Candidate for Vice Chair/Chair/Immediate Past Chair (1 Position)

Molly Marcusse

Biography: Molly Marcusse is the Assistant Archivist for processing and reference at the American Heritage Center of the University of Wyoming. In this position she works shifts on the reference desk, answers reference requests, processes and describes collections, and is currently working with the accessioning department to create a more efficient and effective workflow for description of new collection materials in order to facilitate the creation of EAD finding aids and user access. Prior to coming to University of Wyoming, Molly was the Archives Assistant at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives of the American Institute of Physics, where she helped launch a project using EAC-CPF that has now been accepted into the pilot project to create a national cooperative archival authority. During this time, Molly also served as the Byzantine Archives Assistant at the Image Collections & Fieldwork Archives at Dumbarton Oaks. Molly holds a Masters of Library Science with a concentration in archives and records management from University of Maryland.

Candidate Statement: I am fascinated by the variety of descriptive methods that are employed by archivists and I enjoy learning and talking about descriptive standards, as well as brainstorming new ways to apply description in the archival field. The ways in which we describe materials are a crucial part of the discovery and research process. Discussion and collaboration among archival professionals in best practices, successful and failed experiments, and possible new directions for description is important because it helps us all serve our users to the best of our abilities. I am excited about the opportunity to serve the community as the Vice-Chair of the description section steering committee, to get to know my fellow colleagues interested in description, and help shape the future of archival description.

Cory Nimer

 Biography: Cory Nimer is the University Archivist in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections in the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University. He previously worked in the library as a technical services archivist, manuscripts cataloger, and metadata specialist in the library. He received a master's degree in history from Sonoma State University in 2001 and a master's of library and information science from San José State University in 2005. He has presented and published on various aspects of archival practice, including archival cataloging, authority control, finding aid display, and archival management systems. He has served as a member of the SAA Technical Subcommittee on Descriptive Standards, as a member and chair of the SAA Standards Committee, and as the SAA representative to the American Library Association's Committee on Cataloging: Description and Access and the MARC Advisory Committee.

Candidate Statement: I believe strongly in the section's role as a clearinghouse of information on descriptive practice and as a place to discuss issues and concerns related to descriptive practice and would continue the good work that the section is doing.

Candidates for Member-at-Large Steering Committee Member (1 position)

Eric Willey

 Biography: Eric Willey is a current member of SAA, and will be attending the conference this August. He currently works as a Special Collections and Formats Cataloger at Milner Library, Illinois State University, where he performs archival processing and special collections cataloging.  Between his archival processing and upgrading catalog records to RDA Eric has direct daily experience with a wide variety of metadata standards and means of description.  Eric currently serves on the MAC (Midwest Archives Conference) at SAA and 2016 MAC Program Committee, as well as serving as the “Archival Resources on the Web” column assistant editor for the MAC Newsletter.  He has greatly enjoyed his increasing involvement with MAC, and would like to also become further involved with SAA.  Eric believes that serving as a steering committee member for the Description Section would be an ideal way to begin furthering this involvement with SAA, collaborating with fellow archivists, and serving SAA as well as the archives profession in general.

Candidate Statement: I have nominated myself for a position on the steering committee of the Description Section chiefly because as a student and young professional I received a tremendous amount of help from fellow archivists and SAA, for which I am very grateful.  I view this position as an opportunity to in turn serve the members of this section and SAA, and work with the committee members to engage in activities that will improve our members’ professional lives in some fashion.  I currently serve on the MAC (Midwest Archives Conference) at SAA and 2016 MAC Program Committee, as well as serving as the “Archival Resources on the Web” column assistant editor for the MAC Newsletter.  I have greatly enjoyed my increasing involvement with MAC, and would like to also become further involved with SAA.  Serving as a steering committee member for the Description Section would be an ideal way to begin increasing my involvement with SAA, collaborating with fellow archivists, and returning some of the assistance and kindness I have been fortunate to receive from my fellow archivists and SAA members.

Meghan Lyon

Biography: Meghan Lyon is a processing archivist at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library with experience in describing a wide variety of collections, transitioning through descriptive and collection management systems, and crafting policy regarding descriptive practices. She has a MSI in Archives and Records Management from the University of Michigan and a MA in History from North Carolina State University.

Candidate Statement: I am interested in joining the Description Section Steering Committee because I believe deeply in the importance of archival description – particularly *good* archival description, that is accurate, complete, transferable, and not loathsome to produce – and would like to contribute to the archival community’s attempts to develop and share meaningful, useful standards and systems to ease our work while helping our patrons find what they need.

Ryan Lee

 Biography: Over the past nine years as a professional archivist, Ryan Lee has had a focus on learning, improving, and implementing descriptive standards in the institutions in which he has worked. He earned an MLS from Indiana University-Bloomington in 2006, where he specialized in archives and records management. It was here, first as a student (2003-2006), and later as an Assistant Archivist in the Office of University Archives and Records Management (2006-2008), that Ryan was introduced to and gained valuable experience with several archival descriptive standards, including Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS), Encoded Archival Description (EAD), and Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Ryan also gained an understanding of Archives, Personal Papers, and Manuscripts (APPM), MARC, and Dublin Core.  This experience prepared him for his next position as Metadata Specialist (2008-2010), and later as Corporate Records Archivist (2009-2013) at the LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. Here Ryan was tasked with helping this large and complex institution move forward in adopting national metadata standards during a migration to a new library catalog system. He was responsible for training several staff and volunteers on EAD and DACS, and assisted in implementing an EAD Tool, developed by Max Evans. He was also exposed to several metadata standards from other related fields, including library, records management, museums, and audio-visual collections. In his current position as curator of 19th Century Mormon and Western manuscripts in the Perry Special Collections at BYU Ryan has been trained on DACS (2nd edition) and some aspects of Resource Description and Access (RDA). IHe has also used Archivist’s Toolkit and ArchivesSpace for creating archival descriptions or finding aids.

Candidate Statement: I would love to be able to use this experience I have in shaping the future of the Description Section and moving it forward into the 21st Century. I believe we can always improve our descriptive standards and systems to make our collections most discoverable and accessible, as well as manageable. I would like to help come up with standards that apply to both physical and digital or born-digital records, and those that can ensure that our records are discoverable virtually on the internet in a manner that exposes them to the general researcher. I look forward to this potential opportunity.

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