2026 Labor Archives Section Steering Committee election - Candidate statement

Emma Barton-Norris (she/her) is the Processing Archivist at Bowdoin College Library in Brunswick, Maine, on the ancestral homelands of the Wabanaki. She earned her MLIS from the University of Iowa in 2023, where her work with the Iowa Women’s Archives and the State Historical Society of Iowa included processing collections from the Iowa Labor Collection and the Iowa Labor History Oral Project, experiences that continue to shape her understanding of archives as sites of labor and power. Within SAA, Emma has served on the Steering Committee of SNAP (Students and New Archives Professionals), where she has worked to foreground labor in conversations about the profession. She also contributes to the Archival Worker Task Force, helping document labor conditions in the field and advocate for meaningful change. Although she does not currently work in a dedicated labor archive, Emma brings a fresh perspective grounded in the belief that the labor of archivists is inseparable from the stories of labor preserved in all our collections—and that both demand attention, care, and advocacy.