Author Archives: guestcontributor

Hi Boston, Hi Internet, Hybrid. Join Us In-Person and Virtually for the 2022 Annual Meeting

Posted on May 31, 2022 | Leave a comment

Sarah Quigley and Natalie Baur, 2022 SAA Program Committee Co-Chairs

The Program Committee is excited to invite you to the 86th annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists (SAA)—our first hybrid conference—to be held August 25–27, 2022. We’re planning an exciting program for ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2022 with educational sessions, keynotes, and activities offered both onsite and virtually. There will be something of interest for every attendee, and we are thrilled to have the opportunity to engage members in multiple formats.

This year, the call for proposals asked you to reflect on confronting change and planning for the future. How can we apply all the lessons we’ve learned, especially in the past two years, to create a more inclusive, more creative, and more nimble future? We hope a new conference environment that combines in-person and virtual elements will be both an embodiment of and a framework for discussing these questions.

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Posted in Annual Meeting

The Host Committee Welcomes You to Boston!

Posted on May 25, 2022 | Leave a comment

Rakashi Chand, 2022 Host Committee Chair

We are so excited to welcome our archival colleagues to Boston for ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2022! For those attending the hybrid conference in-person, the city’s rich history, museums and universities, and river and ocean walks offer something for everyone.

At the moment, Boston (properly pronounced “Bawst’n”) is coming alive as the weather warms: flowers bloom, Berklee College of Music students fill the streets with spontaneous concerts, the Red Sox are playing, and people dip their toes in the water on the Cape. This is just the beginning. In summer, picnics pop up all over Boston Garden, you can spot high fashion and even higher heels on Newbury Street, the Esplanade features outdoor concerts, outdoor dining options abound, and Boston’s gorgeous beaches fill with sunbathers and sandcastles. Plan a visit to Cape Cod National Seashore, which was voted one of the best beaches in the country (so it’s worth the extra miles if you’re already here).

Although most people will never try baked beans when visiting Boston—I was born here and have only tried them once—you should definitely try the chowder! (Perhaps it should be called Chowder Town instead of Bean Town?) In addition, plan to partake in fresh seafood fare, although if you prefer admiring fish to eating them, the New England Aquarium is only a few ‘T’ stops away from the Sheraton Hotel. Oh yes, the ocean is literally a 15-minute walk from the hotel, so there is no excuse to not enjoy Boston Harbor, one of America’s oldest and historically active harbors, and maybe take part in a whale watching excursion. You can even glimpse the world’s oldest commissioned warship afloat, the USS Constitution, in the Charlestown Navy Yard.

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Posted in Annual Meeting

American Archivist Transitions to Digital-Only Content

Posted on March 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

Dear Reader,

The SAA journal American Archivist is going completely digital! Volume 83, no.2 (Fall/Winter 2020) is the last issue published in a paper format. 

Last summer the Council of the Society of American Archivists made the decision to publish the journal in an entirely digital format beginning with Volume 84:1 (Spring/Summer 2021)—a decision made in support of the responsible stewardship of SAA resources. Ever-increasing production expenses (e.g., paper costs, fuel surcharges) together with a global pandemic that limited distribution and strained budgets, contributed to this decision.

This is not our first foray into digital access. SAA initially digitized the entire back-run of American Archivist in 2007, making those issues, as well as new issues, available online and via open access (except for articles in the three most recent volumes). In fall 2020, all of the content was migrated to a new digital platform with features designed to enhance your reading experience: mobile-responsive web design, optional split-screen reading experience, suggested articles based on browser history, saved searches/alerts/notifications, and metrics for article downloads, shares, and citations.

Being digital opens opportunities for American Archivist:

  • As we work on a broader and more inclusive set of descriptors, the journal remains committed to supporting diversity and inclusivity. Digital content allows us the ability to refine and improve these aspects of our publication.
  • Accessibility to the journal already has increased exponentially. For individuals who are differently abled, there is the ease of use provided by screen readers, and we are exploring adding alt-text to the workflow.
  • Supporting materials in non-text formats—such as video, audio files, datasets, and full-color images—can easily be added to the content mix.

As the journal continues to evolve, we’re dedicated to providing the same high-quality, peer-reviewed content, extensive author engagement, and production oversight that has made American Archivist the premier journal in the field for more than eighty years. We invite you to keep in touch with us as the journal continues to evolve. Be sure to read it at AmericanArchivist.org!

American Archivist Editorial Board
EditorialBoard@archivists.org

Accessing AmericanArchivist.org

Content on AmericanArchivist.org is open access except for the articles in the three most recent volumes. To access the embargoed content on the new platform, journal subscribers and members of the Society of American Archivists should follow these instructions:

  1. Using the email address associated with your account, reset your password. Note: If the reset email doesnot display in your inbox, please check your spam folder.
  2. Once your password has been reset, go to AmericanArchivist.org. 
  3. Select the “Sign In” button in the right-hand corner to log in with your email and new password.
  4. Explore the new site!

Note that you will need to re-create any saved searches, alerts, and notifications as personal data was not migrated from the previous site. For instructions on how to set up your profile and benefit from these features, click here.

Please contact meridiansupport@allenpress.com with any technical questions.

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Posted in American Archivist

The Five-Ton Elephant: How Student Loans Are Crushing Our Profession

Posted on March 9, 2020 | 3 comments

By Rachel Vagts, SAA Vice President/President Elect

After the Annual Meeting in Austin last summer, a group of archivists put together the SAA19 Archivist Salary Transparency Open Spreadsheet. As a big believer in transparency being the first step to resolving issues of wage equity, I was happy to see folks take up this effort. When I filled out the sheet I was also impressed to see all of the data points they included. But what really caught my eye was the field for the amount of student loan debt that people in our profession are carrying. Of the nearly 500 archivists who contributed to the spreadsheet, the accumulated debt was about $13.7 million. And for everyone who was able to report that their loans were paid off, there was usually someone who still owed more than $100,000.

I’m lucky. I never had a loan debt that high. But after more than 20 years working as a full-time archivist, I’m still paying off my undergrad and graduate school loans. And at about 10 years and six months, I’m also chasing the “dream” of Public Student Loan Forgiveness.

Every couple of months, I close my office door during my lunch and get out my cell phone. I dial the 800 number, punch in the last 4 digits of my account number, and then begin the wait for the menu options. Yep, it’s my regular check-in with my friends at FedLoan to see if they’ve made any more progress on straightening out the approval on the ten years’ worth of student loan payments I’ve made using their automated payment system…which for some reason had me paying ahead about $5 each month.

As the oldest of four kids, my parents helped me with my college tuition, but I was on my own for grad school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I got a work/study job at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and I took out a federal student loan to cover the rest of my in-state tuition and living expenses. All told, I think I borrowed about $16,000 over the course of those two years. I also paid my rent with a credit card more times than I should have—but that’s a different blog post.

My first job was at the University of Maryland. I was a project archivist on a two-year NEH grant and I made $29,000 annually. At that point I consolidated my undergraduate and graduate student loans ($26,000) for a repayment period of 20 years at 9% interest through my loan servicer, Sallie Mae.

I won’t bore you with all of the intervening years but, needless to say, in 2009—after 12 years of paying my loans—I owed $48,000. There were a couple of years when I took forbearance, but I never missed a payment. And then I heard about Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

I researched the program (which seemed like it might be a scam), read carefully read through the rules, and started to follow them. I consolidated my Sallie Mae loans back to the Federal Direct program, which had an immediate impact: They capped the interest rate at 4.875%, so my rate was basically cut in half. I also began paying on an income-based rate, which lowered my payments from around $400 to somewhere south of $200. I set up the automatic payment and went about my business working at my private non-profit college while the Department of Education figured out how they were going to actually run this program.

Why this long story when I know that more than a few of you have a similar one to tell? (Actually a LOT of us have a similar one to tell.) I’ve heard stories about people who haven’t been able to buy a house, have waited to start a family, don’t feel like they can move for a new job. Student loan debt has limited the choices for many of us.

As noted in the spreadsheet,[1] the average student loan debt of archivists who have been in the field for 10 years or fewer is approximately $34,588. The average goes up to $58,782 when you remove the people who didn’t have loans or have been able to pay them off. Thirty-seven respondents in this category report having $100,000 or more of outstanding debt.

The numbers don’t get much better for those who have been in the field for 11 to 20 years, with an average student loan debt of $45,972. And there were several respondents with 20+ years in the field who were still paying—including me.

So what do we do about this? These days there is a lot of talk about forgiving student loans, and I totally support that. But what if we could also come up with a way to become an archivist without having to take out a loan? We must think about new ways into our profession that don’t saddle our future colleagues with this crippling debt.

I certainly don’t have all of the answers on that one, but it’s a big part of what I want to talk about during my year as SAA president. I’m hoping that this post might start a conversation about what some of those paths might be. What if we found a new path into the profession that didn’t require prospective archivists to borrow and spend tens of thousands of dollars? How can we as a group advocate for the existing loan forgiveness programs to actually forgive loans? How can we make sure those programs are expanded to include others who weren’t able to participate for some reason? Please share any and all ideas–I would love to hear them!

In the meantime, I’m on month 8 of the up-to-12-month manual review of my last 44 payments. In a recent conversation the customer service representative told me that my extra payments would be refunded to me. I told her that was a good thing because I’d already promised everyone in my department that when my loan was forgiven I was taking them all to happy hour and buying the first round for everyone who’s still paying off a loan. I figure I might need two or three of my payments to cover it. Hey, maybe I’ll get that news in July and we can have that party at the Annual Meeting….

[1] This is approximate, as the data do not include responses that omitted years in the field and that were included in more narrative responses.

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Posted in Uncategorized

SAA NOMINATING COMMITTEE’S RESPONSE TO PETITION

Posted on January 28, 2020 | 1 comment

The 2019-2020 SAA Nominating Committee sent the following message to the SAA Executive Committee and Executive Director on January 17, 2020:

Dear Executive Director and Executive Committee,

Though the petition for the addition of Kris Kiesling to 2020’s SAA ballot has already been posted and shared without any response from the Nominating Committee, we would like to take the opportunity to address what has taken place during this year’s process.

While we acknowledge that members of SAA, according to the SAA Bylaws, 5.C, have every right to petition for an addition to the ballot, we understand that this is possibly the first time in the organization’s history that such actions have occurred during an election cycle. The question must be asked, just because you can, it is an action that should be taken? We are disappointed that there was a lack of discussion and transparency in adding  Kiesling to the ballot after the Nominating Committee had already selected the slate of candidates and Council had approved it. While the ballot does include an opportunity for a write-in candidate, we see this action as undermining not only our judgment and but also the will of those who elected us to serve in this capacity.

Lae’ l Hughes-Watkins received the most votes, which granted her the position as chair. An excerpt from her candidate statement reads. 

“I think it will be critical to put a slate of candidates together that will have a strong portfolio of success in making room for historically underrepresented identities in leadership positions, who advocate for success of these communities and are willing to call out and address discriminatory practices within the profession and in spaces supposedly designed to nurture and support emerging leaders and change agents.”

As a result, Hughes-Watkins stayed committed to this philosophy in her leadership; one voted on by SAA during the 2019 election. The chair worked in unison with a fantastic team: Steven Booth, Brenda Gunn, Daria Labinsky and Joshua Youngblood, to put together a dynamic, intelligent, thoughtful, diverse, committed, visionary, slate of candidates that we deemed were more than qualified to lead SAA in 2020. And yet we have witnessed what we feel is a questioning of our leadership, and we feel demoralized by what we thought was a democratic process.

The Nominating Committee abided by the rules, which state 

Section I: Bylaws of the Society of American Archivists

5. ELECTION OF OFFICERS AND COUNCILORS

A. There shall be a Nominating Committee composed of five (5) members, two (2) of whom are selected at the spring meeting of the Council from among the councilors in their second year of service and three (3) of whom have been elected by the membership. The person receiving the most votes in the election by the membership shall serve as chair. In the event of a tie vote, the chair shall be appointed by the Vice President / President-Elect from among the three (3) elected members of the Committee.

B. The Nominating Committee shall canvass the membership for suggestions of possible nominees for the offices of Vice President, Treasurer, councilors, and Nominating Committee. The tabulated results of this advisory canvass shall be made available to any member of the Society upon request. The Nominating Committee shall try to achieve a broadly based, diverse governing body.

The bylaws do not require we only refer to the nominations submitted, but we are permitted to canvass for possible nominees. The Nominating Committee reviewed candidates on the form and solicited individuals before, during, and after SAA’s 2019 annual meeting in Texas. We convened several meetings, discussed as a group the nomination form, and those who expressed interest, in combination with those we reached out to during this period. And with the power granted by the voting body, we created a slate that we thought would be able to address the various themes that have come to the forefront within our organization.

There are significant shifts taking place within SAA, a slowly growing diverse demographic with ideas that are challenging traditions, that are pushing boundaries, questioning the archival praxis that has been foundational and yet needs to be re-examined. At the same time, we are trying to balance the challenges of changing economics and create a dynamic future that will help create sustainability for generations. SAA is in the midst of significant change that we must meet head-on. We believe our slate of candidates is ready for the challenge and will not hold onto what was but give us something new to strive for, and dig into the difficult conversations/decisions while adding more seats to the table, not silence those who remain marginalized within the profession.

We are proud of our slate and wished that we would have been given the respect and the opportunity to have a conversation about adding other candidates to the ballot, as we would have been happy to hear these grievances. At this point, we ask that the Executive Director and the Executive Committee reflect on how they will proceed in the future. The 2019-2020 Nominating Committee submits that they have been frustrated throughout this entire process, from the editorial review of our candidate questions to now the addition of another candidate without any pause even to notify the other candidates in advance of this change. We can only request that a more transparent process is put in place in the future by Council. The Nominating Committee hopes this debate will nevertheless ignite everyone to vote their conscience because clearly there is a lot at stake.

We request that the entirety of our response be shared with the Council.  

In solidarity with our SAA membership who put us here,

SAA 2019-2020 Nominating Committee

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Posted in Communication and SAA

Letter of Apology from David S. Ferriero

Posted on January 27, 2020 | 1 comment

Dear SAA Members,

I am writing to you in response to the Society of American Archivists (SAA) statement of January 19, 2020, “NARA Exhibit on 2017 Women’s March in Washington, DC”, in which SAA expressed its concern about NARA’s alteration of a photo of the Women’s March.  The SAA statement explained that our action raised deep archival issues of falsification of historical records, politicization of the National Archives, and violations of archival ethics. I take these concerns extremely seriously, and want to reach out to you and the whole community of archivists represented by SAA to extend my apology to you and to describe our next steps.

As many of you know, on Saturday, January 18, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) issued a public apology for having displayed an altered photograph at the National Archives Museum in Washington, DC. The public apology reads in full:

We made a mistake. 

As the National Archives of the United States, we are and have always been completely committed to preserving our archival holdings, without alteration.    

In an elevator lobby promotional display for our current exhibit on the 19th Amendment, we obscured some words on protest signs in a photo of the 2017 Women’s March. This photo is not an archival record held by the National Archives, but one we licensed to use as a promotional graphic. Nonetheless, we were wrong to alter the image.

We have removed the current display and will replace it as soon as possible with one that uses the unaltered image.

We apologize, and will immediately start a thorough review of our exhibit policies and procedures so that this does not happen again.

On Tuesday, January 21, I sent an apology to NARA staff members as well, and the next day I wrote a post on my blog, “Accepting Responsibility, Working to Rebuild Your Trust.” I owe you and the entire professional community of archivists an apology, too.  I realize that the integrity of the National Archives, the flagship archives of the United States, is essential to the entire profession. Any reason for doubt about our independence and commitment to archival ethics casts a pall over the profession and  is unacceptable in itself. 

We wanted to use the commercially-licensed 2017 Women’s March image to connect the suffrage exhibit with relevant issues today. We also wanted to avoid accusations of partisanship or complaints that we displayed inappropriate language in a family-friendly Federal museum. For this reason, NARA blurred words in four of the protest signs in the 2017 march photograph, including President Trump’s name and female anatomical references. 

To be clear, the decision to alter the photograph was made without any external direction whatsoever.  

We wrongly missed the overall implications of the alteration.  We lost sight of our unique charge:as an archives, we must present materials without alteration; as a museum proudly celebrating the accomplishments of women, we should accurately present not silence the voices of women; and as a Federal agency we must be completely and visibly non-partisan.

We are now working to correct our actions as quickly and transparently as possible. 

We immediately removed the lenticular display and replaced it with our apology letter. On Wednesday, January 22, we added the unaltered image of the 2017 march, placing it side-by-side with one from the 1913 rally. We will reinstall the lenticular display as soon as a new one with the unaltered image can be delivered. We hope this will be the week of January 27.

We have begun to examine internal exhibit policies and processes and we will incorporate external best practices to ensure something like this never happens again.  The SAA Code of Ethics along with codes and standards from museums and other fields will be studied in our review.  

As I stated in my blog post and want to emphasize again here, I take full responsibility for this decision and the broader concerns it has raised. Together with NARA’s dedicated employees, I am committed to working to rebuild your trust in the National Archives and Records Administration. By continuing to serve our mission and customers with pride, integrity, and a commitment to impartiality, I pledge to restore public confidence in this great institution.

Sincerely,

Ferrieros Signature0001.jpg

DAVID S. FERRIERO
ARCHIVIST OF THE UNITED STATES

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Posted in Archival issues

A Blueprint for Change: Project STAND

Posted on January 6, 2020 | Leave a comment

By Lae’l Hughes-Watkins
University Archivist, University of Maryland, College Park

“I am a mediator between what has been and what is yet to come.”
Klamath Henry, Emory University graduate, Project STAND panelist (February 21, 2019)

October 19-20, Project STAND held its third national symposium at Chicago State University. On the second day, Charles Preston, a student activist, and panelist spoke about being on the front lines of the fight to keep Chicago State University open in 2016. If it were not for the efforts of Preston and colleagues Parris Griffin, Christopher Glenn, and their other allies (predominantly students), the university would have likely closed.  The closure would have left over 4,000 students with a challenging path toward the completion of their education, a massive void in the community, staff, and faculty job losses, along with countless dreams deferred.

During Preston’s panel, he, Griffin and Glenn, recounted #BudgetorElse campaign, the hashtag itself could not cover the emotional strain, trauma, and sheer determination that went on behind the scenes. The students lamented over sleepless nights, missed classes, lost friendships, impromptu meetings with Civil Rights leaders, intense interviews with the press, and multiple marches and protests. Preston impressed upon the crowd, the necessity of archiving student actions because they represent blueprints of resistance. Preston spoke to historians, archivists, and memory workers in the room on the value of the archive to students engaged in making a change within their institutions. 

The student organizers outlined threads that were reminiscent of many experiences of activists that were protesting decades earlier on issues of injustice, like Historian Jason Ferreira. He was part of what has been deemed the longest student strike in American history—the San Francisco State College (SFSC) strike that lasted from November 6, 1968, to March 20, 1969. The protest came with the rise of anti-Vietnam War sentiment on campus and the demands of a Latinx and Asian American student population. The students wanted an institution that taught their histories and included a broader contingent from their communities. Ferreira recalls how most people had no idea of the sacrifice made by the student activists, “People did time. Relationships were stressed to the point of crumbling…”[1]  A coalition of students from varying underrepresented communities gathered to create the Third World Liberation Front and partnered with the Black Student Union, who had just won a battle to create a Black Studies program. These change agents risked their lives to garner the attention of university officials, as the campus swarmed with police. By the conclusion of the strike, SFSC administration established a College of Ethnic Studies and agreed to accept nearly all students of color for the fall semester of 1969.[2]

Scholars and historians such as Dara Walker, Martha Biondi, Stefan Bradley, Ibram Kendi, have written fiercely on the role of student organizers from marginalized populations and how they have been critical to revolutions that have transformed academia. Kendi writes in Beholding Mizzou and the Power of Black Students that black student activists and their allies, “forced the institutionalization of Black Studies, Black cultural centers, and diversity offices—and their activism yielded an unprecedented rise in the numbers of Black students, faculty, staff, and administrators.”

What is the memory of an institution that does not include the totality of its evolution? Archivists/memory workers in academia are charged with documenting the history of their institutions. This record cannot include partial truths, dis-membered narratives, or censored identities because they lead to accounts steeped in slavery or segregationist policies of a University president. We must also advocate for the inclusion of the labor of students, specifically those within the tradition of historically underdocumented groups. These voices have challenged the discriminatory behavior that has led to the exclusion of the LGBTQ student population, the continuation of ableist practices, anti-blackness, anti-immigration sentiment, sexism, and other forms of bias and prejudice. The role of student movements in the creation of programs, departments, offices, and even how monuments have been erected or removed demands space in the archive. It is this overarching need that gave rise to Project STAND, a blueprint to engage in reparative archives.

Project STAND is a radical grassroots archival consortia project between colleges and universities around the country, working to create a centralized digital space highlighting analog and digital collections emphasizing student activism in marginalized communities. Project STAND aims to foster ethical documentation of contemporary and past social justice movements in vulnerable student populations. STAND also advocates for collections by collaborating with educators to provide pedagogical support, creating digital resources, hosting workshops, and forums for information professionals, academics, technologists, humanists, etc. interested in building communities with student organizers and their allies, leading to sustainable relationships, and inclusive physical and digital spaces of accountability, diversity, and equity.

Due to an Institute Museum Library Services (IMLS) grant awarded in 2018, we have held three forums across the country. The forums have provided a platform for student activists to discuss their labor, their personal archiving practices, concerns on ethics, and the archiving of social media. We have been able to carve out space for members in the profession and other practitioners to engage in discourse that challenges our archival traditions and previous frameworks for documenting student movements. We are now a coalition of nearly 70 colleges and universities, private and public, including HBCUs and community colleges. We have completed over 370 collection assessments. The assessments have provided details on a variety of areas, including which states have the highest number of collections on Latinx, African American, and LGBTQ records on student activism and Women’s rights, to who has the most significant physical holdings and digitized objects.

 We are sharing ideas on building community within archives in academia; we are advocating for previously silenced histories, working to fill gaps in the record, and utilizing these resources to ignite conversations to support difficult conversations around complex histories.    

Project STAND reaffirms social justice as an imperative within the archival praxis—this is our guiding principle; this is our blueprint!

[1] Karen Grisby Bates and Shereen Marisol Meraji. The Student Strike That Changed Higher Ed Forever. Code Switch. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/03/21/704930088/the-student-strike-that-changed-higher-ed-forever

[2] Ibid.

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Posted in Advocacy, Diversity and Inclusion

Editor’s Comments about Brown Bag Lunch Article Controversy at SAA Annual Meeting: Listening and Learning

Posted on September 11, 2019 | 3 comments

By Christopher (Cal) Lee, Editor, American Archivist

The past month has been one of intensive listening, discussion, and reflection for many people, including me and the other members of the American Archivist Editorial Board regarding the forthcoming article in volume 82, number 2 of the journal, “To Everything There Is a Season” by Frank Boles, and its selection for a Brown Bag Lunch discussion during ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2019 in Austin.

I selected the article for the brown bag event in order to further professional dialog and not to endorse a viewpoint. I have heard members of the profession who have expressed that the article dismisses their experiences and their work in making SAA and the profession more equitable and that the article should not be published at all. I have heard others who have expressed significant concerns about withdrawing the article from publication and discussion. While I have responded to many individuals who have contacted me directly, I regret that I did not more quickly issue a public statement that we were hearing and reflecting on your concerns, and taking steps to address them. I would like to convey my appreciation of the diverse and valuable perspectives shared with me.

This post is intended to provide further context. It is a personal account from my perspective as Editor. More information about the Editorial Board’s activities and plans will be shared as they develop.

Some Background

As many are aware, at its August 1 meeting during ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2019, the SAA Council voted to cancel the scheduled American Archivist brown bag lunch discussion about the Boles article during the conference. The following day, August 2, the Council issued a statement indicating, “The Council believes that giving a platform to the article noted above at this conference contradicts this effort to be inclusive.” In a later statement on August 15, the Council expressed that creating a “welcoming and safe environment . . . is of paramount concern to this Council and is at the forefront of our considerations. In cancelling the brown bag lunch discussion, we took an action that all of us felt necessary in the context of the Austin conference. We agree with many that the ideas put forward in the article warrant a vigorous professional conversation, and it was not our intent to limit that.”

Social media was the chief outlet through which individuals expressed concerns about the Boles article and the brown bag event, with posts first appearing on July 31. Several individuals also contacted me directly through my Editor email account. In addition, I had many conversations onsite at the conference. The concerns expressed included forthcoming publication of the article in the journal, selection of the article for the brown bag discussion, the RSVP item, and the timing of the event.

American Archivist Peer Review Process

As with all other articles submitted to American Archivist, Boles’s manuscript was subject to a double-blind peer review process. This means that we do not reflect the identity of authors to the reviewers, nor do we reflect the identity of the reviewers to authors. All articles submitted to the journal receive three peer reviews: one from a member of the Editorial Board and two from other members of the profession. We use a system called PeerTrack to administer this process. My predecessor, Greg Hunter, built a pool of potential reviewers by encouraging people to register with PeerTrack, and I have done the same.  We now have 240 registered reviewers.  I continue to encourage people to become a peer reviewer, so the process can best reflect the rich array of expertise and perspectives of the profession.  When creating an account, reviewers are able to indicate their areas of interest and expertise.

When the journal receives a new submission, I first examine it to be sure it is complete and that the author has not inadvertently included identifying information in the text. I then invite three reviewers based on areas of expertise/interest and work load considerations. After identifying individuals whose profile indicates a match based on the topic of the manuscript, I check to see if any of the prospects have performed a review recently. The goal is to consider the full set of prospective reviewers and not simply to return to the same ones. Reviewers have 30 days to complete their reviews.

Peer review for American Archivist is based on a rubric developed by the Editorial Board in 2012 that includes several factors such as statement of problem or purpose, relevance of the topic, importance of the topic, contribution to the literature, organization, drawing and building upon relevant literature, methodology (considered broadly in perspective pieces), discussion, conclusion and mechanics.

Once I receive the three reviews, I make a determination of “accept,” “reject,” or “revise” based on the feedback provided. The majority of submissions to American Archivist fall into the “revise” category, in which I convey comments and concerns that the authors should address in order for the manuscript to be published in the journal.

After completing the process above, I accepted Boles’s manuscript for publication in the journal. For those not familiar with journal peer review processes, it is important to point out that publication of an article is not a formal endorsement of the author’s ideas. The peer review process is not designed to determine whether articles represent the consensus of the profession, nor is it an indication that the peer reviewer or Editorial Board agree with the author. That would be impossible, given the complexity of the issues that archivists face, and the diversity of views within the profession.

Brown Bag Lunch Discussions, RSVPs, and Scheduling

Many people have asked about how an article is selected for the brown bag lunch. The purpose of the brown bag discussions is to allow members of the profession to preview and discuss one article from the forthcoming issue of the journal (in this case, volume 82, number 2) before it goes to press. The selection of the article has always been by the Editor (not the Annual Meeting Program Committee), who has traditionally tried to identify an article on large social/professional issues that the profession faces. Below is a list of the previous selections:

As I have expressed since taking the position of Editor in 2018, I believe that it is vital for our journal to reflect the profession’s wider dialog around inclusion, diversity, and social justice. The Boles piece was the only one in the forthcoming issue of the journal directly on this topic, and I selected it in order to provide one venue for discussing the place, importance, and meaning of social justice as it relates to archives, archivists and records.  The goal of the brown bag has always been to provide a venue for dialog; it is not intended to endorse or advocate for any specific positions taken by the author.  However, I recognize that this may sound like an artificial distinction to those who are troubled by SAA providing a visible platform for discussing the piece.

There was the usual advance notice provided by SAA for the brown bag event. On June 19, SAA added an item to the ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2019 schedule about the brown bag selection. SAA also included information about the event in In the Loop beginning with the July 17 issue. As in previous years, the initial announcements did not yet include a link to the piece because the publisher, Allen Press, was still in the process of generating the page proof.

Questions were raised regarding the RSVP for participation in the event. As in previous years, this is a standard protocol used by SAA. Though it did not this year, some previous brown bag announcements have indicated “pre-registration required” or “limited enrollment.” The announcement has always included an RSVP for two reasons. First, the production of the page proof in time for the brown bag is always tight, and we did not know if we would be able to post it online when we announced the event, so we wanted a way to alert people of its availability. Second, we also wanted to know approximately how many people would attend and plan for logistics such as whether everyone would fit in the room. This has never precluded others from showing up at that time, but as with many other aspects of the Annual Meeting, having people sign up helps with planning. Luckily, Allen Press was able to generate the preprint quickly, and we added a link to the document from the online schedule on July 10 and added it to the In the Loop announcements on July 31.

Several people brought to our attention that the brown bag discussion was scheduled at the same time as an Annual Meeting forum about transgender identity organized by the SAA Diversity Committee. This was very unfortunate, but completely unintentional. There are numerous events happening and many moving parts to the Annual Meeting. The Annual Meeting planners do their best to balance the schedule, but there are always regrettable conflicts.

Listening and Planning Next Steps

The Editorial Board has been engaging in numerous activities related to the controversy raised by the Boles preprint. The most important of these activities has been doing a great deal of listening, both during and after the Annual Meeting, to the diverse and valuable perspectives shared. Our ultimate priority is to ensure that American Archivist is a venue that is welcoming and reflects a diversity of viewpoints.

The controversy was a major focus of discussion at our Editorial Board meeting in Austin on August 2. We also held a conference call on August 26, and with the approval of Council, we will be holding an in-person meeting in Chicago on October 27–29. Topics for discussion include (but are not limited to) engagement with the profession around issues raised by the Boles article, enhancing guidance for and feedback to peer reviewers, author and editorial guidelines, and processes for planning future brown bag events.

Aside from issues of process, many people have raised important critiques about the content of the Boles article. In order to give voice to these perspectives, we will be delaying publication of volume 82, number 2 so that we can also include those voices together with the Boles article, as supported by the Council. I have also been informed of concerns about specific inaccuracies and misattributions in the article. I have conveyed those concerns to the author so that he can address them.  In order to minimize the impact on the other twenty seven authors of articles and book reviews in the forthcoming issue, we are pursuing early online publication of those contributions.

American Archivist serves as one of many forums that SAA offers for engagement around vital issues, including social justice. I hope that members of the profession express their views through those forums, including American Archivist. While we have asked several archivists to respond to Boles’s article, the Board welcomes contributions from anyone, now and in the future. Contributions can take the form of articles, which are subject to the peer review process, or letters to the editor. As reflected in the editorial policy, the journal has a long-standing tradition of receiving and publishing letters to the editor “commenting on recently published articles or other topics of interest to the profession.” There will always be an open invitation to engage with the literature.  For those who would like to submit letters to be included in volume 82, number 2, I would ask you to please do so by October 31.

The archival profession faces many large societal issues.  Archivists and archival scholars have raised vital issues for the profession to address in order to best document and contribute positively to the vast array of communities that we serve. It is my hope that our journal will reflect this discussion. I am grateful for the opportunity to continue to learn and grow with you.

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Posted in American Archivist, Annual Meeting

Guest Post: Terry Baxter, Multnomah County (OR) Archives

Posted on August 16, 2019 | Leave a comment

“Our ancestors are rooting for us.”
We Survived, Climbing PoeTree

Two of the most important things to human beings are justice and love. Neither can be fully defined, especially in the scope of this post. I look at love as the understanding that because we humans are interconnected, we act with empathy and compassion toward others, realizing that furthering their desires is important to the realization of our own. Justice comes in many flavors. My focus here is social justice, which can be defined as promoting fair and equitable relationships between individuals and their society, especially considering how privileges, opportunities, and wealth ought to be distributed among individuals. Love and justice bind us to each other with compassionate, fair, and just connections.

These bonds are not constrained by time. The seventh generation principle codified in the Great Law of Peace has been both commercialized and romanticized. Vine Deloria Jr. commented that we are actually the seventh generation, with the responsibility to bridge the worlds of our great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Rather than peering 200 years into the future, we bring forward the earliest memories of people we actually know and transfer them to descendants we will hopefully meet in the future.

Bridging the temporal spans between generations is what archives and archivists have always done.  I have to believe that our ancestors left us their stories to tell us what they felt important – why they did things and what meaning their actions would take in our lives. We have to be able to move our ancestors’ lives and visions forward to our descendants and one important way is to create archives. Archives are needed because very little that is important is achieved in a human lifespan – often not even in a multigenerational lifespan. We archivists purposefully both choose whose voices and what things they said or did to include in archives. Some would argue that you can’t preserve all the stories. While that may be true in an absolute sense, it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t work with as many people doing archivesque work as we can find to try to preserve and transmit as many distinct voices as possible.

The creation of archives (or story, or memory, or community) is an act of love, a way of saying:  Elders, you did this and it will matter to you, Offspring. Archivists commit to being the connective link, not just among those on the earth today, but among all people. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin stated in Toward the Future that, “Love is the only force which can make things one without destroying them. … Some day, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” In Salvation: Black People and Love, bell hooks noted that, “Love is profoundly political. Our deepest revolution will come when we understand this truth.” Archivists are at the core of this revolution—finding stories, preserving them, sharing them. We don’t do this just for evidential or informational value. We do it to connect our species—past, present, and future—to each other in common humanity.

So what about justice, comrades?

We’ve all read the old saw “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” In Theodore Parker’s original abolitionist sermon, the first clause reads: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways.”  On our own, we humans can see only a few decades, maybe a century if we’re lucky. If we rely only on our own eyes to see justice, we often can’t see any bend at all, in fact maybe even a bend away from justice. Archives document that long arc, across generations, and present it for all to see. Using archives is an act of justice; a way of saying that we see you, we see your mistakes, we understand how and why you erred, we know more now and we can repair them to make us whole.

This repair requires the inclusion of voices that have traditionally been ignored an equitable footing. The Protocols for Native American Archival Materials is a useful model for seeing archives as underpinning socially just actions. It requires people to approach each other with open hearts and mutual respect, to make decisions based on shared and equal power (as much as possible), and to find solutions that are acceptable to all parties. Archives are key sources in reparative work like truth commissions, treaty negotiations, reparations efforts, and a variety of other community healing efforts based in the representation of all affected voices through time.

Lae’l Hughes-Watkins concludes in Moving Toward a More Reparative Archives“that engaging in social justice through reparative archival work in the form of the diversification of archives, advocacy/promotion, and then utilization within an academic archive has set a process in motion that has shown early signs of creating feelings of inclusivity within the archival space.”

Archives are relational through time. They bind us, for good and for bad, to our human relatives both in the past and in the future. Our ancestors are rooting for us. They have clamored to have all of their stories heard. Fought for a deeper and more truthful narrative of us humans. Archivists uncover those stories, add them to the sum of human understanding, and move them forward through time. Why? So that our great-grandchildren will know that their ancestors are rooting for them, too.

Terry Baxter has been an archivist for 33 years, currently at Multnomah County and the Oregon Country Fair. He lives in northeast Portland with two Jewells.

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Posted in Archival issues