Category: Academic Archives & Special Collections

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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. 

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Meet Jessica Lacher-Feldman!

Jessica_Lacher-Feldman, Head of Special Collections for Rochester University

by Natalia Gutierrez-Jones

I recently had the opportunity to speak with Jessica Lacher-Feldman, who is the Assistant Dean of Rochester University, as well as the Director of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation. Jessica discovered her affinity for archives during her undergraduate education at University at Albany, SUNY, when she began working at the New York State Museum, which also held a library and archives. At this point she had not thought about pursuing library science, and had been focused on her education in history. Through both graduate classes while obtaining her first masters in history, and the influence of archivists and museum professionals at her job, she began to see the appealing connections between history and library work. Particular outreach events at the NY State Museum, such as ‘camp-ins’ for schoolchildren, made her more passionate about the positive effect of engaging with cultural heritage, and exhibits in particular – a focus that has been central in her career.

Jessica’s current position as both Assistant Dean and Director of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation requires her to balance the grounded work that must be accomplished in the archives with the need to act in the interest of all of the universities libraries as part of her broader role. At her previous job at LSU, Jessica had the responsibilities of Assistant Dean without the formal position, and she has found it helpful to have the official title in her leadership. The balancing act of Jessica’s two roles will be eased in future months as the library hires two new curators and creates a new outreach position for Special Collections. Her average day starts early, arriving at her office around 7 am to have some time to herself before a day full of meetings with the dean, assistant directors, staff she supervises, regarding collection development, exhibits, projects, and grants. On top of that, she spends time keeping up with email communications, particularly with existing and potential donors. Recently her evenings have involved background reading for a class she taught at the University, and preparing for a TED Talk style presentation about her work in archives. Writing articles and working on another book project also occupy her time outside of official work hours.

Her outreach and advocacy work involves myriad tasks, including applying for grants, connecting with donors, and planning and producing exhibits. She tries to intervene in the more traditional programming and give a new approach to involve the whole community and get people excited; a recent project involved yarn bombing! She finds experimentation, creativity, and a mixture of branding and surprises to be the best approach to public programming. Jessica also tries to bring in outside institutions, such as the allied community organizations Historic Brighton and the Susan B. Anthony Museum & House.

Jessica’s passionate approach to outreach and advocacy means that she is constantly representing her profession, and constantly working. She finds archives essential to democratic societies, and wants her colleagues in archives to understand that outreach and advocacy are not a separate, extra component of the work, but a fundamental part. She hopes to convey her energy and commitment to those involved in outreach projects so that they also feel fully engaged in the work and the successful outcome. Jessica also would like to see more artists in the archives, bringing the documents to life through performing or visual arts. She sees these projects as important opportunities to emphasize the success of output fueled by research in the archives.

One challenge Jessica sees for outreach and advocacy work is, as she puts it, “bandwidth.” Staff can become stretched thin with responsibilities and Jessica wants to ensure outreach is appropriately prioritized. She sees this challenge also as an opportunity to shift our philosophy to encompass advancement through outreach. When she needs help with a project, she will engage community members who specialize in the area that needs support. She sees this asking as creating a connection and in a sense, deputizing a community member who will thereafter feel like a part of the archives’ success. Another challenge Jessica has faced is working with donors and collections that were controversial, and having to negotiate with senior administration as to how much publicity and community involvement these collections should receive. Jessica believes archivists have a responsibility to be willing to work with a collection regardless of personal feelings towards the materials. Tension can also arise in her position due to competing priorities as to the target audience of the archives. There needs to be an institutional focus to support faculty, but also collection policies that appeal to external and international researchers and bring in a varied audience.

Jessica has written a book on archival exhibitions (Exhibits in Archives and Special Collections Libraries, 2013) and this form of public programming is important to her. She sees exhibits as a foundation for any way that we approach outreach and advocacy, as they can create a narrative or platform that can be built off of in various ways. Exhibits can ground our message in the actual materials. They give us an opportunity to formulate what we need to say and to consider who our audience is ahead of time. Furthermore, they have value in that there is a lasting component to exhibits, and evidence that becomes preservable, especially in the case of digital exhibits. Jessica’s powerful work ethic and passion for cultural heritage make her an ideal advocate for archives.

Exhibits in Archives and Special Collections Libraries by Jessica Lacher-Feldman
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Myron Groover and Activist Advocacy

Myron Groover (photography by Victoria Ostrzenski)

by Alden Ludlow

Myron Groover is the Archives and Rare Books Librarian at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He received his Master of Archival Studies and MLIS degree from University of British Columbia, Vancouver in 2012. He also holds a MA Honors in History from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland (2006). We spoke with him on issues of advocacy and outreach in a phone interview on September 29, 2017.

For Myron Groover, advocacy in the archives field is an overtly political project. Having graduated with his MLIS degree in 2012, he found the situation within Libraries and Archives Canada (LAC), at the national level, to be dangerously in disarray. With the appointment of Daniel J. Caron as Librarian and Archivist of Canada in 2009, government employees found themselves under siege, with budgets being cut and information professionals being fired.

Groover’s advocacy work grew out of budget cuts to LAC during the administration of Prime Minister Stephen Harper (in office 2006-2015). Defunding of cultural heritage institutions during the administration led to the firing of many LAC professionals, and those that remained were further pressured in their jobs, including requirements that they sign non-disclosure agreements, effectively muzzling them and preventing them from discussing their work in publications and at conferences.

“What I was experiencing was this incredulity that there was this systematic dismantling of knowledge infrastructure which was essential to the core functioning of government and its ability to be accountable to its own citizens, and hardly anyone was saying anything at all,” Groover noted in a recent interview for this profile. “The professional organizations were all afraid to say anything, and the people who worked in the institution were terrified to speak up.” He found himself taking on advocacy on behalf of an archives and library meta-discourse at the national level.

Groover has a broad and varied background which put him on the trajectory to taking up the cause on behalf of his fellow Canadian professionals. Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he grew up in the United States; at fourteen he attended high school in Switzerland, and after that university in the United Kingdom. He left the UK for Canada in 2007 to attend library school.

Groover’s vision of advocacy is broad, yet nuanced. It looks beyond institutions, seeking to work within the social fabric itself. “The business of advocacy, if it is anything, is working together to build a shared narrative of a society wherein libraries and archives are valued and contribute to the well-being of the people that live in it,” he argues. “Advocacy is the process of building that shared narrative, or repairing it when it gets frayed, and making sure everyone can participate in it.”

His advocacy on behalf of LAC employees began to come to the fore in 2012. “I was desperately underemployed at the time, and I did that on my own without any institutional support from anyone,” he says. While in school, Groover had been maintaining a listserve to promulgate his advocacy ideas; in 2012, at the Canadian Library Association (CLA) conference, he took his fight to the top. Caron, “the hatchet-man the right wing had brought in to shepherd through the destruction of the national library, was the keynote speaker,” Groover recalls. The speech was not well received. “Later that day he had a Q&A panel, and I did the unthinkable thing and got up in his face, and asked him some detailed questions; he couldn’t answer them all, and it was a disaster.”

However, that was not enough. “What started out as this impassioned political project of getting people to care morphed into chronicling the decline,” he says. “I thought, we may not win, but I’ll be damned if they are the only ones getting their line of rhetoric out there.” While his message coalesced around issues of accountability, it was draconian LAC employee speech policies introduced in 2013 which drove him to take his advocacy to the next level. “The employee free speech issue ended up getting a lot of attention, because that was where it was easy to connect what was happening at Library and Archives Canada with regular people,” he says. “Everybody has some conception of what it would be like not to have freedom of expression. Everyone has an intuitive understanding that having your participation in mainstream politics curtailed by your employer is outrageous.”

Groover turned to social media to broaden his audience and increase awareness, and that turned out to be the missing piece. “Social media is a way of reaching people who can help you out, and who want to hear what you have to say,” he relates, adding, “what Twitter did was give me an opportunity to take those longer blog posts, encapsulate them, and get them into a broader sphere where you are able to interact with journalists and policymakers directly.” Members of Parliament were taking notice, and Groover was given the opportunity to shape discourse, noting that all the policy work he was doing was a “heavy lift.”

All that lifting paid off. Caron was fired in 2013; the pressure against him finally reached a peak, and what finally did him in was cheating on expenses. “It was a Pyrrhic victory,” Groover notes, adding, “there was never any accountability for any of the things he did in LAC. As I predicted early on, if they got away with it for long enough, then it wouldn’t be possible to rebuild, and indeed that’s exactly what happened.” Despite continuing issues at LAC, morale has improved; Guy Berthiaume was appointed in 2014. “Just by bringing in someone with a different personality, who is willing to take a more conciliatory rhetorical line, that has made a huge difference.”

Another casualty of this upheaval was the CLA, which disbanded in June 2016. In the end, they did not live up to their mission. “They never had vision on anything, never took to advocacy on these issues,” Groover says. “They gave no value back to the community at all.”

Advocacy on behalf of the profession has been taken up by several smaller organizations, and individuals like Groover. “We don’t have whistleblowers in Canada,” he notes. “There is no tradition of that here. You really do need rogue actors, or at least people who have the autonomy to say what they really think. I was lucky enough to be able to do that … I built my standing in the community through unremunerated advocacy work,” he jokes. A new advocacy and culture of transparency within LAC is taking root in Canada, led by professionals in the field, using social media as a tool to connect with journalists, politicians, and citizens.

“It turned into something I didn’t expect,” Groover concludes. “I think back on it, where it started and where it ended up, it is not always clear to me how I got from point A to point B.” This opportunism–addressing needs where they are most pressing–is at the very heart of advocacy.

 

Resources

McMaster University William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections – https://library.mcmaster.ca/archives/

McMaster Rare Books on Twitter – https://twitter.com/MacResColls

Bibliocracy blog – http://bibliocracy-now.tumblr.com/

Bibliocracy on Twitter – https://twitter.com/@Bibliocracy