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Both Sarah Dorpinghaus and Jody DeRidder were elected as Co-Chairs.
Heather Fox and Sherri Berger were selected to join the MDOR steering committee. Welcome to our new members!
This year we are electing a Junior co-Chair, a Senior co-chair, and two steering committee members-at-large. Electronic balloting will begin in July and will be conducted by SAA staff. Election results will be announced at the annual meeting.
The Co-Chairs are elected annually by the membership in an electronic election. The Junior Co-Chair is elected annually for a two-year term, serving in year one as Junior Co-Chair and in year two as Senior Co-Chair.
This year 2 members are standing for election (vote for two) [Bios of each candidate can be found below]
Steering committee member-at-large is a three-year term.[Bios of each candidate can be found below]
This year 6 members are standing for election (vote for two)
Jody DeRidder is Head of Digital Services at the University of Alabama,where she developed a production-oriented digitization team, policies and procedures for long-term access support, and the back-end support for a home-grown delivery system for special collections and born-digital content. She also develops and implements usability studies and workflow support software. Before that, she modified and supported digital libraries for the University of Tennessee Special Collections. Jody has an MS in both Computer Science and Information Science. Her current interests are in natural language processing and exploring the use of linked data for digital collections.
Sarah Dorpinghaus
is the Digital Projects Library Manager at the University of Kentucky Libraries. She oversees workflows for digital content creation, management, and preservation in the Digital Library Services department. She also manages UK Libraries’ digitization projects and is responsible for quality control of content in the Kentucky Digital Library and ExploreUK. Sarah holds an MLIS from the University of Iowa (2009) and her research interests include mass digitization of minimally processed manuscript collections and digitization as a means of processing. Before joining the University of Kentucky Libraries staff, she held project archivist positions at the College of Charleston and the Chicago History Museum.
Heather Gilbert: 
I am the Digital Scholarship Librarian for the College of Charleston and the Project Coordinator for the Lowcountry Digital Library. In addition I serve as the Metadata Coordinator and the coastal region contact for the South Carolina Digital Library and as the Metadata Coordinator for the South Carolina Hubs Pilot Project of the DPLA. I received my MFA in 2004 from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and my MLIS in 2011 from the University of South Carolina. In my time in the field, I have experienced tremendous exposure to policies, standards, issues and concerns contemporary to the MDOR and feel that my perspective and experience coordinating large scale efforts across the state will be beneficial.
In the last two years I have worked on projects to redesign, rebuild, and reinvigorate both the Lowcountry Digital Library (LCDL) and the South Carolina Digital Library (SCDL). As Project Coordinator for the LCDL, my last year has been spent managing the metadata migration out of CONTENTdm into a digital asset management system of our own design built from Drupal, Blacklight, Rutger's OpenWMS project and a Fedora Repository. More information on that project can be found here: http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/8327 My role in the SCDL project was to assist in the redesign and construction of a new website in Drupal and to lead the review of current metadata standards, implementing stronger controlled vocabularies and ensuring compatibility with DPLA metadata requirements. As DPLA metadata coordinator for the SC Hubs Pilot Project, I work with institutions across the state to ensure that our metadata conforms with DPLA standards.
As LIS professionals we have a responsibility to not only protect and preserve our contemporary & historic information objects, but to allow those information objects to evolve with our current and future technologies and use this evolution to increase awareness of not only our resources but our own culture and history. By providing high quality, easily accessible digital access to current institutional holdings and archival collections, we can foster deeper ties to the community and thoroughly inform our intended audience. I believe that we must ensure that these digital collections are not static, but can be used dynamically. One of the primary means of doing this and keeping our digital objects accessible is through adherence to rigorous and interoperable descriptive standards. I hope to offer MDOR not only my enthusiasm and dedication, but also experience of working with very diverse groups of metadata creators, in regards to experience, technological fluency and ability, to aid is achieving and helping others achieve these goals
Dorothy Waugh: I am currently the Digital Archives Research Library Fellow at Emory University’s Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL), where I work on the management of born-digital acquisitions entering MARBL and the development of standards, policies and procedures for our Digital Archives program. The Research Library Fellow is a two-year position for new professionals and is designed to give recent graduates the opportunity to develop expertise, leadership and project management skills in placements related to both the libraries’ strategic goals and the Fellow’s career goals. I hold a Masters in Library Science from Indiana University, where I specialized in digital libraries and served on the boards of both the ALA student chapter and the SAA student chapter. I also hold a Masters in English Literature from the Ohio State University. Throughout my time in graduate school, I worked on a number of digitization projects, including several initiatives at the Lilly Library, and was the recipient of scholarships allowing me to further develop my interests in digital archives and scholarship at a number of conferences, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, and the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia.
My most recent areas of research have included the importance of a proactive approach to donor outreach within digital archives and the opportunities for collaboration between digital archivists and local retro-computing communities: I will be presenting a paper on the latter at the upcoming SNCA/SGA/SCAA Conference in October of this year.
Though fairly new to the profession, I am fast coming to appreciate both the challenges and the great opportunities of working with digital objects. With the number of institutions actively working on initiatives involving digitization and born-digital materials ever on the rise, there is much to be gained from a collaborative community of archivists open to sharing their experience and knowledge. Finding effective ways to foster discussion and share resources within the archival community can help build a collective and continually developing pool of knowledge from which archival professionals can draw as we all continue to learn in this growing field. MDOR has played a significant role in the facilitation of this kind of community, and I would look forward to contributing toward its goals as a member of the steering committee.
Pamela Mitchem is Assistant Professor and Preservation and Digital Projects Archivist for Special Collections at Appalachian State University, a position she has held for the past four years. Prior to that she was Assistant Archivist in the University Archives at Appalachian State for ten years. She participated in the NCECHO (North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online) Digitization Institute in 2007 and has received additional training at Etherington Conservation Services. Pamela has an MA in Appalachian Studies and an EdS in Higher Education, both from Appalachian State University, and is interested in digital humanities as it applies to Appalachian studies research and crowdsourcing for metadata.
Sherri Berger: I am a product manager at the California Digital Library. In this position—which I have held for four years—I provide strategic support, project planning, and communications for the Online Archive of California and Calisphere. Currently I am also working on the implementation of a systemwide digital asset management system for University of California libraries and archives.
I believe I would bring a unique perspective to MDOR, both because of my experience working with digital objects at a consortial level and my interest in the relatively non-technical aspects of creating and operating digital library projects. In fact, if elected to the Steering Committee, I would encourage MDOR to think about metadata and digital object “management” more holistically—in particular, by placing more of an emphasis on the needs of end users. For example, I would like to see MDOR engage more frequently with topics such as evaluating web statistics and usage of digital objects; the effect of mass digitization and minimal/folder level metadata on usability; techniques for enhancing search engine optimization and the visibility of archival resources online; and scalable methods for crowdsourcing metadata. I believe these topics would strengthen the core focus of MDOR, as well as broaden its scope, opening up new areas of discussion within the archives community.
I hold an M.S. in LIS and a Certificate in Special Collections from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a B.A. in American Studies from Northwestern University.
Heather Fox: In my position as Archivist for Metadata and Scholarly Communication at the University of Louisville, I am responsible for metadata creation for digital versions of historical and cultural materials in a variety of formats. I have broad experience with the management of digital objects that ranges from digitization and description of oral history collections to data wrangling information related to access and preservation of the University of Louisville’s first born digital online collection, to creating metadata for the Appalshop Archives’ collection of digitized community video tapes shot in the 1970s and early 1980s.
I received my MSLS from the University of Kentucky and have worked for institutions across my state including the Kentucky Historical Society, the Filson Historical Society, Appalshop and the University of Louisville. I was recently appointed as co-chair of the local arrangements committee for the 2015 Midwest Archives Conference (MAC) in Lexington, KY, I serve as the MAC Membership Representative for Kentucky and am the assistant editor of the Mixed Media column in the MAC newsletter. I serve on the Kentucky State Historical Records Advisory Board and am a past board member of the Kentucky Council on Archives. In April, I was awarded the 2013 Margaret Cross Norton Award for the article I co-authored, “Born Digital Deluge: Documenting 21st Century Events,” published in the MAC journal Archival Issues.
In addition to my work with digital collections, I have processed analog collections ranging from a single election ticket for Millard Fillmore’s 1856 presidential campaign to 160 cubic feet of institutional records of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville. Not only would I bring enthusiasm, organizational skills, knowledge of digital collections and digital preservation to the steering committee, I would also bring solid experience with analog processing that informs my work in the digital realm. I believe experience in both realms of archival practice provides me with a robust understanding of issues challenging us in the digital age and I would be honored to serve MDOR as we consider these challenges.
Stephen J. Fletcher is the North Carolina Collection Photographic Archivist, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in Wilson Library. Before his current position at UNC (appointed in 2003) he has worked as the Assistant Curator and then Curator of Photographs at the California Historical Society (1983 to 1988), and Curator of Visual Collections at the Indiana Historical Society (1988 to 2002). In 1988 he also worked as a consultant to the Sierra Club, organizing and providing access through a Hypercard database to its library's photographic collection.
Fletcher graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in fine art photography in 1982. He began his archival/curatorial career in 1981 while attending RIT through an independent study at the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House. He then worked as a summer cataloging assistant to sort, organize, and catalog approximately 10,000 lantern slides, and then completed two additional independent studies. He then attended the John F. Kennedy University's Center for Museum Studies in San Francisco, obtaining his Master of Arts degree in 1992.
Within SAA, Fletcher served as Visual Materials Section Chair-elect for the year 1993-1994 and as Chair during 1994-1995. He was a steering committee member of the Metadata and Digital Objects Roundtable from August 2005 until August 2008, when he was again voted Chair-elect of the Visual Materials Section for 2008-2009, serving as Chair in 2009-2010. Fletcher has remained active in the Visual Materials Section, encouraging the section to address matters relating to the archival collection of born-digital photographs. He maintains "Savvy Pixels," a wiki of resources related to born-digital photography for archivists. (http://savvypixels.wikispaces.com).
While the focus of his professional career has been as a curator and an archivist, Fletcher never completely set his camera aside. He was one of twelve Indiana photographers who founded INVISION: An Alliance of Photographic Artists. He has exhibited in group and one-person shows at The Photography Gallery and the Artsgarden in Indianapolis, the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) in New York City, and has a photograph on permanent exhibit at the Federal Reserve Bank in Chicago, IL. He is a member of Through This Lens, a photography gallery in Durham, North Carolina.
