TOURS

Silver Special Collections Library, University of Vermont, 48 University Place
The Jack and Shirley Silver Special Collections Library at the University of Vermont maintains a comprehensive Vermont research collection, the University Archives, and an eclectic rare book collection. Join this tour to see the library’s new quarters in the architecturally renowned Billings Library and explore collection highlights.

Historic Burlington Walking Tour, Waterfront Park, 10 College Street
Learn about the Burlington waterfront from a historical perspective. Taking you up and down the waterfront of Lake Champlain, this tour will present a history of Battery Park and of immigration to the city.

Plenary Speakers

Jean Bessette
Jean Bessette is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Vermont, where her research and teaching interests include archives and historiography, rhetoric and composition, digital and multimedia, and gender and sexuality. She is the author of Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures, which received the 2018 Winifred Bryan Horner Outstanding Book Award from the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. Her scholarship has appeared in journals including Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, College Composition and Communication, and Computers and Composition, as well in a number of edited collections. In addition to the Horner Book Award, she has received national awards for her work from the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Rhetoric Society of America. Bessette holds a PhD in Critical and Cultural Studies from the University of Pittsburgh.

Kevin Shapiro
Kevin Shapiro has been archivist for the musical group Phish since 1996, overseeing the band’s collections of audio, video, photographs, and memorabilia. Licensed to practice law in Michigan and Vermont, he moved to Vermont to work with Phish as both archivist and in-house counsel, setting up their archives facility and managing their collections and associated intellectual property. He has a BA in communication from Michigan State University and a JD from Detroit College of Law and, a lifelong musician, supported himself through school playing drums. Shapiro’s work with Phish extends to preservation and marketing and includes From The Archives broadcasts and LiveBait compilations, providing curated access to the band’s prolific output; and producing and consulting on scores of archival CD, DVD, vinyl, boxed-set, and online releases, as well as merchandise, promotional materials, and exhibitions.

Friday sessions

1.1 We’re All Stories in the End..: Active Learning in the Archive
Archival repositories hold collections that tell countless stories across a variety of disciplines, stories that have the potential to engage students and encourage them to explore topics in new ways. In this session, presenters will explore three different instructional sessions developed at diverse higher educational institutions to create active learning opportunities in the classroom. Week after week, at a small liberal arts college in Connecticut, a large student-centered research university outside of Boston, and a small arts college in Providence, the archives reading room became a laboratory for students working with primary source material. Panelists will explain how they developed relationships with faculty, the resources they employed to develop curricula, and lessons they learned from these instructional sessions.

Rose Oliveira, Connecticut College
Pam Hopkins, Tufts University
Andrew Martinez, Rhode Island School of Design

1.2 Two Birds, One Stone: Using Archives Month for Advocacy and to Foster Connections
Part of the nationally celebrated American Archives Month, Archives Month Philly (AMP) is a month-long city-wide festival that focuses on educating the wider community about local archives through public programming and exhibitions. Since 2013, AMP has held at least 125 events at more than 60 participating institutions in the Philadelphia area--and last year inspired the U.S. Navy’s Naval History and Heritage Command archival staff to participate in Archives Month for the first time. Covering a range of issues, from getting started and developing a plan to balancing normal workload with additional Archives Month duties, panelists will discuss how they have defined archival advocacy in order to make it both a manageable and scalable goal and an effective and meaningful project. The panel will also share resources and strategies that attendees can use in their own programs, whether for a single institution or for an entire region.

Chrissie Perella, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
Hillary Kativa, The Science History Institute
Karolina Lewandwoska, Naval History and Heritage Command
Alyson Mazzone, Marine Corps University
Gabrielle Speirs, Naval History and Heritage Command

 
1.3 Email Archiving for the Rest of Us: Developing and Implementing a Low-Resource Strategy for Institutional Email Preservation
With the shift toward email as the dominant form of written correspondence, archivists are increasingly responsible for gathering and protecting these documents. Email preservation not only inherits all the core technical challenges associated with born-digital preservation, such as ensuring the accessibility and survivability of the data themselves, but also presents a host of additional challenges unique to email. Presenters will examine some of the challenges they encountered while developing, advocating, and implementing an institutional email archiving and preservation effort at Middlebury College. Discussion will include non- and semi-technical problems, practical workflows, and technological solutions that--with a bit of luck and care--help staff minimize the negative impact of technological disruptions of the integrity and continuity of the college’s institutional memory.

Rebekah Irwin, Middlebury College
Patrick Wallace, Middlebury College

 
1.4 Beyond the Carton: Thinking Outside the Box for Oversized and Three-Dimensional Materials
Are you grappling with storing the oversize and three-dimensional items in your archive? This session will provide collections storage strategies for large works on paper, paintings and other framed items, and objects--all the stuff that doesn’t fit in a standard document box or carton or that otherwise needs special treatment. Join conservators and archives practitioners as they describe techniques they have successfully used, with a focus on concrete and easy-to-implement methods that will not completely blow your budget!

Erica Donnis, Champlain College
Carolyn Frisa, Works on Paper, LLC
Emily Phillips, Phillips Art Conservation Studio, LLC
Marianne Zephir, Woodstock Foundation/ Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park

1.5 Archiving Amateur Movies: Robbins Barstow Centennial
Through its work with the Orphan Film Symposium and the Center for Home Movies, New York University acquired four films written and directed by “home movie maven” Robbins Barstow. A Vermont native, champion of social justice, and moviemaker, Barstow (1919-2010) received his master’s degree in education and history from NYU in 1945. His best known work, the charming 1956 "Disneyland Dream," was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2008. A celebration of the Barstow’s centennial, this session will introduce Barstow's rich life and work; feature a screening of some of his recently preserved 16mm films; and highlight funding sources available to preserve archival films.

Kimberly Tarr, New York University

2.1 Co-archiving: Collaborative Archiving of Diverse Student Groups
Co-archiving, a non-hegemonic process of gathering records for a group based on collaboration between the group and archivists, requires outreach and active consent, as well as processes to deal with regular turnover--a given for college student groups. Presenting co-archiving initiatives at two small liberal arts colleges--one involving digital records of student groups, the other concerning artifacts of traditionally underrepresented aspects of student life and campus culture--this session will examine some of the practical, ethical, and technological challenges of archival student life and compel us all to turn a critical eye on our institutional memories and the role we, as archives professionals, play in crafting it.

Jessika Georgeanne Drmacich, Williams College
Cecilia Pou Jove, Williams College
Patrick R. Wallace, Middlebury College

2.2 Beyond Frost: Northern New England Poets in the Archives
Popularly considered the quintessential New England poet, Robert Frost appears in collections throughout the region. Panelists will discuss his archival presence in their repositories as well as that of other poets, as they explore the state of Northern New England poetry, what it has looked like in the past, how place imbues poets’ works, what has and has not been collected in archives, and the difficulties in acquiring such collections. Through the lens of poetry archives, the panelists aim to portray Northern New England’s diversity and complexity in ways not always fully understood or acknowledged.

Chris Burns, University of Vermont
Peter Carini, Dartmouth College
Rebekah Irwin, Middlebury College
Cathleen Miller, Maine Women Writers Conference, University of New England

2.3 Problematic Processing: Exploring the Issues of Organizing Complex Collections
Collections processing may seem straightforward, but then a myriad of external and internal issues can complicate things. Funding, time, donor relations, mixed materials, previous processing attempts: these are just some examples of what can set back or derail the successful completion of a project. Archivists usually do not get to choose what they process, but they can learn from their own and others’ experiences. Presenters will cover various aspects of large and complicated processing projects, detailing specific projects, goals, challenges, successes, and outcomes, and invite discussion on how the profession can face processing dilemmas.

Jordan Janosek, Brown University
Amanda Axel, Berklee College of Music
Eve Bourbeau-Allard, Yale University
Stephanie Krauss, Historic New England

2.4 A Dance Archives Duet: Perspectives Working on the Mark Morris Dance Group Archives Project and Jacob’s Pillow
Much like dance itself, dance archives are created by collaboration. Presenters will share perspectives on developing and building on relationships with artists, audience members, administrators, and scholars to create deeper access to dance history. Archivists for the Mark Morris Dance Group will describe working with an active touring dance company to build a new physical and digital institutional archive. Jacob’s Pillow archives staff will focus on their collaborations with today’s artists and scholars to enhance audience engagement with dance during the festival and online. 

Regina Carra, Mark Morris Dance Group
Stephanie Neel, Mark Morris Dance Group
Norton Owen, Jacob’s Pillow
Patsy Gay, Jacob’s Pillow

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