>> Some of my, sharing some of my background in archives. And so I'm really happy to be with you guys today as well as an SAA member and especially because this is the SAA student chapter. Originally, what I was going to do was I was going to kind of walk through some slides I had about oral history in general, like some thoughts I had about what I thought were important ideas or frameworks for understanding oral history and archives. But I might just, you know, have fun and jump around and kind of throw some ideas out and then we'll just do a Q and A. One thing I will say is I can help coordinate with you, Rebecca, about doing some kind of recording along with my slides if that's helpful and I had already prepared talk notes with a lot of linked resources or websites that I was planning on mentioning. So I can email that to everybody or I can email that to you, Rebecca, and then you can share that with everyone or I don't know if we want to try to fool around with file transfer or anything like that tonight but -- yeah, so I'd be happy to like reconnect with any follow-ups as needed. Yeah, so I'll just thank you for my bio. That does give kind of an overview of my career and the last 15 years as an archivist. I did want to mention just because I don't think a lot of people often know about the repository I work for what the Archives of the Episcopal Church is. It's the repository for the corporate institutional records of the Protestant Episcopal denomination. It's also a special collections archive and research facility. The Episcopal church staff and program offices, those are all located at the church center in New York City, but the archives and research facility is located in Austin where I -- where it's been since 1960 -- and that's where I work. There are 10 of us actually that work in the Archives here in Austin. The collection was established in 1835. It includes historical materials that span from the 16th century to the present. It's 20,000 cubic feet and 100 terabytes of records. And I've worked there for the past nine years. But I've been an archivist for about 15 years now and actually a member of SAA even longer. I was an undergraduate history major thinking about becoming an archivist. I joined -- wow, I joined in 1997 and I just realized that was 20 years ago this year, yikes. But my involvement in SAA really kick-started through my student chapter, which was at Wayne State University in Detroit. That's where I connected with other archivists and actually made some great friendships so it's continued to today so I really have found a lot of value in being an SAA member. Through the years, for different reasons at different moments, but I really feel like it's been a -- I've seen a return on the investment. Are you guys all seeing this craziness that's happening on the screen right now?

>> Yes. Amanda's trying to share her desktop which has the slides on them.

>> Oh, okay. Thank you so much, Amanda. Wow. You'll just watch a picture of me over and over again. Let's see, what can I move on to next? One of the things I'll have in my talk notes, I wanted to emphasize a couple of other organizations -- yep, there it is now -- the Oral History Association is one of them. And I think that if you're an archivist who is going to become -- or an information professional who's going to become involved at all with oral history at any stage, the OHA is a wonderful resource and I specifically included a link to the Principles and Best Practices, which are a set of guidelines that really form a base, defining kind of what's expected and all, you know, what the Oral History Association expects should, you know, be thought about for oral history at every stage. And then the next website resource that I wanted to make sure you were all aware of if you weren't already is a site called Oral History in the Digital Age. It's a very rich resource of information presented primarily in short essays and different categories that break down practices of interviewing and transcribing, describing and other aspects. I really can't recommend this site enough, especially if you're working with, as most of us are, digital materials. And then finally, if you don't know about it already, there is a section in SAA for focusing on oral history. The oral history section's a great group to connect with for guidance and information sharing. We do a newsletter -- I'm not sure when the last one was but -- yeah, it's a fantastic section of SAA and they put on a great, they put on a great meeting every year as well, lots of interesting speakers and projects featured. So those are, you know, the three -- for oral history arguments I think the three resources that you really should be familiar with. Of course there are many other useful and relevant organizations that could add value to the work you're doing like the Moving Image Archive Association or Recorded Sound, but yeah, so those are the three that I wanted to mention. So as an archivist, you may encounter oral history in a variety of ways. These are different ways that I've worked with oral history. I've facilitated oral history by working with donors or working with scholars in setting up interviews or projects. I've conducted interviews myself as the archivist, processed, catalogued, and preserved oral history collections and then, you know, have curated and utilized oral histories in collections and exhibits. I didn't start off in school thinking -- or when I was imagining what I would be doing that I would specifically be an oral history archivist. It wasn't a specialization so to speak or a track that I followed. It was really just something that I literally got pulled into. I told this story to the class Rebecca mentioned I spoke to but the first conference I went to for the organization I was the archivist for, that was my first job right out of grad school. I was, you know, thinking I was invited to participate just to visit and meet the different people who I would be working as the new archivist. And the first morning that I walked into the conference, I was pulled aside into a room where there was a video camera set up and a circle of, you know, retired members of the organization waiting and ready to be interviewed for their oral history interview. And I think that was the first moment for me to realize that, you know, being the archivist comes with, you know, a badge of expert so, you know, these folks saw me as their expert. They saw me as the person who would be able to facilitate their history for them. And so I think, you know, that's -- I mean, it's a big honor. It's a big responsibility, but you never know when oral history -- or I mean, in my experience, you never when oral history might be brought into the conversation even if it wasn't originally, you know, a purpose or part of a mission or plan. So whether you're called to organize a project or responsible for cataloging or doing an exhibit, you know, it is important to consider, you know, what is oral history and what do you think that means to you? And what, when someone comes to you and says, let's do oral history, what does that mean to them? Because I think, you know, it can mean different things to different people sometimes, especially if you're looking at journalism or, you know, other types of media. But I'm just going to read to you what the Oral History Association says oral history refers to -- both a method of recording and preserving oral testimony and it refers to the product of that process of recording. So it begins with a first person account, audio or video, made by an interviewer with an interviewee, both of whom have the conscious intention of creating a permanent record to contribute to an understanding of the past. A verbal document, the oral history results, is preserved and made available in different forms. So this definition to me has an emphasis on method and product and intention. And then, you know, this could further be broken down into a discussion of legal issues, formats, preservation challenges, rights, all of those things are covered in depth in both the Principles and Best Practices and the Oral History in the Digital Age -- even in some, you know, covered somewhat in the SAA Code of Ethics if you haven't had a chance to look at those, those are interesting too. But I chose this quote by Doug Boyd who is actually the current president of the Oral History Association, he's also an archivist, because I really agree with it as one of the top principles, if not the top principle that guides all principles when it comes to oral history archives. It really is a privilege to sit down with a person and document their story for history. And in my experience, when thinking about oral history, just like we do when we think about a record, it's useful to think of the full life cycle of an oral history and that involves looking at three stages, which are generally though of as the creation, the curation, and the dissemination stage of oral history. Depending on where you work and the projects you're involved in, you can encounter oral history at different points of the life cycle. I think traditionally -- people -- we associate archivists with the curate and disseminate stages. We take care of the stuff after it's produced. But to my earlier point, the earlier stages are also game. Actually, I think there are advantages for an archivist to be involved in all stages of a project. Archivists and librarians and curators often work with oral history in the curation and dissemination stages after third parties have already collected them. Oh yeah, there we go. I -- here's another thought. Nancy MacKay, you know, Rebecca, you mentioned her class. She writes that curation refers to the long-term care and management of historical documents in order to ensure maximum access for the present and the future. And the emphasis there is that preservation and access definitely go hand-in-hand. So Nancy and I worked together as consultants a couple of years ago to an organization who wanted to incorporate archiving into its overall oral history program. This organization was trying to develop an oral history program for public libraries who were out in the field in kind of rural parts. And in our work, we were really impressed with a guide that at the time won an award actually, the Witness Archive created a guide for how activists in the field could manage and archive or, you know, take care of their video records that they were making. And so we kind of adapted their step-by-step process to give a very simple but high level understanding of like what is involved when you say you want to archive something. If you are doing the archiving, you really need to look at these steps or think about these steps and how your project or institution is set up with resources or what resources would need to be gathered in order to make these steps happen. So, I mean, as library and archive students, you guys know that access is tied to cataloging and good descriptions but something that can be challenging for oral histories just due to the fly by nature of oral history and the multiple formats and versions that come out are the metadata, and trying to come up with metadata standards or think about what is important to know about oral history. All of that is what the task force that was mentioned that I'm a part of is looking at right now. We're looking at -- what are the big oral history institutions doing? What schemas or standards that already exist are people using to make oral history accessible? And what are opportunities and potentials in the future? And what's uniquely important about oral history that makes it different from other formats? And then, also importantly, what tools are available to help with oral history metadata? And one of those tools, the Oral History Metadata Indexer, or commonly known as OHMS, what's what we turn to to manage the SAA Oral History Project Collection. So now, yeah, I wanted to talk a little bit about the SAA Oral History Project. That took place leading up to SAA's 75th anniversary, which was in 2011. It took place from 2009 through 2012 and during that time I worked with other steering committee leaders in the oral history section to solicit nominations from across SAA. So all groups were asked to get together with their component groups and put -- nominate different leaders from their specialization or their group who they thought should be interviewed and then it was a big coordinating effort then to invite the interviewees and coordinate schedules. It was an all volunteer effort. It was really fun and energizing and inspiring over the course of three years of interviewing. And then finally, after soliciting grant funding from SAA Foundation, we were able to transfer the interviews that were conducted to the SAA archives collection which, if you're not aware, is housed at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, their library's special collections department. So in 2016, the online collection was launched. I worked with a graduate student intern there, Trishani Parari [assumed spelling] and she, on the UWM side, processed the collection. She was able to, with the staff there, get 19 of video interviews up. And the result is what you're seeing here on the screen. It is representing the people who were nominated as part of the anniversary and who could make the time and were willing to be interviewed during the annual meetings in 2010 and 2011, interviewed by volunteers from the Oral History section. The transcripts were drafted by graduate students -- SAA graduate students who volunteered their time. So I'm really happy about that nature of the project. It was a way that -- it wasn't just about building a set of interviews. You know, SAA could have hired I think a consultant and a videographer and they could have done that separately, but it was a way that the organization -- that we were all able to participate and do something really interesting and meaningful and actually get to know some of our veteran leaders in SAA. And so the group represents archivists working in different types of institutions who are leaders in different groups within SAA and covers a lot of different eras, initiatives, and interests. The page, as you see, features a thumbnail of each interviewee and then users are able to click on the interview that they're interested in, stream video, and/or download a transcript. So I myself did a lot of the interviews but we also had some other volunteers doing that. And I have something favorite about every one of the interviews I think. What I did though was I did choose something from Rand Jimerson's interview, a quote that I was browsing through his transcript and then landed at this excerpt which caught my eye, something for us to think about in terms of our role as archivists. Through the indexing capabilities of the OHMS system, because of the metadata and the way that the technology works, I read this quote on the transcript, I could then jump right to the segment, which I screenshotted for you guys on the next slide, and go through keywording or browsing the segmented index could go straight to the actual section. So finally, I did a little screenshot for you of the high level metadata that describes -- gives a higher level overview, so an entry into this interview more at the catalog record level. So this is just a very like tip of the iceberg overview of the OHMS system if you hadn't seen it before. But really if you're interested, if any of this seems -- you know, makes you curious, I would definitely encourage you to browse and spend some more time with the collection. You know, SAA Members is interesting, you know, and then it's definitely meant for SAA members as the primary audience as well. I would have loved to have seen SAA institute this oral history interviewing kind of as an ongoing program. I mean, the 19 interviews are very rich and of course it was a wonderful experience in and of itself. It was part -- we thought as part of the anniversary celebration, but there's so many more stories and there's so many opportunities to really look at the diversity within SAA through oral history. It's just extremely time consuming and labor intensive work to get volunteers together or even if you hire people to coordinate individuals' time. But I don't know, I really see the value in it on a lot of different levels. Yes, to add to the historical record about the organization and our profession, but also to really showcase the diversity and the range of work that our profession contributes. So if anyone has any questions about anything that I kind of rushed through or if you just want to talk generally about archives, I would love to hear about what you all are interested in and what inspired you to go into the field. But thank you so much for the opportunity for me to highlight this project. It's pretty cool.

>> Thank you so much, Lauren. That was wonderful. And you have a great aplomb to talk through all these technical difficulties. I appreciate that.

>> Oh absolutely, it happens. So who do we have with us tonight? Amanda, Rebecca, Courtney, Laura, Marissa, Shelley, Wendy, hi everybody. So I caught earlier there.