Suddenly, Everything\u27s Online! What Do We Do Now?

In this presentation, the author, the University of Kentucky university archivist, outlines a problem with acquiring currently-created university documents and offers some initial solutions. The problem is that key university records of historical and strategic importance are being distributed or published online and not routinely transferred to the archives the way they were in the past. Unless these documents are proactively acquired by the university archives, they are likely to be lost because of the ephemeral nature of the Web. Yet, crawling or otherwise capturing dynamic and changing web platforms adds technological complexity and thus requires additional resources. Given that the author has scarce time and money and given the risk of loss of these documents, how should the university archives re-align its acquisitioning effort? Five initial solutions are proposed: First, acknowledge the technological and resource challenge of online formats, while also acknowledging the opportunity their acquisition provides for a wider, stronger presence of voices and content in the historical record. Second, rethink appraisal criteria, moving away from the university records schedule and more carefully quantifying the resources required for acquisition. Third, based on a appraisal, re-allocate the resources to which the archives already has access. Fourth, continue to test and research to refine the technology and staffing requirements and the appraisal criteria. Fifth, use the research, testing, thinking, and practice to advocate for more support

Appraisal Frameworks Used to Deaccession Part of a University Faculty Personal Papers Collection: The Case of the Artist\u27s Scrapbooks

This presentation reflects on an archival deaccessioning situation where the son of a living donor, a member of the faculty at the University of Kentucky, requested the return of the family scrapbooks included in his father\u27s collection. The presentation comprises the story of the deaccession, a definition of appraisal in this American archives context, and then an unpacking of the appraisal decision frameworks operating in this case study

Capstone Officials and Public Records: Risk, Buy-in, and Archival Selection

Use of records schedules as appraisal tools works well for routine records held by low-level employees in public institutions. Records created by top-level public officials, however, can be more challenging to schedule. Using NARA\u27s recent definition of capstone officials as a starting concept, panelists representing public universities and state and federal governments present case studies from their own institutions dealing with policy creation for capstone officials\u27 records, records schedules and public records laws, and archival selection

Diversity + Inclusion = Community Introduction and Wrap up

This presentation articulates a definition of diversity, inclusion, and community as used by the Retreat Planning Committee to frame the speakers and activities at the University of Kentucky Libraries all-staff retreat in August 2015

Appraisal of Faculty Personal Papers in American Public University Archives: The Public Records Retention Schedule versus Cultural and Historical Selection Criteria and the Role of the Archives in the University

In the United States, university archives are part of the university organizational structure. The archives can be formed strictly of permanent university records or can also include the personal papers of individuals related to the university, most often faculty, but also administrators and students/alumni. In addition, by law, the records produced by American public universities--including many of the personal papers acquired by public university archives--are also public records, which must be appraised using their specific state-mandated records retention schedule. The main goal of the schedule is to manage the current and non-current records of the organization in order to mitigate risk and promote efficiency. However, a records schedule is not the tool used by American archivists to appraise across or weed within personal papers collections. Selection criteria applied to personal papers is aimed at building a set of primary source or “eye witness” accounts of people, places, events, locations, and cultures for historical research. This paper explores this tension in the collecting mission and appraisal theory and practice in hybrid institutional-collecting archives in American public, land-grant universities by reporting on the results of a survey investigating whether, how, and the extent to which archivists in these repositories use legally mandated, state-level public record retention schedules to select records for permanent retention and/or destruction across and within faculty personal papers. The results are used to consider what aspects of the university these faculty papers document. Answers to these questions have a direct impact on the public university archive’s holdings and thus on the role of the university archives in American public universities

Preserving Family Artifacts

The Casey County Library is hosting a talk about “Preserving Family Artifacts” on Saturday July 15, 2023 at 11:00 am-Noon. Anyone interested in learning how to care for important family papers, photographs, sound and film recordings, digital information, and books and Bibles are welcome to attend. Ruth E. Bryan, the University Archivist for the University of Kentucky Library’s Special Collections Research Center, will be sharing key steps to keep your family treasures safe for future generations

Archives and Preservation Technical Talk: Introduction and Legal and Copyright Issues in Archives

The Association of Earth Science Editors held their annual meeting at the University of Kentucky in October 2014. They requested a technical talk on archives and preservation topics. A group of co-presenters organized by Ruth Bryan conducted a survey of the membership (results in the Introduction) and crafted 30-minute presentations on individual topics. Included in this paper is the Introduction and the Legal (property rights/donor restrictions) and Copyright (intellectual rights) presentation of the technical talk

Burns like Dust: 1 House, 8 Collections, 7 Repositories

This case study is about collection development policies, both on the repository level as well as applying them within individual collections, specifically faculty papers. Dust is a metaphor for both the on-the-ground experience of archival appraisal as well as for the “dust” of people’s lives and events that historians are “breathing in” when they work with primary source material (Carol Steedman, Dust: The archive and cultural history, 2002). From the perspective of the cultural value of archives, this “dust” is what we select when we’re transforming a mountain of paper or electronic records into archives

The Archives and You: Why Your Memorabilia Matters

Join Ruth E. Bryan, University Archivist at the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center, as she describes what archives are and how your memorabilia can contribute to historical research and scholarship