workshops

Apply for the Carroll Hart Scholarship today

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The Society of Georgia Archivists is now accepting applications for the 2023 Carroll Hart Scholarship. The application deadline is March 6, 2023.

This year’s Georgia Archives Institute will be held June 5-16, 2023.

For full details, please go to https://soga.wildapricot.org/scholarships/hart

The Society of Georgia Archivists awards a scholarship for attendance at the Georgia Archives Institute held each summer in Atlanta. The purpose of the scholarship is to enhance archival education and membership. The scholarship is named for Carroll Hart, former director of the Georgia Department of Archives and History, founding member of the Society of Georgia Archivists, and founder of the Georgia Archives Institute.

Individuals eligible to compete for the scholarship are:

  • Those engaged in compensated or volunteer archival work at any level in an institution in the state of Georgia.
  • SGA members employed outside the state of Georgia.
  • Graduate students preparing for a career in archives at a college or university in Georgia, or SGA student members studying outside the state of Georgia.

Preference will be given to applicants who do not have access to institutional support for attending the Georgia Archives Institute.

The scholarship will cover an amount equal to the non credit tuition for the Institute, but not to exceed $500, and a year’s membership in the Society of Georgia Archivists. Please note that individuals must apply separately to the Georgia Archives Institute and pay the application fee to the Georgia Archives Institute. All regular deadlines and requirements for the Georgia Archives Institute apply. After participating in the Georgia Archives Institute, the recipient will submit a brief article on the experience for use in the SGA Newsletter.

How to apply:

Please fill out the online portion of the application for the Carroll Hart Scholarship. Then, to complete your application email your resume or CV and cover letter to scholarships@soga.org. Your application is not complete until these documents have been received.

Complete applications including cover letter and CV or resume must be received by March 6, 2023.

Read the 2023 SGA Magazine Today!

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The new SGA 2023 Magazine has just been published online, visit here to read the full issue, https://soga.wildapricot.org/publications/magazine 

This year’s issue is full of professional development opportunities, words from our former and current presidents, a new member spotlight, updates on a couple of institution’s grant projects, and a post on remembering SGA’s first President Edward Weldon after his passing in late 2022.

Habersham Education and Research was founded to collect the history of Habersham County in Georgia and make it more accessible to the public. The history of the county is spread out into the Clarkesville Library, courthouse and local historians residences. The most important project Habersham Education has focused on is the digitization and indexing of local newspapers, a valuable resource for researchers and genealogists. With the help of a SGA Spotlight grant the Digitize Habersham project launched in November of 2022 after two years of work of digitizing and indexing. Peter Madruga from Habersham Education and Research details more about this project in the new SGA Magazine. If you are interested in the Georgia Archives Month Spotlight grant learn more on our website. 

Georgia State University in partnership with the University of Maryland received a CLIR Hidden Collections grant to digitize the AFL-CIO Civil Rights Department Southeast Division Records. The department operated in Atlanta from 1964-1989 and was instrumental in ensuring equal job opportunities and the creation of training programs for marginalized communities. The collection has 78 linear feet of mainly documents with some audio visual material. Not only does the team want to make the documents available online, they also are collaborating with the Digital Library of Georgia to create online educational resources. Read more about how this grant project is progressing in the new magazine, available to read now!

Thanks to all of our contributors for submitting something to be featured in this year’s SGA Magazine. We have years and years of a backlog of our quarterly newsletters which were the predecessor of the SGA Magazine. If you want to learn even more about SGA as an organization take a look through our previous issues on our website, https://soga.wildapricot.org/publications/newsletterbackissues . Consider submitting an article next year or if you cannot wait, submit it as a blog post here.

SGA Summer Workshop: Register Now

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Reparative Description from Two Sides: Cataloging and Processing

Thursday, June 23, 2022, 12:30-4:00 PM (EST)

Location: Zoom

This workshop is for archivists and special collection librarians who wish to increase their abilities in limiting harmful language in their organization’s finding aids and catalog records through reparative description. This workshop will help archivists and librarians to identify and build upon best practices in description and cataloging to create policy, guidelines, and implement reparative description in their own organizations. Discussion leaders will present on prominent topics and issues, and participants will learn how to approach description, identify authoritative organizations and documentation, and discuss situations with leaders in this work as well other learners through the roundtable discussion.

Instructors: Beth Shoemaker and Tierra Thomas

Moderator: Laura Starratt

Beth Shoemaker is the Rare Book Librarian at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archive & Rare Book Library in Atlanta. Her work includes cataloging, collection development, teaching and curating exhibits in the Emory Libraries. Her research interests include how practicing catalogers approach ethics in the workplace. Since its formation in 2018, she has been co-chair of the Cataloging Ethics Steering Committee, which released a final draft of the Cataloguing Code of Ethics in January 2021. Beth is a graduate of the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

Tierra Thomas is an early career archivist living in Decatur, Georgia. She earned her MSLS at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – School of Information and Library Science. As an undergraduate, she studied History and African American Studies at Georgia State University. Most recently she finished her contract term as Visiting Archivist for Southern Jewish Collections at Emory University. She has served as a member of the Anti-Oppressive Language Working Group at Emory University’s Rose Library and the Conscious Editing Steering Committee at UNC-CH’s Wilson Library. Her research focuses on social justice and equity and centering those ideals in an archival setting.

Register here.

SGA 2021 Annual Meeting Recordings Available Now

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The recordings of the 2021 SGA Annual Meeting are now available to view online! If you were unable to attend the conference live or missed a session you really wanted to attend, we invite you to view the playlist of presentations on SGA’s YouTube.

The presentations are unlisted, so you cannot access them by visiting our page or searching for them on YouTube. They are only viewable through this link, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH2n1apWPCoP98qJads742hVdd2Gt0dXm

While you are on the playlist be sure to subscribe to our channel!

Registration is open for workshop, Digital Preservation Tools: A Sampler

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Instructor: Seth Shaw
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Columbus Marriott
Empire Mills Room
800 Front Avenue
Columbus, GA
9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Digital preservation is a complex topic with many challenges. Identifying and selecting the right tools to help solve those problems can be confusing. This one-day workshop will introduce a selection of tools supporting digital preservation and how those tools might be incorporated into a workflow. Participants will see demonstrations of several tools and will practice with a few using their own laptop computer.

Digital preservation tasks addressed will include data acquisition (for example, TeraCopy, FTKImager, and HTTrack), fixity checking and monitoring (LOC’s Bagger and AVPreserve’s Fixity), scanning for content or threats (e.g. bulk_extractor and Identify Finder), format identification (e.g. Jhove and Droid), format migration, environment emulation or virtualization, and projects designed to package many of these tools together (BitCurator and Archivematica).

To get the most from this workshop, participants should be familiar with basic digital preservation concepts such as fixity, checksums, migration, and emulation. They should have good computer skills — word processing, browsing the Web, email, copying and renaming files, and creating folders. They do not need more advanced knowledge, such as programming or database design, although familiarity with command-line interfaces and XML is useful. (Individuals with experience in digital archives or advanced skills are welcome to come and contribute to the conversation!)

Attendees must bring their own laptops.

Registration is $80 per person; this workshop is limited to 15 attendees. The registration deadline is October 7, 2015.

Refreshments will be served during the morning and afternoon breaks. Lunch will be the responsibility of the attendees.

For more information on the course or to register, click here.

Registration open for workshop, A Guerrilla Approach to Digital Archives

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Saturday, September 12, 2015
Georgia Archives
5800 Jonesboro Road
Morrow, Georgia
10:00 am – 4:30 pm
Lunch will be provided

This one day workshop will introduce archivists to the basics of digital archives, explaining the concepts of curating and preserving electronic records in terms of traditional archival practice.  Participants will learn practical things they can do to acquire, preserve, and provide access to electronic records with limited resources and technical expertise. 

Creating and sustaining a robust, trustworthy digital archives is hard work. The problems are complex, and even more perplexing as technology evolves and presents new problems. At the same time, archivists don’t have to build an ideal system. Instead, a “guerilla approach” looks for short-term tactics – inexpensive, simple steps that can help archivists move in the direction of the strategic ideal. Breaking digital archives into smaller pieces makes the problem manageable. 

Participants will discuss the core functions of digital archives and how they parallel traditional archives. Which records should be selected and acquired? How should those records be arranged and described? How should they be housed and preserved? And what about access? Participants will learn how their existing knowledge can be adapted to digital archives.

The facilitator, Richard Pearce-Moses, will lead participants through a series of questions, call for possible solutions, and suggest some of his own.

 

Who should attend?

 

To get the most from the workshop, participants should understand the fundamentals of archival practice – appraisal and selection, arrangement and description, housing and preservation, reference and access. They should have good computers skills – word processing, browsing the web, email, copying and renaming files, and creating folders. They do not need more advanced knowledge, such as programming, database design, programming, or web design. (Individuals with experience in digital archives or advanced skills are welcome to come and contribute to the conversation!)

Registration is $80 per person; this workshop is limited to 15 attendees. 

The registration deadline is August 29, 2015.

For more information and to register, click here.

About the instructor

Richard Pearce-Moses was a practicing archivist for thirty years before coming to Clayton State University to head the Master of Archival Studies Program in 2010.  He is a Certified Archivist and a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists. In 2007, he received the Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology, and in 2009 the Library of Congress named him a Digital Preservation Pioneer.

 

About a “Guerrilla Approach”

The workshop name was inspired an article by Christopher A. Lee, “Guerrilla Electronic Management” in Records & Information Management Report 18:5 (May 2002). He notes, “We need to act now in ways that we can, rather than waiting for better solutions to come along.” Lee’s article quotes Jakob Nielsen, who coined the phrase, “insisting on using only the best methods may result in having no methods at all.” Participants are encouraged to read Lee’s article, online at http://www.ils.unc.edu/callee/guerrilla_erm_2002.pdf.

Advocacy workshop at annual meeting

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Sign up now to take part in the advocacy workshop sponsored by Friends of the Georgia Archives (FOGAH) at the SGA Annual Meeting. Training will be conducted by Joe Tanner of Tanner and Associates and will cover how to contact your representative so that your voice will be heard!

The training is free and is open to both members of SGA and anyone in the SE Georgia area who wants to participate. It will be on Thursday, November 8 from 3:00 to 4:30 PM at the conference venue, Sea Palms Resort on St. Simons Island, Georgia.

Registration is required because of the limited space. Please visit http://soga.org/events?eventId=574216&EventViewMode=2&CalendarViewType=0&SelectedDate=10/30/2012 to register. 

Questions about the training? Contact Dianne Cannestra at diannebc@bellsouth.net
Questions about registration? Contact Renna Tuten at rtuten@uga.edu

SGA Workshop: Creating DACS Compliant Finding Aids in AT

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Creating DACS-compliant finding aids using the Archivist’s Toolkit
Date: Friday, September 21, 2012 from 9AM-4PM
Location: Georgia State Archives, 5800 Jonesboro Road Morrow, GA 30260. Room 210

Abstract:
Take advantage of simple tools and current standards to describe your collections in a stream-lined workflow! This one-day workshop will consist of 2 parts: a review of the elements of DACS- Describing Archives, A Content Standard- and an instructional, hands-on workshop using the Archivist’s Toolkit to create DACS-compliant finding aids.  Participants should be familiar with archival arrangement and description and have past experience creating finding aids using MS Word or other word processing programs; they should also be aware of EAD- Encoded Archival Description- though mastery is not required. Each participant should bring a laptop with the Archivist’s Toolkit Sandbox (Version 2.0) downloaded onto it (http://archiviststoolkit.org/support/sandbox2.0) and a short, medium, and long finding aid (both with series and subseries and without) to enter as practice.

The workshop will be led by Dana Miller, Manuscripts Archivist at the University of Georgia.

Archival Recertification Credits-ARCs: 5

Register here.

Please address any questions or concerns to Dana Miller, dmmiller@uga.edu.

Workshop: Disaster Recovery

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News from just next door in South Carolina…

No ever thinks of the disasters that could strike an archives or library.

Sure there are hurricanes, floods, and fires.  But, what about the less obvious disasters like busted pipes, sewage leaks, or a leaky HVAC unit?

Do you know what to do when a sudden disaster befalls a collection at an archives or library?

In conjunction with the Palmetto, Archives, Libraries, and Museum Council on Preservation (PALMCOP), the Archival Students Guild is proud to host a disaster workshop.  Preservation officer, Heather South will present “Disaster Recovery and Response: An Exercise in Disaster and Planning.  Participants will gain hands-on experience in salvaging documents and other materials in the event of a disaster.

Where: South Carolina Department of Archives and History (8301 Parklane Road, Columbia, SC 29223)
Date: Saturday, March 26, 2011
What time: 10 a.m. (please arrive between 9:30 and 9:45)

Please complete the registration form by March 20, 2011.  The registration form should be emailed to soarchiv@mailbox.sc.edu.  Space is limited to the first 30 people.  Lunch will be provided courtesy of ASG.

Come rain or shine, this event will take place and wear comfortable shoes.