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Biography:
Helena Egbert is the Processing Archivist at Kansas State University Libraries. After being hired in April 2020 she led disaster recovery efforts to bring the archival collections back into the building following the Hale library fire in 2018. She continues to lead efforts related to long lasting effects from the disaster. She also oversees processing and collection management efforts. Previously she worked at Oregon State University at the Special Collections and Archives Research Center in processing and public service roles. She earned an M.L.S. from Emporia State University, and a BA in History at Oregon State University.
Candidate Statement:
With encouragement from current leadership, I am excited to run to be the Vice Chair/Chair Elect of the College and University Archives Section. I believe I can further the excellent work that is happening in this section.
Since beginning my work at Kansas State University as the Processing Archivist in 2020 I have led Morse Department of Special Collections’ efforts in moving the entirety of our archival holdings back into the building following a fire in the library in 2018. Through this process I successfully directed and worked with a diverse group of people hired through Belfor, a property and restoration service. Despite all of the archival materials being back in the building, I continue to lead efforts to identify material and update locations in our collection management system, necessary work due to long lasting impacts of disaster recovery.
From 2020-2021, I successfully worked as a steering committee member on the Students and New Archives Professionals Section, and this year I was invited to finish the term of a steering committee member on the Collection Management section. Over the past year, I have also been contributing as a member of the Dictionary Working Group. I have enjoyed working with these different groups and enjoy connecting with many different people across the archives community.
I currently am actively working on the Tenure and Promotions pathways working group, which is an effort initiated by the College and University Archives section. In this group, I am helping lead efforts to create generic profiles of what is required to become a tenured archivist based on different spectra of expectations. Within my own institution, I have successfully led efforts to make K-State libraries' tenure portfolio requirements less tedious to create and use as well update portfolios to reflect current web accessibility standards.
Within my own institution, I supervise a medley of student employees and am a huge advocate for the value of student labor. This advocacy extends to arguing for better pay, funding student professional development opportunities, and mentoring individuals interested in making a career in archives and the wider library field. This demonstrates that I am invested in one of the core stakeholders of college and universities who those in this group help educate and serve.
I would be delighted to learn from my peers in this position and am eager to work with a diverse range of individuals who share high hopes of continuing to make our field more inclusive and equitable. From my experience, the team of individuals already working within the College and University Archives section are immensely capable and I believe in partnership with them, I could continue to support many successful efforts including the Tenure and Pathways working group, the C&UA Coffee Chats, and other ongoing efforts.
Thank you for your consideration!
Biography:
Danielle Sangalang is the Archivist and Records Manager at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She holds a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science and History from Simmons University. Danielle is an active member of the Digital Commonwealth Board of Directors and Past President (July 2019-June 2020). During this challenging time, she had the opportunity to help guide board towards moving our annual conference in 2020 from an in-person event to an online event with a few weeks notice. In addition, she is part of the board’s Membership Committee from July 2018 to present and has helped to organize programming to engage our members (including Getting Ready for Institutional Anniversaries and VIP tours of Boston Public Library’s Digitization Space. Currently the Membership Committee is working to provide low cost professional development opportunities online with a series of events titled: “Expanding Your Digital Horizons.”
Candidate Statement:
Over the past two years I have greatly enjoyed the opportunity to become more involved with the College and University Archives section through the coffee chats! I feel that I have been able to create a better sense of community with fellow academic archivists that I have not been able to create in the past. I have learned a great deal from other attendees as we shared our challenges and successes while adjusting to remote work. I welcomed the opportunity to present my approach to creating a complete list of graduates using ArchivesSpace in a coffee chat titled "Using ArchivesSpace for Data Curation in an Unconventional Way” this April. I also found the topic focused coffee chats to be extremely helpful, especially with collaborations with other groups such as MARS.
I would love to have the opportunity to take what I have learned from working on the Digital Commonwealth Board of Directors and Membership Committee and apply it to current initiatives from the Steering Committee and help to create new programing and opportunities for engagement and community building.
Biography:
Amanda Avery is an Information Librarian, College Archivist, Institutional Repository Administrator, and Records Coordinator at Parkland College, a community college in central Illinois. In 2019, Amanda graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a MSLIS focusing on archives. After graduating, she went on to intern with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Library & Archives assisting the Audiovisual Archivist with organizing and assigning metadata to digital A/V collections. In her current role, Amanda works to build the college archives collection by advocating, organizing and describing collections, grant writing, and making items more accessible by implementing a CMS and a DAMS. Amanda enjoys being involved in her communities which has led her to become a member of the Champaign County Museum Network and Treasurer for her local public library board.
Candidate Statement:
I am honored to be submitting my nomination for the College & Archives Section Steering Committee! As a member of the committee, I can be a voice for the archivists working in community and junior colleges as well as small universities. These institutional archives are often staffed by librarians with already full schedules from their primary roles and little to no experience in archives which is often vastly different from their university counterparts. In my first year as archivist at Parkland College, I have been sought out by other community college librarians searching for community, resources, and inspiration to improve the quality and care of their archival collections. I plan to use my experience in smaller institutional archives to help further develop the Archival Innovators’ Toolkit into a resource for many versions of C&U archives as well as contribute to Coffee Chats and The Academic Archivist blogs. I am passionate about creating communities through communication, collaboration, and diversity and I hope to use this while serving the C&UA membership to encourage involvement and camaraderie from a wide range of institutions and archivists. Thank you for your consideration!
Biography:
John Bence in the Assistant Director & University Archivist in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University. In this role, I oversee the administration of Emory’s university archives, records management, and oral history programs. In addition, John supervises the archivist at the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library’s Historical Collections. John holds an MA in Archives & Public History from NYU. Previously, John was member of the Web Archiving Section’s inaugural steering committee and has been a member and Chair of the Standards Committee of SAA. John has served on many groups internal to Emory, including as President of the Emory Employee Council.
Candidate Statement:
I am happy to submit my name for one of the open Steering Committee positions. I have been a long-time member and would welcome the chance to contribute to the activities of C&UA Section. As our institutions’ needs change, university archives are asked to be many things at once: place of historical reckoning, teaching laboratories, recordkeeping and compliance programs, data repositories, and more. This reality may not represent a fundamental change in our missions, but the pace of change in all these arenas calls for innovation. I believe this section could become a locus for dialogue and ideas that can create profession-wide change, given the number of institutional archives within higher education. I am interested in serving on the Steering Committee to further develop this community of practice and create profession-leading knowledge and strategies for moving college and university archives forward.
Biography:
Michelle Chiles (she/her) is the Head of Archives and Special Collections (ASC) at Providence College Phillips Memorial Library in Providence, Rhode Island. She manages the daily operations of the ASC which includes college archives, special collections, and rare books. In addition to caring for collections, Michelle and her team also provide archival instruction and research services, curate exhibits, and participate in outreach activities in collaboration with library departments and programs on campus. She earned her BA in History from Western Washington University in 2003, Master’s in Teaching from the Albright School of Education at City University in 2005, and her MLIS from Simmons College in 2013.
Michelle has been an active member of the New England Archivists since graduate school serving on the education committee, communications committee, and is currently serving on the program committee for the 50th anniversary NEA annual meeting. She co-founded the NEA Roundtable for Students and Early Professionals, through which she co-established the mentoring circles program. A proponent of mentoring relationships, Michelle has also served as an SAA mentor and mentee. Michelle has been an SAA member off and on for 11 years.
Prior to her position at Providence College, Michelle was the Research Center Manager for the RI Historical Society, a Research and Instruction Librarian for Bristol Community College, and Archivist for the Handel and Haydn Society.
Candidate Statement:
I am excited to submit my nomination for Steering Committee member for the College and University Archives Section of SAA. I became the Head of Archives and Special Collections at Providence College in December 2019, which brought me back to the world of academic libraries and archives. I am now ready and willing to jump in and support my colleagues in this field through engaging programs, activities, and dialogue.
The need to share ideas among those of us in similar situations became so apparent during these last two years and remains so throughout this ongoing pandemic. Many of us relied on peer collaborations to better equip ourselves to advocate for safe work environments and help us think of how to reach our students, faculty, and staff in new ways. The closure of many of our reading rooms and service points during this time caused many of us to look inward and examine our collections in ways that were challenging and difficult. Many of us explored and began to implement changes in description, outreach and engagement, and instruction modalities, all to better represent the full narrative of our campus histories and serve a broader spectrum of our community.
As a member of the Steering Committee, I hope to serve the C&U section by promoting this collaborative engagement among members. I want to harness the opportunities we created in our virtual spaces and the new relationships formed with college partners that previously were untapped and create spaces where C&U members can share this experience and learn from one another. While we have all experienced various stages of burnout and exhaustion, I have also heard from many colleagues how engaged they are with certain aspects of their work that more feels tangible, impactful, and rewarding than before. I hope to be able to capture some of that energy while also providing support and spaces for times when we are stretched too thin.
I am excited to serve with other committee members and focus on goals that serve the needs and interests of the C&U section members. It would be my pleasure to work with all of you, thank you for your consideration!
Biography:
Ellen Holt-Werle is the Institutional Archivist in University Archives at the University of Minnesota. She holds a MLIS from Dominican University by way of St. Catherine University. Ellen’s work with university collections as Institutional Archivist centers surfacing and acknowledging exclusionary institutional histories and the voices and experiences of those impacted by the institution’s settler colonial and racist underpinnings. She is also a member of the Midwest Archives Conference, currently serving on the Ethics and Inclusion Committee. Her current interests are community archives; increasing access to and growing the representation of BIPOC voices and experiences in the archives; and student activism and protest.
Candidate Statement:
I’m pleased to submit my nomination for the College & University Archives Section Steering Committee. I’ve been an archivist for over 15 years, most of that time as the College Archivist at Macalester College. When I was new to that position (and the profession), and throughout the rest of my time there as a solo archivist, the learning and professional development opportunities afforded by SAA were immensely valuable and a critical support. Now that I’ve moved into a new role in a large archives at the University of Minnesota, my goal is to be more involved beyond just the local and regional level. My hope is to not only give back, but to help continue to grow what I’ve gained so much from. I’m interested in how the College and University Archives Section can collaborate with other sections of SAA, particularly around work many archivists are trying to do in the areas of uncovering institutional histories; community archives; archiving student experiences, etc. Many institutions of higher ed have or are beginning processes of exploration and self-reflection related to their histories. Even if those initiatives are reactive, my hope is that the C&U Section can provide collaboration, conversation, and support to archivists who are vital to these efforts. Furthermore, I’m looking forward to learning and engaging with others on how as archivists, we want to not only participate in these initiatives by providing content and context, but to help transform our institutions. Hopefully in doing so, we can ourselves be reflective on how as a profession we can continue to change and grow. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to serve and to learn from all of you.
Biography:
Jane LaBarbara is currently Head of Archives & Manuscripts for the West Virginia & Regional History Center, the special collections unit at West Virginia University Libraries. This work involves overseeing acquisitions and processing of regional history collections as well as the University Archives. She previously served WVU as Assistant Curator, where she focused on processing with additional disaster planning, reference, and instruction work. Her current and previous projects include developing a processing manual and processing priorities, developing a retention schedule for the University Libraries, and finding ways to leverage the assistance of work study students and graduate assistants. She earned her MLS with a concentration in Archives and Records Management from UNC.
She is an active member of SAA and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC), currently serving as SAA’s Key Contact for West Virginia. Her previous professional service includes serving on the MARAC’s conference program committee (Spring 2016) and local arrangements committee (Spring 2019). She also served on an SAA Awards subcommittee from 2014-2017, and the SAA Collection Management Tools Section Steering Committee from 2017-2021 as a steering member, vice-chair, then chair.
Candidate Statement:
I am excited to submit my nomination for Steering Committee member of the College and University Archives Section of SAA. I can bring the perspective of a non-tenured faculty archivist at a large institution that is still finding its way in terms of processes and policies, from the processing manual I’m currently working on (we’ve never had one before) to the digital preservation policy that one of my colleagues is drafting. WVU doesn’t have a University Archivist or a Records Manager (just a university-wide retention schedule and a hopeful heart), so I’ve been working since 2015 to raise awareness of the University Archives, work with units on records management/archives issues, and process university related materials even as my unit devotes a lot of time and attention to the state and regional history collections that we serve to the general public. I’m sure there are quite a few of us in a similar position of not getting to devote all of our time to our university collections, so we need to make that time count and I want to be part of the conversation for how to do that.
I recently participated in the group that planned the landscape survey of college and university archivists, and I am part of the group working on the analysis of those results. College and University archivists are a large group with a fantastically diverse set of capabilities and tools, even as we face a lot of the same basic needs. I hope to apply some of what we’re learning from this survey to the programming that the section can offer, the research we can encourage or participate in, and the conversations we can advance in the coffee chats and on the e-list. Combined with my knowledge of our not-so-unique needs at WVU, I see a lot of areas where we could foster growth across the profession, and I’m excited to learn what this section wants to tackle first.
Biography:
Matt Stahl has served as the University Archivist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, since 2017. He holds a Masters in History and a Masters in Library Science from the University of Maryland. Prior to joining UCSB, he served as the Committee Archivist for the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation from 2013-2017. He also has a background in secondary education, having served as a middle school and high school teacher in the South Pasadena Unified School District from 2004-2010. Matt is active in the Society of California Archivists, and has previously been involved in the Congressional Papers Section through SAA.
Candidate Statement:
My name is Matt Stahl and I am submitting my name for consideration in the College and University Archives Section Steering Committee. I have served as the University Archivist at UCSB since July 2017. Previously, I was the Committee Archivist for the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and have also worked in education as a secondary school teacher. During my tenure at UCSB, I have been a member on the University of California Archivists Council, serving as Chair from 2018-2019. As University Archivist, I have established a clear collection development policy for both our University records, as well as our faculty papers. In the area of faculty papers, I have actively sought to increase the diversity of our collections and revitalized the collecting of administrative and departmental records, which had been dormant for some time.
Currently, I am overseeing the development of our born-digital collection program. While working at the Senate, the overwhelming majority of records I worked with were born-digital. While many colleges and universities have shown early promise in this area, I believe that forward progress in this area has stalled. Additionally I have been actively working with other UC Archivists and records managers to petition the UC President's Office for a formal, unified policy regarding the archiving and preservation of email.
While I have not had much involvement with the College and University Archives Section over the last few years, I am eager to become more involved and focused on issues that affect all colleges and universities. Thank you for your consideration.
