Month: November 2017

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Meet Snowden Becker!

Snowden Becker, Co-Founders of the Center for Home Movies

by Adam Schutzman

Snowden Becker has been actively involved in outreach and advocacy for most of her professional career. She has been working in the cultural heritage field for over 20 years and is perhaps most well known for her work with moving image archives. She first became interested in working with collections when she was an undergrad in art school, after taking a part-time job at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She worked in a number of well-known museums after graduating with a BFA in printmaking, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Japanese American National Museum and the Getty Museum. It was during her time at the Japanese American National Museum that she first realized her passion for working with moving image archives and in particular, small gauge and amateur films. Soon after starting her work there, she began pursuing her Masters in Library and Information Science at UCLA.

During her time at UCLA, she joined the Association of Moving Image Archivists and became the founding Chair of their Small Gauge and Amateur Film Interest Group after graduating with an MLIS in 2001. It was through this interest group that the idea for Home Movie Day came about, which she co-founded in 2002 with four colleagues. Since its founding, Home Movie Day has become a wildly successful, international annual event, where the general public is encouraged to bring in their family films to be inspected for condition and projected by trained film archivists for an audience to watch and enjoy together. The event serves as a highly effective outreach tool, where the public is both entertained and educated about the value of amateur films and how best to care for them from a film preservation perspective. This year, Home Movie Day celebrates its 15th anniversary all over the world. Since 2002, the event has grown from being presented in twenty-four venues in four countries, to being presented in nearly one hundred cities on every continent except for Antarctica.

Home Movie Day 2017 Trailer

In 2004, Snowden co-founded the Center for Home Movies, which is a non-profit organization that administers Home Movie Day and other related amateur film preservation advocacy and outreach projects, such as the Home Movie Registry. Through their various online and in-person programs, the center strives to fulfil their mission to “transform the way people think about home movies by providing the means to discover, celebrate, and preserve them as cultural heritage”. In addition to being a co-founder, Snowden served as a director of the board for the organization until 2010. Even though she no longer serves on the board, Snowden continues to remain closely involved in supporting the center’s work thorough helping to host Home Movie Day and other related projects locally. Her dedicated work in this field over the years has helped shift both the professional and popular perception of home movies from disposable, kitschy relics of a bygone era to important historic records worthy of archival preservation and scholarly research. Recently, the Center for Home Movies became the 2017 recipient of the Society of American Archivists’ Philip M. Hamer and Elizabeth Hamer Kegan Award for their continued work in archival advocacy.

Currently, Snowden is completing her PhD in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Since 2012, she has also served as a teacher and program manager of the Moving Image Archive Studies Program at UCLA. In this role, she helps to educate students about moving image archives and outreach while advocating for smaller, community-based collections.

In a recent interview with her, I asked Snowden the question ‘what makes for a good outreach project’? She responded by saying that “the stuff that works best, is the stuff that is really driven by a demonstrated, well-understood need and that is solving a specific problem”. She goes onto elaborate that, “If you are scoping out a project and you can’t answer ‘what is the problem we are trying to solve here?’ and ‘how do we know that this problem exists?’, then you’re not going to be successful”. These insights resonated strongly for me and seem like important food for thought when one is involved in conceiving of a community-based archival outreach project.

Overall, Snowden’s work in the last 20 years is diverse yet passionately focused. Each one of the projects that she has been involved in shows a strong commitment to archival outreach and advocacy on multiple levels. As a graduate student and early professional in the LIS field with a passion for both outreach and archival moving images, I find her work deeply inspiring. Thanks to the work of people like Snowden, events like Home Movie Day will be helping raise awareness about the historical importance of amateur films and moving image archives for many years to come.

To find out more the Center for Home Movies, visit: http://www.centerforhomemovies.org/

To find a Home Movie Day event near you, visit: http://www.centerforhomemovies.org/hmd/

To learn more about Snowden Becker’s academic and professional work, visit: https://snowdenbecker.com/

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Meet Lorna Condon, Senior Curator for Historic New England

by Anna Faherty

Lorna Condon, the Senior Curator of Library and Archives at Historic New England, was kind enough to meet with me this week and tell me about the collections and programs her institution offers. In her position of senior curator Lorna deals with archival acquisitions, and works on publications, exhibits, and grant writing, among other aspects of archival work. She says she finds it extremely rewarding to help connect people with historical and archival objects that inspire them.

Historic New England is a regional organization encompassing 37 historic properties in five New England States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. The organization was started by William Sumner Appleton in 1910. Appleton hoped to preserve architecture and artifacts that would tell the stories of the daily life of New Englanders, and not only of famous historical figures. Collections that Appleton began are integral parts of the collection today, for example, the ephemera collection and the documentary photograph collection. The library and archives at Historic New England include photos, architectural drawings, postcards, books, periodicals, and manuscripts. Many collections of photographs have been digitized and are available on the Historic New England website. Explore the collections of Historic New England: https://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/collections-access/

Historic New England is focused on preserving, maintaining, and making accessible objects associated with the region’s history. Though the organization began in Massachusetts, it maintains buildings in all New England states except for Vermont. Historic New England has developed collaborative partnerships in Vermont through public programs, lectures on New England history, workshops for homeowners, loans of material to exhibitions, and a field school for preservation students and professionals.

An important group of stakeholders in Historic New England are those living in historic homes they would like to preserve. Through the easement program, Historic New England partners with these homeowners to help legally deed preservation maintenance into their ownership documents to protect their houses in perpetuity. By helping to manage the care of private historic homes, the organization can assist in the preservation of New England heritage outside of the traditional realms of public institutions like museums. Other users of the archive at Historic New England include historians, architects, students of all ages, filmmakers, and community members from various localities throughout the region.

Within the organization, the library and archives provide resources for staff members from various departments: marketing, exhibition, preservation, and publication, to name a few. The archive provides information and artifacts which are featured in exhibits at various locations, including online, in magazines, promotional materials, and books. There are also external groups and individuals which Historic New England reaches with various programs, workshops, partnerships, and exhibitions. Every year, the organization gives awards to authors of books of new research about the material culture of New England, and to collections of works on paper which make significant contributions to history. These awards serve to forge bonds between researchers, collectors, and Historic New England, in order to promote and recognize the value of historical scholarship.

Historic New England partners with various organizations in order to broaden their user base and expand their collections. Some of their partners in exhibit creation, programming, digitization, and grant collaboration include: The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), The Boston Athenaeum, state initiatives such as the Maine Photo Project, schools like Berwick Academy, and professional associations such as the American Alliance of Museums. The program Everyone’s History grew out of community involvement in events relating to the 100th anniversary of the organization. Everyone’s History partners Historic New England with community groups all over the region to tell the stories they are passionate about. Some of the outcomes of these projects are oral histories, books, exhibits, documentaries and ongoing programs. Partners include museums and historical societies, public school systems, religious organizations, LGBT groups, workers associations, preservation trusts, and even a yacht club! Learn more about Everyone’s History:

https://www.historicnewengland.org/explore/everyones-history/

Everyone’s History has helped Historic New England reach potential users from diverse communities, and provides an ongoing connection to groups that represent New England daily life in the modern world and historically. A great example is the Haymarket Project, a collaboration between Historic New England, the Haymarket Pushcart Association, and photographer Justin H. Goodstein. The project documents the lives and traditions of vendors at Haymarket and the history, changes, and challenges of the market. The relationship between Haymarket and Historic New England has continued, and on October 20th, a program hosted by Historic New England and the Haymarket Pushcart Association called “Taste of Haymarket” explores its history and culture for interested members of the public. More information about the “Taste of Haymarket” event can be found here: http://shop.historicnewengland.org/HGO-HAYMARKET-2-9499/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Stephen R. Curley, Tribal Archivist for the Mashpee Wampanoag Community

Stephen R. Curley is the archivist for the Mashpee Wampanoag Indian Community and Government Center

by Jessica Hoffman

A vast complex sits apart from a main road on the Cape, housing the Mashpee Wampanoag Indian Community and Government Center. Nicknamed “The Castle,” the new building is a state-of-the-art asset, layered with modern architecture, security guards, and restricted access rooms. The building represents quite an upgrade from the Tribal Council’s previous home: a modest cottage donated by a local homeowner. But it can also seem an overwhelming, or even intimidating, change.

But tucked into the basement of The Castle is the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Archives, an archives whose outreach and advocacy success depends on building trust with the people it serves.

Stephen R. Curley is the tribe’s first archivist. When he was hired two years ago, the Tribe handed off a room full of boxes, some basic infrastructure, and a set of operational benchmarks. Since then, he has created a functioning archives from scratch: learning about his holdings, identifying their strengths and weaknesses, cataloguing, digitizing, and creating collections.

Curley admits to being surprised and impressed by his progress. “I’ve built it from the ground up. I’m still building. You need to build up an archive before you can do all the community outreach. That way you can show people what you are doing and how their materials will be treated…We want to have our materials in great condition before we display them. It makes a huge difference… People wonder what to do with their own collections. If they know us and trust us and know we will preserve their collections properly they will turn to us.”

While gaining physical and intellectual control of the Tribe’s holdings has been daunting but achievable, gaining the trust of the tribal community of the community has proven to be a much more difficult challenge.

NEW ARCHIVIST IN TOWN

Stephen R. Curley is the first archivist for the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Archives

Originally from Arizona, Curley began his career as an anthropologist. However, he realized he wanted to focus his energies on something less esoteric and more concrete. He wanted to make a difference. In shifting to the field of archives, he hoped to work with tribes to develop and decolonize institutions, better suiting them to the needs of the tribes they serve.

For Curley, the Mashpee Wampanoag Archives was the perfect opportunity. “There wasn’t anything better I could have picked,” he declared. “Tribal archives help lead to tribal sovereignty…but the idea of a tribal archive is still nascent. Not many tribes have their own archives. And they are mostly community based. This is something that isn’t the norm.”

But, he is an outsider in the Mashpee Wampanoag community, a community with a hearty distrust of institutionalization and concerns about the historical exclusion, misrepresentation, and abuse of Native American tribes by academic institutions.

“People have a lot of mistrust and misconceptions… That trust dynamic… It’s a big piece in creating a viable archive. We want people to know that they can trust us to keep their family collections here and that we’ll try to curate them respectfully and we won’t just have other tribal members take things out. Because that’s happened before in other tribal settings.”

BUY-IN

But the Tribal Archives relies on more than just community trust. Trust of the Tribal institutions and infrastructure is critical. And it is something Curley has worked hard to cultivate.

Curley has advocated for his archives since the moment he arrived, building relationships within the Tribal Government itself. He speaks regularly with the tribe’s chief, recording interviews for the future. He also uses these meetings to ground himself in the history of the tribe — a critical part of understanding his holdings and establishing himself as a trustworthy professional. He also works closely with the Tribe’s legal branch, assisting them with the research and records needed for their work.

Curley is also working hard to build relationships outside of the Mashpee community. He is actively reaching out to other institutions in the field, such as Harvard University, the Massachusetts State Archives, Amherst and others, in hopes of building partnerships that will allow the tribe to reclaim some of their historical material via digital surrogates. Curley views these relationships as critical, not only to help grow the Archives’ holdings, but also to help reunite the sovereign history of Tribes.

THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH

The Archivist often does not have final say or control over the Tribal Archives programming ideas. All programs and events are subject to approval by the tribe’s governing infrastructure and press office. And, they often want to avoid anything politically charged. It’s a recurring theme with some of Curley’s outreach ideas.

“The inconvenient truth of archives is internal bureaucracy and politics… Even though we’re just dealing with paper, it can be very political. There’s a bureaucracy that we sort of operate within,” he said.

For example, the tribe recently passed the 40th anniversary of their well-publicized land claim lawsuit. Curley proposed an event to mark the occasion: a screening of a well-balanced video followed by a panel discussion with key players from the trial and historical experts. Unfortunately, his idea was vetoed by the PR arm of the tribe. “It kind of just boiled down to it was ‘too political’ and they don’t want to dredge up bad feelings,” Curley explained.

THE SECRET WEAPON

Curley’s best community outreach tool may be his newest employee, Wasutu-Nopi (also known as Denise Kersey. Her love of history and interest in her family’s past inspired her to apply for the Elder Apprentice position in the archives. “I like seeing my relatives way back when.” When she was just eight, her grandmother died. Through her work, Wasutu-Nopi discovered pictures of her grandmother in her early twenties and “…to get to see her then is… oh wow.”

Wasutu-Nopi is a tribal elder, a distinguished position in the tribal community. Even more, she is well liked and trusted in the community. As a result, her presence and participation in the archives raises awareness of the archives amongst the tribe. “Lots of people didn’t know what (the Archives) was or why it was needed. Or even where it was,” Wasutu-Nopi said. But her work with the Archive has gone a long way towards strengthening community bonds.

FUTURE FACING

Thus-far, the Archives hasn’t done much community-facing outreach, focusing instead on intellectual control. However, both Curley and Wasutu-Nopi have lots of ideas for future programs.

Curley is planning to exhibit their holdings as much as possible. Both a blog and a Facebook page for the Archives have recently gone live. And Curley is committed to creating more online resources, such as an online catalogue of the Tribal Archives holdings. Currently, a small wall-mounted monitor near the Archives entrance cycles through a loop of various digitized images. Curley hopes to add more monitors, or perhaps iPads, with images throughout the building. Ideally, the pictures would not only cycle on a loop, but each picture would have description or content, identifying the people or activities seen in the photos. He’d also like to build a self-guided walking tour on a nearby trail, allowing people to wander the sites and view the timeline of the Wampanoag tribe and their history in Mashpee.

As October was Archives Awareness month, Curley also implemented several special programs to raise the Archives’ visibility. A temporary workstation installation in the rotunda of the Government Center, showcased the Archives’ catalog to a new audience. The Archives also collaborated with the Elders Department’s “Lunch & Learn” program, offering public tours of the space and holdings.

Curley wants his outreach efforts to not only build community trust, but also build the Tribal Archives holdings. The entire image collection of the Archives has been scanned and photographed. However, they have very little metadata.   Curley wants to crowdsource as much information as he can by inviting community members to a social night where they can view some photos on a big screen — and hopefully match names to faces and scenes to events. He also plans to throw digitization parties, allowing community members to bring their old photos to the event to be digitized, and hopefully also be allowed to keep digitized copies for the Archives as well.

Wasutu-Nopi also has a vision for the future of the archives. “I’d like to have kids know what went on in the past. I’d love to have groups of kids coming in and they could see what went on during the Federal Recognition Process. It’s not an easy thing to understand. But they could sit around the table and look at pictures and connect. They could see how we make dreamcatchers, earrings, baskets, and we could tell them stories of the past.”

A lot of people in the community have “a notion that larger institutions don’t care about them.” says Curley. “We can change that… It’s a community archive, not just a governmental archive. It belongs to them. We exist to serve the tribe. And they have an expectation for us to do right by them and to be of use.”

To learn more about the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Archives visit:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Mashpee-Wampanoag-Tribal-Historic-Preservation-Department-THPD-1043796625723086/

Blog: https://mwthpd.wordpress.com/

To learn more about the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe’s land claim lawsuit read:

Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial by Jack Campisi

https://bpl.bibliocommons.com/item/show/701212075

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KJ Rawson, Founder of the Digital Transgender Archive

KJ Rawson, Founder of the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA)

by Erica J Hill

K.J. Rawson is the director of the Digital Transgender Archive, an online platform providing digital versions of transgender historical records, born-digital records, and holdings of other repositories around the world. Despite not having professional training in archival studies, he took several Library and Information Science classes in his graduate program. K.J. Rawson is a professor of Rhetoric, English, and Gender Studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has a Master’s Degree from University of Colorado-Boulder in English Literature focusing on Queer Theory and Critical Race Studies. He received his PhD from Syracuse University in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric.

The inspiration for the archives began when K.J. met historian Nick Matte, at a conference and discussed the challenges they faced when researching transgender history in archives. These challenges include the repositories knowledge of their materials and the environment of the reading room. The archives addresses the barriers in terms of accessibility. Archives may have documents that pertain to transgender history, however, it may be difficult for one to travel to a physical location and find materials.

The DTA functions as a union catalog, virtually bringing together materials that are relevant to the understanding and study of transgender histories. As the collecting policy states, the term ‘transgender’ is used to refer to a “broad and inclusive range of non-normative gender practices.” As such, the DTA considers transgender as a practice rather than an identity, allowing the archives to include a broad range of trans-historical and trans-cultural materials. The focus is on materials created before the year 2000.

What is special about the DTA is that, although there are no physical archives, K.J. has created a lab where student volunteers work to digitize and describe materials. Students also participate in the archives’ social media presence. The posts highlight materials in the archives, including newly added collections. K.J. uses his network of archivists, professors, and researchers, whom he has met at conferences and speaking engagements, to acquire materials for the archives. He uses skype and email the most when working with collaborators.

With a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, he has hired a fulltime project coordinator to oversee the day-to-day activities of the archives. The College of the Holy Cross where KJ teaches, also supports the mission of the archives. By incorporating the materials from the DTA in his classes, he demonstrates its importance as an educational tool. Involving students in using the archives has led to more college support and feedback on the usability of the online platform and has helped streamline the functionality of the site.

The archives has a 10-member advisory board including individuals in the trans community who are located within and outside of Massachusetts. Part of the success of the archives is K.J.’s willingness to ask dedicated archivists and collaborators for their advice and insight. He believes that now is a good opportunity to make the resource available to educate people and organizations about the issues that transgender communities face.

The challenges of the archives include, meeting the expectations of stakeholders and completing projects with grant funding. While people from all over the world can access the materials online (provided they have a device), most information and description of holdings are in English. Efforts have been made to acquire collections in German, Spanish, Portuguese and several other languages. Another challenge involves acquiring materials without knowledge of who holds copyright. This prompted K.J. and his team to create a policy where materials that violate someone’s copyright will be taken down immediately. Direct materials from creators are preferred because of these copyright regulations.

The archives is an advocacy tool in itself to aid trans communities that are committed to education as a tool for social change. It exists to transform people’s perspectives of trans communities in history and present-day. It also has the capacity to inspire other archives to represent trans people in their own holdings. The possibility of physical exhibits based on the materials found online creates a push for users to advocate for the acquisition of materials related to trans history and culture. This push enables trans related museum projects to begin in non-exclusively trans institutions.

One project K.J. is looking forward to the digitization of a collection out of Berlin and establishing connections and relationships with archivists and trans community members in Venezuela.

To browse the Digital Transgender Archive, click here. To read K.J.’s research, including journal articles and a scrollable timeline of the history the term “transgender,” visit his website, here.

[edited from original posting, 11-11-17]

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Ed Summer, Unofficial Curator of Experiments

Ed Summers, Lead Developer, Maryland Institute of Technology

by Victoria Jackson

In a world full of constant content generation, how can library and information science professionals convince their communities, their institutions, and the world at large of their importance? It is a question of growing importance within the field, given the number of technological advancements made seemingly every month. Enter Ed Summers, Lead Developer at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), who has found ways to incorporate user-driven, community-based archival projects throughout his career.

Three years ago, Ed left his position working with digital preservation at the Library of Congress. There, his job included finding ways to preserve digital content. In his current role at the MITH department, he is focused on providing content creators and users with methods of communication. Ed works with both other software developers and researchers, and while his job title is “lead developer,” he does not consider his work as solely technical. When the current director (who is relatively new in his role) came in, he asked if they wanted to change their titles to “better reflect what they do.” Naturally, Ed pondered what he would change his to. He found a title on Wikipedia from nineteenth-century scientists who called themselves “curators of experiments.” Ed is unofficially one of them.

For the last two years, Ed’s main experiment has been Documenting the Now, a “tool and a community based around supporting the ethical collection, use, and preservation of social media content.” Ed serves as the Technical Lead for the project, alongside a host of other archivists from the University of Maryland, the University of California at Riverside, and Washington University in St. Louis. Designed to “explore building tools and community of practice around social media archiving—specifically oriented around the ethics of social media archiving,” DocNow was inspired by the reaction to the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. At the time, Ed was attending a Society of American Archivists meeting during the height of the Ferguson protests. He and fellow archivist Bergis Jules wondered what people would remember about this event in the future. They collected 13 million tweets in the weeks surrounding Brown’s death, started writing about the data collection and analyzation; archival and public interest ensued. For Ed, it was important the project have a home that was physically close to its origin. The project came to reside at St. Louis University.

DocNow is a tool and a community developed around supporting the ethical collection, use, and preservation of social media content.

DocNow aims to provide practitioners who wanted to preserve these moments with an opportunity to do so. The project had two initial deliverables: a white paper about the ethics issues and a digital tool that would allow people to collect twitter posts. However, while working on the project, questions regarding data sharing and consent arose. The project shifted gears: the new objective became to build a tool that “connected curators and archivists with content creators” and “bring the two into a more meaningful communication.” DocNow puts the focus on content creators and the relationship they have with each other.

As you can imagine, receiving a grant from the Mellon Foundation went a long way to advocate for the importance of the work Ed and his colleagues do. In between such prestigious projects, MITH participates in nontraditional advocacy programs, such as a series of digital dialogues in which the school invites researchers from outside its own community to discuss their work. This interdisciplinary relationship is what drives Ed’s work. Ed believes his most important constituents are the university’s students, faculty, and community—in that order. Working in a university can sometimes involve what he refers to as the “town-gown” divide; ordinary community members and members of the university’s community. His goal—which should be the goal of all archivists—is to bridge the gap between the two. Ed sets an excellent precedent for how to accomplish this goal.

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Meet Bergis Jules!

Bergis Jules, University and Political Papers Archivist at the University of California, Riverside

by Jessica Purkis

Recently, I had the chance to catch up with Bergis Jules, the University and Political Papers Archivist at the University of California, Riverside. Bergis manages UC Riverside’s institutional records, political papers collections, and African American collections. While supporting the university’s administration and community outreach efforts, Bergis documents campus history and builds collections around local, regional, and state political organizations in California. As part of his work, he is constantly reaching out and educating to build better donor relations and more diverse collections.

Bergis views his work in archives as a way to build ties between communities and ties between community members. He believes that archives and cultural heritage materials can bring people together, especially when those materials are “put into the hands of those who teach.” Without enhanced accessibility, some users might never encounter these materials (or communities) at all. To build ties, outreach and advocacy are essential. By creating a space for conversation, an archivist can build trust and discover a community’s particular needs. The most important aspect of any outreach or advocacy project, Bergis reminds me, is “putting people and communities first.” No matter the medium, digital or old-fashioned face-to-face, conversation comes first. Bergis believes that collaborating and conversing with smaller communities holding diverse materials is the best form of advocacy that an archivist can perform at a large repository. The best way to do this, he adds, is to learn to listen to the communities that keep the materials.

Because listening facilitates collaboration, Bergis suggests that listening itself is a great way to find new strategies for outreach and advocacy. An archivist can learn a lot from other projects by asking about what has worked and what hasn’t, and then seeing what spaces may be left behind that provide new project ideas. Bergis has had a lot of success learning about new projects through networks of archivists on Twitter. According to Bergis, following the networks on Twitter is a really effective way to find out about and collaborate on all kinds of projects, including grassroots archiving. Bergis himself is very active on Twitter, and can be found at @BergisJules.

In the past, Bergis has helped build collaborative communities around collections from underrepresented groups. He has worked at the Black Metropolis Research Consortium at the University of Chicago and also at the District of Columbia Africana Archives Project at George Washington University. At the BMRC, he was Project Director, and helped create a digital repository of collections documenting Chicago-area African American and African diasporic materials. Bergis wrote a grant to jumpstart the DC Africana Archives Project, increasing access to collections documenting the history of the African diaspora in the DC area. Both projects have been incredibly successful in enhancing accessibility to materials. More recently, Bergis has helped develop Documenting the Now, a tool for archiving tweets, to help document diverse perspectives on social justice issues.

DocNow is a tool and a community developed around supporting the ethical collection, use, and preservation of social media content.

Bergis therefore brings a long-standing commitment to community-building and diversity to his work at UC Riverside’s Archives, located in the UC Riverside Library. The library holds more than 275 manuscript collections, including personal, family, and organizational records. The university collects materials that document a wide variety of experiences in the US, particularly in the Inland Empire Region, an area in inland southern California east of Los Angeles. Some of the strengths of Riverside’s special collections lie in the history and culture of the Inland Empire region, Latin American history and culture, and ethnic studies, which document African American, Native American, Asian American, and Chicano/Latino experience.

UC Riverside currently spearheads the Inland Empire Memories consortium, a group of cultural heritage institutions located in the Inland Empire. Bergis is the Project Coordinator there. He writes grants and manages the program day-to-day in conjunction with the other member institutions. Because the consortium was established recently, right now Bergis spends much of his time listening to the consortium’s members, gathering data along the way about their projects and interests, their resources, and their ideas for later programs. Bergis is currently helping to facilitate the Sherman Indian High School Museum’s project to digitize some of its collections and provide its users with new levels of access.

In future, the Inland Empire Memories institutions intend to collaborate to share funding, develop access tools and programs for digital collections, and build relationships with other community institutions. The Inland Empire Memories mission is “to identify, preserve, interpret, and share the rich cultural legacies of the Inland Empire’s diverse communities” by enhancing access to cultural heritage materials. It emphasizes materials documenting “peoples and groups underrepresented in the historical record.” Increasing diversity in the archival record, I have come to find, is something of a theme in Bergis’ work.

It’s through listening that Bergis has had such success collaborating with others to promote access to a more diversified historical record. I expect that the Inland Empire Memories Consortium will become as active as the Black Metropolis Research Consortium and the DC Africana Archives Project in enhancing access to new materials. I hope to hear about many more projects from its members in the future!

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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.”