Blog and Newsletter

You are invited to apply for a Battlefield Interpretation Grant, a new funding opportunity from the National Park Service's American Battlefield Protection Program (NPS ABPP). 

Battlefield Interpretation Grants seek to fund projects that use technology to enhance battlefield interpretation and education. From increasing accessibility, to augmented reality on personal cell phones, to engaging virtual content that explores untold stories, the possibilities are endless. We want to see how you would use technology to meet today’s challenges in battlefield interpretation and education.

Eligible sites include those associated with the American Revolution, War of 1812 or the Civil War. Awarded annually, these competitive grants are open to state, local, and tribal governments, other public entities, non-profit organizations, and educational institutions. Eligible activities are diverse and may include content development, consultation with stakeholders, audience research, fabrication and installation, costs associated with Section 106, and more. This grant requires a non-federal cost share of at least 50%.

The application deadline is May 5, 2021. The funding announcement and application materials are available on Grants.gov. For more information, head to the NPS ABPP website or check out this informational webinar on Battlefield Interpretation Grants.

NPS ABPP staff invite you to share this email and welcome your questions. Contact them at abpp@nps.gov for assistance.

The New England Archivists Inclusion and Diversity Committee is pleased to announce the second iteration of their contingent employment survey. Building on the work of the first contingent employment survey, in 2016, they want to further understand contingent employment in the archival field. What has changed in the past five years? What has stayed the same? How can professional organizations like NEA support contingently employed archival workers? 

The survey is available here https://bit.ly/3taQ2xQ. It will remain open through June 30, 2021. 

You are eligible to participate in this survey if you are an archival worker or former archival worker and:

you have been contingently employed in New England in the past ten years (2011-2021)

OR

you have been contingently employed anywhere in the United States in the past ten years (2011-2021) AND you are currently living or working in New England. 

For the purposes of this study, contingent employment includes temporary and term positions, grant-funded positions, part-time positions, positions without timely or reliable renewal of contract, and any employment without benefits that colleagues at the same institution enjoy (e.g. vacation time, health insurance, retirement contributions). 

Please share widely, especially with colleagues who are not members of professional organizations or who have left the archival field. 

If you have questions about the survey, please reach out to the chair of the survey task force, Stephanie Bredbenner, at diversity@newenglandarchivists.org

Maine Archives and Museums colleagues are welcome to join the AWE Fund birthday celebration and fundraising campaign. Over the next month or two, AWE Fund is focusing its fundraising efforts on boosting small recurring donations through their Coffee for Colleagues (Tea on Me) GoFundMe. This fundraising campaign allows archival workers to support their colleagues for the price of a seasonal latte or pot of pu’ehr. Each gift helps AWE Fund ensure that our colleagues on furlough can afford groceries, our colleagues between jobs make rent, and our colleagues whose hours and benefits were cut can stay on their health insurance plans. 

The AWE Fund Organizing Committee has set the goal of reaching $1,000 a month in recurring donations and 100 recurring donors by the end of the AWE Fund’s birthday week, April 8th-15th. Making a single or recurring donation to Coffee for Colleagues (Tea on Me) is easy to do, and the minimum single or recurring amount is $5. Recurring donations can be cancelled at any time, especially given that those who are financially secure today may find themselves in a different situation tomorrow. 

If folks choose not to participate, anyone is welcome to help spread the word about AWE Fund’s one year birthday by following the birthday celebration on Twitter @AWEfund2020. The AWE Fund Organizing Committee also invites self-nominations for its speaker series; more information is here: AWE Fund Speaker Self-Nomination form. Questions or requests for more information may be directed to Alison Clemens (alison.clemens@gmail.com), AWE Fund Organizing Committee member.

The Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education (OML) at the University of Southern Maine (USM) invites you to participate in our spring 2021 crowd-sourced exhibition: "Where Will We Go from Here? Travel in the Age of COVID-19."

We are seeking the stories of people who currently reside in Maine of all ages (in general), and other interested participants from anywhere in the world, related to how the COVID-19 Global Pandemic impacted your travel plans between March of 2020 and March of 2021. 

Were you supposed to: take a long-planned trip? Study abroad? Go and visit friends and family? Go on an epic road trip? Travel for work? Go home? We want to understand where you were supposed to go, and how the cancellation of those plans impacted your personal and professional lives.

We will match your canceled trip location with a map from our collections, and pair your reflection with the map in our upcoming exhibition "Where Will We Go From Here? Travel in the Age of COVID-19" (in our gallery in Portland, Maine, and/or online at www.oshermaps.org). We seek broad community participation, and all ages are welcome to submit a response.  To participate, PLEASE FILL OUT OUR QUESTIONNAIRE IN ITS ENTIRETY; the process should take 10-15 minutes.

The exhibition will open in our gallery in May of 2021, and the digital exhibition will follow later this summer. 

Note: Due to limited space, only a selection of submitted stories can be featured in the physical gallery. We will feature as many completed survey entries as possible on the digital version of the exhibition.  We will contact you for more information if your story is selected to be part of the exhibition. Please do not fill out the form if you do not want your story featured in our exhibition.  

Thank you for your assistance, and please feel free to forward this opportunity to anyone who might be interested!

Warmly,

Libby Bischof, Executive Director

AUGUSTA – The Maine State Archives has launched its first-ever catalog of its holdings, via the online ArchivesSpace portal, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows announced today. 

For the first time in the Maine State Archives’ 56-year history, researchers can now search through the bureau’s listing of collections online to see if the Archives is the right resource for their purposes, before contacting an archivist to access the actual documents.

“This is a first step, for the public to have an awareness of what we hold, and we will be building it into a public resource that will eventually link up with the actual digital copies of items such as documents and maps that we have posted to DigitalMaine,” said Katherine McBrien, Deputy Secretary for Archives.

The launch of the Maine State Archives ArchivesSpace portal is the product of five years of work, recently accelerated by the inventory necessitated by the ongoing extraction of holdings from the Cultural Building during building repairs.

“The new ArchivesSpace catalog makes the Archives more accessible than ever before by listing the full scope of our holdings,” said McBrien, “and it serves as an important electronic resource for staff as well.”

Only about half the state archives across the country have completed this type of public-facing indexing. ArchivesSpace is a nonprofit organization created by archivists, hosting finding aids for subscribers on the cloud.

The Maine State Archives maintains approximately 100 million pages of official State records considered to be permanently valuable, such as bills introduced in the Legislature, Governor’s Executive Council Reports, election returns, deeds, maps and military records through World War I. In addition, the bureau’s Records Management division is the custodian of all State records that must be retained for certain statutory periods of time.

“Maine State Archives is a treasure trove of information about our state’s history, and we are excited to take this first step toward making this information more widely available online,” said Secretary Bellows. “Imagine students being able to access remarkable primary source documents from the classroom or their living rooms for research and learning. Our vision is that future generations will be able to access these precious documents from the comfort of their homes, schools or work.”

The survey link is: https://upenn.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bEGt7YRuvWN2PvU

Meris Westberg is a graduate student in the University of Pennsylvania's Historic Preservation program writing a master's thesis on Flood Risk Awareness & Preparedness at Cultural Heritage Sites. Prior to grad school, Meris worked for several museums and noticed 1) a struggle to prioritize hazard preparedness and 2) a disconnect between buildings and collections maintenance. These tensions will be addressed in the thesis project, particularly from the perspectives of federal flood management policy and organizational behavior toward hazard management. 

This is a survey for collections and site managers asking about if & how flood risk is handled at their sites - with a particular interest in the interrelation of historic buildings and collections. The aim is to reach a broad range of site and collections steward to evaluate trends based on site type, size, and region. 

The survey takes about 10 minutes to complete and is totally anonymous. Meris will share full results once the project is complete (hopefully by May!).

The survey link is: https://upenn.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_bEGt7YRuvWN2PvU

DPOE-N Support Funding: Call for Applications

The Digital Preservation Outreach & Education Network (DPOE-N) is excited to announce two new opportunities for funding available to cultural heritage professionals and institutions located in the United States and U.S. territories for digital preservation training and hardware support. 

About DPOE-N Funding

DPOE-N offers professional development support for cultural heritage professionals to attend online workshops and face-to-face training (when traveling is appropriate) focused on digital preservation and access. Funding can be used within a network of available professional development providers and can cover more than one workshop.

DPOE-N staff are also available to work with you to develop a professional development program that fits your needs. For more information on professional development support, and to apply, please visit:https://www.dpoe.network/professional-development-support/ 

DPOE-N has also set aside a modest amount of funding for emergency hardware support to small cultural heritage institutions that have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and are in need of new hardware to ensure the persistence of digital collections with enduring value. For more information about emergency hardware support, please visit: https://www.dpoe.network/emergency-hardware-support/

Interested in applying?
Deadlines for both funding opportunities are rolling. Our grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation provides funding until June 2022!

DPOE-N staff is available to help you with the application process and to answer any questions you may have. Please contact us at dpoe-n@pratt.edu.

About DPOE-N

DPOE-N is a network of training resources available to cultural heritage professionals nationwide to enhance their digital preservation knowledge and skills. We are motivated by the pressing need for libraries, archives, and museums to collect, preserve, and provide access to born-digital materials. DPOE-N is hosted by the Pratt Institute School of Information in collaboration with the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and is generously funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

To learn more about DPOE-N, please visit our website at https://www.dpoe.network/ and follow us on Twitter @dpoe_network and Instagram @dpoe_network

The American Association for State and Local History will again hold an online conference this fall, October 12-15, following the in-person conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, September 22-25. This year’s theme for the dual conferences, “Doing History, Doing Justice,” will take an active orientation – how do history organizations and practitioners DO justice? We will look at how we do our work and how people are impacted by our work, unpacking the notion of “justice” in all its dimensions.

Every year, increasing numbers of conference sessions address issues specifically affecting small museums. These sessions can be as practical and wide-ranging as training, marketing, and strategic planning. Other sessions focus on creative ways to forge and re-energize relationships with the surrounding community.

Now in its sixteenth year, AASLH’s Small Museums Committee is offering several scholarships to AASLH members who are full-time, part-time, paid, or volunteer employees of small museums. Each scholarship will cover one Full Access registration for the online conference. Acceptance of the scholarship is contingent upon recipients submitting a post to the AASLH blog about their online conference experience.

Please note: Small Museums Scholarships are only being awarded for the online conference.

To qualify, the applicant must work for a museum with a budget of $250,000 or less. They also must either be an individual AASLH member or work for an institutional member.

The deadline for applications is August 1, 2021. The committee will email award winners by September 1. For questions, please contact Bruce Teeple, Small Museums Scholarship Subcommittee Chair, at mongopawn44@hotmail.com, or Alex Collins, AASLH Professional Development Manager, at collins@aaslh.org or 615-320-3203.

To apply for this scholarship, please go to: https://aaslh.submittable.com/submit/188266/2021-small-museums-scholarship

The future of these scholarships rests on the generosity of members across the museum community. Please consider donating to this scholarship fund: https://aaslh.site-ym.com/donations/donate.asp?id=14241

Nominations are now being accepted for the 2021 Donald Peterson Student Travel Award!

Established in 2005, this award supports students and recent graduates from graduate archival programs within North America to attend SAA’s Annual Meeting. The goal of the scholarship is to stimulate greater participation in the activities of SAA by students and recent graduates. This participation must include either a presentation of research during the Annual Meeting or active participation in an SAA-sponsored committee, section, or roundtable. 

Click here to preview the application and/or to apply. All applications must be submitted online and include the following:

1. A 500-word essay describing the applicant's career goals and potential impact on the archival profession.
2. Unofficial transcript to verify student status or copy of graduate diploma.
3. Two letters of recommendation from individuals having definite knowledge of the applicant's qualifications.

Nominations will be accepted until February 28, 2021.

If you have any questions regarding the award or the application process, please contact Krista Oldham, Donald Peterson Student Travel Award Committee Chair, at kristao@clemson.edu. 

For more information on the details on awards from previous years, please visit the Donald Peterson Student Travel Award on the SAA webpage.  Please feel free to pass along this announcement to colleagues.

2021 Recipients: As the 2021 SAA Annual Meeting will be held virtually, 2021 recipients will receive complimentary registration to the 2021 virtual conference. They will also receive complimentary registration and travel support to the 2022 Annual Meeting in Boston (or the next annual conference that is held in person). The award cannot be extended past the next in-person annual conference.  

Donald Peterson Student Travel Award Committee:

Jessica Hornbuckle

Tola Livesey

Krista Oldham (Chair)

Danielle Sangalang 

The American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) is currently accepting responses to their annual “National Visitation Survey for History Organizations,” the only national effort to monitor and report on in-person visitation trends at history museums, historic sites, and other history organizations. This survey will help the field assess the impact extended closures from Covid-19, climate change, social unrest, and more had on our institutions last year. In addition to asking about changes to in-person visitation from 2019 to 2020, the survey includes a special section about the impact of the pandemic on operations, capacity restrictions, and staffing.

Your response is absolutely critical to this effort. With information about budget, staffing, and visitation on-hand, the survey should only take about ten minutes. Your contribution to this survey will help the entire field better understand the impact 2020 had on the history community and help AASLH provide better resources and support for the road ahead. Please complete the survey and encourage colleagues at other institutions to do the same. 

The survey closes on March 31.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Visitation2021B