2023-2024 MARS Election Candidate Statements

Thank you to all who considered standing as a candidate for standing in the 2023 Military Archives Section election. Please take some time to review the candidate statements and get to know them so you can make an informed choice.

You will be voting for:

• One Vice Chair/Chair-Elect, for a two-year term; and
• One Communications Liaison, for a two-year term.

The new Chair of the MARS Section will be Beth Ann Koelsch, who was elected as the Vice Chair/Chair-Elect in 2022. Jennifer Milani will continue to serve as the MARS Secretary for the 2023-2024 year.

Ballots will be managed by SAA staff through the SAA election platform; keep an eye on your inbox for when the ballot opens!

This year's candidate(s) are:

Vice Chair/Chair-Elect Candidate(s)

The following candidate is running for the Vice Chair/Chair-Elect position:

Name: Andrew Harman

Job Title and Institution: Head of Special Collections Processing at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Short Bio:

Andy is a Certified Archivist currently stewarding the Center for American War Letters Archives (CAWLA) and Huell Howser Archives in the Leatherby Libraries at Chapman University through mid-July 2023. In mid-July, Harman will began the position of Head of Special Collections Processing at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Born and raised in Orange, CA he is also an alum of Chapman, having earned a BA in History and Political Science and an MA in War and Society, with studies focusing on conflict in the Middle East and how societies go to and are affected by war.

After working for two years as a student in the Leatherby Libraries’ Special Collections, including working with the war letters, he continued his archival education through SAA and returned to Chapman as a project archivist and then full-time archivist. He has been in this role for five years, working with students and faculty while arranging and describing a vast array of donated materials relating to the individual experience of Americans during wartime, and during that time has published several articles and book chapters in both the fields of history and archives.

Brief Candidate Statement: As Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect, I look forward to endeavoring toward empowering and educating a collaborative community of archivists with a single goal in mind, with education and discussion at the center of our work. On a practical level, I would like to work with the committee and other archivists, with planned discussions regarding metadata standards and important aggregated information such as military base lists, lists of units, and other information not yet coherently collected.

The MARS section provides a niche outlet for archivists dealing with a specific set of materials that in their nature may take on facets of all other sections; from manuscripts to records, medical records to personal papers, and more. These require the expertise of archivists employing skills ranging from descriptive practices, to include reparative description initiatives, arrangement, privacy and confidentiality, outreach, access, and more. Discussions on these wide-ranging topics is important to enriching our individual and collective knowledge relating to military archives, as well as educational opportunities, while filling the gaps in our collective expertise into a cogent resource and knowledge base.

Communications Liaison Candidate(s)

The following candidate is running for the Communications Liaison position:

Name: Amy Mondt   

Job Title & Institution: Associate Director—Vietnam Center & Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University

Short Bio: Amy Mondt is the Associate Director of the Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive.  She is a certified archivist and has her Masters Degree in Museum Studies from Texas Tech University.

Brief Candidate Statement: I have enjoyed being a member of MARS since the very beginning and I would be so honored to be able to serve on the executive committee to help give back to the military archive community.  With all of the new programs offered by MARS in the last few years, I feel that the Communications Liaison position is key to promote MARS values, and programs, and encourage participation in the various meetings, coffee chats and other educational opportunities from the section.