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Thank you to our candidates for standing for the 2025 Manuscript Repositories Section election.
Section members, please review the candidate statements below and get to know the candidates so you can make an informed choice.
You will be voting for:
The following candidate is running for the Vice Chair/Chair-Elect position:
Candace Pine
Rare Book and Manuscripts Librarian, Walter Havighurst Special Collections and University Archives, Miami University
Candace Pine is early career librarian/archivist currently working as the Rare Books and Manuscripts Librarian at the Walter Havighurst Special Collections and University Archives at Miami University, located in Oxford, Ohio. While she performs a variety of duties, such as cataloging, teaching, providing reference services, planning and participating in engagement activities, etc., the main focus of her position is processing and maintaining our manuscript collections, as well as making them more discoverable and accessible to our patrons. As such, she is naturally drawn to SAA’s Manuscript Repositories Section, on which she has been serving as a Steering Committee member since 2023. Now, she is hoping to take on more responsibility within the section and move into the Vice Chair/Chair Elect position.
There is a wide variety of challenges and opportunities that come with working with manuscript collections. From working with donors, to determining the organization/arrangement of collections, addressing preservation concerns, promoting the collections, organizing engagement activities/events, negotiating privacy concerns, dealing with processing backlogs, determining what (if any) materials will be digitized, and so much more – there’s a lot to discuss and address. And that’s not even to mention the current tumultuous political landscape that we and our institutions are trying to navigate. However, these are all reasons why I feel that this Section is so important and has so much it can offer, and it’s why I want to get more involved and take on this position. I’d like to see this Section continue to have interesting and relevant conversations about all aspects of our work, and I’d like to help foster a greater sense of community among our members.
My other committee work currently includes serving as a Steering Committee member for SAA’s Women Archivists Section, serving on the Midwest Archives Conference’s (MAC) Archie Motley Memorial Scholarship for Students of Color Committee, and serving as a Co-Chair for the Academic Library Association of Ohio’s (ALAO) Special Collections and Archives Interest Group (SCAIG). My term as Co-Chair for SCAIG is coming to an end soon, which will give me the time needed to expand my service and work on behalf of the Manuscript Repositories Section, which I very much look forward to.
Molly Copeland
Manuscript Archivist, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Library
Molly Copeland holds an M.S. in Library Science with a concentration in Archival Management and an M.A. in History from Simmons University along with a B.A. in Art History from Oberlin College. In her current role, Molly works to steward and make accessible distinctive archival collections that document the history and cultural heritage of Tennessee. Molly’s research interests include reparative archival description, public history, and developing information literacy through engagement with primary sources, and she approaches her work with an ethics of care. She has been a member of SAA, the Society of Tennessee Archivists, and the American Historical Association and currently is a member of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s UX committee.
Erica Donnis
Congressional Papers Archivist and Associate Professor, University of Vermont
Erica Donnis has more than twenty-five years of experience working in the field as an archivist, director of special collections, collections consultant, and museum curator. Erica currently serves as a congressional papers archivist and associate professor in the Silver Special Collections Library at the University of Vermont. Part of a team processing the papers of Senator Patrick J. Leahy at UVM, Erica is the principal investigator for the project’s five-year, $2.5 million Preservation Partnership Grant from the United States Senate Historical Office. Erica also sits on the Electronic Records Committee of SAA’s Congressional Papers Section and is president of the Collections Care & Conservation Alliance, a nonprofit supporting collections care professionals in libraries, archives, museums, galleries, and conservation studios across the United States.
Sarah Roberts
Special Collections Librarian, Michigan State University
Sarah Roberts received her MLS from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a specialization in Archives in 2002 and BA in History from the University of Iowa in 2000. She has been with the Michigan State University Archives and Historical collections since 2002. Until fall 2024, she served as Acquisitions Archivist selecting materials, working with donors and departments, and accessioning new donations. Since then, her position has transitioned to collection evaluation including deaccessioning. She is excited about analyzing our backlog and identifying and prioritizing collections that meet their current collecting scope, and their researcher needs. She hopes to connect with others about this work to learn and share knowledge. Throughout her time at MSU, her duties have also included assisting researchers, processing collections, supervising students, and serving on MSU Libraries’ committees. Her committee work has included board member-at-large for the Michigan Archival Association (MAA) from 2010-2017 as well as chair of the MAA Marilyn McNitt Memorial Scholarship Committee from 2013-2017. From 2021 to 2024, she served as a steering committee member with the SAA Manuscript Repository section.
William Hardesty
Coordinator of Archival Collections Management, Georgia State University Special Collections and Archives
As Coordinator of Archival Collections Management in Special Collections and Archives at Georgia State University in Atlanta, I oversee processing, description, and storage of the paper-based collections. Previously, I’ve been in involved with our photographic collections, reference service, and digitization activities. I learned to be an archivist at The University of Texas at Austin, both in the classroom (MLIS, 2001) and through my earliest experience (at the Briscoe Center). Before that, I trained as a historian. I have been involved in the Society of Georgia Archivists as committee and board member and as associate editor and member of the editorial board of Provenance. As a longtime member of SAA, I have benefited from Manuscript Repository Section meetings and programming but never contributed to its ongoing activities. Especially in recent years, we have been able to connect as a group virtually, and that has helped us to share experiences and solutions. What is most exciting about the profession now is how those solutions are user-centered and we are seeking to serve our publics in new ways. I would welcome the opportunity to pay the section back for some of what it has given me and to help it benefit other members as we go forward.
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Society of American Archivists
Manuscript Repositories Section
Created | 29 June 2004
Last updated | 28 September 2018