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2024-2025 Election: Candidate Bios/Statements
Thank you to all of our excellent candidates for standing in the 2024 Audio and Moving Image Section election. Please take some time to review their candidate statements and get to know them so you can make an informed choice.
You will be voting for:
*Depending on nominations the Steering Committee can include more than two members, but two is the minimum for elections. Since our Section only received three candidate nominations all will be elected. More Steering Committee members can be added if you would like to vote on the ballot with a write-in nominee.
Ballots will be managed by SAA staff through Survey Monkey; keep an eye on your inbox for when the ballot opens!
Chair Candidates
The following candidates are running for the Chair position:
Tanya Yule
Description Services Manager for Archival Control, Hoover Institution, Library & Archives at Stanford University
Tanya Yule is the Description Services Manager for Archival Control at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University, where she manages a team of archivist processing a variety of 20th century materials related to war, peace, and politics. For the last six years Tanya has been working with the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty broadcast materials (approx. 7,000 LF), as well as other AV/Moving Image related projects. Tanya is a former Public Broadcasting Preservation Fellow with the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, where she digitized a video collection from the Center for Asian American Media at Bay Area Video Coalition. Tanya received her Masters in Library and Information Science, and a Digital Assests Management certificate from San Jose State University, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from the (now defunct) San Francisco Art Institute, and holds a certificate in Arrangement & Description from SAA.
Vice Chair/Chair-Elect Candidates
The following candidates are running for the Vice Chair/Chair-Elect (more in the role of Vice Chair) position:
Felicia Boretzky
Media Collection Specialist, Audiovisual Media Preservation Initiative, Smithsonian Libraries and Archives
Felicia Boretzky received her MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh with a specialization in Archives, Preservation and Records Management. With over a decade of media preservation experience, Felicia has worked for non-profit organizations like the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Music & Recorded Sound and at the private vendor The MediaPreserve. Her work has focused on the physical care and condition of these mixed-media collections, understanding the importance of storage and handling for lifelong preservation. She’s passionate that by extending the longevity of these materials we can provide a greater opportunity for access and discoverability of unseen and/or unheard history through digitization. In her past she was a part of the Pennsylvania Cultural Response Team and has served for the last two years as a part of the leadership of this Section for SAA. She is currently becoming more involved with the Community Archiving Workshop (CAW) as well.
Steering Committee Member Candidates
The following candidates are running for the section steering committee:
Biz Gallo
Statewide Digitization Initiatives Coordinator, Library of Michigan
Biz Gallo is the Statewide Digitization Initiatives Coordinator at the Library of Michigan. After receiving her undergraduate degree in film studies, she worked in the film industry, from post production to on-set coordination, before turning her passion for creating film into preserving those parts of the cultural record encapsulated in audiovisual media. She received her Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan School of Information and has since been helping cultural heritage institutions preserve their audiovisual collections through archival reformatting. She regularly presents on audiovisual preservation and digitization project management, and she has been published in the Journal of Digital Media Management, Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, and Archival Issues.
Melissa Hernández Durán
Lead Archivist for Audiovisual Curation, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan
Melissa Hernández Durán is the lead archivist for audiovisual curation at the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan where she provides leadership and guidance in the area of preservation and digitization of audiovisual materials. She manages the Library’s audio and moving image digitization streams (preservation, reference, and strategic projects), develops specifications for this work, and coordinates the digitization of several hundred recordings annually. With over ten years of experience in this work, she has overseen the digitization of over 5K recordings.
Melissa led the set-up of Bentley Digital Media Library, a media access solution built upon Kaltura media services. She also spearheaded the development of a bulk rights review project to increase access to archival sound recordings, which is described in the article “Rights Review for Sound Recordings: Strategies Using Risk and Fair Use Assessments,” published in The American Archivist (2018). In 2019, Melissa received the SAA Fellows' Ernst Posner Award for this article.
She holds an MSI from the University of Michigan and an MA in Caribbean history from the University of Puerto Rico. Her research interests include audiovisual materials and access to archival collections through infrastructure, and rights.
Bree'ya Brown
Digital Archivist, University of North Texas
Bree'ya Brown works as the Digital Archivist in Special Collections at the University of North Texas. In this role, Brown oversees digitization projects and manages the born-digital collections and workflows. As an additional part of the position, she works with Special Collections colleagues to digitize small cultural heritage collections and patron requests. Currently, the department digitizes DV formats and audio cassettes, and will expand services to digitize other video formats with the implementation of new hardware this year. Other responsibilities that Brown hold are teaching INFO 5371 Archives and Manuscripts for the College of Information Science at UNT. Before coming to UNT, she was the University Archivist for Huston-Tillotson University. During her time at Huston-Tillotson, she was awarded the Library of Congress Widening the Path Grant, which creates new opportunities for more Americans to engage with the Library of Congress and to add their perspectives to the Library's collections, allowing the national library to share a more inclusive American story. Additionally, Bree’ya has served as a Project Archivist on Texas Domestic Slave Trade Project for the University of Texas at Austin and worked in the archives division at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission. Brown enjoys conducting research that focuses on cultural heritage and history with a special a focus on the African diaspora, Latin America, and Germany, and topics in Biological Sciences such as water conservation and forestry.
I am excited to express my interest in joining the steering committee for the SAA Audio & Moving Image Section. I am an early career librarian, who is eager to network with AV experts and specialists across different expertise levels. Generally, I am interested in exploring the ways I can contribute to the field and support the AV community as the profession evolves overtime. I can meet with the steering committee once a month and discuss agenda items. Should I be tasked with an assignment, I can be relied on to hold myself accountable to conduct and complete the assignment(s). I have served on the American Archivist Editorial Board as an early career member since 2022 – this will be my last year in this position. The opportunity to transfer into another member position within Society of American Archivist would be an honor and great achievement.