 So, sadly, it would seem that Chris has not gotten our message. So I will preface these remarks with, and Chris has said that he is saddened and sick, that he was unable to join us no more so than me, so I will say that what Chris was going to speak on was the topic of social justice and engaging with marginalized communities at the University of the District of Columbia, and a discussion of the rewards and challenges of archivists engaging in, with underrepresented and marginalized communities at a historically black college and university in Washington, D.C., so that he said that most of his planned remarks were focused on the rewards section. The assignments originally started with a focus on student life and organization, including fraternities and sororities, which were always very popular and attracted a great deal of student interest. In the past four or five years, there has been much more student interest in student activism over the years, both in terms of issues involving the administration's actions and in terms of frequent budget cuts. There have also been several examples of political activism in UDC's history, including various protests involving national and international issues, and all of these have attracted student interest. So the University of the District of Columbia is a, as I said, a historically black college and university created from several predecessor institutions, including the minor school, the Wilson Teachers College, the D.C. Teachers College, and the Federal City College and the Washington Technical Institute. Marilla Minor formed the minor school in 1851, UDC is the only public university in the District of Columbia. It's the only land grant university in the District of Columbia, and since Marilla Minor formed UDC in 1851, the UDC has played a key role in the role of educating African Americans in D.C. So HBCUs, before the Civil Rights Movement, they have offered African Americans one of the only pathways to a college degree, and today HBCUs continue to provide an inclusive and supportive environment to African Americans to obtain higher education. So HBCUs tend to offer a welcoming and inclusive environment to all of those who attend there. One of the appealing features of HBCUs and all educational institutions is that they should be a welcoming environment for people of all backgrounds. I will insert here that I used to say that when I went to college it was, you know, it was not reality. It was like, you know, you went off to college to, you know, and you got out and you had a degree at the end, but it was a welcoming environment. So students aspire to be themselves and be part of an inclusive and welcoming culture. HBCUs have always provided a safe and affirming space for black students, and HBCUs instill cultural pride. They also shield students from having to navigate racism, unfortunately found at other types of institutions. And again, something that we've even seen recently with the incidences at Bowie State University and some of the instances recently outside of Baltimore. So why every student should learn how to use archives. This is something that, again, I will say, you know, not just again to step on what Chris is saying through the National History Day program even, you know, that we should be instilling in our students and, you know, through a strong internship program and things like that. Records are not just places where documents or records are stored. They are witnesses to the African American and American history. Using archival materials allows our students to engage directly with people and stories from the past. Students can hear about events directly from those who experience them. A good archives also can have a good oral history program, you know, if you have a good oral history program. That's a good way for students to interact with people who lived these stories. Again, parenthetically using my own background, when I first came to Washington, I worked for the International Monetary Fund and I did some oral histories with people where I interviewed a man who was at the founding conference for the International Monetary Fund. I sat there and I would like listen to these stories that he would tell us about, you know, that they would plan the international financial system for hours during the day and then they would go down to the bar and they would plan their evening over bourbon and, you know, cigarettes. And I was like, this is how things worked in the 40s, you know. So students can relate their lives and experiences of primary source creators to their own lives and experiences. Archival records serve to strengthen collective memory and protect people's rights, property and identity. So HBCUs have a longstanding tradition of developing collections that document the rich African-American experience. With rare and unique materials, HBCUs have the potential to reach current narratives, to enrich current narratives with the history of American education, the scholarship, the activism of American education, the scholarship, activism and publications of university presidents, faculty, students and alumni. Despite their significance, many HBCU archives are not easily accessible. Much of this has to do with the historical underfunding of these archives. I mean, so there are many challenges that HBCUs face in serving their student populations. Many are first generation college students. Some are still not completely college ready when they started. Many have weak research skills. They have not, they don't have much of a familiarity or an understanding of history. They may have had learning difficulties or other disabilities in their previous school careers. Some are faced with pressing family needs. They are parents themselves or they need to support their families. They may have financial challenges or they are on serious financial aid or they hinders their academic progress. They may be faced with issues of day-to-day needs. They have not had an opportunity to learn much about history or archives prior to coming to the university. They may not be familiar with archives or understand the relevance or usefulness of archives. They may not have any background in the use of archives. These are all things that we as archives professionals should instill and use upon them and impress upon them that as we heard so many times earlier today, we have a responsibility as archivists to protect history, to preserve history, to make sure that it goes forward, so to protect our heritage for another generation. So the rewards that we get from serving our students, we see the experience of history coming to life for our students through the use of primary resources. We see the students learn things new and fascinating and relevant to them. I'm very excited. Chris Anglem has entered the waiting room. I have never been more excited in my life to be interrupted by a presentation. Chris, can you hear me? Chris? I think you are muted. You are muted. Chris, can you hear me? Chris, can you hear me? Very vaguely. Chris, I've never been so happy to hear your voice. All right, what can you see? How was his audio for you guys? Cody? Did you hear me okay? It's faint, but I can make out a lot of most of the words. I'm going to start talking today about challenges and the words of the nation with the representative communities and the HBCUs. The next slide. Professor Chris Anglem, I'm the university architect of the university of Columbia. I work for the resources division there. The university of the university of Columbia is a special publishing library. The university of Columbia has both a reference library and the art notes of the university are submitted to the district of Columbia for seven years. The university, a little bit about the university of the district of Columbia is sort of like an university created from several predecessor institutions including minor schools, future colleges, future colleges, better city colleges, and a particular minor who was a relationist of the form of my school, from the early 1851, which is dedicated to the only couple of them, the three new cities in all certain nations, like Perth and Langerand University. Since McHill Minor formed the university in 1851, the university has played a key role and met a key role in the education of African-Americans in the district of Columbia. Okay, next slide. Next slide, please. So before we talk about the rewards and challenges, talk about what are the significance of HBCUs before the civil rights movement, historically black colleges in universities or HBCUs offered African-Americans one of their only pathways to a college degree is to the HBCUs to provide inclusive and supportive environment for African-Americans to obtain a higher education. Okay, next slide, please. And one of the advantages today of HBCUs is that they provide a welcoming inclusive environment, one appealing factor, a feature of HBCUs and all educational institutions because of that provide a welcoming environment for people of all backgrounds. HBCUs, a student aspires to be themselves in the part of the inclusive welcoming culture and HBCUs do this very, very well. HBCUs have always provided a safe and affirming space for African-American students and they instill a sense of cultural pride. They also show students from Canada who navigate racism, unfortunately found in many other types of institutions. Okay, next slide, please. Next slide, please. Why itself? Since we're talking about learning about our guys, we talked a bit about HBCUs and we have a bit of background on this. We're talking about HBCUs and archives and what, and so we need to first understand why every student should learn how to use archives. So, archives are not just places where documents or records are stored. They're witnesses to African-American and American history using archival materials about the students doing it directly with the people and stories from the town. Students can hear about events directly from those experiences that the students can also relate to the lives and experiences of the primary source creators to their own lives and experiences. Archival records also serve the strength of collective memory to protect people's rights, properties and identity, change their rights and identity. And again, they help them understand the paths they came from and what I think are the ways they are today. And it's kind of lost the source of inspiration probably in the growth over time. Okay, next slide. Next. Some of the significance, particularly of HBCUs or archival collections, is that HBCUs have had a long-standing tradition of developing collections that document the rich African-American experience with rare and unique materials. HBCUs have the potential to enrich current narratives with the history of African-American education and scholarship and activism of university presidents back to the students and alumni. Despite their significance, however, in the HBCUs, archives are not easily accessible or much of the sense to do with the historical underfunding of these archives. And they have not always been well publicized either. Okay, next slide. Next slide. So some of the challenges that we have in particular in serving our students at HBCUs are that many are first-generation college students. Some are not completely ready when they start it. Many have great research skills. Many may not have a familiar or an understanding of history. Some may be learning disabilities or other disabilities. Some are fed by some families that their parents are in need to support their families. So that is an added stressor to the pursuing academic affairs. And many face some serious managing challenges which hinder their academic progress. Okay, next slide. And the further challenges may be are that many are faced with issues they need and have not had the opportunity to learn much about history or archives coming to the university that may not be familiar with archives or understand the relevance or usefulness of archives and must have no background in the use of archives or any sort of grounding or understanding of archives. So we're starting from very much from the beginning stages and teaching them about the importance and significance of archives and how this can be an enjoyable experience for the next slide. And some of our rewards in serving our students are seeing the students enjoy and coming to their history and culture in ways that they have not before. Seeing students view their history from the excitement of the first person respected stories of real people living in real lives and making real contributions to the community. So the stories that can be very compelling to our students. We're not talking about history in terms of merely dates and names and topics that we're seeing to the actual stories being told about the history of our students and the history of our history. And the history of our students are also involved in the students who go back to their last slide. Seeing a district that bone enjoying and owning their history and culture in ways that they have not before seeing students view history from the excitement of first person perspective the stories of real people living, realizing, making contributions in their community, seeing how students can add to the body of common knowledge by adding their own stories and experiences or stories of their friends and family members to this whole story and history. So in my experience as an archivist and changing up, students help you. Our archives, primary sources, and so on. First of all, primarily focusing on the institutional history and also on the student organization with student life and the sorority, the terminities. I've got a great deal of interest in it, and it's a great deal. And many of the students find this to be very beneficial or very helpful and so on. In recent years, I began noticing much more student interest in the areas of social justice and the communities of role in developing social justice and the way that we've added that in terms of our communities role in social justice, particularly in the black lives matter and events like that. I've been kind of supported by the years of research into racism and the endowment of getting lots of end violence and activism. And so when you look from campus, then created some of the lessons learned in prison. It doesn't really work well. We've worked with various departments in ancient campus that worked on social justice decisions. We found this to be very rewarding to students. And found it to be very rewarding as well. It's been a light bulb of fun for a lot of them. They see it themselves, so they see the years of primary and source materials in a way that they have not before, that they have not realized in terms of whether. So we found this to be very rewarding and enriching experience for them. And they also become better researchers. And they've also become better in terms of better analyst, better agency analyst, who we've done. So with that, I will conclude my presentation and with that, I'll ask questions or comments. You mind down with my audio, so if you might want to submit your questions and write any of the title and title answers of this title. I appreciate your attention and your coming to our transfer day edition of the foundation program. Can you please submit your questions and comments and what you can? Yeah, we will take any questions. We'll try and relay them to you, or we can certainly try and put them into the chat, Chris, if we have any. Is there any questions in the room? Anybody would like to ask Chris a question? OK, I do have one question that, Lee, so I'll pull up the chat window here and I'll see if I can pull that up here, Chris. You want to type it in? Or I don't care. I'm curious about what kinds of contemporary collecting they do, whether they, is it as simple as collecting analog records? What type of contemporary collecting are you doing, WebR, Codding, et cetera? Can you see that question, Chris? What type of contemporary collecting are you doing with WebR, Codding, et cetera? Primarily, we're doing a lot of things to do on the launch, because we're very insolent in the process, but the students are not there for them, it's going to be a lot of them about the things we've done, the things we've done in the long-term, and the legacy that we have built. But we really should want to put it on, and so we try to work closely with the student organizations and the offices that are in charge of the student community, and we're looking for it. Here's the names that we're looking for. And we are getting more and more. We're going to do a little part in terms of collecting a digital document and a lot of stuff. And we're going to do a web archiving much more in a digital archiving as well. So there's train coding? In terms of student organizations we're building a lot of with and without the language. That's a good question. I want to share a little bit about the use of the order of the orators and your info. We've done a lot of torture, so I suppose we're offering new projects, but the greater increase the-well, maybe more people in the name of what it's like. Thank you. Any other questions? Over in the corner. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay, yes. You just could discuss the new relationship with DCU and DCCity archives, what they're expecting to achieve, and also some of the controversies that could be rising in media. Discuss the relationship with DCU and DC government archives. Both the benefits that they're expecting and the negative on campus. Consequences, right? Hey, how about that? All right, another question for you, Chris. Discuss the relationship with DCU and the DC government archives, the benefits and consequences on campus. I work actively with DC archives when I refer to quite a bit often to DC government archives, when they need it, when they have a need for this, and I think they supplement each other very well, and we don't, there isn't any sort of overlap between the two of them. Our archives and the DC archives are strictly an institutional archive, but some government documents pertaining to, specifically in DC, but also to education in general, and so the benefits, so they're a synergistic relationship between the two of them, and the students and the faculty and other researchers have benefited greatly from this, and they've gotten the information that they needed, and I can't think of the consequences that have been mutually beneficial for both the researchers, whether they've been academic students or otherwise, and for us, so we value our relationship with DC archives and the other archives in the DC refunds to be a very constructive relationship, and we hope to broaden and deepen this relationship over time. Any more questions? Well, Chris, I really would like to... Chris, I want to thank you very much for making this possible, and I apologize that you were unable to get down here in person, and what I will do is I will share your email with people that if anybody would like to reach out to you and... Excellent. Thank you very much, Chris. See how lent at UDC, yes. All right, so if anybody wants his email address, let's get there in the chat so you can reach out to him with any additional questions or comments, and as he said there, I'm sure he would be happy to host you at UDC and see any of the rich collections that he's got there, but thank you all very much for working through us with this technical issues that we had with this great presentation. And thanks to Chris for making himself available wherever he is, somewhere in the state of New York. For those of you that are still here, we're going to invite Lee to come on up here. We are just going to roll right into our informal feedback session. Feel free to hit us up with any questions, comments, I like to say in any meeting that I'm in, moans of despair, cries of anguish, things that you would have liked to have seen, things that you would want us to do differently in the future. Lee's already said she's not doing it next year. If you, you know, put some money in the tip jar on your way out, I might be persuaded to do it next year. So, and if you're leaving, thank you for coming. There might still be some people downstairs. Yeah, you can go check them with those. Also, check out the rotunda. Please check out all the exhibits. I understand the World Series trophy is in the sports exhibition downstairs. So, all right. Hit us. ASL shift change. Elizabeth? Yes. All right. I'm not, I'm not below starting just calling on people. Yeah, I just did. You know, and I'm, I'm all, I'm going to start calling on people because people whose names I know, you know, and there's only a few people left in the room whose names I know. I will just make a quick comment and say just thank you all for coming. I think we started to plan this a little later than we would have in the years pre-pandemic. So thank you all for being up for experimenting and going with the flow with us. I think we're really thinking, especially moving into the next few years and seeing where the pandemic takes us. But just I would be curious to know about whether like the existing format that we did this time around, like the same as we used to, still works. Whether you thought being in person was a good thing. Those are just some things we're going to be thinking about moving forward in the future with this event. This could be a time to transform it. It could be a time to keep the original structure. Just some food for thought. Well, I've come into that. This is the first time that I have come to any put on like archives or these. And I know that it's the first year coming out of pandemic, which is supposed to mean that everything's back to normal, but it doesn't work that way at all. It's a great practice. So thank you for starting my good practice again. And I don't know that I'm sort of in a different archive space than most people here, but I would have loved if there was a round table time or a panel to hear about how people were doing to kind of like a birds of a feather kind of event where people could choose like a topic like reference or something and connect on it. Yeah. Or maybe to recruit people from different institutions address similar ideas. Like ask me anything kind of thing, like just, you know. Or maybe a shorter presentation. Like for instance, we had a person who said about moving. So maybe two or three institutions have a balance on the beginning of the movie. Or two or three that's part of the trash. Or two or three that we're working on with the student game that's part of there. Sure. Thank you. Can I jump onto that? I think this class that should be really beneficial to hear about some different institutions. And then maybe even have some more clear examples of maybe some of the successes. And, you know, we had an audio visual opportunity in the year but it was still text based. Some more successful challenges. I think you could have benefited from having people involved in presenting and also having some more Maybe some more constituents as well. Like the Kennedy Center presentation, marvelous. It could have been even more expansive. If you had like somebody not in archives who was using archives in a different way for the first time or examples of school programs or an alley. The great mechanism in which we figured out how to get the right box onto the right shelf. That's all pretty amazing. And I would have loved to hear more about how that would be. So I will say that when the Archives Fair first started the DC Archives Fair, it was started by the National Archives Assembly, which is a professional organization of NARA staff. And it was specifically targeted for repositories here in DC. We partnered with the Smithsonian Professional Group. We also used to bring in the Library of Congress Professional Group and we broadened it to include the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. And it just sort of grew and grew and grew and it was started, you know, and then we had the benefit of being able to have technological advancements that we had originally were going to live stream a lot of these sessions. And we did live stream, I want to say, in 2018. And we recorded all of these sessions today. And we will have, they'll be all edited together and they will be put on the NARA YouTube channel. And we'll send that link out to everybody when that's all ready. And so what we will do and what we will continue to do is that with more lead time, I think what Lee was saying is that when we have more lead time, we can hopefully have more sessions. We can have, you know, because we have this space, there's another conference room here, there's another conference room there. So we would have the ability to have run as many as three or four different session blocks, you know, three or four different sessions per block and have up to 12 sessions over the course of the day. And we could have round tables. We could have panel sessions. We could have, you know, lightning talks, things like that. We could have theater presentations. I think the options are limitless. Now, I would like, actually, I would like to ask Jim a question is for people with where you are in a situation where you have a need, do you have, when you go to conferences, that you, I mean, could you contact me to arrange for, to do this presentation, what is your sort of expectation when you go to a professional meeting as far as to be able to present and be presented to? Really, it depends on the expectations to have all of them. The team of interpreters, the flexibility of schedule, often we have a situation where we want to go professionally to a conference and, or a professional organization and we have a established schedule and we also decide interpreter availability and then often the professional organization has no budget to hire interpreters for the full day. Especially to be able to accommodate us, we all decided to go in different areas. So really, this is the ideal setup what we had today. So this logistically makes sense where they're seated, the camera, everybody moving around and that can be very typical and also it's a very common experience for us. So this has been really good. I mean, I was very happy that you were here today and I was happy that we were able to make those accommodations for you and I was in your presentation when I heard that you had gone to SAA because it is not my recollection that SAA has had interpreters in the past. Yeah, that's the point of the conference that we were talking about during COVID. So that was online. Right. And that does make it easier to provide services if they have online services and they're able to hire an interpreter remotely. But, you know, on site can be a bigger challenge. And that's one of the feedbacks that I was going to share with you. So sometimes it's a good idea to also have hybrid mode for next year. Maybe that could be a consideration to make the conference remote as well as in person. Well, we're glad you were able to be here. Me too. Anyone else? But I didn't really know about that. Did somebody happen to plug it and then to make sure that you have absolutely every list of like it's sent down? I know I shared it with the Merak administrator. I shared it with the Merak caucus reps, the DC, Maryland and Virginia ones. I did put it on the Merak Facebook page. We sent it out to Syask. I sent it out to the NARA assembly page. Where are you? Yeah. And actually my wife works at the Smithsonian. She's like, did you send it out to the library schools? And I was like, yeah, I forgot about the library schools. And the thing is I can't put my finger on. There used to be like, you know, there was the old archives list, the archives and archivist list, and like the essay distribution list. And I was like, I couldn't put my finger on where I needed to send it to make sure that I hit as many people as possible. But again, it's, again, we've sort of lost how to get in touch with people over the past three years. Can we Merak work? Yes. What happened to you that it was last week? Yes. I'm also not coming in Monday. So I'm certainly hoping that now that we've had an archives fair in this new pandemic era that more people will be aware of it. And then when we start planning a lot earlier in the next year, this will be a bit less of an issue than it was this year. I wanted to add something also. We got our information through Merak, too. And we wanted to know if we could see with the WR the World Research Library Connections. Consortium. Consortiums. So we could see more institutions that are similar to ours being able to attend here. Sure. That would be a good idea. Jim, do you have a contact for them for the WRLC? Yeah, I can definitely put that on the webpage if you want me to, I'd be happy to. Let me just email me. Email me the contact. Absolutely. Thank you. Perfect. So I'm a NAR employee. So I would say even internally there wasn't anything to be very much communication. I think there was one mention in the discussion post. But even the most recent, like we found out some things that wasn't mentioned on that list which I know in the past have been widely admitted by NAR employees. I know a number of colleagues who just didn't know. Are you an assembly member? I am aspiring as a member. I probably hope you have them today. I did send it out to the assembly membership. So it did go out to that. It was on the external NARA facing calendar. I don't know whether it was on the internal facing NARA calendar. And I did have some people post it internally. I don't know whether it was on the ICN though. But again, that was just something that it didn't get pushed out to as many outlets as I would have like to have it done. And I think that was just a factor of we got the ball rolling late. And there are only so many hours in the day. And I would say also just trying to get our group back too. It has been, what, three or four years? 19 was the last one. 18 is the last one I remember. But I think there was one in 19. Sir. Discussion. Yes, today was our in service day. So it was a research room, but then they had a schedule about some meetings. Right. Yeah. Yeah, so when we started looking at dates for the Archives Fair today, the reason we selected the date for today is because we wanted the archivist to be able to speak. And as she said in her remark, she leaves for Seattle tomorrow. So today was the only day that she could speak this week. And this was the week we wanted. So that's why we scheduled it for today, knowing that she was on travel the rest of this week. And then we were like, okay, we can have the archivist, but we won't have anybody in research services because it was in in service day. So. Well, again, yes, one more in the back. I just wanted to say thank you again. And there's plenty of time. I'll use it for lots of suggestions. But just put together a larger conference for the last week. I really appreciate how hard it is to get going again and to pull back all the little threads and pieces that you used to have in place. And don't get any more. This is not my first rodeo, but it's also unfortunately not my last rodeo. First pandemic, most pandemic. Yeah. Again, thank you all very much for coming. And I will, we will see you in 2024, if not before. Thanks all. Thanks all. Thank you so much for everything. We appreciate you inviting us. Thank you for providing the interpreter. We very much appreciate it. Right. This. Thank you. Yeah, that's it. Perfect. Thank you.