ICA-SUV: Session 4: External Outreach

Dr Claude Roberto:
Networked to receive Franciphone records - resulted in a backlog!. received federal funding to support outreach programme, matched 'in kind' bty Archive.
Created an educational theatreical and musical show based on archives. Developed an educational website. Invited parents to come and watch the play as well as schoolkids.

Brenda S Gunn:
Exhibition & documentary film. Briscoe Centre works with presidential library. Library asked them to fill an empty slot in their exhibition programme. Considered doing a tresures exhibition. Decided instead of to focus on Walter Kronkike - journalist & anchorman. Good way to acknowledge the importance of the papers. 182000 visitors - 200% up on previous year.

Documentary about Barbara Conrad - alumnus. One of the first African American students. Had been involved in an Am Dram controvery while there. Film draws heavily on University archives. 'When I Rise' - shown at film festivals and on TV.

Secured corproate sponsorship for the exhibitiont of ill hole in the budget. president saw the film as part of the University's diversity effort, which had recently been made a priority. Importance of a written agreement with the exhibition venue as to who is going to take responsibility on communication. In budgets cuts, had their budget reduced less than other depts because of the increased visibility they'd brought to the University through the film & exhibition. Development are now raising funds for an endowed University Archivist position.

Shawn Hayes:
National History Day - annual competition, with a different theme each year, with local, regional and national heats. Institutions involved at different levels from partnerships through to hosting visits.
Have to consider your resources carefully before getting involved. Important to spend time with teachers first so that they know how to use archivres before they come in with students.

ICA-SUV: Keynote Session: Thinking About Archives

Tom Hickerson:
Focus our documentation efforts on institutional critical roles and their impact on society - think creatively about what should be documented. Which records best record our goal at a particular point in time? Documnetation of the experience of being a student - rite of passage. How best to record the iconogrpahy of this transitional time?

Consider all forms in which records are created and involved librarians, curators and IT specialists in our documentary efforts.

Look across combined collections as national collection and have shared descriptive methods and common vocabulary to share them.

ICA-SUV conference: session 3: Administration Needs and Impact

Joanne Kaczmarek, University of Illinois:

Getting support for RM across University – used business approach. Offera business service to administrative departments using embedded archives staff.

Outcomes

1)Acquisition of institutional records never before seen by archives – esp construction records

2)new opportunities for research and teaching within architecture dept

3)partnerships with library, business scanning service, local history association.

4)support for an institution wide rm programm

Been able to bring inc c.$100,000 through this project to support the archive. Includes loss recover model – internal charging. Faculty happy to pay because it’s convenient for them.

Business model – customer needs (that they might not know they have), marketing, closing the deal/solving the problem, project management, customer service, refererals.

Don’t address historical need, address their need for easy access and organised access.

Identify a high need dept with $. Provide free evaluation of need. Propose possible solution, broken down into yearly components. Emphasise value of solutions. Don’t just take historical records and leave them with the rest of the problem, offer a total solution.

Future: business process and workflow anaylsis provided by archives as a service. Emnbedded deptl historians.

Charlotte Maday, Universite Paris 7 –Denis Diderot:

Charlotte explained the peculiar situation of French university archivists.

Used t obe only one imperial universities then in 1968 the rest were created – all new universities. Archivists appointed to deal with problems arising from asbestos lawsuits. Seen as administrators rather than historical curators. Historical records must be transferred to national repositories. Universities arrange and describe them while they are still need then transfer them.

Provides training for volunteer university administrative staff to be archives champions, spreading archiving process through university.

LRU Law – gives autonomy to universities – now they need to have an identity they are reluctant to transfer their archives.

ICA-SUV conference: session 2:Innovative and creative inreach and outreach

Gregory J Kocken, University of Wisconsin Eau Claire:

Do we include cataloguing as part of outreach? Is everything we do outreach?

Greg Johnson – introducing students to archives & special collections, college and research libraries Vol 13 no 2 2006 92

Direct outreach to students is ineffective. Promote primary source research as developing critical thinking – to faculty.

Instead of traditional model of developing courses/assignments – which is time and energy intensive – use an innovative model e.g.

Web 2.0 – facebook profile has 300+ friends in 5 years. Get memories from alumni as comments under stories.

Mini grants - $500-$3000 – ask faculty to submit applications to the archive for how they can use the archive in the classroom

Email and brochure are still important – but brochures don’t achieve anything sitting in the archive.

Sarah C Jane, University College Falmouth and University of Exeter Cornwall campus:

Reading the past/writing thefuture. Out of the box creative writing project – http://outofthebox.falmouth.ac.uk/

Internally funded – to assess the value of using archives in creating writing. Aims to influence development in pedagogy in creative writing and archives. Aimed at 2^nd year undergrad screenwriting students. Sessions were being run already but the money gave time to evaluate.

COP – community of practice – group of people who share concern or passion and leard to do it better together. University and archive are separate COPs.

Evidence – articulate the value of what we do. Students made personal meaning map for what archives mean to them at start and end of project. By the end the stereotypes had gone and new insights emerged. Like that archives are cold!

Worked in partnership with local record office and this meant message were reinforced. Gave the students the opportunity to see different types of records and not think of it as just a university thing.

Need to plant the seed early on – initial session in first year, build on in 2^nd year.

Reject Guest Star status. Try to be embedded not optional. Optional to undergrads means non-essential.

Forget dust, think information. Associate archives with e.g. 1980s, show relevance.

Giordana Mecagni, Centre for the History of Medicine, Harvard:

Many Happy Returns ed Larry J Hackman

Most decision are made on merit by well-intentioned decision makers. Need to influence them! Advocacy is long-term. Best advocate is an effective service with demonstrable results.

Those who hold the evidence make the history – Jill Lepore. Tap into academics desire for immortality – if you give us your papers you will become part of history.

Produced leaflet advising faculty what kind of papers they’d like to acquire.

Inform community what you’re doing with their collections – helps promote importance of archives to a community who might not have much experience of them.

Legacy of memory – identity and decision-making.

Staff finds on blog – hey, look at this cool thing!

Hits to blog quadruple when a newsletter is sent out.

Questions for this session:

York University  – doctoral fellowship for phd students at any university. Gives faculty bragging rights at luring students to them but hard to promote. Also play-writing contest for undergrads – have to visit archive.

Harvard – summer fellowship for undergrads to research.

Comments in difference between uk donors (archives) and US (money!).

ICA-SUV conference: session 1: Awareness Development and Education

These are my notes from the ICA-SUV conference happening at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. They're not meant to be comprehensive but represent what I've taken away from each session.

Keynote speaker (replacement for Ernie Ingles, didn’t catch name:
Archivists don’t need to re-invent themselves, they need to promote themselves. Important to focus on your users – current users and future users. Not what we think is good for them but what they want us to collect, preserve and make available. Sell the part of the collection that is unused as the part with untapped research potential.

Archives allow donors immortality. They use a quote from Asimov in their forward plan ‘the library was out-moded and archaic…the older and more outmoded it was the more likely it was to have what I needed’.

In-reach – solve their problems and be their hero. Press love good news archive stories and archives are full of good news stories.

Need to have an elevator speech – explain in 3 mins what you do.

UK study showed information professionals have strong leadership skills but didn’t use them because they don’t have the confidence. Need to promote our collections and ourselves.

Caroline Brown, Uni of Dundee:

Why do we do what we do and why is it that we do it rather than other professionals?

Archivaria spring 1994 debate about importance of archival theory: ‘a considerable proportion of archival theory is abysmal claptrap’. ‘archival work in intrinsically and inescapably ad hoc’.

Archivists are the only people who think about why we keep archives. We need to do this in a complex way but then communicate it successfully. No good just relying on saying ‘it’s historical’.

Need to align aims with the aims of the university.

CAIS stipulated for the Alliance Trust papers that the organisation would fund a PhD post, increase research profile.

Advocacy is about making it difficult for employers to make cuts.

Shannon Bower Maier, American Heritage Center:

Primer 2009 – understand that we are a luxury while persuading those who we serve that we are a necessity.

Importance of in-reach to supervisors, including explaining the importance of outreach.

Most inreach is aimed across the organisation rather than up the hierarchy to budget allocators.

Leslie Latta-Guthrie, Provincial Archives of Alberta:

Community support is essential.

They produce a calendar – very popular gift. Also virtual exhibit at archivesalberta.org

Alberta historical festival- behind the scenes tours are always very popular. Have a fringe play based on the archives= holdings, written by reference archivist. Have refined genealogy offerings over the years, try to refresh each year and target specific communities.

Questions for this session:

St Andrews – rare book blog, 17^th century playing cards picked up by local newspaper, hoping to produce as merchandise.

Centre for History of Medicine – most important thing to do with blog is link to other blogs and invite guest bloggers.

University of Manitoba – youtube channel of séance photos. Reaches different audience. Importance of staff interaction in comments – yes this is real!