CFP: 2025 NAGARA

NAGARA is built on the collective knowledge and experiences of its members, and we want to hear from you! Whether you have a groundbreaking idea, a new approach, or lessons learned in your work, we invite you to submit a session proposal for the 2025 NAGARA Annual Conference in Oklahoma City. Let’s come together next July to share insights, exchange best practices, and inspire one another.

The Annual Conference Program Committee encourages professionals across all levels of government, backgrounds, and experiences to submit a session proposal. While all topics are welcomed, consider addressing some of the following timely subjects that have sparked interest within our membership (listed in alphabetical order):

  • Advocating for Archives and Records Management Programs
  • Archives Outreach, Exhibits, and Cultural Storytelling
  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Archives, Records, and Information Management
  • Developing and Launching RIM Programs (working with a limiting budget and low maturity)
  • Development of Policies, Standards, Workflows, and Tools
  • Diversity and Inclusion in Archives and Records Programs
  • Electronic Records ISO Standards, Preservation, and Access
  • Indigenous and Tribal Archives and Records
  • Leadership and People Management
  • Managing Disparate Information Systems (I.E. SharePoint; Shared Drives; Databases; HRIS)
  • Microsoft 365 (implementation, labels, policies, retention, etc.)
  • Program Administration in Archives and Records
  • Public Records Requests/FOIA

Those selected to present at the conference will receive a 25% discount on their registration fees. The deadline to submit is Friday, January 17, 2025. We encourage you to share your expertise and contribute to shaping the future of our profession. Submit your session proposal ideas today and help us make next year’s 2025 NAGARA Annual Conference an exceptional experience for all!

When submitting a conference session proposal, please consider how it:

  • Informs: Tell the audience about a topic in order to transfer knowledge.
  • Improves: Provide the audience with new knowledge that can be applied.
  • Inspires: Energize the audience with innovative ideas.
  • Involves: Include the audience, the profession, and our users.

 The 2025 Annual Conference Program Committee will assess each proposal based on these factors:

  • Completeness and clarity of the proposal
  • Presenter expertise and relevance to the topic
  • Practical takeaways and actionable tools for attendees
  • Relevance to NAGARA’s membership and mission
  • Promotion of diversity in experience, opinion, and background

The 2025 NAGARA Annual Conference will be an in-person event only. All session participants must register for the conference and attend in person. Presenters will receive a 25% discount on their registration fees. The deadline for proposal submissions is Friday, January 17, 2025.

We encourage you to share your expertise and contribute to shaping the future of our profession. Submit your session proposal today and help make the 2025 NAGARA Annual Conference an exceptional experience for all!

Call for Participation: Research Survey about Linked Data

Dear colleagues:

We are seeking participants for a research survey to assess the uptake of Linked Data technologies for cultural heritage description in the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) community. The results from this survey are intended to capture the degree to which Linked Data is being implemented or used by different constituencies, to identify perceptions on added value or pain points of LD, and to infer risks and opportunities for further development in the areas of domain modeling and software development.

This survey will take 5-10 minutes to complete depending on the specific responses. It can be paused at any time and completed at a later point. Your responses are collected anonymously and cannot be tied to your name or email address. No demographic information relating to your person other than your occupational role will be collected. The data collected in this survey will only be shared in aggregate for research purposes.10 respondents to this survey will be drawn at random to receive a $30 Amazon gift card. The survey can be completed here.

If you have any questions, please contact one of the study’s investigators listed below.

Thank you,

Kate A. Bowers (Harvard University, kate_bowers@harvard.edu)

Regine I. Heberlein (Princeton University, heberlei@princeton.edu)

Stephanie M. Luke (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, smluke2@illinois.edu)

CFP: Acid Free

Acid Free, the online magazine of the Los Angeles Archivist Collective, is accepting submissions for its upcoming Issue #15 on the theme of…SOUND!

Acid Free seeks to be a smart, complicated, non-academic forum for a variety of voices and issues in our field, to ground archivists locally and regionally while also keeping an eye toward larger conversations and landscapes. “Sound” can be broadly interpreted through an archival lens. Possible topics may include oral histories, time-based media, music, storytelling, playlist-ing, DJ culture, field recordings, and the absence of sound: archival silence(s), hearing impairment, silent film collections.

Articles can be any length, but we recommend keeping it under 1,000 words. Deadline is December 1, 2024. See attached Call for Submissions for more information! Send questions to acidfree.la@gmail.com.

Yours,

The Acid Free Team

Call for Contributions to Notes from the Field: Fall 2024


Notes from the Field, a publication of the TPS Collective, is accepting submissions about teaching and working with primary sources for three series of peer-reviewed blog posts: “Language,” “Teaching for Large Audiences,” and “Play in Primary Source Instruction.”

These series were crowdsourced during a Notes from the Field TPS Fest session this summer. Grounded in issues your colleagues in the field are exploring, this call is intended to highlight a broad range of voices from all sectors of the TPS community. Please see the calls below for more information.

Series One: Language

In this series, we are interested in hearing how you think, plan, and teach around languages in primary source instruction. Whether you are teaching with materials in non-English languages or teaching in English for English-language learners, we look forward to learning how you harness language acquisition, comparison, or introduction in teaching with primary sources.

Series Two: Teaching for Large Audiences

How do you plan for instruction with primary sources for a lecture room full of students or an at-capacity museum tour group? What are some active learning approaches you have incorporated in-session? How do you receive feedback? Any successes, struggles, and strategies are welcome. 

Series Three: Play in Primary Source Instruction

In this series, we are exploring the state of gamification in primary source instruction. How do you utilize play in your instruction sessions? Have you partnered with faculty in designing activities? Do you center your sessions around physical or digital resources? A mix? We want to hear your reflections, wins, and wishes for the future. 

Contributions should be 1000-1200 words and will be subject to Notes from the Field’s peer review process. Posts will be published on a rolling basis beginning in November 2024. Full submission information is available in the Notes from the Field author and peer review guidelines. Any questions, expressions of interest, or submissions can be sent to the Notes from the Field Lead Editor, Anastasia Armendariz, at ajarm@uci.edu.

CFP: SHARP 2025

SHARP 2025 ROCHESTER
“Communities and Values of the Book”
Call for Papers

The SHARP 2025 co-organizers seek abstracts up to 500 words for the 2025 annual SHARP conference: “Communities and Values of the Book.” The conference will be  held July 7 – 11, 2025 in Rochester, New  York,  at the University of Rochester and the Rochester Institute of Technology. 

We invite participants to explore the ideas of Values and Communities separately or together, and to interrogate the idea of value and its intersection with the idea of community (or communities) within book culture and bibliographic history.  Proposals are due by December 1, 2024, 11:59 pm USA EST.

The city of Rochester and the surrounding  regions of Western and Central New York have a rich history of book culture, including the vibrant written culture associated with the Burned Over District and the spiritualism, abolition, and suffrage movements, independent presses such as BOA and Open Letter Press, historic presses and printing companies, including Roycroft-Hubbard and Leo Hart, and major institutional collections and programs, such as the Visual Studies Workshop, the Eastman Museum Library, the Strong Museum of Play, and the RIT Archives and Cary Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). This region’s history is also one of dispossession and disenfranchisement. Marginalized and non-mainstream communities in the area have their own rich and vibrant book cultures, including textual, oral, and performative texts, such as those of the Haudenosaunee people, or those of the Deaf community. Who is included, or excluded, when we think expansively about value, community, and the definitions of texts and objects? 

A primary goal of this conference is to bring together the broader Rochester bibliographic community, including writers, creators, publishers, archivists, institutions, and sellers. If a primary value of an international conference is the opportunity to build community amongst scholars, an attendant value in holding a conference in a specific location is the opportunity to deepen and broaden community across time and spaces, while also expanding the way in which we imagine communities and the values that color them.  

This conference will leverage a wide array of knowledge and perspectives surrounding literary production and book creation. A key aspect to our conference organization is the intentional inclusion of traditionally marginalized communities and objects in our programming and presentations. This includes, but is in no way limited to, the Rochester Deaf community, the Haudenosaunee community, Black creators in Rochester and the broader region, Latinx creators, diasporic and refugee movements and practices, LGBTQ+ creators and communities, local comics dealers and creators, zine makers and networks, artist cooperatives, community college initiatives, and other local groups of creators, readers, and sellers. We are interested in the expansive and inclusionary ways in which we can imagine and problematize what books are (comics, zines, tattoos, etc.) and what creation and use can look like (self-publishing, DIY, Kickstarters, textiles, etc.). 

Questions and topics to consider

  • What is book culture? How is the idea of book culture dependent upon the values of different communities? 
  • What are the ways in which geography, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and class intersect with politics, culture, and economic systems in the assignment of value to books, makers, authors, and cultures? 
  • How do these intersections happen locally in the broader Rochester and Western/Central New York area? This is a complicated region that is urban, suburban, rural, the home of the Seneca people, and the location of multiple prisons and detention facilities. It is the historic home of Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, while The University of Rochester and the Rochester Institute of Technology are home to the papers of authors Frederick Exley, John A. Williams, John Gardner, Robert Panara, Sam Greenlee, publishers Open Letter Press and BOA Editions, Ltd., Case-Hoyt printers, 19th century lithography companies, the Print Club of Rochester – to name just a few. 
  • What is the value of alternative ways of looking at book culture, including printing, publishing, creating, reading, collecting, trading, and selling?
  • What are the values that we assign to different book cultures, and what are the implications of those value systems? 
  • How can we productively disrupt value systems? How can we productively build value systems? 
  • How can we problematize or trouble the traditional value of book culture in a way that is productive and inclusionary? 
  • How are the values of intellectual, archival, and commercial communities intertwined? 

Submission of Proposals

We seek proposals for organized panels, for individual presentations (traditional paper, lightning talk, 5-1-5 presentation, workshop), and for hands-on workshops. Panels can take the format of traditional papers, roundtables, 5-1-5 presentations, or lightning talks. We’re particularly interested in proposals for demonstrations and hands-on workshops that expand and have attendees critically examine traditional Western valuation and conceptualization of texts, their creators, and their users.

A limited amount of travel funding is available for students, independent scholars, contingent workers, and the unwaged. If you would like to be considered for travel funding, please indicate this when you submit your abstract.

Individual papers (20 minutes)
All proposals and papers will be written in English. Proposals must include a title and an abstract (max 500 words)  and a specification of A/V needs. 

Lightning presentations (7 – 10 minutes)
Proposals should include the same elements as an individual paper: title, abstract (500 words max), and specification of A/V needs.

5-1-5
5-1-5 sessions are comprised of five presentations, each limited to five minutes and one slide. This format is particularly well-suited for introductions to objects, questions, and conundrums without answers. They are intended to be a low-stakes format for exploration and experimentation. Proposals should include a title, abstract (500 words max), and A/V needs.

Hands-on workshops
We particularly encourage the submission of hands-on workshops and demonstrations. Proposals should include a title, abstract (500 words max), A/V and/or material needs.

Panels
Preference will be given to panels organized in advance by presenters. These panels should consist of either traditional papers, lightning presentations, or 5-1-5 presentations.
Panel proposals must include, for each participant, the required elements for individual papers and a description indicating the title of the panel, the presenters, the panel format, and the theme. All information should be compiled into one document for submission.

Roundtables
Roundtables enable presenters to discuss issues of broad or topical interest, such as theory, methodology, pedagogy, etc. These should include a title, abstract (500 words max), A/V needs, and the names of presenters (with individual presentation titles if applicable). All information should be compiled into one document for submission.

All abstracts must be submitted via our Indico site. Proposals are due by December 1, 2024, 11:59 pm USA EST.

CFP: Oral History Review, Special Issue on Indigenous Oral History

Oral History Review – Special Issue!
Announcing a Special Issue dedicated to Indigenous Oral History
Fall 2026

Twenty-five years ago, Winona Wheeler edited “Indigenous Voices from the Great Plains,” a special issue of Oral History Forum, the journal of the Canadian Oral History Association. Around the same time, she attended her first OHA conference, where, she figured, she was the only Indigenous person there. It was a lonely event! Indigenous peoples had been engaged in the practice of oral history for centuries but not many of us were finding our ways to meetings like those run by the OHA. The years since then have seen much change: in 2020 Nepia Mahuika’s exceptional Rethinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous Perspective, won the OHA’s book award, and in 2021 an Indigenous caucus was
formed to provide a recognized space within the OHA for Indigenous oral historians to support one another and to encourage young Indigenous scholars’ oral history work within their communities. As caucus co-founder Sara Sinclair said at that time, her interest in the new group was in part the simple opportunity it granted to engage with other Indigenous practitioners whose work she admired more directly. In 2022, the OHA committed to an Indigenous Initiative, including building an endowed fund “to promote the success of Indigenous oral historians, as well as meaningful and ethical oral historical projects within Indigenous communities.”

There are still many challenges our practitioners face We remain under-represented within cultural and academic institutions and under-funded in our community-engaged practices. Accounts of what the practice of Indigenous oral history means, and how we do it, also remain under-published and misunderstood. For these reasons and more, we are excited to announce a special issue of the Oral History Review and with it, the opportunity to promote meaningful exchange within our community about the practice of Indigenous oral history, by Indigenous practitioners. This is an opportune time to bring the Indigenous oral history community together again, and welcome new peers to introduce themselves and to join us in our pursuits.

We invite you to respond to this call for papers with oral history encounters/interviews, essays, reflections and stories that reveal the multiplicity of ways in which Indigenous oral historians embrace different ways of knowing, and diverse expressions of what it means to “do” oral history in our communities.

Our call for papers asks you to consider:

  • What you are doing with your oral histories; what are the unique ways that you are working with your material, and how you are putting it to use.
  • The projects that shaped who you are and that most informed your oral history practice.
  • The stories of the narrators who changed your life, the relationships that underpinned your adventures, and the experiences that have evoked the most emotion.
  • The readings that have most impacted the way you think about/teach about oral history, whether those readings are categorized as “oral history” or not.
  • How relationships inform the work that you do.
  • How you think about, and feel about, and honor responsibility to community.
  • How you have navigated rules and restrictions in mainstream academic institutions that have made it harder to do your work.
  • How your own approach to teaching Indigenous oral history has evolved
  • How your own thinking about the meaning and practice of oral history has evolved in your own lifetime.

We are especially excited to consider multi-media approaches to sharing these reflections in the OHR’s digital edition of this issue!

The deadline for submissions is June 1st, 2025.

To submit your articles, use the OHR submission portal, https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ohr.

For questions, please contact our Special Issue Editors, Sara Sinclair and Winona Wheeler:

  • Sara can be reached at sara.e.sinclair@gmail.com.
  • Winona can be reached at winona.wheeler@usask.ca.

CFP: Archives*Records 2025

ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2025: Making it Count

Sunday, August 24, 2025 – Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Anaheim, California

As archivists, records managers, information professionals, and cultural heritage workers, we are charged with making an impact through our work. We are compelled to acknowledge a world where professional concerns are amplified by political, social, and environmental forces that shape how we work and will work in the future. The challenge, then, is to adjust practices, question our assumptions, and seek partnerships to ensure what we do counts in the future.

The Program Committee seeks perspectives from across our profession that emphasize the results and impacts of our work and our workers. The conference theme-Making it Count-encourages proposals that demonstrate the impacts of our work and even expand our understanding of what counts in our profession. The Committee recognizes that part of making our work count for others means making sure it counts for us as well, and we invite proposals that challenge what counts as success in our work. Overall, we seek proposals that explore how our profession can expand our ideas about impact, results, and what counts in a rapidly changing world. Among other topics, proposals might consider:

  • Impactful innovations in collection development, management, arrangement, and description.
  • Making access and outreach count for users and communities.
  • Applications of AI in our work and the ethical implications of its use.
  • Partnerships and collaborations, including post-custodial or community-led initiatives-making the way we engage count for others.
  • Accessibility of archives, both as repositories and workplaces-broadening the way collections and institutions can be counted on to work for everyone.
  • Labor and making our profession responsive to workers’ needs and growth-making it count for us.
  • Assessing the outcomes of our work-making our impacts count.
  • Data gathering and use of data in our profession-how we analyze our work

We welcome proposals on other topics related to archives and archival work.

Read the complete Call at www2.archivists.org/am2025/program/calls/… and consider sharing with your networks!

New Issue: Oral History, The Life Story in Practice

A new special online issue of the the leading journal Oral History, entitled ‘The Life Story in Practice’, presents for the first time a comprehensive volume of articles interrogating the life story methodology with numerous embedded links to audio files. This edition is an open-access (free to all). The life story in-depth biographical interview is central to the work of the British Library Oral History team encompassing National Life Stories (NLS www.bl.uk/nls); the oral history fieldwork charity established in 1987. NLS has supported this edition of the journal which stems from the papers and discussions at the NLS International Symposium on the Life Story, held at the British Library in summer 2023. .

We are confident it will be essential reading for scholars and practitioners, whether you are just setting out in oral history or have decades of experience. Download the pdf at https://www.ohs.org.uk/oral-history-online/. 

The special issue addresses the topic of the life story from many angles, including:

-An exploration of the process of life story recording and how this contrasts with other oral history techniques

-The value of life story collections to to wider policy debates

-The specific challenges we face in archiving and providing public access to life story interviews

-Reviews of the life story in the context of oral history scholarship

The edition was edited by Mary Stewart (NLS Director) and Rob Perks (NLS Trustee and former Director), and the publication features contributions from many members of the National Life Stories team in conjunction with internationally acclaimed oral historians including Alex Freund, Indira Chowdhury, Doug Boyd, Don Ritchie and Alistair Thomson . 

Read, listen, enjoy and feel free to contact the NLS and British Library oral history team with further questions and queries. For those interested in NLS’ ongoing projects our latest NLS Annual Review is available digitally at the British Library Research Repository [https://doi.org/10.23636/96rq-z652].  

**If you’ll be attending the OHA Annual Meeting in Cincinnati this autumn then please join Doug Boyd, Rob Perks, Don Ritchie and Mary Stewart for a roundtable discursive session exploring themes from the special issue (currently programmed for 10am on Friday 1 November – but check the final programme when it’s live). **

Thanks to the journal article authors, the editors, designers and proof reader of Oral History, the Symposium attendees, the NLS team and Trustees and – of course – to all past and current interviewees.

Contact Information

Mary Stewart, Lead Curator Oral History & Director National Life Stories at the British Library
Contact Email: mary.stewart@bl.uk
URL: https://www.ohs.org.uk/oral-history-online/

Call for Feedback: “Digital Preservation: A Critical Vocabulary”

Dear Colleagues,

I am excited to share that Trevor Owens and I are working on an edited volume titled “Digital Preservation: A Critical Vocabulary,” which is currently under contract with MIT Press.

To ensure that this work is both high-quality and impactful, we are opening an online open access preprint/draft for public comment. We invite you to read through the draft chapters and share your feedback. Your insights and suggestions are vital for enhancing this publication and making it as valuable as possible for the community.

How You Can Participate:

  • Read and Comment: Access the draft chapters and leave your comments here: https://digital-preservation-a-critical-vocabulary.pubpub.org/
  • Deadline for Initial Feedback: Comments received by November 1st will be most helpful, but your feedback after this date is still greatly appreciated.
  • Whether you are an expert in the field or simply interested in digital preservation, your participation will make a significant difference. Please take this opportunity to contribute to this important project.

Please feel free to share this with colleagues who may be interested.

Thank you in advance for your time and valuable input!

Rebecca & Trevor

——————————
Rebecca Frank
Assistant Professor
University of Michigan
frankrd@umich.edu

Call for Chapters: Remembering and (Re)remembering Social Justice in the 21st Century

Remembering and (Re)remembering Social Justice in the 21st Century

deadline for submissions: October 20, 2024
full name / name of organization: Ben Alexander. Columbia University
contact email: bea3@columbia.edu

Call for Papers
New Volume: Remembering and (Re)remembering Social Justice in the 21st Century 
Publisher: FACET

Please Submit a 500 word Abstract by October 20.    

We are looking for 3, maybe 4, chapters to complete our volume that is in-contract with FACET.  Verne Harris will be authoring our Forward, Trudy Peterson our Introduction and Verne Harris our Afterword.  Chapter titles include:

  • Bending the Arc of History Toward Justice: The Romero Institute and the Digital Transformation of Social Justice Work in the Twenty-First Century – Indigenous Rights and Environmental Justice
  • Justice as Morality, Morality as Justice: Cultivating a Moral Vision of Archival Capabilities and Human Dignity
  • Out of the Institutional Archive and on to the “Digital Streets”: Restoring Community Access to the Squatters’ Collective Oral History Project
  • The US Opioid Crisis through the Records Lens: Corporate Malfeasance and Justice Seeking.
  • The Archimedes Palimpsest, They Shall Not Grow Old and Shoah’s Interactive Holograms: Making Social Justice History Contemporary 
  • Recordkeeping for Menstrual Data: Privacy, Mobile App Analytics, and Consent

From the end of World War II through the change in millennia intersections between the evolution of the post-modern archive and the formation of post-modern historical discourses intersected concerns for social justice within complex geo-political landscapes composed of fractious post-colonial environments, Cold War interests, and often violent confrontations (within western democracies) centering on demands for inclusion and plurality.  In general, the archive created precedent for the extension of Activisms around the world by incorporating new forms of material remembrance that provided precedent for newly imagined forms of collective memory.  Indeed, while it may seem quaint today, archives struggled to preserve unprecedented quantities of visual materials (both moving image and static) as well as new forms of manuscript materials (mimeographs, Zines etc.) that in their day seemed dangerously ephemeral but were absolutely essential to social justice movements.  Further, the archivist had to imagine new ways to engage new forms of civil rights actions and movements. 

Scholars, archivists and activists today are confronted with similar challenges.  Activist cultures are now largely immaterial.  Activist movements are often global in reach but shaped by geographically specific cultures.  The archivist today must assume new agencies to engage and document social justice actions and movements.  Indeed, the distinction between archivisms and activisms is decidedly blurred. 

Our volume seeks collaborative and international discussion among scholars (from a breadth of interests), as well as activists and archivists to engage the tremendous challenges that threaten the historicity of 21st century social justice movements around the world.  

We are especially interested in 6 categories of research.

1)    What distinguishes 21st century social justice actions from 20th century activisms?  What unities and agencies remain consistent among movements including Occupy, The Arab Spring, and BLM?     

2)    Has the evolution in the very nature of social justice advanced expectations of the archivist?  Must the 21st century archivists assume activist agencies?  Might 21st century archivists require sensitivities (perhaps training) that is additional to 20th century models?  

3)    What will distinguish a 21st century social justice archive from its 20th century counterparts?  It would seem that the very core of archival practice will require careful revaluation in new and unique 21st century contexts.

4)    Certainly, we are experiencing an unprecedented loss of faith in authenticity – a troubling advent for the archive.  How will records produced within complex 21st century digital matrices assume accustomed authority (based on their authenticity).  These are concerns that were vastly limited within the scope and reach of material world. 

5)    From a most contemporary point of view, we will want to consider the tensions between recent political evolutions and assumptions about the very nature of private information specifically and who controls information that is intended to hold government accountable more generally. 

6)    Finally, we are looking for a broad international perspective.  The examples of 21st century social justice referenced above (Occupy, Arab Spring, and BLM) are definitively international in their reach.  How might the experience of these previous revolutionary actions inform approaches to documenting more contemporary social dispensation.  We are especially interested in perspectives from activists and archivists from around the world.