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As a member of the Metadata and Digital Object Section, you have the ability to determine the future of the group. You will be able to cast your ballot in the upcoming section elections during the week of June 24, 2020. Look for your ballot to arrive via Survey Monkey. In the meantime, get to know the candidates!
Over the course of my career as an archivist and librarian, I have benefited tremendously from my colleagues in the Society of American Archivists and am eager to give back as a member of the MDOS Steering Committee. I believe our section can be an effective platform to share information, engage with peers, and build consensus on tools and strategies to help us better manage, preserve, and provide access to digital content. If elected, I look forward to working with our membership to better understand and advance our needs and interests.
Mike Shallcross began his career at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library, where he first served as the Technical Lead for the ‘Email Preservation at the University of Michigan’ project. Following the completion of the grant, he served as a founding member of the Digital Curation Team and developed an automated ingest and processing tool for digital archives (https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/95923) that was used to prepare more than 230 accessions of digital content (approx. 1.2 TB) for deposit in Michigan’s DSpace repository. In 2014, he was named Lead Archivist for Curation, in which role he consolidated processing operations for all collecting units and involved all staff in the arrangement and description of digital archives. He also served as Principal Investigator for the Mellon Foundation-funded ‘ArchivesSpace-Archivematica-DSpace Workflow Integration’ project. Upon being promoted to Assistant Director for Curation (2015-2018), Mike oversaw the implementation of both ArchivesSpace and Archivematica and provided leadership for the library’s archival processing, digitization, digital curation, and conservation activities. He also served on the Task Force on Technical Approaches for Email Archives from 2016-2018 (http://www.emailarchivestaskforce.org/). Since assuming the role of Digital Preservation Librarian at the Indiana University Libraries in 2018, Mike has implemented new procedures and tools to automate the acquisition and ingest procedures for digital archives (see https://wiki.dlib.indiana.edu/display/DIGIPRES/Born+Digital+Preservation...) and explored the application of natural language processing and named entity recognition tools to assist with the appraisal, arrangement, and description of materials.
As someone who gets to work with digital collections on a daily basis, I get to enjoy the hands-on experience as well as the opportunity to teach our student workers and graduate assistants on our digitization processes and standards. Digitization, digital objects, and metadata are interests and passions of mine that I hope to continue to focus on throughout my career. Because of my work experience and interests, I would like to serve on the MDOS Steering Committee as a Steering Committee Member not only to have an opportunity to become more involved in SAA but also to be able to have a more active role in participating in the bigger discussion of these topics.
Since 2016, Randi Johnson has been an Archival Assistant at the University of Arizona Libraries, Special Collections, where she spends a significant portion of my time working on building, updating, and maintaining digital exhibits and collections. In 2014, she received her MLIS from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with a concentration in Archival Studies and completed an internship at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Norlin Library, with her work focused on digitization and born-digital objects. She is also currently taking courses to obtain the Digital Archives Specialist certificate.
I am interested in serving as a member of the MDOS Steering Committee because it presents the opportunity to actively engage the broader community and foster collaboration that benefits both the profession and those who rely on our services. Throughout my career, I have taken the initiatives necessary to increase discoverability and access to archival materials, while also working with staff to identify and implement the highest standards in description and preservation. I quickly understood the importance of the vision and mission of the MDOS Section while conducting research for my book. With few resources at hand, research for a topic as niche as iron producers in nineteenth century Ohio benefited greatly from digitization and the metadata heroes that allowed me to find what I needed. Now, it is more important than ever to emphasize access, management, and preservation as libraries, archives, and institutions of higher learning try to navigate the COVID-19 era.
Clayton Ruminski is the Digital and Preservation Archivist at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina. A new position in Clemson’s Special Collections and Archives, Clayton collaborates with faculty and staff to develop a sustainable digital preservation program that emphasizes access and discoverability for both students and staff alike. Prior to joining Clemson, he was the Managing Archivist at Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, where he developed a digital preservation program in the Manuscripts & Archives Department while improving metadata and description standards to facilitate greater discoverability of both digital and legacy archival materials. In conjunction with the University of Delaware, Clayton served on Hagley’s Fellowship Committee, which evaluated research trends in business history from scholars around the world. He has a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from Kent State University and a Master’s degree in History from Youngstown State University. His book, Iron Valley, which examines how small-scale iron producers in the Youngstown, Ohio, region adapted to mass production and monopolization in the nineteenth century, was published by the Ohio State University Press in 2017.
As a new archivist, Hsiu-Ann is excited to continue to engage in the SAA community through service to the MDOS section as a Steering Committee member. She is interested in greater advocacy for web accessibility and encouraging the discussion around ways computational archival science is informing the evolution of digital object management and collection management tools.
Hsiu-Ann Tom is the Digital Archivist at Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, Louisiana where she focuses on digital and born digital collections. She is responsible for creating standards-based policies and workflows, training staff on best practices for digital asset management, and developing and implementing procedures for the acquisition, preservation, and access of born-digital materials. Her work also includes installation of a professional content management system, and formulating a plan for importing existing metadata and handling ongoing data entry.
She received her Master’s in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archives Management from Simmons University in Boston in 2019. She is a graduate of Columbia University (BA, Sociology) and Harvard University (MA, Religion and Politics), and is a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists. Prior to working in the archival field, Hsiu-Ann served in the United States Army intelligence field as a cryptolinguistic analyst, attending the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. Before coming to Amistad, Hsiu-Ann worked on the archives staff of Boston University's Howard Gotlieb's Archival Research Center working with the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts Collection. She has held archival internships including working at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum and the Massachusetts National Guard Military Records Branch. She served as an intern to SAA’s Human Rights Archives Subcommittee from 2018-2019 where she worked on a survey to document the history of the section over the past 10 years. For the past year she has served as a Steering Committee member on the Human Rights Archives section. She is a member of the Society of Southwestern Archivists, Louisiana Archivists and Manuscripts Association and the Special Library Association.
As an archivist, my work has consistently focused on metadata, description and cataloging. In moving into my current position, this focus has turned towards digital materials, as I remediate and improve metadata for the archive’s digitized testimonies. Many of the challenges that I may face, such as creating metadata for materials whose descriptive needs changed thanks to new digitized formats, are familiar to other archivists. I’m also interested in creating standardized, searchable, and interoperable metadata for access, especially as we have more opportunities to share digital materials between institutions and other platforms, as Fortunoff and many other institutions are presently doing. As a steering committee member of MDOS, I would be eager to work with other members of the profession to address practices around these and other needed areas, through open and inclusive communication and education.
Christy Bailey-Tomecek is the Project Archivist at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. She received her MLS with archives certificate from Queens College, City University of New York in 2014. Prior to the Fortunoff Archive, she has held positions at Manuscripts and Archives at Yale University, the Armenian Church of America (Eastern Diocese) and the Municipal Archives in New York, New York. She has served as a steering committee member on the Encoded Archival Standards section (2015-2017).