Thursday, October 30, 2014

News from Princeton

From Princeton.edu:

"The papers of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison are now part of the permanent library collections of Princeton University, where the renowned author served on the faculty for 17 years.

The announcement was made today [October 17, 2014] by Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber to a packed audience in Richardson Auditorium, addressing attendees of the conference "Coming Back: Reconnecting Princeton's Black Alumni." Eisgruber made the announcement after a tribute to Morrison's legacy at Princeton by trustee Ruth Simmons and before Morrison's on-stage interview with Claudia Brodsky, professor of comparative literature.

Eisgruber said: "Toni Morrison's place among the giants of American literature is firmly entrenched, and I am overjoyed that we are adding her papers to the Princeton University Library's collections. This extraordinary resource will provide scholars and students with unprecedented insights into Professor Morrison's remarkable life and her magnificent, influential literary works. We at Princeton are fortunate that Professor Morrison brought her brilliant talents as a writer and teacher to our campus 25 years ago, and we are deeply honored to house her papers and to help preserve her inspiring legacy."

Click here to read the rest of the article at Princeton.edu.

Monday, October 27, 2014

MEETING MINUTES 
Women’s Collections Roundtable 
August 13, 2014, 5pm-7pm Washington DC

Officers:
Helice Koffler | Co-Chair
Tali Beesley | Co-Chair (absent)
Stephanie Bayless | Vice Co-Chair
Leslie Fields | Vice Co-Chair (absent)
Rachel Appel | Incoming Vice Co-Chair
Rachel Grove Rohrburgh | Incoming Co-Chair

Welcome/Introductions/Installation of New Officers
• Officers began the meeting with a general welcome and asked all attendees to sign in. We went around the room for brief introductions and introduced the new officers during this process.
 • The meeting was well-attended - 41 attendees total, but only 26 signed-in as requested. Attendees hailed from institutions across the United States, including American Folklife Center, Rutgers University, National Archives and Records Administration, Tulane University, University of California Berkeley, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Presentation
Online Art Ephemera: Web Archiving at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and Beyond 
Heather Slania, National Museum of Women in the Arts
Artist archives usually contain important primary source materials such as brochures, catalogues, checklists, artist statements, and dairies—but what happens when this ephemera is only online? The National Museum of Women in the Arts has been web archiving art-related online ephemera using the Internet Archive's Archive-It since November 2011.
Heather Slania presented the considerations and challenges of archiving this material and discussed how arts institutions are beginning to work together for more collaborative web archiving. Slania’s presentation was well-received. During the questions and discussion period, attendees asked about tools to use for web-archiving, social media archiving, and coordinating with other institutions to avoid duplication of effort.

Old Business 

WCRT Bibliography
o We reminded members about the WCRT bibliography, which is a selection of published works that discuss archival theory and practice in relation to women’s archives/collections. We invited attendees to submit new additions to the blog whenever possible and asked for volunteers to read through the document and make sure all information was correct.

WCRT Blog
o We discussed the progress of growing the blog’s readership and the need for member post contributions. We discussed what has been posted and what the group would like to see posted in the future.
 o We encouraged attendees to send any press release or official news they wanted to share to the WCRT email address, even if the news had already been posted on their own social media sites.
 o We send around a sign-up sheet allowing members to volunteer to write a post of pick a specific month to search for women’s collections related news to share.

New Business 

Wiki-Edit-A-Thon
o We discussed the possibility of sponsoring or facilitating a nationwide Women’s History Month Wiki Edit-A-Thon in March 2015.
 o Attendees discussed the pros and cons of attempting this kind of event in their institutions. Those attendees who had held an event like this before shared their experiences.
 o Overall, attendees were unsure if they would hold an Edit-A-Thon, but were interested in the WCRT exploring the possibility of providing a “How to Host a Wiki-Edit-A-Thon” information packet.

Tumblr
o We discussed the possibility of starting a WCRT Tumblr. Attendees were very much in favor of Tumblr.
 o We discussed having leadership set up the Tumblr then having one or more members take over as admin to prevent confusion during turnover periods. Helice Koffler volunteered to be one of the admins. Mark Vassar from the Schlesinger expressed a desire to contribute many of their posts created for other media outlets.
 o WCRT will move forward with setting up a Tumblr page.

Program Committee Report
• The meeting concluded with a report from the SAA Program Committee about the 2015 meeting and call for presentations.
 • The 2015 meeting will be held in a convention center instead of a large hotel. Sections and roundtables will no longer be endorsing presentations, but are encouraged to facilitate coordination between members with possible related topics.
• The program committee is encouraging proposals in a number of new formats and is introducing free form pop-up sessions to encourage continued discussion of popular topics during the conference.

Sixteen attendees continued the discussion and networking at a scheduled dinner at the nearby Lebanese Taverna.

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Did you submit a proposal for ARCHIVES 2015?

SAA members and friends of the archives profession submitted 142 education session proposals and 29 poster proposals for ARCHIVES 2015, the 79th Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists in Cleveland, Ohio August 16-22, 2015.

The 2015 Program Committee members will begin their review of proposals during the week of October 20, and will meet in Chicago November 14-16 to determine the final selections. Here is their tentative proposal notification schedule:

November 17-21: 2015 Program Committee initiates discussions with session proposers whose sessions require revision(s) if they are to be accepted.

November 24-28: Thanksgiving week; most communication halts over the holiday.

December 1-5: Continued communication about required revisions.

December 8-19 (tentative): 2015 Program Committee communicates with all session proposers and chairs and all poster proposers regarding the status of each proposal.

December 19-31: "Official" accept letters sent to each participant on accepted sessions and posters (i.e., each chair, speaker, commentator, moderator, poster presenter). Please allow up to 10 business days for receipt of letter.

December 18, 2014 - July 2015: Alternate proposals slotted on an "as needed" basis (i.e., substituted for a session that suddenly cannot go forward). There is no definite timeline for when alternates will be used because dropped sessions are unpredictable by nature. Alternates are slotted depending on timeframe and topic, so the chances of one alternate proposal being slotted over another cannot be determined.

April 15: Registration opens, and presentation times are available via the public conference schedule.

Monday, October 20, 2014

News from the Tyrrell Historical Library in Texas

The Beaumont Public Library System has been awarded the TexTreasures Grant in the amount of $18,490.00. This grant is made possible from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to the Texas State Library and Archives Commission under the provisions of the library Services and Technology Act. (2015) 

The grant will digitize and provide descriptive historical background information related to the Melody Maids Collection. Once this information has been digitized, it will then be uploaded to the “Tyrrell Historical Library Collections Digital Collections” site for patrons to use as an online research tool. 

The Melody Maids was a girls’ choir that traveled the United States and the world to perform for military personnel located at military installations from 1942 to 1972. The Melody Maids Collection is on permanent display in the Rose Room of the Julie Rogers Theatre in Beaumont, Texas. Several scrapbooks are already available online @http://cdm16058.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/search/collection/p16058coll33/searchterm/Melody%20Maids%20Scrapbook/field/all/mode/all/conn/and/order/title/ad/asc. With the help of this grant, we will be able to add 155 to 185 additional scrapbooks to the collection.





Thursday, October 16, 2014

News from LSU

Political Strategist Donna Brazile Donates Her Papers to LSU

Though she has made her name and home in Washington D.C. for the past three decades, distinguished LSU alumna, veteran political strategist and commentator, author, and Democratic Party official Donna Brazile makes no secret of her pride in being a native of Louisiana and an LSU graduate. Now an important piece of Brazile’s personal history has returned to her home state with the recent donation of her papers to the LSU Libraries Special Collections.
Photographs, correspondence, speeches and other writings, memoranda, reports and analyses, campaign management and research files, and memorabilia comprise the collection. Together the 32 boxes of materials document Brazile’s involvement in Democratic politics and the Democratic National Committee; her interest in and efforts to mobilize African American voters, elect women to office, and advocate for voting rights; her public speaking and teaching; her work with the Louisiana Recovery Authority; and her participation in every presidential campaign between 1976 and 2000, including as manager of the Gore-Lieberman bid for the White House. She was the first African American to lead a major presidential campaign. Visit the link above to read the rest of the news release.

Monday, October 13, 2014

The Theatre Library Association Presents:
Women in Film:  Research, Digital Preservation & Access

Join us on October 17, 2014 for a discussion moderated by TLA President Nancy Friedland looking at women in film from three different perspectives. Mark Newton, Production Manager for Columbia University’s Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS), will discuss the Columbia University’s Women Film Pioneers Project (https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/), a freely accessible online database showcasing the hundreds of women who worked behind the camera during the silent film era. Kathryn Hearst, professor of women’s history at Sarah Lawrence College, will speak about her work as a scholar and professor and the challenges to researching early women filmmakers. Bette Gordon, filmmaker and film professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts will address women in film in the twenty-first century. Brief panel presentations will be followed by lively moderated discussion.

Nancy E. Friedland has been affiliated with Columbia University Libraries for 19 years, where she is Librarian for Media, Film Studies and Performing Arts, and liaison to School of the Arts.  She served as faculty partner on The Film Language Glossary and the advisory group for Women Film Pioneers Project. Nancy currently serves as TLA President, and was Co-Chair of the SIBMAS TLA 2014 Conference.  She also was Editor and contributor to Documenting: Costume Design (2010), part of Performing Arts Resources’ design series.  She contributed to the first editorial team of Oxford Bibliographies Online: Cinema and Media Studies.  Ms. Friedland is Visiting Associate Professor at Pratt Institute’s School of Information and Library Science and Long Island University’s Palmer School of Information Science, where she teaches courses in Film and Media Collections: Archival and Curatorial Practices, Researching Local History: Cities and Towns, and Digital Humanities.  She currently serves on the board of Women Make Movies.  She received an MA in Theatre Studies from New York University and MLS from Rutgers. 

Bette Gordon is a filmmaker and film professor who premiered her newest feature Handsome Harry at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival with subsequent screenings at the IFC in New York City and Sunset 5 in Los Angeles. Handsome Harry featured a stellar ensemble cast, including Steve Buscemi, Aidan Quinn, Campbell Scott, John Savage and Jamey Sheridan. A pioneer in the American independent film world, Gordon is best known for her bold explorations of themes related to sexuality, violence and power. She has been the subject of various retrospectives including at IFC Cinema (2010) and Anthology Film Archives (2011), as well as at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2011 and Indiana University in 2012. Her early short films, most notably Empty Suitcases, won numerous awards and festival acclaim worldwide, including showings at the Berlin International Film Festival, New York's Museum of Modern Art and The Whitney Biennial. Variety (1984) marked her debut as a feature film director, particularly in light of the film's invitational showing at The Cannes Film Festival's Director's Fortnight. Luminous Motion, based on the acclaimed novel History of Luminous Motion, was produced by Ted Hope and Anthony Bregman of Good Machine.

Kathryn Hearst has been on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College since 2011, teaching undergraduate history and graduate-level women’s history. She specializes in gender, race, sexuality, and class in film and media; women’s and gender history; and social and cultural history of the United States and Europe. Kathryn has worked in television, film, and media development at The Polone Company and Hearst Entertainment. In addition to her work with the WFPP, she is a contributor to the Bancroftania, University of California-Berkeley; and an advisor to MoMA’s To Save and Project film series. Kathryn is a member of Women Writing Women’s Lives, CUNY; the advisory board for the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation of the American Museum of Natural History; and the advisory council of Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She received a PhD in History and a MFA in Film, both from Columbia University.

Mark Newton is the Production Manager for CDRS. He oversees the production schedules of the Web-based projects of the Center, including publication support for online scholarly journals, conference proceedings, and other digital projects related to the needs of the Columbia University community for scholarly exchange, and manages a staff of eight developers, designers, and project managers in the service of the center’s multiple project timelines. Prior to joining CDRS, Mark was Digital Collections Librarian and Assistant Professor at Purdue University Libraries. He received a Masters of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois in 2007.


At the New York Public Library’s Bruno Walter Theatre, 111 Amsterdam AvenueOctober 17, 2014.
TLA Annual Business Meeting (open to the public) will take place from 5:30-6:00PM.
Doors open at 6:45, panel event from 7:00-8:00 PM.
Reservations required: RSVP FORM
For additional information please email tlabookawards@gmail.com