Delaware Valley Archivists Group

This year Paige Bartello was awarded SAA Annual Meeting Travel Grant funds to attend the SAA Annual Meeting in-person.

I had the pleasure of attending the Society of American Archivists’ Archives*Records 2024 conference with a travel grant provided to me through the Delaware Valley Archivists Group. Over the three days of the conference I gained invaluable knowledge that will help me in my work as the Administrative Coordinator at the Lower Merion Historical Society, as well as the Assistant Archivist for the Campbell Soup Company.

At LMHS I am the one and only employee there has ever been, and because of this I’ve inherited a lot of archival debt. Since coming on in January of this year I have tried my best to tackle the intense amount of work it takes to rearrange and re-describe the Society’s collections, but I knew I needed some help along the way.

The sessions offered this year were great for me, especially as a conference first-timer. I learned about ways to engage students and community members creatively through zine making and lessons based on historical postcards, which I plan to integrate into my own programming. I also got to hear about the work archivists at Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst have done to engage with the public beyond the reading room. They found a way to use reproductions as teaching tools, including a “museum in a box” that interacts with reproductions to provide an audio element to archival learning. These tactile learning techniques will be something I look to include in our programming, especially for our K-12 audience.

I also learned a great deal about audio and moving image description. We have a fair amount of outdated media formats at LMHS and Campbell’s, and I now know how to identify problem formats and start on the path towards complete digitization of our AVD collections. I plan to start an extended digitization effort with the help from the Pennsylvania Power Libraries program for their database, PA Photos and Documents, and the conference session on FADGI standards has really helped me to understand more about this process. As someone who has not had much digitization or AVD experience in the past, these sessions were supremely helpful.

I was able to find reassurance hearing from Christina Zamon, author of Alone in the Stacks: Succeeding as a Solo Archivist. I am often overwhelmed with the reality of being the sole employee at my workplace, and finding that others have shared the same anxieties and found a way to deal with them is comforting. I purchased Christina’s book at the SAA book store during the conference and it has already proved helpful as I plan my next steps post-conference.

I’ve returned from the conference invigorated and ready to tackle my archival debt head-first and put down deeper roots in the local community. I am endlessly thankful to DVAG for providing me with this opportunity to learn from colleagues that I would not have otherwise had access to.