When archivists from across the Midwest converge in Milwaukee this week, four of DePaul’s Special Collections and Archives staff will be among the crowd at the Midwest Archives Conference Annual Meeting.
Each of DePaul’s staff attending the conference have compelling reasons to be there. First, the Midwest Archives Conference (MAC) is one of the largest regional professional organizations for archivists, with over 800 individual members, and many institutional members, from a 13 state region (though there are members from many other states and countries). MAC conferences are known for their collegial and supportive atmosphere, and for their commitment to helping members grow and learn in the profession, whether they hail from small volunteer-run historical societies or large R1 universities.
Morgen MacIntosh Hodgetts served on the Program Committee for this Milwaukee conference, and planning for this 2016 conference started over a year ago, before their committee’s first in-person meeting at the 2015 Annual Meeting in Lexington, Kentucky. Morgen reviewed proposals, conferred with committee colleagues from other institutions, and helped the committee to craft a diverse and engaging schedule of workshops, forums, panels, pecha kuchas, and poster sessions.
Andrea Bainbridge is part of a pecha kucha to (briefly!) discuss “how an archives staff revamped accessioning procedures to improve data about record transfers and rethought processing priorities to decrease backlog in a time of expansion.” Andrea presented at last year’s Annual Meeting in Lexington on internal outreach encouraging university archives compliance. Andrea is also looking ahead and is part of a local contingent of archivists hoping to bring the Annual Conference back to Chicago for 2018.
Kyle Henke is on a panel and will be sharing our experiences with the Society of American Archivists Jump In, Too/Two initiative, which encourages archivists to “jump in” and manage their digital holdings, especially born-digital content stored on physical media within archival collections. Andrea Bainbridge and Morgen MacIntosh Hodgetts participated in the inventory and identification of physical media for this project in 2014, and Kyle has extended their work with migrating digital content off the physical media and processing it for inclusion in our digital preservation system.
Derek Potts, Part Time Archives Assistant and graduate student in Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, received a scholarship from MAC to attend his first conference. Derek was awarded the Emeritus Scholarship for First-Time Meeting Attendees based on his application essay, which discussed his desire to learn more about digital preservation since his coursework had not yet covered this, and his hope to make connections that would lead to future collaboration in the profession. He will write an essay for the MAC newsletter after the conference, which is a requirement (and perk) of the award.
I sincerely appreciate the time and effort that my Special Collections and Archives colleagues have put into their presentations and this conference. I expect they’ll return reinvigorated and ready to apply new ideas to old challenges, and tried-and-true processes to new projects.