FY18/19 Candidate Statements

Very Large Membership Level

Cynthia A. Ghering
Director, University Archives and Historical Collections
Michigan State University

I am pleased to be nominated as a candidate for the ArchivesSpace Governance Board representing the Very Large Membership category of institution. This is an exciting opportunity to continue the excellent work that has gone into the design and development of ArchivesSpace and plan for future enhancements and releases. As we all know, ArchivesSpace is a unique system – it’s both an open software solution and a dedicated community, all focused on supporting the evolving collection management needs of archivists, librarians and curators. It takes the active participation of these communities; including the Governance Board, User Advisory Council, Technical Advisory Council, and member institutions, as well as developers and staff at Lyrasis, to build and support the most robust system possible.

My home institution, Michigan State University, is proud to be a charter member of the ArchivesSpace community and actively involved since 2013. We have multiple instances of ArchivesSpace at MSU of varying size and maturity. This gives us a broad understanding of implementation and daily use from both a staff and researcher perspective. We are currently using the Archivists’ Toolkit migration tool to export 10,300 accession records and 3,355 resource records from Archivists’ Toolkit to ArchivesSpace and understand the challenges of moving to a new collection system. Like many institutions, we are very interested in the improvements to the user interface, administrative functions, and integrations with other related collection systems.

In my recent roles at Michigan State University, I have firsthand experience of the complexity of web applications and software development and the challenge of balancing the sometimes competing priorities of customers, developers and administrators. I am certified in IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Foundation v3, a best practice framework for IT service lifecycle management and have successfully managed the development and implementation of several large IT projects. As the director of a public land-grant university archives and records management program since 2008, I’m very aware of the challenges facing archivists and technologists with limited resources and a finite capacity for innovation. Prior to MSU, I spent over eight years with the Ohio Historical Society where my last position was the Assistant Director of the Curatorial and Collections Services Department. I received a BA from Western Michigan University in 1991 and MS in Information from the University of Michigan in 1999.

Thank you for your consideration!

Sean Quimby
Director, Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Columbia University

As Director of Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library (RBML), I am responsible for more than 90,000 linear feet of archives, a half million rare books, and 10,000 oral histories. Subjects range from Russian emigre artists to modern publishing archives and the university’s own historical records. While the challenges that we face at Columbia—processing capacity, physical space, the rising tide of born-digital records—are by no means unique, I think it is fair to say that the scale is unusual. Eight full-time curators acquire roughly 3,000 linear feet of new material each year. Nor is RBML Columbia’s only repository for archival collections. The Avery Art and Architecture Library, C.V. Starr East Asia Library, and Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary account for another 20,000 linear feet. 

A century of robust archival collecting across multiple units brought us to the point where we realized that we needed a single, community developed and supported collections management platform. Over the past six months I have helped to spearhead the university wide effort to adopt ArchivesSpace for this purpose. While Columbia’s archivists have led our implementation, my work has been both supportive and strategic. Put simply, I have sought to place archival collecting and collecting management at the center of the Libraries very full agenda. Indeed, among Columbia University Libraries Strategic Directions is the challenge to Shape Discourse by pursuing innovations that “accelerate library performance in partnership with a collaborative community of practice.” ArchivesSpace is just the sort of tool that Columbia’s archival and information technology expertise can both contribute to and benefit from. As a member of the Governance Board,  I would be well positioned to speak on behalf of the challenges and opportunities facing all Very Large Members.

By way of biography, I came to Columbia in 2014 from Syracuse University where I served as Senior Director of the Special Collections Research Center for eight years and co-developed a homegrown archives management tool. Trained as a historian of technology, I began my career at Stanford University as the archivist and curator for the R. Buckminster Fuller Papers. I hold Masters Degrees in the History of Technology in America from the University of Delaware and Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at-Urbana Champaign. At all of my career stops, I have had the privilege of working with some brilliant archivists. I am at my best when facilitating discussions across disciplinary boundaries and communities of practice. Examples include serving on the Faculty Advisory Board for Syracuse’s Humanities Center and, more recently, as principal investigator on a $2.25 million grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to develop open source Fedora/Samvera/Blacklight based modules for the synchronized delivery of oral history content and intellectual property metadata. At Columbia, I have direct oversight of an annual budget in excess of $2 million and, as a member of the Collections Strategy Team, co-stewardship of the Libraries $32 million acquisitions budget.

Small Membership Level

Kat Stefko
Associate Librarian for Discovery, Digitization and Special Collections and Director of the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives
Bowdoin College

I am delighted to stand for election for the ArchivesSpace Governance Board. It would be an honor for me to serve the ArchivesSpace community and to work with other members of the board on advancing the important work and expanding the reach of ArchivesSpace.

Throughout my twenty-year career as an archivist, I have been committed to the interrelated goals of increasing access to and, thereby, use of archival collections. While the shape of my work has varied greatly through appointments at Duke and Harvard universities, Bates and Bowdoin colleges, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a common thread running throughout my career has been an abiding interest in finding the most efficient ways to centralize, standardize, and publicize information about archival collections with the specific aim of engaging users with these materials. In the early 2000s, this work involved developing a collections management database for the Philadelphia Museum of Art that was cited as an early model for what would become the Archivists’ Toolkit (AT).  Seeing an opportunity to contribute to the development of a better tool for a far broader audience, I volunteered to be a beta tester for AT while directing the Muskie Archives at Bates College in 2006.  From Bates, I went to Duke University where I directed the technical services department for the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. During my time at Duke, I advocated for charter membership in ArchivesSpace and provided guidance and oversight for our adoption of the software.  Being a relatively early adopter of ArchivesSpace, Duke was then in a position to give back to the ArchivesSpace community, something I supported through my work and the work of my staff.   Since coming to Bowdoin College in late 2015, I have directed a multi-year project to collocate, standardize, and enhance our archival description, a project which will culminate with the implementation of ArchivesSpace later this summer.

Having worked in both large and small archives, as well as cultural heritage institutions beyond academia, I am familiar with the particular needs and challenges of a wide variety of institutions. I have also seen a broad variety of descriptive practices, and understand the challenges facing institutions as they seek to make their collections more discoverable and their operations more efficient.  As a member of the Governance Board, I would seek to represent the particular needs and speak to the unique challenges of smaller institutions while keeping in mind the commonalities that cut across institutions of all sizes.  I believe ArchivesSpace has made our community stronger by de-emphasizing some of the differences between our institutions and promoting common practices, and this in turn, has made the work of our researchers and users easier.  It would be a pleasure and an honor for me to continue that work by helping guide the next phase of development for ArchivesSpace.