The University at Albany, SUNY has announced a position vacancy for Project Archivist. For more details go to: http://www.albany.edu/rfhr/assets/R14-01.pdf
Month: January 2014
Hotel Reservation now available for the MARAC meeting in Rochester, N.Y., April 24-26, 2014
Hotel reservation is now available for the MARAC meeting in Rochester, N.Y.,April 24-26, 2014! Reservations may be made by phone or on the web at https://resweb.passkey.com/go/MARAC2014 by 5:00 pm on April 3, 2014 for the special rate. When registering please identify yourself as part of the MARAC group. The MARAC room rate is $123.00 per room per night, plus state and local taxes.
Here in Rochester, we offer you the chance to explore a city with a vibrant past that served as the home for historical figures such as Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony and George Eastman. Rochester is a city celebrated for its rich history of innovation, and the Local Arrangements and Program Committees have assembled a diverse program filled with tours and sessions to challenge and interest both archivists just beginning their careers and those with decades of experience. Many of the sessions focus on one or more of the conference’s three Rochester-inspired themes, “Film, Freedom, and Feminism,” but other sessions address a variety of additional topics as well. Beyond considerations of the sessions’ content, the Program Committee has ensured that this conference program is bursting with new ways of presenting information and of teaching, including a hands-on Wikipedia edit-a-thon, roundtables, and many opportunities for audience interaction. The program looks at the archival enterprise broadly, sometimes focusing on history, sometimes on initiating a discussion to develop a new archives project, sometimes on little seen types of archival records. The aim here is to present a rich world of possibility for your consideration.
Register now for the NEA Spring 2014 Meeting
New England Archivists (NEA) is excited to announce that registration for the Spring 2014 Meeting is now open! Join us March 20-22 at the Sheraton Harborside Hotel in Portsmouth, New Hampshire for great programs, workshops, thought-provoking sessions, and a “Jeopardy” tournament. In this E-mail you will find pertinent information about registration, lodging, and what to look forward to at Spring 2014.
REGISTRATION DATES
Early-bird: now-February 17
Advance: February 18 – March 14
On site: March 15-22
For detailed pricing information and to register online, click here. To be eligible for the NEA-Member Registration Rate, please make sure you’ve renewed your membership. Remember: you can always check your status and renew online.
If you have any questions about the registration process, contact Emily Tordo, NEA Registrar at etordo@andover.edu. Any questions about membership renewal, contact Kristine M. Sjostedt, Membership Secretary at Kristine.Sjostedt@umassmed.edu.
LODGING
Sheraton Portsmouth Harborside
250 Market Street
Portsmouth, New Hampshire 03801
(603) 431-2300
http://www.sheratonportsmouth.com/
http://www.sheratonportsmouth.com/
Room rate $125 available until February 24th (subject to availability.), using this code: New England Archivists 2014 QYND6W2WZTY (OR copy and paste the following link into a web browser):https://www.starwoodmeeting.com/StarGroupsWeb/res?id=1306242670&key=9E66C
MEETING HIGHLIGHTS
Spring 2014 will feature two plenary speakers: Vivek Bald and Ian MacKaye.
Ian MacKaye (Friday, March 21) is a singer, songwriter, guitarist, and producer best known for being the frontman of influential punk bands like Minor Threat, Fugazi, and The Evens. Currently he is working to personally preserve recordings of all of Fugazi’s 1,000+ shows. He is also trying to preserve the cassette recordings of his grandmother who wrote a marriage counseling column for Ladies Home Journal. Read more about MacKaye’s audio-archiving work.
Vivek Bald (Saturday, March 22) is a scholar and filmmaker whose documentary, In Search of Bengali Harlem has spurred a related book and website. The website is part of Bald’s ongoing project to document the histories of two little-known groups of early South Asian migrants to the United States. Both were groups of Muslim men, predominantly from the region of Bengal, who entered the U.S. between the 1880s and the 1940s.
The sessions on Friday and Saturday cover a wide range of topics and formats such as a roundtable discussion on the Boston Bombing Digital Archives, working with students in archives, collaborating with non-archivists, and how best to provide access to moving image and sound archives.
The “Jeopardy” tournament on Friday will test your knowledge of the profession, repositories all over New England, and fun historical facts. Players will compete for bragging rights and cool prizes by answering questions from NEA’s own Alex Trebek, Gregor Trinkaus-Randall. Details on how to participate are coming soon.
View the full schedule to begin your own planning for Spring 2014.
If you have any questions regarding the NEA Spring 2014 Meeting, please contact Kelli Bogan, Spring 2014 Program Committee Chair, at kbogan@colby-sawyer.edu.
News from University at Albany
The University at Albany Libraries’ M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives has been selected to receive a 2013C ataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) for its project Building New Access Tools for the National Death Penalty Archive (NDPA). One of 22 selected from 75 applicants nationwide, the project is supported by a $119,900 grant for an arrangement and description project that will enhance access and discoverability of research material in the University at Albany Libraries’ National Death Penalty Archive (NDPA). The grant project provides funding for a full-time archivist to arrange, describe and catalog 710 cubic feet of NDPA collections over eighteen months, resulting in the completion of bibliographic records and of Encoded Archival Description finding aids that will be searchable utilizing the eXtensible Text Framework (XTF), an open source platform providing robust access to EAD finding aids. This grant will result in scholars increased access to historical resources, help teachers develop learning-centered curricula and offer researchers the full benefits of XML in retrieval, access and display. The project will improve access to many of the NDPA’s nationally significant collections including the official records of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, the David Baldus Papers, and the Capital Jury Project interviews with over 1,200 jurors from 353 capital trials in 14 states.
The NDPA mission is to build a collection of archival materials from individuals and national organizations that played substantive roles in the history of capital punishment. Through a partnership between the School of Criminal Justice and the Library that began in 1999, the NDPA has acquired personal papers and organizational records to document the emergence, development and coordination of a political and social movement related to the death penalty. The NDPA collections present a comprehensive picture of political debate, reform, legal maneuvering and academic research from nationally recognized experts on legal executions in the United States. Scholars gain access to primary sources that provide insight into the process, influence and interplay of academic scholarship and political debate over capital punishment. The NDPA contains primary sources in compelling thematic areas, such as civil rights, advocacy efforts of victims’ families and legal history as well as research examining challenges to the death penalty’s constitutionality, deterrence, wrongful convictions and sentences for capital crimes. For a list of NDPA collections go to: http://library.albany.edu/archive/ndpa
Distinguished Service Award Nominations
Do you know a MARAC member who has made a difference in the lives and successes of others? If so, please consider nominating him/her for MARAC’s Distinguished Service Award.
This award recognizes members who have made significant contributions to MARAC and to the archival profession.
Significant contributions to MARAC include the following:
- Service as an officer, caucus representative, committee member or chair, and as a frequent session or workshop instructor;
Significant contributions to the archival profession include the following:
- Service as a member of the board or committee or section of a national or international archival organization;
- Writing books or journal articles in the field;
- Serving as a professor or as a workshop presenter;
- Contributing to a State Historical Records Advisory Board;
- Reviewing applications for granting agencies.
Please note that service to MARAC is weighted more heavily than service to the profession as a whole.
To nominate a member, you must submit the following:
- A nomination form;
- The nominee’s resume or curriculum vitae;
- A letter detailing why the nominee should receive the award;
- A second letter of support.
The Committee strongly recommendsproviding multiple letters of support.
Nominations may be sent at any time via email or regular post. The official deadline is February 17, 2014. All nominations must be received by this date.
For more information on the award and the nomination process, please visit the MARAC website: http://www.marac.info/distinguished-service-award.
2014 Harold T. Pinkett Minority Student Award
The application period for the 2014 Harold T. Pinkett Minority Student Award is now open!
The Pinkett Award was established in 1993 and recognizes and acknowledges minority graduate students, such as those of African, Asian, Latino or Native American descent, who, through scholastic and personal achievement, manifest an interest in becoming professional archivists and active members of the Society of American Archivists. The recipients of the award will receive full complimentary registration to the SAA Annual Meeting and related expenses for hotel and travel for attending the Joint Annual Meeting of CoSA, NAGARA, and SAA in Washington, D.C. in August 2014. In addition, each recipient receives a complimentary one-year membership in SAA.
Eligibility: The Pinkett is awarded to minority students, with preference given to full-time students possessing a minimum scholastic grade point average of 3.5 while enrolled in a graduate program focusing on archival management during the academic year proceeding the date on which the award is given.
For more details or to download the application form please visit: http://www2.archivists.org/governance/handbook/section12-pinkett
The deadline to apply is February 28, 2014.
News from Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University: Call for Proposals
Radical Archives is a two-day conference (Friday, April 11-Saturday, April 12, 2014) organized around the notion of archiving as a radical practice. An international contingent of archivists, artists, artist-archivists, activist archivists, theorists, and scholars working within a range of archives and archival practices will be invited to present and discuss archives of radical politics and practices; archives that are radical/experimental in form or function; how archiving in itself might be a radical act in certain moments or contexts; and how archives can be active in the present, as well as documents of the past or scripts for the future. We are calling for contributions relevant to the four themes of the conference: Archive and Affect; Archiving Around Absence; Archives and Ethics; and Archive as Constellation. Proposed formats could include panels, roundtables, individual paper or artist talks, performances or performance-lectures, screenings, interactive screen-based projects or live participatory projects.
Extended deadline: Monday, January 20, 2014.
The MARAC Blog 