Governance Board Candidate Statements, 2017 election

Owned by Christine Di Bella
Last updated: May 04, 2020
7 min read

J. Gordon Daines III

Supervisor of Reference Services and Department Chair, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Brigham Young University

Candidate for ArchivesSpace Governance Board – Large Member Representative

I am delighted to be a candidate for the ArchivesSpace Governance Board representing Large member institutions. As department chair of the L. Tom Perry Special Collections, I am responsible for managing the operations of our department. I have responsibility for strategic planning, fiscal oversight, donor relations, policy development and implementation, collections management, overseeing reference services, outreach, and inter-departmental relationships.

I have been actively involved with ArchivesSpace program from very early on. I was instrumental in convincing our administration to become a charter member of ArchivesSpace and have served the community as chair of the User Advisory Council since 2014. I have actively participated in the development of specifications for enhancements to ArchivesSpace and have actively promoted the tool in the Intermountain West. I believe strongly in the ArchivesSpace community and see service on the Governance Board as an opportunity to strengthen that community.

I have been active participant in the archival community throughout my career at both the regional and national levels. At the regional level I have served as a council member and president of the Conference of Intermountain Archivists and am the director and editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of Western Archives. Nationally I have served in a variety of roles for the Society of American Archivists including as a member of the ACRL-RBMS/SAA Joint Task Force on Primary Source Literacy, as a member of the Education Committee, as chair of the Technical Subcommittee on Describing Archives: A Content Standard, and as chair of the Description Section. I am also a member of the 2017 cohort of the Archives Leadership Institute. I have contributed to the profession through scholarship on processing digital records, applying business process management techniques to archives, finding aid delivery systems, and the history of the archival profession in Utah.

My varied experience in the archival community has positioned me to be an effective advocate for the ArchivesSpace program. As a member of the Governance Board I would be committed to seeing ArchivesSpace reach its full potential as a tool for archival arrangement and description by fostering opportunities for both community and non-community members to contribute to the development of the software. I would also promote opportunities to partner with other development projects creating tools for the better management of archives.

 

Christian Dupont

Burns Librarian and Associate University Librarian for Special Collections, Boston College

Candidate for ArchivesSpace Governance Board – Large Member Representative

 As your representative during the past two years, I have helped to guide ArchivesSpace through the transition to a new program director and staffing configuration to accelerate software development and enhance community outreach. I have advocated for models that facilitate the contributions of members to software development and testing, feature prioritization, technical support, and training, while at the same time enabling LYRASIS, as our organizational home, to engage development partners and its own resources to efficiently design and deploy the ArchivesSpace application. To this advocacy I have brought my background as a special collections librarian and administrator as well as my experience in developing and promoting Aeon as an online request and workflow management system for special collections and archives.

In the coming year, as ArchivesSpace transitions from a “start-up” phase, backed financially by our founding partners under the terms of our agreement with the Mellon Foundation, to being a fully member-supported organization, the governance board will be reviewing and refining the by-laws that regulate our community-based governance model and our agreement with LYRASIS to provide an array of services to support our program operations. I would be pleased to continue my service on the board to help shape these efforts and otherwise ensure that the ArchivesSpace application and community continue to progress in their abilities to meet member needs for an effective archival management system. I am very excited by the opportunities we have before us.

For further information about my background, including my leadership roles in SAA and ACRL/RBMS, please visit my academia.edu site: https://bc.academia.edu/ChristianDupont

Peter Carini

College Archivist, Dartmouth College

Candidate for ArchivesSpace Governance Board – Medium Member Representative

 I’m very pleased to be running as a candidate for Medium-level institution representative. My involvement with ArchivesSpace actually predates the creation of ArchivesSpace. In February of 2002, I was one of a number of archivists and technologists brought together by the Mellon Foundation in San Diego, CA to discuss the idea of a tool for archives and special collections that would manage collection metadata and simplify the export of that metadata in a variety of formats (EAD and MARC at the time). The Archivists’ Toolkit grew out of this meeting. As the Director of Archives and Special Collections at Mount Holyoke College, I was also part of the early development of the Archivists’ Toolkit. It was this association that led Dartmouth to participate in the Toolkit beta testing.

We began exploring ArchivesSpace to manage our collections and our metadata at Dartmouth in 2014. As part of that process we identified a number of areas that we felt needed fleshing out, and worked with Hudson-Molonglo to build these into the system. In addition, the Library’s Digital Technology Group, specifically Joshua Shaw and Eric Bivona, have added several features, such as an enhanced staff interface, a box label design tool, and Single Sign On (SSO) integration that are available on GitHub.

It has been very exciting to watch the evolution of this tool from conception to reality. I see acting as a representative on the Governance Board as a way to continue ArchivesSpace’s growth and to further perfect it so that it continues to serves a broad array of users and institutions.

 

Ann Hodges

Head of Special Collections and Archives, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi

Candidate for ArchivesSpace Governance Board – Medium Member Representative

I have been Head of Special Collections and Archives at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi’s Mary and Jeff Bell Library since August 2014.  I held the same position at the University of Texas at Arlington Libraries from 2003 until 2013.  I earned master's degrees in library science and applied history and became a Certified Archivist in 1994.  I am a past president of the Society of Southwest Archivists and presently serve on the Texas Archival Resources Online Steering Committee.

At TAMU-CC, I have been working to transfer collections data from paper files and an obsolete database to ArchivesSpace.  As a relatively new user and one for whose repository ArchivesSpace provides the critical infrastructure to improve control of and researcher access to collections, I feel that I am able to bring a fresh eye to the governance of ArchivesSpace and am motivated to support its progress. I also can contribute the perspective of a finding aids consortium that is on the brink of major change.

Its centrality to my vision for my own institution means that I am committed to the welfare and improvement of ArchivesSpace.  I would like to see ArchivesSpace continue to add features and for its users to promote its success so that those still deliberating whether to join may be persuaded to become part of, and help strengthen, the ArchivesSpace community.

 

Thomas Adams

Manager, Library Systems & Digital Project Developer, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Candidate for ArchivesSpace Governance Board – Very Small Member Representative

In the past seven years, Tom has been involved with archiving the history of molecular biology at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, including digitizing the collections from Nobel Prize winners. During that time, Tom has created a new Web presence for the library and archives, created an institutional repository, developed an oral history platform and rolled out an Omeka based repository. Most recently, he has been involved with the CSHL’s History of Science meetings and has made available online the complete set of talks. Additionally, Tom was the production manager for ebook “The Human Genome Project: An Annotated & Interactive Scholarly Guide to the Project in the United States”.

Tom is the principal champion of ArchivesSpace at CSHL and has been transferring finding aids from EAD, word and excel spreadsheets into ArchivesSpace.

For the last two years, Tom has served on the ArchivesSpace Governance Board representing very-small member institutions. He wants to ensure the technical hurdles for ArchivesSpace adoption are not too large which would prohibit smaller repositories from being able to benefit from what ArchivesSpace offers.



Nicholas Zmijewski

Archivist, Industrial Archives & Library

Candidate for ArchivesSpace Governance Board – Very Small Member Representative

I am the archivist at this new stand-alone industrial history archive located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. We selected ArchivesSpace at startup to be our software program for cataloging after carefully considering all the options as it appears the industry is coalescing around it. Prior to this, I ran the archives at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania for seven years and worked in the archives there for another two. While there, my experience was with the program dbTextworks from InMagic while also dabbling with CuadraStar. My biggest pushes were to digitize as many photographs as possible and to make our catalog data available to the public. Just prior to my departure we switched our public user interface to a new discovery system in order to increase our collections visibility.

As a new user of ArchivesSpace who is unencumbered with legacy data from any program I feel as though my ArchivesSpace experience will be different from the majority of users, giving me a different perspective on the program than that shared by the majority of the membership. The program has been heartily embraced in its stock form at my institution and we are beginning to consider ways to customize it that may also be useful to others. Given the sheer number of plugins available, it is clear to me that we have not yet reached the level of development that ArchivesSpace can achieve. I would like to help further that aim, while not making the program so overly complex that no one can use it. I have a lot of prior experience teaching volunteers to do basic cataloging and if there is one thing that has taught me it is that the program needs to be easy to use for everyday functions so that it is accessible to the technical level of an unpaid user that is routinely utilized at a small or very small institution.