Workshop One            8:00 am - 5:00 pm

New Member Meet & Greet

Please 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.

"The Redemptive West"

William Deverell. Director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West

This talk explores the redemptive landscapes -- natural, psychological, and otherwise -- of the post-Civil War American West.  If questions over the fate of the West caused the Civil War, what can we see and say about the redemptive possibilities of post-war lives in the West?  Did the region offer some measure of penance to the broken nation and its broken people in the years and decades following the catastrophic war?

Changing Moving Image Access: Presenting Video Artworks in an Online Environment

• Annette Doss, Special Collections Cataloger, Getty Research Institute
• Mary K. Woods, MLIS, Conservation Assistant, Getty Research Institute

This presentation concerns the Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive (LBMA) held at the Getty Research Institute.  LBMA was among the first museums in the United States to focus on video as an artistic medium. The archive documents LBMA's innovative approaches to the production and display of video art between 1974-1999. Materials include artist files; exhibition records; LBMA's administrative records; materials on the museum's grant and cable television programs; photographic materials; and nearly 5,000 videotapes.

Cultural institutions have recognized the importance of these influential video works which have changed the landscape of contemporary art. However, these time-based materials have left the repository, as well as the artist, in a quandary over issues such as preservation, accessibility, and proper display. 

 This presentation focuses on the efforts to catalog and provide access to this extensive video collection. Topics include the arrangement, description, and cataloging of the collection, as well as the standards used in making the materials accessible. In addition, the intricacies of reformatting the LBMA videos and guiding both their content and metadata into GRI's digital repository for online access will be discussed.

Archivists That Are Doin' It for Themselves: Southern California Edition

Moderator: Michael Wurtz, Archivist, University of the Pacific

• Clay Stalls, Manuscript Curator, Loyola Marymount University. Shady Dealings? Daniel Freeman's Failed Centinela Land Company
• David Keller, Senior Analyst Records Team - Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Deep Water: Photos, Film, & Tape from the MWD Vaults
• Peter J. Blodgett, H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western Historical Manuscripts - Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens: context and commentary

Similar to last year, this session will give archivists that are “doin’ [history] for themselves” a venue to share their historical research and will reveal some local history to visitors from across the state. First, Clay Stalls will use the Daniel Freeman Papers, an important archival collection documenting the growth of pre-1900 Los Angeles, to examine Freeman’s failure to develop the Rancho Centinela in 1873. Freeman’s failure yields insights into Los Angeles’ development before its first great boom, in the 1880s. Then David Keller will explore the history of the Metropolitan Water District, William Mulholland, the Colorado River Aqueduct, and the pre-MWD aqueduct surveys with assets from the organization’s collection including a rare video from the San Jacinto tunnel, along with interviews with former Aqueduct workers. Lastly, Peter Blodgett will comment upon the presentations and place their research in the larger context of Southern California’s development at the turn of the last century.

What Questions Do You Have? The Scope of Expanded Reference Services in Our Archives

Moderator: Wendy Kramer, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library

• Christina Moretta, San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library
• Christina Rice, Los Angeles Public Library, Photo Collection
• Michael C. Oliveira, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California

As archival collections become more discoverable via EAD finding aids,  digitization, and social networking, what changes have archivists been experiencing in reference service work? What's happening with public awareness and demand for access, and how are we responding? How is the role of "the desk" evolving in a digital world, both face-to-face and virtually? How do original order and provenance meet a keyword-oriented public?

Join us for a panel discussion on these and other reference-related issues. Share your ideas, challenges, and questions about staffing, virtual reference, search and discovery, service models, policymaking, evaluation, and advocacy.

New Technologies and Archives: Exchange Forum 2012

Moderator: Robin Chandler, Project Manager, Grateful Dead Archive, UC Santa Cruz

• Todd Carter, CEO and Co-founder, Tagasauris
• Dominic McDevitt-Parks, Wikipedian in Residence, National Archives and Records Administration
• Jon Voss, Strategic Partnerships Director, Historypin, and Heather Moran, Photographer & Archivist, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency

Increasingly, archives amass more and more digital records and also use emerging technologies to provide access, process, and promote their collections. At this time of exponentially expanding digital data, archivists are searching for tools that will speed up metadata creation, improve latent semantic indexing and incorporate crowdsourcing into the processing workflow. Archives are looking for ways to better inform their users through Wikipedia and social media. Some of our colleagues are already experimenting with presenting historical artifacts and manuscripts in a physical world through AR (augmented reality) applications. Representatives from diverse tech companies and a Wikipedian-in-residence will discuss their perspectives on designing new tools for archives, their experiences of working with archival institutions, and will also present some of their new products and services. This forum will include a brief presentation of specific products, along with a facilitated discussion among the panel and the audience.    

More on Todd Carter:  Todd is the CEO and Co-founder of Tagasauris, a meta-data curation platform. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Tagasauris and The Museum of the City of New York a grant to annotate the museum's archive.  Todd will discuss his views on the role that libraries play in the information technology landscape of the future. Todd's talk will focus on improving media annotation with open sourced anthologies, linked open data, semantics, machines and crowd sourced human computation.

More on Dominic McDevitt-Parks: Since the summer of 2011, NARA has been building a close relationship with the editors of Wikipedia. For archives, the benefits include raising awareness about your collections to a wider online audience, improving the quality of information publicly available about them, and the ability to draw on a pool of online volunteers. Potential relationships with Wikipedia can be varied and customized to your needs, but might include contributing high-quality images and media under a free license, providing subject matter expertise for the improvement of articles, hosting local Wikipedians for meetups at your institution, and collaborative transcriptions of textual documents on Wikisource. Find out more about how to embark on your own partnership with Wikipedia.

More on Jon Voss and Heather Moran: What happens when hundreds of thousands of archival photos are shared with open licenses, then mashed up with geolocation data and current photos? Or when app developers can freely utilize information and images from millions of books? From augmented reality and crowdsourcing at Historypin to Linked Open Data, we'll look at how developers are leveraging institutional metadata and contributing to a growing ecosystem of open historical data.

In Pursuit of the Moral Imperative: Exploring Social Justice and Archives

• Jasmine Jones, Simmons College
• Amanda Strauss, Simmons College

The recently revised Core Values of Archivists names social responsibility as one of the central principles of the archival profession and a guiding standard for the archivist's daily practice. The ongoing debate about the social roles, responsibilities, and relevance of archives and archivists is of great importance for educators, practitioners, and students who seek to understand the intersection of social activism and archival practice. Underlying this debate is the transformational question of whether or not social justice is or should be the highest pursuit of archivists. By pursuing social justice, archivists take a bold stance in the representation of identity and the construction of memory. In this session, two students examine the nature of documentation, "contested memory," and social activism through two case studies of the Ukrainian émigré community in North America and human rights archives in post-dictatorial Chile.

The Business of Audio-Visual Preservation

Moderator: Lance Watsky, UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies (MIAS) Program 

• Cornelia Emerson, Development Consultant / Chair, General Education, New York Film Academy
• Bob Sky, Audio Mechanics, Music and Sound Restoration
• Leah Kerr, Mayme A. Clayton Library and Museum 
• Lauren Sorensen, Bay Area Video Coalition

The increasing costs and variety of options available for the
preservation and digitization of audio-visual media present a growing
challenge to those responsible for such materials in their collections.
This session is designed to help archivists, librarians and other
individuals explore the different methods of preserving and digitizing
their films, videos and audio recordings.  The attendees will also learn
how to develop audio-visual preservation strategies, establish and build
relations with service providers, and be exposed to various fundraising
approaches to audio-visual preservation and digitization projects.

• April Gage, NASA Ames Research Center. NASA History in Three Dimensions
• Jill Golden, Hoover Institution Archives. Meme Wars & Memoirs: Google Trends and Hidden Collections
• Paul Grippaldi, Digital Revolution. Audio & Video Tape Preservation
• Kim Klausner, University of California, San Francisco. From Darkness to Daylight: Uncovering Tobacco Industry Secrets Using the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library Multimedia Collection
• Jason Miller, College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley. Visual Indexes for Large Collections of 35mm Slides
• Laura Williams, Special Collections, Stanford University. To Restrict or Not to Restrict: Balancing Access, Privacy and Confidentiality in the STOP AIDS Project Records
• Jennifer Martinez Wormser, Laguna College of Art + Design. Questions I should have asked my shelving contractor before I signed the contract...
• Audra Eagle Yun, Special Collections & Archives, University of California, Irvine. Forget About the Backlog: Surfacing Accessions Using Archivists' Toolkit
  

New Methodologies in Women’s History: Negotiating the Challenges of Finding Women in the Archives

Moderator:  Catherine Powell, Labor Archives and Research Center, San Francisco State University                                                                                            

• Mary Elizabeth Perry, Adjunct Professor of History (Emerita), Occidental College
• Joanne L. Goodwin, Associate Professor of History, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
• Kathleen E. Sheldon, Visiting Research Scholar, Center for the Study of Women, UCLA
• Lisa Sousa, Associate Professor of History , Occidental College
• Sherry J. Katz, Lecturer in History Department, San Francisco State University

Historians over the past four decades have found that researching women in history is often complicated by the fact that women’s voices and texts have been obscured in, or lost to, traditional archives.  Until quite recently women were not considered legitimate subjects of history, and therefore of archival collection.  Nell Irvin Painter has argued that even many “achieving” women lacked their own archives because their papers were lost or destroyed or because no one considered them “important enough to warrant an archive.”  The five historians on this roundtable have been part of a larger book project that seeks to demonstrate the innovative methodologies women’s historians have developed for finding women in the sources.  These scholars have created new archives, found new meanings in male-centered collections by reading archival documents “against the grain,” and woven together many layers of information found both inside and outside of the archives to reveal complexities.  The panel is global in scope, featuring historians working on diverse women from the sixteenth century to the present in Spain, Mexico, Mozambique, and the United States.

Mary Elizabeth Perry will discuss her use of a single document, an official Spanish Inquisition record from 1584, to shed light on the experience of a Muslim slave woman in early modern Spain.   Lisa Sousa will explore her method of weaving together threads of information about women found in many different types of documents from repositories in Mexico, the United States, and Europe to reconstruct the gender prescriptions and roles of Nahua (Aztec) women in Mexico from 1520-1750.   Sherry Katz will illuminate her method of “reaching around her subjects,” socialist-feminists in Progressive Era California, who left few of their own records in repositories.  Joanne Goodwin will discuss the challenges in creating a physical archive for the documentation of women's experiences in Las Vegas. Kathleen Sheldon will illuminate the process of researching the history of working women in Mozambique during the 1980s when almost no archival documentation existed.

Digital Curation: Two Paths

Moderator:  Paula Jabloner, Computer History Museum

• Glynn Edwards, Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries
• Heather Yager, Computer History Museum
• Peter Chan, Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries
• Paula Jabloner, Computer History Museum

The session will provide a hands on and life cycle approach to working with digital objects from two very different repositories. Presenters from the Computer History Museum and Stanford University Libraries will discuss their strategic overview of digital curation. We will cover the planning process, appraisal, creation of and ingest into a digital repository, metadata and delivery.

The panelists will refer to:

Planning and implementation of Computer History Museum’s small scale digital repository which commenced in October 2011.

The life cycle of digital objects at Stanford University Special Collections. Including the demonstration or production environment for exporting data/metadata from the Forensic Tool Kit (FTK), registering it in digital object registry (DOR) and depositing it into the Stanford Digital Repository (SDR) and delivery.

Break                            10:15 am - 11:00 am

 WAI 25th Anniversary Celebration Break

Take a break to enjoy a late morning cup of coffee or tea and a variety of breakfast delights with the WAI Management Committee in celebration of WAI’s 25th year of providing a basic program of archival education. Share a favorite memory, relax, and catch up with your SCA peers, fellow WAI alumni, and past and present WAI staff and faculty.

What is this and what am I supposed to do with it?  Appraising Scientific Records

Moderator: Heather Yager, Computer History Museum

• Bonita Smith, The Aerospace Corporation
• Laura O’Hara, SLAC
• Richard Boyden, NARA San Francisco
  

This session will inform attendees about the appraisal of voluminous modern collections at three institutions with differing mandates.  We will bring together archivists from a corporate archive, federal repository, and a science laboratory to talk about their experiences appraising science records. Each speaker will discuss how appraising scientific records is unique to their repository and how they determine record value. What guides their decisions? Is it an institutional mandate, federal law, future use, or some other factor?  How do they determine the long term value of dense record sets that are sometimes rarely used? Does the appraisal process differ at these disparate institutions or is it similar?  This session is a must for any archivist working with large sets of records, scientific or not, looking for advice on determining the value of those records.

SCA Strategic Planning Session

Moderator: Brad Bauer, U.S. Holocaust Museum

How can SCA help its members in coming years? Whether you're a new member, long-time member, or non-member, come to this session to share your thoughts and opinions on what SCA is doing well, and where it could do better or chart a new course. The decade of the 2010s brings new changes and challenges to the archival profession, ones for which our members are seeking resources, support, and guidance. Will SCA be in a position to provide such help to its members? Join members of SCA's strategic planning task force and contribute your two cents as SCA gathers information to plan its future path.

Vital Partnerships in Local History: How Pasadena is Teaming Up for Digital Access

Moderator: Mary Ann Laun, Library Division Dean and Director of Shatford Library, Pasadena City College

• Martha Camacho, Pasadena Public Library
• Diana Lopez, Shatford Library, Pasadena City College
• Dan McLaughlin, Pasadena Public Library
• Laura Verlaque, Pasadena Museum of History

Archivists need look no further than their local community for partners in preserving and creating access to their collections.  Join the founding members of the Pasadena Digital History Collaboration as they discuss the partnership between a local history museum, public library, community college and dozens of local organizations to create a digital collection which illuminates Pasadena's rich history.

At a time when resources and funding are more limited than ever, partnering with other local institutions is an effective way to manage costs while fulfilling our shared mission to provide and promote access to information. With this common purpose, the Pasadena Digital History Collaboration (PDHC) was founded in 2010 with the objective of assembling and making historical documents on Pasadena's heritage available to world-wide users through a single-search, online interface.  While sharing administrative leadership, costs, training needs, and staff time helps maximize scarce resources, the PDHC partnership has had the added bonus of bridging the physical and intellectual barriers that often exist between institutions, even within the same community. Founding members of the PDHC will share key insights into making the partnership work, exploring learning curves, overcoming technical challenges, developing marketing strategies to promote community participation and establishing techniques that ultimately make this a strategically successful partnership.

Archivists Volunteering -- the Benefits, the Challenges, and the Joy

Moderator: Anne Hall, CA & MLIS, Librarian / Archivist, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco

• Susan Rojo, Manager, Digital Media and Collections Projects, Green Library, Stanford University Libraries
• Gregory Williams, Director, Archives and Special Collections, California State University, Dominguez Hills
• Anne Hall, CA & MLIS, Librarian / Archivist, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
  

This session will highlight the work of archivists volunteering in their communities, utilizing their professional expertise to support institutions in documenting and valuing their own history. The session participants will describe the joys and challenges of supporting archival development in non-profit organizations.

Archivists can bring a different perspective and welcomed professional skills to organizations. The panelists have engaged in a wide variety of activities with three diverse organizations: the San Francisco Chinatown YMCA, a San Francisco Bay Area Synagogue, and ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives. Their work flows across the spectrum and includes: high level collection inventory, refining archival cataloging processes, oral history project, exhibit, large-scale event, publication, and documentary.

These outreach opportunities also allow an archivist to have a "sandbox" environment to try new and different concepts that may not be applicable in their actual job environment. Hear the panelists’ stories and get inspired to volunteer in your own community!

Online Archive of California (OAC) contributor meeting

• Sherri Berger, California Digital Library
• Adrian Turner, California Digital Library

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.

Accessioning Digital Files: Tales from the Trenches

Moderator: Lisa Miller, Hoover Institution Archives

• Nancy Enneking, Getty Research Institute
• Lisa Miller, Hoover Institution Archives
• Rebecca Wendt, California State Archives

Digital files that are transferred by FTP or downloaded from a creator's thumb drive or portable hard drive do not yield the traditional outcome of accessioning, a box assigned to a shelf location. What is the same, and what changes, when file-based materials are accessioned? These case studies address initial efforts to accession digital files at repositories dealing with government records, institutional records, and manuscript material. Because tried-and-true accessioning workflows have not yet been developed for born-digital files, speakers will share their experiences, general directions, problems, pitfalls, and use of tools such as Archivists Toolkit.