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Category: diversity

Seeking Diverse Voices: Reflections on Recruiting Chapter Authors

My original book proposal for Partners for Preservation was anonymized and shared by the commissioning editor to a peer in the digital preservation community. One of the main comments I received was that I should make sure that I recruited authors from outside the United States. Given that the book’s publisher, Facet, is a UK-based publisher – it made sense that I should work to avoid only recruiting US chapter authors.

But I didn’t want to stop with trying to recruit authors from outside the US. I wanted to work towards as diverse a set of voices for the ten chapters as I could find.

When I started this project, I had no experience recruiting people to write chapters for a book. I definitely underestimated the challenges of finding chapter authors. I sent a lot of emails to a lot of very smart people. It turns out that lots of people don’t reply to an email from someone they don’t already know. I worked hard to balance waiting a reasonable time for a reply with continuing my quest for authors.

I needed people who fit all of the following criteria:

  • topic expert
  • interested in writing a chapter
  • with enough time to write a chapter by my deadlines

… all while keeping an eye on all the other facets of each author that would contribute to a diverse array of voices. There were a lot of moving parts.

This is a non-exhaustive list of sources I used for finding my authors:

  • personal contacts
  • referrals from colleagues and friends
  • LinkedIn
  • lists of presenters from conferences
  • authors of articles related to my topics of interest
  • lots of googling

I am very proud of the eleven chapter authors (one chapter was co-written by two individuals) I recruited. For a book with only 10 chapters, having a balanced gender distribution and five different countries of residence represented feels like a major accomplishment. Each chapter author is shown below, in the order in which their chapters appear in the book.

I picked the “Grow It Yourself” WPA poster featured at the top of this post because the work of recruiting the right balance of authors often felt like planning a garden. I pursued many potential chapter authors with ideas in mind of what they might write. Over the life of the project, my vision of each chapter evolved – much as a garden plan must be based on the availability of seeds, sunlight, and water.

I believe that the extra effort I put into finding these authors made Partners for Preservation a better book. It probably would have been much easier to recruit 5 white men from the US and 5 white men from the UK to write the chapters I needed, but the final product would have been less compelling. I hope you find this to be the case if you choose to read the book. I also hope that if you work on a similar project that you consider making a similar extra effort.

Image credit: Grow it yourself Plan a farm garden now. by Herbert Bayer from NYC WPA War Services, [between 1941 and 1943]. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/wpapos/item/99400959/

 

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Breast Cancer: Join the Army of Women & Help Scientists Find the Cause

In honor of the Army of Women Day, my post today takes a quick look at how the American public  has been delivered various messages about cancer via posters and PSAs.

These two 1930s posters from the Library of Congress focus their message on convincing women to seek treatment from their doctor quickly and not fight their cancer alone.

By the 70s we got PSAs from organizations like the American Cancer Society, focusing on not smoking, doing self-exams and seeing your doctor for ‘regular cancer check-ups’. The clip below features Farrah Fawcett in 1981 (25 years before her own cancer diagnosis):

Almost 30 years later we have a new kind of video appeal. The Army of Women, a program of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, funded by a grant from the Avon Foundation for Women, is recruiting 1,000,000 women (and men!) of all ages and ethnicities to participate in studies to find the cause of breast cancer. Their PSA below recasts the challenge. Now, instead of living a healthy lifestyle and then seeking out doctors for diagnosis and treatment – we are asked to join forces with others to support doctors in their research the cause of breast cancer.

I lost my aunt to breast cancer. I have more friends and family who have fought breast cancer than I can count on one hand. I joined the Army of Women over a year ago.

What can you do?

  • If you are over 18, sign up to join the Army of Women database. The first step is to add your name to the pool of individuals willing to be contacted to hear about research projects in the future. It is free. You are not agreeing to participate in any specific project, just adding yourself to the list so researchers can find the subjects they need as fast as possible.
  • Invite your friends and family to join.

Help us reach a day when the only way that a woman can learn about what it was like to have breast cancer is from memoirs, documentaries and tear-jerker movies. I want to put cancer in the archives (forgive me.. couldn’t resist it!).

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Ada Lovelace Day: Portraits of Women in Technology

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What does a brilliant female scientist look like? In honor of the 2010  Ada Lovelace Day, I went on a hunt through the Filckr Commons and other sources of archival images to see how many portraits of women who have contributed to science and technology I could find.

A few years back I read Malcolm Gladwell‘s book Blink. One of the ideas I took away was the profound impact of the images with which we surround ourselves. He discusses his experience taking an Implicit Association Test (IAT) related to racism and his opinion that surrounding oneself with images of accomplished black leaders can change ones ‘implicit racism’. Project Implicit still continues. I found a demo of the ‘Gender-Science IAT’ and took it (you can too!). “This IAT often reveals a relative link between liberal arts and females and between science and males.” My result? “Your data suggest little or no association between Male and Female with Science and Liberal Arts.” My result was received by 18% of those taking the test. 54% apparently show a strong or moderate automatic association between male and science and female and liberal arts.

My inspiration for this post is to find images of accomplished women in science and technology to help young women and girls fight this ‘automatic association’. How can you imagine yourself into a career when you don’t have role models? Lets find the most varied assortment of images of what female scientists and technologists looks like!

The Smithsonian has an entire set of Women in Science images on the Flickr Commons about which they wrote a fabulous blog post over on their Visual Archives Blog. Consider the difference between the Smithsonian Flickr set of Portraits of Scientists and Inventors and that of Women in Science shown below in my snazzy animated GIF.

For me, the first set goes a long way to associate what a scientist or inventor looks like to images of white men with varying degrees of facial hair. I don’t see myself in that set of photos, even though there are a few women mixed into the set. The Women in Science set shows me women and, even though the images are black and white and reflect the style of another era, I can imagine myself fitting in with them.

Digging into a few specific examples within the ‘Women in Science’ images, on the left below we see research scientist Eloise Gerry who worked for the US Forest Service from 1910 through 1954. The caption from this image is “Dr. Gerry in her laboratory with the microscope that helped give the great naval stores industry in the United States a new lease on life.” On the right we have Physicist Marie Curie.

Over on the website of the Smithsonian’s Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology I found a few more images. On the left we have mathematician Tatiana Ehrenfest, from the first half of the 20th century, and on the right a physicist from the 1700s, marquise du Châtelet, Gabrielle-Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil. These were not easy to find – I did in fact skim through all the names and photos listed to find the two shown here.

After thinking a bit about the shortest path to more images of women in science and technology I went onto Freebase.com. I was so pleased to discover how easy it was for me to find entries for computer scientists, then filter by those who were female and had images. This gave me the faces of Female Computer Scientists, including those shown in the screen shot below (and yes, that is Ada Lovelace herself 2nd from the left in the top row).

I was excited to find more images and next I pulled together a list of Female Scientists. Finally a bit more diversity in the faces below (and there are many more images to explore if you click through).

Finally, I put a call out on both Twitter and the DevChix mailing list asking for women to share images of themselves for use in this blog post. Within just a few hours I received photos of Lorna Mitchell (a PHP developer in the UK – photo by Sebastian Bergmann), Aimée Morrison (shown crafting a social multimedia curriculum for DHSI 2010), Kristen Sullivan and a group photo of the DC LinuxChix dinner at ShmooCon.

There are many sources of images of women who have contributed to or are members of the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, but one of the best are archives. Consider the photo credits page for the website dedicated to Biographies of Women Mathematicians which credits 9 different archives for images used on the site.

Images are so powerful. The preservation of images of women like those mentioned above is happening in archives around the world. The more of these images that we can collect and present in a unified way, the more young women can see themselves in the faces of those who came before. It sounds so simple, but imagine the impact of a website that showed face after face of women in science and tech. Of course I would want a short bio too and the ability to filter the images by specialty, location and date. I think that Freebase.com could be a great place to focus efforts. Their APIs should make it easy to leverage images and all the structured data about women in tech that we could possibly dream to collect. I know that many of the posts created today will feature photos of amazing tech women, how do we organize to collect them in one place? Who wants to help?

If you know of additional archival collections including images of tech women, please let me know!

Happy Ada Lovelace Day everyone!

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A History of Our Own, Representing Communities and Identities on the Web (SAA09: Session 202)

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LOC Flickr Commons: Sylvia Sweets Tea RoomAndrew Flinn, University College London (UCL), was the second speaker during SAA09’s Session 202 with his presentation ‘A History of Our Own, Representing Communities and Identities on the Web’. Flinn began with the idea that archives are “a place for creating and re-working memory”. While independent community archives are constituted around many purposes, Flinn’s main interest is in communities focused on absences and mis-representation of a group or event in history. Communities in which there is a cultural, politcal, or artistic activism. Some of these communities may be considered ‘movements’.

How should/can archivists support local archiving activities?

Part of the challenge of online communities is the need to capture the interactions in order to not loose the full picture. The National Listing of Community Archives in the UK‘s website states that they “seek to document the history of all manner of local, occupations, ethnic, faith and other diverse communities”.

The UCL’s International Centre for Archives and Records Management Research and User Studies (ICARUS) “brings together researchers in user access and description, community archives and identity, concepts and contexts of records and archives, and information policy”. Flinn is the Principal Investigator on the ICARUS project Community archives and identities which focuses on in depth interviews of 4 institutions which are “documenting and sustaining community heritage”.

These are some example online community sites:

Main Findings

  • proceed from a position that ‘knowing your own history’ is beneficial their communities as well as to the public at large
  • the quality of the work is done by individual passion and sacrifice, voluntary
  • there is ambivalence to/about the mainstream archives sector — keen to work with mainstream archives, but scarred by past bad experiences
  • good practices now could lead to partnerships in the future
  • these are living archives — not static.. still alive and growing
  • these ideas prompt re-evaluation of conventional archives thinking
  • lots of access to digital objects – perhaps movement to online existence

We need to understand that these communities evolve and are fluid. They have as broad variety of structures, sizes and methods of working. What are the patterns in participation & ownership?

The site urban 75 has hosted extended discussions about recent UK history. Efforts include identification of places and people in uploaded photos. The site connects people about issues about housing and local services – it is very practical but it also has evolved to include this historical documentation. One example post from the Brixton Forum shows a discussion about an Old shop front revealed on Atlantic Road.

A Short Aside

Next Flinn apologized for taking his talk slightly off script. Setting his papers aside, he spoke to the audience about the eXHulme website which he had discovered the evening before while finishing his presentation. Having lived in Hulme, Manchester himself, he felt a great impact from looking through the site. He spent 4 hours looking at it – including photos such as the travellers living in their buses parked – otteburn close 1996 seen at the bottom of this page. His discovery and exploration of this site gave him a greater personal understanding of the impact of these types of community documentation projects. I felt he would have been happy to keep talking about this site and the directions it had sent his thoughts — but he then got back to his papers and continued.

Building Community Online

Interactions online are the historic record of the community itself. Archives evolve and change as the community builds and edits their online content. These heritage and archive sites work to shift from the idea of visitors to engaging users in interaction — they need users of the website to feel part of the community.

Examples of sites building community online:

How do you successfully encourage participation (rather than large number of passive observers) which is crucial to the success of these types of initiatives? Lurking without contributing is easy – even if joining requires action. The rate of uptake may correspond with the sense of ownership. Heritage projects might encourage and sustain such participation. See Elisa Giaccardi & Leysia Palen’s article  – The Social Production of Heritage through Cross-media Interaction: Making Place for Place-making.

Suggestions

  • encourage conversation and treat all stories as having value – value every account
  • promote a sense of ownership once a story has been shared
  • allow for multiple ways to engage with and share content and memories
  • recognize and let users shift from observer to active member

Flinn’s Conclusions

  • What are the challenges and perils facing community archives? Lack of resources. People are doing these things in unsustainable ways
  • Why should we sustain independent community archives? Benefit to individuals, communities and broader society.
  • What can professional archivists do? Support and partnership with groups seeking this sort of partnership.

My Thoughts

The image I included above is from the Library of Congress’s Flickr Commons project. If you read through the comments on this photo you can see a diverse group of individuals come together to document the history of Sylvia Sweets Tea Room. This is just another example of the process of documentation being as interesting as the original image itself.

There is still so much to learn in the arena of building productive online communities. Archivists working through how to archive what online communities create will need to understand how the process of creation is documented via various software tools. As the techniques for encouraging participation evolve – archivists will need to evolve right along with them. I think it is interesting to envision archivists working in this space and supporting these types of communities — becoming as much the champions of the community itself as preservers of a community’s collaborative creations.

Image Credit: Flickr Commons Library of Congress: Sylvia Sweets Tea Room, corner of School and Main streets, Brockton, Mass

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2009, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

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Library of Congress Inauguration 2009 Audio and Video Project

President Taft and his wife lead the inaugural parade, 1909 (Library of Congress: Prints and Photographs Division)

Amazing how much can change in 100 years. In March of 1909, the stereograph above shows African Americans driving the carriage that carried President and Mrs. Taft from the Capitol to lead the inauguration parade to the White House. On January 20th of 2009, Barack Obama will be the guest of honor. The American Folklife Center‘s Inauguration 2009 Sermons and Orations Project aims to collect recordings, transcriptions and ephemera of speeches addressing the significance of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first African American president.

It is expected that such sermons and orations will be delivered at churches, synagogues, mosques and other places of worship, as well as before humanist congregations and other secular gatherings. The American Folklife Center is seeking as wide a representation of orations as possible.

The Inauguration 2009 project is modeled after prior Library of Congress collection projects. Two great examples of these earlier projects are:

If you want to organize a local recording, here are the basics:

  • Recording must be made between Friday, January 16th and Sunday, January 25th, 2009 and postmarked by February 27, 2009.
  • The project website provides the required Participant Release Form for speakers, photographers and those making the recordings.
  • The project is accepting audio recordings, video recordings, and written texts of sermons (see their detailed specifications page for information about accepted formats). Also accepted will be accompanying ephemera such as photographs and printed programs.
  • If you are sending materials to the Library of Congress, they encourage you to use FedEx, UPS, or DHL because of the danger of damage due to security screening done to USPS packages.

If you want to get a taste of  other recordings held by the Library of Congress, you can spend some time browsing the fantastic list of Collections in the Archive of Folk Culture Containing Sermons and Orations provided on the project site.

So spread the word. Honor the Library of Congress’s goals by helping this collection include the perspectives of as many communities as possible. Your local religious or secular leader could have their point of view preserved as part of a snapshot of our country’s response to the Inauguration of 2009. While they hope for audio and video recordings, they are also accepting text transcriptions – so this doesn’t have to be a high tech endeavor. That said, perhaps this is the inspiration you have been waiting for to learn how to make an audio or video recording!

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Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty in the Archival Record and Beyond

Blog Action Day - Poverty long

In honor of this year’s Blog Action Day theme of Poverty, I want to point people to examples of ways in which poverty is documented in archives, manuscript collections and elsewhere.

The most obvious types of records that document poverty are:

There are also organizations dedicated to research on poverty – such as the Chronic Poverty Research Centre, University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research and National Poverty Center. The archival records from groups such as these could show ways that organizations have addressed poverty over time, as well as the history of poverty itself.

Archives do their best job with records produced in the process of carrying out tasks related to business or personal life, and many of those who are living in the greatest poverty aren’t generating (or saving) their own records. Is being documented by photographers, news articles and the Census Bureau the same thing as telling your own story through an oral history or having your photographs, personal papers or other life documents archived? One of the most fascinating things about primary source materials in general, and archival records in specific, is the first hand view that it can lend the researcher. That sense of stepping into their shoes – of having a chance to retrace their steps.

There are certainly institutions whose records cast light on the lives of those in poverty such as homeless shelters, social service agencies and health clinics – but I would put forth that we are rarely capturing the first person voices of those living in poverty. I am realistic. I know that those dealing with the basic issues of food, shelter and personal safety are likely not thinking about where to record their oral history or how to get their personal papers into an archive or manuscript collection. That doesn’t mean that I don’t wish there wasn’t a better way. These are people who deserve to be represented with their own voice to the people of the future.

I am enamored of the idea of recording people’s own stories as is being done in each of the following examples:

I want to end my post with an inspirational project. Photographer Camilo José Vergara has been photographing the built environment in poor, minority communities across the United States since 1977.  He has re-photographed the same locations many times over the years. This permits him to create time lapse series of images that show how a space has changed over time. He has published a number of books (the most recent of which is American Ruins) as well as having created an interactive website.

The Invincible Cities website documents Harlem, NY, Camden, NJ and Richmond, CA. After selecting one of these three locations you are greeted by a map, timeline and photographs. You can walk through time at individual locations and watch storefronts change, buildings get demolished and fashions shift. The interface lets you select images by location, theme and year. My description can’t do it any justice – just go explore for yourself: Invincible Cities. The site explains that his next goal is to create a ‘Visual Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto’ (VE for short) that covers all of the United States.

In the March 2008 PopPhoto.com article Camilo Jose Vergara: 30 Years Documenting the American Ghetto, we find the following interesting quotes from the photographer:

“Once photography at its best and most prestigious became art and the rewards went to photographer artists, the field became uninterested and unable to significantly contribute to the creation of a historical record, that is to the making of an inventory of our world and to illustrate how it changes,” asserts Vergara, adding that the Internet is an ideal way to bypass traditional museums. “You can realize a larger world that can support a different kind of photography.”

The Internet is especially well-suited to housing a multi-layered history of the ghettos’ evolution. Advances in technology allow the designers to arrange images in complex ways: links take the viewer to a page that gives census data; click on a color-coded street map on the left side of the screen to pinpoint exact addresses of panoramic views, artifacts, architectural details, building interiors or street-level views. “These kinds of things were unimaginable when I started the project,” he says.

Can we expect projects like this  to give individuals of the future a real taste of what life was like for the poor in US cities or around the world? Should part of our efforts at diversity of representation in the historical record specifically address preservation of the records and manuscripts of those living in poverty? Lots to think about! I hope this post has introduced you to new resources and projects. Please share any I missed in the comments below.

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SAA2008: Yale, Family Papers & High School Students (Session 508)

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The session’s official title was Family and Community Archives Project: Introducing High School Students to the Archives Profession. It focused on a pilot outreach program carried out by 21 archivists from Yale University at the Cooperative Arts and Humanities magnet high school in New Haven, CT. 117 high school juniors participated as part of their US History course. The pilot aimed to introduce them to what archivists do, work with them to find, understand and describe their family papers and also to present archives as a possible profession to students who might assume that it was only welcoming to Caucasians.

A number of their original plans were adjusted after they met with the high school administrators:

  • They would need to work with juniors rather than seniors because it is the juniors who take US History
  • The principal wanted them to work with all 5 classes of US History students, rather than a single class.
  • The program would run from March to May instead of January to June
  • When they realized that a number of students are in foster care, they needed to find other ways to include students who did not want (or could not) do family research. They chose to add the option of researching the history of community organizations.

Logistics

A total of twenty-one archivists from various departments at Yale University volunteered. They were divided up into five teams, one for each class with which they would be working during the course of the pilot. Starting in October they held weekly meetings to create the schedule and plans. A total of eight lesson plans were created. These took much more time than the archivists had expected. They also designed and printed a brochure to introduce the students to archives, archivists and basic archival terms. A wiki (Family Community Archives Project Wiki) was created to facilitate communication among the archivists and teachers. The wiki included bios of the archivists.

All classwork would be graded by the teachers without input from the archivists. This classwork included a journal component. It was decided that the journal (a 3-ring binder that the archivists provided) would remain in the class room. This choice was made based on teacher input – there was concern that if the journals were removed from the classroom that they would quickly be misplaced or forgotten.

Parents and guardians of participating students were alerted via a letter explaining the class project and encouraging them to help students as they worked on their family or community research.

A blog (Family and Community Archives Project Blog) was created that students, archivists and teachers could all use to communicate with each other. They met with the classes for 8 weeks. Every student got a certificate of participation and an ‘archivally themed goody box’ (think Oscars.. but less opulent). They asked students to complete an evaluation form – to ‘be honest… we are thick skinned’. They mounted an exhibit in the main Yale library featuring the student’s work. As is often the case with 16 year olds, the students pulled it together at the last minute and did a great job. They had an opening reception that included students, parents and the community.

Lessons Learned

They discussed both with the teachers and archivists to analyze what worked and what didn’t. What worked?

  • Students learned what archivists do – some said they might consider a career as an archivist and that they learned a lot.
  • The teachers enjoyed it – noticed some students were more engaged than they sometimes were (while some were not that interested).
  • Brought Yale into community and the community into Yale.
  • Collaboration across libraries and departments – archivists met each other and worked together.
  • The group creation of lesson plans.
  • The choice to assign several archivists per class. It permitted small groups and one-on-one work. Lesson plans were sometimes customized to suite the classroom/teacher/student special cases.
  • The blog: this communication worked for some.. but not all. Hard to know why some students were more comfortable with the blog than others. It was a good way to provide students with information about the archivists and the project.
  • The wiki: provided schedules, lesson plans, resources.. etc. It was very successful & usefull.

The most successful aspects?

  • The archives tour
  • Discussion of who uses archives and why which included audio/visual examples and archival material.
  • The exhibit was a high point of the project. They photographed the items they wanted to display and that worked well. Students were very proud of the exhibit.. 25% did not contribute.

What did not work?

  • Teacher support varied – success completely depended on the enthusaism and commitment of the teacher.
  • 8 weeks is too long for this sort of project
  • Class meeting times too long – 40 and 80 minute sessions
  • Needed more feedback earlier in the process from teachers on lesson plans – didn’t learn the reading level of the students until lesson plans were done… needed clearer definition of expectations for the exhibit.
  • Efficacy and support for homework – some people thought there should be no homework (other than project tasks) .. some thought it should be more structured.
  • Technology support for A/V lesson – school didn’t have equipment to support the A/V projection needs
  • Student privacy – they needed parent/guardian permissions to allow video & photos of students to be taken. There was a very late question about if they could use the students’ first and last in the exhibition. No media release forms were sent out in time to make a video about the session.
  • School activities schedule changed all the time – interfered
  • Early class time led to poor attendance (7 am!)
  • The archivists talked too much – they needed more hands on lessons. Students should have been able to bring in materials earlier in the process and have more time to work with them. More opportunity to connect to the student – the example being the LAST class session when the students brought materials in for scanning by the archivists. This gave a way to connect to the archivists and understand why their materials were important.

Teacher’s suggestions for improving the project

  • Run the project for 2 weeks in march – just after national testing is completed
  • Meet with each class 5 times in a row in one week.. with one class being the tour

This project fit in really well with Yale’s goals of reaching out to the local New Haven community.

Potential lessons for other archivists

  • planning phase:
    • define measures of success
    • define what you want students to learn & how – realistic objects for a 16 year old.. do not be too ambitious. Include perspectives of archivist parents. for some classes lecturing worked well.. some classes small groups worked really well
    • define resources needed ( they had 21 archivists who did work on Yale’s time) – Money = $3,000 spent on photo reproductions, handouts, mounting, gift boxes, lunch for teachers & archivists and final reception.
    • explore what is available on the Internet – look for lesson plans – good stuff out there that is often too ambitious, but good for adaptation
    • partner with the teacher – engage the teachers early on.. define what the students need to do by the end of the project. think about archivists who have never taught before.. figure out what you can do to help them
    • include a tour of a repository
    • provide teaching lessons for archivists who haven’t taught
    • plan for unengaged students and teachers – adapted their lessons.. hard situation..
    • avoid early morning classes
    • resolve privacy/confidentiality issue early
  • implementation:
    • be flexible – be prepared for changing activities schedules and other in class challenges
    • do an exhibit – create copies.. understand that these are precious materials
    • be visual in your teaching – video!
    • delving into family history can raise sensitive information – help 16 year olds figure out how to choose what to display in a public exhibit
    • introduce them to other jobs beyond archivist – at first only talked about archivists work… but next year will also talk about all the people who work in archives. Tie in their interests (this was an arts school.. include that perspective)
    • wrap up meetings with teachers and archivists essential

Diversity

One of the underlying goals of the pilot was to explore ways to increase diversity.

Cultural exchange: What did archivists learn from the students and teachers when working with the school? They learned about the student’s families and their community organizations. It bridged a generation gap – the archivists learned about what it meant to be a high school kid these days. Not all of it was positive – it left a lot of the archivists with concern for the state of education – issues with their writing skills.

Difficult to measure: How do we know it worked? No longitudinal study is being done to find out if they end up working in archives. We need to take a long view – but be impatient.

The impact on archives, defined broadly – no matter if they did not make any new archivists, they supported the archival endeavor – 110 students, teachers and their families now have a better understanding of archives and records.

Questions & Answers

Question: Who crafted the evaluation for the students?

Answer: One of the archivists created it and it was approved by the rest of the team.

Question: In the future would you find it more desirable to work with the teachers on evaluating the student projects for grading purposes? or is that not our business?

Answer: No, they would not want to be involved with grading. The teacher knows the students. That said – they do wish that the teachers had planned the final project earlier on. Next time the archivists would encourage/push for final project guidelines.

Question: How did you measure that your learning objectives were met other than the survey?

Answer: They didn’t do that formally – but anecdotally when the students were in other classes – they heard other teachers report that students continued to talk about the archives work outside of the history class. There was a ‘buzz’ among the students.

Question: How did you find the time to do this?

Answer: The leadership had to agree (at least informally) that the archivists can do this. Molly: They were very surprised by how much time it all took. It was a volunteer effort.. they met as a group 1x a week during their lunch hour.

Question: Why didn’t you consider doing an electronic journal?

Answer: There was a concern that not all students are tech savvy. For example – only a handful of kids engaged with the blog. They felt they couldn’t require it unless everyone had access and a sufficient comfort level with the tools.

Question: Where any archivists of color involved in the project ? If one of the goals of projects like this is to encourage individuals of color to consider a career as an archivist, it might be easier if they see people who look like them.. people out there documenting diverse communities.

Answer: Yes.. a few. There were suggestions that they could contact the roundtables of color/ethnicity – bring in visiting speakers to talk about how they came to work in archives. The materials are important too – materials they can relate with. It was emphasized again that this was a pilot and the had to spend a great deal of time creating their lesson plans from scratch. Now that they have the building blocks – they can improve other aspects.

Question: What about talking about preserving things like MySpace pages – maybe use myspace for the blogging

Answer: They didn’t want to do anything that might exclude people.

Question: Was the non-involved teacher aware of what archives do?

Answer: He didn’t come to the archives tour. He was totally tuned out. He felt he was very behind in the teaching schedule – both students and the teacher felt it was taking away from class time.

Question: Could they offer the 11 out of 117 who said they might want to be archivists internships?

Answer: Maybe – but since the rules of the school required that any student who left the campus was accompanied by an adult, it would be very challenging.

My Thoughts

I found this session very inspiring. I loved that it took the archives to the community and it the community into the archives. This is the sort of outreach project I hope has a chance of spreading to other schools. Interested in considering a project like this at your archives? Take a look at all the resources available on the wiki’s handouts and homework page and be on the lookout for a writeup of the pilot in the Nov/Dec issue of Archival Outlook.

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SAA2007: Opening Plenary Session Ponders Diversity

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In his introduction, Bruce Bruemmer began with a disarming “Thank you disembodied voice” – and merrily rolled along through a short, cheery and heartfelt introduction for SAA president Elizabeth W. Adkins. He saved time (and likely vocal stress) by prerecording a YouTube video enumerating Adkins’s accomplishments . He led rounds of applause for Adkins’s father, aunt, uncle and husband. Bruemmer claims her only fault is that she is too serious. That she did not perceive the inherent humor of Velveeta and Miracle Whip concerned him.

He finally found the chink in her armor when he broke down laughing at the apparently often repeated J. L. Kraft quote “What we do, we do do” – and at this she finally admitted that it was ‘a little funny’.

Elizabeth Adkins’s Plenary Speech

Adkins began her talk by leading the hall in applauding the program committee, the host committee, the sponsors, past presidents, international visitors, and council members – each in turn.

She then made an exciting announcement – American Archivist is being made available online! If you are onsite at the conference, there will be a peek at the beta version on display on Friday in the Embassy Room. Issues from 2000 forward will be available online and they are still working on the digitization of all back issues. SAA will still print the journal. Access to the digital version will be available via a link off the SAA homepage. All but the 6 most recent issues will be available freely to anyone. More work will need to be done to improve visibility through indexing services and complete the digitization of back issues.

After this, she launched into her main speech “Our Journey Toward Diversity – And a Call to (More) Action”. I will do my best to include as many points as I managed to fully  captured in my notes. If this topic interests you – I encourage you to watch for publication of the full original. Please forgive me any misquotes, omissions and oversights. I have also included a few additional details on points that were in the presentation.

Our Journey Toward Diversity – And a Call to (More) Action

Adkins first contemplated diversity of the presidents of SAA by considering how long had it had been since a corporate archivist had been SAA president. The answer was William Overman in 1957 – and Overman is the only other corporate archivist to ever be selected as president. Adkins is also one of only 16 women to have been SAA President.

What does SAA Mean by Diversity? Why do we care? Adkins reviewed the 2004 census of the profession known as A*CENSUS . With its 5,620 responses it was much more extensive than the surveys done in 1956 and 1982.

Gender Imbalance

From A First Look at A*CENSUS Results (published in August of 2004):

The archival profession has experienced a significant shift in gender in the last half century. The A*CENSUS survey indicates that the ratio of women to men is now approximately 2:1. This is almost a mirror image of the gender distribution reported in Ernst Posner’s 1956 survey of SAA members, in which 67% were men and 33% were women.

Adkins stated that the current gender imbalance is an issue for two reasons:

  • we need men’s perspective and input
  • since women are still generally paid less than men – having a gender imbalance is likely driving down salaries

Library and Museums are seeing this same gender imbalance while the gender imbalance is flipped in the IT industry.

Race and Ethnic Diversity

According to A*CENSUS 2004 only 7% of the SAA membership is non-white while the general US populate is 25% non-white (with an even greater number of non-whites in kindergarten classes today).

Why should we care?
* “It’s the right thing to do”
* Completeness of the documentary record
* It’s good business business
* Competition with other professions and career paths

Dr. Harold T. Pinkett (1914-2001) was the first African American at NARA – named an SAA fellow in 1962, editor of American Archivist 1968-1971 and council member from 1971-1972.

SAA first diversity efforts launched in 1970s

From 1936-1972, women in SAA made up only 28-33% of SAA members. The 1970s brought lots of progress for women’s representation and activity in SAA.

Work on Racial and Ethnic diversity started in 1978…more work supported 1981-1987, some efforts supported – other efforts (such as desire for a fellowship to support study) were not.

The Archivists and Archives of Color Roundtable (AACR) founded in 1987, took on this name in 1994 (?). The Harold T. Pinkett Award was established in 1993 “to encourage minority students to consider careers in the archival profession and promote minority participation in SAA”.

In 1997 SAA created a Diversity Task Force and a final report was submitted in 1999. SAA Council accepted final report and moved forward in an ad hoc matter. In 2002 members of the task force were frustrated by lack of progress and passed a resolution asking for info on progress. The crux of the answer was “not a lot”.

In May 2003 the SAA council created a ‘diversity committee’… council is now actually talking about diversity and actually putting things in motion.

Focus on Students

There has a been a huge growth of Student Chapters. The concept was approved by the SAA council in 1993. There has been a growth from 3 chapters to nearly 30. Currently 20% of all members, more than 10% of attendees at this meeting, are students. Adkins hopes the students will help bringing more diversity into SAA and asked for a round of applause for the students attending the meeting.

Where are we now?

In 2005, SAA launched a new strategic planning effort and Diversity was identified one of the three highest priorities (with Technology and Public Awareness being the other 2).

What is the state of diversity today? Lots of talk – but how much actual action?

What is done?

  • position statement
  • census completed
  • monitoring progress
  • education for non-archivists who serve under represented groups
  • experimentation with the idea ofDiversity Fair

Next actions?

  • outreach on college and university campuses
  • provide other “entry points” into the archival profession
  • Archival education

The Task Force recommendations included improvement of the SAA website, providing financial aid for minorities and under represented communities, and working on SAA’s new member development.

Adkins presented an interesting idea of reaching out to kids age 10-15 such that we might influence their future career choices. She also suggested that SAA emulate the ALA model of the Spectrum Scholarship. Established in 1997, the Spectrum Scholarship program granted over 60 $5,000 scholarships this year alone. While SAA does not have the money to support a scholarship at this level – Adkins announced that a new SAA Minority Scholarship has been approved by the SAA council (this leading to the first spontaneous applause of the speech). She also made a big point of pointing to the Midwest Archives Conference’s Archie Motely Memorial Scholarship for Minority Students and saying that they should get credit as leaders in the area of minority scholarships.

“Diversity starts with a commitment to inclusion”

Addressing diversity concerns is hard work, but diversity will improve SAA in ways we can’t grasp now. She compared future progress to past efforts that now seem obvious (provision of childcare, the membership committee..etc).

Adkins concluded that that we need to build on a foundation of inclusion. A ‘welcoming respectful attitude’ will help us move forward. But we need to move forward with not just words – but with also with actions.

The hall gave her a standing ovation. Confronted with this, Adkins remarked that she had made it through so far but now she was getting all verklempt .

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