Management: Innovative Practices for Archives and Special Collections

Management: Innovative Practices for Archives and Special Collections explores the kinds of challenges that managers of archival programs face today and how those challenges can be met to achieve optimal results while working within existing resources. The book features thirteen case studies that demonstrate solutions to both traditional management concerns as well as new issues and opportunities presented by changes in technology and organizational environments.

The featured case studies are:
1) “We’ll Never Let You Retire!”: Creating a Culture of Knowledge Transfer
2) Raising Cash and Building Connections: Using Kickstarter to Fund and Promote a Cultural Heritage Project
3) A Winning Combination: Internships and High-Impact Learning in Archives
4) A Thief in Our Midst: Special Collections, Archives and Insider Theft
5) Tackling the Backlog: Conducting a Collections Assessment on a Shoestring
6) A Platform for Innovation: Creating the Labs Environment at the National Archives of Australia
7) Setting Our Own Agenda: Managing the Merger of Archives and Special Collections
8) Taking Control: Managing Organizational Change in Archives
9) Implementing Pre-Custodial Processing: Engaging Organizations to Invest Resources in their Records
10) Building Effective Leaders: Redesigning the Archives Leadership Institute
11) From Evaluation to Implementation: Selecting Archival Management Software
12) More Bang for the Buck: Sharing Personnel and Resources Across Institutions
13) “Make a New Plan, Stan”: Useful and Painless Strategic Planning

The collected case studies present pragmatic approaches to challenges and opportunities that are common to organizations of all sizes and types. Their common focus is on building stronger archival programs by making effective use of people, technology, and resources while working within organizational requirements and constraints.

The volume will be useful to those working in archives and special collections as well as other cultural heritage organizations, and provides ideas ranging from the aspirational to the immediately implementable. It also provides students and educators in archives, library, and public history graduate programs a resource for understanding the issues facing managers in the field today and the kinds of strategies archivists are using to meet these new challenges.

Kate Theimer is the author of the popular blog ArchivesNext and a frequent writer, speaker and commentator on issues related to the future of archives. She is the author of Web 2.0 Tools and Strategies for Archives and Local History Collections and the editor of A Different Kind of Web: New Connections between Archives and Our Users, as well having contributed chapters to Many Happy Returns: Advocacy for Archives and Archivists, The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping, and the Encyclopedia of Archival Science. She has published articles in the American Archivist and the Journal of Digital Humanities.

Kate served on the Council of the Society of American Archivists from 2010 to 2013. Before starting her career as an independent writer and editor, she worked in the policy division of the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland. She holds an MSI with a specialization in archives and records management from the University of Michigan and an MA in art history from the University of Maryland.

Kate Theimer is the 2014 recipient of the Society of American Archivists’ Spotlight Award. The Spotlight Award recognizes the contributions of individuals who work for the good of the profession and archives collections—work that does not typically receive public recognition. Since 2011, Theimer has used Facebook, Twitter, and her blog to raise money for Spontaneous Scholarships that help unemployed, underemployed, and underfunded archivists to attend SAA’s Annual Meeting. The first year the scholarships were offered Theimer raised $5,504 to assist 18 students and 8 SAA members at the full registration rate; the program continued in 2012 and 2013 resulting in a total of more than $20,000 in donations and almost one hundred archivists assisted over the first three years. Theimer recently launched a campaign to raise funds for the 2014 scholarships.