2021 Election: Candidate Statements

2021 Election: Candidate Statements

Ballots will be managed by SAA staff; keep an eye on your inbox for when the ballot opens! 

Vice-chair/Chair-elect

Kimberly Anderson

Biography

Kimberly Anderson is the Director, Special Collections at the University of Nevada, Reno. Prior to her arrival at Nevada she co-led and then led the Digital Scholarship and Initiatives unit at Iowa State University and was core Archival Studies faculty at the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Earlier in her career she worked as digital archivist, photograph archivist, processing archivist, and project historian in positions in Arizona and California. She holds a PhD in Information Studies with a cognate in the history of science, and an MLIS with a focus on Archival Studies, both from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the chief architect of the Avian Archives of Iowa Online and is currently leading a project to better align the University of Nevada Reno’s practices with the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials. She has been a prior chair of the Appraisal Section of SAA and is currently on the Steering Committee for the Management Section. 

Throughout her career she has engaged with the issues of discovery and description. As a manager, her current work consists of providing administrative support and initiative for the “Mrs. His Name Project,” in which the archives is restoring the personal names of women known only by their marital status, and coaching staff through the beginning stages of other historical description improvements. She is also creating guides to the collections organized by Indigenous community and working on rights statements that clearly indicate the re-use possibilities for digital objects.

Statement of Interest

Description is the primary way we communicate about what we have but it is also rife with bias and selection and can be off-putting or inclusive, or useful or not useful. It is imperfect work, but I am heartened to see active efforts in our professional community to do better. If elected Vice Chair/Chair-Elect I look forward to supporting the Section’s current initiatives with Descriptive Notes and the Inclusive Description portal. If elected, by the time I am Chair it will be time to assess the efficacy and utility of these resources for the Section membership. Description permeates all aspects of archival work and it is critically important to have resources available to do better. Let’s do better together. I would enthusiastically help lead these efforts for our Section.

Ashley Gosselar

Biography

Ashley Gosselar has served as Processing Archivist for the University of Chicago Library’s Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center since 2011. Before joining the University of Chicago Library, Ashley was Assistant University Archivist for George Washington University. She holds a Master’s in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archives and Records Management from the University of Maryland.

Statement of Interest

I am pleased to add my name to the slate of candidates for Vice Chair/Chair-Elect of the Society of American Archivists’ Description Section. I have 13 years of post-MLS experience in archival work, and am currently a Processing Archivist at the University of Chicago Library. Throughout my archival career I have had the pleasure of working in a range of institutions, from a small house museum to the Smithsonian and from a small liberal arts college to large academic research libraries. I have been a member of SAA since 2006. 

For the past decade, my core job responsibility has been arranging and describing manuscript and archival collections in a variety of formats. I enjoy the hands-on craft of processing collections, and teaching this skillset to others. I have experience collaborating with colleagues from across Chicago-area archival institutions to develop discovery portals for Chicago collections: first as a member of the Collections Committee for the Chicago Collections Consortium, and currently as a volunteer for the Black Metropolis Research Consortium’s Portal Working Group. Additionally, I have proven leadership skills. I served for two years on the steering committee for a regional archival association: Chicago Area Archivists. I recently concluded two years as local chapter President of an international philanthropic organization that supports women in their pursuit of higher education. I would bring all of this experience to the role of Vice Chair/Chair-Elect: a deep understanding of the practice of archival description, a keen desire to collaborate with archivists across institutions, and the ability to direct the work of a large membership-organization and its board. 

I believe the Description Section is poised to play a major role in supporting the growing interest among archivists in reparative and inclusive description. The Section could serve as an important hub and resource for archivists doing this work. If elected to this position, I would support the growth of the Section’s new blog and Description Resource Portal. I would also pursue cross-section programming that connects archivists with the resources and relationships they need to engage in anti-oppressive archival description. I look forward to the conversations and decisions ahead of SAA’s Description Section, and would relish the opportunity to lend my skills to this group in a leadership position.

Steering Committee Member-at-large

Marcella Huggard

Biography

Marcella (Wiget) Huggard has overseen manuscripts processing at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, part of the University of Kansas Libraries, since 2015. In this role, she manages a team of full-time staff and students in arranging and describing all manuscript collections. She was an archivist with the Kansas Historical Society from 2008-2015, where she worked in the State Archives with government records, after starting as a project archivist minimally processing both government records and manuscript collections. She has also worked at local historical societies in Kansas and Colorado. Huggard received her Bachelors in History from Knox College and her Masters in History from Colorado State University – Fort Collins. Her research interests include archival collections management practices and state and local history, focused particularly on eastern Kansas/western Missouri.

Huggard has served as Vice Chair/Chair/Immediate Past Chair of SAA’s Acquisitions & Appraisal Section and is currently a member of the C.F.W. Coker Award Sub-Committee. She was a member of the task force that originally developed the Reappraisal and Deaccessioning Guidelines for SAA in 2012. She has also served as Program Committee (2020 annual meeting) and Education Committee co-chair for the Midwest Archives Conference (MAC) and as secretary and Scholarship Committee chair for the Kansas City Area Archivists (KCAA).

Statement of interest

Describing archival collections has been the mainstay of my career, whether I am minimally processing government records series or providing item-level detail for manuscript collections. In my current role at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, one of the first major projects I managed was revamping our processing manual in order to clarify different expectations for arranging and describing collections, depending on what level of processing we are giving a collection. Additionally, I have created a style guide for our finding aids, and I led my team in a reading and discussion of the revised DACS Principles in 2019. Based on those discussions and the updated Principles, I have encouraged the processing team to be more transparent in our finding aids about the decisions we make as processors when processing collections.

The Description Section’s documentation portal, revamped Descriptive Notes blog, and other resources provided by the section are a fantastic place to find new and relevant information about reparative and respectful description, locally applying descriptive standards and best practices, and other needs for describing and making archival collections accessible. I would be honored to help expand and make others more aware of these resources and otherwise help the Description Section better serve its members and the larger Society of American Archivists organization.

Betts Coup

Biography

Betts Coup is a Processing Archivist at Houghton Library at Harvard University, where she has assisted with the development of description (and redescription) policies in keeping with the revised DACS principles and carried out numerous backlog processing and accessioning projects. She has also been involved with the implementation of location and container management and guidelines for creating and merging agent and subject records in ArchivesSpace and establishing new descriptive guidelines and workflows for oversized materials. Most recently, she has been engaged in usability studies of finding aid content and exploring user feedback for and questions about finding aids during a two-year project; she has also participated with a collaborative group considering how to assess the impact of inclusive and reparative descriptive practices and projects as part of the 2021 Lighting the Way Working Meeting.

Betts is the co-chair of the Reparative Archival Descriptive Task Force and a member of the ArchivesSpace Agents & Subjects Task Force at Harvard. She has served as a co-chair of the SAA EAS Section Steering Committee since 2019, and is part of the SNAC Communications Working Group and the SNACSchool team. Betts also teaches Archival Access and Use, which focuses on instruction of archival descriptive standards, at Simmons University. She has an MLIS with a focus on Archives Management from Simmons University and an MA in the History of Art and Architecture from New York University. Betts has an ongoing interest in the way users find and access archival collections and how they are impacted by archival descriptive choices.

Statement of Interest

My work in the archival field for the past seven years has been consistently focused on description, and I have a great passion for exploring the ways in which our descriptive practices impact users and access. Much of my recent work has focused on reparative descriptive projects as well as ensuring that new description is created in a conscientious, inclusive manner. I have been so appreciative of the work the Description Section has done to provide resources and the new blog posts that center on reparative descriptive projects, and I would like to be more involved. Moreover, I seek to be a part of conversations about the direction of descriptive practice and the standards that govern it, and how we can consider the impacts this has on our users, to in fact live up to the revised DACS principles and create description which is truly user-centered.

Elizabeth Peters

Biography

Elizabeth Peters is currently the Processing Archivist and Records Manager at Willamette University, where she is responsible for the arrangement and description of collections, as well as overseeing the records management program, teaching, and providing research assistance. Previously, she was the Project Archivist for the World Student Christian Federation records at Yale University, where she also served on Yale’s Born Digital Archives Working Group. Prior to that, she worked as the Archivist for Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, describing archives and other materials for sale. She received her B.A. from Haverford College and her M.L.S. from Indiana University.

Statement of interest

I am particularly interested in the importance of quality description to the success of other archival pursuits, from collection development and management to reference and outreach. This requires intentional communication and collaboration across the profession, which can be facilitated by the Description Section’s efforts in the new blog, Descriptive Notes, and the Description Documentation Portal. I would like to serve as Member-at-Large for the Description Section Steering Committee in order to support these efforts as they continue and expand, becoming an essential collaborative resource for archivists who specialize in descriptive work and for those whose specialties lie adjacent to description.

Jennifer King

Biography

Jennifer King is the Collections Coordinator and Manuscripts Librarian in the Special Collections Research Center at George Washington University. In this position she curates the Washingtoniana collection, collaborates within SCRC technical services work, and supervises the archivists responsible for curating two of the major collecting areas in Special Collections: the Labor History Research Center and the National Education Association Archives. Jennifer has an MLS with an archival concentration from the University of Michigan and has worked in both university and public library settings.

Statement of Interest

I have spent the last year thinking about, reading about, and listening to archivists both those I work with and those at other institutions, describe their descriptive practices. While I have found immense value in this learning phase, I am now more than ready for action. I want to answer questions like: how can my institution and more broadly the profession change our descriptive practices to identify the counterstories in our collections and use community-created standards to describe these materials? what methods and means will we create to truly value and elevate inclusivity? and how do we ensure we actively advocate for tipping the scales of resource allocation towards this long overdue work? I would like to join colleagues in the Description Section to grapple with these questions and learn and grow together.

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