mac2025minneapolis

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.