Implementing the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials at Northern Arizona University

hello everyone and welcome to this workshop on implementing the protocols for native american archival materials at northern arizona university i'm jessica crouch the community engagement coordinator for archive space and i'm joined today by sam meyer and cindy summers of northern arizona university and liz garcia of university of arizona in this webinar sam cindy and liz will discuss the ongoing efforts of northern arizona university's klein library special collections and archives to implement the protocols for native american archival materials their vision for applying the protocols to archival arrangement and description as well as rearrangement and redescription logistical technological and resource issues with regards to updating legacy archival description and archive space and the design implementation and progress to date of the archival description internship developed to make this work possible as i mentioned your presenters today are sam meyer cindy summers and liz garcia liz garcia is an mlas student and knowledge river scholar at the university of arizona school of information with a concentration in archival studies in addition to her work as the archival description intern at klein library special collections and archives she is also the graduate assistant arc archives specialist at the university of arizona library special collections her research interests include archival theory social justice and librarian archives and digital curation cindy summers is an assistant manager at climb library special collections and archives where she supervises volunteers student employees and interns cindy works closely with the archivist for discovery sam to oversee collections processing which has led to the ambitious project of updating all of sca's legacy finding aids and ingesting them in archive space despite her employment history in many different units of klein library over 23 years she feels fortunate to have become a staff member of special collections and archives where she is surrounded by fascinating history inspired by incredible co-workers and encouraged by the aspirations of future archivists sam meyer is the archivist for discovery at klein library special collections and archives where she oversees arrangement description of the department's archival collections prior to coming to klein library sandborg sam worked as an archival technician with the veterans history project of the library of congress and is a contract archivist with the union of british columbia indian chiefs library and archives she received her master's in archival studies with the first nations curriculum concentration from the university of british columbia in 2018 we will hold all questions until the q a at the end if you'd like to ask a question we ask that you use the q a feature at the bottom of your screen and then those questions will be read and answered aloud during the allocated time for q a if you have a general question or need some form of assistance or you just want to talk to your fellow attendees please feel free to reach out via the chat you also have the ability to turn on closed captioning at the bottom of your screen you can elect show or hide subtitles by selecting live transcript at the bottom of your screen and pressing the little up arrow there you can also elect to view the full transcript either in tandem with subtitles or in lieu of subtitles by selecting that option and with that i'll turn things over to sam cindy and liz and sam if you'd like to start us off wonderful thank you for that introduction and for convening this jessica we're really grateful all right can everyone see my slides we can perfect so thank you everyone for being here it's morning time in arizona but it may not be where you are so good morning from here to just briefly introduce myself again my name's sam meyer and i use she her pronouns um as jessica mentioned i'm the archivist for discovery here at special collections and archives klein library and i oversee all archival processing arrangement and description of our archival holdings i also serve as interim collections manager i want to emphasize right at the beginning of this presentation that i've only been here at sca for about two years two years at the end of may and so much of the work that i'll be speaking to today was undertaken by my past and present colleagues both at nau and uh at heritage partner institutions and i'm indebted to their work and i just want to take this time to acknowledge them and thank them for all the contributions they have made not only to klein library and sca but to the profession as a whole so today i'll be speaking about as jessica mentioned sca's efforts to update all of our encoded archival description finding aids cindy will share more about that effort which is a project that we began remotely in roughly june of last year but has been a big priority for me since i came to sca and as part of that work our efforts to integrate a content review based on the guidance of the protocols for native american archival material for every finding aid that we look at or touch through the pilot project of liz's internship which she'll speak to whoops sorry about that all right so i'd like to begin today with a land acknowledgement uh i join you today as does cindy from flagstaff on the ancestral and traditional homelands of a number of indigenous communities and to recognize those communities i will offer and i use formal land acknowledgement northern arizona university sits at the base of the san francisco peaks on homeland sacred to native americans throughout the region we honor their past present and future generations who have lived here for millennia and will forever call this place home slide shows a black and white image of the san francisco peaks so i'll begin by just providing a little bit of context for sca and for nau northern arizona university is a state university and it is a federally accredited american indian and alaska native serving institution and has recently been recognized as a hispanic serving institution or hsi nau sets service to native american students as its third strategic goal and this strategic goal is shared by klein library which is nau's sole academic library and by sca within klein library sca's mission is to connect and engage the world with the natural and human history of the colorado plateau a geographic region that essentially encompasses the four corners area and the institutional history of northern arizona university our archival holdings consist of two bodies of material the colorado plateau archives and the northern arizona university archives the colorado plateau archives are largely gifted to us from external donors who have some kind of connection with the colorado plateau whether that connection is personal familial professional or creative in 2006 the former head of sca karen underhill secured funding to convene a group of 19 indigenous and non-indigenous cultural heritage experts later referred to as the first archivist circle to meet incline library this meeting resulted in the drafting of the protocols for native american archival materials which were first published in rbm a journal of rare books manuscripts and cultural heritage shortly thereafter and what you see here on the right of this slide is the protocols for native american archival materials website which klein library continues to maintain shortly after the protocols were released and published klein library and sca endorsed the protocols and we have been working to endor to implement their guidance into all of our functions ever since my former colleague jonathan pringle wrote an excellent case study regarding klein library's implementation of the protocols for the native american archives section of the society of american archivists in 2019 and i recommend that you read it later if you want to learn more about what klein has done over the years to implement the protocols currently though we are working on embedding guidance from the protocols into our suite of departmental policies including collections development collections management arrangement and description preservation and access and use policies as well as all the procedural documentation which is based on those policies today i'll mostly be focusing on arrangement and description but i do want to acknowledge that that overlaps with collections management and preservation activities as well as access and use so to recap the protocols briefly for those of you who may be less familiar familiar or for whom it's been a while since you've read them the protocols are a best practices document for non-tribal institutions which provide guidance on the culturally informed care of archival materials which pertain to indigenous or native american communities on this slide i've pulled out either direct quotes or lightly paraphrased sections of the protocols regarding key archival functions such as collections management and acquisitions consultation on the management of culturally affiliated materials and arrangement and description so if you look at these quotes you'll see that the protocols guide non-tribal institutions to recognize that our previous acquisition and collections management practices may not adhere to a more contemporary understanding of indigenous community rights or laws or to newer federal laws specifically those regarding cultural heritage sites as well as nagpra the native american graves protection and repatriation act the protocols guide non-tribal institutions to evaluate their holdings and consider transferring out-of-scope native american archival materials to a more suitable repository they also guide us to repatriate materials that may have been obtained through theft deception or without right of possession in terms of consultation which i'll speak to a bit more in the next slide the protocols advise us to seek active consultation regarding culturally affiliated collections with communities who are represented in those materials that we should embrace the possible need for access and use restrictions based on those consultations or repatriation or other outcomes of that consultation further we are guided to respect a community's request to restrict access to and or use of materials that represent esoteric ceremonial or religious knowledge this links directly to the guidance of nagpra because nagpra was very important to the drafting of the protocols among other documents finally in terms of more descriptive tasks archivists at non-tribal institutions that have native american materials are guided to inform those culturally affiliated communities about collections of relevant materials and explain the nature of those materials inform researchers at the request of a community of potentially offensive language or remove or contextualize such language to indicate that it is not we are not seeking to inflict harm with that language or purposefully using offensive or outdated language and finally to promote the enhancement of description to include contemporary or culturally responsive language i will briefly describe klein library's partnerships with our tribal partners again i want to acknowledge that all of these relationships predate me by many years and sometimes decades we have three formal relationships with tribal partners including the hopi tribe the navajo nation and the hualapai tribe two of these three partnerships the relationship with hopi and with navajo are formalized in memoranda of agreement whereas our partnership with the hualapai tribe is still in development as of 2021. the two moas which we have are contractual agreements between klein library and the hopi tribe as represented by the hopi cultural preservation office or hcpo and the navajo nation as represented by the navajo nation museum archives department respectively the moa with the hopi tribe which was last update in 2016 reflects the relationship which dates back to the 1990s since 2000 klein library has provided the hopi tribe with storage space in our vault for some of their archival holdings uh that moa articulates klein library and the hobie cultural preservation office's mutual commitment to joint stewardship of significant archival resources which includes consultation on culturally sensitive issues and items related to the hopi tribe our moa with the navajo nation museum is smaller in scope and it largely concerns sca's support for digitization of materials held by the navajo nation museum which we host in the colorado plateau digital collections content dm instance maintained by sca in that moa nnm retains all rights and handles permission and reproduction issues for these materials and receives commercial fees for their use in addition to the partners that i've placed on this slide we also regularly reach out to other cultural heritage partners both tribal and non-tribal to deal with specific collection uh concerns related to the protocols and i'll touch on this briefly when i described the project that our archival description intern liz garcia is working on or she may touch on it as well but for instance in that situation we are also consulting with the museum of northern arizona so today sca's implementation of the protocols includes a number of activities firstly we consult with our cultural and institutional partners to develop appropriate access or use protocols for materials deemed to be culturally sensitive by these partners particularly the hopi cultural preservation office these protocols range from restricting public access to parts of collections to or entire collections referring permission requests for reproduction and publication of culturally sensitive materials to the appropriate cultural or institutional partner and gathering or sharing information on user access or use requests related to protected cultural heritage sites whenever we discover materials that we believe may be culturally sensitive sca staff will often put in place temporary access restrictions to prevent harm from occurring while we initiate consultation on the materials as in the stuart dam young collection case which liz will discuss we have also and continue to de-accession or transfer materials which we have either found to be the rightful property of other institutions including tribal institutions or to be inappropriate for our stewardship due to their cultural sensitivity concerns as i mentioned we have collaborated with our tribal partners on digitization projects either supporting digitization of their materials or providing digital copies of our materials to cultural partners or community members often at lower no cost this practice is commonly referred to as digital repatriation we are committed to consulting with tribal cultural experts regarding appropriate cultural care of materials including any ceremonies or rights that need to be performed to mitigate harm that could be caused by these materials jonathan wrote about an incident in 2010 in his case study that i mentioned previously in which a navajo or dna student encountered a snake skin during a processing project which triggered consultation with the president for native american affairs here at niu to get a a cultural expert into the library to cleanse the area and restore balance you can read more about that again i wasn't here for it in jonathan's case study but in general sca is committed to this kind of consultation and to not performing any cultural rights ourselves finally wherever possible we correct or enrich metadata and archival description whether that's because a community member has reached out to let us know that we've misidentified someone to provide additional context to correct or provide alternative name forms especially anglicized spellings of indigenous names updating name forms for federally recognized tribes and tribal lands or working towards multilingual description as far as amd which is my primary wheelhouse here i've just put this slide will describe our general arrangement and description policy which forms the foundation of our work and our workflows the policy's goal is really for us to make materials in the colorado plateau archives available for research use as soon as feasible and to do that i've drawn heavily on the university of california's efficient archival processing manual and delineated our levels of processing as well as mandatory minimum arrangement description and preservation actions or elements that need to occur in order for us to make materials available for research use and finally the policy explains and contextualizes the ongoing functions of reappraisal redescription and rearrangement in every policy we seek to implement the protocols and so some of the specific protocol implementations in this policy include seeking to identify native american archival material as soon as possible during processing ideally during accessioning our desire and commitment to consulting and providing appropriate context for native american archival materials whatever their level of processing and just making it very clear that existing description or arrangement may be revisited in light of the protocols at any time we don't need anyone to tell us to do that we can choose to do it or it could be done because someone has asked us to look at it that appeared in the wrong order my apologies but what i i want to pause here and just really take a moment to normalize the acts of archival rearrangement and redescription and the quote that i've put on the screen which i'll read in full is from information maintenance as a practice of care which is a document and a way of thinking that's really impacted me thinking about how the work of archivists and librarians and curators and many people in this profession is to keep information going to bring it forward into the future and to address errors differences in interpretation uh technological issues everything that we need to address in order to make sure that information persists that's the core of the profession in my opinion um a normal natural part of that that happens all the time is revisiting the prior products of your description and arrangement and i don't mean yours as in your personal arrangement and description although it could be i mean in terms of your institutions or wherever you may sit so the quote which i'll read says acts of maintenance sustain and repair people and things and include the many actions large and small that keep our socio-technical world going as well as the interfaces we designed to function between and among information systems maintenance is not the opposite of change however and its primary value is not to uphold stasis traditionally organizations overseeing complex technologies have used moments of maintenance repair not just to sustain but to upgrade and reimagine their systems and to me this is really what we are trying to do as we revisit our finding aids is not just move from ead 2002 to ead 3 but also reflect on what the archival description and arrangement is doing and what it needs to do for contemporary audiences what they might have missed previously right all archival description is created by humans at particular moments in time and some of those humans as i'll illustrate in my next slide didn't have the same kind of access to informational resources that we have today especially in a pre-internet era so i just want to visualize for you what this maintenance and updating looks like as well as transformation oops sorry all so these are actual copies of finding aids for the stuart young collection which liz will speak about this is the very first description i realize it's a little small that we created for this collection and you can see that it's a data sheet for the national union catalog manuscript collections maintained by the library of congress nukmark if you're not familiar with it was a printed volume in which archivists and librarians around the country would submit brief summaries of their manuscript holdings to the library of congress so that researchers can consult this heavy tome to find uh relevant archival materials and you can see that this document is dated 1980. this is the first time we described this collection but actually that description was predicated on this inventory that was provided to us by the donor of the collection so you can see here a page from the donor created inventory and the way that she identified some artifacts uh the donor was the daughter of the creator which liz will speak to but this just shows how she identified artifacts again in 1980 based on her knowledge and we really carried that information forward in our earliest uh description without necessarily evaluating it here you can see a separation sheet this speaks to sca's legacy as with many academic archives and special collections of having distinct curatorial practices for different archival formats so in this case we removed all the photographs from this collection and handed them over to a different set of staff members to manage at around the time we took the collection in this legacy of format separation is something that we're currently trying to overcome and it's one of our big logistical hurdles that cindy will speak to this is the very first description that we produced for those photographs based on the donor inventory if you can tell from looking at this if there are any catalogers in the audience these are item level catalog records for every photograph and the red text that you see is the primary elsi subject heading that we use to categorize those photographs because that was the technology that was available at the time some of our earliest collections actually were controlled by catalog cards and we still have those cards as we move forward in time we carried that data forward as well so this is a 1998 html finding aid that linked to our homegrown image database i believe it was some kind of access based database and this represents our shift towards trying to provide access to these materials online in some capacity too far we did a more robust photographic finding aid that was hard copy in 2001 which is what you can see here um but again just to keep this in perspective this finding aid predates the first issuance of dax right dax hasn't describing archives the content standard hasn't come out yet and that data all gets carried forward to the current version of the finding aid this is an image of the encoded archival description 2002 finding aid in arizona archives online which is the finding aid aggregator site that we use here at sca so all that data has just been maintained you know maybe improved upon maybe altered maybe errors have crept in over time but we've just been working to carry it forward and at every moment there's a chance for us to reflect on is this still the information that researchers need that the community needs what could we do differently so one thing we are trying to do differently is to use archive space to actually make it easier for us to update all these uh xml files basically without having to do it by hand so what you can see on screen here is a different finding aid that i imported into archive space and you can see here the section of the finding a that i've started correcting in archive space i've found this to be much easier than doing all the edits in an xml editor and so as i mentioned before last june cindy and i started talking about the way to move forward for us being to import all of our ead finding aids into archive space so that we could see them all and figure out what changes need to be needed to be made with each collection so we started really thinking about using archive space to help us achieve that goal and making that you know tied to our protocols work which led us to liz's internship um as i mentioned it's a pilot project for us to really think through with liz what updating finding aid in light of the protocols looks like what the technological issues are for us in terms of in just ingesting our eads into archive space what other issues are going to arise so cindy and i developed this internship which is fully remote um liz has never set foot on campus and we advertised it it is paid and we were so so fortunate to hire liz to help us with this effort and she'll speak more to what she's been doing i have some further reading i'm happy to share my slides later in case anyone wants to uh refer to anything that i have said but for now i'll stop sharing and hand it over to cindy sorry cindy no problem at all are you seeing my uh slides we are all right planning and getting started my name is cindy summers and i supervise our department student workers and volunteers mostly managing the administrative functions and assisting sam in developing projects and workflows for our students volunteers and now interns and due to covet 19 liz and i have both been working remotely while sam has been on site part time during this project so let's talk about what what we wanted to achieve with the project first and foremost we wanted to identify collections containing culturally sensitive material and apply the protocols but while we're at that we also wanted to bring our finding guides into dax compliance correct any encoding errors enhance description and accessibility for researchers and then ingest the guides into archive space and eventually convert them to ead3 so we acknowledged that we were going to need a lot of help to accomplish these goals that's when we started to create workflows develop training for others and test both of them while offering a learning opportunity for a future archivist sam created this internship that would provide us the chance to test our processes and training documents while offering a student a paid learning opportunity and i'll let liz touch on that more um about her internship but now let me tell you a little more about the background and the prep work for this project so our first step was gathering all the information we could find about each collection and as sam mentioned in the past we separated material by format and created different finding guides for each type of format so we decided to begin the project with the manuscript collection because it's the largest and these are some of the locations where we were finding records regarding these collections and these eads i'm sure you can all relate that due to ever-changing technology and staff turnover we have documents and information all over the place so these are the some of the places we found things were paper copies in boxes with their collection paper copies and binders we had a shared department drive on a campus server we had records for the eads in our catalog our library catalog we also have guides in our statewide finding aid network which is arizona archives online and then we also have digital items in our digital collections and now we're gathering all that and storing it in a google drive so we started gathering all this relevant information in one place and the things that we were including were owner files fast processing plans current finding aids former finding aids past projects related to the collections digital items and catalog records and now i don't expect you to be able to read this spreadsheet read what's on it but i did want to show you that things got complicated really quickly as we continued to discover material in different locations the number of our columns grew and the spreadsheet got wider and wider and i started out using a color coding method but i realized really fast that that was going to need to be a notes field because i was using so many colors i couldn't keep track of what each color what the scenarios was for each color so um let me explain the first part of the spreadsheet the first few columns are just identifying information and then this big section here is all the locations where we found information regarding each of the finding guides and so you can see we put links when they when we could to where that material was found and then we have columns for a physical shelf check which i will be doing as soon as i return to campus we flat have a column to flag material that could be sensitive and needs protocol reviews for the protocols and then there's the notes field which contains all of the odd and bizarre scenarios that we are seeing with these collections so some of those weird scenarios that i talk about are while we're gathering this information have been we have collections without any discovery method we found that some of our eads apparently didn't get transferred when we were updating technology sometimes it may have had sensitive material in it and at the time we just pulled the guide down and then didn't return to it we all know how busy everyone is and how short staffed we usually are and so sometimes we just didn't get back to it um and then we noticed that collections there were collections with different titles our catalog might call it papers records journals and then arizona archives online records were in general mostly called collections so in this case the catalog record was actually more accurate so we need to go back and correct those and then um we tran sometimes we transferred collections to other institutions and we just forgot to remove the catalog record so we removed the guide from arizona archives online but forgot the catalog record and so those are just some of the odd scenarios that i've come across and i'm there are many others and i'm sure we will continue to find them and that's why this project is so important so as i've been working on the gathering phase sam has been working with liz to go through the next steps in the process and liz will talk about this soon but based on her work with sam this is what we anticipate the next steps to be so we need to take the spreadsheet and take a deeper look at each of the collections and ask does it contain sensitive material does it have a finding aid in arizona archives online is it in the library's catalog is the title the same in both locations are there encoding errors that need to be corrected and are there other finding guides for the other formats the photos films oral histories and such how can we improve the description and accessibility and are there additional corrections that we can make beforehand before we try ingesting into archive space so after that it's time to ingest and this is what we came up with when we first started ingesting collections we found some common errors that we can now correct in advance sam's been documenting these in her training material and some of these errors are anytime you have a missing unit title or unit date and a c tag you'll come up with an error anytime you have a missing extent within the physical description tag we were coming up with errors and then often in the unit id tag because we did separate the material and have so many call different call numbers um we often found that our unit id uh was maxing out that 50 character limit so we found ways to work around that and now that i've given you a little bit about the background um and the planning phase i'm going to let liz tell you about her internship and the work she and sam have been doing to test these workflows so let me unshare and i'll let liz take over thank you cindy go ahead and open my powerpoint okay how does that look all right we're seeing your powerpoint awesome hello everyone my name is elizabeth garcia and i am the current architectural description intern here at klein library special collections and archives i'm also a current graduate student in the library of information science program at the university of arizona with a concentration in archive studies as jessica mentioned um and in this part of the presentation i will be speaking more about the design of the internship and the sort of of the sort of work i've been doing at sca and with archive space and also i'll be outlining some of the things i've learned as part of the internship as well as some reflections for uh project managers who are overseeing graduate students and before i begin i'd like to take a moment to acknowledge where i am and i am joining you today from the city of tucson which sits on the ancestral homelands of the tahana atam and paswayaki peoples and on this slide you can see a black and white photograph of saguaro national park which sits just outside tucson and this is from the joseph munich collection which is housed at nau so this is will be a quick overview of the internship from my point of view and as soon sam and cindy have spoken to a lot of behind-the-scenes work went into developing this internship you know just given the pandemic and logistically just sorting through all those collections that they mentioned um but they were able to develop this well-structured remote internship with the goal of updating sca's legacy archival description to better adhere to the protocols um and how it ended up being structured is more in like two halves um the first half was focused more on applying what i already knew about archival theory and practice to the operations of an actual institution so this there was a lot of reading in this section just learning more about sca and the protocols as well as some hands-on learning and professional development and in the second half of the internship uh it involves selecting a legacy finding age with the stewart a young collection which i'll speak to in a minute um with that includes materials associated to native american communities for review and editing in light of the protocols and here on the left you can see an excerpt from the project plan which details uh some of the activities i was focusing on for that particular week and it really helped you know just orient the the internship and what i needed to do and i'll speak more to that towards the end so why this internship uh one of the things that really sparked my interest in this internship was the cultural competence aspect i'm part of the knowledge reverse program at the university of arizona which focuses on educating information professionals to the information needs of bypass communities and as such the internship really aligned with the kind of work i was already doing in terms of working with materials pertaining to latino and native american communities and another aspect was the opportunity to work with the protocols um prior to this internship i hadn't had much exposure to them and i heard about them in my courses but i really hadn't had any experience archiving according to them so i was really drawn to that opportunity to learn how they were being applied at the university archive and nau specifically right because that's where they were developed um another aspect of the internship that drew my interest was that it was completely remote um as i mentioned i'm currently in tucson i'm a full-time grad student student so i was really looking for something local or remote that provided a bit of flexibility in terms of scheduling um so this internship was really perfect in that aspect i could work from home with the materials i already had i didn't have to drive up to flagstaff i didn't have to buy any additional equipment and everything could be accomplished with a stable internet connection digitized copies of the materials and weekly zoom meetings with my supervisors and lastly in terms of project management the internship was well defined right sam and cindy had outlined a specific outcome they wanted the intern to achieve which was updating the finding aid to adhere to the protocols and they developed a plan to achieve this goal breaking it down week by week and each week building upon the skills to previously developed and also supervision right it wasn't just them handing me this plan and the materials and saying you know good luck they really made sure to take the time and explain each assignment and talk through um how to accomplish these assignments uh so now i'll move on to sort of the kind of work i'm doing as part of my internship um and then moving away from the first half which is learning about sca and the protocols one of my first assignments was creating a collection level find uh ead for the northern arizona normal school records uh which was it contains the documents the of the development of nau first as a normal school then as a state teachers college and finally as a university and really we were starting from scratch with this collection we had uh scan inventories and some donor file information as well as scan folders but there was no ea defining a describing the collection so i was tasked with creating one and here you can see some of the documentation we had for that collection um this is a simple box folder inventory produced by asu stuff actually sometime in the 1970s so i took all this documentation and the collection level information to start drafting an ead which looks something like that um and then i consulted various nau resources i was looking at their history looking at exhibits and to write a historical note and uh scoping content information and then eventually once the ead was drafted they used it to create a resource record in archive space and then he just ingested that ead to create a finding aid which was added to arizona archives online and this is posted you can access it through aao but here's just a small snippet of that as well um so and then after learning more about how to create finding aids using ead i was then tasked with completing the necessary elements of a research record to create ada collection level finding aid for an unprocessed collection but this time using archive space so once again i was provided with the donor file information and here's that um um sorry yeah so this is the donor file information that was provided with the with the collection um i added so then i worked on filling out uh the finding aid information so i added an um abstract and historical note conditions govern useless access and some scope and contact information and this was the accession record that was already on archive space which we used to spawn that uh resource record um so yeah that was beneficial in doing that and then eventually we were able to create this finding aid um and really the main thing here is right is that i didn't have to use an ead i didn't have to do any encoding i was i could use archive space uh to just focus on actually populating the finding aid with the information i had and really that's the benefit of software like accessories right it's easier and it's faster and you don't have to worry about making sure you know all the tags are right and all that kind of stuff um i also did some ingesting of eads into archive space and the collection we did on this was a part of the my larger project of editing the legacy description project i'll speak to that more in the next slide but for now i'll go over the process of ingesting um so actually uh seo already had an ead for this specific collection so we didn't have to do any of that encoding at first we just went about adding it to archive space to create the resource record so here's that ead that was already that already existed uh for that collection so i went ahead and and edit it added excuse me um but as cindy spoke to this process isn't always straightforward right we got errors um and at first you see that they think oh my god like well what is all this but once you read through it and you can actually see where what where it went wrong and um how you can fix it right so in this specific case some of the note fields were empty and archive space couldn't read them properly so it's just a matter of stripping those empty fields and trying again and once those errors were addressed i was able to reingest in the ead and it successfully went through as you can see here so now we'll speak more to the collection i was tasked with um updating the finding aid and that is the stuart m young collection um so stuart and young was the grandson of bringing bring him young and in 1909 he accompanied he accompanied byron cummings from the university of utah on an archaeological expedition of rainbow bridge the collection was donated to sca in 1980 by young's daughter isabelle burgess and it's a multi-format collection consisting of photographs and cultural artifacts which young gathered during the 1909 trip without any kind of permit and an activity which is very illegal today and there's also photographs from their visit to the hopi villages in 1912.

so here you can see some of the photographs from that collection um this is a photo of husqva begay was the navajo guide who let the cummings who led the cummings expedition to rainbow bridge and he's pictured here with um ida weatherill she was the daughter of john weatherill who was also part of the expedition and this is one of the artifacts that was included in the collection um it is a small indian pot that was identified by isabella um and it was tagged it was only one the little one is the one the only one that had a tag in it so it it notes where he found it um the rest of them there they didn't give any context for so it's we're kind of been going through the process of trying to identify these see if they belong at sca or if they belong at another institution we've been in contact with the m a um to discuss these artifacts and that sort of thing and another artifact was young's diary which was actually included when she gave us the collection um it's not it wasn't the finding it wasn't on the ead so it's also been a matter of you know going over that diary and seeing the contents and trying to see what you know what kind of things he was writing about it mostly it pertains to the to the 1909 expedition and some of the the edits i've been doing to the finding aid so this has been the bulk of my work this time the second half of this internship um we divided it kind of into structural and content in it and in terms of structural edits it's really been about you know just updating general information making sure things are in the right fields um previously the uh the collection number was in the title field which shouldn't be it should be in the unit id field so it's been a matter of updating that information um you've also been establishing file hierarchies so using the reorder mode to move items to their appropriate level without having to do it one by one right it makes it a little easier to move many files at a time and also adding box and folder numbers having top containers right because these the collection when it's housed at nau it's in boxes it's in folders and all this information makes it useful to researchers who are trying to access this information right they know where it is they know how to find it and this is a screenshot of that finding aid on archive space that i'm working on you can see the box and folders that i added to these manuscripts i've also been working on some content edits so this is more um updating just the notes information that these have so scoping contacts arrangement um updating the access use restrictions that sort of thing and this is both the collection level as a whole right the whole story myan collection and also the different record levels right because there's photographs there's the manuscripts and there's the 3d objects right that all needs to be cataloged and all that information needs to be provided and also at the follow-up level there's been some content that is um adding titles right because most of these things have titles so making sure that matches the documentation we have um as well as adding files so as i mentioned the diary is it wasn't included in the finding aid so make sure to add that information and add it under the manuscript record group so researchers know it's there if they want to access it and then in terms of next steps uh well cause i'm still working on the finding aid but next steps would be to export the ead from archive space and merging it with ao compliant versions so you know again downloading that ead and then um formatting it so we can publish it online for researchers and lastly i thought i'd end this presentation with some of my own reflections on the internship in terms of my experience and some things i want project managers who are overseeing graduate students to keep in mind and really this internship was an opportunity to develop my archival skills in grad school we learned a lot about archival theory but we don't have to have the opportunity to apply them so specifically i got to apply arrangement description and collection management practices at a research institution not just at a general level right with a specific respect to the protocols being able to identify native american materials and having these conversations and this practice has been extremely valuable to me and i've also been enriching my technical skills um main one being archived space right i got to graph those finding aids create those eads um and it's daunting right if you don't know to approach these kind of systems if you haven't used them before so it's been great practice to to work with them right and be able to say yeah i can do that and you know especially relevant now it's they're being used by more institutions um it's also beneficial in that i got to work with the eeds and xml editors that i spoke to um not everything can be created and find in archive space unfortunately so it's good to be that we're still practicing those uh creating those findings by hand and using text editors like oxygen um i also learned more about arizona archives online just the main funding and hosting site here in arizona it's what nu uses that's what u of a uses so creating a behind-the-scenes looks and how that looks has been again very beneficial to my career lastly i got to learn more about different points of view right um i got to interact with archivists from different settings i got to see how they approach these different theories of arrangement and description and how they process collections which has again been great for expanding my worldview and i have some recommendations for project managers um first i cannot stress this enough the importance of communication uh from my internship especially was important because i wasn't physically present so being able to keep in contact with my supervisors via email and zoom really allowed me to do the work that i'm supposed to be doing right second in terms of scheduling and times management um the project plan which uh sam and cindy created for this internship um really really helped the progress i've made so far it outlined what i needed to do as well as some resources if i needed to consult anything so having that well-defined project plan in place really helped me navigate the internship and getting a sense of the timeline of the project there's also the need to be flexible uh graduate students often have a lot on their plate so having supervisors that understood my schedule and were willing to work with me to develop it or change it as things rose was very helpful feedback um i think it contributed to the overall quality of my internship because they took that my supervisors took that time to go over my work answer any questions that sort of thing and tied to that is the idea of mentorship mentoring right it's another great recommendation if it applies if you can be applied to your type of work i'm in my final semester of grad school so i've been looking and applying for jobs and simmons sam and cindy have offered their experience to guide me they've looked over my resumes and my cover letters they wrote recommendation letters for me which i'm just super appreciative of lastly i think it's good to give students an opportunity to do meaningful work there's sometimes questions about you know what students can accomplish given their skill set but really what you find is that students know what they're doing and they're looking for the chance to make significant contributions and i feel like the work that i've been doing at sca is important and i'm glad i got the chance to assist them in their efforts so that's currently where we are within the internship there's only a couple weeks left so we're really on working on finalizing the finding aid and just making sure everything's on track um here's our contact information if anybody wanted to learn more or reach out um but i think jessica was going to open the floor for comments and questions so i will end my presentation here thank you so much liz would you mind sharing your screen again and maybe leaving that last site up i have a slide but it doesn't have your contact information on it so maybe that slide if you're willing to share again would be more useful yeah awesome all right yeah so we have a few minutes for for questions and we do have some questions in the q a um for those of you asking in the chat again the recording will be made available on our uh youtube channel and on our website and it will include slides from the the presenters um but going to the questions in the q a the first question from katie relates to donor relations have you received any pushback from donors after you identify materials in a collection that were illegally acquired and then donated to the institution so do you inform the donor that the item's being repatriated and if so have you experienced any pushback this is sam i can take that question [Music] so i would say that the majority of materials that we would look into de-accessioning or transferring them the creator of the materials and in some cases the donor uh are no longer with us um typically those tend to be our older ethnographic collections um and so there are we have fewer concerns about living donors or living creators that's not always the case but i would say that's typically the case um however i know jonathan pringle when he was here had an instance in which he and a grad student did a great deal of research to demonstrate that the materials that were uh donated to us should not have been they were not the rightful property of the donor and so that's something you know that we can always work to establish is applying contemporary legal standards and then deciding how to communicate with the donor for our more recent donors or more contemporary donors we tell them right off the bat that this is something we might do if they choose to donate materials to us so i think now we try to educate donors before they choose to transfer materials to us to say hey if you give this stuff to us we are beholden both to the protocols and to relevant federal law around native american archival materials so we may take actions that you disagree with right and if you choose to donate your materials to us they're no longer you know in the western legal sense your property to manage their our property to manage according to professional standards but really it depends on the collection and the situation in almost every instance thanks sam um we definitely have more questions than we have time uh we're gonna go ahead and just keep answering questions but i understand that it is getting close to the end of the hour so if people have to drop off that's totally fine but um unless uh our panelists disagree i think we'll go ahead and just answer these questions as as we can and then they'll be made available with the recording so rose asks can you say more about how you designed your survey of material how did you decide where to start how did you keep track of what you evaluated and what you haven't etc i can take that one we started with the spreadsheet and and um then digging through electronic files and you know every location that we could possibly find any information about each collection so we just started at the top collection number one and the columns that you saw in that spreadsheet represent all the different locations where we are finding material and we started we have a folder for each collection now and we would put that material in our in our folder on google drive and then we would link to it in that spreadsheet put a link to that record and so um that's the process we're still working on um less than one third of the way through right now for the manuscripts and um it it involves a lot of windows being open you have a lot of tabs open a lot of windows looking in a lot of locations and then like i said because i've been um remote i'll do the shelf checks when i get back to campus next week this is sam just to add to that or clarify when cindy says uh collection number one that's manuscript collection one and our manuscript collection numbering system starts at one and goes to i think 542 at this point um many of the manuscript materials have associated other format collections but we decided to start with manuscripts because they were easy to check on the shelf thanks sam thank you both um like your comment about having a lot of tabs open i felt that um another question from allison was there anything in the young collection that was deemed culturally insensitive and if so how was that instance handled so this is sam i'll answer first and then liz can follow up so part of the reason why we chose this collection for liz is that it was brought to my attention by a researcher who was actually just making a factual correction on one of the photographs and when i went to review our documentation of the collection i noticed that a there were artifacts which liz spoke to that we typically don't accept artifacts that's part of our collections development and collections management policies and then when i looked a little further i saw that in previous versions of the photo finding aid there had been some kind of access restriction on culturally sensitive materials um the 98 finding aid that i showed has a mention that researchers had to consult the curator of photography for access to images of hopi religious ceremonies but which photographs were restricted has been lost to time i don't know anymore um so we are now consulting again uh with the hopi cultural preservation office to get a more contemporary check on which materials might be deemed culturally sensitive in the meantime we've temporarily restricted two of the photo albums out of the six that i believe are likely to be the ones that are culturally sensitive but we're waiting for confirmation from our partners liz do you want to add anything all right yeah sam spoke too i'm not physically at um any use i haven't seen these in person but just going off of the you know the donor file and the collection information that we do have digitally um yeah just you know stuff that should have been flagged when when this collection was first um when it was first accepted so thanks um next question from lisa in regards to the joint stewardship with the hopi is it covered in the moa or was there a discussion should they no longer desire joint stewardship uh this is sam again i'm just pulling up a copy of that so i can be accurate when i answer your question but my understanding is that the moa can be terminated at any time and has to be revisited on a regular basis i believe and i'm just looking now that it remains in effect for five years after that particular version is executed and at every kind of five-year period it can be refreshed reviewed or expired thanks um next question from kimberly do you accept indigenous materials or do you refer potential donors to tribes first um sam again on the materials um i would say that when we get clear offers that we really shouldn't be the people to hold them we refer them to the appropriate institution or tribes so an example of that is that someone had reached out to us to donate the papers of a tribal politician from the navajo nation and we referred that person directly to the navajo nation museum um if it's more like you know our classic example would be an archaeologist or an anthropologist or an artist a photographer maybe who has some material related to indigenous communities but not all of it is related to indigenous communities then we might make a different call or do some kind of consultation it depends on the content of the material and how likely it is to be culturally sensitive so for instance we have several photographic collections that have a lot of portraits of indigenous peoples that we chose to accept because they're part of a photographer's expansive body of work and don't necessarily represent the entirety of that collection or even the largest part of that collection but it really depends thanks sam um maureen has a comment i'm so compelled by the donor education conversation an explanation that you will be held to the protocols um i can imagine archives putting boilerplate into their standard deed of gift that acknowledges this thank you for clear a clear and compelling explanation of your practice so thanks um next question is kate kate's asking the tough question do you have an estimate of how long it will take you to finish this whole process sam do you want me to take that go for it um it's going to take years and um we've estimated three to six um the reason is just the gathering process alone is it takes a lot of time to find everything and to find those strange situations and um like i said i am less than one third of the way through that process right now and in a really good day i can get through maybe 10 collections gathering all the information into one place i still need to do the shelf check and then we need to do all those other things you know making sure they're index compliance you know correcting any of those errors where the title is different in different places it's going to take years thanks cindy um we have a few more questions that have popped up so i'm going to go ahead and um read those and then i think we'll we'll go ahead and wrap things up um but um we have a question from sarah we have a similar circumstance of having records in various locations can i ask about the decision to use google drive and excel documents to collate the information into a singular place um did you consider any other solutions uh i can speak to this and then you can chime in um we picked it because it was convenient to access from home is really the answer um we also could have used a departmental shared driver sharepoint i personally hate sharepoint with the fiery passion of a thousand burning suns um not to overstate it but uh so that was a place that we didn't have to be on a vpn or really deal with any of the difficulties associated with remote work it you if you can access our departmental shared drive um from home but it is not as reliable so that was in my opinion the best place that's accessible from no matter where you're working from i just i would second what sam said thanks um we have some conversation happening in the q a where people are um allison point says that she's been processing since 2001 and it's humbling to see how i was processing 20 years ago and what i could have done differently there's always room for improvement um it's a great point anne asks how do you balance this revision work and your backlog with assessing and describing new material this is sam that's a great question um we are really trying i am really trying to embrace uh the following mantra collection level intellectual control container level physical control for all our new holdings which means that we are describing things in a sort of hardcore mplp more product less process way of providing information about materials as they come in but not necessarily doing in-depth arrangement and description at that time um so the balance right now is basically cindy you know very bluntly as cindy is working on the legacy stuff and i'm working on the new stuff um but it's all part of the same work of just improving our control over collections um and in some ways i think updating our like legacy description actually helps us manage our backlog because we know that a lot of what's in our backlog are accruals to those existing collections and so if those ead finding aids for existing collections that have accruals are in a format where we can easily add information on those accruals it makes it easier for me to manage or backlog so they really tie together in my opinion thanks sam all right two more questions uh one gina is just curious about uh the size of your holdings do you want to speak to this cindy sure um our manuscript collection is a little larger we have about 500 and plus um in the manuscript collection just the number of eads overall uh just recently are our digital archivist said we had 639 i believe all together so that explains the time that we're going to have to dedicate to this as far as frequency the last time we really assessed this was with a project called the arizona archives matrix i believe and then i think some subsequent work around it um assessing our process materials but since our unprocessed materials make up i would say let's say 40 to 45 of our total archival holdings we don't have great data on percentage unfortunately that's that's part of the goal of this project is to really get a better clearer sense but we are dependent on the data we have to guide us and as cindy can tell you the data we have is not always as reliable as we would hope um so you know i could guess maybe a quarter of our collections but that's a pure guess thanks sam and cindy and i uh neglected to read the second half of gina's question which is what sam was answering which was a question about the frequency of native american materials appearing in the collections which sam took a guess of 25 um thank you and then the final question uh and it's a great one has there been any institutional support from the library and nau or nau for this process um this is sam uh there's institutional support at the level of our department um that's where this project that's the level we're at right now uh i do i can't say that the library does have as a strategic goal to improve accessibility in general to our open educational resources and we consider archival collections to be those and to take diversity and equity

2021-04-22 05:24

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