SAA @ UCLA Presents: an Afternoon with Jackie Dooley

SAA @ UCLA Presents:

An Afternoon with Jackie Dooley

Join us for a workshop on skills and conference tips for new professionals!

Jackie Dooley—fellow Bruin and current president of the Society of American Archivists—will share knowledge gained during her career and process of becoming an internationally recognized expert in archives, rare books, visual materials and special collections. Jackie will provide guidance for new professionals in the field, and tips for first time or prospective SAA conference attendees.

Who: Open to all IS community members, geared towards MLIS students with archival studies or rare book, print, and visual culture specializations, and MIAS students.

What: An Afternoon with Jackie Dooley: skills and tips for new professionals

When: Tuesday May 28^th 2013

Where: IS Salon, 2^nd floor

To learn more about Jackie Dooley, visit http://www.oclc.org/research/people/dooley.html or see her on twitter @ https://twitter.com/minniedw

SAA @ UCLA Student Chapter Call for Officers 2013-2014

The UCLA Student Chapter of the Society of American Archivists has open positions for the 2013-2014 school year. We encourage all to consider taking on a leadership role here in our UCLA IS community.

The following positions are open for next year*:

President
Vice-President
Treasurer
Bruin Online Project Program Chair

Read more about each position here.

SAA at UCLA was established in 1996 and is an official student chapter of the Society of American Archivists. As a student chapter of a professional organization, SAA at UCLA strives to familiarize students with the archival profession, sponsor extra-curricular learning sessions, and organize networking opportunities.

Join us in planning next year’s great events!!

Candidates should write a brief statement of interest and submit it here by Fri, May 24.
Positions are open to second year masters students, as well as doctoral students. Elections will be held during the last week of May.
Feel free to contact us at uclasaa@ucla.edu, if you have any questions.

*We are reserving some positions to promote to incoming students at the beginning of the 2013-2014 school year.

UCLA Information Studies: Fields of Endeavor || Featuring Bo Doub (Center for the Study of Political Graphics)

SAA @ UCLA presents “UCLA Information Studies: Fields of Endeavor.” The Fields of Endeavor series introduces UCLA Library and Information Studies program graduates and current interns who are out in the field taking knowledge learned in the program and putting it to use! We are excited to feature activist archivist extraordinaire Bo Doub from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics.

Name:  Bo Doub
Graduation Year:  2012
MLIS Focus:  Informatics
Job Title and Site:  Co-Project Archivist at the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG)

What do you do all day?
I was hired under a federal grant to (i) process and describe, on a basic folder-level, CSPG’s entire collection of over 80,000 social movement posters and (ii) catalogue on the item-level CSPG’s complete collection of Vietnam War Era posters. Since I am only two months into this job, and also because the archive is moving to Culver City this summer, the work so far has been in the “processing” phase. Processing, in this case, involves a lot of sorting of recent acquisitions and backlog to be put-away — sorting posters by geographical region, topic, and/or artist mainly. This sorting gives each poster a permanent location (in a folder in a big flat drawer in the archive) so that the drawers can be moved to the new building and the folders can later be described. Once the folder-level description is finalized, we will be able to generate an EAD collection finding aid for both in-house use and public use online and in the archive. I have also been cataloguing a lot of posters using MIMSY XG, the visual collections management software.

Most frequent response when you tell people what you do:
I try to tell people what I do in more accessible terms than just: “I’m an archivist.” Most often I probably say something like: “I sort and describe cool political art all day!” or I just tell them about the archive itself and the more recognizable institutional partners it has (where CSPG exhibits and loans its collections). People respond with blank stares and comments like, “I never even thought that would exist!” Though most everyone thinks the work sounds “really cool!” (however implausible).

Most interesting item, record, document, etc. you have come across:
I love the Cuban posters from artists and collectives like René Mederos and OSPAAAL (The Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America). A lot of these works came out of the 1960s and 70s advocating for the people of Vietnam against US imperialism and war.

UCLA Information Studies: Fields of Endeavor || Featuring Danielle Bass (NBCUniversal Archives and Collections)

SAA @ UCLA presents “UCLA Information Studies: Fields of Endeavor.” The Fields of Endeavor series introduces UCLA Library and Information Studies program graduates and current interns who are out in the field taking knowledge learned in the program and putting it to use! We are excited to feature NBCUniversal Archives and Collections intern Danielle Bass.

Name: Danielle Bass
Graduation Year: 2013
MLIS Focus: Archives
Job Title and Site: Archival intern, NBCUniversal Archives and Collections*

*Note: Danielle is discussing her internship placement for winter quarter, 2013.

What do you do all day?
My primary task at the archive is to complete a multi-year audit of the physical collection. This involves going down the storage aisles and opening every box to see what is inside and make sure that the contents match their locations in the collections management database. I get to handle props and costumes from movies and TV shows. I also have to put on my detective hat and engage in special research projects to identify what movie or TV show an object is from. In essence, this means that I get paid to watch DVDs! I’ve also had the opportunity to appraise assets from 30 Rock, set up exhibits, and do original cataloging for wardrobe from  Law and Order: Los Angeles.

Most frequent response when you tell people what you do:
When I say that I’m an archivist, I most often receive a blank stare but when I mention that I work at NBCUniversal, people get very interested. “What do you do?” “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve seen?” “Meet anyone famous?”

Peterson Automotive Museum Tour 4/26/13

SAA@UCLA is hosting a tour of the Peterson Automotive Museum. The visit will include a talk hosted by museum professionals about their archives and collection policies and a tour of the vault (which has a lot of amazing old cars, motorcycles, etc.).

More information about the Peterson here.

Who: SAA@UCLA, IS students and faculty
What: Tour of Peterson Museum and vault, FREE of charge.
When: Friday, April 26 @ 11 am
Where: The Peterson Automotive Museum – 6060 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles 90036
(at Fairfax, across for LACMA)

Since there will be spacial limitations, we are limiting the tour to the first 15 folks who  email saying they can commit to the tour.

Send RSVPs to uclasaa@ucla.edu with the subject line “Peterson Tour RSVP.” Please note if you can provide a vehicle for carpooling, if you need a ride, or if you can meet us on site.

UCLA Information Studies: Fields of Endeavor || Featuring Tammi Kim (University of Delaware)

SAA @ UCLA presents “UCLA Information Studies: Fields of Endeavor.” The Fields of Endeavor series introduces UCLA Library and Information Studies program graduates and current interns who are out in the field taking knowledge learned in the program and putting it to use! We are excited to feature East Coast archivist, Tammi Kim.

Name: Tammi Kim
Graduation Year: 2011
MLIS Focus: Archives
Title and Site: Affiliate Assistant Librarian -
Manuscripts and Archives Department, University of Delaware | Newark, DE |

What do you do all day?
I am one of two project archivists hired to process the senatorial papers of Ted Kaufman and Joe Biden over the next two years. Ted Kaufman was Biden’s long-time chief of staff (1976-1995). He was specially appointed to the Senate when Biden became Vice President in 2009 and the papers from his office came to the University of Delaware after his term ended in 2011. Me and my co-archivist decided to start with his papers mainly because his collection is much, much smaller than Biden’s (pre-processing stats: 38 linear feet vs. around 2000 linear feet – congressional collections tend to get really hefty in terms of linear feet). I’ve been at this job for about two months now (and I previously worked at a political archives and research center in 2012), so most of my time right now is spent surveying every single box on the shelves to verify their contents and playing around with an Excel spreadsheet that lists box inventories for all the accessions that make up the collection. We’re also starting to sort all the data to determine potential subgroups, series, subseries, etc.

Right now we are definitely in the project planning and appraisal stage. At this point we are experimenting with various project management tools and creating lots of Gantt charts, timelines, and WBS (work breakdown structures), and estimating metrics for how long it should take us to complete specific steps of the project. Part of my job also includes working with the IT department in the library to build an electronic records workstation to accession and process the electronic records associated with the two collections. And we also know that we’re going to run into audiovisual materials from days of olde (VHS, audiocassettes, minicassettes, Umatic, etc.), so we’re also writing best practice policies and workflows for how to accession and process these formats.

Eventually someday (hopefully) we will also write the finding aid and maybe even come up with ideas on how the collection will be used for future exhibits and instruction sessions (the collection won’t be open for use until Biden has left public office for two years).  I’m also planning on coming up with a project that a graduate assistant from the Political Science department will work on and supervise him/her. And me and my co-archivist are already talking about future opportunities to potentially collaborate on a session proposal or paper about managing large hybrid collections. Right now I am just thankful that I have another peer archivist to bounce ideas off of and to manage this project. It can be easy to get overwhelmed by the volume of boxes we need to go through!

UCLA Information Studies: Fields of Endeavor || Featuring Kylie Harris (United Nations Joint Inspection Unit)

SAA @ UCLA presents “UCLA Information Studies: Fields of Endeavor.” The Fields of Endeavor series introduces UCLA Library and Information Studies program graduates and current interns who are out in the field taking knowledge learned in the program and putting it to use! We are pleased to feature international intern Kylie Harris.

Kylie in Rome, during a research trip for the UN

Name: Kylie Harris
Graduation Year: 2013
MLIS Focus: Archival Studies
Job Title and Site: United Nations  Internship at the Joint Inspection Unit: Archives and Records Management Evaluation in Geneva, Switzerland

What do you do all day?
It all depends on the day, but it could be anything from background research on the records and archives management policies of the different UN entities, designing questionnaires for the units responsible for archives and records management, building a survey on Survey Monkey for staff in all business units to determine actual records management practices, designing and completing tables to compare the different UN entities across a wide variety of archives and records management issues, drafting sections for the report, discussing the project with my supervisor, having team meetings with the Inspector, attending interviews with professionals in the field from the different UN entities, to going on mission with the team to conduct interviews in Rome, Paris, and Brussels.

Most frequent response when you tell people what you do:
When I tell people that I am studying library and information science, specializing in archives, they often respond by saying or asking, “Oh, how interesting…” (whilst looking quite uninterested) or, “So what do you do exactly??” or, “What made you decide to do that??” When I tell people from California about the internship in Geneva they often express excitement and surprise, but when I tell people in Geneva about my internship at the UN they just say “Oh okay, cool” or something like that. So many people in Geneva work for international organizations that to them it’s no big deal.

Most interesting item, record, document, etc. you have come across:
It may seem boring, but for me the most interesting document I worked with was the archives and records management policy document for the UN Secretariat (called the ST/SGB/2007/5). It wasn’t interesting because it’s a great or influential document, but exactly the opposite.