2020 Special Election: Candidate Statements

2020 Special Election: Candidate Statements

Thank you to our excellent candidates for standing in the 2020 Collection Management Section special 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 one Steering Committee member (three-year term). Ballots will be managed by SAA staff through Survey Monkey; keep an eye on your inbox for when the ballot opens!

Steering Committee Candidate Statements

The following candidates are running for the section steering committee:

Helena Egbert

Processing Archivist & Assistant Professor, Morse Department of Special Collections, Kansas State University Libraries

Candidate Statement: I am nominating myself to be on the Steering Committee of the Collection Management Section. I recently became Kansas State University’s Processing Archivist (K-State) at a very busy time. Currently K-State is recovering from a fire in their library that happened in 2018. This caused all of K-State’s archival holdings to be moved off-site. I am helping manage moving archival material back into the building. I believe this gives me unique and ongoing collection management experience to share. Prior to the fire, K-State began transitioning to Access to Memory (AtoM) as their collection management system. I have worked hard to learn this less widely used system and developed more efficient ways to upload finding aid information into AtoM. I am also familiar with Archon from my time at Oregon State University. I am enthusiastic about tackling K-State’s backlog over the next few years. I would appreciate connecting with others to brainstorm approaches to this common, but daunting task. I am interested in learning from others as well as contributing to this section. As a new professional I believe I would bring valuable perspective and energy to the Collection Management Section. I would be interested in helping in whatever way I am needed as a Steering Committee member.

Biography: Helena Egbert joined the Richard L. D. and Marjorie J. Morse Department of Special Collections at Kansas State University Libraries as their processing archivist in April 2020. From 2016 to 2020, she worked at Oregon State University’s Special Collections and Archives Research Center. Egbert started there as an undergraduate and continued through the completion of her graduate studies to process collections and provide reference services, concluding with a grant-funded project as a processing and public services archivist. She holds an undergraduate degree from OSU and an MLS from Emporia State University. In her new position, Egbert will lead efforts to describe department holdings and oversee collection management.

Jane Gorjevsky

Head of Collections Management, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

Candidate Statement: It would be a great honor to participate in the Steering Committee for the Collection Management Section of the Society of American Archivists. As the head of the newly created Collection Management unit in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University, I have been grappling with the issues ranging from collection intake and lifecycle to space and location tracking to maintaining descriptive and collection management documentation. Our department is actively using ArchivesSpace and a number of other popular tools. I found the materials provided by this section to be incredibly helpful and would appreciate an opportunity to give back to this community and to contribute to the important body of knowledge related to the ongoing management of special collections. Over the past several years, I have established working connections with a number of my peers involved in Collections Management in academic and public institution settings, and, most recently, participated in putting together a session "Make It Work: Combining Tools to Create Sustainable Archival Collection Management Ecosystems", presented at the SAA 2020 Annual Conference.

I have a unique advantage of having seen the work of a special collections repository from several different perspectives – as an archivist, a curator and a collections manager - and I appreciate the complex pattern of often competing priorities faced by our organizations. My particular interests include management of audio-visual and digital collections as well as optimal practices and technologies for managing multiple special collections formats in a single repository. I believe that my combination of education, scholarship and professional experience could make a useful contribution to the work of the Section. I am looking forward to sharing my experience, learning from others, and sustaining this section as a forum for discussion of various tools and strategies relevant for the Collection Management community.

Biography: Jane Gorjevsky is a head of 5-person Collection Management unit in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University, responsible for the care and documentation of the Library’s archival and rare book collections. She has been working for the Columbia Rare Book and Manuscript Library for almost 20 years as a Processing Archivist, the Carnegie Collections Curator, and the Digital Assets Archivist, before assuming the current position as the Head of Collections Management in 2018. Prior to her work at Columbia, she was an institutional archivist for the March of Dimes foundation. Over the years, she took advantage of numerous professional development opportunities in the fields of archival management and organizational leadership. She has an MA in history and MA in archival management and historical editing, both from New York University, as well as a BS in applied mathematics and statistics from SUNY, Stony Brook.

Jane has been active in the professional archival community for well over 2 decades, primarily as member of the SAA, where she presented at a number of panels and research forums, and as a member of the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York, of which she was a president in 2001-2003 and an active volunteer on many occasions. She has authored and co-authored a number of presentations, journal articles and book chapters; her most recent article "Breaking Down Barriers: Stewardship of born-digital materials at Columbia University’s special collections repositories," has just been published by the Journal of Digital Media Management. At various points in her career, she was also involved with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference, Association of Moving Image Archivists, and Digital Library Federation as a member or a presenter.