Jeanne Abrams
Jeanie earned a PhD in History and specialization in archives management at the University of Colorado at Boulder. When writing her thesis, she worked with the Jewish Consumptive’s Relief Society records, now a part of the Ira M. Beck Memorial Archives which she directs. Her background in History and particularly Jewish history made her an excellent candidate for the position at Beck.
She works primarily in public history programming and fund raising currently. Public history programming often includes lectures, books, digitization, or exhibits; Beck recently sponsored a lecture by David Von Drehle about his recent book, Triangle: The Fire that Changed America. A recent exhibit is the From Haven to Home exhibit in Denver Public Library; which was organized in only ten days. The are of fund raising includes federal grants, people to people fund raising, grants from the Rose Community Foundation, and membership drives and dinners.
As far a digitization goes, Jeanie herself is not very familiar with the technology–she has graduate students working for her who deal with most of the digitization process. Jeanie works primarily on policy and procedures. Foremost in the concerns she has about digitization is planning for the future. Storage of documents and repeated migrations are headaches to say the least. Another issue is the question of what should legally remain private and what is all right to display publicly. Also to consider is how much of their holdings should be digitized. They do use EAD, however they also use other systems.
In terms of collection development, she often meets with people from the community in order to secure donations. They are less active than they have been in the past in regard to collections development partially because of space concerns. Digitization is a possible solution to this problem; some records could be digitized and then kept off site.
They do have to worry about what to keep. Oftentimes canceled cheques and duplicate records are not processed. They also try to take only collections which further their mission, often recommending other repositories that may be better suited to the collection.
Most researchers who patronize the archive are studying genealogy or tuberculosis. Other patrons are often magazines or newspapers seeking photographs from the archive.
Jeanie has experienced a transition from Beck being a rather independent archive to being integrated into with the Penrose Library at the University of Denver. With this transition she has come to the realization that “democracy is terrific, but dictatorship is more efficient.” With more integration has come more bureaucracy; she feels it is easier to work alone than by committee.
