Fellows’ Ernst Posner Award: Alston Brake Cobourn, Jen Corrinne Brown, Edward Warga, and Lisa Louis

Alston Brake Cobourn, university archivist at East Carolina University; Jen Corrinne Brown, associate professor of history at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi; Edward Warga, library systems and discovery specialist at the St. Cloud State University Library; and Lisa Louis, director of user and research services at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi's Bell Library, are the 2023 recipients 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 that was published during the preceding year in SAA’s journal, American Archivist.

Their article, “Toward Metaliteracy and Transliteracy in the History Classroom: A Case Study Among Underserved Students,” which appeared in the Fall/Winter 2022 issue of American Archivist (vol. 85, no. 2), addresses the increasing importance of transliteracy and metaliteracy within the digital humanities, particularly for underserved students lacking college readiness. For their study, the authors used a class project from an “Introduction to Public History” undergraduate course at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, a regional university with a comparatively large population of historically underserved students. The students established a digital home for the ongoing South Texas Stories oral history project, and they learned about primary source literacy, information literacy, visual literacy, and digital literacy. The authors believe that such projects are feasible at all kinds of institutions, even those with largely historically underserved populations.

The SAA Awards Committee commended Cobourn, Brown, Warga, and Louis for “offering practical tools and excellent advice for working with communities to put them on a path to digital literacy.” The Committee found that the case study presents useful approaches to teaching student populations with little or no understanding of digital literacy. As such, it is a “widely applicable outreach approach and a model that others could use in the development of programs to support underserved communities and to help students understand the importance of preserving their digital footprints.”

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 Katherine Fisher for “Copyright and Preservation of Born-digital Materials: Persistent Challenges and Selected Strategies.”