Sessions & Meetings

 Date, Time

 Description

Thursday,
April 27th

Workshop
9:00 am – 4:30 pm

Workshop
9:00 am – 4:30 pm

Copyright Issues for Digital Archives #1796

9:00 am - 12:30 pm

SCA Board meeting (Board members only)

Tours
1:30 pm - 4:00 pm

California Institute of Technology Archives & Special Collections

The Gamble House

SCA Leadership Meeting

Come discuss your ideas for growing educational and sponsorship opportunities and awareness of the Society with the Board!

6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Opening Reception, Huntington Library

Friday,
April 28

8:00 am - 4:00 pm

Registration for AGM

Plenary address          
9:00 am - 10:00 am

Plenary Address: Ann Scheid

"To Make a City Attractive is to Make it Prosperous"

Ann Scheid, currently the Archivist at the Greene and Greene Archives at the Huntington Library, has taught Swedish at UCLA, German at PCC, and worked as a city planner for the City of Pasadena and as an architectural historian for the State of California. She has written two histories of Pasadena and has published articles and lectured widely on local and regional architecture, landscape history and city planning. She is a graduate of Vassar College, the University of Chicago and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

Session 1
10:30 am - 12:00 pm

Session 1: Describing Digital: Enabling Easy Discovery

Jillian Cuellar, UCLA Library Special Collections
Laurel McPhee, UC San Diego Library
Kate Tasker, UC Berkeley, The Bancroft Library
Laura Uglean Jackson, UC Irvine

This panel seeks to broaden the archival conversation about digital assets and hybrid collections beyond capture and workflows to include description and discovery. What are practitioners doing right now for our users that enables, promotes, and advances discovery of materials that, a few years ago, may have been "locked down" on obsolete media, but are now preserved in dark storage and digital asset management systems? Do we need new paradigms of description, or can we use our existing tools and standards to describe these assets and answer researchers' questions, even before they ask them?

We are all seeking increased efficiency and transparency in how we work with digital assets and make them discoverable. This panel will present and explore some of the strategies being used on UC campuses to describe hybrid and born-digital collections, in ways that are both traditional and new. These strategies will employ shared description standards, and be widely adoptable for repositories big and small.

Session 2
10:30 am - 12:00 pm

Session 2: Soft Money, Hard Realities: The Lives and Careers of Archivists with Short-Term or Grant-Funded Positions

Jennifer Martinez Wormser, Laguna College of Art + Design
Gretta Treuscorff
Lisa Janssen, Freelance
Marjorie Bryer, The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley
Li Wei Yang, The Huntington Library

Panel participants will discuss their experiences working in grant-funded or short-term positions. Often funded by external sources and play critical roles, these jobs can range from description and access to programming and outreach. Grant-funded positions can serve as entry points into institutions that may yield future long-term job possibilities, but they also do not allow the incumbent to plan far beyond a year or two years at a time. Although flexibility, variety, new technology and opportunities to meet a wide range of colleagues often come with such positions, there may also be stickier issues such as financial insecurity, lack of acceptance from permanent staff, and sometimes tight or unrealistic timelines for completing project benchmarks. This panel will examine these positions from the perspective of those who have served in those roles, but also those who as supervisors and administrators have created these types of jobs. We as a professional community do not discuss these types of jobs with a critical eye; this session will endeavor to analyze the benefits, difficulties and opportunities such positions create.

Session 3
10:30 am - 12:00 pm

Session 3: Lightning Talks: Documenting Diversity

12:00 pm – 1:45 pm

Lunch on Your Own

1:15 pm – 1:45 pm

Online Archive of California (OAC) Contributors Meeting

Are you a current contributor to the Online Archive of California (OAC)? Are you thinking about becoming a new member? Join us to meet fellow contributors, ask questions of OAC staff, and learn more about new tools and developments.

Session 4
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Session 4: Hot DAM: Migration and Implementation Strategies for Digital Asset Management Systems

Kelsi Evans, University of California, San Francisco
Christine Deborah Kim, University of California, Irvine
David Krah, University of California, San Francisco
Eric Milenkiewicz, University of California, Riverside
Monique Sugimoto, Palos Verdes Library District
Adrian Turner (Moderator), California Digital Library

This lightning session will focus on challenges and solutions to implementing or migrating to a new digital asset management system (DAMS). Panelists will each briefly share their lessons learned with recently transitioning from legacy systems to new platforms or starting from scratch to launch a new system. They will highlight different considerations related to solutions such as Nuxeo and Islandora and publishing to platforms including Calisphere and Omeka. They will discuss how they approached technical and staff resourcing, budgeting, metadata and file migration, and integrating the DAMS with other platforms. The lightning talks will be followed by an in-depth and moderated Q&A session with the audience and panelists. The goal is to have a candid, participatory discussion that frankly addresses various workflow challenges and solutions, system benefits and drawbacks -- and ultimately encourages archival professionals to take the leap to new systems that can better serve their needs.

Session 5
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Session 5: SNAC Attack

Andra Darlington, Getty Research Institute
Rachael Hu, California Digital Library
Kelly Spring, University of California, Irvine

The Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) Cooperative is nearing the end of its initial pilot phase. Hosted by NARA, the SNAC Cooperative will enable archivists, librarians and scholars to jointly maintain information about the people, corporate bodies and families documented in archival collections. The cooperative model will support economy and quality in archival processing and description by sharing the work of creating and editing records. With links to related collections, SNAC will also improve discovery of distributed historical records. In this session, participants in the two-year pilot will provide an update on recent developments and future plans for the Cooperative, including a look at the user interface for contributors and editors.

Session 6
2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Session 6: Renovations and Collection Moves: Facing the Inevitable

Marva Felchlin, Autry Museum of the American West
Ellen Jarosz, California State University, Northridge
Kelsey Knox, Pepperdine University
Liza Posas, Autry Museum of the American West

As our professional responsibilities evolve, our holdings expand, and our users' needs change, many archivists participate in planning new facilities or renovations to existing ones. Are you planning to move? Did your proposal for a new or renovated facility finally get approved? Are you overwhelmed just thinking about it? While the speakers work at different types of institutions, all have recently experienced planning new spaces and moving staff and collections. Come hear their words of wisdom--what to do, what not to do, how to work with architects, map a move, pack your collection, and deploy staff effectively. Individual presentations will also address engaging in effective communication, project management, continuing public service, managing expectations, and more.

4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

SCA All Members Meeting & Committee Meetings

All SCA members are invited to learn about SCA’s recent activities, including the SCA election results. Everyone at the meeting has a chance to win two free drawings for a one-year membership in SCA.

Committee meetings will follow, which also makes this a great opportunity to check out possible committees to join.

6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Dinner: "Gourmet Night" or on your own

For the first time, SCA will offer a "Trivia Night" sponsored by the Southern California Chapter of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America. Join fellow archivists as your knowledge is put to the test with the chance to be crowned Deans of the Archive of Knowledge! Free dessert, drinks, and prizes will be provided!

 Saturday,
 April 29

8:00 am - 11:00 am

Registration for AGM

Session 7: "Archivists Doin' It for Themselves: Archivists and Their Own Research"

Clay Stalls, Huntington Library (chair)
David Keller, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California
Lisa Miller, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University
Danelle Moon, Special Research Collections, University of California Santa Barbara
Peter Blodgett, Huntington Library (commentator)

Archivists and curators wear many hats in their professional work, but one that is too often unrecognized is that of their own scholarly research. The purpose of this session will demonstrate how we participate in one of the defining purposes of our professional work: the use of collections for research. Lisa Miller will examine how the creation of national forests in California in the early 1900s coincided with federal efforts to assist the landless Indians of Northern California. Danelle Moon will discuss her research and findings on the important but understudied militant American suffragist Vivian Pierce, work that was included in the “Biographical Database of Militant Woman Suffragists, 1913-1920.” David Keller will offer a case study on how his extensive research in the Metropolitan Water District’s Image Collection, maps, and artifact collections for an exhibition prepared him to meet the requests of different audiences, including scholars, for the collections he manages. Commentator Peter Blodgett will critique the panelists' papers and offer perspective on archivists as scholarly researchers.

Session 8
9:00 am - 10:15 am

Session 8: Saving Old Media for the Future: Issues in Image Preservation and Access

Anuja Navare, Pasadena Museum of History
Camille Mathieu, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Julie Cooper, Jet Propulsion Laboratory

This panel will feature a discussion of common challenges in preserving and providing access to historical images. Panelists will discuss types and causes of negative damage, as well as solutions for minimizing this damage. These panelists will also explore ways their archives are providing access to at-risk negative collections through digitization, cataloging, display, and social sharing.

The Pasadena Museum of History (PMH) Archives and Library maintains the area’s largest and most complete photographic archives of Pasadena – an estimated one million photographic images. Navare will describe the condition and challenges of the PMH photo collection, such as vinegar syndrome; implementation of preservation solutions; project funding sources; and challenges and solutions in making collections accessible.The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Archives houses over 350,000 historical photos of missions, experiments, and personnel. Cooper will provide an overview of JPL’s photo collections, preservation strategies, transfer of negatives to cold storage, and various digitization projects to provide access to at-risk negatives. Mathieu will follow up by discussing online photo collections and use of social media for increased photo accessibility.

Session 9
9:00 am - 10:15 am

Session 9: Lightning Talks: New Tools & Approaches

10:15 am - 10:45 am

Break, refreshments. Celebrating 30 years of Mink Scholarships

Session 10
10:45 am - 12:00 pm

Session 10: Born Digital: Care, Feeding, and Intake Processes

Mary-Ellen Petrich, LOCKSS at Stanford University
Andrew Berger, Computer History Museum
Maria Praetzellis, Internet Archive/Archive-It
Steve Hughes, Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Processes for digital preservation are in flux, with new methods introduced all the time, while ever more archival material is digital. Preservation starts with intake, which can be as simple as saving raw bytes to magnetic tape or as complicated as creating a peer-to-peer poll-and-repair network of servers. How materials are processed, prepared, and taken into a preservation system defines how they come out, and by extension how accessible and usable the materials are afterwards.

This panel includes perspectives from a museum, a large university, a government agency, and a nonprofit provider of digital services. Panelists from LOCKSS and the Internet Archive will speak about ingest of material published to the web, while those from JPL and the Computer History Museum will speak about preservation of scientific data and audio-visual materials. Through the experiences of this diverse group of digital preservation experts, attendees will get a peek behind the curtain at unique work environments, as well as practical information on tools which we use or support, such as web capture and digital repositories.

Session 11
10:45 am - 12:00 pm

Session 11: Ethics Roundtable

Julie Graham, UCLA Library Special Collections
Sue Hodson, The Huntington Library

As professionals we often find ourselves facing ethical dilemmas. These might relate to privacy and confidentiality, donor relations, conflicts of interest, or other ethical challenges. Using the SAA code of ethics, and the standards for ethical conduct for rare book, manuscript, and special collections librarians, this roundtable will facilitate opportunities for participants to examine selected case studies of "ethical quandaries", and work together to propose solutions. It promises to be fun and educational!

Session 12
10:45 am - 12:00 pm

Session 12: The Future Looks Good: Quality Control of Audiovisual Media for Archivists

Michael Angeletti , Stanford University Libraries
Nathan Coy, Stanford University Libraries
Kelly Haydon, Bay Area Video Coalition

Is that how it’s supposed to look and sound? This fundamental question of audiovisual preservation work can be a daunting one. From consistency in file characteristics to playback machine alignment to evaluating digitization work from vendors, the presenters will examine a variety of challenges related to quality control of reformatted sound recordings and moving images. Using examples that highlight both media playback problems as well as problems with digital files, the presenters will discuss experiences with in-house and outsourced digitization work, while sharing tools for evaluating audio and video. The intent is for individuals to leave the session with more points of reference to aid in developing quality control standards for projects or when creating organizational guidelines.

Luncheon
12:15 pm – 1:45 pm

Session 13: Recycle and Reuse: Creating Opportunities with Existing Metadata

Tammi Kim, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Karla Irwin, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Emily Lapworth, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Christina V. Fidler, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, UC Berkeley
Shaula Stephenson, Skirball Cultural Center

Good descriptive metadata goes a long way in improving the value of collections. Without it, even the most important materials might be unknown and only discoverable by chance. Some description is inherited from our predecessors, some is passed on through donors, and some is created by our colleagues. Presenters in this session will discuss their experiences reusing, transforming, or otherwise improving existing metadata to make collections more discoverable and usable. They will share specific examples involving different types of collections, metadata standards, and systems.

Tammi Kim will discuss working with and reusing donor-provided descriptive metadata to create DACS-compliant archival description. Karla Irwin will discuss cross-departmental, scalable and automated workflows to manage metadata for born-digital photograph collections. Emily Lapworth will discuss reusing archival description to provide online access to a large, minimally processed photograph collection. Christina Fidler will discuss how the transformation of a MySQL database into a structured portal using MODs encoded files increased accessibility to scientific research materials. Shaula Stephenson will discuss the end-user driven evolution of metadata schema for a digital photographic collection.

Jaime Henderson, California Historical Society
Christina Moretta, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
Sean Heyliger, African American Museum & Library at Oakland
Sharon Dovas, Pixar Animation Studios
Jill Morton, Chevron (chair)

Digitally-born and digitized assets are a growing part of many archival collections. This session will explore how implementing a digital asset management (DAM) system affects archival work and the challenges and opportunities that arise. Panelists from special collections, cultural institutions, and corporate archives will examine how their roles have changed to accommodate managing a DAM system. They will share lessons learned in implementing DAM within their varied institutions, including working with different user groups, vendors, file types, and within the bounds of their technological and financial resources. Panelists will reflect on how they advocated for getting a DAM system, what needs they had hoped DAM would address, how DAM has been received within their organization, and new needs created by its implementation. The session will explore how our society’s growing expectation of digital access intersects with archival work in influencing the resources dedicated to DAM as well as overall project planning and work practices, offering a theoretical and practical examination of this new archives landscape.

Session 15: From Project to People: Exploring Successful Community Engagement Strategies

Jenny Johnson, Stanford University Archives
Laurel McPhee, University of California, San Diego
Liza Posas, Autry Museum / LA as Subject
Josh Schneider, Stanford University Archives / ePADD (chair)

The success of archival initiatives often depends upon thoughtfully engaging relevant communities. This session, consisting of lightning talks followed by a panel-led discussion, will shine a spotlight on innovative methods and best practices for fostering archival community engagement, reveal common pitfalls, and underscore the need for flexible approaches tailored to specific goals and circumstances.

Community engagement strategies to be explored include targeted outreach to specific donor groups, raising awareness of archival collections and those who steward them, and ensuring the adoption of software that is inclusive of diverse user communities' needs. Are you considering or are you currently responsible for engaging with, growing, or managing a community? Come join the panelists in sharing and evaluating innovative strategies for community engagement! 

3:30 pm -4:30 pm

 SCA Board meeting