Monthly Archives: June 2026

Reflections on the NWA 2026 Conference

This year’s conference for the Northwest Archivists (NWA) was held in Tacoma, Washington. The theme was Grit and Memory. Lasting three days, the annual meeting included workshops, panels, presentations, and special events like a screening night and a tour of the Washington State Historical Research Center. As a Student Archivist here at OSU and an MLIS student at the University of Washington iSchool, attending the conference was an exciting and valuable experience.

This event was my first in-person NWA conference, and my first time being on the Program Committee for NWA. The process began in November of 2025, when our first Program Committee meeting was held, and we continued with regular meetings through June of 2026. I was able to offer the perspective of MLIS students to the committee, as well as my connections to the University of Washington student population through our listservs and social media. The bulk of our work consisted of outreach for session proposals, fielding said proposals, organizing the schedule, and putting together the program, among many other tasks. Having had event planning experience in my previous roles, being on this committee was a very nice bridge connecting my past work to my current work.

On the first day of the conference, I attended a tour of the Washington State Historical Research Center and the opening reception at the University of Puget Sound. The tour included an overview of the research center’s stacks, and we got a peek at their methods for digitization and scanning. We took a brief trip into their cold storage room, which was incredible and spacious. Our group was also lucky enough to see a wagon from the Oregon Trail:

It was all in all, a very fun tour and a very interesting look at how one institution handles such a large volume of items!

The next event I attended was the opening reception, held in the Collins Memorial Library at the University of Puget Sound. It was a casual networking event, where I was able to meet several wonderful people! Among them were Stephanie Plowman, the Special Collections Librarian at Gonzaga University, Alexis Hickey, the Archivist and Head of Special Collections at Whitman College, and Hannah Morrison, the Archivist at the University of Puget Sound.

The following day, I started by visiting the Washington State Library booth, where I met Shawn Schollmeyer, who is the Washington Digital Newspapers Coordinator there. She shared her work with me, and also talked briefly about the Washington Talking Book & Braille Library, which has come up in my coursework at UW as well. There was then a wonderful keynote by Jill La Pointe, who spoke about archives and cultural preservation, followed by several conference sessions. The first session I attended was Carlos Pelley’s talk, titled ‘Using Archival Resources for Public History’. He shared the ways that his institution has used archival resources to encourage library engagement and to aid in community needs. He also provided guidance on how other institutions can use specific language and data points to validate their requests for various resources like funding. This was one of three sessions for which I was a liaison as part of my role in the Program Committee. This included aiding in setup and takedown, being on hand for any IT issues, keeping time, taking headcounts, and facilitating questions as needed.

The next session was another I was liaising for, and was from our very own Karl McCreary, and was a joint case study session in which Steve Bingo and John Klint were also presenting. Karl’s presentation, ‘Bird Nerds’ discussed four of our collections within SCARC that relied on citizen science, emphasizing the importance of community-based collections. Steve and John, both from Eastern Washington University, presented ‘Geography of Hope’, discussing the process of their work on the Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge collection. Their case study tied in nicely with Karl’s, examining the perseverance of those who worked on the refuge.

For the final session of the day, I attended another joint case study, this time between Stephanie Lamson and Claire Kenney on conservation services at the University of Washington, and Tish Stringer showcasing 1930 Kodacolor film from the University of Oregon. The first case study followed the process of UW’s conservation over the past few years, while the second looked at a rare type of color film that had recently been preserved and made accessible. Besides one presentation hosted at OSU, this was my only encounter with digital preservation. Tish gave a brief review on how this type of color film worked, and how the UO team was able to convert it from black and white to color.

The last event of the night was a screening hosted by the Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound (MIPoPS), held in the Collins Memorial Library at the University of Puget Sound. The evening featured archival film from a variety of institutions, including OSU. A few of my favorites included a film from the 1930s of Alaska’s west coast, another 1930s clip of a home movie from the Williams Family of Celilo Falls, and two University of Puget Sound student films from the 1980s.

On the last day of the conference, I attended the Native American Collections Roundtable (NACR) session. This was the first archival round table I had ever experienced, and was also my first encounter with NACR. Topics of discussion included reviewing priorities for the group, looking at how to connect various groups of shared interest, how NACR can support various archival institutions, and how NACR can further integrate with NWA. I really enjoyed how so many people of different positions pushed to support each other while advocating for their own needs as well.

Next, I attended my last liaison session, which was for Libby Hopfauf from the Seattle Municipal Archives and MIPoPS, and Andrew Weaver from the University of Washington. This session was another round table, this time for the Audio and Moving Images interest group. The group discussed needs and concerns, ways to share resources and information that is localized to the northwest region, creating a service and repair directory, supporting networking and professional development opportunities among digital preservationists, and ways that the group could support other interest groups and round tables.

The final session of the conference was a case study by Heather Mulliner from the University of Montana, who was also on the Program Committee with me. She presented on the creation of oral history kits for student use at her institution, covering the entire process from funding to implementation. This presentation was fantastic and gave me much to consider when it comes to OSU’s oral history projects.

Closing thoughts on the conference:

Being able to attend this year’s NWA meeting, and to be involved on the Program Committee, was a wonderful experience! I learned so much, not only about how a conference comes together and all the work that happened behind the scenes, but during the actual conference, I learned about how wide the range of archival work really spans. The best part was meeting so many people who clearly have such passion for their work, and who have dedicated so much time and energy into this field. It really widened my perspective on what archives and preservation work can look like, and gave me hope that I’ll be able to find my own niche in the future.

~ Sabrina She, SCARC OSQA/OMA Student Archivist

P. S. I collected as much merch as I could:

Merchandise gathered at the NWA Conference

BIPOC Greek Letter Organizations in SCARC Research Guide: The Behind-the-Scenes Process

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A screenshot of the BIPOC Greek Letter Organizations in SCARC LibGuide

A post featured on this blog in June 2025 announced a new Libguide “BIPOC Greek Letter Organizations in the Special Collections and Archives Research Center: Guide to BIPOC Greek Letter Organizations” highlighting SCARC collections that document the history of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) Greek letter organizations at OSU. In addition to listing the BIPOC sororities and fraternities represented in SCARC’s collections, the Libguide provides historical context for these chapters, as well as some of the campus traditions and events that have brought them together as a community. Gathering this information was a collaborative effort that involved many hands, keyword searches and dives into many different collections via the SCARC website, with the digitized issues of The Daily Barometer student newspaper playing a particularly important role in filling in some of the gap – it was an invaluable resource! The specific steps taken by the SCARC Anti-Racist Description Team in moving from historical research to the completed Libguide, is what this post will explore as a follow up to the June 2025 blog post.

In November 2023, myself and other members of SCARC’s Anti-Racist Description Team began to explore how OSU’s BIPOC Greek community is documented in SCARC’s archival collections. Motivating this project was the acknowledgment that the history of multicultural Greek chapters at OSU, while being reflected in our collections, was not being curated or highlighted on our website or in our collection guides. We needed to change that. I’d first encountered documentation of BIPOC sororities and fraternities at OSU when I processed the records of the Greek Life Office back in 2017 and my curiosity about them lingered. When the call was made for new projects to pursue in the Anti-Racist Description Team, I remembered my work on these files and proposed the idea of highlighting the BIPOC Greek community in our collections through enhanced description in finding aids. The team agreed and we began our journey!

In anticipation of our work on this project, I compiled a list of the OSU Greek chapters whose membership was primarily African-American or Latin-American referenced in the Greek Life Office Records. With this list of seven chapters (later expanded to eight), we began compiling in a shared Google doc all the details we could find from searches of SCARC collections.

Our initial searches returned results in collections that explicitly referenced BIPOC Greek chapters; for example, as part of folder titles, or in a collection’s Scope and Content note. We also found, however, that these chapters were documented in more collections than we expected, and this recognition reinforced our project’s goal: to create a Libguide highlighting the rich history of OSU’s BIPOC Greek community, and the documentation of those communities in our collections.

Our approach in tackling this research as a group involved each of us “adopting” a chapter or two on which to focus our research (full disclosure: mine were Gamma Alpha Omega and Kappa Alpha Psi). We gathered basic details about each chapter (e.g. year chartered at OSU, chapter name, colors, council membership), as well as references to chapter events and activities that appeared in OSU media and historical records. With this information, we constructed historical sketches which detailed outreach activities, philanthropic foci, and traditions on campus for each of the chapters.

Another important goal of this project was to enhance the ways in which materials documenting the BIPOC Greek community at OSU were described. In some cases, these materials were not called out in a collection’s online guide, and we wanted to be sure that a simple keyword search using the search box on our website would return as many results as possible about a given chapter.

Want to learn more about the BIPOC Greek community at OSU, and explore the archival collections in which they’re documented? Reach out to our Public Services team by email at scarc@oregonstate.edu! They’re happy to help you navigate our online research portals, and can get you set up with an appointment to do in-person research. To learn more about the primary sources available in SCARC, how to find them, and the logistics of in-person appointments, visit our online Guide to SCARC.

Written by Karl McCreary, SCARC Collections Archivist, on behalf of the SCARC Anti-Racist Description Team