Category: Books

New/Recent Scholarship: Books

Agents of Empire: How E.L. Mitchell’s photographs shaped Australia
By Joanna Sassoon

Participatory Heritage
Edited by Henriette Roued-Cunliffe and Andrea Copeland

Presidential Libraries as Performance: Curating American Character from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush (Theater in the Americas)
Jodi Kantor

The No-nonsense Guide to Project Management
Barbara Allan

Primary Research and Writing: People, Places, and Spaces, by Lynee Lewis Gaillet, Michelle F. Eble.

Media, Margins, and Civic Agency, by multiple authors. One chapter is “Victims at the Margins? A Comparative Analysis of the Use of Primary Sources in Reporting Personal Tragedy in Norway and the UK.”

Engaging with Records and Archives Histories and Theories, Edited by Fiorella Foscarini, Heather MacNeil, Bonnie Mak, and Gillian Oliver.

The Special Collections Handbook, 2nd Edition, by Alison Cullingford.

The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting, by Anne Trubeck

Valuing Your Collection: A practical guide for museums, libraries and archives
Freda Matassa

Searching for Color in Black & White: Epistemic Closure, the RIT Archives, and the Colonial Roots of White Invisibility (thesis)
Andrew James

Managing People and Projects in Museums: Strategies that Work
Martha Morris

The Care and Display of Historic Clothing
Karen M. DePauw

Registration Methods for the Small Museum, Fifth Edition
Daniel B. Reibel, revised by Deborah Rose Van Horn

Call for Book Proposals: Controversial Monuments and Memorials

Controversial Monuments and Memorials:
A Guide from the American Association for State and Local History

In the wake of the horrific recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the ensuing move to remove monuments to white supremacy, the American Association for State and Local History Editorial Board is seeking book proposals for a work tentatively titled Controversial Monuments and Memorials: A Guide from the American Association for State and Local History.

In order to publish the book while communities are still grappling with this part of their local history, the Board seeks proposals from authors able to complete a 40-50,000 word manuscript between now and December 29, 2017 (approximately four months). Given this short timeline, the Editorial Board will consider proposals that include some reprinted material.

The AASLH Editorial Board envisions a guide for public officials, community leaders, and historic site and museum professionals that will prepare readers to:

  1. Understand the history of racial violence that makes these monuments, memorials, and other physical markers like street signs, controversial in the United States (possibly also providing some international context and examples for comparative purposes).
  2. Discuss the events in Charlottesville and other locales as they relate to their own communities.
  3. Present their communities with practical ways to move forward in contextualizing and/or removing controversial monuments.

Proposals should address these questions:

  1. Imagine that your book is being promoted on the AASLH website or on Amazon. Begin with a title that captures the tone and spirit of your book. What would the ideal descriptive copy be? Emphasize special features or sections using bullets where appropriate.
  2. Your one to three paragraph bio. Emphasize your education and experience that’s relevant to this book topic. Please include other articles or books you’ve published related to this topic. The point here is to position yourself as an expert in this area
  3. Tentative table of contents. Please include page number estimates for each chapter. Please also include for each chapter an estimated number of photographs, figures, tables, or other graphic elements you think you would want to include in the chapter.

For questions, please contact Rebecca Shrum, Series Editor, at rshrum@iupui.edu or Bob Beatty, Managing Editor, at beatty@aaslh.org.

Rowman & Littlefield will offer a $1,000 advance against royalties to the author upon acceptance of a complete manuscript delivered by December 29, 2017.

Proposals are due Monday, September 18, to Bob Beatty (beatty@aaslh.org).

Let’s Do Lunch at ARCHIVES 2017

Dive into a lunch discussion of the professional literature with your colleagues during ARCHIVES 2017!

  • Article exploration: Get a peek at a forthcoming American Archivist article—“Surveying Archivists and their Work toward Advocacy and Management, or ‘Enterprise Archiving’” by Sarah A. Buchanan, Jane Gruning, Ayse Gursoy, and Lecia Barker—during a Brown Bag Lunch on Thursday, July 27, 12:15 p.m.–1:30 p.m. Discussion will be led by American Archivist Editor Greg Hunter. RSVP by emailing Abigail Christian at achristian@archivists.org (subject line: “American Archivist Brown Bag Lunch”). Article will be forwarded to you.
  • Book Discussion: How can archivists create a diverse record or recruit and retain a diverse workforce? Whose stories are being told—and by whom? Where are the silences in the record? These questions and more are at the heart of the 2017 One Book, One Profession selection, Through the Archival Looking Glass: A Reader on Diversity and Inclusion, edited by Mary A. Caldera and Kathryn M. Neal. Join Camila Tessler of Yale University who will lead a Brown Bag lunch discussion on this acclaimed collection of essays on Friday, July 28, from 12:45 p.m.–1:45 p.m. RSVP by emailing Abigail Christian at achristian@archivists.org (subject line: “Through the Archival Looking Glass Brown Bag Lunch”).

New Book: Women in the Museum: Lessons From the Workplace

From the authors:

Museums are complex workplaces.  Guardians of America’s patrimony, they are simultaneously thought of as traditional, boring and irrelevant, but also progressive, fun and important. With collections and exhibitions lauded and vilified, museums are both significant economic drivers and astoundingly vulnerable organizations.  Collectively United States museums employ nearly 353,000 people, almost half of them women.  There is no denying that most museums are stimulating and wondrous, one-of-a-kind, work environments, but two years ago we could not have imagined the gender inequity lying beneath their placid exteriors.
Women in the Museum explores the professional lives of the field’s female workforce, a cohort that grew exponentially from the late 19th-century to the present. It chronicles the challenges working women in the museum field face today, as well as their responses to widespread entrenched and unconscious gender bias.  In doing so, we hope it clarifies how women’s work in museums is different from men’s, and why we think museums must create, foster and protect a level playing field.
Along the way, we asked ourselves these questions:  Are workplace challenges more acute for women if a field is under-resourced, under-appreciated, or in some instances, under-utilized? How is leadership and internal decision-making different in female dominated museums?  Do public perceptions change toward fields where females make up half or more of the workforce?
It is difficult to write about women in the workplace and not write about diversity, and we have been taken to task for that.  It’s especially difficult in a field that since its founding has been a bastion of white, middle and upper-class men and subsequently women.  While issues of racial and ethnic diversity, sexual orientation, age, physical ability and class are often aligned with gender equity, we’ve chosen to take a bite out of the broadest and most basic of topics in one of the narrowest of fields — an environment almost exclusively nonprofit, under-resourced, and little understood by the public.  Our intent is to pull back the curtain on a long-standing and unresolved gender issue:  equity.  What we’ve written is an opening salvo deserving wider and deeper scrutiny.
We believe museums create communities. Those communities include women as subjects of collections, exhibits and programming, women as audience members and supporters, and as employees.  That said, we would like to suggest that for us diversity is the presumption that everyone has a place at the table. If you think those ideas are remnants of the 1970’s, read on. We believe there is still much work to do. And for us, inclusion as well as equity are what is important, and making sure women are represented is the place to start.

One Book, One Profession 2017

How can archivists create a diverse record or recruit and retain a diverse workforce? Whose stories are being told—and by whom? Where are the silences in the record? These questions and more are at the heart of the 2017 One Book, One Profession selection, Through the Archival Looking Glass: A Reader on Diversity and Inclusion, edited by Mary A. Caldera and Kathryn M. Neal.

In ten essays incorporating theory and case studies, archivists explore prominent themes related to diversity and question the archive on representation, authority, neutrality, objectivity, and power. This book illustrates a multitude of perspectives and issues so that fresh voices can emerge alongside more familiar ones, and new concepts can be examined along with new perspectives on established ideas.

Diversity is an ever-evolving concept; the term itself is increasingly rephrased as inclusion. By stimulating further ideas and conversation, we can come closer to a common understanding of what diversity and inclusion are or can be and, perhaps most importantly, how they may be realized in archives and the archival profession. As Stephen Scarth of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland wrote in his review of the book for Archives and Records, The Journal of the Archives and Records Association: “This collection of essays should be best viewed as a springboard which will hopefully inspire further original thought on what is still an emerging subject.”

The ideas in this book don’t end with the last page. For the second year of One Book, One Profession, join your colleagues in reading, talking about, and translating these theories into action.

Let’s read Through the Archival Looking Glass—together!

Group Discount on Book Purchase: Host a book discussion within your institution, among archivists in your community, or at a regional meeting—group orders of 5 or more books receive a 40% discount!

Study Guide Questions: Click here to download.

Related Reading & Resources: Click here for a list of other resources.

Selected Events

ARCHIVES 2017 in Portland

Twitter Discussions

  • Follow #OBOP17 on twitter for more updates and to join the conversation profession-wide

SAA Book Sale thru May 8

Offer valid April 21–May 8, 2017.  While supplies last.

Books for $15 each . . .

Controlling the Past: Documenting Society and Institutions
List $56 (SAA Members $39.95)

Many Happy Returns: Advocacy and the Development of Archives
List $56 (SAA Members $39.95)

Navigating Legal Issues in Archives
List $69.95 (SAA Members $49.95)

*        *        *

Books for $10 each . . .

Archival Internships: A Guide for Faculty, Supervisors, and Students
List $29.95 (SAA Members $24.95)

Becoming a Trusted Digital Repository (Module 8)
List $29.99 (SAA Members $19.99)

Describing Archives: A Content Standard
List $29.95 (SAA Members $24.95)

College and University Archives: Readings in Theory and Practice
List $54.95 (SAA Members $39.95)

Encoded Archival Description Tag Library – Version EAD3
List $29.95 (SAA Members $24.95)

How to Keep Union Records
List $49 (SAA Members $35)

Managing Congressional Collections
List $19.95 (SAA Members $19.95)

Norton on Archives: The Writings of Margaret Cross Norton on Archival and Records Management
List $45 (SAA Members $35)

Protecting Your Collections: A Manual of Archival Security
List $30 (SAA Members $25)

Waldo Gifford Leland and the Origins of the American Archival Profession
List $62.95 (SAA Members $44.95)

SAA Title in HathiTrust: Film Preservation

Another SAA book has been added to the HathiTrust Digital Library. Film Preservation: Competing Definitions of Value, Use, and Practice by Karen Gracy was published by SAA in 2007 and is now out of print, but you can view it for free by clicking here. Film Preservation is one of dozens out-of-print books for which SAA has granted full-view permission in the HathiTrust. For a complete list of these open access books, click here. The HathiTrust is a partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized from around the world.

SAA Sampler Series Now Open Access

A few years ago, SAA’s Publications Board started creating samplers. These are introductions to topics and SAA publications, whether to read on your own or used in a classroom. Two recent announcements about these samplers: they are now all open access and there’s a new one on social justice.

SAA samplers online

Archival Advocacy: Archivists must continually explain who they are, what they do, and why archives are important to society. The selected chapters in this sampler offer different approaches and techniques from three books which align with the core goal of advocating for archives.

Law and Ethics: All archivists will face legal or ethical concerns throughout their careers. In many cases, we are caught unaware, and pressure is escalated by time crunches or demanding patrons. The chapter from the three books represented here aim to equip archivists to handle these sorts of dilemmas as they arise, by presenting practical information drawn from real-life experiences of archivists.

Social Justice: As repositories of the objects that make up the historical record, archives have the potential to shape and define our collective understanding of the past. The selected chapters in this sampler consider personal and collective memory as well as examples of political influence over the historical record.

Call for Editor: Archival History Section Newsletter

As I’ve developed this blog, I’ve wavered about including calls and information about newsletters. My purpose in starting this blog is to promote and help with scholarship, so I generally do not incorporate archival newsletters. I’m posting this call (from A&A listserv) because a newsletter editor can develop skills and is a good way to start engaging in publishing.

_________

Dear colleagues:

SAA’s Archival History Section (AHS) is looking for an editor, or two, to help relaunch a newsletter for AHS members and other interested parties.

Founded in 1986 as the Archival History Roundtable, the AHS advocates for and promotes an understanding of the history of the American archival profession. Inspired by the work of other SAA sections (see, for example, the Lone Arrangers Quarterly Newsletter, https://lonearrangers.wordpress.com/about/), this digital newsletter will function as a dynamic space to keep members informed and up-to-date about people, activities, and events of importance to the history of our profession.

The newsletter editor will be appointed to a 2-year term. In partnership with the AHS steering committee (which is working to formalize the editorial structure), the editor’s duties will include:

  • Setting up an online presence for the newsletter via WordPress.com
  • Determining a publication schedule for the newsletter
  • Identifying content appropriate for the newsletter (i.e. news and announcements, feature articles, updates and photos of AHS activities, information about upcoming conferences and publication opportunities, member recognition, obituaries and oral histories).
  • Editing and proofreading content
  • Creating a marketing and social media strategy for the newsletter
  • Joining monthly AHS steering committee calls when needed to provide updates on progress with the newsletter
  • Work with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee libraries to ensure that the content of the newsletter is archived with the SAA archives on a regular basis.

Interested parties should respond with a one-page cover letter describing interest in the position, including how you would encourage original content and collect pre-existing content from a variety of online and print sources in order to build a cadre of authors to sustain the newsletter.  Also, indicate the amount of time you could devote each week to sustaining the newsletter over the next two years.

Please send all expressions of interest, or requests for additional information, to Eric Stoykovich, AHS Chair, EricStoykovich@gmail.com, by March 31.

CFP: Libraries and Nonprofits: Collaboration for the Public Good

This call focuses more on libraries and does not mention archives, but I believe many of you out there have applicable experiences. The recent Archival Outlook article “Radical Partnerships” is an example. Let’s get those archival partnerships out there!

CFP: Libraries and Nonprofits: Collaboration for the Public Good

About the Book

Libraries and Nonprofits: Collaboration for the Public Good (Library Juice Press) will consider the range of partnerships entered into by all types of libraries and nonprofits and will provide resources and best practices for nurturing these collaborations. We are seeking domestic and international case studies which highlight successful (or problematic) collaborations between libraries and nonprofit organizations for inclusion in the book. Case studies may address the following themes relating to nonprofit organizations and library collaborations including (but not limited to):

* civic engagement
* public health
* social safety nets/social work
* arts and culture
* education/literacy
* environment/sustainability/food justice
* LGBTQIA
* anti-racism
* disability rights
* legal aid/human rights
* housing/planning

Examples range from collaborations with financial literacy organizations to provide free or low-cost tax preparation; legal aid organizations to provide civic education and human rights workshops; literacy organizations to provide storytime programs, ESL or tutoring services; or museums to provide exhibitions, pop-up galleries, or STEAM programming.

How to Participate

Authors are invited to submit a case study proposal as an email attachment in Word or PDF to librariesandnonprofits@gmail.com on or before Monday, February 20, 2017. The case study proposal should be 300-500 words (Chicago Style) clearly explaining the intent and details of the proposed case study as it relates to the topics listed above. Proposed case studies should be based on unpublished work, unique to this publication and not submitted or intended to be simultaneously submitted elsewhere.

Authors will be notified by Monday, March 27, 2017 about the status of their proposals and sent case study guidelines. Completed case studies are expected to be between 2,000-4,000 words, although shorter or longer case studies are negotiable. Full case studies are expected to be submitted by Monday, June 26, 2017.

Proposals should include

* Author name(s), institutional or organizational affiliation, job title/role
* Brief author(s) bio
* Proposed case study title
* A summary of the proposed case study (300-500 words)

About the authors

Tatiana Bryant, Special Collections Librarian, University of Oregon Libraries

Jonathan O. Cain, Librarian for Data Initiatives and Public Policy, Planning and Management, University of Oregon Libraries