Leading Professional Development by Mary H. Moen

Author:Mary H. Moen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 5.2Archival Activities Workflow Diagram

The instructor encouraged students to have patience and perspective when navigating a new collection, to consult available documentation, and to allocate tasks equitably among the processors in the time available. Simple tasks such as recording the before and after of each activity can offer revealing clues across multiple collections at hand as well as genial opportunities to mark milestones. Descriptive tools are hierarchical and standards based (e.g., MARC fields, EAD markup tags, and finding aid structure per DACS), a feature that facilitates cross institutional understanding of the extent and complexity of collections through systems such as ArchivesSpace. The session concluded with a practical discussion of engaging all the archive’s constituents (e.g., K–12 students, genealogists, college students, local residents) in meeting immediate and long-term needs, especially in ways that foster excitement for continued learning and mutually promote the archives as a place for cultural enrichment.

All students attended the synchronous meeting, which made early use of Zoom, a video-conferencing software in the process of university-wide adoption, thus seamlessly including one student who was already on-site in Kansas City. The BAMA archivist and her student intern traveled in from outside town especially to attend the educational session component, bringing with them a box of artifacts. The archivist gradually detailed for the class her early work reconstituting several vertical files; adding names to photographs; researching ownership and provenance documentation; protecting nonpaper artifacts, such as dresses (robes), video, and audio; communicating with residents and with archivists at peer institutions; and frequently answering research requests for items from the Mayor Bruce Watkins collection (AC 53) and the Allan Gray Family Personal Papers of Alvin Ailey (AC 10), among others. She helpfully noted topical areas where BAMA followed or did not quite follow archival standards, and she told anecdotes from her advocacy and collection visibility efforts on behalf of the archives.

In the late afternoon of the session, the class spent some time learning the naming system in place at BAMA, including its use of BA (Black Archives) followed by the subject’s first three letters (e.g., TUS for Tuskegee or WAT for Watkins) as a legacy of Pete (the BA collections enumerate to a lengthy 2,500) and of AC (Archives Collection) once the collection has been processed. The class stressed the importance of actively involving community members and thereby pluralizing the labor of archives. Students in the session engaged in an attentive and thoughtful back-and-forth about each topic and scenarios that would involve making judgment calls, comfortably asking for clarification from the BAMA archivist in determining extents to which certain activities were likely to arise over the week together. Thus, the workshop functioned not only as knowledge delivery and group reflection but also as short-term strategic planning and task mapping on the part of the BAMA archivist.

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