A Symposium on Preserving Contemporary Cultural Heritage

Bergis is an archivist interested in developing solutions for building capacity and achieving sustainability in community-based cultural heritage organizations that focus on documenting the lives of marginalized people. He is also passionate about incorporating ethics into how we collect and preserve digital content from the web and social media about people that are most vulnerable to harm in those spaces.

Bergis will be discussing his advocacy work on behalf of community-based archives and sharing strategies for how we can achieve more equitable community/university collaborations in collecting and preserving our shared cultural heritage. His talk will mainly cover his recent work on the Architecting Sustainable Futures symposium and report and on the Documenting the Now project.

Read more about Bergis Jules.

The South Asian Cooperative Collection Development Workshops (SACOOP) provide a rich case study for broader cooperative collection debates of efficiency, distinction and access.   This presentation explores how iterative and ongoing collaborative efforts can transform thinking about collection development, about workflow practices, and about the enduring need for interconnecting support.

Mary Rader is the South Asia Librarian and Head of the Arts, Humanities, & Global Studies Engagement Team at the University of Texas at Austin, having held positions previously at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Michigan, and the Chicago Public Library.  Through the years, her work has emphasized the need for collective and collaborative action to solve the challenges of collection breadth, depth and access, particularly in relation to South Asian Studies.

Read more about Mary Rader.

This talk discusses the prospects for the future (and indeed, the present day) study of books and other artifacts of contemporary culture in the face of the widespread shift to digital content delivery (even a printed book is a digital file before it becomes an object in our hands). The materials which traditionally found their way into the collections of libraries and archives are thus now digital assets stored in digital asset management systems. Drawing from a report recently completed for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the talk addresses challenges and some potential approaches for safeguarding the principle materials of literary studies, the history of the book, and related fields.

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the College of Information Studies at Maryland, and a member of the teaching faculty at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. His most recent book, Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, was published by Harvard University Press in 2016; with Pat Harrigan, he also recently co-edited Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming from the MIT Press (2016). Kirschenbaum delivered the 2016 A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.

See mkirschenbaum.net or follow him on Twitter as @mkirschenbaum for more.