Learn about the Advocacy Committee
Make your voice heard: the FOIA Advisory Committee seeks public comments
As the FOIA Advisory Committee works hard to examine some challenging areas of FOIA law and policy, it needs your help. Input from the public will help the subcommittees better understand the issues that FOIA requesters and agencies face.
Please visit the FOIA Advisory Committee’s webpage, including the Public Comments page, for information about the Committee and how you can get involved.
For more on the issues the Committee is examining, see: http://blogs.archives.gov/foiablog/2015/02/11/make-your-voice-heard-the-foia-advisory-committee-seeks-public-comments/
First posted on the A.R.T. Listserv on February 12, 2015.
MCNY and QM share results of CLIR-funded World's Fair Project
In a collaboration with the Queens Museum, the Museum of the City of New York has completed an 18-month project to make our collections from both the 1939/40 and 1964/65 New York World’s Fairs more accessible as a result of a generous Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). This project allowed the two museums to process and describe their relatively unknown and inaccessible World’s Fair collections, intellectually uniting all materials into a single finding aid for each fair, and providing item level cataloging for selected highlights from both collections.
The Museum and the City of New York (MCNY) and the Queens Museum (QM), in conjunction with the Queens Library, are now pleased to share finding aids for both the 1939-1940 and 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair, along with item level catalog records for 1650 highlights from these collections via The Archives at Queens Library: Digital Collections.
Click here to view joint finding aids and catalog records for MCNY and QM collections:
Collection on the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair finding aid
Collection on the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair finding aid
Catalog records for 1650 item level highlights from both fairs (Click “Search” button to display records)
Local finding aids for just those materials held at MCNY can be found here:
The Museum gratefully acknowledges the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in the CLIR program. Both museums are also grateful for the partnership with the Queens Library, whose staff worked diligently to help us make these resources available via this new Digital Archives site.
A.R.T. Board member Erin Allsop has been featured in the recent Atlas Obscura article "The Long Lost Archives of New York's Most Glamorous Hotel"!
Erin, who serves as A.R.T. Secretary, also manages the Waldorf Astoria Archives. Luke Spencer recently interviewed her and explored the Waldorf's Astoria unparalleled collection, which includes postcards, menus, cocktail lists, ledgers, photographs, and even bellhop uniforms.
Luke remarks: "For anyone interested in the forgotten glamor of old New York, it's an incredible find."
Here is a link to the article:
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-long-lost-archives-of-new-yorks-most-glamorous-hotel
The Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York, Inc. (A.R.T.) Board seeks input from current membership to more effectively meet its needs and increase sustainability.
The survey can be accessed at:
https://nycarchivists.wufoo.com/forms/art-member-survey-winter-2015/
Your feedback and comments are invaluable. You may submit your responses anonymously or provide your name and email. If you supply your contact info, the A.R.T. Board may contact you regarding your responses. Thank you for your participation! The survey ends February 23, 2015 at midnight EST. Please contact Tamar Zeffren, Director of the Membership Committee, for A.R.T. member questions regarding this survey, at membership@nycarchivists.org.
With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the newly formed Crowdsourcing Consortium for Libraries and Archives (CCLA) aims to forge a national partnership to examine how crowdsourcing technologies, tools, and platforms can help libraries, museums, and archives augment their collections and enhance user experiences.
Through an ongoing series of meetings and webinars, the CCLA team is now collecting cutting-edge information and best practices in the field and summarizing them in an accessible way, with accompanying principles, strategies, and resources to be continuously gathered and shared on the CCLA website (www.crowdconsortium.org).
The questions in this survey cover a variety of topics, including the challenges faced by institutions in implementing crowdsourcing applications as well as personal media usage habits.
This survey aims to inform technology development and government agencies' funding of projects in the crowdsourcing domain. With this work, we are establishing what we know and do not know as a community. This anonymous questionnaire will take no more than 10 minutes.
Here's the link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/CCLASurvey2
Take the 2015 Archivists Employment Survey!
SAA is gathering employment data relating to archivists and the archives profession. Your participation will help us better understand the current employment landscape and inform our advocacy efforts. Please take a few minutes to complete the survey, and spread the word so that the survey reaches as many archives professionals as possible. Thank you! Click here to take the survey.
Interference Archive is continuing their education series, and seeks proposals for single-session classes. Classes could be lectures, film viewing and discussion, hands-on workshops, or any other format you can imagine. In keeping with the mission of Interference Archive, there is a goal of exploring the link between social movements and culture-making.
Deadline for proposals is January 30th.
For more information:
http://interferencearchive.org/education-working-group-invitation-for-class-proposals/
Posted on behalf of the SAA Awards Committee.
The Society of American Archivists’ Awards Committee is seeking nominations for the Sister M. Claude Lane, O.P., Memorial Award. This award recognizes individuals who have made a significant contribution to the field of religious archives. Criteria for nomination include:
· Involvement and work in the Archivists of Religious Collections Section (ARCS) of the Society of American Archivists.
· Contributions to archival literature that relates to religious archives.
· Participation and leadership in religious archives organizations.
· Evidence of leadership in specific religious archives.
Only individual archivists are eligible for nomination. The award is sponsored by the Society of Southwest Archivists, in conjunction with Society of American Archivists. It is named in honor of Sister M. Claude Lane, the first professionally trained archivist at the Catholic Archives of Texas in Austin, who served there from 1960 until her death in 1974. The award finalist is recognized with a certificate from SAA and a $300 cash prize provided by the Society of Southwest Archivists at the annual Society of American Archivists meeting.
For more information on the Lane Award, including past winners, see:
http://www2.archivists.org/governance/handbook/section12-lane
To nominate an archivist for the Lane Award please follow the guidelines provided in the Nomination Form via the link on that page.
All nominations shall be submitted to the Awards Committee by February 28, 2015.
Please contact me if you have any questions:
David Kingma, CA
Foley Center Library
Gonzaga University
502 East Boone
Spokane, WA 99258-0095
509-313-3814
kingma@gonzaga.edu
As reported on the Society of American Archivists website:
CHICAGO—Thirty-six archivists earned the Digital Archives Specialist (DAS) certificate from the Society of American Archivists (SAA) after completing required coursework and passing a comprehensive examination in November. SAA’s DAS certificate program was developed by experts in the field of digital archives and provides archivists with the information and tools needed to manage the demands of born-digital records.
DAS certificate holders must complete nine courses from four tiers: Foundational, Tactical and Strategic, Tools and Services, and Transformational, and pass the comprehensive examination. DAS certificate holders have the skills to understand the nature of electronic records; define requirements, roles, and responsibilities related to digital archives; formulate strategies for appraising, describing, managing, organizing, and preserving digital archives; plan for new tools and technologies and integrate them into existing functions to appraise, capture, preserve, and provide access to digital collections; curate, store, and retrieve original masters and access copies of digital archives; and provide reliable service related to electronic records and digital archives.
The new Digital Archives Specialists are: Marci Behm (Des Moines Public Library), Michael L. Case (USO), Jenny Cashman (Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences), Ryan A. Donaldson (The Durst Organization), Martin Firestein (William Rainey Harper College), Sharon L. Guthrie (Rice University), Mary Haberle (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), Sarah A. Haug (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), Jennifer Ho (Chicago Community Trust), Amy B. James (Maryland State Archives), Kellie M. Johnson (Utah Valley University), Lisa Johnston (University of Minnesota), Jennifer E. King (The George Washington University), Elizabeth S. Knight (Consulting Archivist), Carol Kussmann (University of Minnesota), Matthew B. Leavitt (Brigham Young University), Janice Lurie (Minneapolis Institute of Arts), Alexis S. Macklin (University of Colorado, Boulder), Jamie L. Martin (IBM Corporation Archives), Shannon Mawhiney (Missouri State University), Megan H. McGovern (Progressive Insurance), Jessica McIntyre (Minneapolis Institute of Arts), Lisa A. Mix (New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center), Martha R. Noble (California Judicial Center Library), Amanda G. Pellerin (Jimmy Carter Presidential Library), Clint Pumphrey (Utah State University), Andrea W. Richardson (The Portman Archives), Rebecca Russell (Rice University), Lisa M. Schmidt (Michigan State University), Lauren Seney (The College of William and Mary), Elizabeth Shepard (Weill Cornell Medical Center Archives), Gina M. Strack (Utah State Archives), Lisa Sutton (Washington National Records Center), Rodney R. Swaner (Utah State Archives), Ashley L. Taylor (University of Pittsburgh), and Todd Welch (Northern Arizona University).
A total of 186 people have earned Digital Archives Specialist certificates since the program began in October 2011. Currently, there are more than six hundred participants in SAA’s DAS program who are working toward earning a certificate. For more information, visit www2.archivists.org/prof-education/das or contact SAA Education Director Solveig De Sutter (sdesutter@archivists.org).
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Founded in 1936, the Society of American Archivists is North America’s oldest and largest national archival professional association. SAA enables more than 6,100 individual and institutional members to achieve professional excellence and foster innovation to ensure the identification, preservation, and use of records of enduring value. For more information, visit www.archivists.org.
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