2022 Labor Archives Section Co-chair election - Candidate Statement

The following candidate is running for the Co-chair position:

Steven Calco

Research Archivist, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives

I am the Research Archivist at the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives in Martin P. Catherwood Library. Catherwood, located in the ILR School, is part of Cornell University Library. I hold an MLS from CUNY Queens College and an MA in Labor Studies from the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. Previously at CUNY Brooklyn College and Baruch College archives for nearly a decade, I organized part-time librarians and archivists in the CUNY system before coming to Cornell. My public services role at Kheel includes reference, instruction, and outreach. My latest exhibitions include “All Labor Has Dignity: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Labor Movement” and “The Other Side of the Tracks: Discrimination and Social Mobility in the Railroad Industry” and my latest publication is “Lessons learned: Collaborating to digitize Yiddish-language collections at Cornell.”

If elected co-chair of the Labor Archives Section, I’d continue my work building on the Labor Archives Communications Subcommittee, putting out a forthcoming bi-yearly newsletter and increase our social media presence via our new Twitter @LaborArchivists. I think these platforms will be a perfect opportunity to bring together historians and labor history enthusiasts to learn about our amazing collections and services. I’d love to build on the great work of my predecessors creating a more inclusive environment bringing in archival repositories that hold labor related collections into our meetings and archives directory. And generally I love working with the Labor Archives section and hope you will consider me for the role of co-chair this election!