Registration is now open!
NYAC will be having its annual (free) virtual conference on Friday, June 13th, 2025! Our conference program is listed below.
Register to attend NYAC online via Zoom
NYAC Watch Parties!
Want to get out of your house, meet some friendly colleagues, and consume some great archives content? Sign up for a New York Archives Conference Watch Party! This year ten institutions across New York State are holding Watch Parties where you can view the conference with others from your area, with time for socializing and discussion.
Watch Party Hosts & Locations:
- University of Rochester, Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation – Rush Rhees Library: 755 Library Road, Rochester, NY 14627
- Central New York Library Resources Council (CLRC): 5710 Commons Park Drive, East Syracuse, NY 13057
- Western New York Library Resources Council (WNYLRC): WNYLRC Training Center, 180 Lawrence Bell Drive, Suite 104, Amherst, NY 14221
- UAlbany IST & Special Collection and Archives: ETEC Building, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY 12222
- Long Island Library Resources Council (LILRC): Suffolk Cooperative Library System, 627 Sunrise Hwy, Bellport, NY 11713
- Southeastern New York Library Resources Council (SENYLRC): 21 S. Elting Corners Rd., Highland, NY 12528
- Binghamton University: Bartle Library, 4400 Vestal Pkwy E. Binghamton, NY 13902
- Northern New York Library Network (NNYLN): 6721 US Hwy 11, Potsdam, NY 13676
- Pratt Institute: 144 West 14th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10011
- Cornell Rare and Manuscript Collections + South Central Regional Library Council (SCRLC): Cornell’s Catherwood Library, 521 Ives Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853
Become a NYAC Sponsor!
Support from sponsors helps us keep our virtual conference free-to-attend and will enable us to bring future events to fruition.
📁 Folder Tier Sponsorship ($200): We’ll feature your logo in the list of sponsors on our website, conference slides (shown during breaks), and social media posts.
📦 Box Tier Sponsorship ($600): Three minutes of airtime during our annual confernce (via a pre-recorded video), allowing you to tell our attendees about your organization. And your logo featured in our list of sponsors (see above).
Email the NYAC Treasurer, Ryan Perry (rperry@clrc.org) to learn more and to sign on as a sponsor.
Schedule at a Glance
Friday, June 13th, 2025
| 9:00 – 9:15 AM | Opening Remarks |
| 9:15 – 10:00 AM | Keynote – Hot Town: Researching Climate and Extreme Heat in the Archives |
| 10:00 – 10:15 AM | Morning Break |
| 10:15 – 10:45 AM | Leveraging Consumer-Level AI for Descriptive Metadata Creation in Archival Collections |
| 10:45 – 11:15 AM | With a little help from my friends: Volunteer experiences and engagement at a small institution |
| 11:15 – 11:45 AM | From Analog to Digital: Integrating Audiovisual Collections into Digital Archives from the Ground Up |
| 11:45 AM – 12:45 PM | Lunch Break |
| 12:45 – 1:15 PM | Participatory Archive Ethics Development |
| 1:15 – 1:45 PM | The People Behind Named Places: Getting Creative with Civic Data |
| 1:45 – 2:00 PM | Afternoon Break |
| 2:00 – 2:30 PM | Collection Survey as Catalyst: Perspectives from New Archivists |
| 2:30 – 3:00 PM | ArcLight and DadoCM: Unifying Archival Description and Digital Objects |
| 3:00-3:05 PM | Closing Remarks |
Program Schedule Details
9:00-9:15 am Opening Remarks
The New York Archives Conference welcomes you to our 2025 Virtual Conference! We are pleased to once again offer our conference virtually and are grateful to our presenters and attendees for their willingness to participate in this format.
PRESENTERS
Cara Dellatte | 2025 Co-Chair
Jaime Karbowiak | 2025 Co-Chair
9:15-10:00 am Keynote – Hot Town: Researching Climate and Extreme Heat in the Archives
Schlichting’s research examines how summer heat burdens shaped New Yorkers’ lives from the 1860s through the 2020s. It highlights how the histories of New York’s built environment, climate, and public health entwine. New York’s densely-built blocks of brick and concrete absorbed and stored solar radiation—the climatological effect known today as the urban heat island—by the mid-1800s. The city’s working class and poor had limited access to climate-control technologies before the 1940s and thus lived attuned, and exposed, to summer heat and humidity. Schlichting illustrates how environmental vulnerabilities build upon other forms of precarity at work, at home, in the subway, and on the sidewalk.
Schlichting will introduce the research methodologies and archives of environmental history that illuminate the link between the physical, the sensory, and built and natural environments. Weather is a temporally shifting and often intangible category of nature- and unlike rain or snow, extreme heat is invisible to the eye and presents unique research challenges. But as recent research in the aural and olfactory past reveals, sensory history can successfully speak to the less visible, yet palpable, aspects of nature.
PRESENTER
Kara Murphy Schlichting, PhD (she/her) Associate Professor of History Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY
10:00 – 10:15 am Morning Break
10:15 – 10:45 am Leveraging Consumer-Level AI for Descriptive Metadata Creation in Archival Collections
Discover how the University at Buffalo’s University Archives is leveraging AI to automate metadata creation for 2,000+ hours of audio in the UB-WBFO Radio Archive. This session will explore the use of consumer-level AI to streamline the development of concise and detailed program descriptions from audio transcriptions, facilitating inclusion in the University Libraries’ Digital Collections and the National Archive of Public Broadcasting. Attendees will learn how this innovative approach has significantly reduced processing time and enhanced efficiency in generating summaries. Join us to explore the transformative potential of AI in improving access and workflows within archival practice.
PRESENTERS
Hope Dunbar (she/her/hers), University at Buffalo, University Archives
Ken Axford (he/him/his), University at Buffalo, University Archives
10:45 – 11:15 am With a little help from my friends: Volunteer experiences and engagement at a small institution
Volunteers and interns are valuable additions to the archival workforce, but for small institutions, they may be the most crucial source of labor, expertise, and support for our work. Projects, day-to-day operations, and patron services depend on skilled volunteers and interns to succeed. However, attracting, retaining, and training volunteers and interns is a significant job in and of itself which may be difficult for staff at small institutions to undertake and sustain. The Schenectady County Historical Society, has an engaged and growing volunteer team that supports our archival work under the direction of a single staff archivist. This presentation will explore what has worked for us in building our volunteer corps and examine insights from volunteers and interns. Marietta Carr, Librarian/Archivist, will speak to the staff and institutional side of volunteering. Brynn Marion will represent the volunteer perspective by sharing her experience at SCHS as a volunteer and intern.
PRESENTERS
Marietta Carr (she/her/hers), Schenectady County Historical Society
Brynn Marion (she/her/hers), Schenectady County Historical Society
11:15 – 11:45 am From Analog to Digital: Integrating Audiovisual Collections into Digital Archives from the Ground Up
In 2020, the Wildenstein Plattner Institute (WPI) partnered with the Romare Bearden Foundation to create a digital catalogue raisonné of Bearden’s work. As part of this collaboration, WPI digitized over 400 hours of previously unplayed analog AV recordings from Bearden’s archive. This presentation will discuss the cross-disciplinary expertise needed to integrate AV material into our relational database, build a bespoke media player, and make these materials available to the public on the WPI Digital Archives. We will demonstrate how collaborative efforts and technological innovation, including leveraging AI for creating OCR-enabled transcripts, permitted the WPI to build an AV platform from the ground up. These AV materials serve as a model for integrating AV collections into future digital archives and digital catalogue raisonné projects.
PRESENTERS
Samantha Rowe (she/her/hers), The Wildenstein Plattner Institute
Dana Anderson (she/her/hers), The Wildenstein Plattner Institute
11:45-12:45 pm Lunch Break
12:45 – 1:15 pm Participatory Archive Ethics Development
For 40 years, young people from mostly BIPOC, migrant, and LGBTQIA communities have come to NYC’s Educational Video Center (EVC) to collaboratively produce documentary films about their lives, their communities, as well as the social, cultural, educational, and political issues confronting them. EVC’s Youth Up Documentary Archive (YUDA) is a rich, living ethnography of the experiences of youth learning, creating, struggling, and leading change efforts in an urban center that mirrors the dynamic and troubled heart of our nation. EVC is building YUDA as an anti-racist, anti-capitalistic, BIPOC-responsive archive to ensure alignment with anti-oppressive practices. This conference presentation will share both our process and progress towards developing EVC’s archive ethics guidelines which enables BIPOC communities to retain ownership and decision making power over their assets, redirect wealth back to our communities, and reduce harm.
PRESENTERS
Ambreen Qureshi (she/her/hers), Educational Video Center
Yhennisa Vogue, Educational Video Center, Alumni Advisory Council
1:15 – 1:45 pm The People Behind Named Places: Getting Creative with Civic Data
Launched in 2022 as a collaboration between the Queens Memory Project at Queens Public Library and Urban Archive, the Queens Name Explorer (http://queenslib.org/explore) is an interactive map with biographical profiles and personal remembrances spanning more than 1,200 places in the borough. Drawing on data from NYC’s Department of Parks, Department of Transportation, and others, the project offers a user-friendly way to explore local history, from looking up people by name or characteristics (such as by roles like musicians, activists, and politicians), “touring” a neighborhood and clicking on profiles, and using the information on the map to consider how practices of commemoration include and exclude individuals, communities, and their stories.
In this session, participants will gain insight into how civic data sources, original research, and public contributions can be used to highlight local history through creative approaches to personal biography.
PRESENTERS
Meral Agish (she/her/hers), Queens Public Library
David Engelman, Queens Public Library
1:45 – 2:00 pm Afternoon Break
2:00 – 2:30 pm Collection Survey as Catalyst: Perspectives from New Archivists
In September 2024, a team of nine emerging archivists kicked off a multi-year survey of archival repositories across the City University of New York (CUNY). Together, they will open thousands of boxes and complete CUNY’s first comprehensive records survey in its nearly 180-year history with a special focus on highlighting the diverse human-interest stories of underrepresented communities such as BIPOC, Immigrants, and LGBTQIA+. Their survey will inform university-wide priorities for the next decade in the areas of archival processing, digitization, curation, and fundraising. This session will explore the ways in which information gained from this massive survey has already seeded public programming, publications, environmental improvements, research, and other opportunities for teaching with primary sources. Speakers will introduce the various stakeholders involved in their project and share some of the professional development opportunities they have gained through their work.
PRESENTERS
Erin A’Hearn (she/they), Research Foundation CUNY
Gianna Fraccalvieri (she/her/hers), Research Foundation CUNY
Kevin O’Leary (he/him/his), Research Foundation CUNY
2:30 – 3:00 pm ArcLight and DadoCM: Unifying Archival Description and Digital Objects
The University at Albany Libraries and the Empire State Library Network are enhancing ArcLight to unify access to physical and digital archival materials. Supported by an IMLS National Leadership Grant, this project integrates IIIF manifests with finding aids, enabling metadata, full-text, and digital objects to coexist in a single discovery platform. We will present Delivering Archives and Digital Objects: a Conceptual Model (DadoCM), a system-agnostic framework for improving digital object discovery in ArcLight and other systems. By leveraging IIIF and ArchivesSpace, our approach simplifies digital collection management without requiring a DAMS and benefits smaller archives through statewide aggregators. This session will demonstrate how DadoCM can guide archivists in providing access to digital materials using their existing archival description, even if that is just linking to PDFs. We’ll also showcase UAlbany’s implementation using ArcLight and IIIF.
PRESENTERS
Gregory Wiedeman (he/him/his), University at Albany, SUNY
Mark Wolfe (he/him/his), University at Albany, SUNY
Meghan Slaff (she/her/hers), University at Albany, SUNY