Call for Participation: FIAT/IFTA Survey on Archives & Ethics

The FIAT/IFTA Value, Use and Copyright Commission has launched a new project focusing on ethical issues related to archival content – both in connection with republication online and in relation to metadata containing terms that are now considered harmful or inappropriate.

The discussion on this topic began at the World Conference in Rome in October 2025, with an expert roundtable featuring an open exchange on ethical considerations.

The next steps in the project are this survey, which explores how you address ethical questions in your work, followed by an Online Experts Roundtable on May 19, 2026 at 14:00 CEST, with archive experts who engage with ethical issues in their professional practice.

Your participation is essential to help us understand current practices and guide future discussions. The survey should take around 15 minutes to complete.

We ask for your email address to be able to contact you if we have any additional questions in relation with your answers. We will not share your email address with anyone or use it on mailing lists without your permission.

Thank you for your valuable input. You can contact FIAT/IFTA at: office@fiatifta.org

Link to survey

Invitation to participate: Teaching with Primary Sources and New Information Professionals

My colleagues and I would like to invite you to participate in a short survey that focuses on the education and experiences of new professionals who teach with primary sources. 

The purpose of this study is to learn more about the training, if any, those who teach with primary sources receive formally in grad programs or informally through mentoring, workshops, etc. Anyone over the age of 18 who is a new library or archives professional (<5 years in the field) is eligible to participate. If you decide to participate, you will be asked to answer approximately 25 multiple choice and free-response questions, which should take about 15 minutes to complete. Please do not put any information in your response that could be used to identify you. The informed consent and survey are available at towson.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9FYnjm8mvfa5rQW.

Data gathered by this survey will be shared with the Society of American Archivists and we are seeking to publish the aggregate results. Anticipated benefits of this study include greater insight into the background and needs of new professionals in regards to pedagogical training for archivists and librarians. 

The survey will be live until mid-April 2026. If you have any questions, please contact the Principal Investigator, Ashley Todd-Diaz (atodddiaz@towson.edu). 

Sincerely,

Ashley Todd-Diaz (atodddiaz@towson.edu)

Abigail Nye (anye@uwm.edu)

Josue Hurtado (josue.hurtado@temple.edu)

Lindsay Anderberg (landerberg@nyu.edu)

Morgen MacIntosh Hodgetts (MMACINTO@depaul.edu)

Call for Participation: Contingent Employment Study III (CES III) Survey

New England Archivists’ Contingent Employment Study III (CES III) Survey is open through August 31, 2026, and seeks participants who have been contingently employed in New England in the past ten years.

We want to hear directly from you about your current or recent experiences in temporary or term positions. Follow the link to learn more, take the survey, and share with your friends and coworkers: forms.gle/XMPitYqtXeq1mowx8.

CES III aims to help NEA better understand and support New England’s archival workers in temporary or term positions. This third iteration of the study measures the ways the archival profession has progressed or failed to progress in creating equitable employment opportunities in the years since CES II in 2021 and CES I in 2016. The current sociopolitical and economic climate is a key part of this landscape, and CES III has updated the survey with new questions related to the job market, anti-DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) developments, funding cuts, changes to student loans, and artificial intelligence use in the profession.

Questions for the research team are welcome and can be directed to Elizabeth Nosari, CES III chair, at CEStudy@newenglandarchivists.org.

Thank you,

Sally Blanchard-O’Brien

Erica Buswell

Alexandra Dunn

Irene Gates

Nicole Gómez

Mollie Metevier

Elizabeth Nosari

Clarrie Scholtz

Call for research participation: Seeking MLIS, PhD students and faculty perspectives for Schomburg Study

My name is Manuel Mendez, and I’m leading a research project titled “Arturo Schomburg and Library and Information Science: A Multi-Method Analysis.” The project aims to explore the extent to which MLIS, PhD students, and faculty know about Arturo Schomburg’s library (bibliographic) and archival (curatorial) practices. 

Participants will be asked to complete a 20-minute survey questionnaire and an optional 20-30-minute follow-up interview. Participants will receive a $20 Tango card within 2 weeks. 

The study seeks to elucidate Arturo Schomburg’s LIS practices and to identify methods for integrating them into MLIS curricula. 

Involvement in this study is voluntary, and all responses will remain strictly confidential. Participants can withdraw from the study at any point. Stringent measures will be implemented to safeguard data integrity. 

You can sign up for the study by visiting our link below. If you have any questions, please contact the researcher directly at mduranme@umd.edu.

Participation linkhttps://umdsurvey.umd.edu/jfe/form/SV_4T4eYQA6ryP4LKC 

Manuel Julio Durán Méndez, PhD Candidate

University of Maryland, College Park

College of Information

Call for Participation: practices and attitudes of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) refusal amongst academic library workers in the United States

We are a faculty member and graduate student in the Information, Library and Research Sciences Department at the University of North Carolina – Greensboro, and we are conducting a research study to explore the practices and attitudes of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) refusal amongst academic library workers in the United States. This survey will ask you questions about your attitudes and practices related to generative AI at your workplace.

The survey is open to anyone who works in an academic or university library in the United States. If you are a paraprofessional, student worker, or professional librarian in an academic or university library, we welcome your participation. Employees at university, college, community college, and special or branch libraries at an academic institution qualify to participate in this survey. You must be 18 years of age or older to participate.

The survey is expected to take about 15-20 minutes to complete. Participation is totally voluntary, and respondents can stop filling out the survey at any point. At the end of the survey, you will be asked if you would like to participate in a follow-up interview to further elaborate on your thoughts on this topic; participation in the interview is also entirely voluntary. Respondents will not receive any compensation for filling out this survey, though this information may contribute to the development of policy recommendations to support AI refusal in academic libraries. Responses will be anonymized to protect participants’ privacy.

Please review the full information sheet on the next page. After reviewing this sheet, we will ask you to agree to participate in the survey.

Survey form

Call for Participation: Food in Collections Survey

We are a group of archivists and librarians at Oberlin College working to quantify the impact of food in collections. We are asking you to consider participating in a brief Qualtrics survey about food in museum, library, or archival collections. The purpose of the survey is to assess inherent vice within different types of collections and its impact on preservation and conservation priorities. We are surveying librarians, curators, collections managers, conservators, and archivists from collecting institutions who are at least 18 years old and who currently work in the United States. 

Participation in this survey is entirely voluntary. Should you agree to participate in the survey, your responses will be kept confidential. Your anonymized data will be used for analysis. This study, Protocol AY25-26-ER-02, has been deemed exempt by Oberlin College’s institutional ethics board. For questions related to this survey and your rights as a participant or information about its IRB approval, please contact Associate Archivist Emily Rebmann (erebmann@oberlin.edu) or the Oberlin College Institutional Review Board, Cox 101, (440-775-8410) or email: ocirb@oberlin.edu.

To learn more about the project or to take the survey, please use this link. The Qualtrics survey will remain open until February 28, and we anticipate that it will take no more than 10 minutes to complete. 

Thank you for your consideration,

Emily Rebmann, Eugénie Fortier, and Gena Reynolds

Seeking study participants: “Emotional Responses and Experiences in the Archival Donation Process” (UVA IRB-SBS # 7278)

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to invite you to participate in a study investigating emotionally adverse experiences among individuals donating personal materials to archives and special collections departments in the United States, as well as the emotionally adverse responses archivists observe during the donation process. By examining the nature and causes of these perspectives, this research seeks to expand the understanding of donor-archivist interactions and inform more empathetic, trauma-informed archival practices.

Survey Details

·       Estimated Time: 15-20 minutes

·       Format: Online survey

·       Eligibility: To qualify as a participant, you must have donated materials to an archives or special collections department in the United States or must be an archivist who has worked with donors in an archives or special collections department in the United States (an archivist can also be a donor). Participants should be between 25 – 75 years of age.

·       Security: The information that you give in the study will be anonymous. Your name and other information that could be used to identify you will not be collected or linked to the data. Raw data will be stored on UVA Box, a secure file storage system managed by UVA IT.

·       Survey period: The survey will close on June 30, 2025.

Begin the survey here: https://virginia.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bxTbH3l64LIPDng

If you have any questions about the study or the survey, please contact me at agreenwood@virginia.edu.

With warmest regards,

Amanda Greenwood

Archivist, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library

University of Virginia

Call for Participants Special Collections Catalogers and ILS/LSP Migrations

Dear Colleagues,

Special collections catalogers (those who spend at least 30% of their time cataloging special collections and/or rare materials) are invited to participate in a survey related to Integrated Library System (ILS) or Library Services Platform (LSP) migration and special collections data.

To participate, individuals must be over the age of 18 and currently employed as a special collections cataloger. Participants must have migrated Integrated Library Systems (ILS) or Library Services Platforms (LSP) in the last 5 years.

Participation within this survey is voluntary. Participants may stop completing the survey at any time. The survey will be anonymous but not confidential. The survey will take approximately 15 minutes to complete.

osu.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_b8U2I30vUZ49hum

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact

Libby Hertenstein

hertenstein.9@osu.edu

614-247-9802

Office of Responsible Research Practices

hsconcerns@osu.edu

(614) 688-8457

(800) 678-6251

Call for Participation: Survey on Archival Collecting Reflex

Colleagues,

I’m seeking archivists who have participated, or declined to participate, in rapid response collecting in the aftermath of a tragic event at your institution or in your community to complete an anonymous survey for new research on the archival collecting reflex. 

Do archivists have a collecting reflex, an embedded professional drive to collect material, especially to document tragedies in the immediate aftermath of them. What fuels this reflex? From where does it come? Is it possible to privilege the personal over the professional in situations where the tragedy happened in your institution or community? These are basic questions in my research on how archivists manage their professional obligations to gather and preserve with their personal emotional needs to grieve with their fellow community members in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy.

The following is a link to a Qualtrics survey that launches my research exploring the “archival collecting reflex.” The survey should take no more than 20 minutes to complete. The survey will close on February 23, 2025.

The Qualtrics link: virginia.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_9Hs5t4KH6eEd44m
Participants must be 18 years or older to take the survey. 
With appreciation,
Brenda Gunn, Principal Investigator
UVA IRB-SBS 7274

Call for Participation: Survey re: ILS and Special Collections Data

Dear Colleagues,

Special collections catalogers (those who spend at least 30% of their time cataloging special collections and/or rare materials) are invited to participate in a survey related to Integrated Library System (ILS) or Library Services Platform (LSP) migration and special collections data.

To participate, individuals must be over the age of 18 and currently employed as a special collections cataloger. Participants must have migrated Integrated Library Systems (ILS) or Library Services Platforms (LSP) in the last 5 years.

Participation within this survey is voluntary. Participants may stop completing the survey at any time. The survey will be anonymous but not confidential. The survey will take approximately 15 minutes to complete.

osu.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_b8U2I30vUZ49hum

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact

Libby Hertenstein

hertenstein.9@osu.edu

614-247-9802

Office of Responsible Research Practices

hsconcerns@osu.edu

(614) 688-8457

(800) 678-6251