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Adrienne Cain joined Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History in August 2016 as Assistant Director. She holds the rank of Lecturer on the Baylor University faculty and, in addition, serves as the Secretary/Treasurer of the Texas Oral History Association (TOHA). Since coming to Baylor, Cain has worked on and contributed to several projects in the role of trainer, creator, and/or consultant. She has trained several community groups, students, educators, and independent practitioners who desired to create an oral history project for their neighborhoods, classrooms, and/or institutions. Cain has also created and conducted several presentations on oral history use and methodology for professional organizations such as TOHA, TLA (Texas Library Association), the Southwest Oral History Association and the Oral History Association.
Cain was introduced to the world of oral history while serving as an intern in NASA’s History Office at Johnson Space Center. Before coming to Baylor, Cain was with the Houston Public Library, where she served as the Oral History and Media Librarian for the Houston Metropolitan Research Center (HMRC). In that capacity, she facilitated access to a collection of over 1,500 oral histories through organizing, arranging, describing, transcribing, digitizing, and developing policies and procedures. Prior to joining HMRC, she worked as the Oral History Librarian for the African-American Library at the Gregory School, where she reorganized their collection and significantly increased awareness of the collection along with the amount and quality of the recordings. Due to these efforts, TOHA recognized the Gregory School in 2014 with its Mary Faye Barnes Award for Excellence in Community Oral History.
Cain is a graduate of Prairie View A&M University where she earned two Bachelor of Arts degrees in English and history, earned a Masters in Library Science from University of North Texas, and in 2016 became a Certified Archivist. In addition to SAA and TOHA, she is a member of the Academy for Certified Archivists, Oral History Association, Society of Southwest Archivists, Southwest Oral History Association, and the Texas Library Association.
Ellen Brooks graduated from Fordham University with a BA in History and a BA in Communications before attending the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University. While finishing her Master’s thesis Brooks also worked at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, where she aided in organizing the Museum’s oral history collection and advised on integrating oral history into public programming. She graduated from OHMA in the Fall of 2013.
Brooks has held the position of Oral Historian at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum (WVM) since November 2013. She is responsible for managing the Oral History Program by actively gathering oral histories from veterans across Wisconsin, and, on the archival side, overseeing the preservation and accessibility of the oral history collection.
I would be honored to serve on the SAA Oral History Steering Committee. Oral History is my primary passion but I have learned so much about being an archivist over my past 4 and half years working at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum. I really enjoy exploring the overlap of the two fields and helping to build communication between the professionals practicing oral history and information science. I’m a very involved member of the Oral History Association and I would welcome the opportunity to use my experience with that organization to contribute to the SAA OH Section.
Andy Kolovos is the Director of Archives and Research at the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury, VT, where he has worked since 2002. He holds a PhD in Folklore and Ethnomusicology and an MLS, both from Indiana University. For the past 16 years he has taught workshops on oral history, community ethnography and audio field recording, and presents and consults on ethnographic and oral history archival collections and audio-visual archives. His current work looks at the use of cartooning as a medium for sharing ethnographic and oral history narratives.
As an ethnographer, Andy’s orientation toward oral history focuses on the interrelationship between memory and identity, and the way in which the remembered past informs personal and collective understandings of the present. He views the oral history interview as a potentially powerful and intimate communicative exchange rooted in trust and respect, one that treats interviewees as experts in their own experience and cedes to them interpretive—and ultimately representational—authority for their words.
Through his training and experience as an ethnographer and ethnographic archivist Andy will bring to the steering committee an interviewee- and community-focused perspective on oral history archives that stresses the direct involvement of documented communities in decision making regarding collections, post-custodial practice and repatriation, and the broader ethics of oral history work.