SAA OHS Steering Committee Nominations: Meet the Candidates 2024

2024 Election Candidates

It is that time of the year again, SAA election season! Thank you to all of our excellent candidates for standing in the 2024 Oral History Section election. Please take some time to review their 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 three year term

Two Steering Committee members; for two year terms

Ballots will be managed by SAA staff; keep an eye on your inbox for when the ballot opens in mid-July!

Vice Chair/Chair-Elect Candidates

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

Anu Kasarabada

Anu is an archivist and oral historian for the John G. Heyburn II Initiative, a joint project between the University of Kentucky Libraries and the Rosenberg College of Law, to document the role of the federal courts in American, particularly Kentuckian, history. In this position, she conducts oral history interviews with and collects the papers of federal judges, law clerks, court officials, prosecutors, public defenders, and others who shape the federal courts. With the support of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, she plans the overall direction of the Heyburn Initiative’s oral history project, and she researches and conducts the interviews themselves. 

Candidate Statement

Currently, I am a member of the Oral History Section (OHS) Steering Committee. In this role, I have helped to organize virtual events about the opportunities and challenges in our field and about privacy and confidentiality restrictions on oral history recordings. I am inspired by the enthusiastic response to these and other OHS events, a response that has come from both section members and beyond. I want to build on the work we have done to date and expand section offerings in the years ahead. If elected as Vice Chair/Chair-Elect, I will focus on creating more opportunities for section members to connect, communicate, and cultivate knowledge and skills related to conducting, preserving, and providing access to oral history interviews. Thank you for considering my nomination.

Steering Committee Member Candidates

The following candidates are running for the Oral History Section Steering Committee:

Patrick Daglaris 

Patrick is the archivist for the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at the Oklahoma State University Library, where he oversees the collection management and digital preservation of their 2,400+ interview holdings. He supervises the production of the Amplified Oklahoma podcast in which student interns highlight stories and narrators from the OOHRP collections for broader public consumption. He is interested in the discoverability of audiovisual materials and community engagement by archival institutions and holds a Digital Archives Specialist certificate from the Society of American Archivists. He has previously served on the Communications Committee of the SAA Preservation Section and as well as a representative for the Regional Archival Associations Consortium and is an active member of the Oral History Association and the OHA Archives Caucus.

Candidate statement

My experience creating and managing oral history collections is what brought me to the archives profession over a decade ago and I remain a dedicated advocate for archival principles and best practices in the field of oral history. I believe the SAA Oral History Section plays an important role in creating space for practitioners from various institutional contexts to come together to discuss emerging challenges, strategies and resources in the field, and I hope to contribute my own experiences while learning from others in the field. Oral history collections are complex and messy, from rights management, digitization, digital preservation, metadata, to determining what access or ‘done’ looks like. In my current position I work with many local and statewide cultural heritage institutions in navigating these challenges to determine next steps and sustainable workflows for their oral history projects. I am excited for the possibility to make meaningful contributions to the Oral History Section and the broader oral history archives community served through the Steering Committee.

Kristin Morris

Kristin Morris is the Cisco Archivist at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. She has 12 years of experience conducting and managing oral history programs, processing oral histories, and providing public access to oral history collections. In her current role as the Cisco Archivist, she conducts interviews with current and former employees, and manages a legacy oral history collection (100+ interviews). Prior to this role, Kristin worked as an independent oral historian and public historian consulting with local history institutions. Kristin started her journey as an oral historian in graduate school at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. Since then, she has conducted several oral history and story-gathering projects, cataloged and cared for oral history collections in local history museums, and made oral histories available to the public in a variety of formats (physical exhibition, online exhibition, online catalog search, etc.). Kristin holds a BA in History from the University of Virginia and an MA in History from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. In addition to SAA, she is a member of the National Council for Public History.

Candidate Statement

 I am delighted to stand for a second term on the SAA Oral History Section Steering Committee.I have greatly enjoyed working with my colleagues on the committee to help provide archivists the tools to manage, preserve, create, and share the wealth of information held in oral histories. I look forward to continuing this effort to support archivists in engaging with oral history practice.

 For more information about our election or with any questions, please contact The OHS section chair, Krystal Tribbet  at ktribbet@uci.edu