vagtsrac's blog

I spent the week of August 16-22 at the biennial churchwide assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in Minneapolis, MN. The ELCA archives is in the midst of an oral history project in preparation for the church’s 25th anniversary in 2012 and decided to collect shorter stories during the assembly. They asked me to help out for the week, so I joined them at Minneapolis Convention Center.

We conducted over 50 interviews over the week, all on video and generally between 10 and 15 minutes in length. I interviewed people ranging in age from their teens to 90 years old.

“The Double Standard of Life at Luther College: 1936-1968”

This exhibit traces the rules and regulations that governed women at Luther College in the early days of co-education. It contains pictures and Chips articles to explore the history of the double standards that existed on campus. The exhibit is located in the Archives reading room on the upper floor of Preus Library.

I was in New York the past few days for the biennial meeting of the Lutheran Historical Conference. Attended by historians, theologians and archivists primarily from Lutheran institutions, we heard many excellent papers. I presented my research on Hanna and Marie Larsen, two of Laur. Larsen’s daughters who were missionaries to Zululand (South Africa) in the 1890s.

I was at the Society of American Archivists meeting in San Francisco last week. My first day was filled with meetings. I have just been named the District 6 Rep on the Membership committee, so I am in charge of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana and Illinois.

I was in Louisville, KY last week for the Midwest Archives Conference meeting. It was our first time gathering in KY, which joined the regional organization about 3 years ago.

It was a very good meeting and as usual, it was good to catch up with old friends and colleagues and hear what people are doing in their archives.

Open Source and Web 2.0 are alive and well in the archives. I heard presentations that included a number of interesting products that may have useful applications for us at Luther including a new IMLS funded project called Omeka. http://omeka.org/

While I'm away from campus this week you can check in our the activities of the Luther College Habitat for Humanity spring break.

We'll be blogging at http://lutherhabitat.wordpress.com

I won't mention that it's in the mid 70s and sunny.

I was at the NITLE - Digitizing Audio workshop yesterday at Bryn Mawr College. It was an excellent workshop that covered the things I had been hoping to learn more about with the right level of skill and also included a number of new things that I think we may be able to use at Luther.