SAA 2008: What does it mean to be an Archivist?

Professional Considerations:

• The Reluctant Administrator, or How I Learned to Love Management - Nancy Freeman (Chair), Alison Stankrauff, Courtney Yevich, Colleen McFarland
• Family and Community Archives Project: Introducing High School Students to the Archives Profession - Christine Weideman (Chair), Diane Kaplan, Thomas Hyry, Molly Wheeler
• Past Rites: Marketing for the Future - John Treanor (Chair), Jean Elliott, Edward Rider, Jane Nokes
  

Collaboration and Professional Identity:

• I Walk the Line: Revolutionary Archivists Leading Special Collections Departments - Aaron D Purcell (Chair and Commentator), Susan McElrath, Clark E Center, Jr
• Convergence: R(e)volutions in Archives and IT Collaboration - Philip Bantin (Chair), Rachel Vagts, Daniel Noonan, Paul Hedges, Jennifer Gunter King
• Modern Perspectives on the Relationship Between Archives and Records Management - Alison Langmead (Chair and Commentator), Matthew Eidson, Julia Hendry, Tony Jahn
  

Ethical Considerations:

• Ethnic Archives: Collecting Within Cultural Contexts: The process of soliciting archival collections from individuals and organizations often brings with it a set of challenges that are familiar to many archivists. When collecting in specific ethnic communities, a number of other issues may emerge and the archivist must bring an added cross-cultural sensitivity to this task. Drawing upon personal experiences, three archivists identify some of these issues and raise questions about the nature of archival collecting in general.
• Returning Displaced Archives: Legal and Ethical Perspectives: When the letter arrives demanding the "return" of a collection, what do you do? Restitution claims range from relatives requesting return of family papers to the government claiming its property, disputes between repositories, or foreign countries recovering lost cultural heritage. Recent restitution disputes have generated a revolution in the archives. What are the best legal strategies, the ethical dimensions? Are archivists personally liable? Panelists clarify the questions to ask before you either send those papers back or say "no way."
• Archival Ethics with Changing Practices: The Impact of Technology: Technology is changing the way archivists perform their jobs, but are archivists' ethics changing under the strain of technology? As technology changes, archivists must reexamine their ethics. Ethics standards rooted in a paper and limited-access world are no match for the ethics required in an on-demand, multi-format world. What are the ethical standards that archivists should be employing in this technological world? How do archivists view their ethical role as technology pushes practices?
• Understanding the Balance: Repositories, Researchers, Public Domain, and the Law: Heather Briston (Commentator) University Libraries, University of Oregon: Do our own policies act as a barrier to use? We seek to understand the challenges posed by copyright law, but do we understand the effect of contract law? How do we balance the needs of our repository, the legal issues, and the ethical issues involved in an agreement to duplicate and use between our repository and a researcher? Two lawyers experienced in issues of contract and copyright look at both sides of the issues.
  

Reference and Instruction:

• Want to Thrive? Listen to Your Users (Patrons, Researchers, Customers) - Richard L Pifer (Chair), Judit Olah, Alexis Braun Ma
• Old Movies, New Audiences: Archival Films as Public Outreach Tools - Jeff Lambert (Chair), Bill Moore, Cristine Paschild, Snowden Becker
• Moving Targets: Identifying Evolving Needs in Electronic Records Education - Lee Stout (Chair and Commentator), Ciaran B Trace, Cheryl L Stadel-Bevans, Jim Cundy
• Archivists as Educators: Why Should We Teach? - Rick Ewig (Leader), Carol Bowers, Carol Bryant
  

Technological (Re)Evolution:

• Evolving Finding Aids for Basic Processing - Dan Santamaria (Chair), Mark Shelstad, Jennifer Meehan, D Claudia Thompson
• Pre-Custodial Intervention: Let Them Do the Damn Work! - Kevin Glick (Chair), Laura Tatum, Daniel Hartwig
• Capturing the E-Tiger: New Tools for Email Preservation - Mark Conrad (Chair), Kelly Eubank, Riccardo Ferrante, Glen McAninch
  

It's time to celebrate Archives!

It’s that special month where we celebrate our history and our archives! What are you doing to publicize your collections, celebrate your staff, engage your community, or share your stories?

The OSU Archives has a host of activities to keep everyone busy, full, and entertained all month.

Following the theme “Eat, Walk, Watch” we've planned these events:

October 8: Walk through OSU’s Building History: Larry Landis will lead a group on his buildings tour to learn about our historic campus buildings.

October 17: Taste of the ‘Chives: A Historical Recipes Showcase: It was a smash hit last year! Karl McCreary hosts a fabulous event featuring food prepared by Library staff and others—straight from the recipes in our historic publications.

October 22: Archives Film Fest: Another popular event for the campus community! Karl McCreary has once again pulled together a selection of short films from the OSU Archives collections and invited a broad campus & community to a lunchtime showing of the 1925 National Dairy Champions, cowboys in the Fort Rock region of Central Oregon, and all manner of critters in Mount McKinley Park ca. 1930.

October 30: Haunting for History: Have you heard the one about the giant snake in the bowels of Weatherford Hall? Or about OSU's first University Librarian, Ida Kidder, and her watchful eye gazing from Waldo Hall? Participants will undoubtedly be scared senseless with tales of terror as they wander around the quads, entertained by stories of hauntings and eerie events. Tiah Edmunson-Morton will lead a night-time walking tour of the most ghostly kind!

Portland 2009: Where History Comes Together

Let's chat! Let's plan!
The 2009 joint conference between the NWA and Oregon Heritage Commission will be an excellent opportunity to come together to celebrate the history of the Pacific Northwest. As we reach out to other history organizations, museums, libraries, and special collections, asking them to join us in celebrating in Portland next April, I thought it would be great to have a space to gather and meet each other in preparation for the big weekend...
Yes, I know, we don't live in the same neighborhoods, but with the magic of social software, we can meet virtually! I've set up a page on a ning.com site, which is a social networking site that will manage other social software. I see the site, called Portland 2009: Where History Comes Together, as this virtual space for us to engage, assemble, and share. It's a place to pull together resources, blog posts, forum discussions, photos, sound files-- basically anything you want to put up! And yes, you can even create and print a PDX 2009 badge!
I've chosen some features to include on the page, but the list of optional add-ons is long and we can customize it to meet our needs (videos, blogs, photos, forums, events, etc.). For those of you who set up your pages, please let me know if you have suggestions for improvements, additions, or deletions.

• What is ning.com? "Ning is a platform for creating your own social networks. Our passion is putting new social networks in the hands of anyone with a good idea. With Ning, your social network can be anything and for anyone."
  
• What can you do there? "People who join your network will automatically have a customizable profile page and will be able to message and friend each other."
• An excellent example of what our site could become can be found on the "Lone Arrangers" ning site.
  
• How do I sign up? Yes, you have to create a profile... For details, visit their "signing up, signing in" page.

Please contact me with questions at tiah.edmunson-morton@oregonstate.edu or visit the ning help page.

Listen to a moose: the enchantments of the magical web

The American Museum of Natural History site has an extensive exhibit of "habitat group dioramas" that may just be worth the price of a plane ticket! They are described as being "precise depictions of geographical locations... [with] careful, anatomically correct mounting of specimens... these stunning dioramas are windows onto a world of animals, their behavior, and their habitats."

Sounds great, but what does it have to do with the Northwest? On this site you will find pages dedicated to the Alaska Moose (Alces gigas miller) and Alaska Brown Bear (Ursus gyas merriam). Included are virtual tours of the exhibits, historic film footage from William L. Finley and Arthur N. Pack (American Nature Association), and an audio clip where you can hear a moose!

Go forth & explore (without leaving your office chair).

Better late than never: In honor of Preservation Month

Preservation Matters!
The National Trust for Historic Preservation celebrated the 4th annual National Preservation Month in May 2008! Their theme was "This Place Matters."

Renewed Interest: Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps
For anyone who has wondered what their "Main Street" looked like in the late 1800s, the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps might hold research promise! Preservation Magazine featured the article "Map Quest: How Sanborn Fire Maps Can Guide Restorations, by Mary Beth Klatt, in their March 28, 2008 issue. She explores how homeowners are returning to historic Sanborn maps for their restoration projects. According to Grace DuMelle, president of Chicago-based Heartland Historical Research, more homeowners are interested in ways to ensure their restoration projects are historically accurate-- and these vintage drawings provide a wealth of information!
When D. A. Sanborn started his company in Manhattan in 1867, he intended to serve insurance underwriters by showing a building's fire risk. Each map gives information about the buildings on a town block, including the materials used in construction and whether the building was commercial or residential. Sanborn employees traveled around the country, literally pasting the changes on existing maps until newer versions were created. The Sanborn Co. flourished until the 1950s, when the insurance industry came up with new ways to gauge risk that made the maps obsolete.
To read the full article, go to the Preservation Magazine site.

Going Green?
Preservation Magazine's January/February 2008 issue is dedicated to eco-friendly restoration. To see their articles, take a few minutes to browse the table of contents.

Highlights of two Friday sessions

Northwest Archivists 2008 Annual Conference
New Frontiers in Archives and Records Management
Anchorage, Alaska

Following are summaries for two of the sessions that I attended:

Session 1: The Integrated Digital Special Collections (INDI)
This session introduced the Integrated Digital Special Coillections (INDI), an open-source archival management application developed at Brigham Young University. INDI is a web-based system designed with an emphasis on archival workflow and distributed processing activities. The session included an introduction to the project and demonstrations of the functional application modules and the INDI sandbox, and discussion of future directions for INDI development. Presenters were Brad Westwood, Cory Nimer, and Gordon Daines.

The website for INDI: http://www.lib.byu.edu/indi/

This application has some of the same goals as other open-source archival management applications, such as Archon and the Archivist's Toolkit -- but with a stronger emphasis on workflow and project management. The application currently has no public interface and is intended for staff use (BYU special collections has a permanent staff of ~15+ and employs about 40 student assistants).

Modules that were described or demonstrated:
** Contact management system is used to to track donors and creators; using a single tool for both creator management (authority control) and donor/contact management has been problematic.
** Help feature has been useful to staff; includes both "application assistance" (how to do something) and "data entry assistance" (what information and in what format is appropriate for a given field). Usability testing showed that staff use latter more than former.
** Desktop search tool; have been retrospectively entering accessioning data, so this can serve as "one stop searching" tool.
** Project management (with e-mail feature that allows e-mail discussions that are preserved within the system, linked to the project/collection); this is one of the most robust areas of the application.
** Appraisal; breaks down appraisal of potential purchases/donations into detailed tasks. Probably most useful for a repository with an active acquisitions program in many areas.
** Accessioning; this has been useful because many of the accessioning steps are actually done by student assistants.

The project team has experienced issues because several different programmers have worked on the project which have had different approaches to documentation and varying programming styles. The BYU Library is currently evaluating how to proceed with the project -- whether to continue to invest in programming or to migrate to another system. They are especially interested in a system being developed by/for the ICA (International Council on Archives).


Session 7: New Modes of Access: Challenges and Opportunities for Archival Collections
This session focused on the development/implementation of WorldCat Local at University of Washington Libraries. Presenters were Nicole Bouche (UW Special Collections); Jennifer Ward (Head of Web Services for UW Libraries) and Mela Kircher (OCLC).

The session especially focussed on the impact of WorldCat Local on archives/special collections. Several issues that were raised are:

* "duplicate" titles -- "split" collections at different repositories that the WorldCat Local algorithm considers as different editions ..
** duplicate records for a record in WorldCat submitted by a repository and a record for the same collection submitted by NUCMC (which were previously only in RLIN ... but are being migrated to WorldCat).
** WorldCat local does not serve as a collection-management system ... does work well as a "discovery" tool
** very limited notes displayed

Future enhancements to WorldCat Local will be:
** more articles metadata
** branch scoping (driven off 4-character location codes)
** simple language facets
** additional fields displayed (this is especially important for notes fields in archival MARC records)
** federated search (may be able to search NWDA finding aids database)
** reviews
** FRBR/editions display improvements
** improved WorldCat account authentication
** tagging
** improved reports

Elizabeth Nielsen
OSU Archives

1890 Comes to Anchorage, or at least to UAA

I won’t compete with Emily’s fine description of the Aviation Museum reception except to state that it was a blast and I didn’t get a chance to crash the simulator or to shoot its guns. A tragedy, a travesty, or both . . .

I had the responsibility to run the business meeting Saturday morning. It went as most meetings do, but it is the best opportunity to thank all of the people that really made this wonderful conference go. Arlene Schmuland and her local arrangements crew, Gina Rappaport and her program committee, Kathy Bouska who almost singelhandedly raised nearly $1500 for NWA scholarships, all of the sponsors, all of the hardworking committees, the presenters and speakers, and of course all of the 74 people who registered for the conference. I’m regularly wowed by the energy and power of our little motley crew.

There was one last session. Since I was participating as chair, I had to attend.

Breaking the Ice: Protocols for Native American Materials and Archivists in the Northwest (Linda Wynne, Monique Lloyd, John Bolcer). This session is the result of the Northwest Archivists board decision to present the protocols in each of its five member states during the next five years. Linda, of Sealaska, discussed the need for protocols in Native communities. Her very personal and moving stories about the need to bring tribal material back to the tribe were powerful. I always like the courage needed to show your heart. Monique discussed the background and development of the protocols and also used personal stories to illustrate the nature of the protocols. John discussed institutional concerns with the protocols as written, and had suggestions for revisions that could strengthen the document and make it more supportable by non-Native American institutions. There was very lively discussion afterwards and I think the session was a success in its intention of creating communication of this important subject.

All that remained was the closing plenary with Mike Doogan.

I have to say that I was entranced by Alaska. I believe that the success of this conference should encourage the NWA board and membership to consider moving Alaska into regular rotation, like any other member state, so that our Alaskan colleagues can showcase their digs on a regular basis.