Fellows’ Ernst Posner Award: Maristella Feustle

Maristella Feustle, music special collections librarian at the University of North Texas, is the 2025 recipient of the Fellows’ Ernst Posner Award given by the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The award recognizes an outstanding essay dealing with some facet of archival administration, history, theory, and/or methodology published during the preceding year in SAA’s journal, American Archivist.

Feustle’s article “Archival Authority Records and the Potential of Human-centered Archival Description,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2024 issue of American Archivist (vol. 87, no. 2), analyzes the research benefits of using archival authority records in the online resource Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC). Feustle presents an innovative approach to authority records along with suggestions for how to encourage its wider use. Particularly useful was her discussion of how SNAC can help overcome the biases of a perceived canon. As a case study, she examines how the Berthe and Adolfo Odnoposoff Collection at the University of North Texas Music Library provides insights and benefits of having an intentional focus on human relationships. The study utilized the SNAC project, allowing for a thriving ecosystem of archival authority records.

The article offers a new and interesting way of expanding on a commonality in the profession that responds to current archival concerns but does so in a way that builds upon well-known processes; authority records and Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS) will be familiar and central to many practitioners’ daily work. This approach is helpful in redefining relationships, networks of importance, and offering a new way of seeing, similar to how Indigenous models offer perspectives that challenge some long-held standards that may be overdue for a change.

The SAA Awards Committee appreciates Feustle’s understanding of the labor involved in this approach but agrees with the author that “Resources need not be perfect before they are useful.” The committee believes this article has the potential to make a wide impact on the profession. As the author notes, “It is time for archival description to realize its fuller potential regarding the question of who is represented in our collections. This focus allows renewed consideration of how the particular interactions and relationships within a community, organization, or field of study distinguish a collection as much as the materials themselves. Even when an archival collection is ‘about’ an individual, it reflects the tangible imprint of a community, as a unique assemblage of connections between people.”

Established in 1982, the award is named for Ernst Posner, an SAA Fellow and past president as well as a distinguished author. Recent recipients include Eliot Wilczek for “Archival Engagements with Wicked Problems” and Dana Reijerkerk and Caterina M. Reed for “Archives, Decolonization, and the Politics of Tribal Sovereignty: An Examination of Accessibility Barriers to Indigenous Federal Recognition Research in the United States."