Participant Biographies

Amelia Abreau, University of Washington,  Graduate Student
ameliacabreu [at] gmail.com

As a doctoral student in my second year of study, my current research draws on the descriptive work of libraries, archives, and museums and the emergent genres of digital media. I study descriptive practice as both a step in the development of digitization infrastructure, and a contextual process for social study. In earlier papers, I have critically and comparatively examined description across institutional and professional discourses by adapting analytic criteria to compare subject cataloging, archival description and social tagging. My goal is not to simply highlight key differences, but to articulate the values of descriptive schemes in context and design. Likewise, I am interested in the products of new media, and how their properties are served in new and existing archival information systems. In the long term, I hope to fully explore the means by which descriptive schemes may
develop and adapt—how communities may contribute to the description and curation of their cultural heritage, and new forms of materials adequately stored and accessed.

That the institute is dedicated to both research and education is of particular interest to me. I am dedicated to not just producing research in this area, but also helping implement a new archival curriculum. In my teaching, I emphasize a socially-aware, and democratically-minded, perspective on the practice of archives. I have encouraged my students to question why we can't define things correctly for everyone in our society to understand, why is it so hard to find clear answers about history and culture, and how we'll access information about our society in the future. I encourage my students to examine their own experiences in studying these questions.

My goal is to create an environment with my teaching that allows students to take seriously and learn from their own perspectives as well as their peers. Promoting diversity in Information Studies is crucial to the future of the field, and one of professional, as well as personal, interest to me. I have spent the past year working as research assistant and project manager on the Washington Doctoral Initiative, a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services dedicated to recruiting LIS doctoral students from underrepresented backgrounds and developing a comprehensive mentoring program.

Prior to entering the doctoral program in 2007, I worked professionally as an archivist and academic librarian. I hold an MSIS from the University of Texas- Austin.
 
Amelia Acker,  University of California, Los Angeles,  Graduate Student
aacker [at] ucla.edu

I am a recent MLIS graduate of UCLA‘s Department of Information Studies. For the past three years I have worked as an archival processor in the Department of Special Collections at UCLA. I began as a fellow in the Center for Research and Primary Training where I processed collections of faculty members from the School of Medicine. Currently, I am the Ralph J. Bunche collection archivist.

My work is concerned with the cultural significance of shifting understandings of information and the ways scientific records are transmitted over time.  In my doctoral studies, I want to look at the training of professional archivists, the role of archives and archivists in science, and the documentation of science and scientific communities. I want to know what archivists understand scientific documentation to be and how these ideas shape scientific archives. I am interested in looking at how ideas about archival records and structures become settled, stabilized, and transmitted between communities of record-creators and record-stewards. How do ideas about archival thinking, documentation practices, and existing archives shape our understandings of the scientific record? What will the consequences of long-term digital preservation and migration be for scientific documenta-
tion and archives? How are we educated, apprenticed and initiated into the professional community of archives? How are we taught to make sense of the future of information and our profession? These are questions I want to ask in my doctoral research and in my future career.
 
Dharma Akmon, University of Michigan, Graduate Student
dharmrae[at]umich.edu

My background in history is what initially drew me to the field of archival studies, but the challenges and opportunities of the digital era and its associated reorganization of work and social interaction are what compelled me to pursue an academic and research career in this area. Working as a professional in archives, the issues with digital materials can seem insurmountable. As a researcher, the same complex issues are what excite and inspire me.

I was involved in research from the beginning of my studies in the masters program at the University of Michigan School of Information, where I studied Archives and Records Management. I feel fortunate to have had numerous research opportunities that significantly shaped my understanding of the challenges facing archives. Documenting Internet2: A Collaborative Model for Developing Electronic Records Capacities in the Small Archival Repository, a two-year project for which I served as a graduate research assistant, looked at one modern organization‘s use of records. Most compelling to me is how we might support new modes of work while at the same time ensuring preservation of the record. Further, what does it mean to preserve the context of records, when that context is dependent on proprietary software and technology? This interest has extended most recently for me in thinking about how scientists conduct research and how data archives can serve their present needs while ensuring that data can be reused in the future.

Related to the issue of preserving context is the question of how to present digital materials to researchers. As a research assistant on the Polar Bears Next Generation Finding Aids Project and an interaction designer at JSTOR, I developed a keen interest in the end-use of digital archival holdings. With my research I hope to contribute knowledge of how researchers use digital materials. What kinds of functionality do they expect, and what role do more participatory tools, like ―tagging, have in digital archives?

From the beginning of my studies in archival science I have been interested in research, however I chose to enter the professional world when I graduated. It was important for me to gain ―real-world experience in archives, which I felt strongly would help to better inform my research endeavors. All too often there is a vast distance between archival research and practice. I hope the practical experience I have gained will help me to close that chasm.
 
Bruce Ambacher, University of Maryland,  Faculty
bambache[at]umd.edu

I have a PhD in History, joined the National Archives in 1976, became an adjunct professor teaching archives courses in 1984 at George Mason University and in 2000 at the University of Maryland.  I became a full-time visiting professor when I retired from NARA in January 2007.  As one of the ―first generation of electronic records archivists I was thrown into developing the practice of accessioning, describing, preserving and providing reference for electronic records.  A major part of my NARA career was devoted to developing standards for federal agencies to use in creating and transferring electronic records for preservation.  I worked with the intelligence community on several aspects of recordkeeping and strategic planning for new electronic records applications.  I represented NARA on several interagency bodies addressing electronic records such as the Federal Geographic
Data Committee, the GILS development team, and the NARA review team for DoD 5015.2.  I served as the only archivist on the international committee that developed the OAIS reference model.  I served as the co-chair of the RLG-NARA taskforce that developed Trusted Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC).  I was the preservation officer for the Iran-Contra files and the federal email of the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations.
 
Thus I come to my current position with a strong background in electronic records processing and standards.  I continue working with international experts working to turn TRAC into an ISO standard.  My past positions also put me in a position to explain archival theory and practice to diverse audiences and have utilized the scholarly journals of other professions and satellite broadcasts to help other professions understand archives.
 
My current research interests continue to be advancing electronic records standards.
  
Kimberly Anderson,  University of California, Los Angeles, Graduate Student
kima[at]ucla.edu

Background:
I received my MLIS from UCLA in 2007 and continued into the PhD program at UCLA where I have advanced to candidacy. From 1995 to the present,  I have worked in a variety of archives and library settings. The bulk of my work as a practitioner took place in university archives and special collections with a focus on photograph collections. Since joining the PhD program, I have had the opportunity to work as a course reader for Master‘s students in both archives and general information studies classes.

My chief interests are appraisal, the knowledge and skills of archivists, the social history and intellectual development of Archival Studies, and the Archive as a nexus of memory, community, and identity. I am also interested in the Archive and the personal: the subjectivities of archivists as individuals, the transformation from individual lives to historical subjects, and the use of archives by non-academics.

Research:
My dissertation research is concerned with understanding how archivists learn to appraise. I am currently working with university archivists nationwide to explore how they learned to appraise through both formal and informal means. I am simultaneously using bibliometrics and network analysis to create a visualization of interpersonal influences on appraisal theory, education, and learning. As a subjective skill, I am trying to identify how appraisal is actually learned and used, if archivists are reflective about this practice and/or what role appraisal has in their professional life, and what ―appraisal" and the identification of enduring value mean in different contexts and for different people.

Philosophy:
I think the academic and the practitioner are each playing a specialized role in the same endeavor. As a future professor, I hope to encourage practitioners to see theory come to life in their work and to encourage other academics to learn with and from practitioners.
 
Jeannette Bastian,  Simmons College, Faculty
bastian[at]simmons.edu

I am an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts and I direct their Archives Management concentration.  Archival education is my second career.  For twenty-five years I was a librarian and archivist in the United States Virgin Islands, and was Director of the Virgin Islands Territorial Library and Archives from 1987 to 1998. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1999 and began teaching at Simmons that same year.

My writings and research interests have generally been in the areas of post-colonialism, collective memory and archival education.   In addition to journal articles in all of these areas, my books include, West Indian Literature: An Index to Criticism,1930-1975 (under Jeannette Allis, 1981), Owning Memory, How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History (2003) and (with Donna Webber), Archival Internships:  A Guide for Faculty, Supervisors, and Students (2008).  I am currently editing a book of essays, ―Communities and Their Archives: Creating and Sustaining Memory (with Ben Alexander) to be published by Facet in 2009. In addition I have been the Reviews editor for the American Archivist since 2005.

My current research interests include (1) records and online communities (2) celebrations as records of local memory. I am also continuing to collect data on archival education and am currently updating (with Elizabeth Yakel), the curriculum data that we collected and published five years ago. At Simmons, I am working with colleagues to build a digital repository for our Archives and Preservation curriculum that will enable us to expand and enhance our teaching dimensions.

Snowden Becker, University of Texas at Austin, Graduate Student
snowdenbecker[at]gmail.com

Snowden Becker is a third-year doctoral student in the School of Information at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the recipient of both an IMLS Fellowship for doctoral study in the area of Preservation Administration and a Harrington Graduate Fellowship, one of the University‘s most prestigious financial awards. She also participates in the UT/RGK Center for Nonprofit & Philanthropic Studies certificate program.

Ms. Becker received a BFA in Printmaking from the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore in 1996. After working for several years in the museum community and as an Internet content editor, she returned to school in 1999, earning her MLIS degree from UCLA‘s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies in 2001.

From 1999-2002, Becker worked as Digital & Media Archivist at the Japanese American National Museum. The museum‘s extensive collection of home movies and amateur films documenting the history of the Japanese American community inspired an interest in the neglected audiovisual records of our past, which continues to drive her research and professional career. Becker joined the Department of Interactive Programs at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2002 as Editor/Applications Analyst, then went on to become the first Public Access Coordinator for the film archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences in 2003.

Becker‘s ongoing research work investigates how audiovisual materials are integrated into our cultural heritage. She has written and presented on the use of home movies by the medical community in studies of autism and schizophrenia; the collector‘s market for home movies; preservation, legal, and access issues archivists encounter in collecting amateur films; and the increasing need for police departments to preserve large quantities of audiovisual materials as evidence in criminal cases.

In 2001, she became the founding Chair of the Association of Moving Image Archivists‘ (AMIA) Small Gauge & Amateur Film interest group, a position she held until 2004; she has also served on the editorial board of the AMIA journal, The Moving Image, since 2004, and on the AMIA Scholarship Committee since 2006. Along with her colleague Katie Trainor, she has co-presented the Society of American Archivists‘ ―Becoming a Film Friendly Archivist workshop since 2004, teaching basic film preservation skills to over 200 archivists and other cultural heritage professionals. She has also taught Collection Development for the UCLA Moving Image Archive Studies Master‘s degree program and created new curriculum modules on amateur film for the NYU Moving Im-
age Archiving and Preservation program.

In August, 2003, Becker helped launch Home Movie Day, an annual international event that promotes public awareness and preservation of historic amateur footage. Three films rediscovered through Home Movie Day screenings have since been named to the Library of Congress‘s National Film Registry. In 2005, the Home Movie Day co-founders established a nonprofit organization, the Center for Home Movies, which coordinates Home Movie Day internationally and works to collect, preserve, provide access to, and promote the understanding of home movies and amateur motion pictures.
 
Lloyd Beers, Jr., University of Maryland, Graduate Student
labeers[at]umd.edu

I entered the archival profession as a second career.  After a life-long involvement with various facets of the maritime industry, I decided to pursue a long held desire to obtain an undergraduate degree in History. During the course of conducting historical research for my degree, I was aided in large measure by individuals engaged in the occupation of preserving information and making it readily accessible to those needing it.  These contacts provided me with an introduction to the work of professional archivists.  Because of my research experiences, I decided to join the profession.

In order to attain the necessary level of education, I entered the combined History and Library Science program at the University of Maryland in College Park, graduating in May 2009 with a Masters of Arts in History and Masters of Library Science.  Along the way, I was hired by the National Archives and Records Administration  Archives II in College Park where I am employed as a processing archivist in the textual records division.  My desire to make a larger contribution to the archival profession led to my application and acceptance into the iSchool at the University of Maryland where I am to pursue PhD in Archival Studies beginning in the fall term.  My research interests center on issues of archival access and control of archival holdings.
 
Joel Blanco-Rivera, University of Pittsburgh, Graduate Student
joel.blanco[at]gmail.com

I have a MSI with specialization in archives and records management from the University of Michigan School of Information (2003). After finishing my degree, I went back to Puerto Rico where I worked at the Archivo General de Puerto Rico. I also worked as a librarian at the Ana G. Mendez University System. From 2004 to 2005 I was a lecturer at the Escuela Graduada de Ciencias y Tecnologías de la Información, located at the University of Puerto Rico, where I taught courses for the certificate in archives and records management. This excellent teaching experience, along with my strong belief that the role of archives and archivists in society is intrinsically linked to accountability, advocacy and justice, led me to pursue a doctoral degree.

My research objectives and scholarship philosophy are framed around this belief. I am particularly interested in the role played by archives and archivists during the transitions from authoritarian rule and civil wars in Latin America. More specifically, I‘m interested in how records creation, use, destruction and/or access restrictions shape how Latin American communities remember this traumatic past. I‘m studying the work of truth commissions and the use of records as evidence in trials against military officers and former presidents during the years of repression.

In 2005, my paper ―The Forbidden Files: Creation and Use of Surveillance Files against the Independence Movement in Puerto Rico was published at the American Archivist (vol. 68, no. 2). Another research paper, Truth Commissions and the Construction of Collective Memory: The Chile Experience, will be published in the forthcoming book Communities and Their Archives: Creating and Sustaining Memory, edited by Ben Alexander and Jeannette Bastian.

As a Teaching Assistant at the University of Pittsburgh, I have been able to apply my teaching philosophy, which is based on the principle that students better learn in an environment of trust and sincere dialogue. Therefore, students are encouraged to contribute to the discussion and share ideas with the instructor. Furthermore, it is important to include past and current developments in the archival profession that help students understand better and compare/contrast theory and practice. This teaching philosophy will be further implemented when I teach my own course, ―An International Perspective on Archives, this coming summer.
 
Heather Bowden, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Graduate Student
heather[at]longtermdata.com

I am a first year doctoral student at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I have a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Denver and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from New Mexico State University. I became interested in the problem of long term digital preservation early in my master’s degree studies and found the issues surrounding digital preservation and curation so compelling that I pursued further research under the tutelage of Dr. Helen Tibbo and Dr. Cal Lee.  

I am now the project manager for the DigCCurr II grant: Extending an International Digital Curation Curriculum to
Doctoral Students and Practitioners. The primary impetus of this grant is to develop a PhD curriculum in digital curation, but also has significant focus on bringing the world’s digital curation practitioners and educators together through a series of institutes, symposiums, and it’s new web community portal at digitalcurationexchange.org. As the project manager of this grant, it is my responsibility to facilitate and manage all of these activities as well as the recruitment and supervision of five other PhD students in the next three years.   My personal research interests in digital curation hinge most on the issues revolving around media and file format obsolescence. It is my goal to assess the needs of real digital archives in order to inform the development of tools which will directly aid in the long term preservation of their valuable digital assets. I am most interested in the development of a socially informed, automatic file format obsolescence notification and file format migration mechanism for digital repositories and archives. I believe that this is realizable and I plan to be instrumental in its development. I am currently working with Richard Marciano in the implementation of this idea within the iRODS distributed network environment.

Also deeply important to this research and to the furthering of the digital curation profession, is my budding inter-
est in online communities and how they are formed and managed, and how they are most useful to the communities they
serve. There is tremendous potential to be harnessed from online communities; not only for social networking, but also for their ability to more organically inform what would normally be static automated processes in computer systems.  
Where I am passionate about my research, I am equally passionate about a career where I can educate future practitioners and educators in digital curation. It will be through my ability to empower the next generation of archivists and educators that I will be able to make the deepest impact. I also feel that not only will I be able to influence my students, but I will also be able to learn a great deal from them, which will in turn inform my research, which will inform my teaching, and on and on.
 
Sarah Buchanan, University of California, Los Angeles, Graduate Student
sarahab[at]ucla.edu

Sarah is interested in the cultural use of archival documents to inform historical understanding, and seeks to enhance public appreciation of their value as primary materials for research and learning. Specifically she is interested in modern description and retrieval systems including online finding aids and the use of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) to allow greater dissemination of archival collection holdings. With an interest in student recordkeeping practice, her master‘s thesis analyzes the structure and scope of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) of 1974 as a form of policy affecting student records retention and filing taxonomy. She works as a cataloging assistant at the UCLA Law Library and served as co-President of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) student chapter at UCLA. She is currently a Master‘s of Library and Information Science student at UCLA (June 2009). She received a B.A. with Distinction in Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007.
 
Jennifer Bunn, University College London, Graduate Student
j.bunn[at]ucl.ac.uk 

I gained an archive qualification from University College London in 1995 and subsequently worked in a variety of institutions - the V&A Museum, The Royal Bank of Scotland, Glasgow University Archives and The National Archives. Increasingly, as part of my work, I found myself constantly struggling to balance traditional archival principles and theory with the new digital environment and user expectation, particularly in the area of archival description. I therefore welcomed the opportunity, in September 2007, to embark on a full-time PhD in this area. My PhD is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral Award and the partners are the Department of Information Studies at University College London and The National Archives.

I believe archival description lies at the heart of many of the challenges facing the profession, and yet there is so little understanding of it. In the United Kingdom at least, it remains largely defined by traditional models, dating back to the nineteenth century and there is little conception of any theory of archival description. The aim of my research is to develop that theoretical understanding. It is hoped that this understanding will inform efforts to both improve practice and advance theory in the wider field of archival science. I therefore have the following objectives;  

-The development of a grounded theory identifying the main concerns of those interacting with archival description and the way in which those concerns are resolved.

-Dissemination of the results of the research and knowledge transfer to strengthen ties between practitioners and academics.

I have chosen to advance theoretical understanding through the development of a grounded theory because of its firm connection between data and conceptualisation. This is, I feel, particularly appropriate for a practice based discipline such as archival science. Also appropriate is the method‘s emphasis on the resulting theory being relevant and workable. One of my objectives is to strengthen ties between practitioners and academics and I will therefore need to overcome the mistrust some practitioners feel in regards to theory. By producing a grounded theory which will fit with their experiences, I hope to demonstrate that theory can be of practical use. Additionally the method utilises a balance of rigour and creativity that tunes in with my own personality such that
I will not find myself fighting the method, but working with it.
 
Michelle Caswell, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Graduate Student
mcaswell[at]uwm.edu

Ms. Caswell, who received her MLIS from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will continue there to pursue her Ph.D. in Archival Science at the School of Library and Information Studies.  Ms. Caswell‘s article ―Instant Documentation: Cell Phone Generated Records in Archives, will appear in the Spring/Summer 2009 edition of American Archivist.  She is a founding member of the South Asian American Digital Archive, a non-profit dedicated to building a digital repository that collects and provides access to the diverse history of South Asian Americans.  She plans to focus her doctoral work on the complex intersection of archives and violence in South and Southeast Asia, with a particular emphasis on the impact of colonial recordkeeping practices on con-
temporary archival repositories.  More specifically, she intends to explore how archives in India and Cambodia have been targets for violence, have documented historic acts of violence, and have omitted or included the voices of the subaltern.
 
Janet Ceja, University of Pittsburgh, Graduate Student
essoru[at]gmail.com

My academic and professional background is centered on the archiving and preservation of audiovisual media.  My interest in audiovisual (AV) media dates back to my childhood and educational experiences with these technologies, as well as, the forms of communication they embody.  The manner in which audiovisual media documents and captures moments, ideas, perspectives, stories and the such has always fascinated me, especially in relation to communities that practice oral and visual literacy in dynamic ways.  This is an area I am exploring in the context of culture, identity and location as a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh.

I believe that there are various methods by which communities value records—factors that are highly dependent on socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, as well as, technological forms of dependency.  Thus, to be archived comes in many forms and formats and is practiced in ways that fall into different systems of understanding.  This idea has been sustained by some scholars in Archival Studies, particularly in the 1990s, and my dissertation research intends to add to this body of literature from the perspective of Mexican-Americans.  Of particular interest to me are the methodologies that arise through community and institutionally based AV archiving endeavors as acts of social practice and resistance.  The theoretical frameworks that inform my work are those used in Archival Studies, Film and Media Studies, Cultural Studies and Chicano Studies.  Drawing from these, and
the Mexican-American community I intend to build analysis from a transdisciplinary perspective.  In general, I expect my dissertation research to allow me to expand upon the audiovisual archiving specialization.
 
Clara Chu, University of California, Los Angeles, Faculty
cchu[at]ucla.edu

Dr. Clara M. Chu is an Associate Professor at the UCLA Department of Information Studies, and an affiliated faculty member at the UCLA Department of Asian American Studies. She specializes in the social construction of information systems, institutions, and access in order to understand the usage of and barriers to information in multicultural communities. As a Peruvian  born, Chinese Canadian American, her transnational and ethnic minority experiences provide her a distinctive and critical lens to examine information issues, to learn with students, and to inform professional practice. Having published, presented and consulted internationally in English and Spanish, she is a leading voice on multicultural library and information issues, and serves on the editorial boards of various information and Asian Pacific American journals, including Library Quarterly, Counterpoise,
AAPI Nexus Journal and Amerasia Journal.

She actively recruits people of culturally diverse backgrounds into the information profession (http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/chu/drmc/) and initiated Program PRAXIS: A Pre-Doctoral and Recruitment Pro-
gram for Tomorrow‘s Culturally Diverse Information Studies Faculty and Leaders (http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/
cchu/praxis/praxis.htm), with a major federal grant (2002-03) and led the initiative to establish an Information Studies and Asian American Studies dual master‘s degrees program at UCLA. She is an active member of professional associations addressing multicultural librarianship and is currently a member of the Steering Committee of IFLA‘s Section on Library Services to Multicultural Populations. She is recipient of the American Library Association‘s 2008 Library Diversity Research Honor and its 2002 Equality Award, and was selected as the 2008 Dr. Jean E. Coleman Library Outreach Lecturer. She was named a 2005 Library Journal Mover & Shaker, which recognizes people who are shaping the future of libraries. (http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA510775.html?display=LJMS&pubdate=3%2F15%2F2005)
 
I-Ting (Emily) Chu, New York University, Graduate Student
emmypi[at]gmail.com

As I continue to learn about and work with archives, I have become increasingly interested in community archives. At UC Davis, where I completed my undergraduate degree in Asian American Studies and Women and Gender Studies, I had the opportunity to work with some Asian/Pacific Islander American student and local community groups. This work allowed me to see the complexities of defining, finding, and working with communities.

My position as a Graduate Assistant at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute of New York University allowed me to combine my interest and experience with community work with the coursework in archives that I was learning. I learned a lot about the different needs of community members and repositories from this position, which has fueled my passion for continuing to study community archives. More specifically, I hope to build an Asian/Pacific Islander American archive in Southern California that works with the community to define what it needs and wants from this archive.
 
Kate Colligan, University of Pittsburgh, Faculty and Graduate Student
colligank[at]edc.pitt.edu

Kate Colligan received her MLIS with a concentration in archives and records management in 1998 and CAS with an emphasis on digital preservation in 1999 from the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh.  Kate first worked in the University Library System‘s Digital Research Library, researching and implementing Encoded Archival Description (EAD) in 1998-2000 before her faculty appointment as archivist at the University of Pittsburgh‘s Archives Service Center (ASC) in 2000. Her work concentrated on access issues including supervising the processing of manuscript collections, training and supervising staff and student assistants in descriptive practice, creating EAD finding aids, and other projects that enhanced the visibility of collections.  Kate has worked on a variety of projects with students involving appraisal, processing, preservation, digital projects,
and EAD supervising over 300 students in this period of her career.

In January of 2009 Kate joined the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh‘s Graduate School of Public Health working on the collection and public archiving of infectious disease data from developing countries.  In this new position she will be working on information access issues including digital preservation and data curation with a variety of international collaborators.  Kate currently teaches the Archival Representation course for the Department of Library Information Sciences, and serves on the Women‘s Studies Steering Committee and the University Senate‘s Community Relations Committee.

Kate has remained an active member of professional organizations and has held leadership positions in the Society of American Archivists, Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC) and the American Library Association (ALA) Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS).  Kate has received funding to support the preservation and processing of manuscripts collections from the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission as well as private donations and support for other projects through her collection development activities.  Kate has also been a grant reviewer for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), and the Public Archives and Records Infrastructure Support (PARIS) grant program of the New Jersey Division of Archives and Records Management.

Interests:
The past decade has seen continuous change and dynamics between the traditional concepts of archival documents (particularly paper based) and their electronic representation.  Whether subtle or startling these surrogates run the gambit from high quality with standardized descriptive metadata to poor quality images with no contextualized information.  Those entities responsible for creating and managing large scale digitization schemes depend on the objects, documents, and datasets that are already described.

My own interest in this topic focuses on the blur in our collective descriptive practices when creating digital surrogates of original (paper or other format) records.   As a manuscripts archivist for the past nine years I have seen the vast range of interpretations individual processors place in descriptive records now managed in the online environment.  In many cases manuscripts processors (particularly project archivists or students) are ill equipped to identify let alone describe collections within their holdings yet the online information they create in some sense provides permanent identification for these items in the drive to digitize for access.

Mass digitization is indeed a great boon to access, particularly in terms of access government records that allow for health intervention.  Gaining access to and digitizing infectious disease data from developing countries is a current interest for me and I hope to bring insight from my experience with such records and collaborate with others at the AERI institute who are also working with these and other issues.
 
Terry Cook, University of  Manitoba, Faculty
tcook3957[at]rogers.com

Terry Cook is Visiting Professor (since 1998) in the graduate-level archival studies programme at the University of Manitoba, where he teaches appraisal, electronic records, and archival history; he is also a freelance archival consultant, editor, and writer (with Clio Consulting).  He has taught at the School of Information, University of Michigan, and co-presented the first-ever advanced institutes for the Association of Canadian Archivists.  Before 1998, he was a senior manager at the National Archives of Canada where he contributed to the appraisal and electronic records programmes for government records.  He has published on every continent on a wide range of archival subjects; has conducted numerous workshops and seminars on appraisal, electronic records, and archival ethics across Canada and internationally; has engaged in extensive lecturing tours, especially of Australia and South Africa several times; and has served as General Editor of Archivaria as well as editor of two scholarly series/journals of the Canadian Historical Association.  His most recent publication activity has been editing the forthcoming Electronic Records Practice:  Lessons from the National Archives of Canada and co-editing Imagining Archives:  Essays by Hugh A. Taylor, With New Reflections, as well as working on books on the postmodern archive and the history of the National Archives of Canada.
 
Richard Cox, University of Pittsburgh, Faculty
rjcox111[at]comcast.net 

My research interests have been consistent over the past two decades and focus on the history of archives, recordkeeping, the archival mission, and the formation of the archival profession.  As part of this interest, I often have become engaged in examining various trends in and challenges to archivists and their community. In the past decade, my attention has shifted to ethical and accountability issues in the work of archivists and the relationship between the archival impulse and public memory.  I also have worked for a long time in investigating the shifts in the education of archivists, what I consider to be the most important archival function (appraisal), and changing recordkeeping technologies and all of the various issues generated by such changes.  All of this builds off of a concern that the archivist is first and foremost a scholar of records and recordkeeping and that this scholarly
pursuit is best carried out by interdisciplinary inquiry.  Furthermore, I believe that the archival mission is not only about cultural and historical agendas, but that it involves the importance of records for evidence, accountability, and memory. As an educator, I believe that research and teaching is a synergic process, where one cannot be successful without the other.  I seek to ground both masters and doctoral students in the research literature (and its strengths and weaknesses) about archives and archival work as a crucial part of building a knowledge foundation for their subsequent career.

At present, I have two book-length projects I hope to complete in the next two years.  One has the working title of Archival Anxiety and it focuses on the nature of professional calling, ethical issues, case studies in the failings of the profession to be stronger advocates for their mission, and critiques of current notions of professional activity such as in appraisal and representation.  This book is a companion to several others I have written about the issues facing the archival community over the last two decades. The other book is a study about Lester J. Cappon has a pioneer public historian, building on his detailed personal diary maintained from 1954 through 1981 (the year he died). In many ways, Cappon was the model historian-archivist, easily moving between the disciplines of history, archival studies, and documentary editing and serving as a critic and commentator on all three.  This book is tentatively organized to include chapters on his ideas about archives, his activity as a diarist (a records creator), as an educator, as an early public historian, as a documentary editor, as an expert on scholarly publisher, and as a collector.  What intrigues me about Cappon are his struggles to come to terms with his professional and scholarly identity, issues that I believe remain present today (perhaps even in a more confused state).  I am researching and writing about Cappon at the same age as he was writing his diary and entering into his most productive stage of scholarship.  My research on Cappon is also, then, self-reflective about my own career and the state of the archival, historical, and documentary editing fields and the production of scholarly works.
 
Amber Cushing, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Graduate Student
cushinga[at]email.unc.edu

Amber Cushing is a doctoral student at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she also serves as a research assistant for the Digccurr project and is currently co-teaching ―Access, Outreach and Public Service in Cultural Heritage Institutions in the MSLS/MSIS program at UNCChapel Hill. Her current research interests include the thought process in which individuals engage as they attempt to curate and make value judgments about their personal digital archive as well as workforce issues in the archival field. Before entering the doctoral program in 2007, Cushing held the position of Librarian at the New Hampshire State Library, where she was the main contact person for manuscript and rare book inquires. Cushing holds an AB from Mount Holyoke College and an MLS with a concentration in archives management  from Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. She has completed internships at the Supreme Court of the United States and Harvard University Art Museums as well as a fellowship at the National Archives and Records Administration‘s Northeast Region.
 
Morgan Daniels, University of Michigan, Graduate Student
mgdaniel[at]umich.edu

Morgan Daniels is a second year doctoral student in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. She has a BA in Sociology from Hampshire College and an MS in Information from the University of Michigan. Her professional background includes five years as an information specialist in corporate and law libraries. User studies in archives and museums, science and technology studies, and the intersections of these areas are primary among her research interests. Morgan has served as a research assistant on the Archival Metrics project, which developed standardized user-based evaluation tools for college and university archives. During this project, she gained a particular interest in the experiences of students in the archives and is developing two papers that make use of project data about student users. She is currently working as a research assistant on a project exploring collaboration, knowledge generation, and learning in an online scientific community, an opportunity to ex-
plore information reuse issues through the framework of a specific online community of practice.
 
Rebecca Dean, University of California, Los Angeles, Graduate Student
becdean[at]gmail.com

I am a doctoral student in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA with a concentration in Women's Studies. I received a BA from New York University and an MLIS at Pratt Institute. My research interests include critical and feminist approaches to notions of evidence, documentation, surveillance, infrastructure, and knowledge production. My current projects explore the issue of global public health surveillance through the case of documenting gender-based violence in humanitarian settings. Within this context is an opportunity to analyze and observe the intersectional politics and practices of information access and privacy rights as well as the role of standardization and classification in the monitoring of violence against women. I am also working on a community-based archival project that looks at the relationship between archives and feminist knowledge production in the case of transnational Filipina women‘s social movements. This research delves into postcolonial feminist notions of the archive and critiques of archival practices and paradigms.

Before I started my doctoral education I was a librarian for the Brooklyn Public Library, and the digital resource specialist for the Gender-based Violence Unit at the International Rescue Committee. I currently work at the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA as a graduate student researcher. While pursuing a career in research and academia I stay deeply involved in activism, community organizing, and advocacy around the issue of labor and sex trafficking in addition to other human rights abuses against women. These experiences ground many of my research interests and inform my teaching and scholarship philosophy, which is to build a collective intellectual practice that examines the multitude and workings of power formations in politics, discourse, and practice. My aim is to engage in interdisciplinary research that achieves disciplinary objectives as well as community and
human rights objectives.
 
Lorraine (Lori) Dong, University of Texas at Austin, Graduate Student
lorrie.d[at]gmail.com

As a first-year doctoral student in preservation in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), I have been engaged in issues involving the protection and dissemination of cultural heritage for the past four years as a library employee and then as a graduate student. My appreciation of cultural artifacts as both objects and carriers of information, however, began during my time at the University of California, Berkeley, while studying English as an undergraduate. This deep respect continued while I pursued a Master‘s in Renaissance literature at the University of Cambridge. In addition to thinking about the ideas conveyed by the text, I used paleographic and bibliographic methods in order to gain insight into the historical context and provenance of books
and manuscripts.

After returning from England, I worked in the Preservation and Conservation Departments of the University Library at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. While there, I had the opportunity to work on a number of hands-on projects for the special and general collections, and government serials. Inspired by this work, I went on to earn a MSIS at UT with a focus in preservation administration. Through the generous support of an IMLS Preservation Doctoral Fellowship, I am now able to further pursue my research into the politics and socio-economic factors that affect international collaborations to preserve culture.

My primary research interest is in the intersection of preservation, digitization, and access of cultural materials in developing countries. Scholarly research pertaining to these converging areas continues to be a growing field, especially when presented with the increasing demand for technological progress in non-first world countries and burgeoning nations. I am particularly interested in questions related to how to develop the ability of hosting institutions and organizations to manage and maintain cultural preservation initiatives, given the challenges of meeting the needs of their users while also facing limited resources and training.

As a future faculty member of an information program, I would like to impart to students the importance of having well-planned and diligent preservation management in heritage institutions. Such diligence includes continually researching and evaluating new preservation methods and programs, maintaining strong communication with other cultural institutions, and staying responsive to the various needs of one‘s own institution. I believe in the value of students working on real-world projects within their communities because these activities provide them with heuristic experience as well as much-needed assistance to local archives, libraries, and museums. Currently, I am in the process of developing a curriculum for an undergraduate course I would like to teach next year at UT‘s School of Information on how cultural institutions in Austin, Texas, protect and care for heritage objects. My goal for the class is to inspire students who may not otherwise be exposed to heritage preservation to begin thinking about the decision-making and activities that must go on behind the scenes in order to protect our cultural past.
 
Jean Dryden, University of Maryland, Faculty
jdryden[at]umd.edu

Background:
As a recent (2008) graduate of the doctoral program at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, and having joined the faculty of the University of Maryland‘s i-School in August 2008 to teach in their Archives, Records, and Information Management specialization, I am a relative newcomer to the academic enterprise. However, I bring to this enterprise more than 25 years of professional experience as an archivist, archives administrator, and consultant; education and qualifications in librarianship and records management; and teaching experience at the graduate level.

Research Interests:
My research interests fall within two broad areas: copyright and digital heritage, and archival arrangement and description. My dissertation explored the copyright practices of Canadian repositories in digitizing their archival holdings and making them available on the Internet. Although practices vary greatly across the repositories studied, the research found that Canadian repositories‘ copyright practices in making their holding available online are more restrictive than copyright law envisages (1). Little research addressing how cultural heritage institutions operate within the constraints of copyright, particularly in the digital environment, is yet available; my dissertation suggests a number of fruitful areas for further investigation. After transforming my dissertation into a
series of articles in order to disseminate my findings, I plan to continue to explore whether, and in what ways, copyright is a barrier to making cultural heritage available online by looking at aspects of the copyright practices of cultural heritage institutions, ongoing management and preservation of digital objects, and how users of heritage material deal with copyright.

The second area of research interest arises out of my longstanding experience with the development of standards for the description of archival material, including my participation in the development of archival descriptive standards in Canada, and my experience as the manager of a project to produce a new standard for archival description (2). This work has made me realize how little we know about archival arrangement and description, and has raised a number of questions to be investigated, including archival arrangement, the development and institutional implementation of standards for archival description, and the representation of extent within archival description.

Teaching Approach:
While my teaching philosophy continues to evolve, it has matured considerably since my first teaching efforts, in which my goal was to fill those empty vessels (the students) with everything I knew. Not surprisingly, I had far too much material, the students were glassy-eyed, and I have since changed my approach. Realizing that most learning takes place outside the classroom, I have learned that my teaching is far more effective if my approach is to engage students in the topic, and encourage them to think about the issues through classroom discussion based on questions and real-life situations, and through carefully crafted assignments. In my view, excellent teaching is based upon mastery of the subject, thorough preparation, respect for students, and clear and consistent expectations of them. Within that framework, however, I am also mindful that preparing students for careers
as effective stewards of digital objects presents a number of challenges in an environment in which we are still attempting to discover and establish standards and best practices. Given the pace of technological change, it is more important than ever that students learn to apply principles to evolving circumstances, think critically, and recognize the need for life-long learning.
 
1.  Jean E. Dryden, ―Copyright in the Real World: Making Archival Material Available on the Internet. Ph.D. diss.,
University of Toronto, 2008, 244. (https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/)
2.  Describing Archives: A Content Standard (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2004).
 
Yanan Du, University of California, Los Angeles, Graduate Student
bdd_duyanan[at]yahoo.com.cn

Biography not submitted.
 
Wendy Duff, University of Toronto, Faculty
wendy.duff[at]utoronto.ca 

I obtained my BA (1979) from the University of Kings College, my MLS (1983) from Dalhousie University and my Ph.D. (1996) from the University of Pittsburgh. I am the Director of the Digital Duration Institute, and teach archives and records management with a focus on access to archival materials.

I am a founding member of AX-NET, an evolving international team of researchers interested in facilitating access to primary materials. I have also served as a member of the ICA Adhoc Commission on Descriptive Standards, the Encoded Archival Description Working Group, and The Canadian Council of Archives Standards Committee.

My research interests are user studies, archival metadata, and collaboration among libraries, archives and museums. My current research focuses on the development of generic user-based evaluation tools, the information seeking behaviour of archival users, archival reference and information technology needs of museum
workers.

My research tends to be more qualitative than quantitative.
 
Lorraine (Lori) Eakin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Graduate Student
lorraine.eakin[at]unc.edu

I am a third year Ph.D. student in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina.  My research focus is Archives and Preservation, particularly digital archives and curation.

I have bachelors and masters degrees in economics and taught economics for ten years at several San Francisco Bay area universities including California State University East Bay, University of San Francisco, and Golden Gate University.  In addition, during that timeframe I worked as an information professional and analyst.  In my capacity as a manager and consultant at Deloitte & Touche, I specialized in data quality and integrity and on implementing business knowledge systems.  I developed successful business cases for the funding of a $1.1 billion automated medical record system, a $600,000 business process redesign, a $100,000 id card quality improvement project, and a $500,000 online credit card payment system.  I also managed the implementation of data warehouses and metadata repositories at several organizations, and ensured the clean migration of data from 25 source systems into SAP at Warner Brothers.

Currently, I perform two professional activities in addition to my full-time attendance at UNC:  I am teaching the graduate level electronic records management class here at UNC and I also work as an intern at the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), providing professional services to the Blue Ribbon Task Force on the Sustainability of Digital Preservation and Access, led by Fran Berman and Brian Lavoie.

My research interests focus upon organizational sustainability for digital preservation projects and programs.  I use an ecological perspective, which views the factors influencing sustainability as coevolutionary in nature, therefore embodying a range of economic, historical, social, and institutional influences on the digital preservation environment.

My philosophy toward teaching is based upon the belief that students need both a strong grounding in practice and a comprehensive understanding of research in their particular field of study.  In terms of specific didactic technique I believe in using what works.  Some students are visual; others are auditory.  Some are quantitatively oriented; others prefer qualitative, verbal explanations.  Students exhibit these needs within the classroom via body language, questions asked, feedback to the professor, and even the choice of topics and methodology for projects and papers.  To be flexible enough to change techniques when needed marks an effective educator.

My philosophy toward scholarship could be called the ―Keep on Swimming philosophy.  As Dory in the movie Finding Nemo showed us, a never-give-up attitude focused upon continuous movement toward the goal (as well as the occasional serendipitous discovery) will get you to that goal.  If one lives the ―Keep on Swimming mantra and keeps in mind that our field is both a theoretical and a practical discipline, he or she will engage in research that is grounded in theory yet closely linked to the professional needs of the archival community.
 
Joanne Evans, University of Melbourne / Monash University, Faculty
joanne.evans[at]unimelb.edu.au 

I am a researcher connected to both the eScholarship Research Centre (ESRC) at the University of Melbourne and the Centre for Organisational and Research Informatics (COSI), Faculty of IT, Monash University. I have spent the past 15 years in gaining qualifications and practical experience in information management, recordkeeping and archiving, and systems development, culminating in completing my PhD investigating record-keeping metadata interoperability at Monash in 2007. On the practical side of things, I have been involved in the design, development and deployment of archival information systems at the University of Melbourne since 1995. The Heritage Documentation Management System (HDMS) that we have developed is used across a number of small archives to process and manage their holdings, as well as to make their finding aids available online. I have
also have been the principal developer of the ESRC‘s Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM) system, for creating and managing contextual information networks. The OHRM brings archival and scholarly principles and practices together into a database tool, aimed at building a sustainable information infrastructure that may help to meet some of the research and information management challenges for scholarly practices in the digital and networked age.

Since completing my PhD, I have been working on a part-time basis as a Research Fellow for COSI‘s Smart Information Portals Project. As well as providing a post-doctoral experience, this work picks up on my interest in system design methodologies and methods and in the sustainability and scalability of metadata creation and management frameworks. I have also been involved with recordkeeping and resource discovery metadata standards development as part of working groups within Standards Australia‘s IT 21/7 Committee and with the Australia Society of Archivist‘s Committee on Descriptive Standards. I was also part of the initial international team to develop the alpha version of EAC in 2001.

A common theme across the practical and research activities that I am involved in is a desire to work with groups who are in some way ‗in the minority‘, with lesser access to resources, skills and/or institutional support and/or ways of knowing different to the mainstream. My desire is to work with them to build sustainable archival information system utilizing digital and networking technologies that meet their needs and respect their values. Uncovering these through collaborative research and development activities benefits all parties and I gain much from the two way learning and knowledge exchange. From my research perspective this enables the exploration of issues around individual and community construction of information systems in and through time and space, as well as the development and application of reflective design research methodologies.

 
Shannon Faulkhead, Monash University, Graduate Student
Shannon.Faulkhead[at]arts.monash.edu.au 

I consider myself a newbie to academia entering it in December 2003 as a postgraduate student with an APAI scholarship attached to the ARC Linkage Project Trust and Technology: Building an archival system for Indigenous oral memory (T&T) project. The move from community based research and practice enabled me to pursue my interest in research that aids in the betterment of the Koorie  community (1), and therefore of the Australian community. My PhD thesis 'Narratives of Koorie Victoria‘, submitted in December 2008, contributes to the understanding of the relationship between method and purpose in the creation of narratives upon the Australian community.

My research is cross-discipline working with both the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies, Faculty of Arts and the Centre for Organisational and Research Informatics (COSI), Faculty of IT, Monash University. I have found this dual-occupancy exciting and beneficial in regards to my research and development of understandngs and has resulted in a 2009 ARC Indigenous Research Fellowship to undertake a research project titled Koorie archiving: Community and records working together – a partnership project with the Gunditjmara community of Lake Condah. During the period leading up to my fellowship I am co-authoring a publication with Uncle Jim Berg with the working title Cultural control of, and responsibility for Aboriginal skeletal remains, follow-up projects and activities originating from the T&T project and also have a minor role with an ARC Discovery Project 'Food, Traditional Aboriginal Knowledge and the Expansion of the Settler Economy‘.

To my research, I have brought a valuable combination of community, professional and academic experience and knowledge through my prior work experience. I have made major contributions through my work at the Koorie Heritage Trust Inc  (1994-2003) to the preservation and promotion of Koorie culture and heritage through the development and management of library and archival collections, publishing activities, website developments and exhibitions. The Trust‘s goals and activities relate to preserving and promoting the continuous and living Koorie cultural heritage. Promoting Koorie culture and heritage contributes to pride and self-esteem. All of my work at the Trust was underpinned by community-centred research and development throughout my roles ranging from Librarian through to CEO. My most significant achievement was my involvement in the development, design and management of a purpose built centre for the Trust‘s activities and collections, as well as the related fund-raising campaign.

My fourteen years plus experience in Indigenous studies, specifically culture and heritage of Victoria, has been directed towards educating the wider community in Koorie culture and history, and aiding in reconciliation, whilst supporting Koorie communities in addressing their specific needs in this field. I have broad-ranging experience in advisory roles, education (guest speaking and tutoring), promotion (contributions towards exhibitions and publications), and advocacy.

1.  Koorie is a term of self-identification used by some Indigenous Australian people from Victoria and southern parts of New South Wales, meaning ‗our people‘, ‗man‘ or ‗person‘. Whilst using this term, I recognise and respect that this is not a blanket term adopted by all Indigenous Australian people from this region. Many prefer their own clan, nation, or state title, or the generic terms 'Indigenous Australian‘ or 'Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander‘.   For more information on the Trust see http://www.koorieheritagetrust.com/about_the_trust.
 
Kathleen Fear, University of Michigan, Graduate Student
kathleen.fear[at]gmail.com

I am currently a masters student at the University of Michigan School of Information specializing in Preservation of Information; after completing my degree in April, I hope to continue in a doctoral program. In my research, I am interested in what we can learn from users about what makes information valuable to them, both in terms of content and presentation, and how to use that information to make decisions about what things should be preserved and how. Especially in digital preservation, ongoing research in  preservation and archival science plays a critical part in shaping the decisions that are made in libraries and digital libraries. One of the most interesting challenges in digital preservation is that of creating digital collections of archival material that are accessible and preservable in the long term. I am interested in pursuing a Ph.D. with an archival science focus because it
is increasingly important that digital projects and digital preservation are grounded in an understanding of both traditional archival practice and how users find and use information in the digital realm.

A challenge I find especially interesting is the development of standards for the delivery of digital objects from an online archive. Access and preservation go hand-in-hand in the digital world, but as of yet, there appears to be little large-scale evaluation of the dissemination information packages used by institutions. User considerations add a layer of complexity to any discussion of preservation, and one of the difficulties in preservation research and information science more broadly is to design experimental and research studies that effectively address and measure the behaviors and needs of users. I am interested in exploring different research methodologies and validating existing ones, to help build up the set of tools researchers available to researchers in information science.

In my continuing research, I would like to further explore the relationship between users and preservation, both in the sense of how users can influence what to preserve and how, as well as how the ways in which preserved information should be presented to users so that it is usable and accessible and thus worth continuing to preserve.
 
Jan Fernhout, University of Amsterdam, Graduate Student
jan_fernhout[at]hotmail.com 

I studied history at the University of Leyden, the Netherlands, beginning in 1982 and received my master‘s degree in 1988.  During my military service, from 1989 till 1991, I was a researcher at the Institute for Air Force History in the Netherlands. My archival training at the Archiefschool at The Hague started in 1991, I was certificated in 1994. From 1993 till 2002 I did archival projects in the Netherlands and Germany.

In 2002 I moved to Berlin to study 17th and 18th century filing systems for current records in the archives of the Dutch stadtholder William II in the Landeshaupt-staats-archiv Sachsen-Anhalt, Abteilung Dessau at Dessau and the Oranian Archives (or Oranisches Archiv) in the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer at Berlin for a Ph. D. thesis supervised by Prof. Dr. Eric Ketelaar, Professor of Archivistics at the University of Amsterdam. The title of the thesis is: ―Archivists as scientists? An analysis of archival work in the 17th and 18th century and its significance for archival science and scientific thinking in the period. The goal is to discover in how far scientific ideas of the Ancien Régime were represented in publications about archival science and whether archivists of the
period used these publications.
 
Drahomira Gavranović, University of Zadar, Graduate Student
dgavrano[at]unizd.hr 

My name is Drahomira Gavranović and I am from Croatia. I graduated from Faculty of Philosophy at Osijek University (Croatian Language and literature and Library and information science). Since 2007 I have been employed as a research assistant at Department of LIS at University of Zadar, Croatia. I am teaching the following courses at the undergraduate level: Introduction to Research Methodology and Information Sciences I to the first year students, and  UDC library classification system as part of the Information Organization I course to the second year students. In my teaching I am employing modern methodology, aided by computer technology.
  
My interests are spread from history of the book to modern technology, however, most of my professional life I am spending researching classification systems in ALM communities and understanding boundaries between them. I would like to explore archival classification systems and compare them to library ones. I think it would be interesting to compare archival classes and e.g. UDC classification system with all restrictions for each classification. It would be great if I meet colleagues of similar interest as mine at AERI.
 
Anne Gilliland, University of California, Los Angeles, Faculty
gilliland[at]gseis.ucla.edu 

Since 1995, I have been a faculty member of the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where I developed and direct the specialization in Archival Studies.  In this capacity, I have worked extensively with both Master‘s and Ph.D. students from UCLA and several other countries.  I have served as Chair of the Department since 2005 and currently also chair the committee that administers the interdepartmental M.A. Program in Moving Image Archive Studies. I am also the Director of the Center for Information as Evidence (CIE) at UCLA.  The Center serves as an interdisciplinary forum for addressing the ways in which information objects and systems are created, used, and preserved as legal, administrative, scientific, social, cultural and historical evidence.   CIE is concerned with accountability, advocacy, and artifacts, as well as the axiomatic concepts that cut across these constructs such as legitimacy, sovereignty, power, authority, identity, authen-
ticity, literacy, classification, preservation, and sociopolitical contexts.

I have an M.A. in English Language and Literature specializing in Old Icelandic from Trinity College Dublin.  My Master‘s and Post-Master‘s work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1984-85) focused on archival automation.  Between 1985 and 1995 I worked as a university archivist and records specialist at the University of Cincinnati (1985-1990) as well as an investigator on a project funded by the NHPRC to investigate the appraisal of online conferencing and on another project funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to develop an online center for the history of the health sciences in Michigan (University of Michigan, 1990-1995). My doctoral dissertation from the University of Michigan (1995) developed and assessed an expert system to automate the appraisal of electronic mail.   I am a Fellow and former Council Member of the Society of American Archivists.  
From 2000-2008, I served as a member of the International Council on Archives Steering Committee for the Section on Archival Education (SAE).

My research interests, which originated in an interest in the various convergences between records, record-keeping technology and archival information systems, have broadened and evolved over the years as the field of Archival Studies has developed, and the sub-field of archival informatics has emerged.  My recent work addresses notions of information as evidence in an increasingly digital, post-colonial and globalized world, and particularly the nature and role of the archive and archivists within this world.  Given this context, I am interested in
three aspects:  

1. Technology infrastructure-building, e.g., metadata--especially for accountability purposes, design and evaluation of cultural information systems, and digital preservation technologies and strategies;

2. Professional and research infrastructure-building for Archival Studies, e.g., archival research methods, professional and research education and pedagogy, internationalization of archival work, and pluralization of the field and its theory and practice base; and,

3. Social justice and human rights issues as they relate to archives and records.  I am committed to supporting the development of archival education programs around the world that produce rigorous, reflexive, critical, culturally-sensitive, technologically competent, and globally-aware archival practitioners, researchers and educators (and the three are certainly not mutually-exclusive categories).
 
Karen Gracy, Kent State University, Faculty
kgracy[at]kent.edu

Biography:
Karen F. Gracy joined the faculty of the School of Library and Information Science of Kent State University as assistant professor in 2007.  She possesses an MLIS and PhD in Library and Information Science from the University of California, Los Angeles and an MA in critical studies of Film and Television from UCLA. She previously held the position of assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh from 2001-2007. Her first book, Film Preservation: Competing Definitions of Value, Use, and Practice, was published by the Society of American Archivists in 2007.  She has also served as the editor-in-chief of The Moving Image, journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, from 2006 to 2008. Other recent publications include ―Moving Image Preservation and Cultural Capital, which appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Library Trends (v. 56, no. 1), and ―Film and Broadcast Archives, which will appear in the third edition of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences in 2009.

Research and Teaching Interests and Objectives:
Dr. Gracy‘s research focuses on the transition from the analog to the digital in preservation, particularly how it affects both the nature of the work and the communities that are involved in preservation activities.  While the technical challenges involved in digital preservation are critical, the implications for the sociocultural infrastructure—the people and institutions, the processes and practices—must also be studied.  New players in preservation, such as the Internet Archive and Google Books, are changing the dominant paradigms of preservation and may ultimately transform how the LIS community approaches and conducts preservation work.  In both Dr. Gracy‘s research and teaching, the technical and sociocultural aspects receive equal attention.

As part of this research agenda, she hopes to build off of some of the central concepts debated in her recent Library Trends article (see above), which looked at the social construction of moving image collections in YouTube and Google Video, focusing particularly on these collections‘ potential to usurp some of the functions of the archive.  By foregrounding the user‘s contributions to creation, description, and contextualization of the collection, these sites serve as de facto archives for democratic discourse about political, social, and cultural events.  Their construction by users, including the construction of networks of relationships among documents, is comparable to the activities of the archive, particularly the acts of acquisition, and collection development, description, and contextualization. What has formerly been primarily the purview of the archive has now been appropriated by
creators and users of these materials.  In Dr. Gracy‘s future work she would like to look more closely at these acts of creation, linking, and appropriation in YouTube and other similar videosharing sites.  She will inquire into the role of social tagging and commenting, comparing it to the discourse of curatorial commentary, exploring what effects the videosharing sites have had on processes and practices in established cultural institutions for designing sites to access digitized collections.  Questions to be explored include:

Are libraries, archives, and museums creating more space for organic community and collection building? In what ways? What sorts of resources are available to users for creating ―curatorial commentar about collections, through social tagging, blogs, and the like? How have cultural institutions integrated user input into decisionmaking in the areas of acquisition, appraisal, preservation, description, and access?

Dr. Gracy is also interested in exploring economic and legal aspects of the videosharing phenomenon, looking sustainability models for these types of sites. Both YouTube and Google Video eventually ended up partnering with content owners such as film studios and broadcast networks in order to sustain themselves in the long -term (the videosharing sites profit-share advertising revenues with content owners to secure high-demand content and gain protection from copyright infringement lawsuits).  The question is whether another model can sustain social networking, one which might be more appealing to noncommercial/non-profit organizations.  Does government or private subsidization represent the only other means to keep sites fiscally sound?  This question of sustainability is critically important as more and more cultural institutions incorporate aspects of social network-
ing technologies into their existing catalogs and other discovery resources.
 
Francesca Guerra, University of California, Santa Cruz / San Jose State University, Faculty and graduate student
guerra[at]ucsc.edu 

I have a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Santa Barbara. As a graduate student I was a John D. Rockefeller 3rd fellow in the Program on Non-Profit Organizations at Yale University and also a visiting summer scholar at Yale‘s Divinity School. I am a Lecturer (with Continuing Appointment) in the Sociology Department at UC Santa Cruz and teach a wide-range of  interdisciplinary courses that focus on poverty, global consciousness, criminal justice, law, social justice, religious nonprofits, history of eugenics, disability studies, visual culture and mass media, oral history, and research methods. In 2003, I participated in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum‘s Winter Faculty Seminar on Theology, Ethics, Religion, and more recently, I attended Columbia Univer-
sity‘s 2007 Summer Institute on Oral History, ―Telling the World: Oral History, Struggles for Justice and Human Rights Dialogues. I am also a full-time MLIS student in the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University and plan on completing my degree with specializations in archival studies and academic libraries in fall 2009. I want to combine my expertise with social justice issues with my interest in archival studies and teach/develop courses about the politics of archiving human rights knowledge. My teaching objective is to empower students—particularly first generation, minority, disabled, and re-entry students—with knowledge and new perspectives.
 
Ross Harvey, Simmons College, Faculty
ross.harvey[at]simmons.edu

Ross Harvey is from 2008 Visiting Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College. Previous positions include Professor of Library and Information Management, School of Information Studies, Charles Sturt University, Australia; and academic positions at Curtin University of Technology and Monash University in Australia, and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has also held visiting positions at the University of British Columbia, the University of Glasgow, Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University, and the University of California at Los Angeles. His doctorate was awarded by Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in 1985.

Research objectives:  
Harvey‘s research interests focus on the preservation of library and archival materials, and history of print culture (with a special interest in nineteenth-century New Zealand and Australian newspaper history). His current research projects are developing the digital curation lifecycle model, and New Zealand‘s role in the imperial press system. In his digital preservation research he is particularly interested in the application of research outcomes to practice, especially the application of archival principles to digital preservation. Harvey has published widely, most recently in the area of digital preservation. His most recent book is Preserving Digital Materials ((Munich: K.G. Saur, 2005). He is currently writing a book about digital curation.

Teaching or scholarship philosophy:
Harvey‘s teaching has encompassed a wide range of areas, with emphasis on preservation in archives and libraries, audiovisual archiving, research methods, and the organization of information. In his teaching he attempts to link current and leading-edge practice to a strong theoretical underpinning which is based wherever possible on research findings. He hopes he instills in his students a keen awareness of research as a driver of the development of best practice. Harvey‘s full CV is available on his web site: http://www.elibank.net
 
Laura Helton, New York University, Graduate Student
laura.helton[at]nyu.edu

Over the past seven years, I have simultaneously worked as an archivist of social movements—with an emphasis on southern and African diasporic materials—and studied these archives as critical sites of engagement around the problems and politics of history.  I am now pursuing my PhD in twentieth-century United States history at New York University, hoping to expand my research on multiple intersections: of race and the archive; of collecting and historical memory; and of literary, historical and archival studies.

I earned an MA in history and archival management in 2004 from NYU, where I also served as a fellow at the Tamiment Library processing collections on women‘s movements.  From 2004 to 2006, I was field archivist for the Mississippi Digital Library, a collaborative project to expand access to archives documenting the civil rights movement.  As I moved among five repositories to survey and describe materials, I became increasingly interested in how variant histories of collection development created enduring institutional cultures, attracting different collections, staff, and researchers.  The MDL project coincided with a cluster of fortieth anniversaries of key civil rights milestones, marked by frequent memorial ceremonies, documentaries and museum exhibits, and investigations of long-unprosecuted murders.  These events made clear that the past my colleagues and I were
preserving remained fraught.  Engaging in our everyday work thus required navigating the complicated role that archives play in the social-historical memory of the present.  I took these experiences into my studies at Rutgers University, where I earned my MLIS in 2007.  My coursework in book history allowed me to translate questions I had encountered as an archivist into historical research probing earlier collecting endeavors focused on race in American life.

While my dissertation topic is still in formation, it will likely consider conditions of the 1910s through 1940s—including black internationalist movements, new forms of recording technology, and the persistence of southern segregation—that made race, and especially African American culture, emerge as an object of intensive documentary engagement in governmental, literary, historical, and ethnographic projects.  By considering a range of knowledge production practices, including archive-building projects and literary anthologies, I will explore the relationship between print culture, collecting, and political mobilization.  I hope this research on past archival efforts will help to illuminate what is at stake in more recent movements to collect and document moments of social change and upheaval.

As I pursue fulltime doctoral studies, I remain committed to and involved in the archival community.  Beginning this spring, I will be part of a pilot collaboration between NYU and the Schomburg Center for Research  on Black Culture to process hidden manuscript and photograph collections on African American history and literature.  I am also working with a fellow graduate of NYU‘s archival management program to produce a series of panel discussions in 2009-2010 featuring cross-disciplinary conversations about the growing interest in ―the archive as a conceptual tool to address questions of evidence, classification, and memory.
 
Richard Hollinger, University of Amsterdam, Graduate Student
richard.hollinger[at]umit.maine.edu

I have graduate degrees in Middle Eastern History and Public History/Historic Preservation and have been a practicing archivist since 1990.  I have research interests in  the history writing and recordkeeping technology, with a particular interest in social and cultural responses to technological change and how these may alter recordkeeping practices and mediate the meaning of existing records by those who create and use them.
 
Trond Jacobsen, University of Michigan, Graduate Student
trond[at]umich.edu

Biography not submitted.
 
David Kim, University of California, Los Angeles, Graduate Student
macando[at]gmail.com

Mr. Kim, who received his MLIS from Pratt Institute and a Master‘s in English from New York University, will attend the Ph.D. program at the Department of Information Studies at UCLA‘s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies.  Mr. Kim has worked as an Archivist with the Public Art Fund in New York and a Digitization Project Manager with New York‘s Asian American Arts Centre.  He intends to investigate publicly funded archival digitization projects such as the Library of Congress‘ ―American Memory.
 
Sarah Kim, University of Texas at Austin, Graduate Student
srhkim[at]gmail.com

I received a B.A. in History and Art History in 2001 from Ewha Woman‘s University in Seoul, Korea. I earned a M.S. in Information Studies from the School of Library and Information Science, University at Albany, the State University of New York in 2005 focusing on archives and record management. I worked as an archival processor at the Special Collections and Archives, University at Albany, State University of New York and as a paper conservation technician at the New York State Archives.

I was admitted to the doctoral program of the School of Information in the University of Texas at Austin for the fall semester of 2006 as a Kilgarlin Center Doctoral Preservation fellow supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services grant. My overall doctoral research area is the preservation of digital cultural heritage. I am also interested in sustainable development of archives, the cultural meaning of archiving, and individuals‘ preservation/record management behavior.

Currently I am working on specifying my doctoral dissertation research. I have explored the idea of personal digital archives as my dissertation topic. This began with simple curiosity about the methods used by individuals to preserve personal digital materials in their everyday lives, such as digital photographs, document files, e-mail, websites, blogs, and audio-video materials. Digital information technology does not change merely the form of records; it changes the ways that people express themselves as well. Individuals have more opportunities to actively document and represent who they are using digital information technology. These personal digital materials comprise the evidence of individuals‘ social interaction and convey various meanings as fragments of memory documenting the experiences of individuals, families, and society. Most research about personal digital materials has either focused on preserving personal manuscripts at the institutional level or developing Personal Information Management (PIM) systems for a relatively short-term preservation. In my study, however, the concept of personal digital archives includes individual, private digital archives managed and operated by people in their everyday lives and maintained through generations. I am particularly interested in considering personal digital archives as a medium for self-representation and/or self-reflection through which individuals (re)construct their identities and personal or family histories.

My long-range career goal is to be a creative researcher seeking for an alternative and/or a different way to preserve digital cultural heritage for future generations. I also want to share what I have learned and studied about digital preservation with future digital archivists and preservation professionals through teaching.
 
Allison Krebs-Khalil , University of Michigan, Graduate Student
krscholar[at]gmail.com

Biography not submitted.

Andrew Lau, University of California, Los Angeles, Graduate Student
andrewjlau[at]ucla.edu

I view my time as a doctoral student as an extension of my experience as a Masters student, but markedly different experiences unto themselves. Whereas my education as a Masters student was primarily characterized by exposure to particular issues of the field and the opportunity to allow those observations to percolate, my time as a doctoral student is oriented toward acquiring the necessary skills to actualize research agendas. This is not to say that my curiosity had ended when I received my Masters. Rather, there exists continuity between these two periods that influences the intellectual space that I currently occupy, my research interests, and the dynamic and shifting commitments that emerge as my intellectual and academic identity develops. Such is the nature of inquiry: locating the issues, recognizing their complexities, and strategizing the spectrum of opportunities to rectify them, all the while maintaining a flexibility to amend commitments and agendas to attend to the process. Secur-
ing a position in academia underscores this process, while also foregrounding the need to ensure the transmission of knowledge and development of discourse, not only within Archival Studies, but also with scholars from other disciplines as well as the future generations of archival practitioners: the students.

My research interests are particularly in issues stemming from postcolonialism and the many ways that archives are affected by the legacies of colonialism and imperialism. In the past two years, I have worked in exploring the implications of historical expressions of power and their relationships with archival/memory institutions and educational paradigms and will be expanding my research to include policy, theory and philosophy. I am also interested in the utility and application of methodologies from a diversity of disciplines like Narratological Studies, Multicultural Psychology, and Cultural Studies to explore the epistemological implications of post-colonial approaches to research and education. That is, I hope to work towards answering the question of how
pedagogy and scholarship can be refigured and shaped by approaches coming from a wide-range of disciplines.

My philosophy for teaching and research is influenced by a strong orientation toward interdiscplinarity. That is, I believe that a diverse knowledge base can enhance the richness of discourse and the ways that we as a discipline work through issues in the field. I am particularly interested in drawing from insights from literary theory, philosophy, multicultural psychology, sociology and anthropology; my approach to Archival Studies looks both reflexively at the discipline, as well as outward to the index of relevant discussions outside of what is typically construed as the boundaries of the discipline.
 
Christopher (Cal) Lee, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Faculty
callee[at]email.unc.edu 

Christopher (Cal) Lee is Assistant Professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  He teaches classes in archival administration, records management, digital curation, resource selection and evaluation, understanding information technology for managing digital collections, and the construction of digital repository rules.

His primary area of research is the long-term curation of digital collections.  He is particularly interested in the professionalization of this work and the diffusion of existing tools and methods (e.g. digital forensics, web archiving, automated implementation of policies) into real professional practice.

Curation of personal digital archives has received less attention in the professional literature than the curation of institutional assets, despite the essential role that personal materials have played in the cultural heritage of past generations.  Cal is involved in numerous efforts to fill this gap in the professional repertoire of archivists and other digital curation professionals. He is editing and providing several chapters to a forthcoming book entitled, I, Digital: Personal Collections in the Digital Era, which is exploring issues, challenges and opportunities in the management of personal digital collections.   He is the chief organizer of a meeting of invited international experts called ―Stewardship of E-Manuscripts: Advancing a Shared Agenda, which will take place in Chapel Hill on March 31.

Two of the primary mechanisms for collecting personal digital archives are obtaining physical storage media (e.g. floppies, CDs, hard drives) and capturing content from the Web.  In order to advance the state of professional practice in obtaining physical media, Cal has taken part in formal digital forensics training, and he will be teaching a Short Course called ―Applying Digital Forensics Techniques to Materials Acquired on Physical Media at the Archiving 2009 conference.

The VidArch project (http://ils.unc.edu/vidarch/) focuses on Web capture scenarios.  It is investigated the collection of online video, with a particularly emphasis on contextual information.  Cal‘s contributions to VidArch have included an information model for contextual information in digital collections (http://sils.unc.edu/research/publications/reports/TR_2007_04.pdf) and several empirical studies of online selection and collecting strategies.

Other current projects include DigCCurr and DigCCurrII (http://ils.unc.edu/digccurr/), which are developing and implementing courses of study and practical engagement opportunities in digital curation.  For these projects, Cal has developed an extensive Matrix of Digital Curation Knowledge and Competencies (http://www.ils.unc.edu/digccurr/products.html), which is based on various data sources and grounded in the diverse literature related to digital curation.

Cal is also working with state archives in two different states to investigate the significant properties of electronic records from state government. Past research projects have included CAMiLEON (http://www.ils.unc.edu/callee/dig-pres_users-
perspective.pdf), which examined migration vs. emulation as digital preservation strategies; and an in-depth case
study of the development of the OAIS (http://www.ils.unc.edu/callee/dissertation_callee.pdf).

He has an MSI (with a concentration in Archives and Records Management) and PhD from the University of Michigan School of Information.
 
Lori Lindberg, University of California, Los Angeles / San Jose State University, Faculty and graduate student
msarchive[at]yahoo.com

I am a full-time faculty member at San Jose State University's School of Library and information Science, where I was the chief architect of the School's new Master of Archives and Records Administration (MARA) degree. I have been a doctoral student at UCLA since Fall of 2003. While at UCLA I was a Graduate Student Researcher working within the Description Cross-Domain of the InterPARES 2 project. Now that InterPARES 2 is complete, I am completing my dissertation research utilizing methods and products developed during the project, with my research focused on a metadata framework for archival description, using lessons learned from work with descriptive requirements for electronic records to suggest modifications to present popular and widely-utilized archival descriptive standards: EAD/EAC and ISAD(G)/ISAAR-CPF.

My educational background includes a BS in Music and Theatre and Drama from Indiana University (1984), a BA in English Literature from San Francisco State University (1996) and a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) from San Jose State University (2000). I have been on faculty at SJSU since Spring 2002 and full-time faculty since Fall 2003.


My research interests are in recordkeeping metadata and descriptive standards, archival description, particularly as it affects and is affected by digital recordkeeping, and personal digital information management and preservation.

Having mentored many students to successful careers in the archives field, along with some achieving recent publishing success, it is my greatest pleasure to watch my students succeed in the workplace and contribute to the social, economic and cultural well-being of their communities.
 
Jessie Lymn, University of Technology, Sydney, Graduate Student
jessielymn[at]gmail.com

Jessie is exploring the fringes of libraries and archives. She is in the first year of a PhD at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), with a research project titled "Capturing memories and moments in different spaces: an examination of private, public and institutional collections of zines". The project will develop relationships between the information, archival and cultural studies disciplines, and examine the role of non‐institutional collections in challenging how we understand memory and culture.

In 2008 Jessie completed a MA (Information Management), developing a preservation and access strategy for a local zine collection, and is now working with local zine makers and community members to implement the recommendations.

Jessie is currently tutoring in the communications program at UTS, with a focus on information studies. Her professional background is in archives, information management and web design.
 
Francesca Marini, University of British Columbia, Faculty
fmarini[at]interchange.ubc.ca 

Francesca Marini is Assistant Professor of Archival Studies at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She has a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of California, Los Angeles, and has studied as an archivist in Italy.  She holds a Bachelor‘s Degree in Theatre Studies from the University of Bologna, Italy. Her main research interests focus on performing arts archives and information behavior. She is engaged in several research projects, including Present Memory: Knowledge Requirements for Archivists Preserving Live Theatre, funded through the UBC Hampton Research Fund. She is a University of Glasgow Honorary Research Fellow and Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS)-Performing Arts Visiting Fellow. She publishes in archival and performing arts journals, and she is a member of
several scholarly and professional associations, including The Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA), The Society of American Archivists (SAA), The American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T), the Canadian Association for Theatre Research (CATR), the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), the International Association of Libraries and Museums of the Performing Arts (SIBMAS); and the Theatre Library Association (TLA; also Board member). As a scholar and an archivist, she actively works with Vancouver artists such as Judith Marcuse.

Her teaching philosophy entails an open-minded relationship with students and the creation of an environment that promotes students‘ self-confidence and self-expression. She believes in a constructive intellectual exchange and aims at conveying new knowledge and expertise to students in a way that relates to what they already know, linking theory and practice. Besides transmitting specific skills and information, her goal is to lead students to understand the interrelationships of everything that they are learning, within an international, interdisciplinary and intercultural context.
 
Sue McKemmish, Monash University, Faculty
Sue.McKemmish[at]infotech.monash.edu.au 

My research relates to archival science and systems, electronic recordkeeping, and the broader knowledge management, metadata and resource discovery areas. I have been involved for many years with researchers at Monash University in the development of records continuum theory, particularly relating to the societal role of records in memory, identity, governance and accountability. I have particularly enjoyed working with archival,  LIS, information systems, computing science and Australian Indigenous studies researchers,  PhD students, archival institutions, communities and community organizations, and government agencies  on an exciting range of collaborative, multidisciplinary research projects, for example relating to Australian Indigenous communities and archives; inclusive and culturally sensitive archival education; the nexus between memories, communities and
technologies; metadata standards to support electronic recordkeeping and the provision of quality information and archival resources online; and smart information portals tailored to the needs of individual users and communities. I am also committed to the development of archival research design and methodology, community-centred participatory research models, and the user-sensitive design of information and archival systems.

Research highlights have included the 2004-8 ARC Linkage Major Project ―Trust and Technology: Building Archival Systems for Indigenous Oral Memory  which explored how archives can support Indigenous frameworks of knowledge, memory and evidence, particularly knowledge that is still stored within the community orally http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/research/centres/cosi/projects/trust/); my recordkeeping metadata research (the Australian Recordkeeping Metadata Schema (RKMS) Version 1.0, the related 1997-8 SPIRT Project, and the 2003-05 ARC Linkage Project, ―Create Once, Use Many Times: the Clever Use of Metadata
(http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/research/groups/rcrg/crkm/index.html) which impacted significantly on the de-
velopment of the new Australian National Standard, and ISO23081; and  the development of the Breast Cancer Knowledge Online Portal (http://www.bckonline.monash.edu.au), an outcome of consumer instigated research and collaboration between researchers, governments, industry and professional partners, and user communities.

Another recent highlight has been the establishment of the Monash Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics in 2006. COSI brings together a critical mass of Monash researchers, national and international research collaborators, industry and community research partners and research students. It aims to contribute to the development of individuals, organisations, and society through multidisciplinary research relating to human-centred design and deployment of information technologies, and their creative and effective use in government, business and civil society. COSI‘s major research themes include the role of ICTs in social inclusion, and the nexus between memories, communities and technologies (http://www.infotech.monash.edu.au/research/centres/cosi/index.html).

Since 1990, I have been involved with my Monash colleagues in the development, coordination and teaching of one of Australia‘s leading professionally accredited graduate programs in recordkeeping and archival systems. This has been enormously satisfying. At the same time sustaining our archival programs has been and remains a major challenge. A key to our success so far has been the development of our programs within the multidisciplinary framework of a broadly based Faculty of Information Technology which includes information disciplines ranging from the engineering to the social sciences ends of the spectrum, the strong nexus between our research and teaching programs, and our engagement with a wonderfully supportive professional community.
 
Helen McManus, University of California, Los Angeles, Graduate Student
helen.mcmanus[at]gmail.com

I am a doctoral candidate in Political Theory at UCLA, and a first year in UCLA‘s MLIS program. I received training and experience in archival processing and rare book cataloging at the Center for Primary Research and Training at UCLA, and I would like to pursue a career at the intersection of special collections curatorship and academic research and teaching.

My doctoral dissertation explores the concept and practice of ―endless work, or work that proceeds without a specified end, as represented in nineteenth-century British political literatures. I am particularly interested in the ways in which endless work informs today‘s political imagination, and I ask how we might endure such work, as well as how we might address and critique it. My MLIS thesis will explore the private library as an archive, with particular reference to the Edgeworth family library held in Special Collections at UCLA.
 
Eun Park, McGill University, Faculty
eun.park[at]mcgill.ca 

Eun Park is Associate Professor in the School of Information Studies at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles, an MLS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an MBA from the University of Pittsburgh.  Her research interests include digital archives, digital preservation, metadata, authenticity and authentication, electronic records management, and social aspects of information technology. She teaches courses on metadata, electronic records systems, digital preservation, and records management at the graduate level. In her Ph.D. dissertation, she explored constructs of authenticity as they are understood by universities and recordkeeping communities in different national, cultural, juridical, and organizational contexts to understand variables impact requirements for permanently preserving authentic records in electronic student records systems. Her Ph.D. dissertation was awarded with a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the University of California Office of the President and the Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from Beta Phi Mu (the International Library and Information Studies Honor Society). In 2001, she won the Oliver Wendell Holmes Award from the Society of American Archivists. In 2003, she became an assistant professor at the School of Information Studies at McGill University. Since then, she has been awarded major grants from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council and FQRSC (Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture). She is leading a research team from Giving Life (to Data) to Save Life (in the age of AIDS).
This research focuses on designing and implementing a digitization protocol for building digital archives of photos or a variety of data about HIV/AIDS. She is a member of the International Visual Methodology for Social Change Project, and the Paulo and Nita Freire Project for Critical Pedagogy. She has been working for the InterPARES (International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems) Projects since 1999 and, currently, she is a member of InterPARES III Project Team Korea.
 
Liladhar Pendse, University of California, Los Angeles, Graduate Student
lpendse[at]library.ucla.edu

I am a 2nd year doctoral student in the Information Studies program here at the UCLA. My research focus has been various archival institutions in the developing world. I am particularly interested in looking at the modalities in which various archives exist in the post-colonial setting. My research focuses on the construction of national identities in the parts of the Indian Sub-continent under Portuguese and French colonial rule. After completion of my doctoral program, I plan to teach in archival field. I would like to attend the Building the Future of Archival Education and Research that is organized by the AERI for several reasons. First, the AERI program will be conducive to furthering my knowledge about Archival pedagogy as it exists in the United States. Second, I am embarking on a collaborative digital preservation project of the French colonial documents in India. I believe that attending the AERI will enhance my knowledge about various nuanced scenarios in the archives of the developing world. I foresee continual, strong interactions of the AERI instructors and mentors with assigned mentees. I plan to benefit from these professional interactions. Third and most importantly, attending this workshop will allow me to learn various methodological tools that will be required for a future archival professional.

AERI also addresses the issues that relate to the archives of different cultural heritages. The existing diversity in our cultural heritage is a testimony to the fact that the current cultural differences in various communities continue to influence our present and our future. The archives as one of many social organizations cannot exist outside of this cultural milieu, and thus it is susceptible to the peculiarities of traditions and norms that constitute and govern a particular community. The modern archives continue to function as the aggregators and delivery mechanism for historical evidentiary information about various events that took place within that particular community. This function has led to increasingly standardized delivery mechanisms that are usually defined by the specific social obligations such as meeting the information needs of a particular community.

As mentioned earlier, I have been working on the modalities for engaging the French and Portuguese colonial information policies in India as reflected in the colonial periodical press in the late nineteenth century. While investigating these modalities, I realized the availability of the research related primary materials within the holdings of the North American and several European libraries and archives were extremely limited. These primary materials are scattered in the libraries and archives throughout the former colonial domains of Portugal and France on the Indian sub-continent. I have, as a doctoral student, embarked upon investigating the mechanisms for providing the alternate access to these important materials through current technological capabilities.
This approach is based on the cooperation for digitally preserving these fragile archival information objects. I trust that attending the AERI workshop in July 2009 will benefit me immensely and allow me to be a successful archival educator.

Ricardo Punzalan, University of Michigan, Graduate Student
ricpunz[at]umich.edu

I have a Bachelor‘s degree in Library Science and a Master‘s in Library and Information Science, with a concentration in Archives and Museum Studies from the University of the Philippines. My master‘s thesis, which was supported with a highly competitive research grant, discussed the context of archives in the museum by high-lighting the recordkeeping and object documentation practices in the University museum.

I am currently a doctoral student at the School of Information at the University of Michigan. My advisor is Dr. Margaret Hedstrom. Aside from a Ph.D. in Information, I am enrolled in two graduate certificate programs: Science, Technology and Society (STS) and Museum Studies. I am also a research assistant in an NSF-funded research led by Dr. Paul Conway entitled Beyond Retrieval: Bridging Digitization Processes and End-User Judgements in a Large-Scale Image Digital Library. My contribution in the project involves telephone interviews with heavy users of the Library Congress American Memory‘s online photographs. I am also preparing a literature review for the project, which looks at digitization of historical photographs and archival notions of quality, integrity and value.

In my pre-candidacy research, I explored the role of medical archives in representing, remembering and understanding leprosy in the island of Culion, a former segregation facility in the Philippines. My specific interest was in understanding how the visual records of the former leprosarium were used to construct knowledge of leprosy and the ways they figure in the propagation of stigma. I also examined the role of leprosy archives in remembering the disease and in constructing the island‘s past by members of the Culion community in the present.

I am guided by the belief that the study of archives should be approached from a multidisciplinary perspective. As social institutions, I am inclined to look at records and archives in terms of their contribution in knowledge production and collective memory. My own research is a result of numerous encounters and actual site visits to Culion as well as consultations with experts in various disciplines engaged in leprosy research who are working in both local and international milieu as well as my own background in archives. I have developed my research inquiry with careful consideration to what the study will achieve in both theoretical and practical terms.

I am currently on study leave as an assistant professor at the University of the Philippines School of Library and Information Studies. There, I taught introductory courses in library science and a range of archives courses in both the Bachelor‘s and Master‘s programs of the University. I also served as Museum Archivist for the University‘s Vargas Museum. Upon finishing my doctoral studies I intend to return to the Philippines to continue my research and teaching. I am committed to returning since there is a need for improvement in archival education and research in the Philippines as well as the broader region of the Pacific and Southeast Asia.
 
Sarah Ramdeen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Graduate Student
ramdeen[at]email.unc.edu

Sarah Ramdeen is a first year doctoral student at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  She is currently a research assistant for Dr. Brad Hemminger, working on a study of the UNC Library‘s new Endeca catalog.  The project is titled: Comparison of Library Catalog Searching Interfaces: Text Based Searching with Faceted Browsing versus Metadata Based Searching.

Other research interests include adopting techniques for data preservation from the ILS realm for physical collections in the Geosciences and developing methods for increasing access and improving digital preservation of Geoscience materials.  Ms. Ramdeen also believes that there is a need for further research and development of finding aids and guides to help train scientists and professionals in how to better manage and access their data.

 Ms. Ramdeen began working at the Florida Geological Survey (FGS) in 2004 and is currently working with the FGS on a data preservation grant from the United States Geological Survey.  Ms. Ramdeen holds a BS in Geology and a BA in Humanities from Florida State University (FSU).  She also holds an MS in Library and Information Studies with a Certificate in Museum Studies from FSU.  In the Fall of 2006 she was an intern in London at the Natural History Museum where she worked in the Micropalaeontology section imaging fossils and conducting research.
 
Hea Lim Rhee, University of Pittsburgh, Graduate Student
hlr8[at]pitt.edu

Throughout my academic and professional life I have been committed to the archival and library fields in America and South Korea. Currently I am a doctoral student specializing in archives, preservation, and records management at the University of Pittsburgh. I received my Master of Science in Information (MSI) from the University of Michigan, specializing in archives and records management. Before coming to America, my undergraduate major was library and information science (LIS), and I continued to pursue my studies in this area in my master‘s program at Ewha Womans University, specializing in East Asian archival studies.

My major professional experience was two years as a librarian at the Central Library of Ewha Womans University. My primary task was to catalogue and classify Korean medieval manuscripts and both rare and contemporary books using USMARC, KORMARC (Korean Machine Readable Cataloging), and DDC 20. I also worked for the Korean government agency Korea Development Institute (KDI) and the C.V. Starr East Asian Library of Columbia University in New York as an intern.

My research objectives are to contribute to the accumulation of archival knowledge and the introduction of the Eastern and Western archival communities to each other‘s archival knowledge. I will conduct my research from an international perspective based on my knowledge of East Asian archival studies and North American archival studies. I intend my trans-Pacific research to provide novel and valuable archival knowledge to the world-wide archival community. I will conduct my research also by crossing the archival and library fields. Applying synergically my knowledge of archival studies and LIS, I will conduct interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary re-search.

I believe that teaching is not only the process by which I guide students to learn but also a learning exprience for myself. In other words, although I will facilitate students‘ learning and allow students to take center stage in class, I will also learn how to be flexible in my interactions with students and their varied and unpredictable personalities and learning strategies. My teaching style and course objectives will depend on the course, but I have two consistent main goals. The first main goal in my teaching philosophy is to motivate students toward a level of independence where they develop a desire to learn on their own. I believe that a teacher must encourage students to desire intellectual improvement. My other goal as a teacher is to present theories, concepts, and empirical material to students in a way that allows them to integrate this information into their own life experiences.
In everyday practice, I will try to implement the goals of my teaching philosophy in a number of ways in the hopes of meeting my goals and the students‘ goals and expectations. Every day of teaching will be a learning experience to me.
 
Kalpana Shankar, Indiana University – Bloomington, Faculty
shankark[at]indiana.edu

I am an assistant professor in the School of Informatics at Indiana University-Bloomington. I teach classes in social informatics, computer and information ethics, and organizational ethics. My research projects include the implications of new technology use in scientific practice for recordkeeping and data management and the role of scientific recordkeeping in scientific pedagogy, policy, and practice. I am also a co-Principal Investigator on ETHOS (Ethical Technologies in the Homes of Seniors), a 3 year National Science Foundation-funded project to study home-based pervasive computing, privacy, and senior citizens. I received my Ph.D. in library and information science at UCLA, did postdoctoral research at UCLA with the Center for Embedded Network Sensing
(CENS), and was a AAAS Science Policy Fellow at the National Institutes of Health in the Office of the Director.
 
Elizabeth Shepherd, University College, London, Faculty
e.shepherd[at]ucl.ac.uk 

Dr. Elizabeth Shepherd is a Reader in archives and records management at University College London, Department of Information Studies (formerly SLAIS). She teaches on the Masters programmes in archives and records management, offering modules on principles of archives and records management, records management and management skills for archivists. Between 1992 and 2002, she was programme director of the MA in Archives and Records Management at UCL. She is currently Departmental Graduate Research Tutor and Chair of the Departmental Research Committee. She has established a research centre, ICARUS (International Centre for Archives and Records Management Research and User Studies) (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/icarus/). Elizabeth‘s research interests include the relationships between records management and information policy compliance (the subject of a Research Council-funded project) and the development of the archive profession in England, which is the subject of her PhD and of a forthcoming book (2009). She serves on the editorial
boards of Archival Science and the Records Management Journal, is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council‘s Peer Review College and Higher Education Funding Council for England‘s Research Assessment Exercise 2008, Panel 37. She has published numerous articles and (with Geoffrey Yeo) the internationally best selling book Managing Records: a handbook of principles and practice (Facet Publishing, 2003). Details are at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/elizabeth-shepherd/
 
Donghee Sinn, University at Albany, State University of New York, Faculty
dsinn[at]uamail.albany.edu 

Donghee Sinn is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Information Studies. She specializes in Archives and Records Management, and her research interests focus particularly on the archival research in relation with public memory, archival use/user studies, and personal archiving in the web environment. She has a B.A. and a Master's in Library and Information Science from Chung-Ang University in Seoul, Korea with a focus on history of books and Korean bibliography, and a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh, specializing in Archives and Records Management. Previously, Donghee worked at the National Archives in Korea in acquisition and appraisal, taught at a college in Korean bibliography, and worked as a reference librarian in Korea. While working for a Ph.D. in the States, she worked in the East Asian Library for the Korean Collection at the University of Pittsburgh. Since then she has been participating and serving on the Library Tech-
nology Committee and the Membership Committee of the Council of East Asian Libraries, which is a sub group of the Asian Studies Association. She also worked as a webmaster for one of the institutes at the University of Pittsburgh. Her dissertation study was recognized and prizes were awarded from the ALA (American Library Association) and her own school. She is very interested in building bridges among several disciplines including archival studies, archiving in the web environment, and the East Asian culture and heritages.
 
Susan Soy, University of Texas at Austin, Graduate Student
ssoy[at]ischool.utexas.edu

I am a non-traditional student at the University of Texas at Austin who entered the profession with a MALS from Dominican University in 1976. Since that time, I have worked in public libraries and participated in professional organizations related to public librarianship and archival science.

My experience with archives is centered on local history and my research interest is in appraisal of electronic records conducted by archivists working in or connected with local history repositories.  

My research objectives are to develop a deeper understanding of the ways in which archivists are approaching appraisal of electronic records in repositories that are a part of the public library environment and to consider the creator‘s role in appraisal activities conducted in local history repositories.

My philosophy is guided by practical experience and from a constructivist viewpoint. I‘m drawn to case study research strategies and practiced at conducting interviews. I believe we form attachments and develop meanings for things in our world and that these meanings are shaped by the cultural environment in which we live. They are influenced by our teachers and other individuals who touch our lives. As archivists, we wield influence and construct reality through the actions we take.  

I believe that archivists shape the cultural record through the choices they make and that the roles of teacher, researcher, and archivist converge in ways that empower and trickle up creating at the points of convergence viable solutions to real problems. The points of convergence open pathways and inspire collaborative activity that can succeed even when uncertainties surround the problem. As action is taken, change occurs and those changes involving records creators and archivists result in adaptations of past ideas and another step forward up the spiraling ladder of knowledge construction.  
 
Joanna Steele, University of Michigan, Graduate Student
joanna_steele[at]yahoo.com

 ―For the Archive can never be a quiet retreat for professionals and scholars and craftpersons. It is a crucible of human experience, a battleground for meaning and significance… This statement by South African archivist Verne Harris sheds light on a space that is highly contested, wherein lies the power to oppress or release. In such a realm, archival work is always intentional, always deliberate.

My approach to the archives has been shaped by my love of documentary studies, background in political science, Russian life skills, obsession with ethics, fascination with non-textual records, dependence on community, hope in emergent knowledge, and belief in boundary-pushing practices. My professional experience includes lobbying, journalism, editing, archival processing, and documentation of underrepresented communities. I am currently working as a project archivist with Pepperdine University‘s Special Collections to process the papers of former congressman, HUD secretary, and  1996 vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp. My current freelance projects include cataloguing for a UCLA history professor with a unique collection on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
surveying and preparing the personal papers of former UCLA professor and Filipino American community activist ―Uncle Roy Morales for the Library of Congress, and grantmaking for Latino public radio network Radio Bilingüe.  

My research objective is to study records as they relate to human rights, particularly the work of safe-guarding records and exploration of the ethical and legal issues that arise from displaced archives. I hope to demonstrate and document these issues through fieldwork collecting, preserving, and digitizing the personal papers of former Russian human rights journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Additionally, I would like to participate in curriculum building around the ethics of preservation, beginning with an analysis of the value systems behind archival codes of ethics.

My scholarship philosophy is highly interdisciplinary, drawing from museum studies, film/radio documentation, ethnic studies, and philosophy. My approach to learning is Frerian, intuitive, sensory, and practice-based.
 
Joshua Sternfeld, University of California, Los Angeles, Postdoctoral Scholar
joshuas[at]ucla.edu

Joshua Sternfeld received his Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of California, Los Angeles History Department, after receiving his B.A. in History from Princeton University.  Specializing in Modern European and U.S. Cultural History, Joshua‘s doctoral work was on the socio-cultural and political reception of jazz music in Weimar and Nazi Berlin.  While completing his studies abroad, he also conducted a series of oral histories with German eyewitnesses of the early jazz era.

Joshua is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar with the UCLA Information Studies Department, as well as Associate Director for the Center for Information as Evidence.  Besides his work as the Program Manager of AERI, he organized in 2008 a four-part colloquium series entitled Interdisciplinarity and Information, which brought together distinguished UCLA faculty from the sciences, social science and humanities.  While balancing his managerial duties with the Center, he has conducted a series of original graduate seminars that explore the methodological, theoretical, and practical intersection of digital history with archival studies.  One particular highlight from these courses was Design of a Historical Website, which involved History and Information Studies students working towards the construction of an educational digital collection on the 1893 World‘s Columbian Exposition.
The working site can be found at: http://uclawce.ats.ucla.edu/.

Joshua‘s many interests include: Digital Humanities and Digital History, New Media Theory, K-12 and Higher Education Pedagogy, Sound Technology, Acoustic History, Oral History, and Cultural Heritage.
 
Helen Tibbo, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Faculty
tibbo[at]email.unc.edu 

Helen R. Tibbo, professor at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), teaches in the areas of archives and records management, digital preservation and access, electronic retrieval, and reference. She is currently the PI for the IMLS-funded DigCCurr Project that is developing an International Digital Curation Curriculum for master‘s level students (www.ils.unc.edu/digccurr) (2006-2009). In April of 2007 the DigCurr Conference attracted close to 300 participants with 100 speakers from 10 countries (www.ils.unc.edu/digcurr2007). She is also PI for the DigCCurrII project that is extending the digital curation curriculum to Ph.D. students and practitioners through research fellowships and a
series of institutes. Dr. Tibbo has been PI for two projects funded by the National Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) – Managing the Digital University Desktop project (www.ils.unc.edu/ digitaldesktop) (2002-2005) and the NHPRC Electronic Records Research Fellowship Program (www.ils.unc.edu/nhprcfellows) (2004-2008). Dr. Tibbo is also a co-PI with collaborators from the University of Michigan and the University of Toronto for a Mellon Foundation-funded project to develop standardized metrics for assessing use and user services for primary sources (http://www.si.umich.edu/ArchivalMetrics/Index.html). She is also a co-PI with Drs. Marchionini and Lee on the NSF-funded Preserving Video Objects and Context: A Demonstration Project and its continuation funded by NDIIPP of the Library of Congress. For the Primarily History project, she and Dr. Ian Anderson, University of Glasgow, continue to explore U.S. and European historians and their information-seeking behaviors with regard to primary source materials and technologies used in archives to support remote access. She is currently chairing the campus-wide Digital Curation/Institutional Repositories Committee (DC/IRC) at UNC-CH and has been the organizer, and an instructor, for the Digitization for Cultural Heritage Professionals workshops held at SILS from 2002 through 2004 (www.ils.unc.edu/DCHP). Dr. Tibbo is a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and has served on SAA Council. She is also on the Editorial Board of the Digital Cura- tion Centre‘s (DCC) Digital Curation Manual and the ISO Working Group that is developing an international stan-
dard for audit and certification of digital repositories. Dr. Tibbo has extensive experience planning and conducting practitioner-oriented education and dissemination events with ―Digitization for Cultural Heritage Information Professionals, 2002-2004; ―NHPRC Electronic Records Research Fellowship Symposia, 2004-2007; the DigCCurr2007 and 2009 conferences and the Summer Institutes for Digital Curation Professional for DigCCurrII.
 
Ciaran Trace, University of Wisconsin - Madison, Faculty
trace[at]wisc.edu

I trained and worked as an archivist in Ireland before moving to the United States in 1997 to pursue a doctoral degree in Library and Information Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. My dissertation study, ―Documenting School Life: Formal and Informal Imprints of a Fifth Grade Classroom, used sociological methods and theory to look at school records as social entities; in the process uncovering how records are created and used in socially organized ways. In 2004, I joined the faculty of the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison where I currently work as an assistant professor and coordinator of the Specialization in Archives and Records Administration.

My current area of research centers on what can be broadly termed the social study of everyday life and what Riggins calls ―the socialness of things. As part of the study of material culture, my research examines the relationship and intersection of people and objects in everyday society. Taking a democratic or egalitarian research stance, my primary interest is in studying objects that form a pervasive and often overlooked part of our day-to-day lives. These include two-dimensional textual artifacts (particularly those records or documents that people create in the ordinary course of activity whether at work, school, or as part of their personal lives) and collections of three-dimensional artifacts that have significance as pop culture items.  

In looking at the relationship and interaction between objects and people I focus on the meaning that objects have for individuals, as well as the role that objects play in negotiating and representing broader social relationships. I am also interested in the skills, expertise, and knowledge of objects that people must learn and demonstrate in order to be recognized as members of particular communities. Part of my interest in material culture and the social study of everyday life lies in making the familiar strange, turning the spotlight on seemingly unprepossessing objects and activities and by doing so showing them in a new light. I am also interested in figuring out how people make the most of life, how people negotiate local situations, and what we all share in common
to make this happen. My interest in material culture covers three main areas: the social study of the act of writing and recording, the social study of collectors and collecting, and qualitative study of archival work. Study of everyday life as it pertains to information creation and use (particular focus on organizational recordkeeping and the role of written literacies in the lives of children and young adults), study of everyday life as it pertains to the relationship and intersection of people and everyday objects in society (particular focus on studying how and why individuals and institutions collect material culture, and on studying the intersection of material culture and information behavior), and qualitative study of archival work (particular focus on the theoretical and practical constructs behind archival activities of selecting/appraising, arranging, describing, preserving, and making records available).
 
Frank Upward,  Monash University, Graduate Student and Faculty
frank.upward[at]bigpond.com

Date of birth 2 Feb 1945
Qualifications
         Master of Arts (Melbourne University) 1975, (B.A. 1965)
         Graduate Diploma of Education, (Melbourne University) 1966
Monash University Appointments
          Lecturer:  May 1988 - 1996
          Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2006
          Principal Researcher, Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics, 2006-  
Previous Appointments
          Senior Consultant, 1985-1989, Archival Systems Consultants
          Assistant Director, Australian Archives, Records and Data Management, 1984-5,  
          Information Manager, Rural Water Commission, 1983-1984,
          Registrar, 1981 - 1982, Commonwealth Archives Office,  
          Archivist (various positions) 1975 - 1981, Commonwealth Archives Office
          Teacher, Secondary School and Adult Education, 1967 - 1971  

Discussion of some key points re my role at Monash:
In relation to the Monash University Archives and Records Management program in 1988 I carried out an initial consultancy for the Department of Librarianship which established the second year of a Master of Arts program specialising in archives,  and prepared a successful application for course development funds which acquired $280,000 of seeding funds for the development of the first year of an archives and records Masters program, available also as a Graduate Diploma of Archives and Records Management, which enabled me to arrange the recruiting of colleagues Sue McKemmish and Livia Iacovino to the faculty. Over a period of eighteen years I taught within, co-ordinated and developed more than 20 subjects within various Undergraduate, Graduate Di-
ploma and Masters Programs. Exigencies of course survival resulted in my increasingly specialising in web-based approaches to document management within Internet communication environments, as the member of faculty staff who could bring archival expertise into information systems fields and enjoyed supervising project work.  

Research objectives:
I have reached the end of my academic career but want to spend some time in the next year or two promoting some understanding of the tools I have developed in recent years for archival practices including research practices.  

Research and teaching philosophy:
My own work has involved the writing of grounded theory and I have a corresponding interest in all forms of teaching that are grounded in student activities (i.e. activity based learning). Towards the end of my academic  career I taught using only project based activities, which I supported by providing the students with conceptual tools for understanding the continuum of recorded information for use in web-browser and internet technology projects of their choosing. Conceptual research in the information professions is only now beginning to receive the attention it deserves and might be beginning to be codified. I might be able to contribute to this as I have had to learn by doing. There is very little written about it within archival science. Methodologically (in a nutshell) a version of it will deal with how to select what you will turn over in your mind, identifying what is already there and looking for concepts that you anticipate will make connections with, but are unlike, what is already present.
 
Kelvin White, University of Oklahoma, Faculty
kwhite[at]ou.edu

Kelvin White White is an Assistant Professor at University of Oklahoma‘s School of Library and Information Studies. He received a Master‘s degree in Afro-American Studies and his Ph.D. in Information Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Using social justice as a framework, his work examines the interconnections between the social, cultural, and historical contexts in which recordkeeping activities exist and the implications they have for marginalized or underrepresented communities. Currently, his research examines issues of memory and remembering in Afro-Mexican communities in the Costa Chica (Mexico); critically interrogates contemporary archival theory and constructs; and develops ways in which education and pedagogy might
contribute to cultural relevancy and sensitivity in archival practice and research.
 
Mirna Willer, University of Zadar, Faculty
mwiller[at]unizd.hr

I received BA in English language and literature and Spanish language, MA in English literature, and Ph.D. in Information Sciences from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb, Croatia. Since 1 Nov. 2007 I am employed at the University of Zadar as Associate Professor, and at the Faculty of Philosophy, University J.J. Strossmayer in Osijek as visiting professor. I teach courses Information Organization, Metadata and Identifiers, and Digital Web Archives at the undergraduate level, and Theory and Practice of Information Organization, with special focus on old books and web resources at the graduate and postgraduate levels.

Research and professional interests:  
History and theory of alphabetical name-title catalogues, cataloguing rules, conceptual models of bibliographic and authority data, authority control, information organization with special interest in old books & web resources, bibliographic standards, metadata and identifiers, digital web archives (repositories), MARC formats and metadata schemes, information systems (LIS), interoperability, convergence of cultural institutions – technological aspects & standards.

From 1978 to 2007 I was working in the National and University Library in Zagreb, Croatia in the fields of cataloguing and library automation on the jobs of system analysis and design, metadata standards (bibliographic, technical and preservation), and cataloguing theory. Since 2003 to 2007 I was co-ordinator of the project Design of the System for Harvesting and Archiving Legal Deposit of Croatian Web Publications. The results of the Project were implemented as a fully integrated service of web archiving to the National and University Library processing workflow and user services.

 I received Fullbright Scholarship at the UCLA, Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences (GLIS), Los Angeles, USA under the mentorship of Professor Elaine Svenonius, PhD (15 Nov. 1991 – 15 Feb. 1992). I was a standing member of the IFLA Permanent UNIMARC Committee from 1991 to 2005, from 1997 to 2005 its chair, and since than a consultant and honorary member. I am/was member of the following IFLA working groups: WG on FRANAR (Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records) (ongoing), WG on Metadata and WG for the Multilingual Dictionary of Cataloguing Terms and Concepts, Section on Information Technology, Working Group on Metadata, Working Group on Future Developments of ISBD and ISBD Review
Group (ongoing). I was also a member of the ISSN Format Revision Group, and chair of the Advisory Task Group of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (1999-2007) which takes care of the maintenance and development of the Hand Press Book Database. I was also a member of UNESCO‘s Ad Hoc Working Group on the Common Communication Format (CCF).

In 1997, in the capacity of a Chair of the Professional Board of the Croatian Library Association I promoted the idea of investigating into the possibility of co-operation between libraries, archives and museums. The first seminar entitled Archives, Libraries, Museums: Possibilities of Co-operation within the Environment of the Global Information Infrastructure dealt with the vision of this idea, theoretical framework from the aspect of library and information sciences, and ALM‘s standards aiming at the creation of the environment for the ―interoperability of content. The seminars are now being organized annually.

I published more than 90 articles in national and international journals and proceedings, translations of UNIMARC standard and some works in the field of information organization, and a book UNIMARC in Theory and Practice. I edited 12 proceeding from national and international conferences, and was editor-in-chief of the Croatian Library Association‘s series in which 17 translations of IFLA standards and guidelines were published.

Vivian Wong, University of California, Los Angeles,  Graduate Student
vivwong[at]ucla.edu

I am a filmmaker by training and it was through a film about grandmother and our family‘s immigrant experience that I found my way to the Doctoral Program in Information Studies at UCLA. In making that film, I experienced first-hand the power of visual images to hold and transfer history and memory—a picture really is worth a thousand words and every picture does tell a story.  Moreover, I came to believe in the value and significance of one‘s personal archive to validate one‘s identity and make visible one‘s experience; and in the importance of these archives as part of a greater whole to document, preserve, and display the histories and cultures of the larger communities one belongs to.   

As my film work explores personal history, memories, and identity, my work in Archival Studies engages those same ideas but in the broader context of collective histories, memories, and experiences that are (re) configured in the diaspora. My work interrogates, explores, and articulates how histories, identities, and experiences are embodied, represented, presented, and (trans)formed in those dispersed, displaced, and divergent ―spaces through transnational ―flows of people, capital, and culture.  My research projects include the documentation, collection, preservation, and dissemination of historical and cultural records in diverse ethnic-Asian communities and archival formations in the Asian diaspora.

 I am planning for a career in academia.  I find teaching very rewarding and would like to continue to teach in higher education for the foreseeable future.  In addition, I want to continue as a filmmaker and incorporate documentary filmmaking, community media-making, and visual ethnography in my methodological, pedagogical, and research practices in Archival Studies. Moreover, and more significantly, I also want to build upon the interest that was sparked working with my own family‘s collection of photographs and film footage to expand my scholarship and research, emphasizing the preservation of records in diverse communities to bring them into the cultural and historical fold of the Archives and archival understanding and practices.
 
Elizabeth Yakel, University of Michigan, Faculty
yakel[at]umich.edu 

I have a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science for the University of Michigan.  Prior to that, I worked in archives and special collections for over ten years.  My work experiences were varied but what primarily motivated my returning to school for the Ph.D. was an interest in exploring more in depth research questions, particularly about the representation of archival materials and the descriptive process.  During my doctoral work, I expanded this to a broader appreciation for human information interaction, particularly between individuals seeking primary sources and the technologies that present surrogates, digital reproductions, and digitally born records.   

The primary focus of my current work is in the area of user studies.  There are two strains to this research.  The first concerns overall user-based evaluation.  This is evident in the Archival Metrics project (http://archivalmetrics.org).  With my collaborators, Wendy Duff and Helen Tibbo, I have developed standardized instruments for college and university archives to evaluate their services.  We are currently working on a similar project with government archives.  Our goal is to enable repositories to conduct more scientific user based evaluation and gather better evidence – both quantitative and qualitative to make informed decisions and improve services to patrons.  A secondary hope is to standardize information collection about user and users to enable benchmarking across archives and special collections.  

The second branch of this research concerns linking communities and collections through social computing technologies, such as Web 2.0.  This research is best viewed in the Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections (http://polarbears.si.umich.edu).  Since January 2006, this experiment in social computing has been active.  I have been following community interactions, nature of the contributions, and the success in linking communities and collections.  I have also experimented with crowd sourcing, collaborative filtering, and awareness mechanisms on this site.  When I began this research project, I wanted to design a better finding aid.  In the end this project has become more about the relationships between people and records, online communities, and archivists and the communities they serve. This research has made me reflect on issues of authority and curation as well as
how best to engage communities in the archival mission.
 
Hongyan Yang, Renmin University, Graduate Student
ringhy[at]hotmail.com

Biography not submitted.
 
 
Eunha Youn, University of California, Los Angeles, Graduate Student
youn[at]ucla.edu

I am currently a doctoral student in the Archival program of Information Studies at UCLA. I specialize in electronic record management and, in particular, am interested in archival memory and electronic records in the new digital age. Now I am preparing my PhD dissertation about how social values are reflected in the electronic record management system.   

My interest in the topic, originally, comes from my studies in history.  When I was an undergraduate and a master‘s student in history, I became fascinated by the idea that ordinary people have continuously influenced history and contributed to our historical progress behind the stage, and I studied deeply new cultural history based on  postmodern theories. Familiarization came with a furthered depth in culture, power, and memory in historical writing.  Through reading of the postmodern discussions, I gained a better understanding of culture, society and, in particular, the relationships between the discourse of power and collective memory. In particular, I was very impressed by Patrick Hutton‘s History as an Art of Memory, which mentioned the complex relationship between history and memory, between archives and society, and between reality and representation. The idea that what we
remember and who we remember from our individual or collective past is not fixed, but rather is shaped and reshaped in archives attracted me to deeply study archives as a discipline.

Through 2002 to 2006, I completed my M.A and also the Specialist Certificate Program in the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. There, I got a valuable opportunity to study archives, record management, and digital archives in depth.  My second master‘s degree from SLIS gave me an academic background for archives management from the archival perspective, not from history, and it also gave me practical training needed to be an archivist. It was a time of balancing my knowledge between the cognitive aspect of the archives and the more practical use of it.  The hands-on experience that I needed was provided by the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society (WHS) and the research center of the Wisconsin Veteran‘s Museum.  Through the process, my interest expanded to more practical areas and I gained new insight into
archives management and electronic record management. In addition, after I graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I received a valuable opportunity to work at the archives of the Wisconsin Historical Society, working on digital archives such as ―Turning Points in Wisconsin History,‖ which aimed at providing primary digital sources for K-12 students. Working on these digital projects allowed me to continue to develop my research agenda about electronic records and digital preservation. Also, in the fall of 2005 I went back to SLIS at the UW-Madison. I enrolled in the Specialist Certificate Program in order to delve deeper into electronic record management and digital preservation issues.   

Now, in winter, 2009, I, as a doctorate student in Information Studies, put my two old academic interests together in my doctoral dissertation: archival memory and the management of the digital record. In the program I am always eager to see how technology influences the shaping of archival memory in the new digital area and how digital archives differ from traditional paper archives. I believe that the advent of electronic records deeply impacts the traditional concept of archives and the management of the archival system. The evidence of influence becomes clearer when it is viewed from the perspective of Westernization: how Western technology contributes to embedding Western social values in the non-Western society through the electronic record management system. So, I hope to dedicate all my effort to articulating how Western electronic record management influences the so-
cial values of a non-Western society (Korea).  

After my dissertation, when I become a faculty member teaching archival studies in a university, I would  like to be a teacher dedicated to developing a student‘s intellectual ability in class. The improvement of my intellectual ability in the field derives from the strong curriculum development and high academic standards.  In the field of Archival Studies, students come from diverse intellectual backgrounds and experience. Students bring diverse sets of worldviews and identities formed from their personal or academic experience. Sometimes, like me, people come from different education systems or from other disciplinary backgrounds.  Teachers have a responsibility to develop a curriculum to pull together these diverse ideas of students and to fit them into the standard of our Information Studies intellectual community. To do this, the teacher should develop all ideas through an effec-
tive and organized way of teaching, such as by means of classroom activities, discussions, assignments, term papers, and exams, and so it is important for the students to share a common understanding of the issues discussed in the academic community of Archival Studies. As an instructor, I develop a strong curriculum with my knowledge on the subject matter in my area of expertise; I set high academic standards for students and for myself. So, when students graduate from the program and leave the protective environment of the education system to enter society, I hope they contribute their expert knowledge to our society as well as to our field.

However, even though a strong curriculum is important in education, I believe a good teacher is more than an information provider or class lecturer. The teacher still has a key role to manage student learning in class. As Information Studies has seen major technological changes over the last decades, probably it can be said that the class curriculum or class topics have changed quickly, but I believe the influence of the teacher in education still remains unchanged. For my future, I hope I become a teacher who tries to balance the concepts between two different levels of learning: the knowledge oriented level and the level of personal maturation as an individual, so that just as I remember my professor, my students will remember me.
 
Jane Zhang, Simmons College, Graduate Student
jane.zhang[at]simmons.edu

I am a PhD candidate (archival concentration) at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College. This is my fifth year in the program. I completed my coursework and passed my comprehensive examinations in 2008. Currently I am working on my dissertation. My dissertation topic is on original order and digital archival representation. Professor Jeannette Bastian is my advisor.  

I graduated from the joint MAS/MLIS program, School of Library, Archival and Information Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada in 2001. After graduation, I worked at the University of Calgary Archives for about two years, and then moved to Boston in 2003. I am currently a records analyst at Harvard University Archives, specialized in records scheduling and appraisal, recordkeeping, files management, and professional training. Before I became a record and archival professional, I taught and conducted research in English prose literature at Yunnan University, Kunming, China.  

At the University of British Columbia, I participated in the InterPARES1 project as one of the graduate research assistants. While working at the University of Calgary Archives, I reviewed sample archival records to study the pattern of handwritten records in modern archives. The paper ―The Lingering of Handwritten Records was presented at the first International Conference on the History of Records and Archives (I-CHORA1) at the University of Toronto in 2003. After moving to Boston to work at the Harvard University Archives, I reviewed sample colonial collections in the Boston area to study American colonial recordkeeping. The paper ―The Legacy of American Colonial Recordkeeping was presented at I-CHORA2 at the University of Amsterdam in 2005.  

I started the research on digital information and archival representation in 2006 and completed two papers so far. ―Ontology and the Semantic Web was presented at the first North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization (NASKO) at the University of Toronto in 2007. ―Remembered History, Archival Discourse, and the September 11 Digital Archive was presented at the 2008 SAA Research Forum at San Francisco. My dissertation research continues to explore the topic of archival theory and practice in the information age, and specifically, original order and digital archival representation.  

I feel strongly that with more and more archives going digital, archival research should be motivated to address fundamental theoretical questions in both archival and information sciences to explain, justify, and guide new archival practices. Similarly, archival education should provide future archivists with a solid background of archival theory and information theory to ensure a quality archival presence in the information age that will meet users‘ information needs and at the same time maintain our professional identities. 

• UCLA
• U Mich
• Maryland
• UT Austin
• Simmons
• UW Madison
• Pittsburgh
• UNC Chapel Hill
• OU

Contact the Project Coordinator:aeri [at] gseis.ucla.edu

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