ERS 2013 Election Information

Vacant Positions and Candidates

Vice Chair / Chair Elect

• Martin Gengenbach
• Don Mennerich

Steering Committee (2 positions)

• Wendy Hagenmaier
• Erik Moore

Candidate and Biographical Statements

 Martin Gengenbach

Candidate statement:

The Electronic Record Section is an important platform for collaboration and information sharing, both within the electronic records community and as a conduit to the wider archival profession. The coming term cycle presents significant opportunities to reflect upon and refine the role of the ERS: the recently announced Task Force on Member Affinity Groups, ongoing coordination and integration with the Metadata and Digital Objects Roundtable, and further development of educational programming in electronic records management, digital curation, and digital preservation. The importance of these efforts will only increase, as electronic records become more integrated into every organization’s core archival functions, and as our own level of understanding continues to grow and evolve. I am eager to take on a more active role in the ERS, and am excited for the opportunity to help facilitate and direct its future activities as Vice Chair.

Bio:

Martin Gengenbach is an Assistant Archivist with the Gates Archive, where he has developed strategies and workflows for acquiring and managing born digital content. Before joining Gates Archive, Martin was Electronic Records Archivist at the Kansas Historical Society, where he assisted in developing the Kansas Enterprise Electronic Preservation (KEEP) system and served as co-chair of the Best Practices and Tools Subcommittee of the State Electronic Records Initiative (SERI). He received an MSLS from the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is the recipient of the 2013 National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) award for Future Steward, in recognition of his master's paper, "The Way We Do it Here: Mapping Digital Forensics Workflows In Collecting Institutions," and for his work documenting the Digital Forensics XML metadata schema.

 Don Mennerich

Candidate statement:

Like many members of the section, my career working with electronic records began when someone dropped a box of floppy disks on my desk and asked ‘what can we do with these’, at the time I had no answer. Thankfully, there have been many advances in the years since, it’s now becoming commonplace to find forensic workstations in our processing spaces, workstations for accessing electronic materials in our reading rooms and even the dissemination of our holdings through our websites. Archivists are continually developing new skills and applying exciting techniques to all aspects of managing electronic records.  As vice chair of the ERS, I hope that I can facilitate how the archivists, record managers and curators tasked with managing electronic records communicate and share the knowledge we are creating and compiling daily with each other. it is my belief that in doing so we can ensure that the ERS remains an integral section of SAA.  

Bio:

Donald Mennerich is a digital archivist with The New York Public Library’s Manuscripts & Archives Division. Donald has previously worked as a digital archivist with Manuscripts and Archives at Yale University and as a metadata archivist at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. He holds a MS in Information Systems from Pace University, with a concentration in Information Security, and an MLS, with a concentration in archives management, from Simmons College. 

 Wendy Hagenmaier

Candidate Statement:

It has been nearly twenty years since the inaugural meeting of the Electronic Records Section, and digital records are now a concern nearly all archivists have in common. Indeed, the public at large—from Dropbox users to Beyoncé—is confronting digital records questions on a daily basis. Now that the digital is ubiquitous, what unique leadership role should the ERS take both within SAA and beyond? As a member of the Steering Committee, I will seek to answer this question by facilitating communication and collaboration among groups within SAA and among archivists from diverse institutions. With its decades-long history, I believe the Section possesses a level of expertise and an informed perspective that is vital to SAA, to electronic records policymaking in general, and to the individuals creating the digital records of the future. I would relish the opportunity to facilitate the expansion of that expertise and the sharing of our unique perspective.

Bio:

Wendy Hagenmaier is the Digital Collections Archivist at the Georgia Tech Archives, where she is responsible for spearheading policies and workflows for digital processing and preservation. Prior to starting at Georgia Tech, Wendy worked on digital projects at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. She received her M.S.I.S. with a focus on digital archives and preservation from the University of Texas at Austin School of Information and her B.A. in English from Stanford University. Her areas of scholarly and professional interest include the challenges of preserving and providing access to proprietary formats; how the aura of uniqueness in physical archives translates to the user experience of digital records; personal digital archiving as an outreach and advocacy tool for increasing awareness about the importance of digital archiving in society; the emerging areas of overlap between digital archives and data repositories; and conundrums involved in increasing access to electronic records. (She thanks the Internet Archive for letting her pretend to graffiti their truck in her photo.)

 Erik Moore