Election results for the 2011-2012 AT/Archon RT Steering Committee

The following individuals were (re)elected to serve in AT/Archon Steering committee leadership roles.

Chair:    Cassie Schmitt

Co-Chair:  Genie Guerard

Web Liaison: Kat Stefko

Member: Nancy Enneking

Member: Kyle Rimkus

Member: Rachel Wise

Ex-officio: Scott Schwartz

Ex-officio: Brad Westbrook

The AT/Archon RT steering committee recently announced the ballot of candidates for the upcoming election. The ballot is below, along with supplemental material submitted by the candidates.

CANDIDATES FOR CHAIR

Bridget T. Lerette (Archon) 
Staff Archivist
Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta

I currently work as the staff archivist at the Office of Archives and Records of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta. I have an M.A. in art history and an M.L.S. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and am a Certified Archivist. At my current position, I use ARCHON daily to describe the records and books in our collections and volunteered for the steering committee as a representative of users at small institutions once the second software was added. As processing archivist for the Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. collection at the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center from 2007-2009, I worked with a shared instance of Archivists’ Toolkit. These experiences have provided me with insight on how both tools operate in different archival environments and how to collaborate on solutions to issues. I have participated in the roundtable since the founding and believe that I have insight into how the roundtable can effectively support the user community.

Cassandra Schmitt (AT)
Officer of Administration
Woodard Archivist
University of Oregon Libraries

Cassie Schmitt is an Archivist responsible for collection management activities in Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Oregon Libraries. She oversees arrangement and description workflow, procedures, and policies. She led the department’s switch to the Archivists’ Toolkit and managed the data migration of legacy data from numerous sources. Cassie is a leader on the shared joint instance of the AT with Oregon State University. This collaboration has led to the development of a converter tool to make AT EAD output compliant with Northwest Digital Archives (NWDA) standards and best practices as well as a lightening talk session at SAA this year (co-chaired with Elizabeth Nielsen): “The Archivists’ Toolkit: Innovative Uses and Collaborations.” She is a member of the NWDA AT interest group as well as the NWDA Steering Team. This coming year NWDA will launch a new service hosting an AT instance for member repositories without the technical infrastructure or support to host AT at their own institutions. Schmitt has an MSI from the University of Michigan with a specialization in Archives and Records Management and additional coursework in user-centered design.

As chair of the AT/Archon Roundtable she hopes to continue to build the capacity for the community to exchange advice, experiences, ideas, and collaborate in useful ways. She will be an advocate for archivists and repositories that need assistance with technical infrastructure or other issues. She thinks we can always improve our current practices and tools and will encourage those with expertise in both platforms to provide suggestions for improvement, additional features, and to share their own experiences and solutions to common problems. In this way the community can become stronger and the roundtable can be an advocate for improvements in the new, merged open-source product. She would be honored to use her knowledge and experiences with the Archivists' Toolkit to serve the roundtable.

CANDIDATE FOR WEB LIAISON

Kat Stefko (AT)
Director of Archives and Special Collections
Muskie Archives and Special Collection Library
Bates College

Kat has been involved with the Archivists' Toolkit since the early stages of its development.  As Director of Archives and Special Collections at Bates College, she represented that institution when it served as a partnering repository during the initial development of the specification for the Toolkit.  She also served as a Beta tester during the application’s development stage in 2006.  Bates adopted the AT in 2007 to manage accessions, and Kat is currently managing a project to migrate descriptive data into the AT during summer 2011. Kat has served as Web Liaison for the AT/Archon steering committee since 2009.  She has been impressed with both how far the application and its user community have come over the past few years and is excited to be part of the Roundtable Steering Committee as AT and Archon merge to form an even better open source collections management system. She has particularly enjoyed getting to know users of AT and Archon in working with them to develop repository profiles that she hopes have both informed and inspired other users. 

CANDIDATES FOR STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBERS:

Nancy Enneking (AT)
Head of Institutional Records and Archives
Getty Research Institute

Nancy is currently the Head of Institutional Records and Archives in the Getty Research Institute at the J. Paul Getty Trust. Prior to her arrival at Getty in 2004, she spent 5 years with the Texas State Archives and previously worked at the Center for American History (University of Texas at Au sti n) and  in the institutional archives at Johns Hopkins University. Nancy has a BA in History, an MA in Egyptology from Johns Hopkins Unive rsity, and an MLIS in Archives and Records Management from the University of Texas at Austin. The Getty was a beta-tester of Archivists' Toolkit, implemented it in 2008, has participated in ArchivesSpace focus groups, and has committed to testing the developing ArchivesSpace product. Having worked at institutions with a wide range of technical and financial resources, Nancy is very interested in seeing the future ArchivesSpace tool remain broadly accessible to the archival community.

Dawne Howard Lucas  (AT)
Head, Technical Services
Duke University Medical Center Archives

I am the Head of Technical Services at the Duke University Medical Center Archives. I am a 2005 graduate of North Carolina State University's Public History program and a 2006 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. I have been using (and experimenting with!) AT since I implemented it at the Duke University Medical Center Archives in 2007. Since that time I have shared my AT experiences with other archivists: I co-taught an AT workshop for the North Carolina Library Association in November 2010, chaired an AT/Archon panel presentation for the Society of North Carolina Archivists in March 2009, and am a member of the Triangle AT User Group that consists of members from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, and North Carolina State University. My colleagues and I are very excited about the new ATReference release, and are presently giving feedback to the ATReference Development Team about how to make it more functional for our institution.

David Malone (Archon)
Assistant Professor, Library Science and 
Head of Archives and Special Collections
Wheaton College

With an MLIS from Illinois and a masters in Instructional Technology from Northern Illinois, David can be described as an early adopter of technology as he has sought to utilize technology's attributes to benefit users through enhanced discovery tools since the early days of the public Internet and Gopher. For him Archon was an extension of this and offered the Wheaton College Archives & Special Collections the means to reveal hidden collections and serve the academic community, both local and abroad, as well as the general public. The Wheaton College implementation of Archon has enabled staff to adhere more closely to standards of practice, such as DACS, and to streamline organization and description. With nearly 3GB of descriptive data and digital surrogates in Archon the Archives & Special Collections has finished its third year of implementation and have seen page usage increase 300% this past year. Malone has sought to share his knowledge of Archon with other archivists and institutions through individual consultations and presentations, as well as being active on the Archon user forum. Archon has been a "game-changer" for his repository.

Caitlin Nelson (Archon)
Digital Initiatives Librarian
Florida Center for Library Automation

Caitlin received her MLISc from the University of Hawaii Library and Information Science Program in 2009. She currently works for the Florida Center for Library Automation where she is the project manager for the Archon finding aid hosting service and the Archives Florida project. Caitlin also enjoys bird-watching, water sports and is a burgeoning opera-lover.

Kyle Rimkus (Archon)
Assistant Professor
Head of Digital Scholarship and Programs
Otto G. Richter Library
University of Miami Libraries

Kyle heads the department of Digital Scholarship and Programs at the University of Miami Libraries, where scholars, technologists, librarians, and archivists collaboratively explore creative applications of digital media and web technology to the future of research, teaching, and learning. The University of Miami was an early adopter of Archon, and Kyle has played a significant role in its development and adoption over the past several years. He has co-taught the national SAA workshop "Implementing DACS in Integrated Content Management Systems: Using Archon," has conducted extensive outreach and training to Archon users throughout Florida via the statewide Opening Archives initiative, and is the technical lead on the Collaborative Archive of the African Diaspora, a developing Archon-driven resource for scholars seeking manuscripts and other original cultural materials related to South Florida's historically black communities, with special emphasis on African American and Caribbean collections.

Because of his engagement on an institutional, regional, and national level with Archon, he is interested in serving on this group to represent the technical and organizational interests of the Archon user community in discussions of future directions the software may take. He has an M.S. in Library and Information Science and an M.A. in French Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a B.A. in Germanic Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His professional interests include digital project management and digital services for special collections and archives.

Jody Thompson (AT)
Head, Archives and Records Management
Library Information Center
Georgia Institute of Technology

Jody currently serves as Department Head, Archives and Records Management, Georgia Institute of Technology, a position she has held since 2005.  In 2010, she served as President of the Society of Georgia Archivists.  She has given presentations and workshop about the AT.  The Georgia Tech Archives has been interested in Archivists’ Toolkit since we took part in beta testing in 2006. We have adopted all functions of AT, and it has made for a much more streamlined approach to managing and describing our collections. We are currently reviewing the ATReference project, and we look forward to future endeavors of AT/Archon.

Rachel Wise (AT)
Archivist/ Information Lifecycle Manager
Knowledge & Library Services
Harvard Business School

Rachel currently manages the Information Lifecycle Management Program, institutional archives and records management activities at Harvard Business School. Particularly interested in consortial implementations and scalability, Rachel has been an active member of the Archivists Toolkit Working Group at Harvard which has a centralized installation for special collections and archives use across the University. Harvard participated in the beta testing of the Archivists Toolkit and has developed a plug-in to allow repositories to count selected formats, genres, media, and types of containers. At Harvard Business School, the Archivists Toolkit is used for managing institutional records, manuscript collections, faculty papers, and visual collections including photographs and film. Rachel has extensive experience with descriptive practices and has held positions as Special Collections Processor in Baker Library Historical Collections at HBS and Senior Manuscripts Processor at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Rachel has an MLIS from Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science.