Elections 2023

VICE CHAIR/CHAIR-ELECT (Select 1)

Danielle Sangalang
Archivist and Records Manager, Massachusetts College of Art and Design

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).  In 2020, she had the opportunity to help guide board towards moving our annual conference 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.” Last year Danielle also served as the chair of the SAA Donald Peterson Student Travel Award Committee. Danielle is also very dedicated to knowledge sharing when possible and has presented at the New England Archivists conference this April about institutional anniversaries as MassArt is currently celebrating its 150 th anniversary.

Candidate Statement:

It would be my pleasure to serve as vice chair/chair elect of the Society of American Archivists College & University Archives Section. Having been a lone arranger at a college archive for over seven years being part of this community has meant a great deal to me. Over the past three 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 also found the topic focused coffee chats to be extremely helpful, especially with collaborations with other groups such as MARS. 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” last April. I believe that it is so important to be able to share our projects/initiatives with our fellow college and university archivists so we can offer support and inspiration to each other. Even after returning to the office I find check ins with colleagues across different colleges and archives to be an invaluable resource for idea sharing and community building.

Meeting virtually on a regular basis is an initiative that I would like to see continue for years to come to help college archivists meet and collaborate. I also familiar with other initiatives that this group has been working on recently. I had the opportunity to edit and comment on the DRAFT Guidelines for College and University Archives, I think it would be great to see continued work on improving these standards. I am also very interested in the pathways to promotion and tenure project and sharing knowledge with other archivists and finding ways to support others going through tenure and promotion.

I would love to have the opportunity to take what I have learned from serving as the president of the Digital Commonwealth Board of Directors and through informal participation in the College and University Archives Section. As vice chair/chair elect I would continue to advocate for community engagement and collaboration.

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Eden Caruso Sheafer (She/Her), MLS
Records Management Specialist (Archives) | Records Management and Archives, Tarrant County College (ODMC) 

Biography:
 

Eden Caruso Sheafer is the Records Management Specialist (Archives Assistant) at Tarrant County College Archives. After joining TCC in April 2022 she has led the introduction of digital repositories to the college and begun the major project of starting a digital repository through Texas Digital Libraries to feature all special collections of the college to students, faculty and researchers. She created the metadata guidelines, terms of use, and other statements for the archive. At this time, she is leading the search for grants to benefit the archive and with the help of the archivist and grant team will embark on her second grant project. She earned her M.L.S at Texas Woman's University in December 2022. 

Candidate Statement: 

With the lovely encouragement of the current members of SAA I am proud to run as the Vice Chair/ Chair Elect of the College & University Archives Section. I have been a member of this group for a few years now and feel I would add a fresh perspective for new professionals and students. This will be my second cycle of voting that I have participated in, and I feel this year is the year! I will continue to push for more professional development and mentoring opportunities for the committee and help create positive connections between members.  I have been actively enrolled in the SAA Mentor program for almost 2 years and have felt the impact of my time with my mentor. I feel I have gained vital career information and have made incredible connections with other members. This group has continued to inspire me, and I hope to do the same as your next Vice Chair/ Chair Elect. 

STEERING COMMITTEE MEMBER (Select up to 3)

Marian Matyn
Archivist at the Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University

Biography:

Marian Matyn is Archivist at the Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University (CMU) and Associate Professor in the CMU Libraries where she rotates teaching a one-credit information literacy class LIB 197 and serves as Liaison Librarian to in the CMU Department of History, World Languages and Culture (HWLC). As an adjunct faculty member of HWLC she teaches HST 583 Archives Administration, a 3-credit class. Significant projects and initiatives she initiated, led or co-led and continue to lead or co-lead include: encoding finding aids and forming a community partnership with the University of Michigan to host them; developing hybrid and all online archival classes and internships; a project to identify 3%  of the Clarke’s manuscript collection  to digitize over the next decade; the Clarke’s historic moving image film project; and a reparative cataloging project for the CMU Libraries resources. Marian trains, mentors and supervises all student processors, mainly undergraduates, to archivally process, create and encode finding aids for mixed format and moving image film collections. Her professional service has included ICA-SUV, MARAC, and MAC committees, a term on the Michigan Archival Association board, two years of volunteering as a SAA mentor, and a term on the SAA Membership Subcommittee. At CMU Marian serves on various committees including the CMU Institutional Review Board for human subject research. She also was appointed twice to the Michigan State Historic Records Advisory Committee. Marian has multiple presentations and publications on indigenous research, teaching with primary sources, the moving image film project, transforming internships and classes to hybrid and online, the PBB disaster and memory, and Michigan circus history focused on female fliers and equestrians. Previously Marian worked at Chester County Archives (West Chester, PA), Hagley Library (Wilmington, DE), and the State Archives of Pennsylvania. She earned a B.A. in History and a M.I.L.S. from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and, later as a full-time working mom, a M.A. in history from CMU.

Candidate Statement:

Hi. I’m Marian Matyn and I would like to serve on the SAA College & University Archivists Section Steering Committee. During the first years of COVID-19 one of the events I joyfully anticipated and truly appreciated was C&U’s Coffee Chats. The safe space, wisdom, gentle humor, and friendship of my archival colleagues proved critical to me being informed about what was actually happening in other states, especially to archivists and archives, and to support each other and make friends as we struggled in rapidly shifting, stressful, unprecedented times. As the craziness of our world continues, I have, like many of you, experienced morphing job responsibilities, expectations, and decreased resources, stretching me to adapt and learn new skills. We continue to need a safe space, such as C&U provides, where we can discuss, learn, encourage, collaborate and support each other while we prepare and adapt for the future. I often wonder, how will primary sources, archivists, and archives remain relevant and valued by administrators during budget cuts, as students increasingly can’t read penmanship and more professors shift to online courses and avoid using our primary sources? I encourage us to engage on these topics, and with allies in related professions, to find creative ways forward together, perhaps through focused presentations, workshops, or brainstorming sessions. We are stronger united. To the committee I would bring my energy, a breadth of diverse experiences, passion for DEI, archives, teaching, and mentoring, as well as a willingness to adapt, listen, learn, and change.

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Renae Rapp
Assistant Archivist at City College of New York, City University of New York

Biography:

Renae Rapp is the Assistant Archivist at City College of New York, CUNY. She manages the processing program, reviews policies, and oversees internships and student support staff. Previously she was the Archivist and Scholarly Communications Librarian at SUNY Maritime College. She holds an MSIS and MA in Public History from the University at Albany, SUNY. 

Candidate’s Statement:

With encouragement from current and past leadership, I am enthusiastic to run as a candidate for the Steering Committee of the College and University Archives Section. I served in several leadership positions in SAA and other regional and local associations and my passion is to support new and current professionals through building and maintaining services in associations. I am confident that I can continue to provide excellent services and tools to the C&UA Section members. 

From 2019-2020, I was a Steering Committee member of SAA SNAP (Student and New Archives Professionals). Through this committee, we successfully expanded our blog posts and social media and hosted webinars. As a Steering Committee member, I met other new professionals hired during the pandemic. Our little cohort shared stories and our experience with remote imposter syndrome with SNAP members through a webinar, “Starting a New Position During a Pandemic”. Working with a wonderful, committed, and strong group of young people motivated me to contribute to other SAA sections and services. 

From 2019-2021, I volunteered for the SAA Mentoring Committee and co-led the first SNAP Mentoring Cohort. The advice, resources, and reassurance were invaluable to me as a new professional when I had a mentor through the 1:1 mentoring program. After working with SNAP in the past, I vocalized the importance of a SNAP cohort, especially during the uncertainty of the pandemic. My co-mentor and I focused on peer-to-peer mentoring within the cohort to encourage leadership, every voice being heard, and sharing lessons learned. I am proud to say many of our mentees have accepted positions and the Mentoring Cohort is successful in its third year! 

Currently, I am a member of the new SAA Tenure, Promotion, Sabbaticals Resources (TaPaS) Pathways Working Group. Through our discussions with tenured archivists, we successfully developed new services with unique features and modalities to connect tenured and tenure-track archivists together in an informal setting. The TaPaS Resources include a Glossary, Archivist Profiles, and a Coach Databank. I collaborated with several tenured archivists in curating the Coach Databank with the intention to encourage archivists to seek help from each other with the complex procedures of tenure, promotion, and sabbaticals. 

As a Steering Committee member of the College & University Archives Section, I will continue working with and building more tools and services for all members of the section. I am looking forward to meeting more C&UA members through coffee chats, curating services, and general meetings. 

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Becky Briggs Becker
University Archivist at the University of Missouri-Kansas City

Biography:

Becky Briggs Becker (she/her) is the University Archivist at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). She joined the UMKC University Libraries in February 2022. In this role, she oversees the preservation and access to administrative records and historical materials documenting UMKC’s operations and history. Her current project is to improve access to thousands of linear feet of archival material by revamping processing workflows and creating finding aids in ArchivesSpace that will appear online for the first time. Becker previously worked in the university archives at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she earned her master’s degree in information sciences and her bachelor's degree in communications. She joined SAA as a graduate student when she served as treasurer of her graduate program’s student chapter. Since then, she has been active in SAA and regional library and archives organizations, including serving on the Reference, Access, and Outreach Section’s Events and Exhibits Resource Bank Team and as an editor-at-large for The American Archivist Reviews Portal (2019-2021).

Candidate Statement:

I am pleased to submit my nomination for the College & University Archives Section Steering Committee. While I have worked in university archives for more than ten years, now I’m a new non-tenured faculty archivist running her own department. The College & University Archives Section’s resources, especially the will-be-updated-soon Guidelines for College & University Archives, have been so invaluable for me to consult while I worked on collection surveys, created collection management recommendations, and drafted new collection development policies. I see my participation on the Steering Committee as an opportunity to give back and help new archivists navigate the challenges unique to archives documenting higher education institutions’ histories and legacies. I have also enjoyed

the Coffee Chats and other programming opportunities that connect college and university archivists, keep participants informed of current issues in the profession, and highlight potential collaborations with other SAA sections. If elected, I hope to continue and expand on the good work the Steering Committee has done to keep the C&UA community connected and engaged. Thank you for your consideration!

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Kate Burns
Archives Librarian, Regis University

Biography:

Kate Burns recently decided to make the last half of her career life the most exhilarating and switched careers to become an archivist. They joined the Regis University library faculty (Denver, Colorado) as Archives Librarian in 2023 after receiving their MLIS from the University of Denver to add to an MA in Literature and Culture Studies from the University of California, San Diego. Their prior experience includes work at the state archive History Colorado, the Western History Collection at the Denver Public Library, the Arvada Historical Society, and the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame. Over the years they have taught courses at colleges and universities in Gender and Women’s Studies, social justice, feminist theory and practice, digital storytelling, and writing. Their research interests include gender in the 19th century U.S. West, LGBTQ+ history, serving older adults, community archives, and Open Education Resources (OER).

Candidate Statement:

As someone relatively new to the archival profession, I bring the perspective of being ready to learn, eager to connect with colleagues, and open to innovative methods as well as proven strategies to support members and build community. I thrive on teamwork and collaboration that enables archivists to focus on meaningful ways to serve communities, contribute to the profession, and foster a work/life balance that includes joy, rest, and self-care. I have found it essential to practice cultural humility and view equity, diversity, and inclusion work as a life-long process of self-exploration, self-critique, courageous learning, and standing with those who experience bigotry, disenfranchisement, or underrepresentation in my communities and the larger world. As a member of the Steering Committee, I would be an enthusiastic participant interested in lifting up the priorities of the membership.