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Sarah E. Dunne of the Owls Head Transportation Museum

 

Sarah E Dunne, Archivist for the Owls Head Transportation Museum

by Nicholas Glade

The Owls Head Transportation Museum is a unique institution; therefore, it needs an archivist willing to step up to a variety of tasks and challenges. Enter Sarah Dunne! As a head Archivist, she performs a wide variety of different activities each day to keep the museum, archives, and library up and running. On any given day Sarahmight be doing any combination of the following things: cataloging, tracking down WWI memorabilia from Maine politicians, digitizing archival materials, supervising volunteers, or working with maintenance crews to keep bi-planes in working order, as well as arranging research partnerships with New Zealand and Japan. Of course, these tasks are just the tip of the iceberg of what Sarah Dunne does for the Owls Head Museum.

Since this museum is unique, Sarah has developed creative outreach programs that encompass a wide scope both thematically and geographically. A perfect example of the scope of Sarah’s outreach is a current project she is undertaking with an institution in New Zealand. This project aims to do a complete restoration of the Beech Staggerwing airplane used by Admiral Byrd for Antarctic exploration. On the library side of things Sarah is responsible for an impressive collection of manuals for vintage and antique vehicles. Since many of these manuals are rare and often relevant to vehicles in the museum’ collection, Sarah is also in charge of cataloging them and maintaining them in the museum’s library. These manuals also serve as an important outreach tool, since adding to them to the Owls Head collection involves reaching out to, or being consulted by, a variety of institutions and individuals. The upkeep needed for the vehicles means that Sarah often consults with her “gearhead” (a word used for car lovers and enthusiasts) friends and colleagues. As a result, her subject expertise goes well beyond the library field which conversely expands the museum’s scope of partnerships and collaborations considerably.

When it comes to collaborations within the museum field, Sarah has undertaken and initiated many interesting and effective projects. One of the most recent projects involved cross-promoting materials. Owls Head provided a scan of a WWI Scottish Royal Flying Corps pilot’s logbook in the museum’s collection to the RAF Museum in exchange for documents that provided more information about the pilot’s life and death. Another successful project involved an exchange with the Longfellow House in which Sarah not only provided their archivist with materials connected to a 1913 Rolls-Royce that first belonged to Alice Longfellow (daughter of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow), but also, with the assistance of the museum’s Ground Vehicle Coordinator, arranged for the visiting archivist to get a ride in this very Rolls-Royce. The Longfellow House archivist generously provided Sarah with copies of correspondence between Alice Longfellow and Rolls-Royce. Sarah has also collaborated with the Owls Head Transportation Museum’s two neighboring institutions; the Knox Museum and the Farnsworth Art Museum. These collaborations are attempts to “mix the artists and the gearheads” and for the three museums to attract audiences that wouldn’t normally visit them. The most recent of these exhibits was called The Art of Disaster, and some of the Owls Head Transportation Museum’s archival material related to aviation crashes and train wrecks was displayed alongside artwork from the collection of the Farnsworth Museum and from private collectors.

Due to the small population and community feel of Owls Head, Maine. Sarah also does community outreach and programming work. The museum’s antique vehicles and airplanes often make cameo appearances at parades and events, with their vintage airplane flyovers being a crowd favorite. The museum hosts multiple events and cruise-ins, which help present their collection to a large audience. Sarah often contributes historic information and images to the promotional materials for these events. Sarah also works closely with families in the area and elsewhere that have connections to early transportation history, and has even gotten donations from the family of a former governor of Maine.

Sarah’s job involves some fundraising. This means she can sometimes be found writing grants or meeting with potential donors. She occasionally even uses Owls Head’s antique vehicles to pick up donors and guests from the airport next to the museum. Sarah also contributes to the museum’s biggest fundraising event: the annual New England Auto AuctionTM. This event features an auction of special-interest vintage and modern vehicles This event is extremely popular with car collectors in North America and beyond (some phone bidders call in from Europe), and in turn an extremely well attended and popular summer event in Maine.

 

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Emily Drabinski: Advocacy is in Every Part of the Job

Emily Drabinski, Coordinator of Library Instruction for LIU Brooklyn

by Gina Cullen

Meet Emily Drabinski, Coordinator of Library Instruction

Emily Drabinski, the Coordinator of Library Instruction at LIU Brooklyn, grapples with a lot of logistics every day. They may take the form of analyzing the metrics of library use, organizing instruction schedules, or reconfiguring the physical layout of the reference desk, but working with the tangible problems is where Emily excels. “What I like about libraries is that it’s material and concrete: books, wires, copiers, opening hours, food policy. You never have a question or problem that’s abstract, they’re always real,” she said while we discussed challenges facing libraries as institutions.

Given the breadth of her responsibilities, it’s clear that she has an excellent grasp on coordination. Every semester she organizes the schedule so that every faculty member has a lab and a librarian available for their requested time slot. She and four other librarians lead about 300 classes a year for primarily freshman and sophomore students, which is only part of their regular duties within the library. Because librarians are also considered faculty at LIU Brooklyn, she has university responsibilities as well, which include attending faculty senate meetings and being the representative at Board of Trustees meetings. She also serves as the secretary of the Long Island University Faculty Federation, Local 3998, NYSUT/AFT, AFL-CIO.

Prior to her career as a librarian, Emily worked in the print media world primarily for magazines. Her last job was as a fact-checker for the magazine Lucky, where she was caught up with the trivial minutiae of tasks like ensuring that the number of bargains listed inside was accurately conveyed on the cover. After getting chewed out for mixing up the telephone number for Barney’s and Saks Fifth Avenue, she realized, “This can’t be my whole life.”

At the time, New York Public Library had a program sponsoring students as they went through librarian school if they worked at the library so she applied for a job with them and in 2001 she enrolled at Syracuse University. She immediately felt at home in her classes, learning about the ways libraries compile, organize, and store all human knowledge for everyone to access. The aspiration of the profession is often confronted by the daily realities of working in libraries.

“It turns out it’s a lot of stapler repair,” she laughs.

But focusing on the little actions and outreach we can have with any person who comes into the library has become a large part of how she conducts her job. Working in an academic setting means that she teaches students not just how to use the library to search for information but how to find and recognize accurate and reliable information. That instruction may take the form of showing health science students, who need sources to debate a critical issue in healthcare, how to find pro and con sources without using the words ‘pro’ or ‘con,’ or teaching them how to access information from Medline. She’s even taught students how to scan book chapters on their phone, a small skill that can have a significant and lasting impact on how they can conduct their work. Sometimes the most beneficial action is something simple like turning on the fax machine or copier, because it makes a lot of students lives better.

Emily’s practical approach to helping students is even more essential given the problems facing LIU Brooklyn. Like many other higher education institutions they have seen declining enrollment, retention issues, and labor issues. Last year administrators physically locked faculty out of the library over contract negotiations and this year they have slashed budgets for nearly every department while also implementing a new policy that obtaining grants is now a factor for achieving promotions or tenure. This has made the primary focus of their outreach and advocacy to be on behalf of their own survival. As she explains, “Working conditions are students’ learning conditions so if we have primarily a contingent labor-force that is getting paid peanuts to teach our students then they’re not going to teach our students very well.”

Part of that work includes what many other libraries have done; they have snack tables at student orientation, they have zines with information about their services, and they have 24-hour service during finals. Assembling statistics and compiling them in reports is another important tool in making the case for additional resources, although the declining enrollment affects all aspects of those numbers. Distilling the intangible act of obtaining knowledge into a measurable metric, something that Emily likens to “extracting resources from higher ed the way you would extract resources from a silver mine, which is just very strange because the commodity is a person,” has its own implications on how it influences the data itself but without that data she can’t show why those resources are necessary. It’s a difficult, challenging time for the higher education sector and that makes Emily’s approach of localized, project-based work all the more essential.

While archival institutions serve a slightly different purpose, this approach of focusing on practical actions can serve as a valuable guide in better engaging with our communities. Emily teaches her students how to navigate the library and learn how to best analyze and utilize the resources they find. Archivists can take the same approach and teach not only how to use the archive but also how to use primary sources and apply the historical context of when they were created. If archivists and local educators can collaborate to create programs that emphasize the importance of these documents –not just historically but relating to many disciplines — then they could provide a valuable service of lasting skills to their community. Hopefully this would also lead to a mutually beneficial rise in usage, further demonstrating their importance and the necessity for adequate funding.

Please check out more of Emily’s publications, which cover a range of topics from information literacy standards and instruction, the intersection of power and library structures, to gender and sexuality in librarianship, available on her website. She is also the series editor for Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies from Library Juice Press/Litwin Books. She considers her article “Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction” (Library Quarterly, April 2013) to be one of her most important pieces that has guided her thinking regarding all the projects she’s done since and it provides an nuanced and needed perspective to the discussion.

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Meet Genevieve Weber!

 

Genevieve Weber of the Royal BC Museum & Archives

by Ariel Barnes 

In late September I spoke with Genevieve Weber, an archivist at the Royal BC Museum & Archives in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. She studied History at the University of Victoria and received a Master of Archival Studies with the First Nations Curriculum Concentration from the University of British Columbia in 2008. After completing her Archival Studies degree Genevieve moved to the Nass Valley, where she worked as an archivist in the Nisga’a Lisims Government. Before starting at the Royal BC Museum & Archives she worked in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and the BC Provincial Government. Currently, she works as an archivist focusing on First Nations records and liaison. As part of her job, Genevieve handles outreach for the archives, including managing the archive’s social media accounts.

The Royal BC Museum & Archives serves as a provincial museum and archive, collecting artifacts, documents, and specimens of British Columbia’s natural and human history. As a provincial archive, the BC Archives is the home to the governmental records of British Columbia. The archive provides access to the public as well as researchers and government officials.

The BC Archives and the BC Museum work together to create exhibitions for the museum, with archivists providing archival records for displays. A current exhibition at the Royal BC Museum is called Family: Bonds and Belonging, which explores what it means to be family and how traditions can evolve over time. As part of the exhibition archivists at the Royal BC Museum & Archives offered three workshops on family history and genealogy. Genevieve describes the workshops as successful because some visitors attended multiple sessions. In a larger sense, Genevieve believes that any outreach program that sparks an interest is successful, whether the interest is remote (meaning online) or onsite. A successful outreach program has to be engaging and aware of its audiences. As an archivist focusing outreach Genevieve feels that it is crucial to be aware of the different audiences or groups attending a potential program.  During our conversation, Genevieve stressed that a successful outreach program takes its audience’s interests into consideration and respects the differences found between groups.

On select Thursdays, the Royal BC Museum & Archives opens its doors to patrons over the age of 21 after closing for themed events called happy hours. These Musuem Happy Hours bring collections and visitors together in new and interesting ways. Genevieve is most proud of a recent event called Museum Happy Hour: Pride, which showcased the LGBTQ+ community in the museum and archive.  For the event, Genevieve selected relevant archival records, including a radio feature about drag culture in Vancouver in the 1980s and a copy of a 1970s pamphlet about the gay community in Vancouver written by an anonymous gay man. This program meant so much to Genevieve because it allowed museum and archives visitors to connect and relate to the archival records a way that can be difficult in the traditional archival setting.

During our discussion, Genevieve said outreach is an important aspect of archival work because programs are a way to bring people into the archive and connect with the records. Genevieve believes that without outreach archives would not have an audience for their collection.  Without outreach programs to bring people in the archives the materials will not be in use and history will be lost. To Genevieve archival materials are for use and outreach programs allow for users to interact with archival records in new and interesting ways.

Genevieve’s days are never dull. Her days can vary depending on the work that needs to be completed. Genevieve normally spends one day a week doing reference work. On other days Genevieve works with First Nations records and liaises with researchers. When she is not working directly with researchers, she manages the archives’ Twitter feed. One recent campaign celebrated Women’s History Month in Canada by highlighting some of the interesting collections from women located in the archive. Genevieve mentioned that all month long they were going to be posting information about inspiring women using the hashtag #WomensHistoryMonth. She also spends some time providing group tours, which requires research on Genevieve’s part as she targets the tours to the group’s interests. Over the course of a week she will have worked on many different projects but that is just part of the job for an archivist at the Royal BC Museum & Archives.

You can find out more about the Royal BC Museum & Archives here: https://www.royalbcmuseum.bc.ca/

On Twitter: https://twitter.com/BCArchives

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Meet Ben Maracle!

Meet Ben Maracle!

by Allyson Sekerke

Ben Maracle is the former Outreach & Operations administrator at The Howard Gotlieb Center. The Center is a Boston University archival repository that specializes in contemporary public figures, and Maracle began working at the Center shortly after graduating from Cornell with a degree in communications. As a student, Maracle did outreach and administrative work for Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program. Because of his experience in outreach, Maracle said accepting the position at the Center seemed like the right move.

Although this position was historically administrative, Maracle ultimately became responsible for event planning and reforming the Friends of the Howard Gotlieb Center membership program. There are approximately 300 Friends of the Howard Gotlieb Center, many of whom have been members for over 30 years. One member even described this program as Boston’s best-kept secret, a notion that Maracle hoped to change. “If there’s one thing that I can do, it’s make something begin to get legs” Maracle said. According to Maracle’s statistical research, many Boston University students settle in the New England area after graduation. With that in mind, Maracle wanted to design a membership program that would attract students and keep them engaged throughout their professional careers.

Maracle has been restructuring the membership program and, with the help of an outside designer, developing new promotional materials. “In a sense, I have become an art director of the Friends program” Maracle said. Maracle has also introduced surveys to measure the success of past events and expressed his surprise that no previous attempts to collect data from event attendees had been made. “Just because you have 300 people, doesn’t mean you have 300 happy people” Maracle said. Having that data and understanding their return on investment, Maracle suggests, is critical to the continued success of the Center. The goal is not, of course, to make money, but to justify their existence to the university and ensure the university’s continued investment in the Center. As Maracle says, “our currency is people, people coming back.”

The Center, for example, is holding an event featuring Bonnie Timmermann, a legendary casting director, and at the same time, a Boston University communications professor is teaching an acting class. Ideally, Maracle says, the students in this course could come to the event and learn how “not to blow it” at an audition. “There’s a ton of students who would really get a lot out of it if they just new about it” Maracle said.

Unfortunately, educational institutions, Maracle says, are naturally the “slowest moving things on the planet,” and despite his vision for a reformed membership program, Maracle faced many roadblocks from the administration. The administration was resistant to change, and Maracle himself had little say over the Center’s programs, the majority of which are lectures and panel discussions. By the time they came down the “pipeline” to Maracle, the format of the event and the speakers had already been decided. Despite these limitations and despite the fact that Maracle left the Center in October 2017, he hopes he has made an impact on the Center’s future membership. “I’m really hoping,” Maracle said, “fingers crossed, that this actually works.”

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Meet Sara Davis and the Olmsted Archives

Historic view of Fairsted showing vines on the side of the house, with shrubs and sumac, circa 1904. Job #673—F.L. Olmsted Estate/Fairsted (Brookline, MA)

by Emily Magagnosc

Sara Davis is the Digital Project Manager for the Olmsted Archives at the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site. As the Site is part of the National Park Service, outreach and public programming is essential and involves everyone at the Site. Park Rangers provide visitor services, including tours, walks and lectures, and working with public schools, supported by archives staff. The archives and museum staff primarily interact with the public through reference inquiries, but they collaborate with interpretation staff on social media efforts and special programming. In the archives, Sara is working to design and develop a comprehensive digitization program that is sustainable long-term focusing on the plans and drawings collection, the most frequently used collection.

This digitization project involves many aspects of archival work. “On an average day, I identify and select items that are a top priority to be digitized, verify locations, create optimized digital images of plans, embed and confirm accuracy of metadata, generate access copies and place master files in long-term storage, and ensure they are uploaded online for access.”

In terms of outreach, she says good outreach involves community engagement, and her daily work at the Olmsted Site facilitates that. “The large-format scanner I use for digitization is located along the museum tour route,” she says. “So I may be physically handling and scanning the collection while a tour is in progress and will speak to the tour groups if they are interested.” Additionally, the digital images she produces are made available for access on the Site’s Flickr page and promoted on Facebook.

The Olmsted outreach efforts include the National Parks community as well. The Site is only one of over 400 National Parks and Sara and her colleagues regularly collaborate with parks and other institutions across the nation on projects.

Sara says her path to finding a career as an archivist has been long and winding. She tried out a number of paths, but none of them kept her interest for very long. But, after thinking about her life experiences, the commonality was that she found enjoyment in assisting others, especially regarding passing on information that would help them succeed. This led her to the Archives Management Program at Simmons. She graduated in January 2016.

She cites the work of her cousin, Gabriel Lopez and his wife, Jodi Lopez, in sparking her interest in archives. They had been using the archives at the University of Northern Colorado to research a historic neighborhood in Greeley, Colorado, known as the Spanish Colonies where Sara’s family has roots. Sara says that the family connection inspired her to pursue archival work because she wanted to ensure that everyone is included in the narrative of the nation’s cultural heritage and equal access to historical documentation.

This inspiration informs the work Sara does at the Olmsted Site. “My favorite part [of the digitization project] is that I am able to provide access to collections to the serious scholar and the casual browser,” she says. “These plans document places. People can go out into the actual place and see the changes over time by comparing it to the historical materials.”

While she cautions that digitization may deter people from visiting the physical archives and engaging in person with others, the benefits of digitization include an increase in discoverability and access. And, perhaps most importantly, with digitization digital outreach and advocacy efforts can be made world-wide.

 

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Rachel Seale, Outreach Archivist

Rachel Seale, Outreach Archivist

by Jenny DeRocher

Rachel Seale has worked at Iowa State University Special Collections and University Archives as an Outreach Archivist for almost two years. She moved from Fairbanks, Alaska, where she worked for six years as an archivist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. At the Iowa State University Special Collections and University Archives, Rachel is happy doing what she does best: outreach and education. Above all else, she enjoys working with patrons and students and teaching them about the archives and special collections. Iowa State University is in Ames, Iowa and holds a rich agricultural history. The university has notable engineering and agricultural programs. The Special Collections and University Archives holdings reflect this history, as do the exhibits Rachel plans. She works to connect the current university students and surrounding community to this history.

Rachel balances many tasks as an Outreach Archivist. She does program planning, teaches classes, coordinates exhibitions, plans meetings to collaborate with different departments in the library and at the university, does a few reference desk shifts every week, and manages the social media outreach. Rachel is on the Events Committee and is Secretary for Librarian’s Assembly for the University Library. She also serves as social chair for the Asian American Pacific Islander Faculty Staff Association at the university and is a new member of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Committee on Public Awareness.

This variety of tasks works for her, but she acknowledges that she may not be the typical archivist. The exhibition program planning and instruction is the biggest part of her job and she works to make her classes interactive and fun for students. The exhibit coordination and occasional curation takes a lot of time and the department schedules exhibitions almost two years in advance. This part of the outreach is most important to her—she sees making connections with other people as an opportunity for the archives and her institution.

The public programs Rachel has coordinated have been well attended. The exhibition curators design an over-arching theme to an exhibit and then the programming is coordinated before, during, and after the exhibition is open to the public. Programming includes but is not limited to opening receptions and lectures that occur through the duration of an exhibition, surrounding its theme. A key goal is to collaborate with other institutions in the area, like the Ames Public Library or the Ames Historical Society. For example, the Ames Public Library hosted a lecture given by Professor Heidi Hohmann about the development of the Iowa State Parks System this past summer to correspond with an exhibit Rachel’s department put together. With limited parking, the campus can be inaccessible for the general public for events. However, by hosting events at the public library, her outreach events become more accessible and allow for creating valuable relationships in the community outside of the student body.

Rachel explained to me that her position didn’t exist at her institution before she was hired. She acknowledged the freedom she has with these circumstances. When she needs guidance she goes to her Department Head, Petrina Jackson, who has a background in outreach and instruction. She also asks her colleagues at her institution or at surrounding institutions for advice if she thinks their expertise is more appropriate. The openness at Iowa State is one of the reasons she was attracted to this position—making relationships and collaborating with people is very important both on a personal and a professional level for Rachel. This is good advice for those of us entering the field: finding institutions that are open to building your position around your expertise and passion will make both you and your institution more successful.

However, Rachel does also recognize how challenging it can be for institutions to prioritize outreach. It takes a lot of time and attention away from the other necessary work at the institution. From her experience, Rachel thinks her position and the field of outreach and advocacy is growing. In ten years, she sees her position splitting into two separate positions because her institution’s framework is growing, in part because of her successful outreach and advocacy. At the Iowa State University Special Collections and University Archives, there is more programming happening, larger exhibits and opportunities available, more collections to work with (while everyone participates in outreach, her position freed up other archivists to focus more on growing the collection and also created awareness to donors), and more researchers. As the field of outreach and advocacy grows, and the Society of American Archivists (SAA) puts more research out on the field, Rachel believes more institutions will create positions like hers to promote their own growth.

As an Outreach Archivist, Rachel believes her job is to teach people about what the archives are and why they are important. She doesn’t just do community outreach and advocacy—she does it within her own institution. She enjoys dismantling tropes about the archives; for instance, she encourages people to touch and engage with the materials and to find a connection with the rich history held at the Iowa State University Special Collections and Archives. With successful programming and instruction, with these connections patrons and students feel to archival resources and the university’s history, it becomes easier to advocate for her repository and her position. This connection she has with patrons and students is what matters to her—more so than any connection she has with collections in her repository.

 

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Meet Deborah Richards!

Deborah Richards, Special Collections Archivist @ Mount Holyoke College

by Julia Nee

Meet Deborah Richards, the Special Collections Archivist at Mount Holyoke College, a small liberal arts college for women in South Hadley, Massachusetts! A graduate of Simmons College with a MSLIS in the archives concentration, Deborah previously worked with the state legislature in Oregon. With a BA in History and Women’s Studies from Oregon State University and a MA in American Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, her interest in history, women’s studies, and activism still inform how she does her work as an archivist today. When she finally discovered archives, she realized she enjoyed research more than writing, and was hooked. Through her experiences as an intern at Houghton Library at Harvard University, student worker at Northeastern University, an archivist at the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and the Assistant Archivist at the Smith College Archives, Deborah has nearly 20 years of experience working in archives.

For the last four years, Deborah’s day at Mount Holyoke College is always exciting because of her various tasks and responsibilities as one of two archivists. She never quite knows who is going to email or walk through the door. On an average day she could be providing reference services, accessioning new materials, supervising student workers, working with donors, performing stacks maintenance, or overseeing the oral history project for LGBTQ alums. Interestingly, Deborah commented that while a lot of professional focus recently has been on digital materials and resources, digital work is the least time consuming part if her job. Deborah is usually up and moving around, doing something new, and enjoys the range of work in archives.

Advocacy and outreach work is very important to Deborah. She believes that information is kept in an archives is not just there to be saved, but is meant to be used. To achieve that end, archives have to create openings for their discovery. For Deborah, advocacy and outreach are very similar because she wants to promote her archives and its material just as much as everyone else’s archives and their materials. She says that it is a disservice not to do outreach. The most exciting advocacy and outreach project Deborah currently has in progress is the LGBTQ Alum Oral History Project. Recognizing the limited representation of LGBTQ history related to Mount Holyoke in the archives, the archives has interviewed over 50 alums to document their time on campus.

Deborah’s archives offers a variety of other advocacy and outreach programs at Mount Holyoke. First, the Archives and Special Collection is very active on social media, thanks mostly to student workers. The archives uses many platforms to reach the most people, including Twitter, YouTube, tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat. To further showcase some of their collections, the archive produces numerous exhibits, both online and in house. The archives hosts ‘Crafternoons,’ a monthly afternoon of crafts for students to get them through the door, make them familiar with the archives, and introduce history or archival materials. A recent craft was creating old-fashioned felt college pennants, and an upcoming activity is ‘Do It Yourself Tea Bags.’ The archives also has a project called Transform/Transcribe which involves crowdsourcing transcription of letters from the archives’s collections. This type of project shares what the archives has and tells volunteers and alums that the archives wants them to visit, help, and be involved. Additionally, Deborah involves the archives in other on-campus activities. The archives brings its button maker to campus activities like Mountain Day, to increase its visibility and network. The archives works closely with classes and professors and the Alumnae Quarterly for publications.

For Deborah, the best types of advocacy and outreach projects are those that involve the audience. She argues that if you let people actually get their hands on something or do something, they will be far more engaged. Some of her favorite projects from other institutions have been oral history projects, the CLGA’s walking tours, and the History Project’s Gayme Night (an evening of board games taken from the collection). She does recognize the challenges, specifically limited time, in creating a successful program. There are a lot of behind-the-scenes, time-consuming steps, rehousing materials for displays for example, so Deborah thinks it is essential to find small ways to do outreach, like the student directed social media and the traveling button maker. She is always inspired by what other archives are doing.

 

 

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Jade Pichette, Volunteer & Community Outreach Coordinator

Jade Pichette, Volunteer and Community Outreach Coordinator, CLGA

by S.S.

Meet Jade Pichette, Volunteer and Outreach Coordinator for the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (CLGA). Although Pichette’s background in social work might make them an outlier in the archival field, they see this atypical professional experience as an asset. Pichette’s work in nonprofits, and especially their work in anti-oppression advocacy and education, strongly informs their approach to archival work. In pursuit of an organizational mission to serve as a resource and catalyst for progress for LGBTQ+ people, the CLGA works to collect, preserve, and make available materials created by or about the LGBT community. Through their outreach work, Pitchette works to ensure that CLGA’s mandate: to preserve the history of marginalized people – is fulfilled in a way that is equitable and inclusive.

When asked what their ‘average’ day at CLGA looks like, Pitchette’s response resonates with those familiar with community organizing: “I don’t have one.” CLGA’s outreach efforts and volunteer activities bring the community into the archives through diverse and dynamic programming, from leading neighborhood walking tours to curating themed exhibitions.

Pitchette’s work has allowed the CLGA to develop strong partnerships with community organizations, including with the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario, which has recently worked with the archives to create timeline of LGBTQ history in education. This material reached the Federation’s 7,000 members across Canada. Going forward, the archives and the Federation plan to collaboratively design workshops to help teachers integrate more LGBTQ history into the elementary level curriculum are underway. This partnership harnesses the strengths of both sides – the Federation has curriculum design expertise; CLGA brings their LGBTQ history expertise – and is focused through Pitchette’s anti-oppression framework, emphasizing an equitable lens that traces history beyond dominant, mainstream narratives.

Without outreach that is “explicitly centered in anti-oppression and anti-racism,” says Pitchette, community archives can be vulnerable to “reproducing only the perspectives of those who work or volunteer,” and in turn representing only those perspectives in collections. By reaching out to non-white and non-cis-gendered communities in acquisition, and by helping update collections policies to demonstrate an explicit interest in records from intersectionally marginalized communities, Pitchette has worked to ensure collections represent a diversity of viewpoints. Aside from collection development work, Pitchette also focuses on the reference interactions patrons’ have with CLGA’s board members, staff, and volunteers on a daily basis. By instituting mandatory diversity and inclusion sessions and a strong volunteer policy, Pitchette aims to foster a welcoming environment at CLGA, and create an organizational culture that values inclusion.

CLGA currently seeks proposals for a consultant to aid in their selection of a new name. Their current name – the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives – can be seen as at best unwelcoming, and at worst exclusionary, of people who don’t identify as specifically “lesbian” or “gay.” CLGA’s stated goal of the upcoming name selection indicates a desire to “better reflect [their] mandate to support the archives of LGBTQ2+ people.” This name change can itself be seen as a form of outreach, aiming to identify the organization to those whose history it seeks to preserve.

Ultimately, Pitchette sees inclusive outreach as imperative to the survival of community archives, as well as one of the major challenges in the archival field. They feel that the profession as a whole needs to come to think of outreach as integral to the work of archives – and as something that is directly connected to funding. New professionals coming through MLIS programs can help push the conversation to the fore of the profession, pushing for recognition of outreach as a necessary component of a functioning archives. Outreach is essential to help people – especially marginalized people – see that their histories are valuable, an essential step towards preserving those stories for the future.

 

 

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Get to Know Bill Barrow and the Cleveland Memory Project

Greetings from Luna Park
Postcard from the Postcards of Cleveland Collection, part of the Cleveland Memory Project. Credit: Michael Schwartz Library, Cleveland State University.

by Jessica Chapel

When Bill Barrow was a child growing up in Cleveland, an electric sign on the city’s West Side lodged itself in his memory. A tipped bottle of milk poured light into a glass, advertising Dairymen’s Milk, a local company. “I keep asking the world for a photo or a home movie,” Barrow told the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 2012.

He isn’t asking the world for a photo of that milk bottle sign out of nostalgia. Barrow, the Head of Special Collections in the Michael Schwartz Library at Cleveland State University, oversees the Cleveland Memory Project, a digital repository of images, oral histories, documents, and other materials chronicling the history of Cleveland. The centerpiece of the Cleveland Memory Project is the 500,000 photographs in the Cleveland Press Collection, a trove that spans decades of city life.

Launched in 2002 by the Schwartz Library in partnership with community organizations throughout Northeast Ohio, the Cleveland Memory Project has been a collaborative effort from the start, said Barrow, and outreach and advocacy work has been key to building the repository both within the library and the community.

“Not much would get accomplished if I tried to run Cleveland Memory entirely out of Special Collections,” said Barrow, explaining that he’s as motivated by idealism as he is by pragmatism. “I have an old Sixties notion of community organizing and participatory democracy fueling this all-together-now approach.”

Barrow, who holds a master’s degree in history from CSU and a master’s in library science from Kent State University, began working with the Cleveland Press Collection as a graduate student in 1993; in 1994, he was hired to process the Cleveland Union Terminal Collection at Schwartz. Both collections became part of the library’s Special Collections department when it was created in 1999, the same year Barrow was brought on as Special Collections Librarian.

The Cleveland Memory Project grew out of earlier efforts to digitize and make local history collections accessible, and a long list of teams across the Schwartz Library and CSU — including Digital Production, Discovery Services, Multimedia Services, and the Law College — was engaged to make it real.

Keeping that early momentum going remains a priority. “The Cleveland Memory Team has meetings monthly at least 11 times a year and is very well attended,” said Barrow. “We use it to keep everyone abreast of relevant developments and to discuss new project proposals.”

It’s that engagement that gives Barrow reason to believe the work of the Cleveland Memory Project will continue well into the future. “The challenge is always money. I’d gone to library school at age 48, so recognizing that my economic life as a librarian wouldn’t be 50 years, targeted my ambition on trying to get as much of the print-based local history resources into the digital realm as I could,” said Barrow.

“There’s still tons to be done. More money, more staff, more everything, would push that job closer to completion. But with the Cleveland Memory Team functioning so well, I think they’ll carry on, state budget permitting.”

Barrow cautioned that buy-in can’t be taken for granted. “Silos are always a problem, whether because of territoriality or lack of conviction that [an institution’s] mission calls for working with others.”

Collaborating with the audience also matters. When work on the Cleveland Memory Project began, “we started with those [topics] we knew the patrons most often requested when they came into Special Collections. We have a feedback loop where people can ask questions, correct mistakes, or volunteer collections to donate,” said Barrow.

“We have allowed other libraries, historical societies, government agencies and even individuals to mount material in Cleveland Memory, which helps us focus outward more. The idea is not to have a show-window where the CSU staff decides what the people want to see, but rather a community stage where we invite colleagues at other institutions to put material up from their holdings.”

Barrow plans to keep finding ways to bring the larger community into the archives. He gives talks around the region, speaking to civic groups about the Cleveland Memory Project and Special Collections. He’s made use of a blog and a newsletter — as well as Facebook and Twitter — to connect with the Cleveland Memory Project’s audience.

And to connect with donors, who have added their items and memories to the repository. If the world hasn’t yet come through with a photo or video of that old electric sign for the Cleveland Memory Project, longtime Cleveland denizens did with reminiscences when Barrow put out the call on his blog. Dairymen’s Milk still haunts more than a few people’s dreams.

Looking ahead, Barrow’s thinking about how to make collections more available to the public.

“I’m coming around to an access mode for Special Collections, rather than a preservation one,” said Barrow. “While still acknowledging the importance of preserving primary sources, I’m opting for a model whereby Special Collections is the repository of material destined for digitization and access. To me, preservation has always been only a long-term access strategy and now, with digital technologies, we can provide superior access without particularly compromising the preservation factor.”

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Meet Andrew Elder!

Andrew Elder, Interim University Archivist and Curator of Special Collections, University of Massachusetts Boston

by Julia Newman

Currently serving as the Interim University Archivist and Curator of Special Collections at the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMass), Andrew Elder recognizes the importance of outreach and advocacy within the archival field. His entry into the archives was sparked by an interest in activism and the ways history is constructed through the use of archives. He explains that he lacked the personality of a conventional activist and thus found a way to fulfill his interests through involvement with archives that provided communities an opportunity to document their own stories. Andrew’s personal and academic interests lead him to Simmons College, where he completed his Master’s of Science in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archives Management. As a professional archivist, Andrew stays engaged with his work by dedicating his free time to community archives and volunteer organizations.

After moving to Boston, Massachusetts in 2006, Andrew began working with the History Project: Documenting LGBTQ Boston through an internship. He continues to support this all volunteer organization as an archivist, member of multiple subcommittees and a co-chair of the Board of Directors. Andrew explains that the History Project’s mission is to document and preserve the history of the community, but more importantly the organization is concerned with actively sharing their archival materials with members of their community and the general public. The History Project provides free and paid public programming, and Andrew remains involved in the planning and outreach integral to such programs. He is currently working on the 2017 HistoryMaker Awards, an event he helped launch in 2009 that was held on October 11, 2017. Andrew’s involvement with this event also includes script writing, design work and the never-ending struggle to balance the politics and mission of the organization. For some, his involvement with this organization would be enough to constitute a full-time position, but yet Andrew manages to find time for this work beyond the many requirements of his current position at UMass Boston.

Boston History Project

In August of 2017, Andrew transitioned from Digital Archives and Outreach Librarian to the Interim University Archivist at UMass Boston. This move required that Andrew shift some of his duties to other colleagues, but he continues to engage in outreach and advocacy in his current position. Although his average day now includes managing his department and attending meetings about library wide initiatives, Andrew continues outreach work through face to face donor visits and advocacy efforts in fundraising strategy sessions. Further, Andrew is also involved in the Mass. Memories Road Show, a digital history project supported by UMass Boston that offers communities throughout Massachusetts an opportunity to bring in photographs to be digitized and compiled into an open archive. This program demonstrates the services archives can offer to communities wishing to document their own history. In reference to community projects, Andrew understands the significance of remaining respectful of a community’s right to establish their own archive separate from formal institutions. Archives should work to support community organizations or archives through outreach and advocacy without imposing on these communities.

For Andrew, outreach and advocacy remain part of his personal and professional involvement with the archives. He stresses the importance of being an archivist that talks about archives in order to communicate the value of archival institutions, and to persuade others to see the value in their potential contributions to archives. Andrew views archival work as a public service for it also allows individuals the chance to gather more information about something new. Andrew explains that successful public programming surrounding the archives should allow for discovery, but should also be entertaining in order to hold attention and increase engagement. In outreach development, Andrew also states the value in communicating with other professionals in the field. He recognizes that archivists and other information professionals face numerous pressing issues on a daily basis, but reiterates the importance of a commitment to outreach and advocacy within archival work. This includes creating regular content, maintaining social media, working with volunteers and fundraising. Largely, Andrew encourages more individuals in the archival field to look beyond the archive for outreach and advocacy opportunities. 

Within the archival and larger information field, Andrew demonstrates the capacity of archivists to support outreach and advocacy work in their professional and personal lives. Although Andrew maintains a busy work life at UMass Boston, he continues to dedicate his time and energy to community-led archives and programs. He is certainly doing as much as he can to advocate for archives and demonstrate respectful outreach work.