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Participants and Research Interests
Having worked as an archivist and librarian prior to starting the PhD, my work brings practical concerns of libraries, archives, and museums to the critical study of documents in the digital world. Through my work, I hope to enrich the theoretical discourse of cultural institutions and illuminate their processes to an interdisciplinary community.
Participating in the 2009 Institute, I was able to develop my research and teaching agendas in a supportive and dynamic community. I am dedicated to my research in this area, but also in helping to implement the next generation of archival curriculum. In my teaching, I emphasize a socially-aware, and democratically-minded, perspective on the practice of archives. My goal is to create a collaborative environment with my teaching and research that allows students to take seriously and learn from their own perspectives as well as their peers.
Promoting diversity and social engagement in Information Studies is crucial to the future of the field, and is one of my key priorities. In my time at UW, I have held fellowships from the Institute Public Humanities and the HASTAC Scholars program, working within these interdisciplinary environments to develop public engaged research. I have also worked for the Washington Doctoral Initiative, a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services dedicated to recruiting LIS doctoral students from underrepresented backgrounds and developing a comprehensive mentoring program.
Prior to entering the doctoral program in 2007, I worked professionally as an archivist and academic librarian. I hold an MSIS from the University of Texas- Austin.
I want to critically study the nature, sources, and limits of archival records. My work is concerned with the cultural significance of shifting understandings of information and the ways records are transmitted over time. In my doctoral studies, I want to look at the links among the following chain of topics: the training of professional archivists; the documentation of science and scientific communities; the role of archives and archivists in science. My work is focused on what archivists understand scientific documentation to be and how these ideas shape the stewardship of scientific archives; how are these ideas related to what scientists understand the scientific record to be? My attention to archivists’ power over the scientific record is closely related to how archivists make sense of our practice—how we are educated, apprenticed and initiated into the professional community.
After pursuing my MLIS with a specialization in archival studies, I worked as the Ralph J. Bunche Collection archivist at the Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, UCLA. In the future I hope to teach archives tradition and practice to undergraduates, humanities and library school graduate students.
I have a PHD in History, joined the National Archives in 1976, became an adjunct professor teaching archives courses in 1984 at George Mason University and in 2000 at the University of Maryland. I became a fulltime visiting professor when I retired from NARA in January 2007. As one of the “first generation” of electronic records archivists I was thrown into developing the practice of accessioning, describing, preserving and providing reference for electronic records. A major part of my NARA career was devoted to developing standards for federal agencies to use in creating and transferring electronic records for preservation. I worked with the intelligence community on several aspects of recordkeeping and strategic planning for new electronic records applications. I represented NARA on several interagency bodies addressing electronic records such as the Federal Geographic Data Committee, the GILS development team, and the NARA review team for DoD 5015.2. I served as the only archivist on the international committee that developed the OAIS reference model. I served as the co-chair of the RLG-NARA taskforce that developed Trusted Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC). I devoted almost one-third of my career, in various intense time frames, to legal support relating to lawsuits (FBI appraisal, Iran-Contra, PROFS, and GRS 20). I also served as the unit head for preservation processing for one year and as the archival liaison to Lockheed Martin for the ERA project.
Thus I come to my current position with a strong background in electronic records processing and standards. I continue working with international experts working to turn TRAC into an ISO standard. My past positions also put me in a position to explain archival theory and practice to diverse audiences and have utilized the scholarly journals of other professions and satellite broadcasts to help other professions understand archives.
My current research interests continues to be advancing electronic records standards.
is Professor of Archives and Information Science at Mid Sweden University, Professor II at Oslo University College and Adjunct Professor at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia, where she worked until 2007. She is a Fellow of the Australian Society of Archivists, an Editor-in-Chief for Archival Science and a member of the Editorial Board of Archives and Manuscripts. She was President of the International Council on Archives’ Section for Archival Educators and Trainers from 2000-2004 and is currently a Vice President as well as a member of the ICA’s Programme Commission.
Her research interests include implementing recordkeeping systems in the digital environment, the development of professional standards and implementing recordkeeping systems. She is a member of the CEDIF research team HYPERLINK "http://www.cedif.org/" http://www.cedif.org/: the Centre for Digital Information Management at Mid Sweden University.
She is particularly interested in advancing standards of professional practice through education and training for the community of records managers and archivists and fostering a scholarly approach to professional education. She has a long-standing interest and extensive experience in developing e-learning courses and teaching online.
I received my MLIS from UCLA in 2007 and continued into the PhD program at UCLA
where I am now a candidate in my third year. Prior to graduate school, I worked as a practitioner in university archives, law libraries, and special collections with a focus on photograph collections and departmental records.
My chief interests are appraisal (both conceptually and historically) and the knowledge and skills of archivists. I am particularly interested in the Archive and the personal: the subjectivities of archivists as individuals, and the role of appraisal and selection in the transformation from individual lives to historical subjects.
I am currently conducting a bibliometric analysis of fifteen years of archival appraisal literature to empirically identify nodes of influence, information flows, and highly cited works and authors. This is one of the stages of my dissertation research which hypothesizes that archival appraisal is learned through social interaction, broadly defined. Following this stage, I will conduct qualitative interviews with practitioners to identify informal nodes of influence and information flows in relation to archival appraisal.
I think the academic and the practitioner are each playing a specialized role in the same endeavor. As a future professor, I hope to encourage practitioners to see theory come to life in their work and to encourage other academics to learn with and from practitioners.
I am currently an Assistant Professor in the Library and Information Science Program in the Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver and am charged with the development and oversight for the archives and records management courses and curriculum. I also teach course courses such as Organization of Information and Professional Values and Ethics for all of the students in the library program. Based on my earlier professional experience working to help integrate library, archives and museum database software and the multi-disciplinary education program at the University of Michigan School of Information (I received a PhD in 2006 and an MLIS in 1993), I believe these three disciplines intersect on a number of levels. This intersection is becoming even more apparent to me as I work closely with colleagues in the DU LIS program who have strong library-focused backgrounds as well as students and faculty in the musuem studies department. I try to bring this integrated approach to the classes I teach. Additionally, an understanding of the theory of situated knowledge significantly influences my approach to teaching. Practical experience provides an understanding that students cannot get in the classroom, so I strive to incorporate service learning in my classes through community projects I have established with institutions in the area.
My research interests at this time are focusing on methods for transferring the knowledge of experienced archivists to their successors. This interest stems from previous research I conducted that examined how reference archivists find information in archival collections in order to determine what knowledge and skills they acquire and use to be successful. The findings of that research indicate that a large part of the knowledge experienced archivists use to find information is difficult to capture and document because it involves event, spatial organization, social and tactic knowledge that are intertwined with the archivist's declarative knowledge of facts about collections many of which are not documented in finding aids.
Dr. Lucy Barber is the Deputy Executive Director of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the grantmaking arm of the National Archives. The NHPRC focuses on preserving and making accessible the records the document the history of the American nation. She oversees the Commission’s grantmaking programs and general operations and serve as deputy to Executive Director Kathleen Williams.
Lucy G. Barber was a 1984 Truman Scholar and received her B.A. in History from Haverford College in 1986 and her Ph.D. in History from Brown University in 1996. In 1995, she joined the faculty as an assistant professor in the history department at the University of California, Davis. At Davis, she taught courses on modern American history, from the introductory survey to advanced reading courses for graduate student. She launched a public history program within the department, developing an undergraduate public history class, and a formal internship program. In 2001, Barber left UC Davis for a position as an archivist at the California State Archives, where she worked on the online catalog project and began its electronic records efforts.
She is the author of Marching on Washington: The Creation of a National Political Tradition, (University of California Press, 2003). In 2006 she was named Director for Technology Initiatives at the NHPRC, overseeing policy and grants for archival projects, especially those involving digitizing of historical materials, preservation of electronic records, and development of new tools and training programs. She continues to manage a small portfolio of grants that support professional development for archivists and documentary editors and the development of new tools for both profession.
On a personal note, she grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, which had an innovative history education program that Dr. Cherry studied, and meant that she did her first research in archives at Jones Library and the University of Massachusetts at age 13! Copies of the papers are in the private collection of her mother. She also writes about her family history at http://overrepresented.blogspot.com/.
Jeannette A. Bastian is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts where she directs their archives education program. She was the Territorial Librarian and Archivist of the United States Virgin Islands from 1987 to 1998 and received her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1999. Her research interests and writings are in the areas of post-colonialism, collective memory and archival education. Her publications include West Indian Literature: An Index to Criticism,1930-1975 (J.Allis, 1981), Owning Memory, How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History (2003), Archival Internships: A Guide for Faculty, Supervisors, and Students (2008 with Donna Webber),), and an edited volume, Community Archives, The Shaping of Memory (2009)..
I am a doctoral candidate in the School of Information at the University of Texas, Austin. I received a BFA in Printmaking from the Maryland Institute, College of Art in 1996 and an MLIS degree from UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies in 2001.
My ongoing research work investigates how audiovisual materials are integrated into our cultural heritage. I have written and presented on the use of home movies by the medical community in studies of autism and schizophrenia; the collector’s market for home movies; preservation, legal, and access issues archivists encounter in collecting amateur films; and the increasing need for police departments to preserve large quantities of audiovisual materials as evidence in criminal cases. My dissertation research focuses on the last of these interests, exploring the archival nature of the police evidence room and the people and processes involved in the long-term management of evidence in changing formats.
In 2001, I became the founding Chair of the Association of Moving Image Archivists’ (AMIA) Small Gauge & Amateur Film interest group, a position I held until 2004; I have also served on the editorial board of the AMIA journal, The Moving Image, since 2004, and on the AMIA Scholarship Committee, which I currently chair, since 2006. Along with my colleague Katie Trainor, I have co-presented “Becoming a Film-Friendly Archivist” workshop since 2004, teaching basic film preservation skills to over 200 archivists and other cultural heritage professionals at the SAA annual meeting and other locations nationwide. I also taught Collection Development for the UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies Master’s degree program and created new curriculum modules on amateur film for the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program.
In August, 2003, I helped launch Home Movie Day, an annual, international event that promotes public awareness and preservation of historic amateur footage. Three films rediscovered through Home Movie Day screenings have since been named to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, and many others have been preserved by regional archives as a direct result of this event. In 2005, the Home Movie Day co-founders established a nonprofit organization, the Center for Home Movies, which coordinates Home Movie Day internationally and continues to work on collecting, preserving, providing access to, and promoting the understanding of home movies and amateur motion pictures.
I strongly believe that a 21st century archival education should prepare new members of the field to manage a historical record that has been accruing mechanical, electronic, digital, and visual components for well over a century. The burden of preservation and awareness of the need for active intervention to keep contemporary records accessible for the long term is something that the archival community must also work at sharing with a broader public through outreach, education, and access initiatives.
I have a MSI with specialization in archives and records management from the University of Michigan School of Information (2003). After finishing my degree, I went back to Puerto Rico where I worked at the Archivo General de Puerto Rico. I also worked as a librarian at the Ana G. Mendez University System. From 2004 to 2005 I was an instructor at the Escuela Graduada de Ciencias y Tecnologías de la Información, located at the University of Puerto Rico, where I taught courses for the certificate in archives and records management. This excellent teaching experience, along with my strong believe that the role of archives and archivists in society is intrinsically linked to accountability, advocacy and justice, led me to pursue a doctoral degree.
My research objectives and scholarship philosophy are framed around this believe. I am particularly interested in the role played by archives and archivists during the transitions from authoritarian rule and civil wars in Latin America. More specifically, I’m interested in how records creation, use, destruction and/or access restrictions shape how Latin American reckons with legacies of human rights abuses. Specifically, I’m have studied the work of truth commissions and the use of records as evidence in trials against military officers and former presidents. In this context, my dissertation will examine the work of the National Security Archive in Latin America.
In 2005, my paper “The Forbidden Files: Creation and Use of Surveillance Files against the Independence Movement in Puerto Rico” was published at the American Archivist (vol. 68, no. 2). Another research paper, “Truth Commissions and the Construction of Collective Memory: The Chile Experience”, is part of the book Community Archives: The Shaping of Memory (London: Facet Pub., 2009), edited by Jeannette A. Bastian and Ben Alexander.
As a Teaching Assistant and Teaching Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh, I have been able to apply my teaching philosophy, which is based on the principle that students learn in an environment of trust and sincere dialogue. Therefore, students are encouraged to contribute to the discussion and share ideas with the instructor. Furthermore, it is important to include past and current developments in the archival profession that help students understand better and compare/contrast theory and practice. I have been able to apply this ideas in the courses I have taught at Pitt, and particularly the one I created and offered during the summer of 2009: An International Perspective on Archives.
Francis X. Blouin, Jr., is a professor in the School of Information and a professor in the Department of History. He is a fellow of the Society of American Archivists. Since 1981, Blouin has served as the director of the U-M's Bentley Historical Library. The Bentley Library houses the archives of the University of Michigan and the principal historical collections of the State of Michigan.
Blouin is interested in a wide variety of archival issues particularly from an international perspective. His most recent work, Vatican Archives: An Inventory and Guide to the Historical Documents of the Holy See, presents the first-ever conceptual overview of papal archival records. For this volume he received grants from the Getty, Mellon, Lilly, and Homeland foundations, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The results are online and have been published by Oxford University Press.
Blouin is a member of the Board of Directors of the Council on Library and Information Resources, a "think tank" based in Washington, D.C., that focuses on a broad array of issues related to libraries, archives, and information technology.
Blouin has also lectured widely on archival issues throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. He organized a special year-long Sawyer Seminar on fundamental issues relating to the nature, structure, and politics of archival collections and institutions within a context of rapid technological change. The proceedings of those seminars have been published as Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G Rosenberg (eds.) "Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory." Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2006.
Carol Brock is a Certified Records Manager and the former Director of Information Assets for the US Government Accountability Office. She successfully spearheaded a NARA pilot project for simplified records scheduling and implemented an enterprise wide electronic recordkeeping system for which she earned the National Archivist’s Achievement Award. She has 23 years of Federal RM experience as a contractor, consultant, and Federal employee. Carol is a founding member of the Federal Information and Records Management (FIRM) Council and is an active member of ARMA and AIIM. As a member of AIIM's C-30 Committee, she co-authored the EDM/ERM Integrated Functional Requirements. It has been 23 years since Carol earned her MLIS from UT-Austin. She returned to UT this Fall to work on her PhD in Digital Preservation. She taught RM at Catholic University for two years.
As Political Scientist and Cultural Anthropologist entering the field of Information Studies, I am interested in looking at how archival practice shapes historical narratives. I have worked in the field of community technology, as a digital video producer, bilingual technology instructor, web manager and digital archivist for various non-profits and community based organizations in Hawaii and San Francisco. I have experience in teaching digital media production and web 2.0 technology, such as blogs, flickr, youtube, and ourmedia, to assist low-income, marginal communities to have a web presence to inform others about their community based work. I have worked closely with immigrant and indigenous communities who design their own information systems that work within and outside of traditional information institutions (archives, libraries and academia), incorporating their own epistemologies of where information is located, such as in the environment, landscapes, communities, families and bodies.
My current research objective is to create a philosophy and practice of community based digital archiving of communities in Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines who are concerned about military expansion occurring on their lands. Given their situation, what do they consider records and record keeping in order to document military expansion? To understand why they are focusing on military expansion, I will be studying the history of American imperialism after the Spanish American War. How did American archives develop in its new territories of Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines? What were the American archival philosophies and practices during that time to facilitate the incorporation of Hawaii, Guam and Philippines into the American empire? Today, indigenous and postcolonial communities in these countries, and the diaspora, are using web 2.0 (blogs and facebook) to construct their own information systems to communicate to others in the region and globally about the military expansion they are experiencing. What are the records and record keeping systems that these communities document on web 2.0 information systems? What are the limits and possibilities of digital technologies and web 2.0 in communicating the issues they face? What records can digital and web 2.0 technologies capture, and what can they not? How do communities address the gaps between their epistemologies and digital archiving? A postcolonial analysis is important in foregrounding the historical context for why certain records and record keeping are used by these communities. A feminist analysis can help me explain issues of power within and between community based archival practices, and dominant archival practices.
My current approach to graduate teaching is grounded in over 30 years of experience as a librarian and archivist, working primarily in the special collections environments within research natural history institutions. Having served the collections, staff and users at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, the New York Botanical Garden and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, I had the usual responsibilities for organization and description of library and archival collections as well as the design and preparation of exhibitions, exhibition catalogs, and conferences to promote these collections to a wider popular and scholarly public. Throughout, I also had the opportunity to publish in the journals of these disciplines, as a demonstration that librarians and archivists could also add value to the institution’s research collections. I frequently draw on these experiences as examples of the range of activities that an archivist can be involved in as well as the ways in which specific institutional context may affect the resolution of issues in project management. Perhaps more significantly for AERI participants, I have participated in projects which moved these institutions across the electronic threshold, serving as project manager for the online library catalog at the New York Botanical Garden, and currently as the co-ordinator for a project to survey the electronic records at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, using students enrolled in the Digital Preservation course. Other classes which I am currently teaching include the introductory course to archives and records management, museum archives and preservation management. Indulging my antiquarian interest, I also teach a course in the history of books, printing and publishing.
As an educator, I recognize the importance and value of alerting students to both the opportunities and the obligations of these administrative responsibilities, looking beyond the daily work of ongoing service to an institution. Therefore, case studies and scenario-based discussions are used to illustrate the theory which serves as the foundation in our courses. As the faulty advisor for students seeking field experience or other internships, I am also anxious to build and maintain relationships with cultural institutions that have not previously employed archivists in order to provide learning experiences for both students and host sites. My research interests are primarily in the analysis of institutional recordkeeping systems, particularly as they move from paper-based legacy systems to electronic ones.
I am pursuing a PhD in library and information studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison because I am passionate about archives, accountability, and social justice. I plan to devote my career to researching, writing, and teaching about the intersection of archival theory, practice, and human rights. In particular, I would like to focus on the intersection of archives and violence, an intellectual project that stems from my academic background in both archival studies and Asian religions.
I am, at heart, a writer. While pursuing my MLIS at UW-Milwaukee, I rediscovered my love of academic research and have since channeled my creative energy into scholarly writing, publishing two papers. The first, “Instant Documentation: Cell Phone Generated Records in Archives,” explores the growing importance of cell phone generated voicemail messages, text messages, still images, and video footage in documenting both historic events such as September 11, 2001 and human rights abuses. It appears in the Spring/ Summer 2009 edition of American Archivist. The second of these papers, “Irreparable Damage: Violence, Ownership, and Voice in an Indian Archive,” explores a violent attack on a repository in India in 2004, looking at archives as both sites of violence and political symbols, and exploring issues of ownership, political pressure, and access. The paper received the 2008 Student Paper Award from Libri: International Journal of Library and Information Services.
The thread that ties all of my research projects has been the link between archives and violence. Archives have been sites of violence, as seen in Europe during the Holocaust and in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Archives are also important loci of documenting violence and have played crucial roles in holding governments and individuals accountable for human rights abuses, as seen in the current International Tribunal in Cambodia. At the same time, archives have also been responsible for the violence of omission, privileging the voices of the elite at the expense of a more accurate and inclusive historic record. I would like to focus my doctoral work on the complex intersection of archives and violence in South and Southeast Asia, with a particular emphasis on the impact of colonial recordkeeping practices on contemporary archival repositories. More specifically, I would like to explore how archives in India and Cambodia have been targets for violence, have documented historic acts of violence, and have omitted or included the voices of the subaltern.
In addition to my research, my work as an archivist has focused on practical approaches to including voices in the archive. Inspired by my work as Assistant Bibliographer for Southern Asia at the University of Chicago, I became a founding member of the South Asian American Digital Archive, a nonprofit dedicated to building a digital repository that collects and provides access to the diverse history of South Asian Americans. I look forward to pursuing this work further and to launching my career as an archival educator.
I am a third year doctoral student in the Library and Information Science program at the University of Pittsburgh. I received a B.A., in Film Studies, UC, Santa Barbara, 2004 and M.A., in English with a focus in Film and Media Studies, University of Rochester, 2006. After graduate school I went on to gain professional experience through a series of jobs that involved film, video, research and archiving—all of which provided the right settings for the conception of questions I now seek to answer in the Academy.
Broadly speaking, my research interests involve understanding the historical and socio-cultural relationships between library and archival preservation and:
• Audiovisual Media
• the Politics of Standards and Best Practices
• Communities of Color / Diasporas
• Memory Work and Projects
Yet at the heart of most of my work is audiovisual media—an attraction that began during my childhood and which later grew with my educational experiences. The manner in which the media documents and captures moments, ideas, perspectives, stories and etc. fascinates me, especially in relation to communities that practice oral and visual literacy in dynamic ways. This is an area I am exploring and writing about in the context of culture, identity and space for my dissertation.
Kevin Cherry is Senior Program Officer at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the primary source of federal support for the nation’s 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. Through its grants, research, and convenings, IMLS works at the national level and in coordination with state and local organizations to sustain heritage, culture, and knowledge; enhance learning and innovation; and support professional development. Kevin helps coordinate IMLS’ largest discretionary grant program, the 21st Century Librarian Program, which seeks to support the development of the nation’s library and archives workforce. A special collections and manuscripts librarian by education and training, Kevin has worked in public, community college, and research libraries, as well as a state library agency. He has also taught in a school library media program. While consultant for special collections at the State Library of North Carolina, he was manager of one of the nation’s first statewide digitization programs, NC ECHO (Exploring Cultural Heritage Online) where he became a well-known advocate for small- to medium-sized cultural collecting agencies. Before coming to IMLS, Kevin was active in the governance of the American Library Association, serving on that organization’s council. Kevin is interested in outreach, public programming, and teaching roles of archives and special collections. His dissertation research analyzed online K-12 history teaching materials created by state archives and collaborative digitization programs. More specifically, this research briefly outlined the history of the use of primary sources to teach history, before attempting to better understand how well online archival materials support seven different aspects of domain-specific cognition in history. Based upon this research, his dissertation proposes the creation of a shared, collaborative framework to teach the skills involved in the “doing” of history. Kevin has a BS (Biology), MA (History), and MSLS, and he has defended his dissertation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a native of Denver, NC, and lives in Washington, DC.
I hold an MA in Anthropology and an MLIS from The University of Southern Mississippi. Currently, I am employed as a researcher for Consumer Reports. I conduct health research for the magazine's monthly newsletter, validate information and sources used in the articles, and provide remote reference and research assistance to writers and editors. In addition, I manage the Consumer Reports on Health archives.
I will begin my doctoral studies in Library and Information Science at Simmons College in the fall 2010 semester. In general, my current research interests are conservation and preservation of print and digital media and cultural heritage; library and archive instruction, public education, and user interaction; and museums, rare books, and special collections. In particular, I am interested in researching the relationship between professional archives and grassroots collections and how this relationship can encourage archival education and enrich archival collections. Also, I am interested in the relationship between the researcher and the archives, for instance how do individuals trained in different academic disciplines approach their research in the archives and how can understanding this enhance the methodology of archival science.
Paul Conway is associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. His research program encompasses digitization of cultural heritage resources, particularly photographic archives, the use of digitized resources by experts in a variety of humanities contexts, and the measurement of image and text quality in large-scale digitization programs. His work is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Conway teaches courses on digital libraries, understanding archives, preserving sound and motion resources, and digitization for preservation. He is also leading efforts at the School of Information to develop an undergraduate program in Informatics. Conway has extensive administrative experience in archives and preservation fields and has made major contributions over the past 30 years to the literature on archival users and use, preservation management, and digital imaging technologies. He has held positions at the National Archives and Records Administration, the Society of American Archivists, Yale University, and Duke University. In 2005, Conway received the American Library Association's Paul Banks and Carolyn Harris Preservation Award for his contributions to the preservation field. He is a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists, serves on the Editorial Board of American Archivist, and has been active in the Society for 25 years.
Kaitlin L. Costello
Kaitlin Light Costello is a doctoral student in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where she is a Carolina Digital Curation Fellow. She recently completed her master’s degree in library and information science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, where she focused on digital libraries and digital curation in her coursework. Kaitlin also holds a bachelor’s degree in film with a concentration in poetry and poetics from Vassar College. She has worked at a variety of libraries and archives, both in staff positions and as a volunteer.
Kaitlin is interested in many of the general issues surrounding digital curation; her specific research interests focus on methods of appraisal for interactive web content. She is particularly interested in engaging users in selection and appraisal processes. She is currently working on a study which examines how academics use Twitter and whether they think their tweets should be archived for future use. She recently completed a study of digital preservation coursework at the graduate level titled “Digital Preservation Education in iSchools,” which was presented at the 2010 iSchool conference.
In addition to her research, Kaitlin is assisting Dr. Helen Tibbo in the masters-level class on archival appraisal during the Spring 2010 semester. She is also developing course materials and modules for the 2010/2011 DigCCurr Professional Institute: Curation Practices for the Digital Object Lifecycle, which she is organizing with Dr. Tibbo, Dr. Cal Lee, and two other Carolina Digital Curation Doctoral Fellows. Kaitlin is committed to educating both future practitioners and future faculty in the areas of archives and digital curation, and she plans to teach in an information school that offers coursework in archives and records management after completing her PhD.
Richard J. Cox is Professor in Library and Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Information Sciences where he is responsible for the archives concentration in the Master's in Library Science degree and the Ph.D. degree. He was a member of the Society of American Archivists Council from 1986 through 1989. Dr. Cox also served as Editor of the American Archivist from 1991 through 1995 and Editor of the Records & Information Management Report from 2001 through 2007. He has written extensively on archival and records management topics and has published fourteen books in this area: American Archival Analysis: The Recent Development of the Archival Profession in the United States (1990) -- winner of the Waldo Gifford Leland Award given by the Society of American Archivists; Managing Institutional Archives: Foundational Principles and Practices (1992); The First Generation of Electronic Records Archivists in the United States: A Study in Professionalization (1994); Documenting Localities (1996); Closing an Era: Historical Perspectives on Modern Archives and Records Management (2000); Managing Records as Evidence and Information (2001), winner of the Waldo Gifford Leland Award in 2002; co-editor, Archives & the Public Good: Records and Accountability in Modern Society (2002); Vandals in the Stacks? A Response to Nicholson Baker’s Assault on Libraries (2002); Flowers After the Funeral: Reflections on the Post-9/11 Digital Age (2003); No Innocent Deposits: Forming Archives by Rethinking Appraisal (2004), winner of the Waldo Gifford Leland Award in 2005; Lester J. Cappon and Historical Scholarship in the Golden Age of Archival Theory (2004); Archives and Archivists in the Information Age (2005); Understanding Archives & Manuscripts (2006) with James M. O’Toole; Ethics, Accountability, and Recordkeeping in a Dangerous World (2006); and Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations (2008). A new book, The Demise of the Library School: Personal Reflections on Professional Education in the Modern Corporate University, will be published later in 2010. He is presently finishing books on archival ethics and policy; war, memory, and archives; and Lester J. Cappon as a pioneering public historian. Dr. Cox was elected a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists in 1989.
I am a PhD student in the LIS Program at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Information Sciences. My current research interests include archival issues related cultural heritage and how personal documentation and record keeping interface with emerging technologies. Prior attending Pitt, I worked as an archivist throughout the Pittsburgh helping non-profit organizations. I also have a professional background in archeology, and I have participated in field research in Pennsylvania, New York, Indiana, and Israel. I have an M.A. from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, where I first became interested in archives while working at the James L. Kelso Bible Lands Museum. My primary motivation for pursuing a PhD in Library and Information Science is closely tied to my personal passion for teaching. As a Teaching Fellow at Pitt, I have taught courses on archival preservation and archival appraisal, and I this summer I will be teaching a new course I designed on archives and cultural heritage. I am interested in combining my professional experiences in archaeology and museum studies with my current work in archival studies. I consider it part of my mission as an educator to help equip future archivists to better deal with culture and the digital record.
Amber L. Cushing is a doctoral student at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she also serves as a research assistant for the NHPRC funded Archival Metrics and User Evaluation for Government Archives project. Her current research interests include individual’s affective relationships with records, personal digital archiving and saving behavior. Her
dissertation work examines the influence of sense of self on individual’s conscious decisions to save digital objects on personal computers. She has assisted with teaching for classes in the archival and records management concentration as well as the cultural institutions class. Before entering the doctoral program, Cushing held the position of Librarian at the New Hampshire State Library, where she was the reference department contact person for manuscript and rare book inquires and government documents inquires. She also managed the library and information science collection. She has held archival-related positions at the Library of Virginia, the National Archives and Records Administration, Harvard Art Museums, the Mount Holyoke College Library and the Curator’s Office of the Supreme Court of the United States. Cushing holds an AB in History from Mount Holyoke College and an MLS with a concentration in Archives Management from Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science.
I am a third year doctoral student at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. My research has encompassed a number of aspects of archival studies, including the impact of college and university archives on student users and the development of tools for user-based assessment of archives (both with the Archival Metrics project). Currently however, my research interest is the use of scientific data, both by their original creators and by secondary users, for purposes other than those for which they were originally collected. My work in this area explores the challenges to scientific data reuse, which my colleagues and I investigate primarily through qualitative research using interviews and observations of scientists. The work I will be presenting at AERI stems from a study of the data management and sharing practices among members of a small academic laboratory, particularly focusing on questions of credibility and trust in the secondary use of scientific data.
The broader theme of my work is the flow and reuse of information within particular communities. To this end, I am also working on a project with several colleagues to understand the function of hashtags for political action on the social networking site Twitter. We are working on a case study of the #amazonfail phenomenon of April 2009, during which a number of discussions on Twitter of the de-listing of books on gay and lesbian themes on Amazon.com helped draw wide attention to the event. This was one of the first instances of a hashtag on Twitter widely adopted for social protest and commentary. We are focusing on the group of Twitter users who first coined and used the hashtag #amazonfail to understand how it was used to both share information on an emerging event and to recruit people to take collective action around the issue.
Devan Ray Donaldson
My name is Devan Ray Donaldson and I am a second year Ph.D. student in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Broadly, I am interested in digital preservation. Specifically, I am interested in preservation metadata and large-scale digitization.
My current research explores how developers and system administrators make decisions regarding use of standards for preservation metadata in digital archives. Because digital objects will not preserve themselves and digital preservation management systems will not adapt themselves to models and data dictionaries for preservation, successful digital preservation devolves to the highly detailed decision making that is required to implement preservation standards. Thus, my research is both important and timely.
I want to provide my students with as practical and hands-on of an experience in the opportunities and challenges associated with maintaining a digital archive as possible. Toward this end, I plan to offer courses focusing on understanding file formats and metadata extraction file formats as well as preservation metadata courses in which students will act as system administrators and developers. Because the technical skills and knowledge of preservation metadata wherewithal are essential for being an effective digital preservationist, I hope to give my students ample opportunities to experience digital preservation work in a comfortable and supportive classroom environment before they go out into the real world.
I earned a MS in Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a BA in History from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. I have been a Bill and Melinda Gates Scholar since 2002 and a Rackham Merit Fellow since 2008.
I am a second-year doctoral student and IMLS Preservation Doctoral Fellow in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin (UT). I received my MSIS and CAS in Preservation Administration at UT, and my M.Phil. in Renaissance Literature at the University of Cambridge. I have worked in the Preservation and Conservation Departments at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and am presently the conservation technician at UT’s Architecture & Planning Library.
My research interests are in the dynamic social, economic and political factors that affect preservation and access to cultural heritage expressions in the developing world, especially in Africa. My ongoing research involves looking at the genesis and development of international policies for cultural heritage preservation within large international governmental and nongovernmental organizations. Other aspects of study include ICT growth, postcolonial nationalism, the tourism industry, and shifts in international intellectual property regimes. Due to escalating protectionism in intellectual property rights systems, the development of intellectual commons in non-industrialized nations is particularly vital. Additionally, I would like to become more involved in the advocacy for greater inclusion of indigenous and traditional communities as active heritage management participants and leaders within a globalized environment.
My scholarship philosophy is that theory and practice go hand in hand. It is therefore essential that archival practitioners continue to not only share their project experiences with the archival community at large, but to also situate their decision-making and innovations within existing IS theories, best practices/standards, and socio-cultural contexts. Meanwhile, academic researchers hold the role of making critical observations of existing trajectories in archival practices and politics, and to help shape the future of the field.
Wendy M. Duff obtained her BA (1979) from the University of Kings College, her Wendy. M. Duff obtained her BA (1979) from the University of Kings College, her MLS (1983) from Dalhousie University and her Ph.D. (1996) from the University of Pittsburgh. She is the Director of the Digital Curation Institute, and teaches archives and records management with a focus on access to archival materials.
She is a founding member of AX-NET, an evolving international team of researchers interested in facilitating access to primary materials. She has also served as a member of the ICA Adhoc Commission on Descriptive Standards, the Encoded Archival Description Working Group, and The Canadian Council of Archives Standards Committee.
Her research interests are archival user studies, archival metadata, and collaboration among libraries, archives and museums. Her current research focuses on the development of generic user-based evaluation tools, the information seeking behaviour of archival users, archival reference and information technology needs of museum workers.
Professor Duffreceived the Premier’s Research Excellence Award, and is a co-investigator on a research project funded by the Mellon Foundation and is also co-investigator with Lynne Howarth, Jennnifer Carter, Costis Dallas, Seamus Ross for “Museum Knowledge Workers for the 21st Century” funded by the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN).
I am a fourth year Ph.D. student in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina. My research focus is Archives and Preservation, in particular, electronic records management and the sustainability of digital preservation projects and programs.
I have bachelors and masters degrees in economics and taught economics for ten years at several San Francisco Bay area universities including California State University East Bay, University of San Francisco, and Golden Gate University. In addition, during that timeframe I worked as an information professional and analyst: In my capacity as a manager and consultant at Deloitte, I specialized in data quality and integrity and in implementing business knowledge systems. I developed successful business cases for the funding of a $1.1 billion automated medical record system, a $600,000 business process redesign, a $100,000 ID card quality improvement project, and a $500,000 online credit card payment system. I also managed the implementation of data warehouses and metadata repositories at several organizations, and ensured the clean migration of data from 25 source systems into SAP at Warner Brothers.
In addition to my full-time attendance at UNC, I teach the graduate level electronic records management class here at UNC and I am the project manager for the IMLS-funded project “Educating Stewards of Public Information in the 21st Century (ESOPI-21)” (http://ils.unc.edu/esopi21/index.html#). I also provide occasional consulting services for preservation-related organizations. For example, I recently developed a cost model for Dryad, a repository of scientific data for the evolutionary sciences (http://datadryad.org/repo).
Within my research, I focus upon organizational sustainability of digital preservation projects and programs. I use an ecological perspective, which views the factors influencing sustainability as co-evolutionary in nature, therefore embodying a range of economic, historical, social, and institutional influences on the digital preservation environment. I am currently exploring the use of cloud computing (and other distributed architectures) as a potential means for providing sustainable preservation of public (i.e., governmental) information.
With respect to teaching, I believe that students need both a strong grounding in practice and a comprehensive understanding of research in their particular field of study. In terms of specific didactic technique I believe in using what works. Some students are visual; others are auditory. Some are quantitatively oriented; others prefer qualitative, verbal explanations. Students exhibit these needs within the classroom via body language, questions asked, feedback to the professor, and even the choice of topics and methodology for projects and papers. To be flexible enough to change techniques when needed marks an effective educator. In the classroom I attempt to merge a strong grounding in theoretical principles with the practical techniques that inform, and are informed by, those principles.
I am a researcher at the eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) at the University of Melbourne, and am also affiliated with the Centre for Organisational and Research Informatics (COSI), Faculty of IT, Monash University. I have spent the past 15 years in gaining qualifications and practical experience in information management, recordkeeping and archiving, and systems development, culminating in completing my PhD investigating recordkeeping metadata interoperability at Monash in 2007. On the practical side of things, I have been involved in the design, development and deployment of archival information systems at the University of Melbourne since 1995. The Heritage Documentation Management System (HDMS) that we have developed is used across a number of small archives to process and manage their holdings, as well as to make their finding aids available online. I have also have been the principal developer of the ESRC’s Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM) system, for creating and managing contextual information networks. The OHRM brings archival and scholarly principles and practices together into a database tool, aimed at building a sustainable information infrastructure that may help to meet some of the research and information management challenges for scholarly practices in the digital and networked age. Most recently I have had the chance to become involved with teaching into the archives and recordkeeping program at Monash.
After completing my PhD in 2007, I worked on a part-time basis as a Research Fellow for COSI’s Smart Information Portals Project. As well as providing a post-doctoral experience, this position enabled me to continue developing my interest in system design methodologies and methods and in the sustainability and scalability of metadata creation and management frameworks. I have also been involved with recordkeeping and resource discovery metadata standards development as part of working groups within Standards Australia’s IT 21/7 Committee and with the Australia Society of Archivist’s Committee on Descriptive Standards. I was also part of the initial international team to develop the alpha version of EAC in 2001.
A common theme across the practical and research activities that I am involved in is a desire to work with groups who are in some way ‘in the minority’, with lesser access to resources, skills and/or institutional support and/or ways of knowing different to the mainstream. My desire is to work with them to build sustainable archival information system utilizing digital and networking technologies that meet their needs and respect their values. Uncovering these through collaborative research and development activities benefits all parties and I gain much from the two way learning and knowledge exchange. From my research perspective this enables the exploration of issues around individual and community construction of information systems in and through time and space, as well as the development and application of reflective design research methodologies.
I am a first year doctoral student at University College London. I obtained an MA in Archives and Records Management, also from UCL, in 1997, and subsequently worked as an archivist at the University of Southampton and at West Yorkshire Archive Service (WYAS). My PhD, entitled “‘We think, not I think’ Harnessing Collaborative Creativity to Archival Practice: Implications of User Participation for Archival Theory and Practice”, is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral Award, and the partners are the Department of Information Studies at University College London and The (UK) National Archives.
My interest in this subject stemmed from my role as Collections Manager at WYAS, where I introduced several new initiatives aimed at encouraging greater user participation in the generation of information about our collections. In attempting to establish a sense of strategic direction for these ‘Archives2.0’ developments, however, I discovered that – although there is increasing evidence of practitioner experimentation with collaborative techniques in archives in the UK - there is as yet scarce analysis concerning the potential impact and challenges that such initiatives pose for professional archival thinking, training and practice. There is very little discussion regarding the resources required to sustain successful collaborative initiatives, and even less debate on how best to manage the ensuing dialogue with users, and the implications this might have for notions of archival trust and authenticity. There is also little consideration of the tensions between archives’ potentially global audiences and the localised community-based performance frameworks which are the reality for the majority of UK archives outside of the national repositories.
Coming from a practitioner background, I was attracted by opportunity the partnership with The National Archives presents to derive the research questions directly from ‘real world’ challenges and possibilities. I believe that the practitioner community is looking for leadership in the area of collaborative engagement methodologies, and and I hope that one of the outcomes of the research will be to strengthen the theoretical underpinnings of archival practice in the UK.
The objectives of the research are:
• to distinguish between and evaluate different approaches to user engagement with the professional world
• to identify attributes which enable ‘success’ or lead to ‘failure’ in user participation in archival activities
• to develop a conceptual model of user collaboration in archives
• to understand better the implications in terms of resources, technology and professional practice of seeking to implement successful models of user interaction with archive services
• to evaluate whether, in this light, user contribution has a role within the formal process for archival description determined by the international standard ISAD(G)
I am a Koorie woman from Mildura, who recently completed my PhD research through Monash University titled ‘Narrative Creation and Koorie Victoria’. My research concentrates on the location of Indigenous Australian peoples and their knowledge within the Australian society and collective knowledge. This research embraces the differences occurring between Indigenous and mainstream Australia as being positive and working towards methods of celebrating these differences within mainstream research methodologies and collective knowledge. Whilst my research is multi-disciplinary in nature, to date it has centred on community and archival collections of records and has been situated within the dual-disciplines of Indigenous Studies and Archival Science.
This dual-discipline research is supported through working with both the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies (CAIS), Faculty of Arts and the Centre for Organisational and Research Informatics (COSI), Faculty of IT, Monash University. I have found this dual-occupancy exciting and beneficial in regards to my research and development of understandings and has resulted in a 2009 ARC Indigenous Research Fellowship to undertake a research project titled Holding Gunditjmara Knowledge: Community and records working together – a partnership project with the Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation of Lake Condah, western Victoria. I am also currently writing a book with Jim Berg on the repatriation of skeletal remains titled Power and the Passion: Our Ancestors Return Home, and engaged in follow-up projects and activities originating from the ARC Linkage Project Trust and Technology: Building an archival system for Indigenous oral memory (T&T) project.
To my research, I have brought a valuable combination of community, professional and academic experience and knowledge through my work prior to academia. I made major contributions through my work at the Koorie Heritage Trust Inc (1994-2003) to the preservation and promotion of Koorie culture and heritage through the development and management of library and archival collections, publishing activities, website developments and exhibitions. The Trust’s goals and activities relate to preserving and promoting the continuous and living Koorie cultural heritage. Promoting Koorie culture and heritage contributes to pride and self-esteem.
My fourteen years plus experience in Indigenous studies, specifically culture and heritage of Victoria, has been directed towards educating the wider community in Koorie culture and history, and aiding in reconciliation, whilst supporting Koorie communities in addressing their specific needs in this field. I have broad-ranging experience in advisory roles, education (guest speaking and tutoring), promotion (contributions towards exhibitions and publications), and advocacy.
I am a first-year doctoral student at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. My research focuses on the preservation of scientific and medical research data, especially radiological images. My interest in the preservation of these objects encompasses both technical and social or policy issues that influence data management practice. In my continuing research, I would like to further explore the relationship
between users and preservation, both in the sense of how users can influence what to preserve and how, as well as how the ways in which preserved information should be presented to users so that it is usable and accessible and thus worth continuing to preserve.
Currently, I am a fellow in the IGERT Open Data program and a HASTAC Scholar, sponsored by Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office. Along with ICPSR (the Inter-University Center for Political and Social Research), I am conducting a study to assess current data management practices and perceived needs for training and support among researchers at U-M. This research involves a large survey of U-M researchers (completed), along with 20-30 in-depth interviews with individuals who responded to the
survey, and will result in a set of recommendations to the Provost and Office of the Vice President for Research on how the University can better support researchers in managing their data. I am also involved in projects examining knowledge management practices in hospitals and the effectiveness of drug-drug interaction alerts in a computerized prescription order entry system among different user groups.
In 2006, I received a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Yale University, and completed my Master’s in Information from Michigan in April 2009.
Before joining the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, I worked for almost ten years as Senior Archivist for the European Central Bank in Frankfurt am Main (Germany), where I was primarily responsible for the development of records management and archival policies and procedures. Previously (from 1995 to 2000), I was the Head of the Records Management Office and Intermediate Archives at the Province of Bologna (Italy).
I obtained my PhD in Library, Archival and Information Studies from the University of British Columbia in June 2009. I also hold a degree in Arts and Philosophy from the University of Bologna, a postgraduate degree in Archival Science, Palaeography and Diplomatics from the State Archives School in Bologna, and a Master’s degree in Design and Management of Advanced Records Systems from the University of Urbino.
In my doctoral dissertation – which is entitle “Function-Based Records Classification Systems: An Exploratory Study of Records Management Practices in Central Banks” and was conducted with the supervision of Dr. Luciana Duranti—I investigated the purpose of records classification, the mean of the term function, and the methodology for conducting business analysis as adopted by the records managers and archivists of the organizations examined.
Since 2004, I have been conducting research for the InterPARES Project, to which I have in particular contributed in the areas of archival policy and legislation. Other research areas in which I have recently published are digital signature technologies and the functional approach to records appraisal. In 2007, I contributed to the review of the European Commission’s Model Requirements for the Management of Electronic Records (now MoReq2).
One of the components of my teaching philosophy refers to a continuous effort to go beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries with the aim of obtaining new insights and inspirations. I believe that this attitude is especially important when it comes to forming new generations of professionals who will necessarily be confronted with an information society that will increasingly be less segmented. In particular, I believe that by exploring diverse approaches to the study of organizations, including their functions, cultures and behaviors, one can enrich the understanding of the recordkeeping function in different contexts.
At the same time, however, the act of crossing those disciplinary boundaries must be based on a deep understanding of the foundations of the archival science (of which records management is part). Only after having acquired a sound knowledge of records-related principles and methods, including any relevant controversial issue, students would be able to compare multiple perspectives, make insightful connections, and use methodologies coming form other disciplines in order to investigate their own.
My research agenda is interdisciplinary and presupposes the involvement of sociology, organizational theory, social psychology, communication theory, organizational behavior, and other human activity systems-related studies. I am convinced that a better understanding of today’s complex organizations and work systems will help improve the theories, methodologies, and practices that, in a digital environment more than in a traditional one, heavily rely on a function-based approach to records creation, classification, appraisal, arrangement, description, and access.
Furthermore, research in this area might shed light on contemporary diplomatics, which is another area that needs to be investigated in depth and possible with the assistance of new conceptual tools, such as those derived from genre studies.
I earned a BA in French from Millsaps College and MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from UNC-CH by 1973, at which time the world-wide oil-driven economic crisis guaranteed that I would not be able to find a job in academe. So instead I worked as a medieval archaeologist in Europe in the 1970s and then became involved with humanities-oriented computing, which I supported in the Computer Unit of Westfield College of the University of London, where my primary interest was text analysis. Returning to the US in 1979, I worked at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) until 2000, where I was a documentary editor, archaeological editor, historian (French colonial and southeastern native American ethnohistory), museum exhibit developer, and electronic records program director, while at the same time creating the MDAH's automation program from scratch as manager of information systems for all divisions of the institution from 1980-2000. I am the author of an extensive literature in ethnohistory and colonial history, including especially Choctaw Genesis 1500-1700 (1995) and Practicing Ethnohistory (2006); I have been a consultant to Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians since 1980 and have most recently worked with the tribal archivist on the reform of archival practices. From 1997 to 2000 I directed the NHPRC grant-funded project at MDAH to create an electronic records program for the state of Mississippi, which I think I may fairly claim was up and running before that of Washington state.
I was hired by the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin in fall of 2000, with the brief to develop a suite of courses designed to prepare students to become what has recently been referred to as "Archival Engineers," capable of capturing, managing, and maintaining digital cultural objects indefinitely. In the past ten years I have taught almost 300 Master’s students in digital archives classes and I currently chair the committees of seven PhD students. I also teach archival appraisal and a course in the UT Museum Studies portfolio program on historical museums, of which I am one of three principals. My teaching philosophy is based on respect for students and their ability to take control of their own learning, while my teaching practice attempts to draw from the best of my own experience as a student to pair skills in critical reading with demanding problem-oriented discovery to support lifelong learning in a field where change is endemic.
My research interests to underpin this work include institutionalization of digital repositories, appraisal practices for digital records, preservation of intangible cultural heritage including especially ethical considerations, and the analysis of digital records corpora, and I have published, presented, and supervised student work on all of these topics. Recently my interests as a historian have led me to begin investigating the generation of documentation by the community of practice that spans the computer industry, computer publications, and computer users, with a view to understanding archival documentation requirements to support historical studies in this field.
Leisa Gibbons completed a Masters in Information Management and Systems at Monash University in 2007. Leisa’s background includes an Art History degree from the University of Western Australia and studies in the field of writing for film, television and visual media. When starting at Monash in 2006 her area of archival theory specialisation travelled towards digital records and in particular, moving image and digital technologies, ultimately leading to continuing her studies within research at Monash in 2008.
Leisa’s research investigates the multiplicity of digital cultural records, particularly those found online and in complex forms such as within social media networks. The focus is on records-as-process using the Cultural Heritage Continuum model developed by Frank Upward, a sister model to the Records Continuum model. The methodological approach for the thesis sits in the interpretive paradigm and employs sense-making and reflective practices using qualitative methods and case study field research.
Whilst studying, Leisa has worked as an Archivist at BHP Billiton Archives and as the Records Manager at the Brotherhood of St Laurence, a not-for-profit organisation in Melbourne. Recently, she has started her own business, Rhizome Digital, supporting her ongoing PhD research by providing specialist recordkeeping advice for not-for-profit organisations, particularly in areas such as social media, compliance and policy.
Since 1995, I have been a faculty member (Chair 2005-2009) of the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, where I developed and direct the specialization in Archival Studies. I am also a faculty member in the Inter-Departmental M.A. Program in Moving Image Archive Studies (Chair, 2009). I have worked extensively supervising, co-supervising and mentoring Master’s and Ph.D. students from UCLA and several other countries. I am also the Director of the Center for Information as Evidence (CIE) at UCLA. The Center serves as an interdisciplinary forum for addressing the ways in which information objects and systems are created, used, and preserved as legal, administrative, scientific, social, cultural and historical evidence. CIE is concerned with accountability, advocacy, and artifacts, as well as the axiomatic concepts that cut across these constructs such as legitimacy, sovereignty, power, authority, identity, authenticity, literacy, classification, preservation, and sociopolitical contexts.
I have an M.A. in English Language and Literature specializing in Old Icelandic from Trinity College Dublin. My Master‘s and Post-Master‘s work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1984-85) focused on archival automation. I worked as a university archivist and records specialist (University of Cincinnati, 1985-1990) as well as an investigator on a project funded by the NHPRC to investigate the appraisal of online conferencing and on another project funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to develop an online center for the history of the health sciences in Michigan (University of Michigan, 1990-1995). My doctoral dissertation from the University of Michigan (1995) developed and assessed an expert system to automate the appraisal of electronic mail. I am a Fellow and former Council Member of the Society of American Archivists and former Council Member of the Midwest Archives Conference. From 2000-2008, I served as a member of the International Council on Archives Steering Committee for the Section on Archival Education (SAE).
My research interests, which originated in an interest in the various convergences between records, record-keeping technology and archival information systems, have broadened and evolved over the years as the field of Archival Studies has developed and the sub-field of Archival Informatics has emerged. My recent work addresses notions of information as evidence in an increasingly digital, post-colonial and globalized world, and particularly the nature and role of the archive and archivists within this world. Given this context, I am particularly interested in three aspects:
1. Technology infrastructure-building, e.g., metadata, design and evaluation of cultural information systems, and community archive development;
2. Professional and research infrastructure-building for Archival Studies, e.g., archival research methods, community-based research, professional and research education and pedagogy, internationalization of archival work, and pluralization of the field and its theory and practice base; and,
3. Social justice and human rights issues as they relate to archives and records and especially Indigenous, racial and ethnic, and other under-represented or underempowered communities of record. I am committed to supporting the development of archival education programs around the world that produce rigorous, reflexive, critical, culturally-sensitive, technologically competent, and globally-aware archival practitioners, researchers and educators.
Karen F. Gracy joined the faculty of the School of Library and Information Science of Kent State University as assistant professor in 2007. She possesses an MLIS and PhD in Library and Information Science from the University of California, Los Angeles and an MA in critical studies of Film and Television from UCLA. She previously held the position of assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh from 2001-2007. Her first book, Film Preservation: Competing Definitions of Value, Use, and Practice, was published by the Society of American Archivists in 2007. She has also served as the editor-in-chief of The Moving Image, journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, from 2006 to 2008. Other recent publications include “Moving Image Preservation and Cultural Capital,” which appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Library Trends (v. 56, no. 1), and “Film and Broadcast Archives,” which appeared in the third edition of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences in 2009.
Research and Teaching Interests and Objectives
Dr. Gracy’s research focuses on the transition from the analog to the digital in preservation, particularly how it affects both the nature of the work and the communities that are involved in preservation activities. While the technical challenges involved in digital preservation are critical, the implications for the sociocultural infrastructure—the people and institutions, the processes and practices—must also be studied. New players in preservation, such as the Internet Archive and Google Books, are changing the dominant paradigms of preservation and may ultimately transform how the LIS community approaches and conducts preservation work. In both Dr. Gracy’s research and teaching, the technical and sociocultural aspects receive equal attention.
As part of this research agenda, she hopes to build off of some of the central concepts debated in her recent Library Trends article (see above), which looked at the social construction of moving image collections in YouTube and Google Video, focusing particularly on these collections’ potential to usurp some of the functions of the archive. By foregrounding the user’s contributions to creation, description, and contextualization of the collection, these sites serve as de facto archives for democratic discourse about political, social, and cultural events. Their construction by users, including the construction of networks of relationships among documents, is comparable to the activities of the archive, particularly the acts of acquisition, and collection development, description, and contextualization. What has formerly been primarily the purview of the archive has now been appropriated by creators and users of these materials. In Dr. Gracy’s future work she would like to look more closely at these acts of creation, linking, and appropriation in YouTube and other similar videosharing sites. She will inquire into the role of social tagging and commenting, comparing it to the discourse of curatorial commentary, exploring what effects the videosharing sites have had on processes and practices in established cultural institutions for designing sites to access digitized collections. Questions to be explored include:
· Are libraries, archives, and museums creating more space for organic community and collection building? In what ways?
· What sorts of resources are available to users for creating “curatorial commentary” about collections, through social tagging, blogs, and the like?
· How have cultural institutions integrated user input into decisionmaking in the areas of acquisition, appraisal, preservation, description, and access?
Dr. Gracy is also interested in exploring economic and legal aspects of the videosharing phenomenon, looking sustainability models for these types of sites. Both YouTube and Google Video eventually ended up partnering with content owners such as film studios and broadcast networks in order to sustain themselves in the long-term (the videosharing sites profit-share advertising revenues with content owners to secure high-demand content and gain protection from copyright infringement lawsuits). The question is whether another model can sustain social networking, one which might be more appealing to noncommercial/non-profit organizations. Does government or private subsidization represent the only other means to keep sites fiscally sound? This question of sustainability is critically important as more and more cultural institutions incorporate aspects of social networking technologies into their existing catalogs and other discovery resources.
I bring unique professional and academic experiences to the institute. As a Master's student at the University of Pittsburgh, I had the opportunity to teach and participate in faculty meetings within the Department of Theatre and Performances Studies. In my second year, I was recitation leader for "Introduction to Theatre History" and an instructor for "Introduction to Performances." Through my teaching experiences, pedagogical discussions, and faculty meeting participation, I gained a deeper understanding of what it takes to be a strong teacher and how an academic department functions.
After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh, I served as Assistant Director of Admission and Assistant to the Web Strategy Team at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. Both positions provided first-hand opportunities to learn how higher education institutions function, and how faculty and administration work together for academic excellence and market effectiveness. I believe these experiences will greatly inform my participation in discussions about pedagogy and higher education administration, as well as improve my teaching skills.
As a student in the Simmons GSLIS program and recent graduate, I have worked in a wide variety of archives. From presidential libraries and university special collections to small historical societies, I witnessed the many issues, challenges and strengths of these different institutions. My diverse professional experience enhances my ability to think critically about the current and long-term issues facing archives and archivists, my desire to help move the field forward, and my mission to prove the relevance of archives to society at large.
As part of my effort to move the archives field forward, I would like to explore the reasons for the lack of diversity in the traditional archives field. At the 2007 meeting of the Society of American Archivists, Elizabeth Atkins gave her presidential address on this very topic. According to the evidence Atkins presented in this speech, the archives field does not accurately represent the pluralistic nature of our society's population. Is there a lack of diversity in the field? What does it mean to diversify the archival profession? What obstacles may be preventing this field from diversifying?
Amy Harris has served as Director of the University of Michigan Exhibit Museum of Natural History since 2000. Harris has a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University and a M.A. in the History of Art from the University of Michigan. Harris has 25 years of experience in the administration of cultural organizations and museums, with a particular focus on development, and holds leadership positions within the University of Michigan and in the greater Ann Arbor community.
Margaret Hedstrom is an associate professor in the School of Information and will become a full professor on September 1, 2010. Before joining the U-M faculty in 1995, Hedstrom was chief of state records advisory services and director of the Center for Electronic Records at the New York State Archives and Records Administration (1985-95).
In fall 2003, she was an author of "It's About Time: Research Challenges in Digital Archiving and Long-Term Preservation (PDF)," sponsored by the Digital Government Research Program and the Digital Libraries Program Directorate for Computing and Information Sciences and Engineering at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. The other report was "Invest to Save (PDF) ?," a report and recommendations of the Working Group on Digital Archiving and Preservation, sponsored by the NSF and the European Union. Other writings include "Digital Preservation: A Time Bomb for Digital Libraries ?."
Hedstrom has been conducting research on the management and preservation of electronic records since 1979 with the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. At the New York State Archives and Records Administration, she supervised a three-year research project which developed alternative models for electronic records programs. She was also one of the principal planners of a major conference on electronic records research held in 1991 which established national priorities for research and development; and she organized a follow-up conference in 1996.
She also headed the CAMiLEON project with the University of Leeds. In that project, researchers were devoted to the use of emulation tools as part of a strategy for long-term preservation of digital records. CAMiLEON stood for Creative Archiving at Michigan and Leeds: Emulating the Old on the New.
Other major professional accomplishments have included heading the SI research team that assembled the archives of the African National Congress at the University of For Hare's National Heritage Cultural Studies Centre in South Africa.
Hedstrom has published widely on many aspects of archival management, electronic records, and digital preservation. Her current research interests include digital preservation strategies, the impact of electronic communications on organizational memory and documentation, remote access to archival materials, and cultural preservation and outreach in developing countries.
Laura Elizabeth Helton
Over the past eight years, I have simultaneously worked as an archivist of social movements and studied these archives as critical sites of engagement around the problems and politics of history. I am now a second-year PhD in United States history at New York University, where my research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-centry collecting and archival practices, print culture, and the materiality of knoweldge production.
I earned an MA in history and archival management in 2004 from NYU, where I also served as a fellow at the Tamiment Library processing collections on women's movements. From 2004 to 2006, I was field archivist for the Mississippi Digital Library, a collaborative project to expand access to archives documenting the civil rights movement. This project emerged at a moment when civil rights history made the daily news; clustered around the fortieth anniversary of key civil rights milestones were new monuments, unsealed state records, investigations of long-unprosecuted murders, and reignited debates about the status of racial equality. Engaging in our everyday work thus required that my colleagues and I navigate the complicated role that archives play in the memory politics of the present. As I surveyed repositories across the state, I became increasingly interested in how their variant histories of collection development had created enduring institutional cultures that shaped their participation in ongoing cultural debates. I took these experiences into my studies at Rutgers University, where I earned my MLIS in 2007. My coursework on book history allowed me to translate questions I had encountered as an archivist into historical research probing earlier collecting endeavors, particulary those focused on building African American archives.
My dissertation will consider conditions of the 1900s through 1940s--including New Negro movements, new forms of recording technology, racial violence and surveillance--that made race emerge as an object of intensive documentary engagement in governmental, literary, historical and ethnographic projects. By considering a range of knowledge production practices--Daniel Murray's turn-of-the-centry bibliographic work at the Library of Congress, the Harlem citizens' committee that inaugurated a "Negro collection" at the New York Public Library, the WPA's Historical Records Survey, and others--I will explore the relationship between print culture, archives, and political mobilization. I hope this research on past archival efforts will help to illuminate what is at stake in more recent efforts to collect and document movements for social change and the communities who make them.
As I pursue fulltime doctoral studies, I remain committeed to and involved in the professional archival community. I recently served as a consultant to the Newark Archives Project, and since 2009 have been processing manuscript collections at the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture as part of a pilot project to uncover "hidden" collections (based on Chicago's successful Mapping of the Stacks project). Along with Peter Wosh and fellow graduate student Dylan YEats, I am co-curating "Discussing the Archive: Ideas, Practices and Institutions," a series of interdisciplinary events exploring overlapping and divergent concepts of "the archive" in the humanities.
I have M.A. degrees in History (UCLA) and Public History/Historic Preservation (CSUDH), and I am currently completing a Ph.D. in Archival Science at the University of Amsterdam. I have been a practicing archivist since 1990 in variety of settings.
My current research interests revolve around how and why personal and institutional records survive (or do not survive); that is, what shapes the conscious and unconscious decisions throughout the document lifecycle that result in some materials being retained and preserved and others not. I have a particular interest in how technological changes in communication and recordkeeping can disrupt pre-existing patterns in records, by either eliminating or diminishing old forms of documentation or allowing for the capture of information that previously went unrecorded.
I am currently Associate University Archivist with the University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections, and was previously employed at the Archives of Manitoba, Queen’s University Archives, Kingston, and at the Library and Archives of Canada in Ottawa. I have a Master of Arts (History, in Archival Studies) from the University of Manitoba, and a Master of Arts (History), from the University of Saskatchewan. I am currently enrolled in a PhD programme at the University of Amsterdam under Dr. Eric Ketelaar. The subject of the dissertation is archives of the paranormal specifically the Hamilton Family fonds at the University of Manitoba Archives I have written several articles on Aboriginal history and a book on the local history of the Cypress Hills of Alberta and Saskatchewan. My current interesting include archives of the paranormal and depictions of western Canada in film and television.
Dalena Hunter is an incoming PhD student in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies program at UCLA with a focus on archives and their affect on minority and marginalized history. She received an MA in African American Studies from UCLA in 2010, an MLIS from UCLA in 2007 and a BA in English from Cal State University in 2003. Ms. Hunter has been the Librarian at the Bunche Center for African American Studies since 2007 and in that capacity she has worked to increase access to primary and secondary materials documenting African American history in the United States and the Los Angeles area. As a future scholar, Ms. Hunter is interested in engaging in theoretical discussions on archival creation and preservation as it exists inside and outside the traditional cannon.
Trond Erik Jacobsen
I am a PhD candidate at the School of Information at the University of Michigan and Dr. Margaret Hedstrom is my advisor. My archival research interests include archives and collective memory, the use of records as forms of evidence, and the role of research in appraisal. My dissertation answers the question: How do the parties to the Federal Acknowledgment Process mobilize records as evidence? The entire acknowledgment process pivots on mobilizing records as evidence – meaning the identification, acquisition, organization, representation, and interpretation of records as evidence – and assumptions about what constitutes valuable evidence in a juridical context.
In other current work in my role as a Research Assistant, I collaborate with a faculty member to analyze how scientists and engineers make decisions about reusing others’ research and data. In prior work as a Research Assistant, I helped to develop a typology of information asymmetries and information sharing practices between and among indigenous nations and investors in the municipal bond market and between and among indigenous nations and federal, state, and local governments related to law enforcement. As both sole author and with collaborators, I have numerous peer-reviewed publications and invited presentations for each of my research interests. I have a BS in Sociology from the University of Oregon where I studied mass media systems and military research at American universities. As a student and freelance journalist, I have written investigative and analytical pieces on topics as diverse as the relationships between early Clinton-era investments in what was then called the National Information Infrastructure and military research, US and international polices for and governance of near-Earth space, water conflicts in the arid American west, and the National Security Education Act of 1991. For more than a decade I was a college policy debate coach for nationally-ranked programs at Cornell, University of Oregon, University of Vermont, and the University of Alaska and have also worked as a law librarian and political operative for two congressional campaigns.
I greatly valued my experience at AERI 2009 at which I formed lasting friendships and professional relationships. I received much valuable feedback on a research paper related to my dissertation and a poster describing research with Ricardo Punzalan mapping the emergence of the concept of 'collective memory' in the archival science literature. As I am co-convening a methods workshop on archives and collective memory for AERI 2010, I will not be presenting a paper or poster, but would very much like to informally share my substantial progress on both projects with interested colleagues.
Maria Kalberg commenced as a PhD student in May 2009 at the Department for Information Technology and Media, Mid Sweden University researching in the Centre for Digital Information Management (CEDIF). She has a Bachelor of Arts in Archival and Information Science and has extensive professional experience as an archivist in both business and public archives in Sweden. Her most recent position was as the archivist for the Härnosänd municipality. She has also taught Archival and Information Science at Mid Sweden University. Her research interest is in implementing organization-wide records systems and the professional development of archivists. Her research objectives are to develop new knowledge that can guide the archival profession to improve their professional development to meet new challenges regarding organizational changes and the paradigm shift from traditional recordkeeping to digital recordkeeping.
Eric Ketelaar is Emeritus Professor at the University of Amsterdam. From 1997 to 2009 he was Professor of Archivistics in the Department of Mediastudies (Archive and Information Studies) of the University of Amsterdam. As a honorary fellow of his former department he continues his research which is concerned mainly with the social and cultural contexts of records creation and use.
For a long time engaged with the epistemological and philosophical challenges of the meanings of archives, Eric Ketelaar’s research, writing and teaching have earned him the international recognition to be a leader in the field of social and cultural archivistics (or: archival science) advocating a postmodern and comparative approach. Since 1997 he has been involved in research on social and collective memories. Recently, he has started to refine this research by advancing the paradigm of communities of records, enriching this with the outcome of multidisciplinary research on individual and group identities and with internationally accepted principles and concepts: access as democratic imperative, joint cultural heritage, etc.
In 2000/2001 he was The Netherlands Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan (School of Information). From 2003 to 2008 he was Honorary Professor at Monash University, Melbourne (Faculty of Information Technology) where he continues to be involved as a Adjunct Senior Research Fellow.
He was General State Archivist (National Archivist) of The Netherlands from 1989-1997. From 1992-2002 he held the chair of archivistics in the Department of History of the University of Leiden. During twenty years he served the International Council on Archives (ICA) in different capacities. In 2000 ICA elected him Honorary President.
Eric Ketelaar wrote some 300 articles mainly in Dutch, English, French and German and he wrote or co-authored 15 books, including two general introductions on archival research and a handbook on Dutch archives and records management law. He is one of the three editors-in-chief of 'Archival Science. International Journal on Recorded Information'.
Full bio- and bibliography on www.archivistics.nl
David Kim is a first-year Ph.D student in Information Studies at UCLA and the recipient of last year’s Archival Education and Research Institute (AERI) Doctoral Fellowship. His research interests include the issues of representation, subjectivity, evidence and value surrounding the archive as a concept, and archives themselves as memory practice, technical and literary method, and institutions. He is also interested in digital humanities and its emerging pedagogic frameworks, as well as technology-mediated visual culture. He has been a research assistant for the Transliteracies Project organized by the English department at UC-Santa Barbara, which addresses contemporary research questions related to socially-mediated computing and knowledge production with engagement from both humanities and the sciences. He has been also working as a research assistant exploring topics in digital humanities under the direction of Dr. Johanna Drucker.
He received his Masters degree in English at NYU, and his thesis dealt with race, gender and sexuality in 20th-century American literature. He also has a Masters in Information and Library Science from the Pratt Institute, where he was an IMLS fellow working in public libraries as well as in digital resources and web applications for the Brooklyn Public Library. Prior to starting at UCLA, he was an archivist at the Public Art Fund and a consultant on digital archives projects for numerous other arts organizations in New York City.
As an undergraduate student, I studied racial identity and psychometrics as my primary field of study. However, upon graduation, I decided to enroll at the University of California Los Angeles in the Department of Information Studies with the goal of becoming a professional archivist. This shift was not merely the result of my growing desire for a career change; rather, I arrived at the realization that many of the issues associated with racial identity and the processes of its formation were substantially influenced by access to and interface with historical evidence. Consequently, I shifted my interests toward the archival profession.
Throughout the program, I realized that there were questions about the archival field that remained untouched, especially with regards to issues stemming from postcoloniality and networked culture in the age of increasing globalization. I became interested in the work of archival scholars addressing the needs of communities around the world that have been historically subject to oppression that view archival repositories (and by extension, the field of archival work) as sites of power, and as apparatuses of control.
A common thread through these seemingly disparate endeavors to actualize a coherent research agenda is the question of pedagogy, and the dissemination of our professional knowledges. I view the task of teaching to be an explicitly socio-political endeavor, and the classroom (physical or virtual) to be a forum in which the discipline can be deconstructed, reimagined, and refigured. Within institutions of learning, for professional education in this instance, education serves to either perpetuate and reinscribe hegemony, or it offers a fertile ground upon which to build critique and transformation of the institutions themselves and societies at large. Educational theorist Paulo Friere described education in great length in terms of emancipation, and I have incorporated this perspective in how I view myself as an educator and budding scholar. In late 2009, I was hired as an adjunct faculty instructor at Glendale Community College in Los Angeles to teach an introductory course on new media, information, and technology. While the purpose of the course is centered on broad discussions about information technology and new media, I attempt to adopt a holistic approach to discussing the subject that includes the connectedness of the range of information phenomena and ecologies, including those of the archival profession.
My work is greatly inspired by the previous generation of postmodern archival scholars. As such, my research agenda aims to explicitly interrogate the social, the cultural, and the political, for the keystone of my work as a fledgling scholar is the focus on critical interpretation of how archival systems are developed and implemented, particularly when dealing with culturally sensitive materials. I draw extensively from critical theory and psychoanalysis to explore the psychological and psychic stakes of the archival profession. While some within the field might discount my project as belonging to the purview of the humanities, it is my belief that the constitution of the field of archival practitioners and scholars is enriched by a rich range of conceptual and theoretical frameworks that interrogate the implications of our work, regardless of their disciplinary origins. Consequently, my work pays due homage to the progenitors of postmodern archival theory and their difficult but crucial endeavors to work toward a paradigm shift that casts the social, cultural, and political as priorities for the archival field.
Christopher (Cal) Lee is Assistant Professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He teaches classes for graduate and undergraduate students, as well as continuing professional education workshops in archival administration, records management, digital curation, understanding information technology for managing digital collections, and the construction of digital repository rules.
His primary area of research is the long-term curation of digital collections. He is particularly interested in the professionalization of this work and the diffusion of existing tools and methods (e.g. digital forensics, web archiving, automated implementation of policies) into real professional practice.
Curation of personal digital archives has received less attention in the professional literature than the curation of institutional assets, despite the essential role that personal materials have played in the cultural heritage of past generations. Cal is involved in numerous efforts to fill this gap. He is editing and providing several chapters to a forthcoming book entitled, I, Digital: Personal Collections in the Digital Era, which is exploring issues, challenges and opportunities in the management of personal digital collections. He was the chief organizer of a meeting of invited international experts called “Stewardship of E-Manuscripts: Advancing a Shared Agenda,” which took place in Chapel Hill on March 31. Cal has been an invited speaker at the First International Digital Lives Conference at the British Library in February 2009 and Saving Our Present for the Future: Personal Archiving 2010 at the Internet Archive in February 2010. He is also spearheading the international Personal Digital Archives Working Group (PDAWG).
Two of the primary mechanisms for collecting personal digital archives are obtaining physical storage media (e.g. floppies, CDs, hard drives) and capturing content from the Web. In order to advance the state of professional practice in obtaining physical media, Cal has taken part in formal digital forensics training, and he has taught workshops on “Applying Digital Forensics Techniques to Materials Acquired on Physical Media” in multiple professional venues.
The VidArch project (http://ils.unc.edu/vidarch/) focused on Web capture scenarios. It investigated the collection of online video, with a particularly emphasis on contextual information. Cal’s contributions to VidArch included an information model for contextual information in digital collections (see: http://sils.unc.edu/research/publications/reports/TR_2007_04.pdf and forthcoming article in the Journal of Documentation) and several empirical studies of online selection and collecting strategies.
Other current projects include DigCCurr, DigCCurr II (http://ils.unc.edu/digccurr/) and ESOPI-21 (http://ils.unc.edu/esopi21), all of which are developing and implementing courses of study and practical engagement opportunities in digital curation. For these projects, Cal has developed an extensive Matrix of Digital Curation Knowledge and Competencies (http://www.ils.unc.edu/digccurr/products.html), which is based on various data sources and grounded in the diverse literature related to digital curation.
Past research projects have included CAMiLEON(http://www.ils.unc.edu/callee/dig-pres_users-perspective.pdf), which examined migration vs. emulation as digital preservation strategies; and an in-depth case study of the development of the OAIS (http://www.ils.unc.edu/callee/dissertation_callee.pdf).
He has an MSI (with a concentration in Archives and Records Management) and PhD from the School of Information at the University of Michigan.
I am in the second year of a PhD at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). I have a BA (Cultural Studies) (Honours) from the University of Adelaide and a MA (Information & Knowledge Management) from UTS. My professional background includes work in online information management and community archives, and I am currently tutoring in the information and communication programs at UTS.
My doctoral research considers archival spaces outside of traditional institutional archives. Using zines and the zine community as a specific site of research, I am exploring a series of ‘other’ spaces of memory making and collection. Zine practice is framed by ideas of DIY, the personal and small scale, resistance and ephemerality, and these ideologies provide alternative views on the archival process. As a practicing zine maker and member of the community/ies I am also interested in exploring the simultaneous roles of researcher and practitioner through my work.
I am currently an assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina, where I began work as an instructor in 2004. I hold a PhD in Library and Information Science, with a concentration in archival studies, from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh.
In my dissertation research into practices for documenting appraisal at the National Archives and Records Administration, Library and Archives Canada, and the National Archives of Australia, I began to explore the nexus between appraisal and archival accountability. Archival appraisal is at the heart of all work carried out by archivists, but there is no universally accepted formula for its conduct. This lack of professional consensus challenges archivists to document how appraisal is accomplished. Since archivists bring many perspectives to the selection process, it is imperative to explain the thinking, goals, and assumptions behind the appraisal process in order to provide a record of how archives were formed. If archivists are to demonstrate that they have acted responsibly towards society’s documentary heritage, they must leave evidence of how they have carried out this critical task. By developing standard methods of documenting the appraisal decision-making process, archivists can demonstrate accountability for the appraisal function to employing institutions, users of archival materials, and society in general for ensuring the responsible selection of the documentary record. These areas remain strong research interests for me, and I plan to build on this initial research to explore practices for documenting appraisal in other environments.
My main teaching responsibilities are in the areas of archival administration and preservation management. I view teaching as an ongoing learning process and I enjoy the opportunities and challenges involved in striving towards excellence in teaching in both the traditional classroom and online settings. I encourage students to take active ownership of their education and professional development through building learning communities where everyone’s perspectives and contributions are expected and respected. I attempt to develop assignments that engage students in critical-thinking and problem-solving related to issues of relevance to the archival profession and to utilize a variety of instructional strategies in order to provide students with different learning styles opportunities to excel.
I am beginning my doctoral studies at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Information Sciences this fall after receiving a BA from Lehigh University and a MA in Museum Studies from Syracuse University. During my graduate studies, I worked as a Design History teaching assistant and completed internships with the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Following my time at Syracuse University, I worked at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut.
My research interests at this time are focused in the areas of archival ethics, memory studies, and cultural property issues in the archival field. At the University of Pittsburgh, I will be enrolling a new series of seminars through which we will explore technology’s impact on cultural and scientific memory. During my undergraduate education at Lehigh University, I developed an interest in the illicit trade in cultural property and disputes among state and non-state actors in this issue area. I plan to closely examine the role of archivists in these cultural property debates during my doctoral study at the University of Pittsburgh. In addition, I am committed to researching cultural heritage disputes that specifically surround archival records.
During my time as a teaching assistant at Syracuse University, I worked to create a learning environment in which my students felt comfortable contributing their ideas through a class discussion with their peers and myself. My teaching philosophy is also rooted in a strong belief in the importance of observing linkages among fields through interdisciplinary learning.
My research relates to archival science and systems, electronic recordkeeping, and the broader knowledge management, metadata and resource discovery areas. I have been involved for many years with researchers at Monash University in the development of records continuum theory, particularly relating to the societal role of records in memory, identity, governance and accountability. I have particularly enjoyed working with archival, LIS, information systems, computing science and Australian Indigenous studies researchers, PhD students, archival institutions, government agencies, community organizations and communities on an exciting range of collaborative, multidisciplinary research projects, for example relating to Australian Indigenous communities and archives; inclusive and culturally sensitive archival education; the nexus between memories, communities and technologies; metadata standards to support electronic recordkeeping and the provision of quality information and archival resources online; and smart information portals tailored to the needs of individual users and communities. I also have a major commitment to the development of archival research design and methodology, community-centred participatory research models, and the user-sensitive design of information and archival systems.
Research highlights have included the 2004-8 ARC Linkage Major Project “Trust and Technology: Building Archival Systems for Indigenous Oral Memory” which explored how archives can support Indigenous frameworks of knowledge, memory and evidence, particularly knowledge that is still stored within the community orally (http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/research/centres/cosi/projects/trust/); my recordkeeping metadata research (the Australian Recordkeeping Metadata Schema (RKMS) Version 1.0, the related 1997-8 SPIRT Project, and the 2003-05 ARC Linkage Project, “Create Once, Use Many Times: the Clever Use of Metadata” (http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/research/groups/rcrg/crkm/index.html) which impacted significantly on the development of the new Australian National Standard, and ISO23081; and the development of the Breast Cancer Knowledge Online Portal (www.bckonline.monash.edu.au), an outcome of consumer instigated research and collaboration between researchers, governments, industry and professional partners, and user communities.
Another recent highlight has been the establishment of the Monash Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics in 2006 – COSI brings together a critical mass of Monash researchers, national and international research collaborators, industry and community research partners and research students, and aims to contribute to the development of individuals, organisations, and society through multidisciplinary research relating to human-centred design and deployment of information technologies, and their creative and effective use in government, business and civil society. COSI’s major research themes include the role of ICTs in social inclusion, and the nexus between memories, communities and technologies (http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/research/centres/cosi/index.html).
Since 1990, I have been involved with my Monash colleagues in the development, coordination and teaching of one of Australia’s leading professionally accredited graduate programs in recordkeeping and archival systems. This has been enormously satisfying, and sustaining our archival programs remains a major challenge. A key to our success so far has been the development of our programs within the multidisciplinary framework of a broadly based Faculty of Information Technology which includes information disciplines ranging from the engineering to the social sciences ends of the spectrum, the strong nexus between our research and teaching programs and our engagement with a wonderfully supportive professional community.
The concept of using recordkeeping and information technology for therapeutic purposes evolved from my own experience as a nurse, information and knowledge manager and student of archival systems.
Though I had early in my career worked as a nurse with some experience in aged care, it was the ability to draw on various disciplinary experiences later in life, that enabled me to identify a practical use to what I understood to be a widening gap between these disciplines when it came to understanding how they could contribute to wellbeing through the use of technology.
It began on a very personal note with a visit to the nursing home where my grandmother was a new resident. The awful truth was that it felt like a place where people physically and psychologically wait to die. Whether the expectations, in reality, would be different in the current generation in institutional accommodation compared to more technology literate groups is not clear. What was evident to me was the dramatic lack of stimulus in the facility; the environment, design, nature of care, general interactions between staff and residents and the level of activity.
The themes in the initial literature review for the Storyline Project were derived through a combination of personal experience, reading of research papers and exploration of the subject matter with professional workers within the information management and recordkeeping professions as well as gerontology professionals (nursing and allied health).
Some of the main issues in aged care are: the age of facilities which reflect dated designs and beliefs, the lack of funding, shortage of adequately trained staff and support for the continuous development of carers (both professional and home).
The aim of the my doctoral studies is to therapeutically contribute to the health and aging in a way that eases the demands on carers and the system by improving the quality of life, and, thereby alleviating some of the physical and psychological demands for both the person being cared for and the carer.
April Norris is an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Preservation Doctoral Fellow in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2006, she earned her M.S. in Information Studies and an Endorsement of Specialization in digital preservation from the University of Texas at Austin. Digital preservation is the kernel of April’s research interests, which also include knowledge management, information policy, and Library and Information Science (LIS) education. Currently, April is exploring the field of digital forensics as a means of informing archival thought and improving digital preservation practices. April believes research is an ongoing process of building and interpreting context. She values and integrates multiple perspectives into her research, and seeks to improve real-world conditions with rigorous and reasoned research.
Professionally, April has worked as an information professional in both Texas state government and higher education. Most recently, she was the Records Manager for the University of Texas System Administration following a position as an Information Analyst at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.
My main research interest focuses on copyright and the related legal and policy issues involved with the dissemination of digital media, digitized or created digital, to the public, primarily by cultural institutions such as archives, libraries, and museums. I also examine issues related to preserving digital works and the technologies necessary to preserve and access digital works. Recently, I have been examining the recording of tacit knowledge in computer restoration work necessary for archival preservation, and I am currently going through the IRB process at the University of Texas to do research in this area.
For my dissertation, my preliminary plan is to do ethnographic research in an archives in order to examine the issues related to copyright encountered in day-to-day activities. From that examination, I hope to generate an instrument (most likely a survey) to examine those issues at other locations.
I am a doctoral student, lecturer, and member of the IT Staff at the School of Information at UT Austin. In these various roles, I teach undergraduates about technology and culture, assist with technology-related activities (such as the creation of multimedia tutorials and the use of various types of software, including DSpace), and have the opportunity to examine policy issues related to copyright at institutions like the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center and the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.
I have an MLIS from the School of Information. I am a member of the Society of American Archivists and the American Library Association. I participate in the American Library Association’s Copyright Scholar program, and helped create and maintain the Copyright Advisory Network site at librarycopyright.net. I am currently a member of the board of EFF-Austin, a civil liberties group created with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Eun G. Park
Eun Park is Associate Professor in the School of Information Studies at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles, an MLS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an MBA from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include digital archives, digital preservation, metadata, authenticity and authentication, electronic records management, and social aspects of information technology. She teaches courses on metadata, electronic records systems, digital preservation, and records management at the graduate level. In her Ph.D. dissertation, she explored constructs of authenticity as they are understood by universities and recordkeeping communities in different national, cultural, juridical, and organizational contexts to understand variables impact requirements for permanently preserving authentic records in electronic student records systems. Her Ph.D. dissertation was awarded with a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the University of California Office of the President and the Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from Beta Phi Mu (the International Library and Information Studies Honor Society). In 2001, she won the Oliver Wendell Holmes Award from the Society of American Archivists. In 2003, she became an assistant professor at the School of Information Studies at McGill University. Since then, she has been awarded major grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture (FQRSC). She is leading two research teams regarding building digital archives of photos and films on the contexts of AIDS and HIV, sponsored from SSHRC Standard Grant and International Opportunity Fund. She is a member of the International Visual Methodology for Social Change Project, and the Paulo and Nita Freire Project for Critical Pedagogy. She has been working for the InterPARES (International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems) Projects since 1999 and, currently, she is a member of InterPARES III Project Team Korea.
I am a first-year doctoral student in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. I received my BA in Philosophy from Southwestern University in 2002. I completed my Master’s degree in Information studies in 2007 and a Master’s in Architectural history in 2009. I returned to the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin as an IMLS Preservation fellow this past fall. My primary research interest is in architectural archives and the shift from predominantly paper-based collections to born-digital materials. This focus on architectural records developed while working at the Alexander Architectural Archive during my graduate education. As an archival practitioner, I have had an opportunity to process several collections, curate exhibits that draw from the archival holdings, and confront preservation issues when attempting to accession digital records.
While my primary focus has been on archives, I am interested in the intersections between architectural libraries, archives, and museums. The way people seek and use information is changing and the information community has an opportunity to blur the lines between institutions and repositories through collaboration. Through my doctoral research, I am pursuing questions about how to preserve digital architectural records, maintain the technology needed to use materials, and create systems to provide access to files. I am beginning my research by examining how architects create and use digital files within their practice as a means to determine which records to archives, how to describe the files, and how to connect disparate record types, both analog and digital, to create cohesive and complete archives of architectural firms. I am also exploring how patrons, both scholars and the broader public, might engage architectural records and contribute to documenting the history of their communities. I anticipate sharing my research with the field of library and information science as well as the architectural community to create an open dialogue about the sustainability of records documenting the built environment.
I am currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information and my advisor is Dr. Margaret Hedstrom. Aside from a Ph.D. in Information, I am enrolled in two graduate certificate programs: Science, Technology and Society (STS) and Museum Studies.
My most recent research experience brought me to the town of Techiman in Ghana. Under the auspices of the Museum Studies at Michigan program, I undertook six weeks of ethnographic research studying the recordkeeping practices of the indigenous leadership structure of Techiman. During this period, I helped organize the records of the Techiman Traditional Council and train some of the Council staff in basic archives management and preservation. A paper on this experience, which I intend to submit to a refereed journal, is underway. The paper reflects on the place of textual records in a postcolonial oral society and discusses the role of records within an indigenous leadership structure. I tackle the relationship of archives with the preservation of culture and traditions, and the process by which archival records come to be regarded as heritage.
I look at archives not as a set of impartial collection of records, nor as a set of practices driven by a neutral imperative to preserve artifacts. In this regard, I relate archives with the exercise of power, the creation of knowledge and official histories and narratives, and the politics of identity formation. Thus, I have been pursuing research that critically questions the place of archival records and the practices associated with record keeping and curation as legitimate sources or practices of information and knowledge.
I have explored these themes in recent papers and articles published as a student at Michigan. My article, “The Archives of the New Possession,” in the refereed journal Archival Science, explores the entanglement of archives with colonialism, nationhood and the formation of national identity in the Philippines. In November 2009, I published a book chapter discussing how a collection of medical records created and consumed under a colonial system of medical segregation function as embodiment of community
identity and memory within the context of commemoration on the island of Culion, a former leper colony in the Philippines. My pre-candidacy paper titled “Visualizing Leprosy: Archives, Stigma and Social Memory” discusses how images and visual depictions of leprosy function as both representations of medical knowledge and embodiment of stigma and segregation.
My duties as a Research Assistant on an NSF-funded research project that looks at the uses of digitized images allowed me to further pursue my passion in visual archives. My research experience in this project led me to pursue a dissertation research that looks at closely the interaction between materiality and digital surrogacy.
My dissertation explores how the transformation of analog photographs into the new digital format is affecting the research practices and the interpretation of images by visual studies scholars. Here, I continue to be true to my interest in interrogating archives more critically, this time in terms of accounting for how image digitization, often regarded as a neutral technical process, impacts research practice and interpretation of visual records in profound ways. I pursue my research with the belief that the process of digitization is not merely a technical concern, but an issue that inspires us to rethink the changing nature of visual records, revisit our notions of authenticity and originality, and most importantly, widen our understanding of the power new media has in structuring interpretation, bestowing significance and
Before pursuing my Ph.D. studies, I was an Assistant Professor of archival studies in Philippines. In this context I had the opportunity to help establish archives and heritage centers in remote regions of the Philippines, facilitate workshop and training on collections management and preservation, and curate exhibitions on diverse subjects. In 2006, I organized a commemorative exhibit for the centennial of the Culion Leper Colony, a former medico-penal facility for people afflicted with leprosy in the Philippines.
Pendse Liladhar Ramchandra
I received my MLIS from the Information Studies program at UCLA in 2006. Since then I have been working full-time as a curator for South Asian Studies and Slavic/Eastern European Studies collections at the University Research Library, UCLA. In 2007, I was admitted in the PhD program in Information Studies at UCLA. In October 2009, I successfully defended my dissertation proposal that will investigate the modalities by which the French and Portuguese colonial era newspapers of India are understood as transient information objects in the post-colonial setting. What kind of information was intended to be conveyed in these newspapers? What degrees of collaboration and dissent can be found in the editorials of these periodicals? What type of information is contained within these newspapers and journals that was a sort of mass consumption in a rather unstable French and Portuguese colonial worlds in South Asia? These are some of the questions that my research intends to address. How the marginal populations of these small colonial enclaves were treated and how do the curators of these legacy collections relate to these evidentiary documents in three different modern settings.
The first setting will be the libraries and archives of India. The lack of preservation resources in the developing world countries like India has severely hampered the preservation of these high value low use print materials. For the second setting, I chose the current archival and library preservation practices with respect to these periodicals in both France and Portugal. The third setting is that of the libraries in the United States. On one hand, the preservation of these periodicals using the digitization and microfilming can be problematic due to various intellectual property rights related issues at these three locations. On the other hand, the access to the information that is contained within these periodicals might be hampered by either the lack of resources or low priorities that are often given to the newspaper materials in a typical library setting. Studying full-time in the program and working full-time at the library has not only posed some challenges but the situation has provided me with some excellent opportunities. I will focus on one of these unique opportunities below.
Recently, I was given an additional responsibility as a curator for the Central Asian Studies collection. I began to learn Turkish and Azerbaijani languages. The study of these languages has allowed me to compare them to other languages that I know including my native Marathi. The knowledge of multiple languages has affirmed my belief in a popular Turkish saying- “Bir lisan, bir insan”. This saying can be roughly translated as follows: one tongue one human. On surface, this adage might seem overly simplistic, i.e., for each portion of humanity there is one language in Babel like fashion, however about it has forced me to rethink how the language policies during the colonial period helped create an hybridized identity for both the colonizer and colonized. I would like to focus on language related colonization in India.
Sarah Ramdeen is a second year doctoral student at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a Fellow of the DigCCurr II project. Fellow duties include organizing of the DigCCurr II Professional Institutes and Symposiums along with 2 other Fellows. Her research interests include looking at the overlap between Information and Library Science and growing need for management of digital scientific collections, investigating how geologists and other scientists are expected to manage and maintain their digital collections, and the development of educational modules for educating scientists in managing digital collections, modeled on their own workflows. Her previous research includes working on a study of the UNC Library’s new Endeca catalog with Dr. Brad Hemminger, titled "Comparison of Library Catalog Searching Interfaces: Text Based Searching with Faceted Browsing versus Metadata Based Searching". She also recently completed a qualitative study of data preservation practices at State Geological Surveys. Currently she is working on a research project with Dr. Helen Tibbo and Dr. Rob Capra on email habits in the university setting. Ms. Ramdeen holds a BS in Geology and a BA in Humanities from Florida State University (FSU). She also holds an MS in Library and Information Studies with a Certificate in Museum Studies from FSU. In the Fall of 2006 she was an intern in London at the Natural History Museum where she worked in the Micropalaeontology section imaging fossils and conducting research.
Hea Lim Rhee
Throughout my academic and professional life I have been committed to the archival and library fields in the United States and South Korea. Currently I am a doctoral candidate specializing in archives, preservation, and records management at the University of Pittsburgh. I received my Master of Science in Information (MSI) from the University of Michigan, specializing in archives and records management. Before coming to the United States, my undergraduate major was library and information science (LIS), and I continued to pursue my studies in this area in my master’s program at Ewha Womans University, specializing in East Asian archival studies. At the graduate level, I have participated in research projects related to archives and/or libraries.
My major professional experience was two years as a librarian at the Central Library of Ewha Womans University. My primary task was to catalogue and classify East Asian (Korean, Chinese, and Japanese) medieval manuscripts and rare books using Korean Machine Readable Cataloging (KORMARC) and DDC 20. I also catalogued and classified Korean and German contemporary books using USMARC, KORMARC, and DDC 20. In addition, I worked for Korea Development Institute (KDI), a Korean government agency, and the C.V. Starr East Asian Library of Columbia University in New York as an intern.
My research objectives are to contribute to archival studies and introduce the Eastern and Western archival communities to each other’s archival knowledge. I will conduct my research from an international perspective based on my knowledge of East Asian archival studies and North American archival studies. I intend my trans-Pacific research to provide novel and valuable archival knowledge to the worldwide archival community. My research will also cross the archival and library fields. Synergetically applying my knowledge of archival studies and LIS, I will conduct interdisciplinary research.
I intend to pursue a university faculty position, and teaching will be a new and pleasant challenge in my professional life. I believe that teaching will enrich my students and myself. While I will facilitate students’ learning and keep them center stage in class, I will also learn how to be flexible in my interactions with students and their varied personalities and learning strategies. Every class will be a learning experience that will improve my teaching. My teaching style and course objectives will depend on the course,
but I have two consistent main goals. The first is to motivate students toward a level of independence where they develop a desire to learn on their own. I believe that a teacher must encourage students to desire intellectual improvement. My other teaching goal is to present theories, concepts, and empirical material in a way that allows students to acquire both archival knowledge and practical skills. My most important message to them will be the significance of their role in society as information professionals.
In January 2009, Seamus Ross became Dean of the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Dean. Prof. Ross is best described as having a passion for research in the areas of preserving cultural heritage and scientific digital objects, humanities informatics, and the application of information technology to libraries, archives and museums. From 1997, he was Founding Director of the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII), at the University of Glasgow, and Professor of Humanities Informatics and Digital Curation. Since 2004, Prof. Ross had also been the Associate Director of the United Kingdom’s Digital Curation Centre. Prof. Ross earned his BA from Vassar College, his MA from the University of Pennsylvania, and his DPhil from the University of Oxford.
I have a B.A. in English from Birmingham-Southern College and J.D. from the University of Alabama School of Law. I am currently finishing my master’s coursework at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information and have applied to continue my studies in the doctoral program. I am active in the both the Society of American and Archivists and the Association of Moving Image Archivists. I have substantial experience with both traditional, paper-based archives, as well as media archives and digital archives. I have interned at the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, the Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive, and I have worked on archival projects at the Harry Ransom Center, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, and the University of Texas Videogame Archive. My current areas of research interest are the long-term management of digital archives, the preservation of new media and born-digital objects, documenting participatory culture, and the application of intellectual property law to the archival practice. I have a particular interest in developing research that will aid and encourage media production organizations to adopt more robust self-documentation and self-archiving policies. In my scholarly work, I adopt a blend of qualitative research and legal scholarship. It is my sincere belief that we, as a culture, must aggressively develop and refine our archival practices to document and preserve the products of our increasingly digital culture.
Donghee Sinn is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Information Studies. She specializes in Archives and Records Management, and her research interests focus particularly on the archival research in relation with public memory, archival use/user studies, and personal archiving in the web environment. She has a B.A. and a Master's in Library and Information Science from Chung-Ang University in Seoul, Korea with a focus on history of books and Korean bibliography, and a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh, specializing in Archives and Records Management. Previously, Donghee worked at the National Archives in Korea in acquisition and appraisal, taught at a college in Korean bibliography, and worked as a reference librarian in Korea. While working for a Ph.D. in the States, she worked in the East Asian Library for the Korean Collection at the University of Pittsburgh. Since then she has been participating and serving on the Library Technology Committee and the Membership Committee of the Council of East Asian Libraries, which is a sub group of the Asian Studies Association. She also worked as a webmaster for one of the institutes at the University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation study was recognized and prizes were awarded from the ALA (American Library Association) and her own school. She is very interested in building bridges among several disciplines including archival studies, archiving in the web environment, and the East Asian culture and heritages.
I am a first-year doctoral student in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. My most recent position was that of archivist for the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University. I hold a master's degree from the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College with a concentration in archives and records management.
My academic and professional background and interests have been broadly focused on issues of preservation and access. As a doctoral student, I have continued to explore relationships between power, ethics, and access as related to the study of archives. I have come to strongly believe that these topics must contain a core discussion of ethics and social justice. I am looking forward to developing further research that addresses these issues as I move further towards the dissertation.
While at Texas Tech, I authored a chapter on sustainable archival access for a forthcoming SAA book titled “Green Archives,” and spoke on the same topic at the August 2009 meeting of the Society of American Archivists in Austin. I am active in SAA, currently sitting on the Distinguished Service Award committee and serving as a member of the Issues and Advocacy Roundtable steering group.
I am a PhD student in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. My approach to the archives has been shaped by my love of documentary studies,
background in political science, obsession with ethics, fascination with non-textual records, dependence on community, hope in emergent knowledge, and belief in boundary-pushing practices. My professional experience includes lobbying, journalism, editing, cataloguing, trucking, archival processing, and documentation.
My research objective is to study human rights documentation through ethnography of "archives in formation" (Michael Lynch). Additionally, I hope to contribute to curriculum
building around the ethics of preservation, problematizing the value systems behind our professional code of ethics and exploring the implications of advocacy in archives.
My scholarship philosophy is interdisciplinary - drawing from memory studies, film/radio documentation, capabilities theory and aspiration as embodied in archives, and museum studies - and grounded in fieldwork. My approach to learning is Freirian, intuitive, sensory, and practice-based.
Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman
Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman is Associate Professor of American Culture and Music at the University of Michigan. A Native Hawaiian by birth and an ethnomusicologist by training, her research brings historical, archival, and ethnographic perspectives to bear on the post-contact histories of music and dance performance traditions in Hawai‘i and Tahiti. She is the author of Sacred Hula: The Historical Hula ‘Ala‘apapa(Bishop Museum Press, 1998), and numerous articles in scholarly journals and edited volumes. Dr. Stillman has served as Facilitator to the non-profit organization K?lia i ka P?n?wai (Kumu Hula Association of Southern California), which has afforded valuable opportunities to combine archival scholarship with performance reconstruction. To date Dr. Stillman has curated three concerts and co-produced three CD recordings, Kal?kaua (2006), Kapi‘olani(2007), and Lili‘uokalani (2010). Her most recent CD publication is Ancient Hula Hawaiian Style Vol. 1: The Hula Kuahu (2010), a compilation of mid-20th century recordings with extensive liner notes. Dr. Stillman‘s work on CD productions introduced her to Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Daniel Ho, with whom she began a songwriting collaboration in 2007. Their first CD of newly-composed songs, ‘ikena(2008), was recorded by actress Tia Carrere and Daniel Ho, and received the Grammy Award for Best Hawaiian Album in 2009. The followup CD, He Nani(2009), also received a Grammy nomination; and the creative team is preparing for the release of the next CD in July 2010. Dr. Stillman also teaches hula at the master class level under the umbrella of Great Lakes Hula Academy, which she launched in 2007.
Proscovia Svard commenced in May 2009 as a PhD candidate at the Department of INformation Technology and Media, Mid Sweden University in Harnosand, Sweden. She is working is under the auspices of the Center for Digital Information Management (CEDIF) at www.cedif.org. The Centre for Digital Information Management is a three year research and development programme funded by the EU and is managed by the Mid Sweden University in cooperation with county board of Vasternorrland and the municipalities of Sundsvall and Harnosand. The project aims at development models for effective and long-term information management within mainly public organizations but also within private organizations. She has worked as an Archivist, Research administration for the Program on Post-Conflict Transition, the State and Civl Society and Project Co-ordinator for a Nordic Documentation Project on the Liberation Struggles of Southern Africa www.liberationafrica.se at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden. She has a BA and MA in Archives and Information Science and a BSc in Media and INformation Science. Her research interests are; Business Process Management, Enterprise COntent Management, Enterprise ARchitecture, electronic information managemetn, long-term preservation of information, Truth and Reconcilian Comissions and their documentation processes, the role of archives in enhancing accountability and transparency in government institutions, information access and the link to democracy and development, long-term preservation of electronic information and its management.
Biography not available at the moment.
I trained and worked as an archivist in Ireland before moving to the United States to pursue a doctoral degree in Library and Information Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. My dissertation study, “Documenting School Life: Formal and Informal Imprints of a Fifth Grade Classroom,” used sociological methods and theory to look at school records as social entities; in the process uncovering how records are created and used in socially organized ways. In 2004, I joined the faculty of the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where I worked as an assistant professor and coordinator of the Specialization in Archives and Records Administration. In 2010 I joined the faculty of the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin.
My area of research centers on what can be broadly termed the social study of everyday life and what Riggins calls ―the socialness of things. As part of the study of material culture, my research examines the relationship and intersection of people and objects in everyday society, taking a largely qualitative, naturalistic and constructivist approach. Taking a democratic or egalitarian research stance, my primary interest is in studying objects that form a pervasive and often overlooked part of our day-to-day lives. These include two-dimensional textual artifacts (particularly those documents or records that people create in the ordinary course of activity whether at work, school, or as part of their personal lives) and collections of three-dimensional artifacts that have significance as pop culture items.
In looking at the relationship and interaction between objects and people I focus on the meaning that objects have for individuals, as well as the role that objects play in negotiating and representing broader social relationships. I am also interested in the skills, expertise, and knowledge of objects that people must learn and demonstrate in order to be recognized as members of particular communities. Part of my interest in material culture and the social study of everyday life lies in making the familiar strange, turning the spotlight on seemingly unprepossessing objects and activities and by doing so showing them in a new light. I am also interested in figuring out how people make the most of life, how people negotiate local situations, and what we all share in common to make this happen. My interest in material culture covers three main areas:
I am a third-year doctoral student at the UCLA Department of Information Studies. I have a B.A. in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and an MLS from Indiana University. I also have years of experience working in archives, special collections and public libraries. The focus of my doctoral research is Electronic Medical Records (EMRs).
My interests cover several areas in this regard. In the sense most relevant to this meeting, I am interested in including some concepts as they are commonly articulated in archival work (such as accountability, justice and evidence) into policy discussions surrounding EMRs, which tend to focus on technical/managerial concepts such as efficiency and interoperability. I am also interested in the politics of privacy and consent as they relate to electronic medical record-keeping and the materiality of electronic
records over and against notions that technological progress leads to an escape from the physical.
If I were to describe my philosophy toward scholarship and teaching briefly, I would say that it revolves around justice as a core value along with a critical orientation toward received knowledge. I think these values and skills are necessary and largely receding from Western society and it is my goal as a researcher and teacher to promulgate them.
Kelvin L. White is an Assistant Professor at university of Oklahoma’s School of Library and Information Studies. He received a Master’s degree in Afro-American Studies and his Ph.D. in Information Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Using social justice as a framework, his work examines the interconnections between the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which recordkeeping activities exist and the implications they have for marginalized or underrepresented communities. Currently, his research examines issues of memory and remembering in Afro-Mexican communities in the Costa Chica (Mexico) and Native American communities of Oklahoma; critically interrogates contemporary archival theory and constructs; and develops ways in which education and pedagogy might contribute to cultural relevancy and sensitivity in archival practice and research.
I am a student in the LIS doctoral program in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College. I have an MS in Library and Information Science with an archives concentration and a MA in History from Simmons. Since 2005, I have served as an adjunct instructor at Simmons,teaching archives and records management courses.
My research interests center around recordkeeping behavior. I am interested in how an organization’s recordkeeping processes, rules, and expectations shape the documentation of its activities and how that documentation shapes the organization’s understanding of its actions. A possible dissertation topic for this research question may be the U.S. military’s process for documenting and reporting its operations during the Vietnam War and how the military’s reporting influenced its understanding of the war. In addition to having an academic dimension of adding to the recordkeeping behavior literature, this research may be able to make a policy contribution to understanding the complexity of documenting, measuring, and assessing the state of current counterinsurgency conflicts.
Since 1996 I have worked as an archivist and records manager at higher education institutions, serving, since 2002, as the University Records Manager at Tufts University. In this role I provide departments with recordkeeping advice, work with appropriate stakeholders to develop records policies, and contribute to
institution-wide information management efforts, such as data privacy compliance.
I served as a co-principal investigator on an NHPRC electronic records research project, Fedora and the Preservation of University Records. Core deliverables from this project included requirements for trustworthy recordkeeping and preservation systems and steps for trustworthy ingest and maintain processes. I am currently the project director of an NHPRC electronic records program expansion grant that is developing encoded submission agreements that support archival accessioning and creating archival description of records creators at Tufts University.
The focus of my efforts in the PhD program is to crystallize my research interests, my work as a practicing records manager and archivist, and my teaching experience as an instructor to enable me to make contributions to the academic literature, shape records and information-related policy, and participate directly in the education of new members of the archives and records management profession.
Bradley J. Wiles
I am a manuscripts archivist in the Special Collections Department at Hill Memorial LIbrary on Louisiana State University's Baton Rouge campus. I hold a M.A. in History from Western Illinois in Macomb, Illinois, and a M.A. in Library and Information Studies with a focus in Archives and Records Administration from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Prior to my employment at LSU, I worked on a series of projects at the Wiconsis Historical Society, the UW-Madison Oral History Department, and the State of Wisconsin Department of Health and Family Services. I am active in several library and archives organizations including the Louisiana Archives and Manuscripts ASsociation of which I am currently vice president.
Since September 2008 I have been working remotely and part-time toward a Ph.D. through the Department of INformation Studies at Aberystwyth Unviersity in Wales, U.K. Through the details of my dissertation proposal are being finalized, it will include a comparative assessment between the development of archives education in the United States and the United Kingdom.
My dual role as a professional and student offers a great opportunity to gain first hand experience as a practicing archivist while exploring the theoretical and conceptual implications of archival work. My research interests include historical and social aspects of archives as institutions, objects, and places, and archiving as an essential component of cultural production. I believe a broad understanding of archives within society is important to its ongoing development as a profession and scholarly discipline. I hope to articulate this understanding in future instruction and research.
I am a filmmaker by training and received my MFA in Directing from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television. My most recent film is a short documentary about my grandmother from Malaysia entitled, “Homecoming”. And it was through this film that I found my way to the PhD program in Information Studies at UCLA. In making “Homecoming”, I experienced first-hand the power of visual images to hold and transfer history and memory—a picture really is worth a thousand words and every picture does tell a story. Moreover, I came to believe in the value and significance of one’s personal archive to validate one’s identity and make visible one’s experience; and in the importance of these archives as part of a greater whole to document, preserve, and display the histories and cultures of the larger communities one belongs to. As my film work explores personal histories, memories, and identity, my work in Archival Studies engages those same ideas but in the broader context of collective community histories, memories, and experiences that are (re)configured in the diaspora.
My research interests include the documentation, collection, preservation, and dissemination of historical and cultural records in Asian American communities and archival formations in the Asian diaspora. My work explores the notions of historical memory in im/migrant and diasporic narratives and the ways those experiences are embodied and performed in the everyday practices of local, transnational, and globalize communities, as well as circulated across time and space with the mediation of digital technologies. My current film project is a documentary about an organization in Los Angeles that mobilized the Chinese American community to build a library in its Chinatown neighborhood. My films have screenedinternationally in film festivals, academic conferences, and on public television.
Prior to returning to graduate school, I was the Assistant Director of the Center for EthnoCommunications at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center where I developed, produced, and promoted media about and by Asian Americans and their communities. I also taught classes in community media, video ethnography, and documentary filmmaking at the UCLA Department of Asian American Studies I am planning to continue my career in academia. I find teaching very rewarding and would like to teach in higher education for the foreseeable future. In addition, I want to continue as a filmmaker and incorporate documentary filmmaking, community media-making, and visual ethnography in my methodological, pedagogical, and research practices in Archival studies. Moreover, and more significantly, I also want to build upon the interest that was sparked working with my own family’s collection of photographs and film footage to expand my scholarship, emphasizing the preservation of records in diverse communities to bring them into the cultural and historical fold of the Archives and archival understanding and practices.
I originally hail from the East Coast, growing up in Maryland and graduating from college in Pennsylvania where I majored in East Asian Studies.
I have been involved with the archives profession in a variety of capacities since the late 1970s, having served as Archivist of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark and Seton Hall University (1978-1984); Archivist and Library Director at the American Bible Society (1984-1994), and Director of the Archives/Public History graduate program at New York University (1994-present). My research interests involve American religious history, the history of records and recordkeeping, and emerging technologies. I also serve as Publications Editor for the Society of American Archivists, and have been professionally active in a variety of areas. I am a Fellow of SAA and have been a member of SAA Council. Most recently, I served as PI for an NHPRC grand, “Digital History Across the Curriculum,” which involved integrating new media and technology more thoroughly into our graduate program.
Joel Wurl is a Sr. Program Officer in the Division of Preservation & Access, National Endowment for the Humanities, where he currently coordinates the division’s “Humanities Collections & Reference Resources” program. He is also Adjunct Instructor in the Applied History program at George Mason University. Prior to joining NEH in October, 2006, he worked for 20 years with University of Minnesota's Immigration History Research Center ending there as Head of Research Collections and Associate Director. From 2002 to 2005, he served on the council and executive committee of the Society of American Archivists and as editor of the Midwest Archives Conference’s journal Archival Issues. He co-chaired the program committee for the 2008 SAA annual meeting in San Francisco. Wurl's publications have appeared in both archival and immigration/ethnic history journals, and he is general editor for "North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories," an online publication of Alexander St. Press. His 2005 article “Ethnicity as Provenance: In Search of Values and Principles for Documenting the Immigrant Experience.” received the bi-annual Margaret Cross Norton Award for outstanding contribution to Archival Issues. Wurl was named a Distinguished Fellow of SAA in 2007.
yakel [at] umich.edu
I am currently an Associate Professor in the University of Michigan School of Information. Before joining Michigan faculty in 2000, I taught at the University of Pittsburgh and prior to that was an archivist and records manager for 15 years. I teach in the Archives and Records Management specialization and am coordinator for the new Preservation of Information specialization. Additionally, I also teach a doctoral seminar in qualitative methods. My research interests include access to primary sources and user information behavior in archives, particularly digital archives. Recently, I have been investigating how social computing / Web 2.0 applications affect access to archives through the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections. My other major research project concerns Archival Metrics and creating standardized assessment and reporting tools for archivists. My research has been supported by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I have been active in the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and and served on its governing council. I became an SAA Fellow in 1999.
I am a new doctoral student at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I received an MSI at the University of Michigan School of Information, specializing in both archives and records management and preservation of information. Because I completed coursework towards a master’s degree in history specializing in the colonial period in Korea, I learned how the colonial government carefully used historical documents to gain political power and to make sure that the Korean people became less resistant to Japanese rule. However, my original interest in archival and information studies in historical contexts led me to broader interests through my work experiences in the university archives, museum, and IT industries. Now I am interested in how archives are becoming more accessible by virtue of the Internet. Specifically, I am interested in exploring how digital archives are represented on the Web, how users interact with digital archives, how the Web mitigates traditional interactions and mediations between archivists and users, and how the impact of digital archives on users differs from the impact of traditional archives.
At the University of Michigan, I was involved in a research project named “Archival Metrics”, a study jointly conducted by the iSchools at the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Toronto. One of the aims of the project is to create standardized survey tools and other performance measures that public repositories could use. I am mainly involved in the “Archival Metrics and User Evaluation for Governmental Archives” phase of the study. My contribution to the project includes data collection and analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data.
youn [at] ucla.edu
I am a PhD candidate in Information Studies at UCLA. I received an MA in history in Korea, and also an MLIS in Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Because of my background, my interests are always related to culture, society and (archival) technology, in particular, how cultural elements could influence building an archival system. For my dissertation project, Standardization of Archival description in Korea, I conducted six months of field research in two different archival institutes in Korea. I found the institutions appropriate the principles of the ISAD(G) in their own way and implement them into the system. The study shows that the attempt to standardize archival description through ISAD(G) is localized and feeds off previous practices and culture. Based on the research, I will continue my research focusing on various cultural impacts on archival technology. Also I hope to develop an archival curriculum from a more intercultural/ international perspective of archives.
jane.zhang [at] simmons.edu
I am a PhD candidate (archival concentration) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College, currently working on my dissertation entitled “the principle of original order and the organization and representation of digital archives”. I graduated from the joint MAS/MLIS program, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada in 2001. After graduation, I worked at the University of Calgary Archives for about two years, and then moved to Boston in 2003. I am currently a records analyst at Harvard University Archives.
At the University of British Columbia, I participated in the InterPARES1 project as one of the graduate research assistants. While working at the University of Calgary Archives, I reviewed sample archival records to study the pattern of handwritten records in modern archives. The paper “The Lingering of Handwritten Records” was presented at I-CHORA1 at the University of Toronto in 2003. After moving to Boston to work at the Harvard University Archives, I reviewed sample colonial collections in the Boston area to study American colonial recordkeeping. The paper “The Legacy of American Colonial Recordkeeping” was presented at I-CHORA2 at the University of Amsterdam in 2005.
I started the research on digital information representation in 2006 and completed two papers so far. “Ontology and the Semantic Web” was presented at the first North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization (NASKO) at the University of Toronto in 2007. “Remembered History, Archival Discourse, and the September 11 Digital Archive” was presented at the 2008 SAA Research Forum at San Francisco. My dissertation research continues to explore the topic of archival theory and practice in the information age, and specifically, in digital archival representation.
Index of Research Interests
Bradley J. Wiles
Hea Lim Rhee
Eun G. Park
Digital Media/Law/Data Sharing
Human Relations to Records
Pendse Liladhar Ramchandra
Dong Hee Sinn
Devan Ray Donaldson
Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman
Laura Elizabeth Helton
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