Candidate roster for the 2019-2020 section elections

Vice Chair/Chair-Elect

Justin Kovar is the Audio and Moving Image Archivist for the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin and has been at the Center since 2011.  Previous to that he was a Graduate Research Assistant for the University's Historical Music Recordings Collections and intern for the Texas Archive of the Moving Image.  Justin earned his MSIS Degree from the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, and is an ACA certified archivist. Justin was also the soundtrack composer for the mobile video game "God of Blades," which was notable for including virtual items that could only be unlocked when the user was in a library.  

Newsletter Editor

Kelly J. Applegate is a Metadata Specialist with The MediaPreserve, a division of Preservation Technologies, LP. She received her MS/LIS from the Illinois School of Library and Information Sciences in the spring of 2017 and moved to the Pittsburgh area later last year for her position with The MediaPreserve. Kelly has been published both on libraryjournal.com ("Legacy Matters: How Academic Repositories Can Fulfill Emotional Request") and in Cataloging & Classification Quarterly (“Achieving and Maintaining Metadata Quality: Toward a Sustainable Workflow for the IDEALS Institutional Repository”).

She has a passion for preservation and archiving which has become focused on audio and visual preservation since she began at The MediaPreserve. Many years ago, she worked in the pre-press production industry, and part of her duties were, in fact, proofreading and copyediting. She’d love to combine her past and present experience to serve as your SAA Audio & Moving Image Newsletter Editor.

Steering Committee

Shawn VanCour is Assistant Professor of Media Archival Studies in UCLA’s Department of Information Studies, where he teaches courses on the history and preservation of sound and moving image media. He is author of Making Radio: Early Radio Production and the Rise of Modern Sound Culture (Oxford University Press, 2018), as well as articles on the history of US radio, film, and television production and the cultural politics of audiovisual archiving. He is an active member of SAA, AMIA, IASA, and ARSC, and currently serves as assistant director of the Library of Congress's Radio Preservation Task Force. Further information may be found on his faculty page at https://gseis.ucla.edu/directory/4368/.

Allison Schein Holmes is the Archivist for WFMT and the Studs Terkel Radio Archive, collaborating with such partners as the Library of Congress, the Chicago History Museum, Chicago Public Library and Dominican University’s School of Information Studies. After receiving her archivist certification in 2013, she became the Archivist for the Creative Audio Archive at Experimental Sound Studio, where she had been the Archive Manager since 2011. She earned a Bachelor's degree in Audio, Arts, and Acoustics from Columbia College Chicago and an MLIS from Dominican University in 2012 to become an audio archivist.  Prior projects include processing the photography archives of Johnson Publishing Company as part of the Armstrong-Johnston team, reorganizing the library at the Arts Club of Chicago and metadata assistance for Northwestern University Library’s Digital Collections department. She is also the 2014 recipient of the Young Mazzuchelli Model award.

Sarah Cunningham  is the Audiovisual Archivist at the LBJ Presidential Library branch of the National Archives and has been teaching in the Graduate School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin since 2004. She teaches an Introductory and an Advanced class in Audio Preservation.

Cunningham’s work revolves around digitization projects, the preservation and transfer of vintage audiotapes, system upgrades, and the storage of information and digital delivery of audiovisual recordings in archival collections. She is the Audiovisual Archivist at the LBJ Presidential Library branch of the National Archives.   Her areas of expertise are the preservation of archival analog media and digital solutions for the preservation of audio recordings on unstable media. Interests include forensics for digital audio recordings, media archeology and the tools needed to keep digitized recordings connected to their analog existence.

Dana R. Chandler

University Archivist/Associate Professor at Tuskegee University