so i am recording the session ladies if you'd like to go ahead and get started without further ado here's bethany and jessica hi everyone um thank you so much for joining us this afternoon so we would like to start this off by giving a land acknowledgement since we are recognizing the university of illinois and also because bethany and i both reside within this community and so we feel it is important to begin by recognizing and acknowledging that we are on the lands of the peoria cascakia pyankasha waya miami muskotin adawa sakh miskwaki kickapoo polywatami ojibway and chickasaw nations these lands were the traditional territory of the native nations prior to their forced removal these lands continue to carry the stories of these nations and their struggles for survival and identity as a land-grant institution the university of illinois has a particular responsibility to acknowledge the peoples of these lands as well as the histories of dispossession that have allowed for the growth of this institution for the past 150 years we are also obligated to reflect on and actively address these histories and the role that this university has played in shaping them this acknowledgement in the centering of native peoples is they start as we move forward for the next 150 years so you can go to the next slide bethany so to give you an idea of what we're talking about today we're going to give you a little bit of a background on the university of illinois archives a brief history and examples of some contemporary collecting projects and takeaways and considerations for doing contemporary collecting and ex we're especially stressing the word considerations um because we're in the midst of kind of discussing a lot of these ideas of how contemporary collecting has evolved with some of the work that we've done and that while we may have come up with some temporary solutions we want to make it known that there are some areas where maybe everything hasn't been perfectly resolved and that we may need to revisit some of this and of course we're open to any type of feedback and suggestions that any of you may have to offer because i know that there are many of you who have thought about similar projects and are doing some amazing work next slide okay thank you jessica um so just to provide some brief background about the university of illinois archives where jessica and i both work the university of illinois archives was established in 1963 and it is one of several special collections units that are part of the university of illinois library in addition to records and personal papers related to the university the archives holds materials related to several professional organizations including the american library association the ad council and the third armored division the archives has programmatic areas and faculty papers fine and applied arts including the souza archives and center for american music multicultural collections and services natural and applied sciences and student life and culture and while we acquire institutional records and faculty and alumni papers we also have a history of documenting current events on campus so for example the first university archivist maynard richford had done a lot of work to acquire materials related to current student life and also documenting current science and he argued that the archivist should spend most of the time out of the office and engaging with campus life and activities so now i will turn it over to jessica who will discuss a couple examples of collecting the present so in 2001 student life and culture archivist ellen slain conducted a documentation project that gave the university community an opportunity to reflect about the tragic events surrounding 9 11. the project while very public had anonymous responses ellen also included a statement saying this space is being provided for the university community to express our emotions about the tragedy the nation is facing our hope for this space is to promote a civil and supportive atmosphere for the entire campus please be respectful of your fellow students faculty staff and extended university family the project definitely received a variety of responses from a call for peace the need to stand in solidarity with one another some responses maybe were not um considered may have been considered somewhat controversial but it really did help to show and reflect how people were um grieving and thinking about this experience and there were even some responses and reflections that um were in various languages as well and you can go to the next slide so 20 years later many of our projects have moved a little bit more from an analog approach to more of a digital approach and while using digital methodology has its advantages especially when you're trying to navigate documentation projects during a pandemic when we're not always able to gather as much as we'd like there definitely can be some challenges and even some responsibilities that can be placed on archivists so some of this is a little bit what i'm about to discuss is a little bit of a recap from a presentation um that i was a part of on juneteenth in of this past 2020. um it was a virtual discussion facilitated by burgess jewels which featured various organizations including documenting the now the black avis witness texas actor violence project and project stand and one of the discussions that i talked about was the record series being black at illinois and this series documents protests particularly around 2015 around the campus community and the responses particularly after a recent trial in ferguson and the collection while very powerful with the imagery of students and different representation with the university community helped to kind of tell the story about the responses and the way that people were feeling um required some concern even when they were initially transferred there were discussions about making the content accessible but of course trying to put in maybe some protocols about if any of this was to be used that there needed to be the university of course needed the archives needed to be tagged there needed to be maybe a conversation even with the donor about how some of this might be used however and at that time we well there were certain factors such as um facial recognition we probably weren't thinking about some of the concerns maybe as clearly as we might think more around 2020 or 2021 and what actually made this conversation come more to light um was a conversation that i had with project stand there was interest in using these photos for the website and while the photos especially are very powerful there was an immediate concern about how this could possibly maybe negatively impact students that were part of this movement and what also became more of a concern is realizing this content was donated by a staff member and while that staff member works very closely with students there was very limited student input when it came to acquiring this record series so that prompted me to reach out to the donor to have a very honest conversation about how there is interest in wanting to use this series however it may not be best particularly to just make it access easily accessible even on project stand's website and the donor appreciated the concern and offered to actually give us some other resources such as a powerpoint presentation and just asked us to double check to make sure there weren't any pictures included but the content could very much help to explain the movement the donor also um co-wrote an article that was published that helps to tell this story and also tied in some other past movements on the university of illinois campus and how all of it kind of connected so it ended up being a very positive experience because it was a way of us realizing that sometimes we do need to revisit what we've already done because maybe there's more concerns that have shown up so in the present moment we've decided that the records series can still be searchable you can search it you can read the description but you won't be able at least for now to see the photos or the videos you there is a note that you can contact the university archives if you would like to receive access but of course that will entail a discussion about how this content might be used and a proper consent form and so we wanted to just make it clear that you know we don't it's not that we want to restrict all of it but there are some real concerns and that we need to have more of a discussion about how some of this might be used and ultimately of course we want to ensure that more safety is provided and you can go to the next slide so an alternative to point to actually is the black students for revolution record series and what's especially important about this record series is this organization worked very closely with um former archives colleague anna trammell and she has cultivated a relationship with the student group as they were visiting the archives multiple times to look at other collections and that started a conversation about transferring some of their own records so we do have a small series from them so and um shortly after they've donated some of their paper documents then a conversation with anna came about donating some digital files as well and anna worked closely with the students to make sure that they had input throughout this process and that the descriptions accurately reflected their materials and they have a variety of records they do have some photos and videos but they also have flyers and pamphlets and quite a bit of material that gives you such variety and this is a series where i do plan on reaching out to the student group um many of them have graduated but there still are some around to make sure that they're still okay with the way that this is accessed and that this is accessible but you know we have felt that it is important when we look at these two record series that one didn't really have student input the being black at illinois series but the black students for revolution record series very much had active student participation when it came to the transfer of these records and you can go to the next slide and these are just also some of the other quick um things that you can find in the black students for revolution series so i will turn it over to bethany now thanks jessica so um the first example that i'm going to talk about relates to a controversy that the university archives documented back in 2014 and 2015. in 2014 the university of illinois board of trustees rescinded an offer of employment to dr steven saletta after he had made comments on twitter that were critical of israel's military attacks in gaza salida had been previously offered a tenured position at the university of illinois and then it was withdrawn by the chancellor phyllis wise shortly before he was due to move to illinois it was later revealed that the chancellor and several other employees had used personal email accounts to discuss the matter in an effort to evade public disclosure several months later in august of 2015 the chancellor and provost both resigned from their positions and along with several other staff and administrators so as the controversy unfolded the archives wanted to set up a way to capture the university community's reaction as well as broader national media attention our colleague chris prom who is associate dean for digital strategies in the university of illinois library had set up a project to capture the controversy since several people were working on this project together at the same time the idea was to employ low barrier tools that would enable us to capture this content quickly and we used tags or the twitter archiving google sheet to capture tweets using the hashtag salida and also use the internet archive save a page plugin for google chrome which enables anyone using a chrome browser to right-click on a page and archive it we use the tool to capture media stories blogs university websites and reddit forums on the salida controversy the archive urls were added to a google doc and organized by type of web page such as university document or news media website and then by date they're under the idea was to create something akin to an analog clippings file the resulting document ended up being 147 pages long so we ended up collecting quite a few number of urls and while multiple people were able to easily implement and use the save a page plug-in we had to make sure that we weren't duplicating each other's work which did happen a couple of times um so it was really important to communicate about who was capturing which web content um and also to make sure that we were checking the google doc as it was updated and while this was a relatively easy method the metadata that we have is pretty limited and so we also collected some other digital materials in addition to this which still are waiting to be processed such as videos and other documents and those were also ingested into our digital repository another contemporary collecting effort that some of the archives and other colleagues in the university library participated in was documenting the local women's march in champaign-urbana on january 21st 2017 and we followed the guidance that had been set up by daniel russell and katrina van dieben as other repositories all over the country and the world were working to document the march in dc as well as their local marches in champaign-urbana or cu as we call it there were there are several cultural heritage and institutions and repositories so we wanted to make sure that we collaborated with the champaign county historical archives which is located at the urbana-free library since the cu march was of the local community which the champaign county historical archives would be the appropriate repository for so all of the posters and oral histories that we collected were given to the champion county historical archives and we made sure to use their donation and interview forms and had meetings beforehand to make sure that we could coordinate our work with them as a science archivist one of the things that i'm really interested in is documenting current science the university of illinois has developed a number of innovations and research initiatives in response to covert 19. and these projects range from studies to analyze and address the effects of the virus to the development of medical apparatus and testing mechanisms so for example researchers at illinois developed the shield saliva test to regularly screen all faculty staff and students twice a week or more and that recently received fda authorization as well and the test results are pretty fast and you generally get them within 24 hours and the university also had developed an accompanying app called safer illinois where you can track your results and then also it allows you to show a badge when you're entering a building to show whether you've had a recent negative test in addition other such projects include an emergency ventilator called rapidvent and so i worked with the web archiving graduate assistant in the university of illinois library grace moran to decide on which sites to crawl and how frequently to crawl them and we decided to crawl most of the sites on a monthly basis especially those which appeared to be updated frequently but there were also a handful of sites that we decided to just crawl once such as news stories and publications that were related to some of these research projects so i wanted to ensure that we captured documentation on the sites as well such as license agreements that the research teams had provided as well as manuals on how to implement and use some of these um apparatus that they had developed but also the associated publications with these research projects um such as this preprint that's here on the side and so we decided to crawl these types of documents only once a longer term goal that i have is to reach out to some of these interdisciplinary scientific teams to conduct oral history interviews and learn more about the records that they've generated from these research projects related to this work last year jessica and i developed a project to collect reflections from the campus community during the pandemic we created a submission form for people to submit demographic information and upload a variety of types of digital materials in the submission form that we created the only question that we made mandatory is about whether the individual making the submission is a faculty member student alumni or staff and we made the rest of the questions optional we also felt it was really important to enable people to be able to submit an anonymously also hearkening back to the original 9 11 project that ellen swain had done we have definitely have um some thoughts about how we would do similar co you know contemporary collecting projects differently moving forward and how to ensure that we are approaching these projects ethically and with care and on the following slide we have a list of a few considerations that we think are important to bear in mind with such contemporary collecting projects so now i will turn it over to jessica to talk a bit about this thank you and just to add there will be a little bit more discussion about the kova documentation project during a midwest archives conference presentation as well and that it was very important for us to make sure that people aren't feeling any type of pressure to contribute to this type of project um especially with the the clovidson mission documentation project there have been people that personally reached out that said i really want to contribute but i'm not in the space to do this right now but i understand the importance of why you're documenting this project and so we've tried to make it very clear that in no way do we want to pressure anyone to contribute and of course even once this project ends people are always welcome to submit responses to us later and i have personally told people that i also in the future would like to even contribute to the documentation um to contribute to some of the projects that um my alma maters have are working on as well but i'm personally not at a point where i'm ready to do that as well nor do i feel any type of pressure and so that's something that we've made sure to emphasize is that this space is provided for those who would like to share and that there's an option of how much people would like to share but that it is it's there but it is of course not anything that we want to obligate anyone to do as we personally are trying to um work through this pandemic ourselves and nothing will be accessible until we have done a very thorough review as well because of course like many of us we are gradually learning about these best practices as well and so you can go to the next slide so some of the considerations and takeaways are are our practices ethical is there proper consent what records do we need to revisit in order to ensure that there are more ethical practices and policies put in place should we restrict accessibility of some of the records as was kind of pointed out with the being black at illinois series and if so how much do we restrict some of it and unfortunately that means some of these series might mean that there is limited accessibility at least in the present moment and that it could you know limit those who could really use this material as valuable ways for research purposes but we also recognize that there may be people who may misuse certain records other than their original intent and as archivists it is important to recognize that no matter how much we try to ensure ethical practices and proper copyright procedures these may be challenges that we always are going to have to maybe reconsider and confront and while that might be difficult it shouldn't discourage us from recognizing potential concerns and i will personally say some of it has resonated with me as in 2015 when i was a grad student i did participate in some black lives matter rallies and other um protests and movements so it is on one end where you know i think there's plenty of us that can provide a certain amount of empathy that some of us have been out there in those spaces in that um we personally could have been impacted and it is important to make sure that we are thinking about that as well and even if we haven't personally been impacted um the concerns of course should always be on our mind and sophia noble um notes that the right to control over group and personal identity and memory must become a matter of concern for archivist librarians and information workers so now let bethany finish the rest um and so also when thinking about collection scope it's you know not just important to decide what to collect for these kinds of projects but also to think about what's feasible to collect um and what resources do we have to collect the materials and what kinds of appraisal considerations will be important to bring to bear on the materials and these are projects that we should not just embark on alone either but think about who are our stakeholders are there other repositories with whom we have overlapping collecting purviews and interests or that we might partner with um and above all you know think about how we you know should be building relationships with the community which we seek to document or for whom and or for whom we seek to document archives are fundamentally about building relationships and documenting relationships engaging with donors and creators is a really vital part of that so that we can not only better understand the context in which materials are created and used but also develop more reciprocal and collaborative models for stewarding them and as a part of that we also really need to think about how we can employ responsible and ethical workflows and tools and this might mean you know in a sense moving away from the idea of quote unquote rapid collecting and capturing large quantities of content and instead you think about how we can consider moving towards what kimberly christian and jane anderson describe as slow archives which is not necessarily meant to be opposed to the idea of fast but as they write slowing down is about focusing differently listening carefully and acting ethically so we should ask ourselves are we using tools that perpetuate and reinforce inequities are our workflows reinforcing inequities and causing harm we need to do a lot of work and thinking before we embark on collecting the present and so jessica and i are um not presenting any answers here at all but um but we just wanted to share some of the challenges that that we faced and that we think are important for the archival community to talk about and we look forward to hearing your thoughts about that and we also uh just prepared a slide with um some references um that we were either used for this talk or some other resources that we've um found to be useful so happy to share that and thank you so much and uh we'd be happy to hear your questions and comments i'll let the virtual accolades pour in for you you can watch the hands clap on the screen um so i'll remind everyone if you want to pop some questions in the chat i'm happy to share those uh if you'd like to unmute yourself please do so just let us know who you are where you're from and ask away and i'll give a second that anybody wants to pop in otherwise i have a question already ready to go you're getting a lot of claps in the chat by the way well i'll kick it off uh i have a question from helen conger and you both have already already touched on this a little bit so maybe you could expand upon it uh helen asks does the university archives have a time period where restrictions on access will expire for a collection like being black at illinois records or even all records i'm guessing that university records are subject to open records laws question mark um yeah i can start and bethany can contribute more um yes we we do um on a i from what i understand we do a lot of things case by case there are some standard procedures that um depending on the type of information it might we might restrict it for you know x amount of years and make sure that there is a note in place so that people are aware just in case someone happens to leave so that that information is clear for being black at illinois i think we're we haven't really put a time limit on it um what was important really in the present moment was when it became very clear that there was limited student involvement maybe we need to rethink this um that we wanted to just first um you know re limit some of that accessibility just to ensure that we were trying to make sure that we were trying just ensure safety concerns um it's we are um we have a small working group um that has you know discussed some of these concerns as well i think what we've felt at this moment um just to be perfectly honest is because we're not in the archives like we regularly are and that there is somewhat um to a certain extent of a disconnect that we just didn't want to make a decision where we moved too quickly um and so we didn't we wanted to make it known yes the series exists if you want to learn more about it you can come talk to us if there is an interest in using it we can have a conversation to figure out what's the best use so i would say specifically for being black at illinois it's something where we are taking it by a case by case because we wanted to make sure we're not doing something too quickly as well sorry about that i got another question here uh how do you deal with hipaa concerns in the covid19 submission yeah i can um i can take that actually one of the things that we discussed before we created the submission form we had consulted with the university archivist and a number of others in the library before we made it go live but um we did put a note on there that we asked people to you know not explicitly include health information um just because we're not really set up in a way to um to adequately um kind of create access and manage access to that kind of information however in a pandemic where you're collecting information about people's experiences you know that's something that is really difficult to you know to not include and on the other hand we also had a conversation with a professor in the history department um who focuses on the history of um medicine and um you know thinking about you know what do we what do we want to create as a record of this you know for the future for future researchers um and so you know having um some of this sort of health related or public health related information would be really critical to that end um so you know like jessica mentioned you know this is something that we're going to have to review and spend some time reviewing before we decide how and to create access to the materials but um you know it's definitely not perfect um by any means you know jessica has anything to add to that well no i have nothing to add um in that same vein i have a question that's kind of in the same vein that came from kate and i'll just it's uh i'll just read the text here uh we solicit uh contributions text and photos from our campus community about the pandemic experience we got permission from some contributors to open their photos to public view immediately but then realize that a lot of the photos are screenshots of zoom meetings whose participants don't necessarily know they're being photographed we have the same problem kate their faces and display names are visible we ended up restricting the whole collection for now but kate is wondering if you've run into similar issues yeah i think we received a few submissions that do include group zoom screenshots um so yeah that again is something where yeah we would need to you know carefully think about how we would create access it might be the kind of thing where you know we would create access in the reading room and have you know some user consent mechanisms in place we did also it was optional but submitters could include their email addresses so if we do have concerns about some of the materials that were donated we could certainly reach out to those those folks and have a conversation further about that as well so yeah i've got another question here ashley would like to know what are some challenges to getting started in finding um i'm wondering if there could maybe if um if ashley can maybe expand upon that regarding coven materials or [Music] protests or any other type of protests um i would say i don't know that it has been too much of a challenge with finding materials um and i think part of it is that in some ways i don't know that we've necessarily had an intent on trying to specifically go out and acquire materials but more so about when people come to us what are the best practices and procedures that we should consider within that and i think we've tried to be you know very careful especially this summer there were questions about you know what's the archives going to do to document this work and i think for us we kind of felt it's not necessarily our place to go out there and take pictures and document but if people would like to send anything to us how do we carefully examine this material and i think it's also important to note i had a great point that um one of my the zoom life and culture archivist ellen slain brought up is we have so much material from protests especially from the 1960s but we didn't acquire all of it in the 1960s a lot of that has been given to us over time so i think that's been the main thing is wanting to make sure that if people want to come to us that they feel welcome to with all the questions that are involved in the course that we're making sure that we are asking the right questions as well and that no one of course should feel obligated that's the challenging part i think for many of us of wanting to make sure that we are encompassing the full picture of everything but there there's been a lot of discussions with archivists that some people want to be forgotten and they very much have that right i'll pop in and say ashley did say protests but i think you i think you covered that but feel free to expand upon that if you'd like but i will give you this next question nancy asks are you requiring deed of gifts for submissions to the covid project they decided this was the way to go with their own project at smith college um we did not um we did um include some language in the submission form um you know to let people know that these are materials that we would be making publicly accessible um however in retrospect i think that you know would have been good to think about how we could have implemented some sort of deed a gift in that situation so um yeah so i would love to hear how others have approached that as well too i've got a question here from i think it's lena do you have any advice for collecting materials directly from student organizations lena says we have a we have the problem that students are not the most responsive to emails during the term and then the turnover is high enough that they're constantly starting over uh to create those relationships um yeah ellen swain of course is a perfect person who can provide a lot of input given um the many years that she's worked with student organizations um some of what we've done is um we obviously could not do it this past fall but they have this event quad day which is where everyone all these student organizations are out on the quad and we've gone to different organizations to talk about who we are and that's been a positive way to have a little bit of communication i have the fun part of going there because for some reason people still think i'm an undergrad so people just love to tell me about their organization so that's been a nice way to have some personal connection and what's also been helpful is sometimes there are student organizations that have anniversaries coming up and they'll reach out to us and we try to make sure they have as much input as well and what they would like to see so that's also been a way to even attract quite a few alumni and there's been some great faculty that have worked with us as well that have had us come talk to classes one area that i've that i've found lately that's been helpful is having more of a connection with the cultural centers on campus because a lot of the directors have close communication with quite a few student organizations and especially that's been a relationship that ellen slain and anna trammell have both cultivated and i've um have been able to work with some of them a little bit more with anniversaries and so many of the directors have also just been communicating with us a little bit more and so some of them have said you know what we have these student groups and they need to actually come talk to you but ellen slain i definitely recommend looking at some of the work that she's published as well i know she did kind of a student archives consulting program so she's someone that i get to talk to all the time about this because our offices are right next to each other but even just reading what she's published i think is a great resource great i do have a question from matthew howardy's collections and projects that document the present help inform collecting decisions in the future and how might they provide further insight into previous projects that document the past yeah that's a really interesting question for me i guess um one of the things that i've kind of thought of in reflecting on some of you know these contemporary collecting projects is um you know the importance of engaging with donors and creators and you know what you lose when you don't have that um so i think you know thinking more critically and carefully about how we can do that moving forward is something that would be really important [Music] and yeah and i think that even examining how we've approached these efforts over time is um something really interesting to think about you know as you know jessica talked about the 911 project um you know provided some really interesting um and important um things for us to think about in terms of um providing a you know sort of safe space for people to share um their reactions um but yeah i don't know just if you have anything else to add to that as well um no i think you said everything pretty well um i'll uh hop back in uh so kind of going back to that 9 11 uh collection project that you discussed at the top of the presentation uh you know sometimes those kind of projects especially in the in the immediate aftermath and you see people donating those materials they sometimes are maybe a little more some are very heated and then some are just hatred so how do you contend with that kind of material that that is more heat at the moment and or well less heat at the moment and more hatred filled how do you contend with that and how do you work with that material for long term especially down the road knowing that this may at some point become presentation material exhibit material that's a really good question um that's requiring me requiring me to think a lot and i'm sure i'm going to have lots of thoughts right after this ends because that's how it always goes when you have a presentation that all these things come to mind that you should have said um i i think what we always what we often have to remind ourselves too is that of course there's going to be a lot of material um and there's definitely been material in the past that may not necessarily represent or reflect our personal views but that perspective exists and it's it's out there um it's something even that i've realized even as i've given instruction of needing to sometimes remind students of yeah you might see some content that will depict blackface from the 1930s that's not something that i personally enjoy looking at but it's also part of the history um it it it exists um so i i think it's important um keeping that in mind but also making thinking about you know how that might be portrayed or discussed um but it is definitely one of those um you know challenging areas great and i have a comment uh steph says your framework around an ethic of care is so thoughtful this feels like an authentic and holistic approach to archival work in academic archives it's not a question just a recognition that this work is hard work hard work i like that this work is hard work if anybody else i'm monitoring the chat but feel free if anybody wants to pop in and ask a question in person or over the over the chat you're welcome to do so well i'm not seeing any takers but i know that uh the session we are recording the session and there were a request or two for your references jessica and bethany so we will get those references that reference slide from you and uh figure out how to share that to the uh wider audience uh elizabeth asks if we're gonna send out the link to the recording uh yes i know that we're we're saving it to the cloud and we'll we'll figure out how and where that's going to go but we'll definitely let you know where that is i do have a last minute question slipping in here do student donors always transfer the rights to the archives in the deed slash donation forms uh they're thinking about ownership of materials created by students that's a a great question that again alan swain is very much the expert and especially when i've worked with some student groups there's always that conversation that we have and um one of the things that we are looking at and there's been some great examples that people from other the archivists from other institutions have provided especially in terms of what um adidas gift form looks like and there was one that was what gets a little complicated at the university of illinois i know this is not the situation with every institution and particularly not every state school but what's a little challenging is that archival records it really doesn't matter whether or not they're students faculty provost it is seen as part of a university property and part of state property and that gets a little interesting and so um there have been forms of consent forms developed for working with specifically for student groups but there has been a desire to you know particularly work with administrators on making sure that it's drafted in the best way it's been a little bit hard with communication but ellen and i recently talked about that's something that we need to also just revisit as well um because it is something that you know we want to make sure is very um understood that um while we may not always want to that we don't always i'm trying to say my words correctly that that is you know a factor and these records depending on how someone wants to look at it it is officially you know seen as something that um is related to the state and that it and that is something that unfortunate that really it does that doesn't it does not matter how our personal views are with that and so it's making sure that we are complying and that um there's a lot of clarity um about that if that makes any sense have one last question um do you consult your university council uh with questions regarding restrictions on collections and access we have um definitely particularly depending on what division it's referring to if it's student affairs there's a lot of various consulting as well and what helps in a lot of ways especially is that we have quite a few individuals within the archives that have been affiliated with the university for a while so there is a lot of institutional just knowledge um even for those of us who haven't been here as long about you know who it is that we should be um asking the right questions to so um it is a matter where there's just a lot where we've had to take things by a case by case and bethany might have more to add yeah i think it is you know essentially a case-by-case situation and we have worked with legal counsel in the past to review for example our oral history interview agreement form um in addition to the current data gift that we that we use so um yeah so there has been some case-by-case [Music] work in coordination with um with them as well thank you i've got one last question more of a procedural thing i think from paul paul wants to know how do you curate or process the materials that you have been given do your processors organize or arrange them or are they treated as a single lump i guess i could just say that it's a sort of uh a case-by-case um situation how we process materials it really depends um you know what the materials are um you know as jessica mentioned this working group that we're part of that you know we're kind of thinking through more carefully how we will be um you know appraising and processing and making accessible um you know some of these materials so that's something that um you know i think that we're currently in the process of rethinking and re-evaluating as well so uh yeah but i think it is you know essentially on a case-by-case situation um with administrative records um you know we might um you know employ sort of a more mplp kind of approach but with you know materials like um faculty papers or alumni papers you know would employ you know more careful kind of approach and thinking about how we want to arrange and describe those materials so i don't know jessica has anything else to add to that yeah definitely and i would say we're in an interesting position where we are we have three different service points as well um so we're in three different locations and um so with with our collection scopes sometimes there are certain um as bethany kind of echoed where certain um series might look a little differently i mean i think a perfect example is the sue the archives and center for american music because that is specialized in a way it's some of that is going to look quite different than um working with student life and culture records um or faculty papers so um it's i think also we've kind of based it on even just with some of the ways that we've cultivated relationships as well and i did want to just point out that angel diaz noted project stan's toolkit for archiving student activism and that's something that we've been very much reviewing and have found it very helpful and very thoughtful about questions to ask especially regarding materials related to student activism great well i think we'll end it here thank you again jessica and bethany for sharing your valuable knowledge and insight we really appreciate it uh this is also a reminder for those of you who are interested in the next webinar it will happen on april 15th which is a thursday at 1 pm eastern just hop up to that link at the top of the chat and you'll be linked out to those webinars so a big round of applause again for jessica and bethany and we'll see y'all next time thanks so much thank you
2021-03-18