Meet Your Steering Committee: Katie Nash

Read Time: 6 minutes

The Meet Your Steering Committee Series allows the section membership to better get to know the Committee. For more entries, click here.

Katie Nash, MLIS, CA (she/her) is the University Archivist and Head of UW Archives at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In this role, she is responsible for the overall management of the department which includes: stewarding donor relations and collection development; supervising professional and student staff; spearheading the creation of policies, procedures, and workflows; supporting research and public services; leading space and environmental management projects; and supporting processing, as well as the Oral History and Records Management Programs. She became a Certified Archivist in 2011 and is active with various SAA Sections and the Midwest Archives Conference. Katie has worked in the archival profession since 2005 and has been in her current position since 2018. 

Photo provided by Katie Nash

I love the energy students bring to an academic archives and institution, as they are full of new ideas and ways of seeing the world – which helps me stay current and hopefully relevant.

Can you share a success you’ve had in your repository recently?

We’ve had a lot of successes since I arrived at UW-Madison in 2018, but one major success is an increase in staffing within the University Archives and Records Management unit. From budget reductions to people leaving the profession (retirement or other reasons), increased workloads and demands, and other stressors, we often find ourselves underresourced and staff are unable to focus on their areas of expertise. UW-Madison is an R1 institution in the Midwest and part of the Big Ten Academic Alliance. I’ve worked at much smaller institutions, so I understand the meaning of being understaffed and not having resources similar to larger institutions. However, for years, the UW Archives has fallen behind in keeping up with appropriate staffing levels compared to our peers in the Big Ten. Since 2021, the UW Archives has added five new positions (two temporary) – some funded through the UW-Madison Libraries, and some funded through other departments on campus and/or endowed funds. This is a huge increase in staff in a very short period of time, especially in a post-pandemic ever-changing world. A lot of advocacy since 2018 is behind some of these new positions, being in the right place at the right time with a plan, and other strokes of good luck and perseverance have led to our success in increasing staff within UW Archives.  

What current or future project are you most excited about in your archives?

UW-Madison is funding a new Libraries Collections Preservation Facility that is expected to open in 2025. The facility will provide industry-recommended environmental controls to ensure archives, special collections materials, and other library collections are appropriately housed and preserved. Over the next few years, University Archives and Records Management staff will prepare 5,000 linear feet of paper materials and approximately 3,500 linear feet of AV collections to move into the new facility. It’s a major project for us, but also something we currently do on a smaller scale (sending archival collections to an offsite facility). There are many issues to address, questions to ask, decisions to make, documentation to create, and much more. We are working together as a team on this project and it’s very exciting to know we have the support and resources from the Libraries and campus to make our collections discoverable, accessible, and preserved.   

What are some of the challenges you face in your position?

While there have been many successes since I started working at UW-Madison, there have been and continue to be just as many challenges. One major challenge I currently face is related to growing pains. UW Archives has been understaffed for decades, but since 2021 we’ve added five new staff positions! That’s a large number of employees to add in a couple of years and with that increase comes transitions and changes that are sometimes difficult to see and address right away. It can be challenging to understand the total impact of changes in staffing – which is why it’s crucial to keep lines of communication open in an effective and meaningful way. Change can happen fast and procedures and ways of doing things are often flipped upside down and the work environment can feel unstable and uncertain at times. I struggle to effectively bring everyone together through changes in a sustainable way and at a pace that resonates with most. There is a lot of change related to how and who makes decisions, revising divisions of labor, integrating remote work policies, and prioritizing goals and projects to accomplish. The UW Archives has been in a state of constant transition since I started in 2018, and through all this I’m slowly learning how to practice delegating and seek feedback and guidance from colleagues along the way. I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to work with in UW Archives, and while these growing pains are present each day – I’m confident we’ll continue to work together as a team and figure out what works best for our new staffing model. 

How did you get your start in academic archives and why have you stayed?

Since undergrad, I’ve always held a job in a library on campus and have enjoyed being in an academic environment for my studies and work. After receiving my Master’s degree, I worked two part-time jobs: one was in an Interlibrary Loan office at a university library, and the other was in a local history museum archive. While I enjoyed the variety of work in both jobs, I was also looking for a full-time, permanent position where I could learn and grow as a young professional. Through working in a museum archive, my heart found its way to the archives profession, and to this day I can’t imagine working in a different profession. 2005 was the first year I worked in an academic archives and I had no prior experience in this setting. I spent the next nine years mostly being a solo archivist and utilized that time in my career to network and learn as much as possible. I quickly experienced the phenomenon of working in an academic archives where employees age each year while the crops of new students who enter the institution are the same age year after year! I love the energy students bring to an academic archives and institution, as they are full of new ideas and ways of seeing the world – which helps me stay current and hopefully relevant. Additionally, the scholarship and research that takes place at an academic institution can often directly affect academic archives – helping us all stay abreast of current trends, past practices, and research endeavors by people who are truly making a difference in the world.  

What is your favorite way to keep up with the archives field?
In general, I find that there is so much information out there to absorb via so many platforms that it can be overwhelming and exhausting to try and keep up with everything happening on a regular basis. I appreciate the conversations and announcements on the Society of American Archivists listservs, but the most reliable way for me to try and keep up with the archives profession is by reading Archival Outlook. Within this publication, I find the stories and articles fascinating, thought-provoking, diverse in content and types of archival institutions represented, and it’s easy for me to digest in a reasonable period of time. Another way I stay involved with the archives field is through the Midwest Archives Conference (MAC) and annual meetings. I make an effort to attend MAC and SAA conferences each year to network with fellow archivists, attend conference presentations, and tour archival repositories.

Advertisement

Meet Your Steering Committee: Jane LaBarbara

Read Time: 3 minutes

The Meet Your Steering Committee Series allows the section membership to better get to know the Committee. For more entries, click here.

Jane LaBarbara is the Head of Archives & Manuscripts at the West Virginia & Regional History Center, West Virginia University Libraries. She earned her M.S.L.S. with a concentration in archives and records management from the University of North Carolina. Previously, she held the positions of Visiting Librarian and Assistant Curator at WVU. Her research interests include archival processing and procedures, and disaster planning. She has served as chair of SAA’s Collection Management section and currently serves on the steering committee for the College & University Archives section.

Photo provided by Jane LaBarbara

I’m really excited about creating a processing manual. In the past, we’ve had rules, but teaching processing… was more of an oral process. When we get a new grad student, I feel like Homer telling the saga of processing.

Why or how did you find your way to becoming an archivist?

During my undergrad in History, I didn’t have a car, so when it came time to do a field-experience class, the best option was to work in the university archives on campus. There, I got to work with the Richard Halliburton papers, which I loved. After ruling out the possibility of teaching, I got on the path directly from undergrad to grad school, and I was lucky to land a full-time position at WVU 6 months after graduating from UNC.

Can you share a success you’ve had in your repository recently?

This success is mostly due to the hard work of a colleague, Grace Musgrave. She worked during and after the pandemic to “backlog” new and old donated collections, which meant adding them to a detailed spreadsheet. Then, she reviewed old backlog collections for which we had insufficient information in the spreadsheet, worked with me to map the sheet’s columns to ArchivesSpace accession record fields, and then she used the ArchivesSpace accession CSV import function to upload our backlog into ArchivesSpace. Now, all our unprocessed collections have joined the processed ones in ONE system. Soon we can implement a tracking system to help me keep tabs on where collections are in the processing lifecycle and who is working on them.

What current or future project are you most excited about in your archives?

I am a big fan of checklists, documentation, consistency, etc., so I’m really excited about creating a processing manual. In the past, we’ve had rules, but teaching processing to new Graduate Assistants and staff was more of an oral process. When we get a new grad student, I feel like Homer telling the saga of processing. Grace and I are crafting this manual for the people doing processing and resource record creation, but also to document instructions for ourselves on the minutiae of acquisitions, steps to be completed once processing is done, etc. If anyone has a glowing example of a processing manual to share, please let me know!

What are some of the challenges you face in your position?

I’ve been in my current position for about a year, and we onboarded three new students, one returning student, and two processing staff in the fall semester. I’m learning to balance my time between teaching and supervising processing, getting everything in order on a procedural and policy level (recent turnover means we can revisit our collecting policy, deed of loan, restriction policy, etc.), handling donations, and putting out little fires.

What projects do you envision the section undertaking during your time on the steering committee?

I recently helped write an article on the landscape of college and university archives, based on a survey we ran, so I’m looking forward to seeing what more we can do with that data. I’m also looking forward to participating in the study to investigate to what extent impostor phenomenon is present in our profession.

Meet Your Steering Committee: Ellen Holt-Werle

Read Time: 4 minutes

The Meet Your Steering Committee Series allows the section membership to better get to know the Committee. For more entries, click here.

Ellen Holt-Werle is the Institutional Archivist in University Archives at the University of Minnesota. She holds a MLIS from Dominican University by way of St. Catherine University. Ellen’s work with university collections as Institutional Archivist centers surfacing and acknowledging exclusionary institutional histories and the voices and experiences of those impacted by the institution’s settler colonial and racist underpinnings. She is also a member of the Midwest Archives Conference, currently serving on the Ethics and Inclusion Committee. Her current interests are community archives; increasing access to and growing the representation of BIPOC voices and experiences in the archives; the settler colonial roots of collections across the university; and student activism and protest.

Photo provided by Ellen Holt-Werle

The position I’m in is a newly created one, so there are no paths or precedents to follow. On the one hand, that’s exciting and freeing… However it also means I’m figuring out what my position is, how to grow it, and what I want to do.

How did you get your start in academic archives and why have you stayed?

I’m a wannabe and then accidental archivist. I was unable to take the archives class when I was in my MLIS despite being interested in it. However after receiving my degree, I was encouraged to apply for a part-time, temporary archivist position. That turned into a full-time job, though split 50/50 Reference Librarian and Archivist, and then changed again to 50/50 Special Collections Librarian and Archivist. Now, 17+ years since starting that first temporary job, I’m still in archives, though in a new position and institution as of September 2021 (and finally a 100%-time archivist). Things that immediately come to mind regarding why I’ve stayed: I really like working with tangible collections; I enjoy instruction and interacting with students; and I particularly like that I get to learn a little about a lot of things and go down endless rabbit holes.

Can you share a success you’ve had in your repository recently?

I’m collaborating with a faculty member in our Anthropology Department to bring together staff and faculty from across the university who work with collections—whether archival, in our natural history and art museums, teaching collections of biological specimens or material culture, etc.—to discuss the colonial and settler colonial roots of many of these collections and the linkages that exist between them, sometimes even unbeknownst to us. Thus far, archivists, curators, faculty, and staff have been really interested and engaged, and we hope to be able to plan some more formal programming for next year.

What current or future project are you most excited about in your archives?

In addition to the Colonial Collections collaborative mentioned above, I will be co-teaching a Honors seminar in the Spring of 2024 with a History faculty member on “The Histories of Student Activism.” I’m excited to dig into student activism and protest here at the University of Minnesota, as well as broader national contexts, in preparation for this course, and to see how the students engage. 

What are some of the challenges you face in your position?

The position I’m in is a newly created one, so there are no paths or precedents to follow. On the one hand, that’s exciting and freeing and part of what attracted me to this job. However it also means I’m figuring out what my position is, how to grow it, and what I want to do. I was a solo archivist before, and continually struggled with how to find balance—admittedly not very successfully. I’m still figuring out balance, but in a new way that’s positive. I can think about prioritizing work that feels the most impactful, versus I used to stress about how to move forward so that I didn’t feel like I was failing at all parts of my job. The other challenge has been moving from a very small liberal arts college to a huge R1 university, and all the additional systems, people, layers of bureaucracy—and especially acronyms—that I’m going to be trying to figure out for years to come.

What projects do you envision the section undertaking during your time on the steering committee?

It has been great to meet new people and see some of the workings of SAA. One thing I’d like to see is more opportunities for different sections to work together. We already do this some through co-sponsored talks, etc., but I think there’s always room for more and new ways. I also think there’s a role for the College & University Archives section to play with so many of our institutions tackling institutional histories and legacies of racism. What that looks like, I’m not sure yet, but I’m open to ideas if anyone ever wants to chat: holtw006@umn.edu.

Meet Your Steering Committee: Amanda Avery

Read Time: 4 minutes

The Meet Your Steering Committee Series allows the section membership to better get to know the Committee. For more entries, click here.

Amanda Avery (she/her) is the Learning Technologies & Collections Librarian at Parkland College in Champaign, Illinois. This position includes acting as the College Archivist, the part of librarianship she loves the most. Amanda graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2019 and held a summer internship at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Library & Archives the following summer. Although a full-time archives position hasn’t been in the cards, she finds community college librarianship to be a good challenge and is grateful for the opportunity to manage the College Archives while there.

Photo provided by Amanda Avery

The road to archivist has been, and continues to be, a series of knowing the right people and being open to opportunities.

Why or how did you find your way to becoming an archivist?

I have always loved local and genealogical history as well as collecting and keeping items that share my own story, but I had no idea it was a profession until I started looking at grad school. Finding out about Archives as a profession sealed my decision to earn my MSLIS. 

The road to archivist has been, and continues to be, a series of knowing the right people and being open to opportunities. I was able to volunteer at two campus museums during grad school as well as a local community archives which led the way to completing a practicum and my internship. Since graduation, it has been difficult to land a full-time archives position due to limitations for relocation, but I have found opportunities at community colleges to put my knowledge and skills to use. Most community colleges do not have a full-time archivist and the responsibilities often lie with a librarian who has other duties. In my experience, these librarians are very willing to let someone who is excited about archives care for the collections, so I jumped right in. I am now one of those librarians, but I am happy to be able to continue archival work and stay involved with the community.

Can you share a success you’ve had in your repository recently?

My biggest success to date is receiving a grant to digitize the college’s student newspaper and making it available and searchable to the public. I wrote the grant proposal with a colleague, and it is the first successful application for either of us. With funding we are able to pay my colleague extra hours to inventory the newspaper collection, purchase boxes for rehousing, pay a vendor to digitize the issues, and pay a grad student to upload the files into our institutional repository. We will also be sharing the files with the University of Illinois for inclusion into the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection which allows the articles in each issue to be keyword searchable. This is a huge step in making our archives collection accessible.

What current or future project are you most excited about in your archives?

I am currently working with two colleagues on getting our finding aids into ArchivesSpace. Our finding aids are currently Word documents and are very difficult to search when we have a research question. Typically, we look through several different finding aids to find out where related materials might be located. ArchivesSpace will let us, and our users, keyword search the collection which makes it more accessible than ever. We have been working for several months to make sure the finding aids are up to date and accurately reflect the collection’s contents, so this is a very exciting step for us.

What are some of the challenges you face in your position?

One significant challenge is the nature of my role which is the Learning Technologies and Collections Librarian. This means I have my hand in e-resources, archives, the institutional repository, technical services, instructional technologies including the LMS, and the television station. I have just started in this position a few months ago and due to many transitions already, it has been difficult to find the right balance. I am lucky to work with two part-time librarians who also love archives, so I am able to push forward projects with their help.

What projects do you envision the section undertaking during your time on the steering committee?

I am interested in access to resources for archivists who do not have a large budget or a lot of time to dedicate to their collections. I hope to spend time on the Archival Horizon’s Toolkit and increase the resources available there.

Meet new Steering Committee member: Liz Scott

Liz Scott (she/her) is an Archivist & Special Collections Librarian and Assistant Professor at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania and has worked at a variety of institutions during her career. Liz is a member of the Society of American Archivists, the American Library Association, and has been a certified archivist through the Academy of Certified Archivists since 2006. Additionally, she is a member of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC) where she is a member of the Nominations Committee. She belongs to several local organizations including the Monroe County Historical Association (MCHA) and the Museum and Library Alliance of the Greater Lehigh Valley (MLA). Liz received an MLS from the University at Albany, SUNY and a BA in history and English from Dickinson College. She is currently working toward her second master’s degree in the English department at East Stroudsburg University. Her research interests  include archivists in academia, art and archives, service-learning in libraries and archives and web archiving.

Photo from Liz Scott

Why or how did you find your way to becoming an archivist?

I feel really lucky to have discovered archives when I was in college. I got a job as a student in Dickinson College’s archives and special collections and from day one I was hooked. I had finally found the perfect career for a history major. After considering teaching and law, the archives job felt like the perfect fit. I was lucky enough to get a paraprofessional job at Lafayette College after graduating from Dickinson and soon realized I wanted to go to graduate school. My boss was a great mentor to me and encouraged me to leave even though she would have to find someone to replace me. I feel very lucky to have been involved with this field now since the age of 20 which is over half of my life.

Can you share a success you’ve had in your repository recently?

As a lone arranger, it is all about the small things for me! We just launched our university’s institutional repository for which I am partly responsible. We have a librarian who is solely dedicated to the graduate theses and I have been working to populate it with faculty publications, student projects, jazz materials, and records from the archives and special collections. Getting the archives and special collections accessible is one of my biggest priorities so I am excited for the materials to finally be online.

What current or future project are you most excited about in your archives?

I am really excited about getting our art collections online into CollectiveAccess. There is a University Art & Sculpture Collection and then we have another collection dedicated to the local folk artist Sterling Strauser and some of his artist friends. I only have spreadsheets and an Access database as organizational tools. Our state school library network asked if I would be a guinea pig and test out CollectiveAccess and then train other repositories in how to use the software. I am excited to get these works of art and sculpture online so that people can see our collections.

What are some of the challenges you face in your position?

I think the biggest challenge is splitting my time as a librarian and an archivist. On the librarian side I teach information literacy sessions, am a liaison to eight departments on campus, and staff the all-virtual reference desk for several hours a week. This takes away time from doing the things archivists need to do like accessions, organizing records, and getting materials digitized and online. In the past, it had gotten so bad that I needed to schedule time into my day just to do archival work. We recently lost a librarian position so there is even more work. I do not want to let my colleagues down so I continue to work on library projects. We work a few weeks in the summer and this is when I get most of my archival work done. Even though I have been in this job for almost five years, I am still finding that balance. I hope that someday the majority of my work will be archives related vs. library related.

What projects do you envision the section undertaking during your time on the steering committee?

I am really interested in tenure and promotion for archivists. I have been working with my research group on the subject for several years where we have done three presentations on the subject including an SAA session and an SAA Research Forum topic. We are just about to finish an article on that same topic. When I got my tenure-track job, it was hard to find resources and information about archivists and tenure. There was plenty about librarians and tenure but largely not a lot of scholarship or even just blogs and other resources where I could find information. It may be because so many archivists are lumped in as librarians that they assume the information good for a librarian is good for an archivist. I am going to be working on a Tenure & Promotion Pathways as a Steering project that will work to create resources for those in tenured and tenure-track positions. I will also be leading a few Coffee Chats in October, November and December on various subjects. I am really looking forward to being a contributing member of the C&U Steering.

Meet new Steering Committee member & new Academic Archivist blog editor: Caitlin Colban-Waldron

Caitlin Colban-Waldron (she/her) is a 2020 graduate of Queens College CUNY and received an MLS and certificate in archives and preservation. Since December 2019, she has worked at Queens College in the Special Collections and Archives department and currently serves as an Adjunct Archivist. She grew up on Long Island, NY, and recently moved to Queens. Beginning later this fall, Caitlin will serve as the new blog editor for the Academic Archivist (a role formerly held by Katie Nash, University Archivist and Head of UW Archives, University of Wisconsin-Madison).

Photo provided by Caitlin Colban-Waldron

Why or how did you find your way to becoming an archivist?

I initially started graduate school with the goal to become a public librarian; my previous career in e-commerce marketing was unfulfilling and increasingly frustrating, and I spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of career that would be motivating and enjoyable. I landed on librarianship, but when I finally enrolled and started coursework, the archives classes in the course catalog intrigued me. I took one class as an elective and immediately changed track. 

In that first archives class, a guest speaker was scheduled, Obden Mondesir. He spoke about his work at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, and how he got to that point–he carved an interesting and fully purposeful path himself through internships, part-time work, fellowships, and volunteer work. It was so impactful for me, because it was that moment that I remember thinking: if this was my career, I’d have to really commit and fully jump in. It was the moment that a stimulating academic topic turned into a potential career path. After that guest lecture I decided to take the leap, quit my e-commerce job, and start trying to gain real-world archives experience. I completed a series of internships and eventually became Obden’s colleague at Queens College (QC)!

Can you share a success you’ve had in your repository recently?

At QC, we’ve been navigating COVID-19 since the very beginning of the pandemic. The first major American epicenter of the virus was here, in our community. I’m proud to be part of our team for many reasons, including transitioning to working remotely on projects and then cautiously coming back to an empty campus in the last few months, but now the library is opening to students and researchers again. We’ll have our first on-site reference visit this week, which I am counting as a small success that feels huge.

What current or future project are you most excited about in your archives?

I’m so excited to process journals from the Gender, Love, and Sexuality Alliance (GLASA) club on QC’s campus. These journals lived in the club’s office in the student union, where any member could write about how they were feeling, what they were working on, how they moved through the world, or simply to leave notes for one another. The journals range from the late 1980s to the 2000s. The journals are not just supremely cool and important historical artifacts from the college and its students, albeit in a different time and a different plague, but as a lesbian I am deeply invested in writing ethical description for these journals and working with the current iteration of the club to represent them in the archives and the college’s historical record with respect and dignity.

What are some of the challenges you face in your position?

Time is the eternal enemy, right? At QC we are up to our eyeballs with exciting, fascinating, and urgent work. But our limited physical capacity to be at work and COVID restrictions pushed us to be creative and expansive when thinking about how we would approach work remotely. The Head of Special Collections and Archives at QC, Annie Tummino, deserves all the credit in the world for keeping us focused and non-despairing. She was proactive in assigning alternative work like an in-depth review of our institution’s controlled vocabulary, a partnership with Queens Public Library’s community archiving program Queens Memory and their own quickly-launched COVID-19 project (check it out here: https://qplnyc.urbanarchive.me/cities/nyc), and the operational rollout of a new platform for digitized materials, JSTOR Community Collections.

What projects do you envision the section undertaking during your time on the steering committee?

As the Early Career Member, I’m obviously a little new to the world of SAA and its various sections, but I’m thrilled to be part of the C&U steering committee. I’m more eager to learn how the committee works and communicates with its members and broader networks. I can’t wait to be enthusiastic support to the great initiatives that the C&U steering committee are planning for the coming year.

Meet new Steering Committee member: Tiffany Cole

Tiffany Cole is the archivist at James Madison University (JMU) in Harrisonburg, Virginia. In her role at JMU, Tiffany manages all aspects of collection processing including new and legacy arrangement and description. Tiffany also assists with collection development, reference, outreach, and instruction. She earned her MA in public history from JMU. She has been a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists since 2018 and earned SAA’s Arrangement & Description certification in March 2020 (just days before the COVID-19 lockdown!). Tiffany also serves as the senior co-chair of MARAC’s Finding Aids Award Committee. Her interests include the role of archives in campus history initiatives, reparative description, and vintage Pyrex.

Photo provided by Tiffany Cole

Why or how did you find your way to becoming an archivist?

I pursued my graduate degree in history knowing that I absolutely did not want to teach, but instead wanted to engage with history in a more tangible way, outside of the classroom. (Little did I know just how integral instruction is with archival work.) I had a graduate assistantship at the very same repository where I now work and I fell in love with archival processing—each collection was a new adventure with its own story and set of challenges. After graduate school, I worked in the research and curatorial department of a presidential home and then transitioned back to archives in a public services capacity at a local university special collections library. I returned to JMU, my graduate alma mater and where I was first introduced to archives, in 2016.

Can you share a success you’ve had in your repository recently?

I’m encouraged by recent collaborations with folks in our library’s Metadata Strategies unit. The pandemic provided us the time and space to look closely at our metadata and descriptive practices. Together, we’ve worked to identify opportunities for reparative description, including revising outdated and harmful subject headings as well as remediating gaps in name authorities, particularly for local Black community members and organizations. These efforts will undoubtedly inform future projects related to JMU’s collection of Black poetry specifically as well as all new and legacy description moving forward. Additionally, I am confident that our collective efforts toward better and more equitable description will help researchers find and access materials as we move forward with implementing the ArchivesSpace PUI.

What current or future project are you most excited about in your archives?

I’m looking forward to the ongoing collaboration between JMU Special Collections and Furious Flower Poetry Center, the nation’s first academic center for Black poetry. We began stewarding their collection in 2016 and it is particularly rich in its audiovisual materials featuring readings and performances by Black poets. Work is underway to adopt a digital platform that suits this and other collections of AV materials which also means creating and capturing lots and lots of metadata. Our main library, where Special Collections is housed, is also slated for an expansion and renovation in the coming years. See also my comment above about adopting the ArchivesSpace PUI. So there are many exciting things on the horizon!

What are some of the challenges you face in your position?

The semester started a few weeks ago and we have witnessed an unprecedented level of in-person appointment requests. Our researchers are making up for lost time! While this is definitely a good problem to have, and I am heartened that students in particular are exploring our collections with so much enthusiasm, it magnifies the lack of time and resources that our small staff has to do all the things—reference, outreach, preservation, instruction, processing, etc.

What projects do you envision the section undertaking during your time on the steering committee?

I’m really looking forward to continuing the weekly section coffee chats. It’s a great way to stay connected to the section on topics ranging from content management systems, student workers, professional development, and promotion and tenure. Speaking of P&T, the section is just starting a project to explore pathways to promotion and tenure.

Anything else you want the membership to know about you or your work?

While part of JMU Special Collections’ collection development strategy is to document the history of the university, we are not an official university archives. This is a precarious position for us and one that I’m hopeful will change in the not too distant future. Until that day happens, I’m excited to connect with others who are working to document the histories of their institution who are in a similar position as well as learn from others who have recently gone through the process of becoming a recognized and official university archives.

Meet Steering Committee Member: Elizabeth James

This is the final post in our series highlighting the recently-elected Section leadership.

Elizabeth D. James is the current Archivist and Digital Preservation Librarian at Marshall University. She earned her Master of Science in Archives Management at Simmons University. Her work focuses on maximizing access to archival materials through accessible description, processing, and digitizing of materials and making use of non-traditional platforms to encourage access by diverse users. Her research interests vary, but primarily focus on computational approaches to using archival collections for discovery and analysis, the impact of memory organizations on local communities, and scalable approaches to managing digital archives.

Why or how did you find your way to becoming an archivist?

As an undergraduate history major in search of work, I somehow used my skill at origami to leverage my way into a job in my university’s preservation department building phase boxes for rare books. To my surprise, I enjoyed reading and handling the books much more than I expected. This job led to another position in a special library and archive on campus that exposed me to prints, rare books, exhibit curation, and archival materials–needless to say, thanks to some wonderful supervisors and colleagues, I was hooked! However, I had heard tales of how competitive and difficult life in the archives professional could be, so I worked for a year as an AmeriCorps service member at a house museum before I finally decided to apply to and attend Simmons College (now Simmons University).

Can you share a success you’ve had in your repository recently?

Like many, even though “digital preservation” composes half of my job title, much of my work involves hefting around and addressing legacy issues with physical material. Digital preservation is something that all too often falls by the wayside, especially in smaller institutions, so I was excited to finally have my proposal to implement a low-resource intensive digital preservation program using open source tools and my own programming knowledge approved.

What current or future project are you most excited about in your archives?

Since learning Python, I have been using it for various projects at my institution related to digital preservation, data visualization, and data cleanup and migration. However, one of the things that I’m most excited about is creating learning resources and conducting instruction on how our collections can be explored and used as data by undergraduate students to expand our traditional instruction program.

What are some of the challenges you face in your position?

In addition to my work with digital preservation, I am also responsible for all manuscript collections at my institution. Currently, I’m processing a large, early 20th century collection of business records created by an industrial company that manufactured coal, salt, and chemicals. This means I spend some of my in-person work time covered in coal and other mystery substances. I have never been more thankful for the COVID-19 induced mandated practice of indoor mask wearing at my workplace!

What projects do you envision the section undertaking during your time on the steering committee?

One large project the steering committee will be working on is initiating a review of the Guidelines for College and University Archives. I’m excited to work on this project because I feel that it is an opportunity to update the Guidelines to be indicative not only of the current college and university archives field, but the desired future. I’m particularly enthusiastic about providing multiple ways for college and university archivists of all kinds to contribute to this work.

Anything else you want the membership to know about you or your work?

As an archivist in Appalachia where the archives community is dispersed at best, I’m a huge fan of collaboration and creating virtual communities within the archives profession. I’m always interested in talking to individuals doing similar work, so please reach out if you’ve read anything here you find interesting!

Meet Steering Committee Member: Angel Diaz

This post is the third in a series highlighting our recently-elected Section leadership.

Angel Diaz (she/her/hers) is the University Archivist at Penn State University. In this role since 2018, she identifies, acquires, and maintains records of enduring value that chronicle the development and experiences of the Penn State community. She earned her MLIS from the University of California Los Angeles. She served on the 2020 SAA Annual Meeting Program Committee and was Co-Chair of the Archivists and Archivists of Color Section (2016-2018). She is a participating member of Project STAND and is a current fellow in the Association of Research Libraries’ Leadership and Career Development Program (2020-2021).

Why or how did you find your way to becoming an archivist?

As many people do, I started working with archival materials through an undergraduate internship–at the California Historical Society. I helped organize their extensive California newspaper collection by county. Not only did I love learning about the state, but found myself thinking a lot about why we were keeping and organizing the newspapers in this way. However, even while working there I had no idea one could become an archivist. I started working as a middle and high school humanities teacher. A short time later, my friend took on a job at the Bancroft Library (UC Berkeley), told me she was going to get her MLIS, and invited me to study for the GRE with her. It was an exciting jump to a new profession. In our graduate program, I found my place learning about how archivists can facilitate engagement and learning with historical materials to audiences of all ages and communities.

Can you share a success you’ve had in your repository recently?

It’s taken some planning and extra work but I have been pleased with some recent collaborative outreach and engagement efforts, including shifting from developing a physical exhibition to a digital exhibition and zine workshops for student organizations. The zine workshops have all taken place on Zoom, but a small group of colleagues and I have been able to prepare physical zine supplies packets that we mailed to the students to have ready for the meeting date. The packets include paper, sample zines, and reproductions of archival materials for the students to cut up and include in the zines they create. We invite specific student organizations and base the theme of the zines on that group’s mission and focus. The workshops provide a space for creative thinking, while highlighting collection materials and making a connection with leaders from student organizations.

What current or future project are you most excited about in your archives?

I am very excited about a student-led oral history initiative currently taking place. It started with a seminar course I was embedded in last spring. Students in this course took on research projects with University Archives materials on their chosen topic around Penn State history. One student conducted research on African American student activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She was eager to learn as much as she could on the topic. I provided archival materials and other resources, and the professor put her in touch with a Penn State alumnus who graduated in 1970 and had been active in various social and political efforts. The student interviewed the alumnus for her research paper and through the conversation learned of additional African American alumni who had also been activists on campus.

At the conclusion of the course, the student reached out to me to share that she wanted to speak to the other alumni in order to bring more resources for our collections. We quickly developed an oral history project she could take on–and I was able to advocate for a paid position for her to do this project. The work would all be done remotely over Zoom because this all started alongside the pandemic. We met regularly to discuss best practices and methodology, utilized her existing research to develop interview questions, and even conducted practice interviews. The interviews will be added to the University Archives collections for research access. This oral history project has been a wonderful initiative to be a part of because it is wholly based on the student’s interests and goals. Watching her interviews are such a positive experience because I see her genuine interest in hearing from each participant and that in turn brings ease and great topics into the conversation.

What are some of the challenges you face in your position?

This is not a new challenge to anyone, but there is so much to do as a University Archivist. I work in collaboration with the Office of Records Management to support handling of university records coming in from across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Penn State is one university with 24 campuses) in both physical and digital format, support research and access to materials during the pandemic, am always looking for ways to engage students with archival materials, and am in a tenure-track position so scholarship is an expectation. It’s a balancing act that I have yet to figure out.

What projects do you envision the section undertaking during your time on the steering committee?

It seems like this steering committee hit the ground running this year! I’ve been happy to participate in some of the Coffee Chats organized by Karen Trivette. These weekly meetings are a great way to come together as colleagues to share challenges and successes presented to us throughout the COVID work environment and to also just chat about our work generally.

The steering committee is also starting the process of revising and updating the Guidelines for College and University Archives. The last update was in 1999, so we’re due for an update! Lastly, since it looks like our remote work and social distancing will last for some time, we have been looking into providing a series of virtual learning opportunities on a variety of topics for section and organization members.

Meet Steering Committee Member: Sandra Varry

This post is the second in a series highlighting our recently-elected Section leadership.

Sandra Varry is the Heritage & University Archivist at Florida State University where she collects, manages, and provides access to FSU’s archive and manages its Heritage Museum. She holds an MFA in Photography from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, and an MLIS from the University of South Florida. She became a Certified Archivist in 2013 and Digital Archives Specialist in 2014. She is a recent past chair of the Visual Materials Section of SAA, and a past President of the Society of Florida Archivists. She taught traditional and digital photography for 13 years before becoming a full time archivist, specializing in historic photograph collections.

Why or how did you find your way to becoming an archivist?

As a young photographer I worked with found objects and texts in my personal work, and had a passion for the history of photography, creating exhibits, and teaching. I decided to merge my love of teaching with libraries and made my way into the archives in 2009. It was a great fit, and as a university archivist I immediately began working with a very large photograph collection. Preserving and providing access to image collections and records has become my passion. I regularly give presentations and workshops on preserving scrapbooks and photographs, digitization, and working with digital photography and prints.

Can you share a success you’ve had in your repository recently?

As with a lot of institutions, moving ourselves online has been a major undertaking. I feel we made quick work of creating a framework for communication, expectations, and how to manage staff and researcher needs while staying safe. We are very fortunate to have the resources we need to do this well. We are now able to begin accepting collections again building on the basis of these new procedures and processes.

What current or future project are you most excited about in your archives?

We have a lot of digitization projects in our queue, but I am really interested in giving better access to our negatives that don’t have accompanying prints – we often have requests that require us to review them. There are many engaging bodies of work in those negatives that could be more easily used and shared.

What are some of the challenges you face in your position?

We are extremely busy – all of the time, so there are a lot of projects that end up down the list of to do’s. The challenge is to constantly leverage our resources (time/staff, etc.) to stay on top of things and not allow too many  to become “someday” projects.

What projects do you envision the section undertaking during your time on the steering committee?

I am very excited that we are taking on updating the section’s standard for College & University Archives. It’s a good resource and the updates will allow for broader adoption and support for all types of institutions. I also look forward to our online webinar series and continued coffee chats.

Anything else you want the membership to know about you or your work?

I’ve been in academia for twenty years, with almost ten in archives. I am always learning something new from those around me and the collections I work with. It’s one of the things about our profession that I love.