Turning Assessment Recommendations into Actions: How to Make Practical Use of Assessment Reports
Collections assessments provide a path forward, but there are often barriers. Limited time, funding, and staffing can prevent us from achieving our intended collections care goals. This session will provide a brief overview of assessment processes and content, featuring real-world examples with guest speakers from organizations that have undertaken an assessment. John Anderies, Director of the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives & Library at the William Way LGBT Community Center, Julie Fether, Archivist at East Broad Top Railroad Archives and Special Collections and Catherine Tedford, Gallery Director at St. Lawrence University will then share some of the strategies that they have used to turn assessment recommendations into successful projects. They will address how to get started, tips for staying organized, and ways to seek outside help from students and consultants. Moderated by Dyani Feige, CCAHA’s Director of Preservation Services.
This webinar addresses Focus Area #2: Training and Engagement of the Foundation for the Advancement in Conservation’s (FAIC) Held in Trust Report on Collections Care and Preventative Conservation.
About our speakers:
John Anderies is the Director of the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives & Library at the William Way LGBT Community Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he also oversees Arts & Culture programs and manages the Philadelphia AIDS Oral History Project. John has also worked as a processing archivist at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania, and as Head of Quaker and Special Collections at Haverford College. John holds degrees from Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory of Music, Case Western Reserve University, and Indiana University.
Dyani Feige is CCAHA’s Director of Preservation Services, where she works with libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural organizations to conduct needs and risk assessments, assist in disaster planning, and help develop policy and planning documents for collections. She also develops and presents education programs on preservation and conservation concerns. Before joining the staff of CCAHA in 2010 as Preservation Specialist, Dyani worked in the Brooklyn Museum Libraries & Archives. She has also worked in the New York Public Library’s Preservation Division; for the Conference Board; and in the Special Collections & Archives at Kent State University. Dyani received her MS in Library and Information Science with a Certificate in Archives at Pratt Institute and her BM in Music Business from New York University.
Julie Fether is the archivist for the East Broad Top Railroad Archives and Special Collections, a joint operating unit between the non-profit organizations, the EBT Foundation and the Friends of the East Broad Top. As the inaugural archivist hired in May 2021, Julie has built a solid foundation for the EBT Archives to protect, preserve, and provide access to over an estimated 6,000 linear feet of East Broad Top Railroad corporate records, photographs, and other collections with the earliest records dating back to 1856. With a career background in higher education, Julie worked at Penn State Altoona as a project coordinator for the Community-based Studies program, a lecturer in American history, and at Penn State’s Frost Entomological Museum as a collections specialist. Since 2015, Julie has curated four exhibitions featuring the William H. Rau Pennsylvania Railroad Photograph Collection at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Altoona, Pa. Julie is a member of the Lexington Group of Transportation History, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference, PA Museums, and the Small Museum Association.
Catherine Tedford has served as gallery director at St. Lawrence University since 1989 and is a short month away from retiring. She oversees an active program of rotating exhibitions, educational programs, and a permanent collection of about 7,000 art objects and cultural artifacts. In the past five years, she has written and implemented two collection-related grants funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which she’ll describe in more detail in her presentation. One grant funded the Preservation Needs Assessment with CCAHA, and the other funded an environmental optimization study to protect the University’s permanent collection. As a fun side note, Cathy also oversees a collection of over 18,000 political stickers from around the world with a new official title of the People’s History Archive.