Keynote Speakers

OPENING REMARKS

REBECCA GOLDMAN is the College Archivist at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA and currently serves as the chair of SAA's College and University Archives Section. A graduate of Swarthmore College, she received her MSLIS from Drexel University in 2008 and her MA in Public History from La Salle University in January 2018. Rebecca served as the first chair of SAA's Students and New Archives Professionals Section, which advocates for new archivists throughout the profession. Three months into her first archives job, she created the archives-themed webcomic and humor blog Derangement and Description.

CLOSING REMARKS

SNOWDEN BECKER has been a leader in the field of media archives and preservation for over fifteen years. She is a co-founder of the international Home Movie Day event and the nonprofit Center for Home Movies, which was awarded the SAA Hamer Kegan Award for archival advocacy in 2017. She received an MLIS degree from UCLA in 2001, and is completing her doctorate in Information Studies from the University of Texas at Austin with a dissertation on archival aspects of evidence management practices in law enforcement agencies. Becker is currently the MLIS Program Manager in UCLA's Department of Information Studies, where she teaches graduate courses in media preservation, collections administration, professional development and portfolio design.

Session 1

Getting Ready For Work

From Student to Accessioning Archivist: Changing Roles and Responsibilities in a Changing Department
Jessica Maddox, Accessioning Archivist, University of Nevada, Reno

Hired as a student assistant in the UNR Special Collections and University Archives Department over a decade prior, Maddox will discuss her changing role in the department, from student assistant to professional staff in a newly created accessioning archivist position. Her presentation will discuss this as well as significant changes occurring in the department, from the hiring of a new department head and the retirement of longtime faculty members, to the implementation of new workflows that help to bring the department into the 21st century. Jessica hopes to share insight into what she has learned in her challenging new position and how that relates to her experience in library school.

Programming for Archivists: Getting Started
Noah Geraci, Digital Assets Metadata Librarian, UC Riverside

There’s plenty of hype about how everyone should learn to code or how tech skills are supposed to guarantee a good job. But what is genuinely useful for archivists to know about computing? What skills help us do archival work more effectively, and better steward the collections we work with? What resources exist, and where does a person with minimal experience begin (especially if you feel critical of and alienated by mainstream "tech" culture)?

From the perspective of a new professional who has learned on the fly, this presentation will discuss the relationship of computer programming and archival work, and offer some quick, practical starting points-- like working with command-line shells, Python, and the ArchivesSpace API; finding other archivists' code on Github; and looking to the resources of communities like DLF, Code4Lib and Software/Library Carpentry.

I am supposed to know how to do that? On the reality of teaching expectations in academic libraries and archives.
Alyssa Loera, Head of Digital Services and Technology, Cal Poly Pomona

Depending on the type of institution, an archivist will likely be asked to teach to an audience at some point in their career (the type of audience will vary). Instruction can range from one-shot overviews within a classroom setting, workshops, trainings, or simply the elevator speeches needed to convey the importance of the archives. Often graduate programs and/or entry-level processing positions downplay the amount of active user engagement that comes with higher level archives and library positions. This talk will discuss how teaching requirements can differ across the academic environment with examples from the speaker’s own transition into a more instruction-heavy position. It will also discuss mechanisms for improving one’s own approaches to instruction, with discussions on instructional design, audience analysis, peer to peer learning, and standardized teaching frameworks.

Wages for Intern Work: Denormalizing Unpaid Positions in Archives and Libraries
Karly Wildenhaus, MLIS Student, UCLA

While no comprehensive studies have yet been published quantifying the extent of unpaid internships within archives and libraries, their prevalence is easily recognized as widespread. Unpaid internships are offered and facilitated based on the implication that they correlate positively to future job prospects, although recent studies point to evidence that complicates this idea. Instead, the prevalence of unpaid internships may negatively impact efforts for diversity and inclusion among information workers while contributing to greater precarity of labor throughout the workforce. Meanwhile, professional organizations and academic programs often do not discuss the realities of unpaid internships, and some MLIS programs require or encourage students to work without remuneration for course credit at their own expense. Situating unpaid internships within larger questions of economic access, labor laws, indebtedness, and neoliberalization, this talk will advocate for the denormalization of unpaid internships within archives and libraries, especially for those institutions that articulate social justice as part of their institutional values. Although rendering these positions obsolete is likely beyond the power of any one entity, this talk will identify tactics that can be taken at the individual- and institutional-level to advance economic justice and the dignity of all work that occurs in our respective fields.

Session 2

Archival Dilemmas: Collection-Based Case Studies

On Performance: Archival Practice and its Challenges
Carolina Meneses, Metadata Technician, University of Miami

Performances are always transforming and reinventing themselves through the interactions that create them. Each one is a unique manifestation or expression of the experiences of the performer, their interpretation of the choreography and the audience. No two performances are identical. Understanding the dynamic nature of performance is integral to its preservation. To that end, Meneses will provide a brief survey of current archival practices for performance (dance, theatre, performance & conceptual art) archives, as well as discuss her experience applying the “More Product Less Process” approach to the Trisha Brown Dance Company’s archive in New York. Special attention will be given to what makes performance archives different from traditional archives such as the diversity of archival material, reproducing ephemeral performances, standardization and notation, and challenges in processing and providing access for performance archives in an institutional environment. Other topics and points of conversation will include what major resources and professional support exist for performance archivists, and what are the limitations to current practices in the field.

Saving More Than the Sea: Reviving the Salton Sea History Museum
Julia Hause, Archival Studies Student, UCLA 

This presentation will focus on Hause’s work with materials from the former Salton Sea History Museum (SSHM). Championed by local historian Jennie Kelly, SSHM had a short and tumultuous history. It opened in the historic, Albert Frey-designed North Shore Beach and Yacht Club in 2010, where it operated for nearly a year. A conflict between the Museum and the building owner forced SSHM to relocate in 2011. The collection was eventually moved to Kelly’s residence and various other storage facilities, where the materials have largely remained until the present. With Kelly’s untimely death in 2015, efforts to reestablish the Museum ceased until 2016. Hause has worked on tracking down the dispersed collection items and developed an inventory for the purpose of finding a more permanent home for the materials. In the presentation, Hause will describe the work she has accomplished thus far and will discuss some of the challenges faced by working with items from a defunct community-based organization as an outsider to the community.

Too Hard to Handle: The Problematics of Processing Porn - Two Internship Case Studies
Jonathan Naveh, MLIS/Media Archival Studies Student, UCLA

Recent processing internships at The UCLA Film & Television Archive (FTVA) and California State University at Northridge Special Collections (CSUN) have led to two fundamentally different experiences handling pornographic collections. During the summer of 2017, Naveh interned at UCLA FTVA and processed unidentified visual film elements as part of the Pat Rocco Collection and Outfest-UCLA Legacy Project. The identification of these elements contributed to the Legacy Project’s mission to preserve at-risk LGBTQ moving picture images. Outfest and The UCLA FTVA have thus preserved, cataloged, and made accessible most of Rocco’s erotic collection. As a result, scholars and historians find themselves able to draw upon these films as audiovisual documents of mid 20th-century gay culture. In fall 2017 Naveh processed the Robert E. Mueller Scrapbook Collection at CSUN. While Rocco’s collection was densely informative, the CSUN scrapbooks lacked provenance information, historical context, and other helpful indicators. This presentation will examine the problematic aspects of processing these different pornographic collections. Naveh will discuss how knowledge of provenance, use and users, historical context, and intentionality aids archivists when processing and safeguarding erotic materials.

Creating Diversity and Inclusivity Through Outreach and Collaboration: A Look at LAAC's Acid Free Magazine
Grace Danico, Archivist, Private Collection

The mission of SAA's Strategic Plan is to promote the value and diversity of archives and archivists. This presentation will discuss the Los Angeles Archivists Collective's Press & Publications subcommittee and their strategic work on Acid Free Magazine. Their goal was to make the publication inclusive of the diverse people, voices, and experiences that make up the archival community and the communities we serve. To accomplish this goal, they posted calls for submissions to various channels with a focus on people of color, reached out to a diverse group of archivists and invited them to collaborate on content and/or participate in being interviewed for the publication, and also featured unique archives and collections of cultural value. The end result is a nationally recognized publication that not only recognizes and celebrates diversity in archives and archivists, but also builds connections to a wider audience that extends outside the archival world.