A Balancing Act in the Archives: Increasing Access to the Great Plains Black History Museum Collections

The University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections is temporarily housing a portion of the Great Plains Black History Museum’s (GPBHM) archival collection as a result of an ongoing community partnership. The GPBHM’s stated mission is “…to preserve, educate, and exhibit the contributions and achievements of African Americans with an emphasis on the Great Plains region, as well as provide a space to learn, explore, reflect and remember our history” (https://gpblackhistorymuseum.org/). It was founded in 1975 and has since served as a rich resource for Black history in the Omaha community. UNO has a history of collaborating with the museum for co-sponsored panel discussions, history summer camps, and guidance on collection care. Building upon these joint efforts naturally led to piloting a partnership that involved the temporary transfer of archival collections to UNO for arrangement, description, and select digitization. At the time of transfer, the collection allowed no public access due to space limitations. As community members, UNO archivists wanted to help make these resources available to the wider community. UNO staff could reasonably offer their professional resources to contribute towards increased access to the GPBHM archival collection. The potential multiple pitfalls of community partnerships do require in-depth consideration though, some the authors were prepared for and others less so. The ethical considerations of UNO staff forming a partnership that transferred records temporarily out of the community in which they were created were significant. While UNO archivists bring professional skills to the project, it was critical that they not approach it from a position of all-knowing power, but with a service mindset while incorporating significant input from the museum leadership. Communication between UNO and the GPBHM was an important piece in establishing the partnership. The MOU between both parties indicates exactly how UNO will assist the GPBHM in their efforts to increase access, while ultimately ensuring that the resources be as open as possible to the community. The authors learned that communication can be difficult when there is a single point of contact, made more difficult by a volunteer board populated by people who work full-time elsewhere. While the authors were prepared for these potential pitfalls, they were less so ready for the juggling act of balancing resources. Quite unexpectedly, the platform where digital collections were to be made accessible became a nonviable option only two years into the partnership. This coincided with uncertainties surrounding a permanent GPBHM location to house and provide access to the collection, which may not be settled for years. In addition, concerns over the annual library budget have contributed to discussions surrounding priorities in processing and digitization. Despite these uncertainties, one of UNO’s strategic priorities is community engagement. The authors are fortunate to have the support of both their unit Director and library Dean to pursue the work. The authors will continue to support increased access to the GPBHM archival collection by pursuing grants that will assist with conservation, further processing, and ongoing digitization. The ongoing work will build off the selection of materials originally chosen for its subject matter and relevance to UNO’s Department of Black Studies. This paper will discuss building relationships with community partners, the ethics of partnerships that include relocating and hosting collections, complications with balancing resources, and handling the unknown. The authors will describe and reflect on UNO’s partnership with the GBPHM with the goal of serving as one example of how positive community partnerships can benefit all parties involved

Balancing Act in the Archives: Increasing Access to the Great Plains Black History Museum Collection

Our unit has been working for several years in various capacities with the Great Plains Black History Museum in North Omaha, a community museum located in a predominantly and historically Black area of our city. The Museum is a rich exhibit-based resource for Black history in Omaha and the region. Their stated mission is to “preserve, educate, and exhibit the contributions and achievements of African Americans with an emphasis on the Great Plains region, as well as provide a space to learn, explore, reflect and remember our history.” They mount rotating exhibits, give in-person and virtual tours to school and community groups locally and further afield, and have a robust Facebook presence with multiple posts a day every day. On the slide you\u27ll see their exhibit space near their front door, and then that same door from the historic 24th Street corridor in North Omaha. They also have a large underutilized archival collection, which is our focus today. It holds a variety of formats including photographs, correspondence, scrapbooks, posters, pamphlets, ledgers, documents, and other material. The collection documents Black foodways, rural settlements after the Civil War, urban settlements to meet increasing demands for labor and during the Great Migration in the 20th century, education and schools (K-16), businesses, churches, community leaders, veterans of the armed forces, social organizations, musicians and music venues, police reform, the Underground Railroad in the Great Plains region, and more. Our latest collaboration with the museum involves arrangement, description, and selective digitization of this collection. This project is ongoing but unfortunately stalled at the present time. This is a change from when we first proposed this topic for Brick & Click and even since we presented it at a local NE conference in May. We’ll get into this throughout our talk today

Balancing Act in the Archives: Increasing Access to the Great Plains Black History Museum Collection

Our unit has been working for several years in various capacities with the Great Plains Black History Museum in North Omaha. Our latest collaboration involves arrangement, description, and selective digitization of their archives. This project is ongoing though paused at the moment. In this talk, Wendy and I are going to summarize our current development of a research topic in the archival profession stemming from this Great Plains Black History Museum project–that of ensuring access to a community archive through a partnership. Along the way, we’ve been thinking through issues like resource allocation, sustainable access to community archival collections, hosting collections, and ethical issues, among others. Our outline today is the partnership history, lessons from a lit review in progress, benefits and obstacles of community-institutional archives partnerships, and the future of this research. And now we’re going to hear from Wendy about the history of this partnership

Intentional Design: Crafting a Sustainable Internship Program

The University of Nebraska Archives and Special Collections’ internship program was born of the pandemic and has evolved into a structured, sustainable, and mutually beneficial internship program. We, along with archivists everywhere, rushed to modify and create digital projects that would sustain us and our student employees and interns, during an unknown stretch of working from home. While this short-term project creation worked during the height of the pandemic, we needed something more structured for the students and sustainable for archivists. This led us to develop an internship program that centered on a mutually beneficial framework and a healthy work environment. Through this session, we hope to provide resources for our archival colleagues who are creating new or modifying existing internship programs. We will address project planning, framework design, documentation, piloting the program, and continual assessment. We will walk through our program elements and workflows, sharing what we changed along the way and why. The design of this program facilitates sustainability through creating projects that are respectful of archivists’ workload and student needs. We hope to provide students with a sense of purpose, accomplishment, and support they can carry with them to their academic programs and careers

Intentional Design: Crafting a Mutually Beneficial Internship Program in a University Archives and Special Collections

At the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) Criss Library, archivists in Archives and Special Collections work with students at varied levels, from student employees to interns, and engagement through instruction. These interactions and employment opportunities manifest in various types of projects, ranging from long-term processing work to more individualized assignments based on the parameters of practicums and internships. In the past, most of this work was based on in-person experiences. In early 2020, UNO archivists rushed to modify and create digital projects that would sustain them and their students during an unknown stretch of working from home. As the pandemic stretched on and working from home expectations changed, students continued to need remote work and learning opportunities. UNO archivists gained several student workers and interns over the course of the pandemic. Some of the students were transferred from other departments in the library, such as Circulation, which needed more time to determine how they could work from home. Many of the students that were temporarily placed in Archives and Special Collections had no experience with archives’ work, and archivists were “ghosted” by a few student employees. Archivists did not take this personally as the pandemic affected everyone differently; they reconnected with students with redoubled efforts in flexibility and compassion. However, archivists are not superheroes; they could not be all things to students while dealing with their own pandemic-related circumstances. As a result, archivists had to identify ways in which they could engage students in meaningful work, while avoiding their own burnout or making more work for themselves. The Hagel Archivist, Digital Initiatives Archivist, and Outreach Archivist initially worked individually to create and manage their student employees and interns. Each area of student work, processing, digital collections, and outreach required different workflows for project creation, and varied methods for scaffolding projects and outcomes. Additionally, each archivist had different levels of experience in supervision and creation of student projects. The Hagel Archivist manages students on short and long-term processing projects and working with multiple students from various academic programs. The Digital Initiatives Archivist oversees digitization projects that partner onsite UNO students for digitization and editing with remote library information science (LIS) students from various programs for metadata creation. The Outreach Archivist and her students create social media content, virtual programming, and exhibits to support collections and campus-wide events. In 2021, these three archivists decided to create a more structured and well-rounded program for engaging student employees, practicum students, and interns in the various facets of archival and special collections work. This paper addresses UNO archivists’ planning for remote, in-person, and hybrid student projects in processing, digital initiatives, and outreach. It includes discussion of implementing different student projects and lessons learned. Also described is the ideation of a formalized internship design and workflow as UNO archivists look to increase remote collaboration with students even as they return to full-time in-person work. Through this work, archivists plan to create student projects that are mutually beneficial and leave their students with a sense of purpose, accomplishment, and support they can carry with them throughout their classes and into employment

We Can Do It! But Should We? Reflecting on Projects and Priorities

What happens when you combine archivists and non-archivists with good intentions, unprocessed collections, institutional push to seek grants, competing pressures and deadlines? At the University of Nebraska at Omaha Archives and Special Collections, this familiar scenario occurred during a period focused on prioritizing Latinx collections including personal papers, Office of Latino and Latin American Studies Records, and oral histories. During our presentation, we will share how archivists attempted to wrangle multiple funding streams to meet processing, outreach, and digitization goals while internal and external forces took a toll. These included stakeholder expectations, the complexities of student employment, campus events, and class collaborations. We will also examine how project goals and converging timelines created gaps that we felt could not receive adequate attention. When we began these overlapping projects, we knew that staying in scope was key to successfully reaching our goals. Yet one element that exemplified scope creep was oral histories. While these are important resources for research and community engagement, they also proved to be an epicenter of angst over funding, labor, and collaborators misunderstanding how archives and digital collections are funded and maintained. Conversely, we experienced a boon in usage of archival materials thanks to outreach events and instruction sessions. In keeping with the conference themes of controlling workload expectations, stretching resources in innovative and practical ways, and cultivating collection relationships, we will highlight successes and setbacks as the scope of the projects grew and then contracted when resources could not match aspirations

Autonomous Electron Tomography Reconstruction with Machine Learning

Modern electron tomography has progressed to higher resolution at lower doses by leveraging compressed sensing methods that minimize total variation (TV). However, these sparsity-emphasized reconstruction algorithms introduce tunable parameters that greatly influence the reconstruction quality. Here, Pareto front analysis shows that high-quality tomograms are reproducibly achieved when TV minimization is heavily weighted. However, in excess, compressed sensing tomography creates overly smoothed 3D reconstructions. Adding momentum into the gradient descent during reconstruction reduces the risk of over-smoothing and better ensures that compressed sensing is well behaved. For simulated data, the tedious process of tomography parameter selection is efficiently solved using Bayesian optimization with Gaussian processes. In combination, Bayesian optimization with momentum-based compressed sensing greatly reduces the required compute time$-$an 80% reduction was observed for the 3D reconstruction of SrTiO$_3$ nanocubes. Automated parameter selection is necessary for large scale tomographic simulations that enable the 3D characterization of a wider range of inorganic and biological materials.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Promising Practices for Community College Developmental Education

Developmental education is a key part of the college experience of a great number of community college students. Nationwide, about 60 percent of recent high school graduates who enter postsecondary education through community college take at least one remedial course (Bailey, Leinbach, and Jenkins, 2005). Yet, despite the prevalence of students who take developmental courses at community colleges, there is surprisingly little definitive research evidence on what makes for effective developmental education practice. Many studies of community college developmental education (or “remedial” education; we use these terms interchangeably) are based on programs and students at single institutions. These studies often do not make use of carefully selected comparison groups, and they typically do not track individuals long enough to find out whether students are eventually able to earn degrees or transfer to baccalaureate programs (see Levin and Calcagno, 2007). This document provides a summary of key findings from the research literature on developmental education practices that appear promising. It was produced as a discussion resource for community college educators and state agency staff in Connecticut. We hope that the practices described in this document encourage community college educators in Connecticut to reflect on how they currently approach developmental education and discuss ways they might strengthen program outcomes

Patient Satisfaction and Disease Specific Quality of Life After Uterine Artery Embolization

Objectives: This study was undertaken to evaluate changes in fibroid specific symptom severity and health-related quality of life (HRQOL) after uterine artery embolization (UAE) and to consider the impact of these changes on satisfaction with the procedure. Study design: A validated, fibroid specific, symptom, and HRQOL questionnaire was mailed to 80 women who had undergone UAE from 1998 through 2002. Pre- and postprocedure symptom severity and HRQOL scores were obtained. The primary outcome measure was change in fibroid symptoms and HRQOL after UAE. Secondary outcomes included objective measures of patient satisfaction, and the decrease in uterine volume after UAE

Suture-method versus Through-the-needle Catheters for Continuous Popliteal-sciatic Nerve Blocks: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

BACKGROUND:The basic perineural catheter design has changed minimally since inception, with the catheter introduced through or over a straight needle. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently cleared a novel perineural catheter design comprising a catheter attached to the back of a suture-shaped needle that is inserted, advanced along the arc of its curvature pulling the catheter past the target nerve, and then exited through the skin in a second location. The authors hypothesized that analgesia would be noninferior using the new versus traditional catheter design in the first two days after painful foot/ankle surgery with a primary outcome of average pain measured with the Numeric Rating Scale. METHODS:Subjects undergoing painful foot or ankle surgery with a continuous supraparaneural popliteal-sciatic nerve block 5 cm proximal to the bifurcation were randomized to either a suture-type or through-the-needle catheter and subsequent 3-day 0.2% ropivacaine infusion (basal 6 ml/h, bolus 4 ml, lockout 30 min). Subjects received daily follow-up for the first four days after surgery, including assessment for evidence of malfunction or dislodgement of the catheters. RESULTS:During the first two postoperative days the mean ± SD average pain scores were lower in subjects with the suture-catheter (n = 35) compared with the through-the-needle (n = 35) group (2.7 ± 2.4 vs. 3.4 ± 2.4) and found to be statistically noninferior (95% CI, -1.9 to 0.6; P < 0.001). No suture-style catheter was completely dislodged (0%), whereas the tips of three (9%) traditional catheters were found outside of the skin before purposeful removal on postoperative day 3 (P = 0.239). CONCLUSIONS:Suture-type perineural catheters provided noninferior analgesia compared with traditional catheters for continuous popliteal-sciatic blocks after painful foot and ankle surgery. The new catheter design appears to be a viable alternative to traditional designs used for the past seven decades