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2024 Election: Candidate Statements
Thank you to all of the candidates for the 2024 Description Section election. Please read below for candidate biographies and statements of interest.
You will be voting for:
Ballots will be managed by SAA staff; keep an eye on your inbox for when the ballot opens!
Vice Chair / Chair-Elect
Max Goldberg
Bio:
Max Goldberg is the Creative Arts Archivist in the Technical Services for Archives and Special Collections department at Harvard University, where he processes archival collections from the Loeb Music Library, the Fine Arts Library, and the Harvard Film Archive. He is also a co-convener of Harvard’s Archives Discussion Group, a monthly meeting for archivists and archives-adjacent workers from across Harvard to meet and discuss topics in the field, as well as being a member of Harvard’s Reparative Archival Description Working Group. Previously, he worked at California Revealed, a program funded by the California State Library to provide digital preservation and online access services to partner archives and libraries across the state. Max has an MLIS with a concentration in Archives Management from Simmons University and an MA in Cinema Studies from San Francisco State University. He was on Canyon Cinema’s Board of Directors from 2015-2022.
Statement:
I hope to join the Description Section as Vice Chair/Chair-Elect to actively engage with a broad network of archivists invested in continuing to explore how the theory and practice of archival description can better inform one another. As an archivist who acts as a liaison between several repositories at Harvard, I’m especially interested in how we communicate the principles and values underpinning our goals for archival description to a range of different users and stakeholders—the Descriptive Notes blog being a great forum for this kind of reflection. I am also hoping to work through the Description Section to engage peers about refining best practices for describing collections with significant audiovisual components and am always interested in how we apply the theoretical insights of reparative description in our daily work.
Secretary
Mandy Bernard Lignelli, C.A.
Bio:
I am a certified archivist based in Maryland. I hold an M.S. in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Cultural Heritage Information Management from The Catholic University of America, where I was awarded a Graduate Library Preprofessional scholarship. I graduated summa cum laude from St. Mary’s College of Maryland with a B.A. in English and spent a semester abroad in Oxford. Before deciding to pursue a career in archives, I previously worked in publishing and media production.
Statement:
I would like to be considered for the position of Secretary on the Section Steering Committee.
As an archivist with a background in English, I’m very interested in the theory and practice of archival description. I’m inspired by the trend in reparative archival description as a testament to both the power of language and our social responsibility as archivists. As a member of the Description Section, I enjoy keeping up with the Descriptive Notes blog and admire the work that the Section has done to compile resources in the Documentation Portal.
I previously served on the Steering Committee for the Congressional Papers Section and am familiar with coordinating section elections, updating the section’s microsite, and planning the section’s program for the annual meeting. As Secretary for the Description Section, I would gladly continue to share these responsibilities in addition to recording the meeting minutes.
Member-at-Large
Kolbe Resnick
Bio:
I am an archivist at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. I hold an MLSIS from Pratt Institute and previously held positions at Anthology Film Archives and the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo. In every role in my career so far, I’ve worked to increase visibility and accessibility to archival collections through description. At UB and at Yale I continue to process and describe collections and refine workflows to find access points for materials to ensure their discovery and use. The collections I work with are broad, including manuscripts, letters, visual materials, ephemera, and born-digital files. I enjoy the work of describing collections and items that are difficult to distill into easy categories. I also enjoy finding unique access points for collections and highlighting materials, subjects and agents in collections that might otherwise be overlooked. In my own work, I look to implement inclusive descriptive practices, thinking about past description and how improvements can be made to make sure harmful or outdated language is updated or contextualized.
Statement:
I’m always interested in learning how other archivists and institutions approach and solve issues around archival processing and description. In addition, I enjoy discussing practical and technological developments that aid in preservation and access efforts. Serving on SAA’s Description Section Steering Committee would be an excellent opportunity for me to expand my network, learn from colleagues, offer my own perspective, and work with others to identify sustainable and ethical strategies for the access, description, and stewardship of archival collections.
Melissa Haley
Bio:
Melissa Haley is the Shapiro Center Archivist & Program Coordinator at The Huntington Library. Prior to this position she was the American Presidential Papers Project Archivist at the Huntington and has held positions at UCLA Library Special Collections, New York Public Library, The New-York Historical Society, and elsewhere during her 20+ career in archives. Melissa serves as the current co-chair of the Society of California Archivists’ Labor, Advocacy, and Public Policy Committee and from 2016 to 2022 she was an editor of Acid Free, the online magazine of the Los Angeles Archivists Collective. She has an M.A. in U.S. history and certificate in archival management from New York University.
Statement:
As a career processing archivist, I have many years of experience creating finding aids, catalog records, and other descriptive tools such as research guides and processing blog posts. I am especially interested in reparative and inclusive description, and in finding ways to implement the many new standards for these efforts that have been released in the past several years. I would be excited to assist with the continued development of the Description Section Documentation Portal. I’m also interested in extensible and iterative processing and accessioning as processing and the various description challenges these approaches create. In addition, I spent several years writing for and editing Acid Free magazine and could apply those skills to the section’s Descriptive Notes if needed.
Jennifer Gathings Eidson
Bio:
Jen Gathings is the Collection Strategies Archivist at University of Maryland in College Park, MD where she manages the accessioning program, and also plays a key role in planning relocation or processing for collections that consist of multiple legacy accessions, are large in size, and complex in nature. Jen trains, mentors, and supervises student assistants who are mainly graduate students, to accession, inventory, process, and create records in ArchivesSpace. Her work also supports reparative description and DEI initiatives as demonstrated in her lead role in planning and implementing symposiums in 2023 and 2024 for The 1856 Project’s research as part of the Universities Studying Slavery. For the last three years, she was also heavily involved with a Hidden Collections CLIR grant which partnered with Georgia State University to digitize over 100,000 pages of content from the AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department. Her past involvement with SAA was as a member of the Labor Archives Roundtable, and the Oral History Section, where she served on the Steering Committee, as the Newsletter Editor and Web Liaison, the Vice Chair, and lastly as Chair. She is a member of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC) and was recently elected to serve as the next Maryland Caucus Representative. Jen holds a BA in Art History from Indiana University in Bloomington, and a MLIS from University of Pittsburgh.
Statement:
Most of my 20+ years of experience as a professional archivist involved accessioning and processing at the Atlanta History Center, Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project, the David C. Driskell Center at University of Maryland, as well as the AFL-CIO Archive in the Special Collections at University of Maryland. Creating new description using various internal and vendor templates, as well as coordinating the migration of legacy finding aids into ArchivesSpace records involves many layers of interpreting description policies and procedures because the description is going into different platforms. In my current job, I am organizing a major revision of our processing manual which was last revised to incorporate the structure of ArchivesSpace. We will be adding guidelines for pre-accessioning steps with donors, as well as reparative description, oral history description, deaccessioning, revised inventory templates, and much more. My team is involved with all things related to access to collections, and description that is user friendly, consciously written or edited, as well as following archival description standards. It is a balance to achieve this! I would love to be considered for a position in the Description Section to contribute to and learn from the work of the section. I particularly find the Descriptive Notes blog a very useful resource. After several years away from SAA, I look forward to becoming more involved again!
Holly Deakyne
Bio:
I have worked in various archival settings, primarily as a processing archivist for personal and professional papers, including at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Ohio University, the Getty Research Institute, and the New-York Historical Society. I hold an MLS from Pratt Institute with a specialization in archives and BA in art history from Florida State University. In my current position, I am appraising, arranging, and describing congressional papers in a hybrid collection. In addition, I am working with others in the department to update the description and access components of our electronic records processing workflow. I previously served on the SAA Museum Archives Section Standards and Best Practices Working Group from 2013 to 2017. In that role, I assisted in building the collection of documents for the Resource Guide and interviewed archivists on the development of their electronic records programs for inclusion as a reference source. I have been a member of the Manuscript Repository Steering Committee since 2022 organizing virtual educational events to help archivists expand their knowledge and skills in the profession and to connect with others with the same interests.
Statement:
My primary interests in terms of description are getting more information from the donor upon acquisition when possible and updating description based on needs determined by reference use (or non-use). I am interested in assisting the Description Section Steering Committee on its stated goals of collaborating with other sections and continuing to develop the Description Documentation Portal.
Jennifer Brcka
Bio:
My name is Jennifer Brcka, I'm the Lead Processing Archivist at the Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame, where I help guide policy and practice for the description and management of archival collections across several campus repositories. I have been with Hesburgh Libraries for 20 years. Six of those years have been in our archives; a body of earlier experience in metadata and analog conservation have greatly informed my work as an archivist.
Statement:
I would be delighted to serve the Steering Committee as Member-at-Large. I have considerable experience with archival and other content standards, and am excited by the professional dialogue surrounding standards and best practices at the national level. I believe that we exist at a fascinating point in time where our descriptive efforts must be flexible and adaptive enough to embrace an evolving environment engaged in reparative and community-guided work, and yet synchronous and mechanical in efforts which will allow our description to be increasingly interoperable in the years ahead. Personally, I have a research interest in the application of linked data models to archival description. I would look forward to this opportunity to learn and to serve the Section.
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