Year One

Last week marked my one year anniversary of moving to North Carolina and taking up my position as the Associate Archivist of Davidson College. I’ve written a bit in here before about all of the Big Life Changes that have occurred over the past year and half or so (completing two graduate degrees, moving 900 miles, etc.), but anniversaries always seem like particularly apropos times to reflect, so, here’s a few of the things I’ve done over the past year (get ready for a long-ish post!):

INITIATIVES

Probably the most enjoyable part of my job is that I get to work on a vast array of different projects and initiatives – there’s always something happening in the small (three FTE) Archives & Special Collections working group. We’re a constant hub of energy and ideas, and much of that is down to the amazing people I work with – the College Archivist & Records Management Coordinator (Jan) and the Special Collections Outreach Librarian (Sharon) have a combined 55 years of Davidson work experience, so their institutional memories and knowledge are invaluable. But even more important (to me, at least!) is their total willingness to try new things, play around with ideas, and listen to the new person in the room. Though I work most closely with Jan and Sharon, my larger department at the library (Discovery Systems) is similarly inventive and friendly, and I’ve met and begun collaborating with lots of amazing people around campus and around the state. I love working in such a supportive unit, AND they frequently bring in snacks to share – I’m living the dream, you guys.

When I came into work last Wednesday, Jan and Sharon had placed this incredibly heartwarming whiteboard in front of my office:

AWW
AWW!
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Digital Humanities at SAA 2014

In a week, I’ll be attending my first Society of American Archivists annual meeting – this year’s theme is “ARCHIVES * RECORDS: Ensuring Access.” In order to help sort out which sessions I want to attend, I thought I’d crib from my colleague Mark Sample’s Digital Humanities at MLA 2014, and compile a list of digital humanities-related sessions and events.

Obviously, this list will be biased as to what I consider “digitally-inflected” – for instance, I’m not including any of the pre-conference workshops, although these definitely include options that have a strong digital component, nor am I including sessions/ events that appear to be standards-based (if I did, the list would be almost entirely standards!). This list includes five of the 70 sessions, which means that 7.14% of this year’s sessions are DH-inflected; however, that does not account for day-long events (like the Research Forum or THATCamp SAA), posters, roundtables, or committee meetings, some of which I did include on this list.

Please do let me know if you think I’ve missed a session/ event, or included one that shouldn’t be on the list. As someone whose professional personal interests certainly cross the (perhaps occasionally siloed) archivist-librarian-digital humanist borders, I’m looking forward to discussing DH and plenty of other topics with the crowd at SAA’s largest meeting yet!

These descriptions are copied-and-pasted from the SAA’s online schedule.

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SNAP Student Experience Series

The Society of American Archivists (SAA)‘s Students and New Professionals (SNAP) Roundtable is a very active group that seeks to fill a void in SAA – namely, to provide a forum for those newly entering the field. One of the ways SNAP does that is by running a blog, including their Year in the Life, SAA 2014 Election Candidate Interviews, and Student Experience blogseries. As a new professional, I definitely appreciate both the SNAP blog and having an official group within SAA to advocate for my needs.

My reflections on the grad school experience was actually the first post in their Student Experience series (and the second was an old colleague of mine from my intern days at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Sami Norling) – check it out here!