SCA AGM 2023

Session Descriptions

Printable Schedule: Schedule-at-a-glance.pdf

FRIDAY, APRIL 7

New Member Meet & Greet Join the Membership Committee at this informal gathering to meet your new colleagues. All new members are welcome, as are returning or veteran members who'd like to welcome those new to SCA.

Plenary address: We Are the Land: California Indians and the Making of California, the United States and the World Opening plenary address by Dr. William Bauer, co-author of We Are the Land: A History of Native California

Voces del Teatro Oral History Archive Voces del Teatro, an oral history archive, is attempting to compile the first official chronicle of Latinx theatre-makers in Los Angeles - in the words of the creators. These 40 interviews are a living record of the challenges and triumphs experienced by Latinx actors, directors, designers, playwrights, producers and artistic directors.

We’ll demonstrate how the development of this theatre genre closely paralleled the socio-political history of the L.A. Latinx community during the modern period from the Chicano Movement to C. American immigration, to the Uprisings of 1992, to the 2020 Uprisings and the pandemic. 

We’ll present a short highlight reel, then give an overview of the establishment and evolution of the principal theater companies. 

We’ll talk about the critical need to record and preserve this vital history for future generations. We’ll also speak about how these theatres and the genre itself are at risk of disappearing due to economic downturns and lack of attention given by “mainstream” theatre. 

Collaborating to Share “Hidden” History The Broadway neighborhood, a community of predominantly African American residents and business-owners, has been largely forgotten since it was devasted by the construction of the 10 Freeway. Relatively unknown even in its heyday (based on conversations with locals, many members of Santa Monica’s communities of color recall the neighborhood fondly, while the white community in Santa Monica was unaware of Broadway’s identity), Broadway was a destination for shopping, socializing, and worshipping. 

The Quinn Research Center’s (QRC) goal is to resurrect the story of this neighborhood and to preserve what little remains of it. The first step in preservation is awareness. QRC worked with the Santa Monica History Museum to create an exhibition documenting the history of Broadway and to share the stories of residents, businesses, churches, and social organizations. 

As the stewards of an extensive and rare collection of material documenting Santa Monica’s African American history, QRC’s co-founders have partnered with local community organizations such as the Santa Monica Public Library to make their collection more accessible to researchers and local community members. 

Meet the California State Archivist Join us for a Q&A discussion between the California State Archivist, Tamara Martin, and SCA President, Liza Posas. It will be an opportunity for SCA members to ask questions about and become more familiar with the work of the State Archives. Liza Posas will field questions from SCA members and help guide the discussion. Tamara Martin will provide information related to the questions asked as well as talk about her role as State Archivist.

OAC/Calisphere Contributor Meeting Are you a current contributor to the Online Archive of California (OAC) or Calisphere? Are you thinking about becoming a new member? Join us to meet fellow contributors, ask questions of program staff, and learn more about new developments with the services. We will highlight and share work-in-progress updates from our Calisphere and OAC roadmaps, including: community best practices and considerations to collectively support more responsible access and inclusive description; progress highlights on Calisphere's new harvesting infrastructure; and "Building a National Finding Aid Network," a two-year IMLS-funded research and demonstration project.

CSU Archives & Archivists Roundtable Join fellow Cal State University colleagues for our April roundtable in person at the AGM! An informal time to share updates, meet folks, eat lunch, and learn more together as our community of practice. 

Reparative Description Projects 

Two panels will discuss reparative description projects at their institutions:

In Frame and In focus: learning from community consultants: As part of In Frame, an Academy Film Archive-led project to build a searchable database of films and filmmakers relevant to underrepresented communities, the Academy is currently working with community consultants who advise on the project’s taxonomy, user needs, and methodology. We will report on our work thus far and discuss lessons learned along the way including how to incorporate direct community participation in ways that are ethical, inclusive, and holistic. We will speak about several aspects of our work with consultants, including our candidate selection process, use of trained staff facilitators to lead focus group discussions, and our plans to expand our work with community consultants as the In Frame project continues to evolve.

From Internship to Partnership: A Critical Reflection on the Intersections of Power, Language, and Labor in the Reparative and Inclusive Description (RID) Survey Scholar Internship: In January of 2021, the Bancroft Library launched a large-scale digitization project with support from the 2019 CLIR Digitizing Hidden Collections grant to provide online access to more than 130,000 pages contained in over 800 California Land Case Files dating from 1852 to 1892. The information in these legal documents offers evidence of life in early California from the perspective of Mexican Californians, or Californios, and provides a unique view into the transition from Mexican to American rule in the state. Online access to these original documents in their entirety provides new opportunities for scholarship and allows new audiences to examine the injustices of California’s colonial past.

Digital Case Studies:

Exposing Colonial Legacies through Online Access: Digitization of the California Land Case Files In January of 2021, the Bancroft Library launched a large-scale digitization project with support from the 2019 CLIR Digitizing Hidden Collections grant to provide online access to more than 130,000 pages contained in over 800 California Land Case Files dating from 1852 to 1892. The information in these legal documents offers evidence of life in early California from the perspective of Mexican Californians, or Californios, and provides a unique view into the transition from Mexican to American rule in the state. Online access to these original documents in their entirety provides new opportunities for scholarship and allows new audiences to examine the injustices of California’s colonial past.

Level Up! Archivists Are Unlocking the "Extra Life" for Video Games After 50 years of growing popularity, there is a rising interest in archiving and preserving video games and computer entertainment in both the corporate and museum worlds. As a consumer product, games create an interesting archival challenge for the corporate content creators and those external to the organization that wish to preserve game history. Alison Quirion, an associate archivist for a major video game development team, will present an overview of the current state of game archives, the types of materials archived, the unique needs of their end users, and the challenges of building and maintaining game archives, using examples from her own work and the work of colleagues within the industry.

Marin City 80: Resistance of Historical Erasure and Power Imbalance Today in Marin County, which possesses 6 of the top 10 most segregated cities in California, Marin City endures as a black community. Performing Stars of Marin celebrated the 80th anniversary of Marin City in 2022 through public programming that highlighted its history and legacy while enacting social change in partnership with Dominican University of California (DUoC). Power, historical narrative, and framing it in modernity are keys to exhibit development, book publishing, music festival planning, playwriting, and community strengthening that embodied Marin City 80. As a university that has an obligation to center students, the community partnerships with Performing Stars of Marin provided opportunities for multidisciplinary community engaged learning work.

Academic archives, even low budget repositories, possess the resources and power that can be leveraged to assist community archives in uplifting a marginalized people’s history. This discussion aims to compel archivists of any specificity to center the practice of cultural humility by forming non-paternalistic partnerships to shift historical and modern power imbalances, providing DUoC students an opportunity for community engaged learning.

Poster Sessions:

An opportunity to view posters and talk with the poster presenters!

• From Enemies to Friends: Incompatible prints - Hannah Rogers, Krystel Jimenez
• A Collaborative Approach to Engaging Students in Meaningful Career Exploration - Katrina Williams, et al
• La Historia: Creating a sustainable community archive - Rosa Pena
• SAA Dataverse - Maggie Hughes
• The Forward Clubhouse Turns 100 - a case study in archival outreach in an all-volunteer historical society - Sarah Lewis
• Digitizing and Describing the Southeast Asia Community Resource Center Collection - Elyse Fox, Lynn Drennan, Pachia Lucy Vang
• Ready - Or Not Emergency Preparedness for Cultural Collections - Hillary Ellis, et al
• All’s Fair in People and Archives: The Los Angeles County Fair and the Celebration of Culture, Heritage, and History of Southern California - Andrew Kopp

SATURDAY, APRIL 8

Your data don’t define me!: Making space for feelings amidst the data dump The Society of American Archivists’ 2022 A*Census revealed that the proportion of BIPOC individuals in the archives profession is 16%. The Ethics and Inclusion Committee wishes to gather BIPOC archivists to discuss the Census and how the Society of California Archivists can continue to contribute to the hiring, retention, and promotion. Further, the EIC understands that statistical data often flatten individuals' lived experiences. We want to gather to make space for community discussion about feelings and radical reflection. How do we make meaning of the data to go beyond the numbers? How do we engage with this data while contextualizing our lived experiences? In this interactive session facilitated by Ethics and Inclusion Committee members, participants will help us to identify priorities for the committee to focus on as we seek to establish community. At the end of this session we will discuss next steps for change and re-envision where the EIC can grow. **This session is intended only for BIPOC professionals working in archives or allied fields. We kindly request that white-identifying colleagues attend a different session.

Collaborations and partnerships: Universities, Students, and Communities 

Local Histories and Archival Collections: Empowering Students' Inquiries Recent acquisitions and collaborations at the UC Merced Library provided librarians and archivists with the potential to engage and empower students to rethink traditional historical narratives, and to recognize their own agency in the knowledge-making process. The library recently acquired photographs chronicling activist work by the AWOC and the UFW in the 1960s, and documenting the lives migrant farm workers. We have worked on collaborative projects with community members illuminating local histories of Japanese-American incarceration during World War II. The narratives that arise from such collections provide entry points into archival spaces where under-represented individuals and communities have been marginalized, denigrated, and erased. This is especially resonant on a campus where almost 80% students identify as non-white.

Accessibility and Mentorship: How Community Partnerships Can Reveal Collections and Inspire a New Generation of Cultural Heritage Professionals Occidental College’s Special Collections and Archives is collaborating with the History Department, with support from the Grace Nixon Foundation, to host an internship for a student to support the management and development of Oxy’s Japanese American Relocation collection. These partnerships create an ongoing program with two central objectives: 1) to make this unique collection accessible to a diverse audience and 2) to provide a student intern hands-on experience in preparation for a career in public history, special collections, archives, or museums. 

Collaborate to Elevate: Uplifting Diverse Collections through Exhibits and Curriculum Development UC Davis Library Archives and Special Collections launched outreach initiatives intended to ensure that underrepresented students and surrounding communities see themselves within the collections we steward. Collaborations with institutional and community partners can expose and uplift diverse archival collections through exhibits and K-12 curriculum projects. ASC fostered collaborations with the California History-Social Science Project, the Marchand Public Engagement Initiative, and the Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies to create educational programs centered on Latina/o/x and Filipina/o/x communities. 

Preserving the Profession: Advocating for Archivists through Fair Labor Principles Please join members of the SCA’s Labor, Advocacy, and Public Policy Committee to collectively envision what a set of fair labor principles looks like for archivists. In the 2022 SCA AGM, we invited you to help identify priorities for the committee to focus on as we seek to respond to the excellent recommendations of our colleagues on the Labor Task Force in their final report, one of which is that SCA adopt a set of Fair Labor Principles. In response, SCA Labor, Advocacy, and Public Policy Committee members have been hard at work drafting a set of fair labor principles, and we want to hear from you. Please join us for an interactive workshop session facilitated by members of the committee. We will discuss what constitutes fair labor principles for archivists, solicit feedback on our working draft, and brainstorm actionable plans for implementing these values in our advocacy, labor, hiring, and management practices. All conference attendees are welcome.

The people’s university: assessing the state of the CSU archives The California State University system, known as the People’s University, comprises 23 campuses, all of which have special collections staff, some of whom work in isolation. This campfire session is for everyone who wants to learn more about an exploratory survey of the current state of the archives, including labor issues, across the California State University (CSU) system AND wants to dialogue about how we can unite to advocate together.

The team comes to the project with varying levels of experience with research; some are novices, others seasoned scholars. This exercise provided some lone arrangers with a sense of community, and a safe space to learn how to conduct data-driven research projects.

After an overview of the findings, we will have an open, community dialogue by facilitating activities to brainstorm together so we can envision and start to create more equitable, liberating archives environments. You don’t need to be a CSU archives worker to attend–we believe all will be able to take away ideas for their own advocacy, research, and community-building work.

Community-Centered Archives Practice and the Institution: Transforming Education, Archives, and Community History How can academic archives foster equitable access to local community histories for the purposes of teaching, learning, and community building? Speakers from UC Irvine, the California Digital Library, and a community-based organization will illustrate community-centered archives partnerships and initiatives that support social justice and ethnic studies educational objectives in California. Panelists will describe their efforts to identify actionable strategies to support ethical and responsible representation of marginalized histories in digital collections, exhibits, and documentation projects. The presenters will also reflect on considerations for ensuring the sustainability of such endeavors beyond grant funding. Join us in thinking about cultivating commitment among higher education institutions to community-centered archives approaches, solidifying the ability and responsibility of academic libraries to engage critically and contribute to social justice-focused scholarship, training, pedagogy, and partnerships in their communities.

Sacramento Archives Crawl: 12 Years of Building Community For 12 years, the Sacramento Archives Crawl has brought together around two dozen archives and special collections libraries in the Sacramento Valley, Sacramento Delta, and Sierra Foothills to meet the public, talk about what we do, and show off our collections. Though the purpose of the Crawl is for external outreach, Crawl Committee members and participating institutions have found that our cooperative work on the program has built a stronger archivist community here in the Sacramento region, bringing together information professionals who would not otherwise get to work together and creating better working relationships across institutions. In this session, Crawl committee members will talk about what the Crawl is and how it came about, how we manage it as a group, and our successes and challenges. We’ll also talk about how we see the Crawl serving the Sacramento region’s community and how we’ve built important relationships with the public; local individuals, businesses, and organizations who help support us; students; new researchers; and each other.

Awards Luncheon 

Power to la Gente/the People: History Making and the Role of the Archive Dr. Lorena V. Márquez will emphasize the importance of archives in creating history and centering la gente/the people in the historical narrative. Her book, La Gente: Struggles for Empowerment and Community Self-Determination in Sacramento, is testament that to champion the history of the people one must rely on local archives. Her upcoming book, In their Voices: Chicana/o Movement Elders Reflections on the Civil Rights Era, will highlight the Sacramento Movimiento Chicano and Mexican American Education Oral History Project and the importance of establishing community archives.