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Teresa Mora
Head of Special Collections & Archives, University of California, Santa Cruz[statement due June 1]
Thank you for considering me as a candidate for the ArchivesSpace Governance Board. I look at this as a wonderful opportunity to contribute to the larger archival profession and am eager to more fully participate in the ArchivesSpace Community.
Having come to the role of manager through the pathway of technical services I am keenly aware of the need for functional and flexible systems, such as ArchivesSpace, to support the larger mission of collection accessibility. Although I'm no longer a regular user of ArchivesSpace, I was an early adopter in my previous position at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley and have had the opportunity to see the tool in use in both a very large (Bancroft) and now large institution (UC Santa Cruz). In my time at the Bancroft as the Principal Manuscripts Archivist I helped to implement ArchivesSpace and was an active user. In my current role as Head of Special Collections & Archives at UCSC, I still engage with the tool but most of the daily work is conducted by colleagues as I focus my time on managing the department. Small by UC standards, our holdings include over 40,000 published works and over 600 manuscript collections. All of our manuscript holdings are managed in ArchivesSpace and it is our primary tool for the authoring of finding aids as well as MARC records for our archival collections.
Although not yet a perfect system, I believe strongly that, as a community-driven, open-source system, ArchivesSpace is a powerful tool and I welcome the opportunity to become more involved in moving the work of the community forward. I am particularly intrigued by the prospect of serving on the Governance Board given the good work they have been doing in recent years, specifically the adoption of the Diversity Partnership program which I consider a model for the bridges that need to be built to ensure the entire archival community has access to this important resource, not just those of us located in well-established and well-funded institutions.
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Medium Level Representative
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