mac2025minneapolis

Cost: Free
Location: Hilton Minneapolis
Enrollment: 40

This free event will feature conversations exploring how we, as archival professionals, have successfully and unsuccessfully integrated diversity, equity, and inclusion into our individual and collective/institutional work. Topics may include collection priorities and management, outreach, conservation, donor relations, hiring practices, and more. Together, we will examine how to move beyond well-meaning but insufficient efforts to create meaningful and lasting change, and how to navigate challenges such as resistance and backlash. Participants will collectively decide how our conversations will reflect the priorities and experiences of the community.

What should you know already?
No prior experience is necessary.

Cost: $50
Location: Hilton Minneapolis 
Enrollment: 20

This workshop for oral historians of all levels of experience will focus not only on what oral history is, but also on how and why the oral history field has emerged as one of the most flexible and dynamic methods of historical account collection. Over the course of the four-hour workshop, the instructors will empower you to come face-to-face with the history you are documenting, and demonstrate how to navigate thorny issues of empathy vs. exploitation, trauma-based accounts, and who has the right to tell whose story in the archives. The nuts and bolts of oral history will be covered extensively, offering you the opportunity to submit your own projects for feedback and development in project design, interviewing, transcription, preservation, and access.

Who should attend?
Anyone interested in learning more about how to design and execute successful oral history projects.

What should you know already?
No prior knowledge or experience needed

This informal meet up is for connecting LGBTQ archivists in the Midwest, whether working directly with queer archival materials or not. How do we want to support and celebrate Midwestern LGBTQ archival work? Do we need to develop a more formalized network? These are a couple of the topics we hope to discuss during this time. This meet up is hosted by Aiden Bettine, Curator of the Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota. Please email abettine@umn.edu with any questions.

Location: Minneapolis Central Library, 300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis, MN 55401
Cost: Free
Capacity: 15 people
Tour details: Hennepin County Library Special Collections holds several in-depth collections including the Minneapolis and Hennepin County Collection of local history. See behind the scenes of its archives and digitization programs. To learn more, visit https://www.hclib.org/about/locations/special-collections    
Transportation Options 

Location: 1256 Penn Avenue North, Minneapolis, MN 55411
Cost: $10 per person to be paid at MAAHMG upon arrival (cash or credit card).
Capacity: 15 people
Tour details: Join MAC for a guided museum tour of the Minnesota African American Heritage Museum and Gallery. The MAAHMG preserves, documents, and highlights the achievements, contributions and experiences of African Americans in Minnesota. To learn more, visit https://maahmg.org
Transportation Options

Location: 345 W. Kellogg Blvd. Saint Paul MN 55102
Cost: $10 to be paid at time of registration
Capacity: 15 people
Tour details: Get a behind-the-scenes look at the Minnesota Historical Society Library 
and Archives storage facility. MHS collections chronicle a wide range of materials that 
represent Minnesota’s diverse history and culture. To learn more, visit  https://www.mnhs.org
 Transportation Options 

Cost: $10 to be paid at time of registration
Capacity: 15 people
Tour details: The University of Minnesota Libraries’ Department of Archives and Special 
Collections (ASC) collects and preserves an amazing array of materials that support 
interdisciplinary research. Take this behind the scenes tour of the underground caverns where the collections are stored. To learn more, visit https://www.lib.umn.edu/collections/special
Transportation Options

Location: 725 Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN 55403
Cost: $10 to be paid at time of registration
Capacity: 15 people
Tour details: The Walker Art Center’s Library and Archives contain a comprehensive 
collection of artists’ monographs and catalogs, and over a century's worth of archival 
materials related to the Walker’s long history. To learn more, visit 
https://walkerart.org/library-research
Transportation Options

MAC Pals, come join us for the MAC Pals Midday Meet and Greet! This special event provides a relaxed opportunity for you to connect with your pal(s) before the meeting kicks off to share valuable tips for making the most of the conference and your MAC membership. It’s a great chance to socialize, make plans, and strengthen your connections with fellow members. Register by March 12, 2025, on the registration form to attend the MAC Pals Midday Meet and Greet and enjoy some light lunchtime snacks and drinks with your pals. For questions, contact Rebecca Wells, the MAC Pals coordinator, at macpalsprogram@gmail.com.

The era of Indian boarding schools remains a profound and complex chapter in history, marked by intergenerational trauma, cultural erasure, and resilience. Fallon Carey’s work focuses on the curation of Fallon Carey’s work focuses on the curation of boarding school records to support truth-telling, promote healing, and empower Indigenous communities. Through initiatives such as the National Indian Boarding School Document Access project (NIBSDA) and collaborations with institutions like the National Archives, she engages in digitizing and preserving archival materials that document the operations and impacts of these institutions.

This talk will highlight the multifaceted nature of this work, including the technical and ethical challenges of managing sensitive historical data, ensuring cultural protocols are respected, and addressing the dual responsibilities of providing public access and safeguarding Indigenous Perspectives. By collaborating with tribal nations, researchers, and policymakers, this effort not only preserves history but also creates pathways for community-driven storytelling, education, and advocacy. Through this plenary, Carey aims to illuminate the significance of boarding school record curation as a means of confronting historical injustices, fostering understanding, and contributing to the ongoing pursuit of restorative justice. By bridging archival preservation with community needs, this work seeks to honor the past while supporting a more just and equitable future.

Carey joined the team at NABS in fall of 2022 as the digital archives assistant and took on the role of digital archives manager in the summer of 2024. She is passionate about advocating for tribal sovereignty in archival collections and has worked to facilitate relationships between tribal and nontribal institutions. Since graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a master’s in library science in 2020, she has worked at the University of Utah cataloging oral histories from individuals from 90 different Tribal Nations for the Native American Oral History project funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

In addition to her archival projects, Carey has partnered with Franklin Library staff to promote indigenous collections and library services in Hennepin County. Her past projects include a position as a contributor to the Hennepin County Library Native Advisory Council and the Minnesota Department of Education’s Indigenous Representations Project. Before moving to Minneapolis, she lived on the Cherokee Nation reservation and got her BFA in ceramics with a minor in art history from the University of Tulsa. Carey is a descendent of a boarding school survivor who attended Chilocco Indian Training School.

Poster sessions offer you the chance to see projects and research conducted by colleagues, from students to new archivists to career veterans. Poster presenters will be available to discuss their research during select breaks - look for Poster Presentations event. Check Sched for updated break times.

Vendors:

• Allied Vaughn
• ArchivesSpace
• Artefactual
• Atlas Systems, Inc.
• Hollinger Metal Edge
• Indus International, Inc.
• Internet Archive
• Iron Mountain
• Ithaka
• Lucidea
• LYRASIS
• NEDCC (Northeast Document Conservation Center)
• Preserve South
• San Jose State University
• University Products

Poster sessions offer you the chance to see projects and research conducted by colleagues, from students to new archivists to career veterans.

Poster presenters will be available to discuss their research. Check Sched for updated break times.

Poster: Building a Community Table: The Illinois Wesleyan University Social Justice Tour
Presenter: Liz Bloodworth, (Illinois Wesleyan University)

Poster: “More Than You Should Chew”: Approaches to processing large born-digital collections in under-resourced community
Presenters: Camelia Furio, (University of Iowa), Murray L. Rice II (University of Iowa)

Poster: Felician Sisters: Thriving Through Embracing Community Participation
Presenters: Sister Grace Marie Del Priore (Felician Sisters of North America), Alyssa Noch (Felician Sisters of North America)

Poster: Practicing Archival Activism: Collecting and Curating Reproductive Health in a Post-Dobbs World
Presenter: Ann Holland (University of Iowa, Iowa Women’s Archive)

Poster: Content Notice Development at a Queer Community Archive
Presenter: Liz Shuga (University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison LGBTQ+ Archive)

Poster: Managing Your Resources to “Serve Up” More: Using Item-Level “More Product, Less Process” to Efficiently and Effectively
Presenters: Steven Gentry (University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library), Kendall Scarborough (University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library), Marc Tsuno (University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library)

Poster: A Seat at the Table: Naming Women in the Johnson Publishing Company Archive
Presenter: Jacob Wolf (Getty Research Institute)

Poster: Serving it Up: Social Work Theory and Archival Practice in Preserving and Empowering Marginalized Voices
Presenter: Shulammite Olukayode (Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville)

Poster: Dishing Out Digital Learning: Transforming Archives Instruction with Asynchronous Modules
Presenter: Nada Abdelrahim (Indiana University)

Poster: Becoming Communities that Include All: Documenting a Federal Lawsuit
Presenters: Curt Hanson (University of North Dakota, Chester Fritz Library), Rosemary Pleva Flynn (University of North Dakota, Chester Fritz Library)

Poster: Collecting Everyone: Using Demographic Data to Build Representative Repositories
Presenter: April Anderson-Zorn (Illinois State University)

Poster: Cultivating Connections: Serving History Through Digital Engagement and Community Outreach
Presenter: Emily McDonald (University of Illinois)

Poster: This Won’t Hurt a Bit: Serving Up Solutions That Recordkeepers Can Swallow
Presenter: Daria Labinsky

Poster: "We Are a Family:" Finding Community Through Collections Processing
Presenter: Katherine Hacanyan (Eastern Michigan University Archives)

Poster: Bridging History and Nature: A Collaborative Effort to Design Historical Panels for County Parks
Presenter: Marisa Campanaro (Wright County Historical Society)

Poster: Preserving LGBTQ+ Stories: Recent Changes to the UW-Madison LGBTQ+ Oral History Program
Presenter: David Advent (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Poster: Cooking Up Success: Empowering Community Archives Through Partnership
Presenter: Kierstin Wagner (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Poster: ‘Serving it Up with Ones and Zeroes:’ A Programmatic Workflow for Inserting Content Notices in Digital Collections
Presenter: Theresa Burger (University of Minnesota), Scott Lawan (University of Minnesota)

Like any good hotdish, accessibility is made up of many different ingredients. And, like any good hotdish, there’s no single definitive recipe. Rather than framing accessibility as a set of steps or a list of ingredients, this panel frames it as a suite of potential actions we can take to enact our values around access for our users, ourselves, and our colleagues. Coming from a range of institutions and backgrounds, presenters will examine accessibility from multiple angles, by: 

– Exploring the intersection of disability with higher education and the job market, focusing on the structural and societal ways that disabled people are excluded and disempowered, whether that’s navigating school programs, internships, or job precarity and focusing on ways to lower the barrier to entry for archival workers with disabilities whose perceived “replaceability” gives institutions less incentive to accommodate them; 
– Looking at professional standards and regulations as carrots and cudgels toward advancing accessibility, including ADA Title II and SAA’s Guidelines for Accessible Archives for People with Disabilities;
– Making complex digital collections accessible, looking at both the systems being used along with the items themselves;
– Demystifying accessibility best practices in the classroom; and
– Driving a cultural shift towards greater accessibility within our institutions and broader profession. 

You will come away from this session with an increased understanding of how accessibility can be improved in archives, resources for further learning, and strategies/ideas/steps to implement in your home institution.

To conduct digital preservation activities, it is helpful to have a recipe or workflow. One can purchase a ready-to-bake off-the-shelf product, follow an existing recipe step-by-step, or improvise. You will hear from representatives of several institutions who will regale you with the progress they have made in developing/adapting their recipes for digital preservation workflows. University of Kentucky will discuss their efforts to define, streamline, and adapt existing workflows for born-digital materials that are elements of large hybrid collections, demonstrating decision trees and automation tools that have helped them fully-bake their workflows. Notre Dame will articulate their efforts to identify tools and develop workflows for born-digital processing/preservation that will work with existing infrastructure. Their work−not yet operationalized−has focused on a number of use cases regarding different media carriers/formats, and how to document handoffs, record actions taken, and other activities for multi-format collections that require input from their archival team. Ohio State will describe the evolution of their newest digital preservation repo−Gray−and how they cooked-up a homemade workflow adapting existing open-source and proprietary tools. Finally, Wayne State will discuss the challenges/opportunities of designing a digital preservation program, while navigating many enterprise-level IT transitions to collaborate on sustainable workflows, and accounting for born-digital and digitized materials, their description and appropriate access strategies. While these “recipes” have been developed at medium-to-large academic institutions, we believe they are adaptable to institutions of all sizes and backgrounds.

Over the past two years, colleges and universities across the country have experienced waves of campus protests in response to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and votes of no-confidence against administrators because of their challenges to free-speech, faculty governance, and DEIJ initiatives. Led by a board member from Project STAND, this moderated discussion will share approaches and lessons learned from five institutional archives (two private; three public). You will reflect on the decision-making processes within their archives during these events, including  following guidance from crisis-collecting best practices such as Project STAND and Documenting the NOW, the mechanics of soliciting and collecting contributions to physical and digital documentation initiatives, and strategies for incorporating perspectives and experiences that people might be reluctant to share directly due to fear of repercussions or distrust of parent institutions and their administrators. Additionally, they will discuss issues of ethics, anonymity, and access in balancing immediate, interim, and long-term collecting efforts.

To explore these issues, presenters will share unique campus-specific responses such as holding a writing workshop at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, offering fully anonymous submissions from protestors at Indiana University, working with a sociology research methods course documenting protest at Connecticut College, connecting collecting efforts with the congressional testimony by Northwestern University’s president, and looking at a full range of collecting options from the immediate to the long-term at the University of Minnesota. Common themes will include the implications of public vs. private institutional status, considerations about balancing documenting provenance while maintaining donor privacy, and the benefits of using student archives employees in this work. Ample time will be allocated for audience discussion.

The opening reception will occur in the Symphony Ballroom of the Hilton Minneapolis. The ballroom offers a stunning view of Minnesota Orchestra Hall and beyond. Come join in an opportunity to relax and gather with your fellow attendees, and visit with any vendors you missed during the Vendor Fair. We will also have a Renew and Rejuvenate Zone in the ballroom for those who want to color, make buttons, and more. Light snacks and refreshments will be served, and a cash bar will be available. Guests and children are invited to attend with an extra fee required to cover food and drink costs.