2017 Elections

Thank you for participating in the 2017 election for the International Archival Affairs Section (IAAS). We are holding elections for two open positions:

•   Junior co-chair – Two year term (one year as junior co-chair, and one year as senior co-chair)

•   Member-at-large – Three-year term

Please read the candidate biographical statements below, and then vote for one candidate for each position by July 11, 2017.

Thank you again for voting in this year’s election!

IAAS Steering Committee (Ryder Kouba, Daniel Necas, Katharina Hering, Margarita Vargas-Betancourt and Susanne Belovari)

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Candidate for Junior Co-chair:

Katharina Hering

As junior co-chair, I plan to continue to collaborate with my colleagues on the steering committee in developing the IAAS as a forum for discussion and exchange about international archival issues, and as a support network committed to promoting international archival solidarity. 

For the past three years, I have served as the at-large member of the steering committee, and am one of the co-editors the Global Notes blog (launched in July 2014). I remain committed to co-editing the blog with my colleagues, and hope we can recruit more authors to write about international archival issues, and share announcements and conference reports. I believe it would be helpful to survey the IAAS membership to learn more about people’s interests, and I am eager to support specific initiatives, such as the recent suggestion by a member to collect information about programs providing support for international archival collaborations. I hope we will continue and expand our collaboration with other sections beyond organizing shared sessions at the SAA annual meeting, especially with LACCHA, the Human Rights Section, and the Archival History Roundtable, and work on developing collaborative resources. I continue to be interested in establishing a fund that would allow us to invite international speakers to SAA meetings, and in supporting the Itinerant Archivists with organizing future trips facilitating international archival exchanges. 

For the past five years, I have worked as the Project Archivist for the National Equal Justice Library, which is part of Georgetown Law Library. The NEJL holds a range of international materials, including collections documenting legal aid for refugees and immigrants. My own research has focused on various topics related to international archival history, including the role of archives and archivists during National Socialism, as well as the role of archives and archivists in documenting the Holocaust. I am also very interested in the history of archival access to personal, confidential, and privileged information from an international perspective. Independent from the IAAS, I am active with the CAA and with the Friends of the DC Archives. My academic degrees include a MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh and a PhD in history from George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

Candidate for Member-at-large:

Mark Edwin Peterson 

I trained to be a medieval historian at the University of Wisconsin, but along the way, I worked in a number of archives and law libraries with files and collections. So, when teaching did not turn out to be the place for me, I went to the University of North Carolina to study to be a Special Collections Librarian. I worked with rare books at the medical school of Washington University in St. Louis and then James Madison University. Since my work at JMU included reference work and training of the interns in Special Collections, I ended up learning a lot about managing archives over my years there. Now I am the librarian at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, but much of my work involves directing the processing and description that is done on our archives. This includes the new skills I am developing in creating digital collections. Originally from Minnesota, I have lived in Oregon, Wisconsin, Germany, Hungary, North Carolina, and Virginia. My scholarship has come to focus on the international book trade and its role in the transfer of culture. My teaching has often looked at shared cultures and the development of global conflict despite them. Now that I am dealing with US topics much of the time at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, I find that much of my archival work still has connections to the ways that Americans engaged with the rest of the world.

I am running for the at-large position with IAAS, because I have grown concerned about the degree to which important collections have become endangered through conflict and neglect even as sharing information has become immediate and easy. Right now, the tools are being developed to make many more historical collections visible to a wider world. Archivists and researchers have to rush in some cases to make use of those tools, though, because we are seeing outright assaults on culture on many different fronts. I feel that fostering communication among archivists on an international scale is necessary if we are going to seize this moment and do our best to be advocates for archives and serve the greater public.