athletes and their stories within our collections. As a full-time wheelchair user, I am wholly dedicated to accessibility for all within the archives field, for users and also professionals. I am a current member of the Accessibility and Disability Steering Committee, have contributed to the Guidelines for Accessible Archives working group, and will have a chapter published in forthcoming Preserving Disability book. Within the Olympic & Paralympic Committee, I chair our organization’s disability Community Resource Group, and consult on various accessibility issues. Outside of my roles with the USOPC, I serve as a board member on local and national committees focused on disability, accessibility, and adaptive athletics. I also volunteer with an assortment of adaptive sports organizations, and provide expert analysis for NBC and ESPN on the sport of wheelchair road racing. My professional experience as an archivist in a repository collecting disability history as well as my lived experience as an individual with a disability makes me a great fit for this section with a unique combination of personal and professional knowledge related to accessibility and disability.