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Vol. 30:4 ISSN 0160-8460 December 2002
The Archival Research Fellowship Program
At the fall 1999 meeting of the New England Archivists, five Boston-based archivists conceived an idea for a national archival research fellowship program. Under the aegis of the Massachusetts Historical Society, they submitted a proposal to the NHPRC to fund such a program, designed to allow working archivists to undertake research into complex archival problems.
The impetus for the new program was threefold: the vacuum left by the end of the Research Fellowship Program for the Study of Modern Archives, a residential program successfully administered by the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan between 1983 and 1998; concern among archivists and archival educators about the lack of advanced research in the profession; and the increasing need to develop methodologies to take advantage of the opportunities and meet the challenges of new information technologies and the advent of electronic records.
To address this lack of research, the group sought to provide practicing archivists with the opportunity to contribute to research efforts. The fellowship program was designed to provide financial support, and thereby the flexibility to conduct research, to archivists and allied professionals working under 12-month contracts. The fellowships are specifically intended for archivists with professional or personal responsibilities who might be unable to participate in a residential research program. Grant funds are to be used by fellows for release time from their jobs, travel, or other expenses associated with their research projects. The program is also intended to serve as a model that could be replicated in another region of the country after the initial 3 years of funding expires.
Conceived as an opportunity to advance both basic and applied research, and to encourage broad participation in the research process by archivists, curators, and information specialists, the five Boston-based archivists: Joan Krizack (Northeastern University), Brenda Lawson (Massachusetts Historical Society), Megan Sniffin-Marinoff (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Kathryn Jacob (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University), and Mary Ide (WGBH Educational Foundation), developed a grant proposal to the NHPRC to fund this non-residential research fellowship program.
Participants at a meeting of the archival research fellowship program held at the fall 2002 meeting of the Society of American Archivists. Left to right: Brenda Lawson, Megan Sniffin-Marinoff, Joan Krizack, Nancy Deromedi (fellow), Mary Ide. Back row: Richard Pearce-Moses (fellow). Photograph courtesy of Joan Krizack.
NHPRC awarded funding for the Archival Research Fellowship Program in 2001 to the Massachusetts Historical Society, which is administering the project. In addition to the five-person executive board comprised of representatives from the five participating institutions listed above, an advisory committee was formed to assist the executive board in the selection of fellows. Advisory committee members are Philip Eppard, State University of New York at Albany; Andrea Kalas, The Discovery Channel; Tim McGovern, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; James O'Toole, Boston College; and Gregory Sanford, Vermont State Archives.
In March 2002, the first round of Archival Research Fellowships was awarded to four individuals with outstanding proposals: Nancy Deromedi of the Bentley Library, University of Michigan; Richard Hollinger of the University of Maine Special Collections; Elisabeth Kaplan of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota; and Richard Pearce-Moses of the Arizona State Library, Archives, and Public Records.
Nancy Deromedi's project, "Wired Faculty: Research to Assess the Archival Value of Faculty Websites to Document their Functions and Activities at the University of Michigan," will investigate the "specific application and use of the World Wide Web in records created by university faculty." Some of the questions Deromedi intends to research are: What is unique about faculty web site documentation? Are there similar creation patterns among faculty members? Who owns the records? Do academic disciplines differ in their faculty web presentations?
For his project, "Case Studies in the Impact of Electronic Communications on Record Keeping Practices in Organizations," Richard Hollinger will collect and analyze quantitative and qualitative data from three organizations: a business, a non-profit organization, and a municipal government. The project will explore the effect that electronic communications have on each organization's recordkeeping practices and provide an analysis of the implications of these findings for records professionals.
Elisabeth Kaplan's research project, "Electronic Brains, Archival Minds: Preservation and Change in the Postwar Era," will investigate the role of archivists and technology since World War II. Her research will examine the development of early computing technology, the professional archival community's relationship with new technologies, and how this did (or did not) affect archivists' sense of identity.
Richard Pearce-Moses will create a new annotated glossary for archivists, manuscript curators, and records managers. This will be a revision of the 1992 Lewis Bellardo and Lynn Bellardo work, A Glossary for Archivists, Manuscript Curators, and Records Managers. The need to revise the earlier glossary is based on new archival concepts and terminology, in particular terms relating to digital technologies. The Pearce-Moses glossary will be descriptive rather than prescriptive, and it will include key archival concepts and relevant terms from related disciplines. The final product will be made available at no cost on the Society of American Archivists Website.
For more extensive information about all of the 2002 Archival Research Fellows' work, see http://www.masshist.org/fellowships/fellows.cfm?fellowship=nhprc. At the end of each award cycle-in June 2003 and June 2004-the Fellows will present their work for discussion at public symposiums in Boston. The first Archival Research Fellowship Symposium will be held in Boston on June 13, 2003. The keynote speaker will be David Levy, author of Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age (Arcade, 2001). For more information about the Archival Research Fellowship Program or next year's symposium, contact Brenda Lawson, Massachusetts Historical Society, 1154 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02215, 617-646-0502, blawson@masshist.org.
Collectively authored by those archivists administering the grant.
