Governance Board 2024 Elections - Candidate Statements

Matthew Neely
Senior Archivist, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford

I am thrilled to put forward my candidacy to represent the 'Very Large' member institutions within the ArchivesSpace Community. My decision to stand for the Governance Board is deeply rooted in my profound appreciation for the collaborative spirit of the ArchivesSpace Community.  Serving on the User Advisory Council since 2020 has been a privilege, allowing me to both learn from and contribute to our collective efforts to enhance ArchivesSpace. 

Throughout my User Advisory Council tenure, I have been an active participant in the Development Prioritization Sub Team, assuming leadership roles as Vice-Lead (2022-2023) and Lead (2023-2024). This experience has provided me with a profound understanding of the application's functionality and its diverse utility within our community. Our most recent work has been to support the Program Team’s efforts to create new Jira guidance for the community. I was particularly eager to contribute to this area during my term as Lead.

With over two decades of experience in archives at the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, I believe I could offer valuable contributions to the Governance Board. I have worked at multiple levels at my organisation from archives assistant, as a cataloguing archivist, and now in my current role as Senior Archivist for Systems and Metadata. I have been using ArchivesSpace since 2018 and played a leading role in its implementation at the Bodleian. I have extensive experience working with a very large and complex dataset having overseen the migration of our metadata into ArchivesSpace and having management responsibility for archives metadata. I was also responsible for delivering ArchivesSpace PUI and SUI training as part of our implementation. ArchivesSpace has been transformational in managing our catalogue data and making it easily discoverable for our users. I have experience working with archives in a wide range of formats including managing audio-visual and born-digital material.

I am a member of the UK Archives and Record Association and I also serve on the Archives Hub Steering Group which represents a broad range of archive repositories in the UK Higher Education sector.

I am committed to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion within the archival profession. The Diversity Partnership Program is an extremely welcome initiative and I view efforts in this area as a crucial strategic objective. I am involved in work at my institution to address problematic terminology in archival description and I fully support work toward reparative description and de-colonization. 

As your representative, I pledge to advocate tirelessly for the diverse needs of our community, ensuring that ArchivesSpace remains a robust, sustainable and inclusive platform for all users. I look forward to collaborating with fellow community members to achieve our shared objectives. Thank you for considering me.

Rachel Poppen
Collections Archivist, the University of Iowa Special Collections and Archives (SCA)

Thank you for your consideration of my candidacy for the ArchivesSpace Governance Board to represent "Very Large" institutions. I'm excited for the opportunity to be more involved with the community and contribute to its mission of supporting the continued development of ArchivesSpace. 

 I currently am employed as a Collections Archivist at the University of Iowa Special Collections and Archives (SCA), a position I started in July 2023. I graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with an MSIS in May 2023 and this is my first professional position. Although I am new to my position and the archival profession, I was first introduced to ArchivesSpace in 2019, as a student employee at SCA. I continued to use the software as a student employee at the Briscoe Center for American History at The University of Texas at Austin. Throughout these different settings, I have been consistently impressed by the usability and intuitiveness of ArchivesSpace, combined with its ability to be a platform for so many different aspects of an archives. From managing accessions and donor information, managing physical and digital locations, to direct searching by patrons, ArchivesSpace touches my work in many different facets. In addition to being familiar with the many benefits of using ArchivesSpace, I am also aware of the pressure points and opportunities for growth. 

The University of Iowa was an early adapter of ArchivesSpace in 2013, migrating from Archon, and it is now our main content management system for our archival holdings. While it has long been the platform we have presented to our users to navigate finding aids and search our collections, we are still expanding our use to include more staff-facing and governance functionalities, such as accession management and integration into our other statistics/data projects.  

 I would be honored to serve the ArchivesSpace community and contribute my perspectives as a user of the software and an early-career archivist on the ArchivesSpace Governance Board.

Alston Cobourn
Head of University History and Records, East Carolina University
I am excited to be a candidate for medium member institution representative on the ArchivesSpace Governance Board. It is a tremendous opportunity to work with colleagues on shaping an application that has been so vital to the work of our profession over the last decade and a half. I believe I would be a valuable member of the Governance Board because I have 12 years of experience implementing, using, and training others to use ArchivesSpace at three academic institutions that varied greatly in size, demographics, location, and mission. This experience will enable me to bring a diverse set of perspectives to the Board. 

First, at the small, undergraduate only, private liberal arts college Washington and Lee, I proposed we implement AS because I believed a single, open-source archival management system was what our profession needed and that it had boundless potential. I then led the implementation over a two year period and taught staff and student assistants how to use the system. 

Next, at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, a medium sized state school with the federal designation of being a Hispanic Serving Institution and a high number of first time college students, I implemented the use of FAST subject headings in AS, used the application in my daily work, trained our student assistants on its use, and assisted IT with troubleshooting. 

At my current institution, East Carolina University, which is a larger but still medium sized state school with a significant percentage of first generation college students, I assisted with a migration from Archivist Toolkit to ArchivesSpace, trained staff and student assistants, and plan for how we can best utilize AS’ current and forthcoming features.

Also, I have significant experience with the ArchivesSpace community. I served on the User Advisory Council and the Reports Subcommittee from 2015-2019 and briefly on the Governance Board in 2016, presented at the AS User Forum multiple years, and presented at AS webinars. Unfortunately, my stint on the Board was cut short because I took a new job at an institution that was in a different size AS categorization level. However, the short experience I had was very meaningful. I have advocated for ArchivesSpace by presenting about my positive experiences with its implementation and use at multiple professional conferences and publishing about it in the Mid-Atlantic Archives Journal. 

After working for five years with Patrick Galligan from the Rockefeller Archives to propose and work through the approval process for two new DACS elements, 8.2, Rights Statement for Archival Description and 13.10, Rights Statement for Archival Authority Records, I worked with the AS Technical Advisory Committee and development team to ensure new functionalities to integrate these elements were built into an upcoming release of the application.

I have a wealth of professional service experience with the Society of North Carolina Archivists, Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Group, Society of American Archivists Metadata and Digital Objects Section, and the Digital Library Federation’s Born-Digital Access Working Group. I have been a Certified Archivist through the Academy of Certified Archivists since 2016.

I have been less involved in the AS community for the last several years because of shifting job responsibilities, but I am now able to make a commitment again and am looking forward to working for the betterment of our community. My wide experience in archives, my leadership skills, and ability to work in a team combined with my experience with ArchivesSpace, the ArchivesSpace community, and the Governance Board structure make me a strong candidate for this position. Thank you for your consideration.

Julia Novakovic
Digital Archivist, RIT Archives, Rochester Institute of Technology

It is an honor to run for re-election on the ArchivesSpace Governance Board, this time in the capacity as the member representative for Medium-sized institutions. (I was elected to the board and served as the Small-level member representative from 2021-2023 while working as the Senior Archivist at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.) As the current Chair of the AS Governance Board (and at present, a non-voting member), I have been fortunate to work with many talented archivists and information professionals on topics both technical and ethical. 

I am approaching a decade of hands-on experience with using ArchivesSpace on a daily basis. I was previously on the AS Nominating Committee (2017) and the AS User Advisory Council (2018-2020), serving on the Reporting, Testing, and Usability sub-teams before joining the AS Governance Board in 2021. The ArchivesSpace community has been an indispensable part of my own professional development, and I am so glad to have the opportunity to give back. (Often in the library and archives world, we may find ourselves on volunteer committees or councils, dreading monthly meetings or begrudgingly offering to take on a task simply because no one else has raised their hand--I promise that ArchivesSpace is nothing like this.) I have enjoyed learning, participating, listening, brainstorming, problem solving, testing, researching, presenting, and getting to know the ArchivesSpace staff, folks on the governance councils and board, and members alike.

I would like to continue to see the growth of, and persistent community backing for, the ArchivesSpace Diversity Partnership, our program that offers support for implementing the ArchivesSpace application to institutions that are themselves or primarily serve communities underrepresented in the ArchivesSpace community. ArchivesSpace is in a position to use its platform to amplify the voices of those who have historically been silenced; if the fees for technical support, training, and hosting are one barrier to an organization serving their community, then ArchivesSpace should help to alleviate that obstacle when possible. I also want to work toward increasing the diversity and equity of our governance councils and board, making sure that there is an opportunity for everyone who would like to be involved in making decisions and prioritizing development--again, removing perceived barriers to participation. ArchivesSpace is the premier archives application out there, and it is only strengthened by the wide-ranging experiences and voices of its members across not only North America but worldwide. I am committed to the growth, development, and success of ArchivesSpace and its valuable role in our profession.

Jared Cowing
Systems Librarian, Williams College

Thank you for your time in reviewing my submission in the election of a representative for Small institutions on the ArchivesSpace Governance Board. ­I am both humbled and excited to have your consideration. For the past three years I have served as Systems Librarian at Williams College, where I support the use of ArchivesSpace for our Special Collections Department. While I have been active in the user communities of several other library systems in my library career, my involvement with ArchivesSpace has been more recent and began when assuming my role at Williams. In that time I have been grateful for the ability to more closely learn about the often distinct technology needs of archives.

What I would bring to the Governance Board are my experiences in other communities, and new perspectives on our community’s efforts to achieve the mission of ArchivesSpace. I have worked in an environment of mutual support for open source software through a brief time in the Islandora Collaboration Group, and in a role of community support through several years in OCLC’s WorldShare Management Services Community Leadership Team. I have experience reviewing departmental budgets and expenditures and am interested in building on this experience in reviewing the financial statements of a program on a scale like that of ArchivesSpace. Above all, I have an interest in meeting, listening to and learning from community members from small institutions.

Small institutions are often dedicated to the service of underrepresented peoples, perspectives and materials, but they are also more likely to be lacking in resources. It is voices from these members that often go missing more broadly in software development initiatives where greater human, technical and financial resources are correlated with greater influence. I find it worth celebrating that the governance structure of ArchivesSpace ensures voices from institutions across all sizes and levels of resourcing. I just as much appreciate that this structure does not in and of itself guarantee a community that is diverse, equitable and inclusive in all the ways that it needs to be. Knowing that there is always work to be done in this regard, I would be honored to be tasked with listening and participating in conversations around the ArchivesSpace community’s next steps forward by serving as one of its representatives.