Plenary Speakers
Friday, July 8, 2016
Plenary Speaker: Mindy Famer, Ph.D., Director, May 4 Visitors Center, College of Arts and Sciences, Kent State University
Speaker Bio: Mindy Farmer is the director of the May 4th Visitors Center and an assistant professor in the History Department at Kent State University, where she oversees all aspects of the Center’s educational programming and academic outreach. Before joining the Center, she worked for the National Archives and Records Administration as the founding education specialist at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. One of her primary – and most challenging –missions was to build public trust and establish nonpartisanship educational programming at the once highly partisan, private institution. She played a key role in some of the Library’s most high profile successes, including the creation of the Watergate Gallery and the first academic conference. She also worked closely with local educators on a variety of innovative initiatives and oversaw the bustling school tour program.
Plenary Title: Exhibiting Evidence: Using the Archive to Make Sense of Difficult Topics
Abstract: TBA
Saturday, July 9, 2016
Plenary Speaker: Sue McKemmish, Ph.D., Professor of Archival Systems, Monash University
Speaker Bio: I joined the ARK team, Frank Upward and Livia Iacovino, at Monash in 1990 after working for 15 years for the National Archives and Public Record Office of Victoria. It was the beginning of an amazing journey. Along the way we built an ARK graduate education program, theorized about recordkeeping in the continuum, and became part of an international community of archival and recordkeeping researchers, research students, educators and practitioners. In early days my research and writing was concerned with the nature of records as evidence of me and evidence of us in the very broadest sense and always in a process of becoming; understanding and explaining the records continuum; the recordkeeping-accountability nexus; and Australian and International recordkeeping metadata standards. Over time I have come to focus on agency in the archival multiverse, participatory archiving and recordkeeping, rights in records, researching in partnership with communities, and transformative practice.
Plenary Title: ARK Research: The State of the Art
Abstract: This paper will report on the state of the art of archival and recordkeeping research in the English‐speaking world. It will present a thematic analysis of ARK research over the past 10 years, update previous analyses by Gilliland and McKemmish1 of the methodologies and methods being used in ARK research, and identify emergent areas. It will discuss research trends with reference to the grand societal and archival challenges identified as part of the related AERI initiative, and the construct of the archival multiverse.
View Professor Sue McKemmish's AERI plenary presentation here.