Digital Oral History Archivist and Archives Educator

Description

DESCRIPTION: The 1947 Partition Archive seeks to welcome a Digital Oral History Archivist and Archives Educator to our Berkeley, California based team. This position will cater to those who are passionate about 1) archiving and preserving oral histories within analog and digital environments, 2) teaching contemporary archival techniques to a community of undergraduate and graduate students, among others, 3) researching, exploring and innovating new pedagogies/methodologies in the area of digital archiving, all within a team setting, 4) leading a federally funded digital archivist education program, and 5) stewarding a complex, conflict-zone, multilingual and international collection, together with a highly diverse team. The Digital Oral History Archivist and Archives Educator (Archivist/Educator, hereafter) will build up their skill-set to eventually lead our digital archiving and community education program over time. Presently, this position is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities (neh.gov), through a grant program for which the Archivist/Educator will serve as Principal Investigator.

About The 1947 Partition Archive: The 1947 Partition Archive (The Archive, here after), founded in 2010, is the first and largest oral history archive on any South Asian and World War II (South Asia theater) related topics in the United States, and the first and currently largest oral history archive globally on the 1947 Partition of South Asia (which resulted in the creation of India and Pakistan in 1947). The Archive builds its collections through a novel crowdsourcing process which entails training community members and scholars in documenting oral histories and submitting them to The Archive’s collections. Presently, The Archive hosts over 11,200 oral history interviews which includes nearly 50,000 video artifacts, over 70,000 photographs and 20,000 additional accompanying documents. The interviews are in over 35 languages and dialects, and have arrived at The Archive’s Berkeley office from 16 countries. Beginning in 2021, our team developed and deployed software to allow for cloud-based remote description and analysis of oral history video interviews as they arrive in the collections. The Archive’s collections are actively being added to each day, and continue to grow. As the collections grow, so does the interest of the research community in accessing them.

The Archive runs numerous internship programs and highly structured community volunteer programs to support description and preservation of the large body of work as it arrives at The Archive daily. At the same time, The Archive educates the next generation of the digital humanities workforce, specifically in the digital archiving, preservation and curation fields. The in-house remote archiving software described above has enabled archivists to join us from across the United States; previously, archiving related activities were limited to our location in Berkeley, CA.

Digital Oral History Archiving: The Archivist/Educator will provide strategic oversight of arrangement and description for the complete collections at The 1947 Partition Archive (hereafter, The Archive), ensuring that the archival processing best supports community participation, community representation, community education, academic research and teaching. Furthermore, the Archivist/Educator will ensure practices not only meet, but exceed national and international standards, and enable a wide and inclusive representation of Partition and World War II-era (South Asia theater) oral histories. The Archivist/Educator will oversee the evaluation, analysis, arrangement, and description of all components of the complex oral history collections, exercising comprehensive knowledge of both national archival standards and using applicable standards as adapted in-house, in response to the unique nature of The Archive’s contents and community of stakeholders. The Archivist/Educator is responsible for risk management regarding responsible records practices and access to restricted records. The Archivist/Educator will also serve as an oral history specialist, ensuring that The Archive’s efforts in planning and executing oral history projects follow professional standards and best practices.

Research and Innovation: Innovation and perpetual ‘out of the box’ thinking is a way of life at The Archive. Our work in previously undocumented and underrepresented communities necessitates doing things differently. Acting on the belief that a more comprehensive, more representative, accessible and interactive archive will best serve our communities, The Archivist/Educator will continuously strive to collaboratively evaluate and update processes in our fast evolving digital world. The Archivist/Educator will collaborate with the larger team in continuously re-imagining how the organization and its patrons participate in and access the richness of our oral history collection. The incumbent is responsible for collaborating with senior team members in seeking external and donor support from granting institutions and community partners that will enable The Archive to strengthen its digital archiving programs. The Archivist/Educator will attend local, regional and national conferences examining digital archiving and community oral history practices, and examining legacies of marginalized colonial-era histories.

Archival Science Education: Community stake-holder communications are another key component of the incumbent's responsibility. The Archivist/Educator will maintain professional communications with oral history interviewees and interviewers, who are submitting interviews to The Archive. The Archivist/Educator will participate in the general operations of the oral history archive by providing reference, research, and operations support. The Archivist/Educator will administer bi-annual short courses teaching The Archive’s process to internship and apprenticeship students, and supervise the work of student interns, student assistants, apprentices and other junior archivists. Importantly, The Archivist/Educator will work collaboratively with The Archive’s team, and interface professionally with the community at large. Finally, The Archivist/Educator will spend some time each week directly working with, or overseeing junior archivist interactions with community members, including, academic researchers or other community users, who are accessing the collections remotely or in-person at our Berkeley location. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive community and strongly encourage candidates who have experience working with a broadly diverse student population to apply. The incumbent must have excellent interpersonal and communication skills to be able to foster relationships with junior and senior team members, as well as the community at large. In short, The Archivist/Educator is responsible for developing, preserving, and providing access to the complete collections. The Archivist/Educator will actively engage university and community partners to acquire new materials, provide reference services, and promote the collections through instruction, exhibition, programming, and outreach.

Join us and channel your inner perfectionism and our shared passion for spreading knowledge and compassion by uncovering our world’s untold stories.

This apprenticeship is accomplished in-person, full-time, from The 1947 Partition Archive’s Berkeley, California office. The position is open effective immediately.

CORE RESPONSIBILITIES

Archival Program Administration

• Strategic oversight of accession, evaluation, analysis, arrangement, and description of all components of the complex born-digital and physical oral history collection materials;
• Evaluate and update metadata schema, controlled vocabularies, and protocols for quality control of the software and metadata schema.
• Evaluate and update processing workflows;
• Ensure practices meet emerging best practices, national and international standards, and applicable in-house standards developed in response to the special requirements of The Archive’s conflict-zone, South Asian themed collection;
• Ensure inclusive practices that enable a wide and inclusive representation of Partition and World War II-era (South Asia theater) oral histories;
• Manage risk regarding responsible records practices and access to restricted records;
• Collaborates with Director and other archives staff in reviewing, developing, implementing, and maintaining written policies and procedures that govern transfer, acquisition, storage, processing, and description of materials;
• Provides general guidance and leadership on the collections across The Archive and general community;
• Compiles weekly metrics that provide incremental measurements towards annual goals on archival access, use, community contributions, archivist activities and more;
• Compiles annual reports on the metrics described above;
• Collaborate with Director to set annual goals for the arrangement and description of collections, and community education goals;
• Proactively pursues grant-funding for projects that align with organizational priorities.
• Supports annual fundraising drives and pursual of longer term funding opportunities that support the Digital Oral History Archiving and community education programs.
• Support teams, consultants and Director, on preservation efforts.
• Support teams, consultants and Director on archival software development.
• Fosters an environment that creates inclusion, respect, trust, and accountability.
• Displays continuing growth in professional and subject matter knowledge through ongoing skills enhancement, research contributions, professional development, conference participation and so on.

Community Education

• Execute and lead the six month Digital Oral History Archivist (DOHA) college internships program, and the one year DOHA advanced apprenticeship program.
• Deliver training courses on theory and practice to finalists of the competitive internship and apprenticeships program.
• Collaborate to develop and enhance teaching and training curriculum for the internships program. Adjust curriculum to age groups and technical expertise.
• Collaboration with educators on developing curricula introducing students to the principles of digital archiving and the importance of archives in understanding history.
• Collaborate with recruitment staff and relevant team members to coordinate recruitment, hiring (or on-boarding volunteers), orientation, training, supervision, and evaluation of interns, apprentices, junior staff, volunteer staff and student employees.
• Coach, mentor, and counsel both direct and indirect reports in order to develop staff in a positive and proactive manner ensuring individuals have opportunity to develop broad knowledge of archive philosophy, operations, services as well specialized skills.
• Review and provide feedback on archival processing by junior archivists, interns, apprentices and student employees.
• Works staff and Director to develop specialized training for junior or other staff based on need, and participates in succession planning and management initiatives as appropriate.
• Supports a collaborative culture of fostering trust, compassionate communication, and conflict resolution.
• Collaborate on annual goal development, policies, identify new and continuing initiatives, allocate staff, and delineate budgets.

Community Engagement

• Support the Constituency Communications team in overseeing strategic communications with community stakeholders, especially interviewers and interviewees participating in the oral history program;
• Collaborate with the Constituency Communications team on continuously developing, expanding and conducting the free community Oral History Workshops held bi-monthly;
• Manage and oversee communications with stakeholders requesting copies of collection materials;
• Support the curatorial team in developing content for community engagement with The Archive’s resources, programs, and services;
• Support the curatorial and events teams in developing content for community education through exhibitions, events, documentary film-making, and more;
• Participate in appropriate professional and scholarly associations and organizations including maintaining membership and/or accreditation; attending meetings, conferences, workshops; and serving in appointed or elected positions.
• Contribute to the fields of archival practices, accessibility tool development, outreach, and oral history through original research, collaborative team work and/or scholarly outputs (presentations, publications, white papers, standards development, exhibits, etc.).

Archive Access and User Support

• Support promotion of The Archive’s collections by participating in events, exhibitions, digital scholarship projects, presentations, publications, articles, announcements, social media and other means to engage audiences with Emory University history.
• Work collaboratively with the Director to advance discovery through the adoption of existing tools and collaborative development of new tools, that include online platforms, web pages, research guides, digital scholarship projects and other means to advance user access.
• Guide users on ethical use of conflict-zone and sensitive oral history materials.
• Provides extensive research and reference service for internal and external users.

Oral History Program and Collection Development

• Serve as an oral history specialist, ensuring that The Archive’s efforts in planning and executing oral history projects follow professional standards and best practices, while remaining rooted in community needs and aspirations;
• Work proactively and collaboratively with community members wishing to donate oral history collections and personal artifacts;
• Use data to strengthen collection building;
• Support oral history ground staff and Story Scholar Program as well as Citizen Historian Program teams through efficient real time reports on submission receipt, content acquisition status, content errors or incidents, constituency communications and archival status reports;
• Uphold The Archive’s organization-wide core principle that ‘interviewees are people and not subjects,’ whose trust and well-being are of utmost importance and are prioritized during program policy development and decision-making activities.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• ALA-accredited Master’s degree in Library Science, Archival Science, or related field.
• Knowledge of archival theory and methodology including appraisal, arrangement, description, and preservation.
• One to five years of experience processing materials in an archives or special collections setting.
• Minimum two years teaching experience.
• Ability to work effectively with a multi-ethnic student population and commitment to fostering a diverse educational and work environment..
• Commitment to special collections and archives public service, including a keen interest in promoting the use and appreciation of archival materials.
• Excellent oral, written and interpersonal communication skills.
• Excellent public speaking and classroom management abilities.
• Demonstrated conflict resolution skills.
• Excellent analytical, organizational, and time management skills. Ability to set priorities, meet deadlines, and complete tasks and projects on time, within budget and in accordance with requirements.
• Meticulous attention to detail.
• Ability to work in a collaborative, team-based environment.
• Ability to research and write successful grant proposals.
• Demonstrated commitment to practices that foster inclusion and belonging.
• Ability to think critically, be flexible, navigate ambiguity, and thrive on solving difficult problems.
• Experience in project management and multitasking.
• Ability to nurture and develop interpersonal relationships professionally with colleagues, with students and juniors, and senior leadership, as well as in the community, including a demonstrated ability to set appropriate boundaries.
• A desire to settle for the long term in the San Francisco Bay Area, where The Archive headquartered.
• A keen interest and desire to work from our dedicated Berkeley, CA office location.
• Demonstrated proficiency and comfort with personal computers, learning to use new software, and navigating the web, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, Excel and more.
• Knowledge of current trends and issues in archival science.
• Demonstrated research and publication skills.
• An ability to supervise, including in hiring and training of new team members; Delegation of work and responsibility; Organizing workloads, providing guidance and direction, monitoring and evaluating performance, coaching and counseling, and taking disciplinary action as necessary.

PREFERRED REQUIREMENTS

• Demonstrated ability to work across time-zones, with an international team, in a multicultural and multilingual environment.
• Knowledge of South Asian cultures, languages and/or histories.
• Subject matter expertise in South Asian studies or South Asia related fields.
• Previous experience in conducting oral history field work.
• Certification: Digital Archives Specialist Certificate from the Society of American Archivists is preferred
• Master’s degree in library science, archival science or related fields and formal training in archives administration
• Minimum two years of supervisory experience
• Professional experience as a digital archivist, preferably at an institution that produces public programming
• An energetic and enterprising spirit
• Experience in processing digital archival collections, including experience in creating metadata descriptions, digitization, and care of born-digital materials.
• Knowledge of intangible heritage preservation and practices

DEADLINE TO APPLY: We hope to fill the position as soon as possible, and will accept applications on a rolling basis. Join us in organizing endangered histories, human knowledge, and information in this digital age!