Category: Uncategorized

by Caroline Tanski

As the story often goes, Felicia Williamson didn’t intend to be an archivist. She studied German and European history and pursued historical research through a Fulbright scholarship in Austria. She took a student job in circulation at her college library and began to apply for PhD programs so she could become a history professor. Then one day a librarian she worked with pulled her aside and said, “It seems like you enjoy this work. Have you thought about becoming a librarian instead?”

Williamson knew from her own experience as a researcher that she in fact wanted to be an archivist. She earned her MLS from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where she worked as a graduate assistant and met her husband, a digital archivist. Before graduate school, Williamson spent several years working in congressional archives, learning how to understand organizational structure and building skills as a team leader. She left to become the head of special collections for the Sam Houston State University Archives in Huntsville, Texas, where she stayed for four years.

Then, after almost a decade in the field, Williamson saw that the Dallas Holocaust Museum and Center for Education and Tolerance had an opening for an archivist. Given her professional credentials as well as her academic work in German and European history, the fit couldn’t have been better. The Dallas Holocaust Museum was founded in 1984 by survivors who had settled in Dallas. It was created as a memorial that would call visitors to react to history and form opinions. A capital campaign to build a new museum and expand paused during the 2008 financial crisis, and was taken up again in 2011-2012 with a period of hiring and institutional reorganization. The focus of the organization and the archives shifted to both the Holocaust and human rights, addressing many other genocides and human rights tragedies. It was during this wave that Williamson joined the museum, and that the collecting policy for the archives was broadened to include human rights materials. “History is what gets recorded,” Williamson says, “but also what gets collected.”

With her background in congressional and academic archives, Williamson had robust professional qualifications but had not worked in a museum archives before. The Dallas Holocaust Museum Archives is a one-person shop, so she didn’t have colleagues to turn to for advice. So Williamson cold-called every museum archivist in Dallas to arrange coffees, lunches, tours, and anything else that would give her an opportunity to meet face-to-face and gather knowledge. What she learned was that the archives that were doing interesting, important things were the ones that were acting as builders instead of maintainers. “Libraries and archives can become forgotten within an organization,” she says. “One thing I’ve learned is to make sure the archives is included in the vision, the core statements, in the strategic plan. Those are the guiding documents that actually have bearing.” Williamson set about to ensure that her archives were recognized in the museum’s core documentation. It took eighteen months for those changes to be made, but the archives are now inextricably linked to the museum’s vision of success.

In July, 2016, five police officers were shot and killed on streets right next to the museum by an Army Reserves veteran who was motivated by police violence against people of color. Williamson recognized in her new collecting policy a responsibility to respond to the events by gathering oral histories from witnesses. Never having faced this situation before, she once again picked up the phone and called archivists across the country who had worked in the aftermath of crises to learn from their experiences. She went out and spoke with witnesses, with police officers when possible, while respecting the sensitivity and tragic context of the task.

Williamson’s career has been marked by compassionate outreach and sophisticated inreach. Being the sole archivist for the museum can be overwhelming, but she enjoys that “rarely are there two blocks of thirty minutes that are alike.” Taking a cue from successes in Austin, she and her husband, along with other local archivists, are actively planning to bring an archives bazaar to Dallas, taking materials out of institutions and into the city streets, collaborating with food vendors and microbreweries. Williamson wants to get out there where the people are. She wants to be part of opening archives to new audiences, and of bringing new life back into the archives. Building off of the legacy of the museum, Williamson plans to continue reaching out.

by Ayoola White

Spencer Keralis is in love with metadata. He blogs, he emails, he evangelizes his department to a variety of academic disciplines at his university. He is the Head of the Digital Humanities and Collaborative Programs Unit at the University of North Texas (UNT). He began working at UNT in 2011, in a library position funded by a grant. The next year he took on the newly created role of Director for Digital Scholarship. In 2014, the Digital Humanities Unit was founded. He completed his doctoral studies in early American Literature at NYU in 2016.  . In this short amount of time, Keralis’ job roles and titles evolved to match the new skills that he was developing, namely pedagogy, research, and marketing. The department has continued to grow to match the needs of the UNT community.

With a background in early book culture, Keralis has a special appreciation for digitization, even though the Digital Humanities Unit doesn’t do a lot of that. He points out that, although digitization is not tantamount to preservation, it does increase access. Even if a rare book that is from, say, the 1800s is too fragile for regular handling, digitization allows people to get excited about discovering something unique. His familiarity with the realm of literature is a boon to Keralis in this position, along with his devotion to public service.

The Humanities Unit organizes a lot of workshops and other events. The philosophy that underpins the organizing of these events is “programming clusters,” often inspired by current issues. The flexibility that this framework marks an advantage over the practice of continually having annual events without regard for whether the event is needed or not. The most popular event that the Digital Libraries Unit hosts is the Human Library, which has been running for six years and takes place during National Library Week. The way it works is that a patron can “check out” a person and hear that person’s life stories. Keralis points out that this is a spectacular way for people from marginalized groups to share their perspectives. Another event that Keralis is proud of is the Digital Frontiers Conference, an annual regional conference with an emphasis on being affordable for, accessible to, and inclusive of early career professionals. In his words, “makers and users are brought together.” The conference draws people from a variety of fields—humanities, computer science, genealogy, and library science to name a few—and they all go through the same conference experience together, as there are no separate tracks or concurrent sessions.

A continual challenge that Keralis has faced in his position has been finding proper metrics of value to judge the effectiveness of the department. After all, not all that is measurable is useful, and not all that is useful is measurable. This situation can be especially stressful since metrics are used to allocate funding, which Keralis considers to be “the biggest nightmare” for his department, since the technology and expertise associated with the digital humanities can carry a hefty price tag. For this reason, Keralis is always in “community-building mode” to demonstrate the value of what he and his colleagues do.

In terms of the future of the Digital Humanities Unit, Keralis is hopeful about the community that has been built around it. Specifically, he referenced the high student involvement in digital humanities scholarship, particularly at the Digital Frontiers Conference. He observes that students are frequently on the same panels as faculty. Keralis also appreciates that people from disciplines that are not strictly based in the humanities have become involved with his department. For example, he was invited to a design class, and he was excited by the ideas students were generating about “interrogating race, gender, and sexuality” in their field. Keralis is heartened by the engagement of these emerging scholars.

by Elena Hoffenberg

Caitlin Birch combines her academic training as a historian and professional archival expertise in digital forms as the Digital Collections and Oral History Archivist at Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College. Birch completed her MLIS and MA in History at Simmons College in 2014. Previously, she worked at archives in the Boston area on digital projects spanning from encoding finding aids and digitizing photographic collections to converting metadata and managing complex multimedia projects.

Rauner Special Collections Library is situated on Dartmouth’s campus in Hanover, New Hampshire. In addition to receiving records of individuals associated with the College, it collects materials relating to printing, New Hampshire, Anglo-American literature, science and medicine, and theater. It is also home to the Dartmouth College Archives, which collects and maintains its permanent records. The library acquired the Stefansson Collection on Polar Exploration in 1952, which attracts researchers from around the world. Hundreds of people visit the library each year to see a first edition of Joseph Smith’s The Book of Mormon. “It advertises itself at this point,” Birch shares, attracting visitors daily during the summer.

As historian and an archivist, Birch has an awareness of how different yet intertwined these fields are. Her training as a historian prepared her to “speak that language” when working with the academics who conduct research at the Rauner Special Collections Library. She has also spoken to groups on campus to showcase how born-digital materials and methods such as web indexing can be useful in research in the social sciences.

Undergraduates comprise a significant number of users for Rauner Library, a result of the emphasis on primary source research in teaching curriculum. The College Archivist Peter Carini and Head of Special Collections Jay Satterfield identified incorporating research into the curriculum as a priority. In Birch’s words, it was “pointless to collect materials unless they’re being used.” Since then, Dartmouth has become a leader in teaching with primary sources. Each summer, the library hosts an active learning institute on this topic, bringing together archivists from across the country to broaden the impact of this work to other campuses.

This engagement with students is central to Birch’s role as Oral History Archivist. As the director of the college’s oral history program, she works with undergraduate students to introduce them to the theory and practice of oral history, while also supervising the oral history collecting they conduct and providing archival expertise to ensure that the interviews are preserved and made accessible.

The Dartmouth Vietnam Project exemplifies Birch’s varied involvement. A history course on the Vietnam War was reimagined as an opportunity to gather oral histories to meet the dual goals of enriching the students’ learning experience and gathering material for the library’s collections. Birch collaborated with the professor and an instructional designer to create an experiential learning project for students to collect oral histories from Dartmouth community members who had served in Vietnam. Birch works with students throughout the process. In addition to drawing on her expertise in digital collections to preserve interviews once they have been collected, she also works with students to introduce them to oral history methodology and guides them through the research with primary sources to prepare for interviews.

Launching this spring, SpeakOut, Birch’s most recent collection, came about in another way. Members of DGALA, the Dartmouth Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Alumni/ae Association, approached Birch for advice about collecting oral histories, hoping to document the diversity of experiences–positive and negative–that comprise the history of the LGBTQIA+ community at Dartmouth, as students or as employees. This grew into a project for the College Archives. With funding and support from the Provost and the Dean of Libraries, Birch has continued to develop a model to train students to gather oral histories to document this important part of Dartmouth’s history.

Contrasting these two projects, Birch shares how the engagement with contributors has differed. For the Dartmouth Vietnam Project, interviewees were asked about an event; they reflected on a moment in time at Dartmouth when the college was engulfed by the war, sharing their individual perspectives. For SpeakOut, those who will share their stories for this collection will speak about who they are. “It was not about a time period,” Birch explains, “but what it means for identity to shape experience in college or at work.”

Whether working with traditional researchers, undergraduate oral historians, or Mormon tourists, Birch embraces the opportunity to engage with users. In her position, she combines her experience in history and in archival studies to connect people with the diverse materials of the Rauner Special Collections Library, while actively working to ensure the collections grow to incorporate more stories of Dartmouth’s past to serve the community of the college.

Welcome to LIS 476, Spring ’18!

We’ll be launching a new series of our Professional Profiles starting in early March. Each profile will feature an archivist or cultural heritage professional working in innovative and impactful ways to connect communities to collections. Stay tuned for engaging and thoughtful content created by students at the Simmons School of Library and Information Science (slis.simmons.edu)!

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Thanks dedicated readers and participants. The SLIS476 blog Archives Unboxed is now wrapping up for the Fall 2017 season. Stay tuned for more posts and cultural heritage projects coming in Spring 2018.

I will also be turning the reigns over to our new instructor, Marta Crilly. Welcome Marta!

— Rebecka

by Constance Hyder

Margaret Grant Cherin is the Collections and Exhibitions Curator at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, an early college in Great Barrington, MA. After studying Art History at Smith College, Margaret continued her studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, earning a master’s degree in Medieval Art History. Starting her career in art museums, she worked in various capacities with the Norman Rockwell Museum, Clark Art Institute, Williams Museum of Art, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Venice Biennale, and Jacob’s Pillow, before she began at Simon’s Rock in the early 2000s as a part-time exhibitions curator in the Daniels Art Center. After a time, she was asked to oversee the school’s archive as well, and when she made full-time she divided her time between her responsibilities in the archive and in exhibitions. In 2010, wanting to improve upon her skills as an archivist and gain a deeper understanding, Margaret began working toward her MLIS at Simmons College, completing her degree two years later. In recent years, strong student interest led Margaret to shift her focus more to the archiving aspect of her job. This interest is strong enough, in fact, that a work study position was created in the archive, something Margaret expanded into a for-credit internship for the coming semester.

For Margaret, outreach and advocacy are the fun part of archival work. Sure, it can be difficult—most people do not have a concept of what archives are, much less what you can do with them. When Margaret brings students into the archive for the first time, their shock is palpable. Archives are associated with the grand scale of the National Archives—or a high-tech secret lair like something out of a Dan Brown book—but instead they get what is essentially a small room stuffed full of boxes. Still, this dissonance usually only serves to make the archives all the more remarkable. When Margaret explains what the boxes hold, all the different types of materials, their enduring value, and all their possible uses, students tend to, in her words, freak out. It gives them a different context, and students are often so thrown that she can see it in their face the moment they understand.

It’s this sort of understanding that Margaret sees as a key element of successful outreach and advocacy. What you want as an archivist is a reaction: a connection meaningful enough to provoke a response. She points to alumni events and reunions as examples of this, with one project in particular as particularly powerful. At a recent event, they showed a film one of her students had made out of archival materials. Using hundreds of pictures paired with audio from the long-term faculty and staff interviews in the Simon’s Rock Institutional Oral History Project, they created a Ken Burns-style documentary on the school’s history. This resonated so strongly with the audience that people were crying after the film ended—that is when Margaret knew it was a job well done.

In fact, it is projects like this—the ones coming out of the work study program—that Margaret shows the most enthusiasm for. The value she places in her student workers is clear, going beyond the assistance they give her as a Lone Arranger. When the position first opened, Margaret used to give them boring tasks like refiling; but because she wanted them to actually get something out of the experience, she began encouraging students to take on projects of their own instead. When they were able to channel their own personal interests into their work, it improved the final product and a forged deeper connection. The aforementioned oral history project is one instance of this. While it began as an aspect of the school’s 40^th anniversary celebration, a student worker suggested reviving it to augment the photographic exhibition they planned for the upcoming 50^th. Not only did the project find life in later outreach projects as well, but Margaret stresses that it is involvement like this that can change the way students think about their school, and give them a greater appreciation for it. The student, Molly McGowan, wrote an article on her experiences which can be found here.

In this way, the work study program seems to be Margaret’s most successful outreach project. The students’ point of view and insight is essential in strengthening Margaret’s own outreach work, and their growing enthusiasm turns them into advocates themselves. Students have carried their experiences into other parts of their academic life, improving the archive’s visibility and affecting the mentality of even the Provost himself. It is the interest of Simon’s Rock students, workers or no, that Margaret considers instrumental in getting the archives out of the basement.